India, Nov. 4 -- Priscilla Chan's journey from growing up in a Vietnamese refugee family to attending Harvard and becoming a philanthropist began with a family history of war and separation. During a 2021 interview with Stanford Graduate School of Business, Priscilla Chan, co-founder of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, spoke about her family's escape from Vietnam by boat and the difficult decisions her relatives faced during the war. Her grandparents divided their children into groups of two or three and sent them on separate boats, so that if one sank, they would not lose all their children.

Chan also spoke about her childhood outside Boston. Her family was sponsored by the Catholic Church and settled in an Irish Catholic town outside Bo...