One Taiwanese American professor, Chang-Lin Tien, became the first Chinese American, as well as the first Asian American, to head a major research university in the United States. His career was propelled by personal determination and a fierce reverence for education—a reverence to which his family had introduced him by example. Tien was born in Wuhan, the son of a wealthy banker. His father had earned a degree in physics from Beijing University, the most prestigious university in China. (“A degree in anything and you were automatically Mandarin; it was a ticket anywhere,” Tien explained years later.) The pedigree enabled his father to become a financial commissioner in the Nationalist government, but no one foresaw that events would crumble the very foundations of their society. The Japanese invasion of China stripped the Tiens of everything—their home, their servants, their luxurious lifestyle. Fleeing the Japanese forces, the family uprooted themselves from Wuhan and moved into the French concession of Shanghai. With extraordinary resolve, Tien’s father rebuilt his life as well as his fortune, eventually becoming the CEO of a major bank and Shanghai commissioner of commerce. Their world became lavish once again, complete with servants and chauffeured cars: “We lived like the Rockefellers!” But then, once again, it all disappeared: the 1949 revolution wiped out their charmed existence, and the family, once again refugees, escaped from Shanghai to Taiwan with little more than the clothes on their backs.
“My father couldn’t cope with the loss,” Tien later told a San Francisco Focus reporter. “It was the second time he had lost everything.” When Tien first arrived in Taiwan at age fourteen, his entire family—twelve people—had to squeeze into one tiny room. “There wasn’t even room for all of us to sleep at the same time,” he recalled. “We had to take turns.”
One evening, Tien awoke to find his father sitting in the room, staring into the darkness. “Go to sleep,” Chang-Lin told him. “Don’t worry about us. We’ll find jobs.” Bitterly, his father retorted, “I don’t care whether my children even have nothing to eat. What I worry about is I cannot send my children to get an education.” Young Tien never forgot those words.
Shattered and depressed by the memories of his ruined career, Tien’s father later died of a heart attack, at the relatively young age of fifty-four. To help support the family, Chang-Lin worked odd jobs in high school and college. After graduating from National Taiwan University, he left nothing to chance and applied to 240 schools in the United States. The University of Louisville in Kentucky granted him a full scholarship, and in 1956 he borrowed money to pay for an inexpensive plane ticket to Seattle, then boarded a Greyhound bus for the seventy-two-hour ride to Louisville.
In the American South, Tien caught his first whiff of America’s obsession with race. The moment he stepped off the bus, he saw signs marking bathroom doors and water fountains “Whites Only” or “Colored.” He felt uncertain about his category, but local whites told him to use the white facilities, explaining that he was a guest of the United States. Tien was privately repulsed by the system and agonized over its injustice. Observing that all local buses were segregated by race, with whites sitting in front and blacks in back, he chose to walk whenever possible instead of taking public transportation.
Later he found that racism permeated not just street life, but academia as well. At the University of Louisville, one of his professors repeatedly called him “Chinaman” (at first, Tien recalls, “I was so ignorant, I thought it was a term of endearment”). Eventually he decided to put an end to these insults. “For two nights I could not sleep, staying awake and thinking about what I should do … As a refugee, I had insecure status; I owed my livelihood to his employment. He could end my position and I might have to go back to Taiwan. I was very afraid.” Finally Tien worked up the nerve to tell the professor never to call him “Chinaman” again. The confrontation was a partial success—while the professor reacted defensively, saying it would be difficult to remember Tien’s “foreign” name, he never again used the derogatory term of “Chinaman.” However, he looked for other ways to humiliate Tien, leaving him uneasy and insecure. On one occasion, this professor ordered him to climb a ladder and shut off a steam valve. He slipped and broke his fall by seizing a 400-degree Fahrenheit pipe, but he dared not complain about his severely burned and bleeding hand for fear of being ridiculed.
A less resolute man might have abandoned academic life, but Tien forged ahead with laser-like focus. In 1957, only one year after his arrival, he earned his master’s degree at the University of Louisville. Two years later, he got his doctorate at Princeton and immediately joined the mechanical engineering department at the University of California at Berkeley. He would spend the next four decades at Berkeley, rising swiftly through the ranks, becoming a full professor, chairman of the department, vice chancellor of research, and finally chancellor of the university. On top of his administrative duties, he would also work on the design of the Saturn booster rocket, correct a heat-shield problem in the U.S. space shuttle, and conduct breakthrough research on superinsulation that would be used to construct high-speed levitation trains in Japan.
(Chang 300-303)