I followed his success from afar, usually by way of conversations with mutual friends. When we were both at home in Los Angeles, we would meet for lunch or a game of pickup basketball. He was slow and stocky, but he was good. He would surprise me with a running hook shot and then flash an easy smile.
Like my mother and father before me, I had become a newspaper reporter, and I thought I was doing pretty well. Hamilton, though, decided to use his deferred law school admission and return to Harvard. By the second year, I’d heard that he was ducking law classes, sleeping in, and spending a lot of time perfecting his left-handed layup.
It didn’t matter. He excelled anyway. In his final year, he interviewed at 26 top law firms and got 26 callbacks. The 12 he chose for final interviews all offered him a position. It was scalp collecting—“a bit psychotic,” Hamilton would tell me. “I applied to all those places to prove myself.” He chose Munger, Tolles & Olson so he could come back to L.A. “They were the most prestigious firm in the western United States,” he said. “More than half the people in that firm graduated summa cum laude. I knew because I counted.” Hamilton, who practiced corporate law, fit right in. He joined the Munger Tolles recruiting committee, even took charge of doling out Laker tickets. His clients included Kobe Bryant. Hamilton helped him buy a basketball team in Italy. But still, Hamilton Chan was not happy.
In 1962, Hamilton’s father had emigrated from Hong Kong to Los Angeles because he wanted success and happiness, especially for his family. His name was Hamilton Charlie Chan. Hamilton seemed harder to say, so he became Charlie. “People started making fun of me,” Charlie recalls. He knew nothing of Charlie Chan, the Chinese American film detective from the 1930s and ’40s who spoke in Confucian aphorisms and raised 14 children, the eldest known as “Number One Son.” By the time the real Charlie Chan became a student at Los Angeles City College, the movie Charlie Chan was seen as a disgraceful stereotype.
The name Charlie Chan also didn’t help much when he applied for jobs. Finally he answered an ad placed by the Equitable Life Assurance Society of the United States, which needed agents. A manager handed him the Yellow Pages. “There are your clients,” the manager said. The phone book revealed Charlie’s talent. He could sell insurance to anyone, and now his name seemed to help. When Charlie Chan called, people asked, Is that your real name? It was the opening he needed. Equitable sponsored him for permanent residency, and Charlie Chan was put in charge of an Equitable branch office in the 3400 block of Wilshire Boulevard. He invested in the stock market and lost his savings. But he married a Vietnamese woman of Chinese descent named Christine, and they were happy.
Christine suggested he start a business. He thought of printing. Printers had done well for 500 years, and he figured they would do well for another 500. An Equitable executive tried to talk him out of it; Charlie had 900 regular insurance customers, a solid base for a long and comfortable career. Nonetheless, Charlie and two partners, including a college roommate, opened Chop Chop Printing. The name meant their work would be done quickly and well—chop-chop. But it made introductions difficult: “This is Charlie Chan from Chop Chop Printing.” One partner quit, and in 1971, Charlie reincorporated with the other as Charlie Chan Printing. They reopened just up the street from Equitable. Months in, they had little equipment and no customers, and they were about to shut down when Charlie knocked on the door of another insurance company, a former competitor. Its printer had failed to finish an order of documents. Could Charlie produce thousands of pages in 48 hours? Christine, pregnant with their daughter, helped. They made mistakes collating the order, but they met the deadline and won the account. Word got around, and other insurers followed.
by Joe Matthews, LA Magazine | Read more:
Photograph by Michael Kelley
