Elaine Chao Says APA Community Needs Political Development

Secretary of Labor visits S.F.’s Chinatown

By Martha Smilgis
The San Francisco Examiner

Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao’s trip to San Francisco last week was not only about revisiting her roots in San Francisco’s Asian Pacific American community. As a political veteran, Chao recognizes that the APA community, for all its economic energy and cultural richness, still needs to be developed as a political resource. To that end, she made very good use of her time here.

Chao visited Chinatown on Thursday to address the Lung Kong Tin Yee Association, the venerable business and community group. She later joined GOP gubernatorial hopeful Bill Simon for a fundraising dinner at the Fairmont Hotel for 500 local APA leaders.

Under sparkling chandeliers in Lung Kong Tin Yee’s meeting room on Grant Avenue, Chao said she is a friend of the small-business people who, like her parents, came to this country for freedom and opportunity. She told of coming by freighter from Taiwan to New York City when she was 8. Her family — she is the oldest of six girls — lived in a one-bedroom apartment while her father started a small shipping business, worked three jobs and finished school.

Composed and elegant in a pale-blue pants suit, Chao spoke in Mandarin and English to the meticulously dressed audience. Despite her professional and political success, she reiterated “the Chinese traditional virtue: Never forget your elders.” She was greeted with traditional Chinatown hospitality: lion dancers, drums and cymbals. The Lung Kong Tin Yee Association is one of Chinatown’s oldest. It has sponsored businesses, youth camps and a Chinese-language school.

Emerging activism

This all seemed to resonate nicely with the audience, and certainly pleased Chao.

In an interview with The San Francisco Examiner, she observed that “the Asian community is up for grabs politically. Asians are Republican by nature, with a natural proclivity for Republican values.

“Asians are small-business people, conservative and opposed to taxes. They focus on their families and children, and few are political activists.”

Nonetheless, she noted that Japanese and Filipinos tend to vote Democratic, whereas Chinese and Vietnamese lean toward the Republican party. (The Vietnamese are fiercely anti-communist.)

“Asians tend to go with whoever is in power because of their respect for power,” Chao said.

“Culturally, they lack a tradition of political activism. In some Asian groups, there’s a tradition of noninvolvement because of persecution. Keeping your head down was the way to survive. Of course, the later, assimilated generations [have] become more political.”

Smart and industrious, Chao attended Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts and earned a master’s in business from Harvard University. She began her professional career as a banker at Citicorp in New York, then became a White House fellow and moved to Washington, D.C. Through contacts in the Reagan administration, she visited California and, in 1984, took a position as an investment banker with Bank of America in San Francisco, syndicating billion-dollar loans for businesses throughout the state.

Chao, 49, loves San Francisco because it was the first place she saw APAs in all types of jobs, from postal workers to CEOs. She told the group of Chinese notables, “We are all one family,” and underscored her record of hiring 17 APAs for the Department of Labor — and President Bush’s appointment of 77 APAs to government jobs. Chao praised Bush as a “new kind of Republican” with “one of the most ethnically diverse Cabinets.”

Financial wiz

In addition to fame as the second APA appointed to a Cabinet post — current Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta became the first when President Clinton appointed him Secretary of Commerce — Chao earned a reputation as a financial turnaround artist. She was appointed by Reagan to revamp the loan-default system at the Federal Maritime Administration. Later, she was chosen by a headhunting firm from among 600 candidates to restructure bankrupt and scandal-ridden United Way of America. In 1992, President George H.W. Bush appointed her to head the Peace Corps, where she sent volunteers to the Baltic states.

Efficient and gracious in spite of a nonstop schedule, Chao oversees a department of 17,500 people with a $45.5 billion budget, much of which is spent on unemployment insurance. A financial wiz, she is also on President George W. Bush’s economic team and, despite the nose-diving stock indexes, defends his proposal to invest Social Security money in the stock market.

“It is only 2 percent of one’s money,” she said. As head of the Labor Department, Chao oversees 401(k) plans, health benefits, workplace safety regulations and wage controls.

Nowadays, she and her husband, Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., have replaced Bob and Elizabeth Dole as Washington’s Republican power couple.

Having worked in the private and political spheres, she admits that government bureaucracies are not as efficient as those of private enterprises.

“But they ensure fairness and nondiscrimination,” she told The Examiner. Although Chao married late at age 39, she “loves being married” and keeps homes in Kentucky and Washington, D.C. Deeply respectful and in awe of her parents’ struggle, she has only one regret: “I’m sorry I didn’t have kids. But there are trade-offs in life.”

Reach Martha Smilgis at msmilgis@sfexaminer.com.