The Chinese in America - Iris Chang [261]
40
Chien-Shiung Wu (also known as Jian Xiong Wu), a Chinese woman physicist at Columbia, confirmed their theory experimentally. Though many felt that Wu, then the world’s leading female physicist, also deserved to be honored by the Nobel committee, she ended up winning honorary doctorates from twelve universities, including Harvard and Yale, and earned the title of the “Queen of Nuclear Physics.” †T. Y. Lin International later built some of the most daring structures in history, such as the giant arches of the Moscone Center in San Francisco, which support, without columns, the biggest underground room in the world.
41
The natives later claimed that Taiwan was the “number three” choice for mainland refugees: the most powerful went to the “number one” destination, the United States, and those with money went to the “number two” location of Hong Kong. Everyone else, they said, headed for Taiwan.
42
The natives viewed them as the latest arrivals in a long parade of conquerors. During the seventeenth century, the island fell under the domination of the Dutch, the Spanish, and then the Manchus. In 1895, after its humiliating defeat in the First Sino-Japanese War, the Qing dynasty ceded Taiwan to Japan. Half a century later, when Japan lost World War II, they returned Taiwan to Nationalist China. Originally, many Chinese natives on the island, ecstatic at Japan’s surrender, looked forward to reunification, but their excitement soon turned to rage and disappointment. In 1947, KMT malfeasance and corruption ignited a local revolt, which the Nationalists swiftly and brutally crushed.
43
Soong had exploited his position to exchange worthless Chinese currency into U.S. dollars, which he used to profit through black market speculation, and before the entire Nationalist monetary system collapsed, Soong had converted his wealth into gold and moved to New York City.
44
For instance, one journalist who had read Marxist literature before migrating to Taiwan found himself sentenced to several years of hard penal labor after authorities discovered evidence of his literary tastes by reading his friend’s diary.
45
One Chinese American, who asked to remain anonymous, remembered that his childhood home in Taiwan became a miniature factory. Between 1948 and 1979, his father purchased tons of milk powder stored in metal buckets, as well as hundreds of food cans with rusted surfaces. “We children had to use sandpaper to scrub away the rust to make the can like new for resale,” he recalled. †The KMT needed scientific expertise to fill the ranks of a new government technocracy, and in 1979 the government created the Hsin-chu Science-Based Industrial Park to recruit talent from the United States.
46
Born in Ann Arbor in 1936, the son of a Chinese engineering student at the University of Michigan, Ting moved to mainland China at the age of two months. The Communist revolution forced the family to migrate to Taiwan, where his father taught at National Taiwan University, and Ting later returned to the United States to study at the University of Michigan in the 1950s.
47
In 1960, almost half of all Chinese people in the continental United States—43 percent—lived in either the New York or San Francisco Bay areas, two of the most expensive regions in the country.
48
TOEFL is an English-language proficiency exam for international students aspiring to study in North America or other regions with English-language curricula.
49
Yuan was the grandson of Yuan Shikai, a military commander who had served briefly as emperor after the 1911 Republic revolution, and his family had suffered heavy persecution during the Cultural Revolution. But Yuan Jialiu’s sudden appearance from America changed everything. Acting under orders from Premier Zhou Enlai, local officials hastily returned confiscated houses to Yuan’s relatives and even gave them job promotions. (They were not, however, able to repair in time Emperor Yuan Shikai’s tomb, which the Red Guards had tried to demolish with explosives.)
50
At the forefront of the battle