"Mom, why don't you sell me?" a seven year old girl called Fang Fang said to her dying mother. "If you sold me, you would have money to buy medicine…. Don't worry mom, when I grow up, I know my way back to look for you." What Fang Fang did not know was both her parents were dying of AIDS due to selling blood. Earlier this year, despite government provided ARV, both her parents died of AIDS, leaving behind Fang Fang and her younger sister, who is also HIV positive. Fang Fang already lost both parents to AIDS, and will soon lose her one and only sibling to the virus, becoming the only survivor in her family. According to the New China News Agency, there are 76,000 AIDS orphans in China like Fang Fang, and the number will increase to 260,000 by year 2010.

During the 1990s, many poor peasants in China sold blood in order to earn an extra income. Due to unsanitary blood collection practices, many of them contracted HIV and died of AIDS. In some villages today, over 40% of the adults either had died of AIDS or are HIV positive, leaving behind tens of thousands of orphans. Most of these children do not have HIV themselves, and will continue to live in the society for 60 or 70 more years. If we do not help them now, they will grow up uneducated and vulnerable, becoming a large force of social instability for decades to come.

As I watched in horror the destruction of the middle generation, I started a program focusing on helping the AIDS impacted children by sponsoring their education and providing psycho-social support and vocational training to them. We do not build orphanages, and we do not operate foster care. We empower the local communities so that children can grow up with their grandparents and relatives. We put them back into the local education system so that they can go to school with other non-AIDS impacted children. Although we do not run schools to provide education, we do run a lot psychosocial support programs and vocation training for the AIDS impacted children and youth. We also try to cut the middle person as much as possible, by directly paying the education fees to the local schools and to the students we serve. Taking a pragmatic, non-confrontational and result-driven approach, we have grown to become the largest non-governmental effort in helping children impacted by AIDS in China, serving over 4,000 children in the program.

In addition to the program helping children impacted by AIDS, we also run an equally important AIDS prevention program focusing on vulnerable groups such as MSM and sex workers in 8 cities in China, providing the much needed safer sex information, condoms and lubricants through community outreach, VCT, hotline and capacity building workshops.

Since the emergence of SARS, the Chinese Central Government has moved from denial to proactively solving the AIDS problems. Our work has become easier in terms of government acceptance. However, the growth of the problem and the spread of AIDS have outpaced the progress made. Like many other NGOs, our work is impacted by lack of sustainable funding and capable human resources.

AIDS emerged 25 years ago in the US, the same time when I moved to San Francisco to attend high school. Since that time, it has grown to a global disaster, killing over 20 million people. Another 45 million are living with HIV in the world today. Over 12 million children are orphaned by AIDS.

In 1997 when I was working for an investment bank, I tool a journey to Tibet, where I got inspired by two religious tools that the temple used to train the monks. One tool represents wisdom, and the other compassion. It is the goal of Tibetan Buddhism to train monks to possess both qualities. If a person only has wisdom but no compassion, he or she may not do much for the society, but if a person has a lot of compassion but no wisdom, the help to the world may also be limited. If I spend all the time in the AIDS impacted villages hugging and crying with the orphans, I may not be able to help a lot of them. Our mission is to create a health, equal and harmonious society. Although it is a charity, we try to run this charity as efficient as possible. For example, we put a strong emphasis on internal management, monitoring and evaluation, application of technology, and voices from the front line and from the people we serve.

Tonight's award comes in an appropriate time, two weeks before the World AIDS Day, in an appropriate place, Asia. While most of the AIDS casualties are now in sub-Saharan Africa, many experts predict that Asia will be next. You may think that Asia still has a long time to respond. However, from an epidemiological perspective, once we have passed a threshold, the spread of the virus will move very quickly. Take South Africa as an example. It took South Africa 5 years for the prevalence to increase from 0.5% to 1%, but it took that country just another 7 years to reach from 1% to 20%. We simply do not have time to be complacent.

Because of the huge population base of Asia, we do not need to see a 30% prevalence to reach a global disaster. Even a moderate 3% infection rate in two Asian countries alone, namely China and India, could translate to 70 million new infections, which will be more all the people who have died of AIDS and infected in the world ever combined, resulting in unbearable cost in medical care, social instability, and millions of orphans.

After learning the disastrous impact of AIDS in Africa, many people in the developed world said "Gee, I wished I knew, and we could have done something". In the case of Asia, we have no excuse of saying such thing, because we do know it is coming. So ten years from now in 2016, when we sit around attending the 11th "Asia 21" meeting, I hope we would not say to each other, "Gee we should have done something".

Tonight in the audience are young leaders who care about the development of Asia Pacific. All of us can do something about it NOW. It could be joining the cause as a volunteer, hosting an awareness raising event, donating money or material supply, or developing a corporate social responsibility program. We are running out of time, and desperately need more help.

It is a great honor to be here tonight. I am extremely grateful for Asia Society and its partners for having the vision to give this inaugural award to an AIDS NGO in Asia, which not only represents its recognition of our work but also the recognition of the importance of AIDS.

Ladies and gentlemen, we have a very narrow and rapidly closing window of opportunity to do something about AIDS before it is too late. As my friend David Ho said, to a large extent, our generation will be judged by history on how we respond to AIDS. I hope you can join me in the fight of AIDS. Thank you very much.