Behind the historic gift: Gerald Chan’s remarks to the UMass Chan Medical School community On behalf of The Morningside Foundation, Gerald Chan addresses the Sept. 7 campus celebration Editor’s note: The following are the remarks made by Gerald Chan, on behalf of The Morningside Foundation, on Tuesday, Sept. 7, at UMass Chan Medical School in Worcester, during the campus celebration recognizing the $175 million gift from The Morningside Foundation. It gives me great pleasure in representing The Morningside Foundation to join in the celebration today. Terrible restrictions from the pandemic have prevented my family members from being here and leaving me as the sole representative of the family. What I’d like to do is offer a few remarks to give some color to this gift. By renaming the school as UMass Chan Medical School, this institution is now inextricably linked to the Chan family. I want this linkage to be meaningful to you beyond a transaction by which The Morningside Foundation provided some financial support to the school. Too much of modern life has become merely transactional. Scarce are the reflections in search of meaning. The persons this naming are to honor are Mr. and Mrs. T.H. Chan, the parents of my brothers and me. My father passed away 35 years ago at an age younger than mine now. He was diagnosed with transitional cell carcinoma of the bladder, had a botched surgery done by an over confident
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surgeon, and died within nine months from initial diagnosis. My mother, on the other hand, is 101 and still going. She keeps an active social calendar, eats out with friends and family regularly and enjoys her food, especially dessert, which is a must-have as the conclusion to a proper meal. I’m fortunate that she passed on to me her mitochondria genome. It would be wonderful if the mitochondria in my cells can keep making ATP for as long as hers. There are many things that I can say about my parents, but I feel that mere facts and chronology are of limited import. In as much as we all hated the study of history that was a mere recitation of dates and events, I would not want to tell you about my parents in such a format. History should be living, imagined and reimagined so as to be impactful on the present. The past gives us roots, not so much in the sense of connecting us to bygone times, but in anchoring us in values that are timeless. The life of my father gave form to the values he passed on to me. His life inspires me to live similarly; and his life ennobles mine. The gift to UMass today has its roots in the life of giving that my parents lived. I will give you one vignette of my late father. When the elevator repair man who had worked for him for some years fell ill and needed a blood transfusion, my father gave that man his own blood. In those days in
Hong Kong, blood banks were as yet underdeveloped. There would be a band of people standing outside the back door of the hospital waiting to sell blood. My father, who was by then a well-to-do man, could have paid anyone of those men for their blood. Instead, he gave the elevator man his own blood. In that one act of giving which cuts through layers of socioeconomic strata, he affirmed the common humanity he had with the repair man. His giving taught me that financial giving is but a surrogate that affirms a common humanity. I would like that this gift not be a mere conveyance of financial resources, but a continuation of the humanity that my father lived by. Since this gift is to a medical school, I will provide a further sketch of my father by sharing a bit of his medical history. From my aunts, I learned that my father was a rambunctious boy in his childhood. He had a good mind and was especially good with numbers, but he was not a good student. It would be years later when my son was diagnosed with ADHD, and my younger brother pointing out to me that I had all the hallmarks of ADHD, that I realized my father in all likelihood suffered from ADHD. But in those old days, a kid with ADHD was simply a bad kid. Under the prevailing Chinese culture, any deviation from social norms was judged as errant, and therefore bad. My dad was therefore thought to be
