During a 2021 interview with Stanford Graduate School of Business, Priscilla Chan, co-founder of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, spoke about her family’s escape from Vietnam by boat and the difficult decisions her relatives faced during the war. Priscilla Chan’s journey from growing up in a Vietnamese refugee family to attending Harvard and becoming a philanthropist began with a family history of war and separation. Her grandparents divided their children into groups of two or three and sent them on separate boats, so that if one sank, they would not lose all their children.
When Chan went to check on her, she noticed that the child had lost two teeth. Chan also spoke about her childhood outside Boston. Her parents arrived in the United States as refugees from Vietnam with little money and limited English skills. As the first person in her family to attend college, Chan initially felt like an outsider until a service group connected her with students from similar backgrounds. One incident changed how she understood the challenges these children faced. A child whom Chan tutored skipped several classes at school . Chan found out that she had been concentrating too much on attendance and academic performance without being concerned about the dangers to that child’s life. She understood that children cannot learn effectively when their health and safety are at risk.
In her 2019 remarks at the ASU GSV Summit, published by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative , Chan recalled tutoring children at Franklin Hill, a low-income housing development near her hometown. Because she did not want to go out to the playground and face other students, she recalled being bullied in middle school and eating lunch in a public school bathroom. Because she believed there were more opportunities ahead, she said she worked hard. Because her parents had little familiarity with the American higher education system, she recalled that Harvard seemed like an uncertain and difficult-to-reach prospect for her family.
Her family was sponsored by the Catholic Church and settled in an Irish Catholic town outside Boston , where Chan said she often felt like an outsider. Neither had attended college, Chan said in the interview. She said that despite their abilities and resilience, many lacked teachers who recommended them for special programs or encouraged them to pursue college.
Chan taught science for a brief time before pursuing medical training at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), where she completed her medical education and pediatric residency. Chan later discovered that the boy had witnessed severe domestic violence at home and that his behavior, which resembled seizures, had been misunderstood. This experience shaped how The Primary School in East Palo Alto operates, with teachers, parents, pediatricians, and mental health experts working together. Furthermore, Chan talked about another girl in The Primary School who used to sleep throughout the nap periods and throw tantrums. It turned out that she came from a homeless family and did not have the right sleeping arrangement. She was given a revised sleep schedule, while her mother received assistance with housing and employment services. Across her accounts of growing up, studying, teaching, and practicing medicine, Chan returned to her family’s journey out of Vietnam and the optimism she carried into her own life. These experiences as a student, teacher, and doctor helped shape her interest in children, education, and science.
During her medical training, Chan recalled treating an 8-year-old boy whose mother had told his school that he had a seizure disorder. Because the school excused his absences on medical grounds, he had missed 180 days of classes by third grade, the equivalent of approximately one full school year accumulated over several years.
This approach, according to Chan, focused on the underlying cause of the behavior.
