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“I never knew I was poor because I never new there was anything else out there. We always had food on the table. We all ate together every day at six o’clock. Rice and soup and vegetables, and maybe, chicken if we were lucky, and that was it,” recalls Ed.

As a student, Ed wasn’t the best early on. He was basically a C student. He got bored easily and was always ahead of the teacher. He was probably a gifted student at that time, since Chin scored very high on his IQ tests. Had they offered gifted or advanced classes then, he most likely would have been in them.

“When I was a kid, there were a lot of derogatory racist remarks toward me. I used to get in fights because I would never take it. Big guys, little guys, it didn’t matter. I got caught up in the martial arts because I didn’t want to get whipped at the time,” Chin stresses. “I’ve been a martial arts enthusiast for many, many years.”

Ed studied several types of martial arts. He was fortunate to train with Wally Jay of Alameda, with his uncle, Jimmy Lee and also with Bruce Lee, said to be the finest martial artist who ever lived. Today, Ed’s son Bradley is a silver medal national champion with a brown belt in karate.

“I’m just a salesman,” Chin shares softly with us. “I originally started selling Chronicle subscriptions way back when I was a kid to win trips to Disneyland and everywhere else. Then I sold brushes made by the blind. I was the biggest producer, even then.”

“As a kid there was something I learned. There were two ways you were going to get out of wherever you came from, and that was, one, to have money, and two, to have control of the English language. So I worked very hard perfecting my English language skills.”

“After high school I started college and I later dropped out before I graduated because I had to make some money. I was broke, my father was ill, I needed some money. That’s how I got started in insurance.”

“When my father was ill I remembered him talking to the insurance person. He didn’t have insurance for that particular problem. This insurance man had on a suit and a tie, and I didn’t. I asked him what he makes, and he said, you could make $15,000 a year. At that time, that was three times what a teacher was making. I said if he could do it, so could I,” beams Ed.

“Originally, maybe 18-20 insurance companies turned me down. I didn’t fit the profile, the basic format, the education, grades, family, married, everything on the chart said I didn’t fit. I eventually got on at The Equitable in December of 1960. I later found out that I got on because my boss needed to fill a quota on new hires. Not a racial quota, but a body quota. He had to hire at least two guys a year. I’m sure he would have hired that first guy who came in with a tie on. The first six months I made $36,000. Over the next four or five years I sold a lot of insurance,” smiles Chin.

Ed later moved on and was made a vice president of First American Life Insurance Company formed with capital he helped raise from Asian backers who later moved the company to Arizona. “One morning I woke up in Arizona and went down to the office and the place was empty,” exclaims Chin. “Everything, including the phones. I was in Arizona with only $300 to my name. I gave all my commissions to the company to help build it. Rather than come home and have everybody say, I told you so, I stayed down there and sold insurance and I worked it out and paid everybody off.”

“I later went to a couple of people I knew to raise $5,000 apiece from them. They liked me. So they gave me the money to start my first agency. I later bought out my partners over the next three or four years. I grew the business and sold it in 1975 and retired. Retirement lasted only six months.”

Currently Chin is 100% owner of $25+ million, AIS Corporation, which specializes in helping clients in the employee benefits area. Today, AIS provides benefits to more than 15,000 individuals, employees, executives and owners of small to mid-sized companies. “We found our niche,” explains Chin. “The Asian marketplace is our focus. We dominate it. We have over 1,500 companies we insure. We grow by over 20 companies each month. Our sophistication is far more superior than anyone in this industry. We also speak the language, whether it be Japanese, Korean, Spanish, Mandarin, Cantonese or Taiwanese. There are 300 different styles of the Chinese language. All of my people here speak a minimum of two or three languages. We do all our meetings in the client’s choice of language.”

AIS works very closely with the local multi-ethnic communities they serve. Chin has given back considerably to the area he was born and raised in. Recently, he donated $250,000 to the local Asian Cultural Center for their auditorium which now bears his name. Our strong and innovative leader has also been recognized as Asian Entrepreneur of the Year, Businessman of the Year and was recently in a feature profile in the June, 1997 issue of Money Magazine.

Even with all of the hundreds of awards he and his team have earned, Ed Chin still manages to remain a loyal, humble and proud American who remembers his roots and reminds us, “When you think of America, you think of all of the great opportunities it has to offer us.”

Resource Information:
AIS Corporation
Phone: (800) 788-6524
info@ais-insurance.com