One is that some anti-China forces tried to sabotage the float. Most people thought the float would not become a reality, but Zhang persisted.

"I was never discouraged," she says. "I believed we would be successful."

After numerous negotiations, on Jan 1, 2008, the China Olympics float passed by the Rose Parade podium. Zhang held hands with her team member from Avery Dennison and said: "We finally made it!"

But Zhang was not finished with floats. After the Beijing Olympics float, she began preparing one for the Shanghai World Expo. With the support of the Shanghai Municipal Government Information Office, she invited several Rose Parade committee members to the 2008 Shanghai Tourism Festival parade. Zhang also brought designers to Shanghai to become familiar with the city's customs and styles.

"As a result, the designers captured the essence of the city of Shanghai, and it became another win-win cooperative effort from the two ends of the Pacific Ocean," she said.

In 2012 when then-Chinese vice-president Xi Jinping visited the US, Zhang delivered a speech representing all Chinese-Americans in southern California at a party for Xi.

Zhang gave Xi a copy of her book, In Memory of My Father: General Zhang Zhizhong, with an introduction written by Xi's father, Xi Zhongxun.

"All overseas Chinese have a common feeling: the further away we're from our motherland, the closer our heart is to it," Zhang says.

While traveling back and forth between China and the US, she established an educational foundation in her father's name to support needy students from Anhui, her father's home province.

Zhang plans to produce a movie of her father in 2015, the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II.