He wanted slightly more for his children. The Second World War had interrupted my grandfather’s medical studies, so he became a civil servant. When my mother was a child in Taiwan, her father set up a chalkboard in the family’s kitchen and wrote a new word in English on it every day. Still, he understood that American life is unbounded promise and hypocrisy, faith and greed, new spectrums of joy and self-doubt, freedom enabled by enslavement. by any specific dream, just a chance for something different. It was a ritual, and it was a type of freedom-being on the road and possibly eating well-that was not to be passed up. Whenever new grad students arrived from Taiwan, he and his friends piled into a car to pick them up. He discovered the charms of pizza and rum-raisin ice cream. He arrived as a devotee of classical music, but within a few years his favorite song was the Animals’ “House of the Rising Sun.” He subscribed, very briefly, to The New Yorker, before realizing it wasn’t meant for newcomers like him, and requesting a refund. He lived in New York, witnessed and participated in student protests, and, according to old photos, sported long hair and vaguely fashionable pants. In the years that followed, willingly marooned far from home, my father acquired various characteristics that might mark him as American. Then they set off for Boston’s Chinatown, a portal to a world they had left behind. The two young men greeted my father at the gate, traded backslaps, and rushed him to the car, where they stowed his worldly possessions-textbooks and sweaters, mostly-in the trunk.
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He scanned the crowd at the airport and saw a friend who’d come from Providence to pick him up and drop him off in Amherst.īut the friend didn’t know how to drive, so he had promised to buy lunch for another guy in exchange for a ride to the Boston airport, then to Amherst, and finally back to Providence. My father flew from Taipei to Tokyo to Seattle to Boston. A dozen other physics majors graduated with him from Tunghai University, and ten of them ended up pursuing careers abroad. In those days, you left if you were able to, especially if you were a promising student. My father left Taiwan for the United States in 1965, when he was twenty-one, and he was nearly twice as old before he set foot there again. I couldn’t understand why my parents wanted to go back to a place they had chosen to leave. We spent summers and winter vacations there weeks would pass when the only people I spoke to were my parents and their middle-aged friends. Whenever there was a weeklong break from school, my mom and I flew to Taiwan. I listed the new songs I liked, and he would seek them out in Taipei’s cassette stalls and tell me which ones he liked, too: I told him about cross-country practice, made honest commitments to work harder at school. Every now and then, I rewarded his quick, careful attention by interspersing the next set of math questions with a digest of American news: I told him about Magic Johnson’s announcement that he was H.I.V.-positive, I narrated the events that led up to the Los Angeles riots, I kept him up to date on the fate of the San Francisco Giants. I skimmed the explanations and copied down the equations and proofs. After wearying of America’s corporate ladder, he’d moved to Taiwan to work as an executive in the burgeoning semiconductor industry, and he was busy establishing himself at his new job. He replied with equations and proofs, explaining the principles of geometry in the margins and apologizing if anything was unclear. My homework requests were always marked “Urgent.” The time difference between Cupertino and Taiwan was such that I could fax my father a question in the evening and expect an answer by the time I woke up. You couldn’t discriminate against the right answer.įaxing was cheaper than long-distance calling, and involved far less pressure. Like many immigrants who prized education, my parents had faith in the mastery of technical fields-math and science-where answers weren’t left to interpretation. In seventh grade, I had tested just well enough to skip two years of math, and now I was paying for it. I was starting high school, in California, and everything, from what instrument I played to the well-roundedness of my transcript, suddenly seemed consequential. In theory, this was so he could help me with my math homework. When my father moved back to Taiwan, my family bought a pair of fax machines.