established by Robert and Pearl Lam Bergad in 2005

The Choi-Chiu and King-Wo Lam Family Fund was created in November, 2005 to carry on the traditions of scholarly pursuit espoused by Choi-Chiu Lam and charitable giving exemplified by his wife, King-Wo Lam. Attending the University of Hong Kong on a full scholarship and majoring in English literature, Choi-Chiu was among the first group of students to graduate from the newly established Faculty of Arts in the 1920s. He went on to a career teaching English and translating English for foreign correspondents in Hong Kong. In his retirement he returned to his first love, Chinese poetry, and translated the famous Three Hundred Poems of the Tang Dynasty into English. In his Preface he stated that his purpose was to translate these three hundred poems into prose, thus affording himself the opportunity to express fully the intentions of the poets without the constraints of meter. He passed away in 1993.

King-Wo was a member of a prominent jeweler’s family in Hong Kong. She met Choi-Chiu through a cousin who was attending the University of Hong Kong at the same time as Choi-Chiu. She and Choi-Chiu were married in 1931 and they spent the World War II years in Shanghai and Vietnam, returning to Hong Kong in 1945 when the Japanese Army retreated from Hong Kong. They had four children, three of whom now reside in Minneapolis. In her later years King-Wo emigrated to Minneapolis where she passed away in 2000.