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Facebook bride embodies the American dream

How £12 billion Facebook bride embodies the American dream: Father of Zuckerberg's new wife was Asian refugee who worked 18-hour days in Chinese takeaway

• Priscilla Chan was mainly raised by her grandmother because parents Dennis and Yvonne worked such grueling hours at their Boston restaurant
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• Her science teachers says she was determined and bright pupil who was aiming for Harvard when she was just 13

Priscilla has closely guarded her family's humble roots, releasing only a few titbits through Facebook's PR machine. Her 'official' biography states that after Quincy High, she studied biology at Harvard where she met Zuckerberg as they queued for the toilet at a party in 2003.

She has recalled: 'He was this nerdy guy who was just a little bit out there.' While Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard after founding Facebook in his dorm room and moved to California to build his company, she remained at the prestigious Ivy League university. After Harvard, Priscilla attended medical school and graduated as a pediatrician a week before her wedding.

Her family's home is a four-bedroom red-brick detached house in a quiet cul-de-sac in the middle-class Boston suburb of Braintree. But the precise details of how the family arrived in America are unclear.

Determined pupil: Priscilla's yearbook photo from state-run Quincy High School, near Boston

Reports in China say they came originally from the city of Xuzhou in eastern Chandong province, also the home city of Rupert Murdoch's wife Wendi Deng. Others say that the family lived in Nanjing, an industrial town 150 miles west of Shanghai, before leaving to live first in Hong Kong and later in the US.
A source at the Asian-American Civic Association in Boston said it was 'highly likely' the family spent time in a refugee camp, either in Hong Kong or on arrival in the US.
Priscilla's father said he was a refugee who had lived in Vietnam, according to Thai-born NapatSriwannavit, who bought the 87-seat Taste of Asia restaurant from him in 2006 and turned it into a noodle bar called Pho & I.

Mr Sriwannavit said: 'Mr Chan was a very good man, very good manners. He said he had been a refugee and had lived in Vietnam. He was Chinese but he told me he lived in Vietnam.'

When Priscilla's father sold up, he told the new owner: 'I'm tired of working such long hours.'

Records show Dennis, who now owns a small wholesale fish business, was given a social security number as an 'Asian Refugee' between April 1975 and November 1979.

It is believed that he and his accountant wife, now 50, moved to Massachusetts in the early Eighties. Priscilla and her younger sisters, Elaine and Michelle, were born in the US.

Priscilla has already introduced Zuckerberg to her Asian roots. The couple travelled to Vietnam last December and to China in March.

Of the future, Mr Swanson said: 'Priscilla wants to contribute to society. She was the one who encouraged Mark to start a feature on Facebook encouraging people to be organ donors.

'She knows who she is and what she wants. She and Mark both want to change the world. And they are in the fortunate position of having the resources to do that.'

Mansion: Mark Zuckerberg's mansion in Palo Alto, California, which he bought for a reported $7 million

When Priscilla Chan married her long-time boyfriend, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, last weekend she looked every inch the fairytale bride.
In a stunning full-length white gown, 27-year-old Priscilla smiled serenely as she exchanged vows with Zuckerberg, 28, worth an astonishing £12 billion, in a surprise ceremony.

Her transformation into the wife of the world's youngest billionaire, however, is more remarkable than it may seem.

For Priscilla is the child of a Chinese-Vietnamese father who arrived in America with his family in the Seventies after spending time in a refugee camp.

Billionaire bride: Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg wed Priscilla Chan last weekend in California

Later Dennis Chan, 47, raised enough money to open a Chinese restaurant, where he worked gruelling 18-hour days as he dreamt of his first-born daughter living the American dream.

Priscilla was raised largely by her grandmother as her mother Yvonne also worked long hours at the Taste of Asia in Boston. At the 1,200-pupil state-run Quincy High School in the working-class town of Quincy, near Boston, it quickly became clear that Priscilla was bright - and determined to get on.

Peter Swanson, 66, her science teacher and tennis coach, said: 'She came up to me during that first year, when she was 13, and said, 'What do I have to do to get into Harvard University?''

'I was stunned. In all my years of teaching I have never had a 13-year-old ask a question like that. She knew what she wanted, even back then. I encouraged her to join the tennis team because I knew that Harvard would require her to have a well-rounded resumé.'

He added: 'She was mostly raised by her Chinese grandmother, who spoke no English. She was a very dignified woman who clearly was a huge influence in Priscilla's life. The grandmother was her emotional support. Her parents were working long hours - 18-hour days - at the restaurant.

'Priscilla worked incredibly hard at her studies and graduated top of her class. She gave me a voucher for a free meal at her family's restaurant as a gift.
'It was clear the family came from humble beginnings but were prepared to work around the clock to make something of their new life in America.

'Priscilla had that drive within her. She did everything she needed to round out her resumé and make it attractive to Harvard. And she joined the tennis club – she was not a natural athlete but with hard practice she steadily improved. When she got into Harvard she ran up to me grinning from ear to ear and said, 'See, I told you I would get to Harvard!''

Changing fortunes: The Chans' old restaurant Taste of Asia in Boston - now called Pho & I

Mr Swanson visited Priscilla and her new husband at their £3.5 million home in Palo Alto, California, last year. 'Mark was at the kitchen table working on his computer,' he said. 'Priscilla introduced us and he grinned and said, 'Behind every great man there is a great woman.''

'People are saying how lucky she is to marry him, but he knows he's the lucky one. Priscilla is the ultimate story of the American dream made good. Her parents came to the States with virtually nothing and she has married a self-made billionaire. It doesn't get much better than that.'

Source: the Dailymail

Facebook’s Royal Wedding

THE wedding of Mark Zuckerberg to Priscilla Chan last weekend here in the backyard of their $7 million home had all the staging of a carefully orchestrated celebrity event. A publicist for Facebook eagerly offered photos afterward of the beaming couple, who met at Harvard and have dated for much of the last nine years. Well-placed anonymous sources leaked to reporters the dinner menu, which included sushi and Mexican food, and the fact that Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong performed.

Even the date, May 19, was significant: it was a mere day after Facebook’s initial public stock offering, the culmination of Mr. Zuckerberg’s life work since founding the social network in his Harvard dorm room in 2004. But the curiosity that lingered was not just about what designer’s dress the bride chose to wear (Claire Pettibone) or how long it would take shareholders to sue Facebook for bungling its IPO (six days). Instead, people wanted to know: who was that princess bride who married Silicon Valley’s crown prince?

Indeed, to anyone who still confuses Mr. Zuckerberg with the portrayal of him in “The Social Network,” particularly the scene where his former girlfriend brushes him off (and the prospects of any future romance for young Mark seem dim), the very fact that he even had a longtime girlfriend must have come as something of a shock.

Ms. Chan, 27, unlike some of her equals in social status here (among them Mr. Zuckerberg’s colorful sister Randi), eschews the Silicon Valley limelight. Recently graduated from the medical school at the University of California, San Francisco, she plans to become a pediatrician. (In that, she seems to be following in the path of other notable Silicon Valley spouses who have their own established careers, like Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of Steve Jobs and an entrepreneur in her own right, and Anne Wojcicki, the wife of Google’s Sergey Brin and a founder of 23andMe, a genetic testing firm.)

Ms. Chan guards her privacy and, so far, avoids speaking to the media unless it serves Mr. Zuckerberg’s career. Though she has an active Facebook page (where her “interests” include “No on Prop 8” and Fage yogurt), she is rarely tagged in online party shots. She declined to be interviewed for this article.

“Priscilla doesn’t need to be on the cover of a magazine,” said Heidi Roizen, a venture capitalist and longtime Valley resident. “We are in a reality-star ecosystem. But there is a spectrum to this stuff, and some people take a more thoughtful approach.”

One of the few people talking about the wedding, at least publicly, was Ms. Pettibone, thrust into the spotlight by Ms. Chan’s choice of wedding dress.

Ms. Pettibone said she realized Ms. Chan was wearing her design after the designer’s husband pointed it out in a photograph he saw of the new bride. “It’s not our top seller,” Ms. Pettibone said of the $4,700 dress, one of 40 in her bridal collection, in a phone interview. “But it’s respectable.”

All her dresses are made to order so, last week, Ms. Pettibone said she combed through her orders to see where the dress was sold. It was the Little White Dress boutique in Denver, and it was apparently bought by a third party.

Since the wedding, Ms. Pettibone said, traffic to her website has skyrocketed. And retailers are demanding samples to show prospective brides. “There is nothing like a celebrity bride to lift your profile,” Ms. Pettibone said.

People who know Ms. Chan and agreed to speak, albeit without using their names for fear of offending her or Mr. Zuckerberg, said she is a quiet yet forceful presence who is protective of her new husband, whom she met in line for the bathroom at a fraternity party in 2003. Of their first encounter, Ms. Chan told The New Yorker in 2010, “He was this nerdy guy who was just a little bit out there,” remembering his novelty beer glasses printed with a computer programming joke.

In Palo Alto, Ms. Chan is close to a handful of friends, including Jessica Vascellaro, a Wall Street Journal reporter, and her fiancé, Sam Lessin, a Facebook product manager; Jessica and Aaron Sittig, senior Facebook employees (Mr. Zuckerberg was best man at their Palm Springs, Calif., wedding); and Brittany Morin, who is married to Dave Morin, an early Facebook employee who left to become a founder of Path, a photo-sharing site.

The couple prefers dinner at home with friends to raucous parties, say people who know them. They dote on their Puli, a herding dog named Beast, which they frequently photograph and have created a page for on Facebook. Ms. Chan likes to cook (so says her Facebook page), and she is known among friends for her lemon ricotta pizza.

Most important, she has been accepted into the close-knit Zuckerberg family (Mark Zuckerberg has three sisters), from Dobbs Ferry, N.Y., but who have spread to Silicon Valley to work or visit. “They are building a new kind of dynasty,” said a person close to the Zuckerbergs who declined to be named so as not to offend the family.

Ms. Chan was born on Feb. 24, 1985, and moved with her family to Braintree, Mass., when she was a junior in high school, according to a recent article in The Patriot Ledger, a local newspaper. In 2003, she was named valedictorian at Quincy High School, where she had played tennis and won a science and technology challenge, and gave a graduation speech inspired by the Dr. Seuss book “Oh, the Places You’ll Go.”

Little has been written about Ms. Chan’s Chinese-American family. But on Facebook, Dennis Chan has identified himself as the father of Priscilla and of two other daughters, Michelle and Elaine. Ms. Chan graduated from Harvard in 2007 with an undergraduate degree in biology before moving to Palo Alto to be with Mr. Zuckerberg, who had left Cambridge two years earlier. “She has always been a big part of the story of Facebook,” said David Kirkpatrick, the author of “The Facebook Effect,” which chronicled the company’s meteoric rise. “It is unbelievably significant that Priscilla knew him before he became a billionaire.”

In 2005, Mr. Zuckerberg was quoted in a profile of him in The Harvard Crimson talking to Ms. Chan and asking her if she wanted a job. “I’d love a job at Facebook,” she replied, before offering Mr. Zuckerberg a Twizzler.

But unlike other classmates enamored of Mr. Zuckerberg, she stayed in school. “She was not particularly in Mark’s thrall,” Mr. Kirkpatrick said. “She just treats him like the guy she’s in love with, not the same Mark Zuckerberg everyone else fell in love with.”

Separated by 3,000 miles, Mr. Zuckerberg and Ms. Chan split up for awhile and Mr. Zuckerberg saw other women, including an undergraduate from the University of California, Berkeley, according to Mr. Kirkpatrick’s book. When Ms. Chan reunited with her old beau in Silicon Valley in 2007, having been hired as a fourth- and fifth-grade science teacher at the Harker School, a private school in San Jose, she negotiated the terms of their getting back together, including the possibility of marriage, said a person who knows Ms. Chan. Mr. Zuckerberg was reluctant, said the person, contending that his youthful image was an asset to the company.

The couple agreed that they would not live together, but that Mr. Zuckerberg would spend at least 100 minutes of private time with Ms. Chan a week, as well as take her on at least one date, according to “The Facebook Effect.” Indeed, Mr. Kirkpatrick reported that Mr. Zuckerberg once left a News Corp. corporate retreat, where he was a guest, explaining to the company’s chief executive, Rupert Murdoch, that he was taking Ms. Chan to a movie. The couple also agreed to vacation for two weeks yearly overseas and have since visited Dubai, Mumbai and China. A friend said they were considering a trip to Peru this year.

In 2010, Ms. Chan moved into the rented house Mr. Zuckerberg was living in, in the College Terrace neighborhood of Palo Alto not far from Facebook’s former headquarters. (They have since moved to the house where the wedding was held.)

Jessica Roth, a fourth generation cobbler who lives in College Terrace, said she used to see Mr. Zuckerberg and Ms. Chan walking to dinner at Palo Alto Sol, one of the restaurants that catered the couple’s wedding. Ms. Chan even stopped in Ms. Roth’s store, European Cobblery, once. “She was neutral, showed no emotion,” Ms. Roth said. “She keeps to herself.” One Halloween, though, Ms. Roth said, Ms. Chan dressed up as a pea pod and handed out candy to neighborhood children, including hers.

Among the issues that Ms. Chan seems to care about is that of donor organs, which is now one of Facebook’s social causes. Mr. Zuckerberg told Robin Roberts, in an interview with “Good Morning America” earlier this year, that, while Ms. Chan was still in medical school, the couple would often talk at dinner about the desperately ill children she saw, and also the ones whose lives changed once they got an organ transplant. Mr. Zuckerberg called the transformation of their young lives “unbelievable.”

Despite dating, and now being married to one of the richest men in the world, Ms. Chan is unlikely to amend her pragmatic sensibilities. The person who earlier commented on their relationship recounted the following story: One day, Mr. Zuckerberg’s sister Randi was shopping with her future sister-in-law when Ms. Chan stopped to admire a pair of shoes that cost $600. Ms. Zuckerberg said, “You should get them, you have the money.” Ms. Chan, instead, put the shoes back. “It’s not my money,” she replied. 

Source: NY Times