"It's not the speed on the straightaway that is the measure of a driver," Lulu Chow Wang said. "It's the speed coming through the hairpin turns." A founder of Tupelo Capital Management LLC, Ms. Wang was talking about her experience racing vintage sports cars, but she might as well have been talking about her life.
Ms. Wang is one of the original members of the Committee of 100, a group of high-level Chinese-Americans — who include I.M. Pei, Yo-Yo Ma, and Oscar Tang — created shortly after the Tiananmen Square crackdown to "encourage rapport and understanding between two countries that I love and have great loyalty to," Ms. Wang said. Recently, Ms. Wang was co-chairwoman of the Committee's annual gathering in New York, an event that drew 700 attendees and featured, among other notables,
Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and leveraged-buyout greats Henry Kravis and Wilbur Ross.
Ms. Wang's involvement with the group has had an important impact on her life. "It was only when I become involved in the Committee that I began to meet more Chinese people and came into touch with that part of me that is Chinese," she said.
Not that her roots were so deeply buried. Her mother always required that her four daughters speak to her in Chinese, even though the girls were quite young when the family came to America.
The move was accidental. Her father's job as a senior official with the Nationalist Party took the Chow family to India during the war years of the 1940s. Ms. Wang was born in New Delhi under the crudest of circumstances. "I was born in a car. They called for an ambulance, but of course it didn't come," Ms. Wang said.
In 1948, her father brought the family to America for a vacation, leaving behind an infant daughter deemed too young to travel. While the Chows were touring, Mao Zedong took over China. The uncle caring for their fourth daughter was thrown into prison, and Ms. Wang's youngest sister endured a life of deprivation because of her capitalist ties, living in a remote, dirt-floored farmhouse.
It wasn't until 30 years later, after President Nixon had opened the doors to China, that the family was reunited. Ms. Wang's mother was issued one of the first American visas to go to the People's Republic of China, and found herself on a train platform searching the faces of hundreds of Mao-jacketed young people, with only an old photograph as a guide.
After attending public schools on Long Island, Ms. Wang went to Wellesley College. That simple declaration gives no hint of the importance of those four years. Ms. Wang has just stepped down after 18 years as a trustee of her alma mater and gave the school $25 million to build a new student center. The gift, made in 2000, was the largest ever received by a women's college.
To say Ms. Wang is passionate about Wellesley and about women's education is to understate her enthusiasm. She networks through her Wellesley connections (Mr. Paulsen's wife and mother are both alumnae) and has been an enormous advocate for the school.
She credits her Wellesley-acquired background in English literature for her start on Wall Street. Just out of school, Ms. Wang answered an ad placed by a small brokerage firm looking for a financial writer. Before long, she had set her sights on becoming a securities analyst and moved on to work at Donaldson, Lufkin and Jenrette, a top research firm. She was assigned to the food group as a junior analyst, but she didn't remain junior very long. After staying up nights to bone up on chemistry and finance, she wrote a prescient report on the emerging high-fructose corn syrup industry, and her career was launched.
"I always tell young women: Bite off more than you can chew, find ways to distinguish yourself," Ms. Wang said.
Following this path, Ms. Wang moved on to Bankers Trust Co., where she was soon responsible for analyzing about 20% of the Standard & Poor's 500. "I was a glutton for learning," she says. "My ultimate plan was to be a portfolio manager. When Bankers Trust veered towards quantitative research, I moved" to Equitable Capital Management. While at Equitable, she picked up an MBA from Columbia University's School of Business in 1983, and finally achieved her goal of managing money.
Her final stop before opening her own shop was Jennison Associates LLC, a top equity management firm, where she spent 10 years as a director, and then executive vice president, and was responsible for managing some $4 billion in assets.
Ms. Wang opened Tupelo Capital Management in 1998. Her husband, Anthony Wang, had made a fortune at Computer Associates, a firm founded by his brother, which ran into problems after Tony Wang retired in 1992. Her ambition was to manage the family's money, and to take in a few accounts. Early on, she dedicated proceeds from her firm to various causes.
She opened the doors with a bit more than $100 million, which quickly grew to nearly $1 billion. "It grew all too quickly," Ms. Wang says. "We wanted to keep it small but past clients wanted in. We never marketed at all."
The firm specialized in "bottoms-up" research that looked for "opportunistic" growth. "We define growth over an 18- to 36-month horizon" explains Ms. Wang. "We can invest in commodities, cyclicals — my old grounding in research has served me well."
About five years ago, the energetic Ms. Wang began to throttle back. She returned the institutional money under her management, and more recently adopted a "fund-of-funds" approach for the remaining accounts. Her plan is to focus on her board memberships, which include the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Columbia University, WNYC Radio, and Rockefeller University, and to continue serving on a number of investment committees.
In addition, Ms. Wang, who favors tailored St. John Knits and intellectual conversation, will continue her improbable racing career. After retiring, her husband began to collect vintage sports cars. His tastes ran to the best of the best, and his collection, the specifics of which are kept private, is apparently peerless.
That doesn't prevent the Wangs from racing their valuable Ferraris and other models around the country. They take this pastime seriously, though Ms. Wang's eight or so annual turns in the driver's seat cut into her hectic schedule.
"Thanks heavens for e-mail," Ms. Wang said. "I never use it on the track, of course, but if I'm navigating in a rally, with Tony driving, and there's a long stretch, I'll get out my BlackBerry."
Such moments are probably the only times she takes her eye off the road ahead.
