Melding the Asian and American Styles of Caring

It’s not by accident that San Marino banker Dominic Ng raised a record $66 million for United Way of Greater Los Angeles.

The first Asian American fund-raising campaign chairman for the charity achieved the milestone this summer by following his well-honed recipe for tackling projects.

It started when he was a foreign student attending the University of Houston in 1977, a time when his Texas schoolmates weren’t friendly to him or other Chinese students. Ng barely had enough money to make ends meet, but the freshman from Hong Kong scraped together $100 to buy a TV and to subscribe to the local newspaper. He considered them essential tools for understanding America.

Ng had noticed that Americans always laughed when they watched Johnny Carson.

“If I could understand what they’re laughing about,” he thought, “if I could crack a joke they thought was funny, then I could enjoy my life more and they will enjoy my company more.”

But try as he might, his Hong Kong English was no match for American slang, and the cultural context eluded him.

So, Ng read the newspaper every day and watched not only Johnny Carson but Mary Tyler Moore and Archie Bunker--until he found them funny too. And, sure enough, he made friends.

That approach to solving a problem--learn all you can and make friends along the way--has served him well far beyond Houston.

Today, Ng, 42, is chairman, president and chief executive of East West Bank, the third-largest independent bank headquartered in Los Angeles County. He sits on numerous civic, educational, community and nonprofit boards, spending 15% to 20% of his time in community service.

His goal is “making a difference”--an important consideration in his life.

In the United Way campaign, he felt an added burden. He believed that his performance would reflect on the entire Asian American community. Or as he put it: “I could not afford to mess it up.”

At the same time, he saw an opportunity to connect Asian Americans to mainstream philanthropy.

Ng did his homework. Then, with the passion of a crusader, he went to work, expounding the virtues of Western civic culture to his fellow Asian Americans.

“I asked so many of them to participate in the campaign that I am going to owe them for the rest of my life,” Ng jokes.

Substantial contributions from Asian Americans helped the local chapter set this year’s record.

They gave $2.6 million in amounts over $100,000, with Ng’s Pasadena neighbors, Andrew and Peggy Cherng, topping the list. The Cherngs, owners of the Panda Restaurant Group, gave $1 million.

“The community has been kind to us, so it’s time to pay back,” Peggy Cherng said.

In that simple statement, Ng sees an Asian American philanthropic role model.

“By their example, many Asian Americans will say, ‘This is our responsibility. This is what we should do.’ ”

It is through involvement, he says, that people of Asian ancestry--an overwhelming majority of them immigrants--acquire a sense of belonging to their adopted country and become citizens with a stake in it.

Ng says that what Asian Americans gave United Way cannot be measured in financial terms alone. The giving represents a process by which new Americans enter mainstream philanthropic culture.

Although Asian Americans have a long tradition of sharing their wealth, resources and time on this continent, their giving has tended to be limited mostly to family, friends and numerous organizations within their communities.

It’s time to do both, Ng says. By combining the Asian practice of taking care of their own with the American ethos of reaching out to the larger community, Asian Americans can have influence beyond their numbers, he believes.

Though Ng has reached the pinnacle in his field, he had no professional aspiration when he was growing up as the youngest of six in a “big Catholic family” in Hong Kong. But he was a good student, and his guiding principle, even as a boy, was to “do my best.”

In the teeming British colony of the 1960s and 1970s, where many youngsters couldn’t attend school because they had to help support their families, Ng felt grateful to be able to study.

His parents were refugees from Shanghai who fled the mainland in 1949 after the Communist takeover. They arrived in Hong Kong, unable to speak Cantonese and without any prospects for work.

But with the help of a Catholic church, his parents soon found work. Mother sewed uniforms for Catholic school pupils and Father won a contract to operate a fleet of school buses to transport parochial school children.

“That’s how my parents became Catholics,” Ng says.

He attended Mary of Providence Elementary School, wearing the uniform his mother sewed and riding the bus his father’s company operated.

When time came for college, Ng chose Houston because his eldest brother was already there. But no sooner had he arrived than brother had to move to Los Angeles. Eventually, Ng would follow him.

Amid his struggles to adjust to his new environment, Ng used his love of music to connect. He joined the choir at the Catholic Newman Center and played electric bass.

For many years before moving to Southern California, Ng, a certified public accountant, worked as an executive for Deloitte & Touche.

During his nine years at the helm of East West, the San Marino-based financial institution has grown from a savings and loan primarily serving Los Angeles’ Chinatown to a full-service commercial bank. Its assets more than quadrupled, from $600 million to $2.6 billion, during that time.

Ng thinks Fortune 500 companies and mainstream charities would do well to recruit smart and dedicated Asian Americans to sit on their boards.

They have much to contribute, he said. “They are good for America.”