Sports: Only in America - USA Ice Hockey Forward Julie Chu

When you see her photo and her name, Julie Chu, you know right off the bat she is of Chinese ancestry but the USA on her jersey says she is as American as anyone else on the Women's Ice Hockey Team.

Her ancestors hail from the same part of China as mine! Her story reads like a typical immigrant success story. Excerpt:

Chu's father, Wah, was born in Canton (now called Guangzhou), China. The capital of Guangdong Province, Canton is a busy port and a commercial and industrial center on the Zhu Jiang (Pearl River), in the southern part of the country. Wah moved from Canton to then British-controlled Hong Kong at age 1 with his mother, who did not want her son growing up in communist China. In 1967, the mother and son emigrated to the U.S. when Wah was 16. Wah and his mother took up residence in New York's Chinatown, located on the Lower East side of Manhattan. Shortly after arriving in Chinatown, Wah was attending a youth group meeting at a neighborhood church when he met his future wife. Julie's mother, Miriam, lived on the Upper East side and traveled downtown to attend the same youth group. "The kids always joke with me, saying I've only had one girlfriend," says Wah, who married Miriam after attending Cornell University. The pair moved from New York City to Queens and then to Fairfield, in southwestern Connecticut. Wah works for the consulting giant KPMG. Chu's older brother, Richard, graduated from Skidmore College (N.Y.) in the spring of 2001. Her older sister, Christina, graduated from Fairfield University in Connecticut in 2002.

Her entry into ice hockey occurred after finding figure skating wasn't for her. Excerpt:

At one of her first sessions, Chu was skating less than gracefully when she caught a glimpse of her older brother, Richard, at the other end of the ice. He was practicing power skating with a learn-to-skate hockey group, and Julie was seething with jealousy. She knew then she wanted to play hockey. "I was so bad at figure skating," she says. "I never even got to wear the cute outfits. I had on bulky clothes and when I fell down, like a turtle, I had to wait for an instructor to come pick me up." Chu asked her father if she could trade in her toe picks for hockey pads. He agreed.

And the rest is as they say is history. Chu lead the Choate Rosemary Hall high school hockey team as well as the Connecticut Polar Bears. She then made it onto the USA team that won silver at the 2002 Salt Lake Olympics. After that, she went to Harvard majoring in psychology and has been a star on the Harvard Crimson ice hockey team.

Go Julie! Go Team USA!!

Image source: http://www.nbcolympics.com/2005/1215/5075785_200X300.jpg