Sue Ling Gin 2/12 | Asian American Wonder Women

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     A woman's magazine like Face "too racy" for a woman who worked for years as a Playboy bunny--and made good money at it? What compulsion could prompt a mature and respected businesswoman to renege on her word to be interviewed, then to compound the offense by denying that she had even consented in the first place?

     A possible answer presents itself in old articles and items about Sue Ling Gin in the archives of the Chicago Tribune, Chicago Sun-Times and Crane's Chicago Business. They reveal that since the mid 80s Gin has made skilled use of the media and of the minority-dominated Chicago political establishment by playing to the hilt the role of a civic-minded minority businesswoman, a role she might have feared would be undermined by revelations of her more colorful, human past. The Chicago newspaper archives contain dozens of items on Gin. Her appointments to the boards of a university, a bank, a public untility. The savvy businesswoman who enlists the left-wing political clout of public housing project tenants to win Flying Food Fare a valuable food concession at Midway Airport. Joining a small group of entrepreneurs in a luncheon with Bill Clinton prior to his departure for trade talks with Japan. Banding together with a clique of Chicago's minority business insiders to jostle for preference in winning what could be a hugely lucrative riverboat gambling license. The succession of news stories revolve around a common theme--Sue Ling Gin, minority businesswoman extraordinaire.

     Currently, millions of dollars of Flying Food Fare's revenues come from contracts awarded by local governmental entities--the Chicago Board of Education, Cook County jails, Amtrak, Midway Airport and other airports. A riverboat gaming license could be so hugely lucrative as to push Gin's business into the big time. She is currently pursuing a joint venture with Air France to set up an airline catering business in Shanghai. That too requires endorsements from various humorless government agencies as well as quasi-governmental civic-groups. Clearly Gin has staked the future growth of her enterprises on continued government favors. Anything that undermines the picture of her as a sober minority businesswoman, Gin has decided, may jeopardize her chances of winning the kinds of lucrative preferences on which she has placed her bets.

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     During the 1920s strict anti-Chinese-legislation kept out all but a trickle of the most determined of Chinese immigrants. Among them was a couple from Canton who settled in the quiet, whitebread Chicago suburb of Aurora, Illinois. The Gins were the town's only Asians. In fact, their son Richard, born in 1931, would become the first Asian American ever to graduate from Aurora's East High. Five years after Richard came a daughter named Connie. She seemed to have been born normal, according to Richard. Then something terrible happened. By school age she was mentally retarded.

     "I think when she was young, my mother dropped her on her head," Richard says. Now 64, he retired recently after a modestly successful career as a contractor. He speaks slowly with a vowel-swallowing midwestern accent. "My dad took her around to various places and could not do anything for her. She has a very low IQ, although some things she knows about, but shešs not average by a long shot."

    Connie did manage to get married later in life. According to Myrtle Grey, head of East High's English department, after graduation Connie moved to Chicago and had two daughters. At one point she had to be institutionalized and her children were taken from her and sent to live with Richard, his wife and their two children. Connie's kids went to East High with his own. PAGE 3

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