The Chinese in America - Iris Chang [145]
Other stranded scholars were not household names, but their colleagues revered them as giants. In mathematics, Shing-Shen Chern developed differential geometry theories that would later earn him the National Medal of Science, and Chia-Chiao Lin, a theoretical astrophysicist, created a famous density wave theory to explain the spiral structure of galaxies. In engineering, Tung-Yen Lin, a professor at Berkeley and the founder of T. Y. Lin International, became one of the greatest authorities on bridges and pre-stressed concrete.† In medicine, Min-Chueh Chang, a Cambridge-educated scientist at the Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology, co-invented the birth control pill and successfully performed in-vitro fertilization with rabbit ova, a process that later helped make possible the first “test tube babies.”
These pioneers would serve as the academic role models for a new wave of Chinese intellectuals who began arriving in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. They too would come from upper-echelon families, seeking graduate degrees and fortunes in America. But unlike the generation of scholars who preceded them, they would not come directly from mainland China. Instead they would migrate from the island of Taiwan—the last hope and refuge of the exiled Nationalist regime.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The Taiwanese Americans
Just a step ahead of Mao’s advancing forces, thousands of Chinese who had supported Chiang’s Nationalist government made hurried plans to leave mainland China. Their children would later recall their panicked, even hysterical parents attempting to coordinate last-minute departures of family and close relatives. Suddenly yanked out of lives of luxury and crammed into trains and ships, swept along by a mass exodus characterized by fear and chaos, these former children of privilege would never forget being torn away from the security of their previous lives.
From November 1948 through early 1949, more than five thousand refugees, many former rank-and-file bureaucrats in Chiang’s government, arrived in Taiwan from the mainland each day.41 Eventually, between one million and two million refugees would reach the island. To get a sense of the size and character of the dislocation, one would have to imagine the United States government suddenly moving virtually its entire bureaucracy to the island of Puerto Rico.
It was easier for children, because of their youth and inexperience, to adapt to their new surroundings. Many saw Taiwan as a tropical paradise, a welcome change in their lives. In the sixteenth century, the Portuguese had named the island Ilha Formosa (“Beautiful Island”), and its natural splendor was not lost on the young arrivals. Years later, they would remember fondly the joy of netting exotic butterflies, of playing in rice paddies on the outskirts of town, of savoring all the juicy mangos, papayas, and pineapples they could eat. They were far better off than the mainland refugees who entered the United States directly from China during the early 1960s, who had suffered the extreme hardship of the famine years under Mao’s rule. Still, the relocation to Taiwan was not entirely positive for these children. They grew up under a different set of oppressive conditions, under a regime-in-exile determined to install and sustain on Taiwan the same strongly authoritarian and oligarchic system of governance with which it had ruled China.
The adult émigrés had a difficult time on all fronts. Accustomed to sophisticated urban life, most were ill-prepared for the humid climate and slow pace of the island. People who had lived in mansions now found themselves in bamboo houses, with rooms separated only by paper screens and with open-air windows that insects and lizards crawled through at will. In many areas there was no electricity