Jean S. Cheng passed away peacefully in her home on August 9, 2020, at 97 years old. She had been a full-time resident of Princeton for over 70 years.  Most of her life she was inseparable from her high school sweetheart and then husband Professor Sin-I Cheng of Princeton University, who pre-deceased her in 2011.  Born in the village of Wangli, China, she grew up amidst the turmoil of war, with first the Sino-Japanese War and then the Communist Revolution.  She was the first in her family to strive for self-improvement through schooling, an extraordinary ambition when the education of girls was at best an afterthought. She attended a boarding school, needing to walk for days to get from home to school in the countryside at a time of war.  She had decided for herself that education was a must, and nothing was going to get in her way.

Luck was with her when the Catholic Church chose to sponsor her for college in the United States, where she could join Sin-I who was already in the U.S. having won one of the few Chinese Government scholarships for studies abroad. For each of them, it was a once in a lifetime opportunity to achieve dreams that had been previously inconceivable.  She was forever grateful for the generosity afforded to her by the Church, a priceless gift she never forgot.  After graduating from the College of New Rochelle, she followed Sin-I to Princeton, and proudly relished his accomplishments over decades as a renowned professor in the Department of Aerospace and Mechanical Sciences at the University.

She is survived by her daughters Doreen and Irene and her son Andrew, seven grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. She often measured her own success by the success of her children and then theirs.  She could not be more proud, or feel more fulfilled, than to see her life's devotion to family bear such fruit. She never forgot where she came from, while also never taking her sights off the need to do better. She lived the motto "You make your own luck", a lesson she passed on to all her family.