AIG's roots went back to 1919 in Shanghai

A Brief Shieh Family History from my father's side: My uncle MK traveled with the founder Cornelius V. Starr to the Interior of China without water as I was told by the son of my cousin(Bobby) over a hundred years ago. Starr worked with the US Office of Strategic Services during World War II to create an intelligence unit that gleaned information from insurance documents. I was a statistician with Farmers Insurance Group in 1951-52 in Los Angeles. My genes worked for two years only but I taught many decades with my genes from my parents who taught English and Chinese.

When AIG's CEO Greenberg took the reins in 1968, AIG was a privately held company. Greenberg, a compactly built son of a taxi cab driver,eventually became a figure in both New York and Washington, where he counted Henry Kissinger and Reagon CIA director Bill Casey among the confidantes. (Published by the Washington Post,December 29, 2008 on page A6 under the Crash of the leading characters with photos. My uncle published his biography with photo of Maurice Greenberg and I was given a copy for family remembrance.

My grandfather was the first Chinese to do insurance business with the British and my father had the opportunity to study and to teach at Anglo-Chinese College for many decades. That is Zia(Shanghai dialect) family history in Shanghai. My mother was a Manchurian princess who became a refugee from Hangzhou to Shanghai to teach in a school and met my father many decades ago.

Anglo-Chinese College was the prep school for St.John's University in Shanghai that I earned my B.A. degree in 1946.

Francis Shieh a.k.a. Xie Shihao on New Year's Eve with reflection of my ancestry with roots in Shanghai. December 31, 2008 at 12.26 p.m.