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After Charlie Zhang accepted his Business Journal award for Excellence in Entrepreneurship on March 20, he told the crowd, “God bless America.”
It was a statement that combines two factors that Zhang believes helped him achieve success: the United States and God.
Zhang grew up in Shanghai, where his family ran a coffee roasting business until the communists threw his father in prison. His mother was a natural entrepreneur, teaching him that “if you screw it up, fix it.” Zhang himself was sent to work seven years in the countryside’s rice paddies as part of the infamous Cultural Revolution.
He was able to get a visa to the U.S. as a student exchange musician. At the age of 24, he arrived in Southern California in 1980 with $20 in his pocket and a clarinet, full of dreams of becoming a professional musician.
For 12 to 14 hours a day, six days a week, he worked in the kitchen of a Chinese restaurant where a hand injury dashed his musical ambitions.
“Being a dishwasher wasn’t a waste of time—I studied what people didn’t eat because I had to throw it away,” Zhang wrote in a 2019 Leader Board for the Business Journal. “I learned the three most popular plates were house special chicken, Mongolian beef and a vegetable dish.”
When he met his wife Ling, an immigrant from Taiwan, she insisted he go to church with her.
“I came here as a nonbeliever,” Zhang recalled. “My wife took me to the church.”
She told him, “You have to be a believer, or I won’t marry you.”
Zhang became a Christian in 1985, the year he married Ling. The couple have two sons.
“Becoming a Christian was the right choice of my life,” Zhang said. “It’s been a great journey.”
Pick Up Stix
Zhang says his faith gave him confidence that he would survive as an entrepreneur.
He raised $50,000, including $7,200 that he himself saved, to start his own restaurant that eventually became known as Pick Up Stix. Zhang grew the chain to 85 restaurant stores before he sold it to TGI Fridays in 2001.
“I came to America with $20, and they gave me $50 million!” he wrote in his Leader Board.
He knew he didn’t want to be in the restaurant business forever, and he wasn’t ready to retire. After the sale, he took off the weekend and then started Laguna Niguel-based Zion Enterprises, developing shopping centers, medical buildings, office complexes, residential homes and apartments. The couple in 2004 co-founded Aseptic Solutions USA, a state-of-the-art premier bottling company that they sold in 2012 for $60 million to nutritional company Glanbia PLC. In 2022, he co-founded Bank Irvine, where he is chairman of a bank that caters to recent Chinese immigrants. He’s sometimes a consultant for restaurants, but he doesn’t open them anymore, saying “that’s a young person’s game.”
“He’s one of the greatest success stories in American entrepreneurship,” said Shelley Hoss, chief executive of the Orange County Community Foundation, when presenting him the award March 20 before an audience of nearly 400 at the Irvine Marriott.
Along the way, he’s won other awards, such as the Ellis Island Medal of Honor and honorary degrees from Concordia University and Cal State Fullerton.
The Key to Success
Zhang attributes the key to success as “surrounding myself with great people.” Christianity taught him to treat people the way you want to be treated, he said. As a result, he has employees who have worked for him since the 1980s.
“The Bible showed me the way—it gave me the never ever give up mentality.”
Nowadays, the couple is focused on charitable works. Last year, the Business Journal named the couple to a list of the 50 most prominent businesspeople involved in Orange County’s nonprofit world.
They purchased a building in Irvine that is the headquarters of the Pacific Symphony. They began OC Music & Dance to provide a “world-class facility” where people of all ages, experiences and cultures can enjoy the arts. The art school is planning an 85,000-square-foot facility costing $40 million at Irvine’s Great Park. Zhang is on the board of directors of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum because the late president’s opening of U.S.-Chinese relations did so much to change his life.
He knows he has achieved the American dream.
“I never realized that I would be that big of a success,” he said. “The community raised me up. That encourages me to want to give back.”