When Rose Cheung learned that her younger daughter, Henrietta Wong ’12, would be attending the USC Gould School of Law, she felt ecstatic. “It was like a dream come true,” she says.
Cheung, who has always liked USC for the way it cares about its students and alumni, knew as a parent that the university was a good fit for Henrietta and that the education would be excellent. “Being well educated,” she says, “is as important as being ethical and moral.”
But there was another factor in her joy: Decades ago, she herself had dreamed of studying at USC to become an architect when financial restraints got in the way of her wish. That experience, as much as any, has shaped and informed Cheung’s life in all its aspects.
Cheung, who is a real estate developer, immigrated to the United States at 17. Her older sister attended USC with parental support; but by the time Cheung left Hong Kong with a high school diploma from a competitive British institution in her pocket, her father’s career and business had hit a low. All he could afford to give her was $2,000.
With a USC tuition out of reach, she enrolled upon her arrival in California at Pasadena City College and transferred after two years to California State University, Los Angeles. To make a living and pay for school, she worked up to four jobs simultaneously. She worked part-time for a CPA and did clerical and secretarial work, all while studying hard. “I was broke,” she says. “Every dime was a lot of money to me.”
After finishing college in three years to save on tuition and passing the CPA exam in the 95th percentile nationwide, Cheung meandered her way via accounting and banking into founding her own real estate development company. Over the past three decades, her firm has built everything from condominiums to track homes—with Cheung participating in all stages of planning and construction. She has driven all over Los Angeles and Orange counties to study her competitors’ projects and make her own as comfortable as possible, and she often acts as the general contractor.
As it turned out, Cheung had inherited from her family much more than $2,000: the will to make it despite adversity. “I still got what I wanted,” she says, her tone feisty as she refers to her original dream of becoming an architect.
But Cheung is about more than her own aspirations and achievements. In her living room in Beverly Hills hangs a popular replica of a painting that depicts a group of figures known in Chinese folklore as the Eight Immortals. The way Cheung tells the story of the seven men and one lone woman, they each came from different social classes and pursued different paths to success. But all made it to a level where they could help mankind and bestow many a gift on humanity.
In raising her two daughters, Cheung has tried to impart to them an appreciation for what they have received in terms of comfort and education. “Being fortunate,” she tells them, “does not mean that you are above anybody else.”
Henrietta, who is a legal consultant for Microsoft, and her sister, a writer, attended public schools from kindergarten to junior high. And one of the reasons Cheung was happy to see Henrietta attend USC Gould is the university’s strong student diversity in terms of financial background. “It’s a good mix,” she says. “The real world is like that.”
Cheung says that she tries to “never forget that when you are successful, you help others who are less fortunate.” Like her grandfather, who came from a small village in China, built a publicly held business empire and became a local legend for using his wealth to provide jobs, food and lodging to hundreds of people, she longs to do good. It is from that spirit that she has been pursuing ventures to explore the potential of Chinese herbal medicine to combat diabetes. “I want to help relieve suffering,” she says.
And it is from the same spirit that she and her husband Steve Wong, who is a dentist, made a joint gift of $1 million to USC Gould that they later topped off with a scholarship fund.
Cheung, who has long been eager to support a major educational institution in L.A., hopes that her gift to the law school will allow people like her — “I am very ordinary, very normal,” she says — to become even more successful than she has been. She wants to see the scholarships that she is funding go to young men and women of all races with financial needs who are good students but not necessarily the best. “That,” she says, “is exactly who I was.”
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