Story of a Cowboy

By: Kunchao Chen

Is it a coincidence, or perhaps fate? Throughout my varied educational and professional career, I never could break away from the lucky number seven. I was born in the seventh month (July) in a town in northern Taiwan. I did not enter kindergarten till I was seven years old. I completed compulsory primary school education in seven years and graduated from National Hsin Chu Senior Industrial Vocational School seven years after. To avoid military service, I took the university entrance exam, and after another seven years I got my degree from National Cheng Kung University. Forced to leave the country by the political and economic situation, I got my master’s degree from the University of Cincinnati seven years later. In continuing pursuit of professional expertise in tech, after another seven years, I returned to my alma matter to receive an advanced doctoral degree in mechanical engineering. After receiving my doctorate, I continued to work at the same company, but after seven years I decided to help at the family business and so I transferred to a company near the restaurant. In all, I have worked at seven different companies, large and small, throughout the United States. The wonderous thing is that after seven years of working at the last company, the R&D department went through a merger, and because I did not want to leave the Gold Coast, I retired then and there. I have been living at this retirement home since; it has been three times seven years.

My great grandfather came to Taiwan from Fujian province, China. Disembarking in Tainan, he then settled in a Hakka village in Hsinchu. The generations following all married Hakka wives and farmed for a living; by the second generation we’d turned our backs to the ancestors and spoke only Hakka; it was only in rites commemorating ancestors that great grandfather’s nickname was recalled: Fujian Old Chen (福老陳). All generations before me were illiterate; mine was the first with a compulsory education system when we began to attend primary school. If we could test into a vocational school, we could study for a few more years, but thinking of University was akin to dreaming. In my whole village there was still no one who has attended a professional college. I was a farm child – as soon as class ended, I would go home to help with house and farm work (It goes without saying that summer vacations were also spent at home). My first jobs were fetching water, watering the plants, and feeding the cattle. I loved to pet the cows and feed them with grass. If I was out herding with other cow-herd companions, we would sing folk songs and swim in the river. We would also sharpen their horns to get them an edge in battle for conquering the best grassland. Grazing the cows on my own, I could sit on the old cows’ back and read, or practice singing solo. When I got a bit older, I had to start doing strenuous farm work. Summer vacation was the busiest time in the fields – endless cropping and weeding all under the scalding hot sun. And when the work was done it would already be time to go back to school. My family’s fields were right next to a highway. At around five in the afternoons in summer months when the sun was still high, as the workers in the oil and cement factories got off their shift and walked home, we still knelt in the hot mud, pouring sweat and gripping weeds with sore hands all the way until the sun set. Even on weekends there was no rest. I really wanted to be a white-collar worker, so I started to prepare to test for advanced schooling. Well, I was accepted into Hsinchu Industrial School and started to study engineering. Thus began my professional journey of engineering.

During World War II all English classes were stopped, so that I lost the opportunity to learn the foundations of English. Of course, there were no Mandarin classes either. After liberation from Japanese colonial era, beginning and advanced levels of courses were revised. Without sufficient teachers or suitable textbooks, my Chinese and English proficiency was not nearly as good as those of high school students, and as the university entrance exam usually picked its questions according to high school textbooks, I did not even dare thinking of applying to university. Fortunately, vocational subjects were still taught in Japanese by most Taiwanese teachers until graduation. When I graduated from National Hsin Chu Senior Industrial Vocational School, I was fortunate enough to pass the government employment exam and was sent to Taipei to work as a civil servant at the steel plant of Taiwan Industrial and Mining Corporation. From then on, I was freed of the village environment, and took my first stride into industrial society and urban life. As the time of required military service approached, my only option to defer military service was to boost my English and Chinese skills to try and get into a university. At the time there were no cram schools; all I could do was buy an English textbook and self-study. Building up from zero, I gradually improved, until after one year of dedicated struggle I took my first shot at the entrance exam. It turned out my English was still much too poor, yet I familiarized myself with the nature of the math and science sections, and changed my study strategy, putting more effort into reviewing the hard sciences. With the extra points in the sciences I could make up for the poverty of my humanities scores. This strategy proved fruitful during the second round of testing; I was admitted into the mechanical engineering department of National Cheng Kung University. The week immediately after registration, my family sent me my military recruitment notice, so I attached my enrollment certificate and sent it to the military service office for deferral, thereby seamlessly entering the next level of higher education.

The introductory general education courses for the engineering department were all in literature and politics, comparatively taxing for those of us industrial school graduates. But as we got into professional coursework I felt more at ease. I had already taken many related courses, plus I had three years of real-world experience. With this stable foundation and solid understanding of core concepts I could absorb advanced theory more easily. The second semester of my first year my grades shot up and I got a scholarship from Taiwan Mechanics Corporation (台灣機械公司). Not only did I now have enough money, my internship and employment opportunities were also guaranteed. I was offered winter and summer break internships with free housing and a salary. On top of that, my internship reports also went towards my engineering degree.

After graduation I accepted the reality I had to prepare for military service. After reporting to Donggang Airforce Camp for enlistment training, I transferred to the Okayama Airforce Aircraft School for advanced training. Upon completing training, I was promoted to be second lieutenant ordnance officer, and was assigned to the first air force wing at Hsinchu basecamp to complete my service. As my hometown was in Hsinchu, I lived with my family rather than at the base and took the Neiwan train line to go to work. Only when it was the Duty Officer’s night off would I remain at camp to lead troops through evening responsibilities. Most of the air force reserve at Hsinchu base were the children of high-level officers; thanks to them I could also live the life of an elite officer. Just before the officer on shift arrived, the troops would send around a letter saying they had to report on time, as if other times they could do whatever they want. Those preparing to study abroad were constantly running off to Taipei. But I was different. My scholarship was conditional on employment, and I had to work for two years before I could dream of going abroad. Since I couldn’t study abroad, I got married with my girlfriend of four years before being discharged from the military, and after being released brought my wife down to the southern city of Kaohsiung to begin work at Taiwan Mechanics Corporation. My new family settled in, and soon our first son was born. I rose from being a civil servant to assistant engineer, and my compulsory employment term was soon complete. Then, when our first daughter was born, I no longer thought of leaving my family to pursue study abroad. At the time it was government regulation that students abroad were not permitted to bring their families.

I had an old friend who was my classmate’s colleague. His parents still vehemently opposed marrying a girlfriend who had only junior-high school education. So he quit work at the company and returned to his alma matter to be an assistant teacher and prepare to go to study in the United States. Upon returning to school he started dating a classmate. She was a member of Initiative of Change, and preparing to go on a promotion tour around the world. His father wanted to encourage him to get married early, and said if he went abroad and married his new girlfriend, he’d pay for their masters tuition. Soon it was settled, and they were engaged. She traveled around with her group with the intent of leaving them in the States and settling down to study. This friend of mine was searching for someone to apply for foreign exchange to bring to the States for his fiancée’s tuition. He also wanted to find a companion to go to grad school together, so he called me up and encouraged me to pursue advanced studies abroad. If I could get a scholarship and use some of their money as proof of sufficient funds for visa application, all I would need to pay for myself was travel. Then I could fly to the far-off US for advanced studies. At that time, I had just been promoted to deputy director of the mechanics plant. The director himself was a KMT party pig and worked at the company headquarters in Taipei; he never came to see the factory. I was responsible for over two hundred employees. I felt I had a lot of authority and was gaining experience. I was proud of my achievements. My colleagues even said I was very popular! But then the director of the security room wanted me to join the KMT (Kuomintang, Nationalist Party). When I refused, the company stopped giving me my bonus money for the deputy position. Having become carried away in my success, I did not care to haggle over when my bonuses were distributed, but what I really couldn’t take was that if I didn’t join the KMT I would never be able to become factory director. At 30 years old, I had already hit a glass ceiling. My fervor to go to the US was lit, so I began to apply for admission and scholarships to the same university as my old friend longing for his far-off fiancée.

The machine tool is the mother of all machines. All machines are produced by a machine tool; it includes lathes, shears, drills and planers, etc., which are all the essentials of a mechanical workshop. Cincinnati, Ohio, is the world’s first and largest center for machine tools, producing all kinds of manufacturing machines for all kinds of products. The machine tools of Taiwan Mechanics Corporation all came from there too. The University of Cincinnati, with a history of over 100 years, is located in the city center. The day college operates on a five-year cooperative education system. The evening graduate school is even bigger than the daytime one, because most of the research is conducted by working engineers from all over the city. To keep up with ever-shifting scientific progress, many companies set aside funds for their employees to attend evening grad school. This kind of research institute was just right for a middle-aged engineer come to the US in search of fortune. I had to support my family. Getting a master’s was also the route to getting a green card, and there would also be many opportunities for working on the side. We both had professional experience working with machine tools, and it would be easy to find work after graduation. So I applied for a scholarship from the University of Cincinnati. The government had just relaxed its study abroad policies; everyone who held a university scholarship could forego the foreign students’ exam. After we both received letters of acceptance for scholarships, we began to prepare for the oral visa examination at the consulate.

Preparing for the interview meant I had to strengthen my speaking and listening abilities. My listening comprehension by language in order of fluency was first Hakka, then Japanese, then Mandarin, then Taiwanese and lastly (British) English. But the consulate required me to test my most feared American English. In Kaohsiung I could not find an English cram school, and the only radio I had did not play the English language program from Taipei. But what was the point of whining? I had heard the consulate would first give a brief written test on a specified topic of daily use to test for expressivity and grammar, before doing the oral examination. So I chose a topic at random every day, wrote for five minutes, then did a word count, and looked for misspellings and grammar errors, thereby tempering my expressivity. But as for listening, it was no use. I worked my brain like this all the way until one half year before departure, when while the Taipei Post Office was installing automatic mail distribution equipment, the site supervisor of Taiwan Mechanics Corporation was suddenly killed by a large gear, influencing the project’s progress. As the date of delivery pressed closer, I was the most suitable person to take over, because the machine parts for that project had all gone through my mechanics workshop before getting packaged and shipped to the site. Struck by an idea, I ran to the project assistant and asked him to send me to the North do direct various project on site. As soon as I was approved, I prepared to head up to Taipei.

I fought till the end in efforts to go abroad. I brought my whole family to Taipei and rented a place next to my father in law’s house. During the day I would go to various project sites to take care of work, and at night and weekends I concentrated on training my listening comprehension. A friend introduced me to a professor in the foreign languages at National Taiwan University who provided tutoring for the oral visa examination. Coincidentally, his son had just finished military service and was planning to go to the University of Cincinnati at the same time as me to get a masters in aeronautical engineering. Yet though that professor knew a lot about skills required for the visa examination, because he’d come from a Japanese university and his accent sounded nothing like an American, he still did not have much help on my abysmal listening ability. I only attended a couple of times. Clutching the Buddha’s feet could also not remedy by weakness. I could only rely on putting up a front. I thought of the Art of War by Sun Tzu: to use offense as defense and undermine the opponents’ opportunities to attack. That is, I would undermine the examiners ability to ask me questions. In other words, since the length of the oral examination was set, to make the examiner ask less questions, I would simply have to talk for longer to on each one kill time. I had already spent much time steeling my expressivity, after all, so talking longer would not be a huge issue. Even if my English had a thick Japanese accent, there was not much to be done about that (if the examiner didn’t understand that was his problem). I just needed to prepare so topics to kill time with.

Before the day of my interview at the consulate, I discussed Sun Tzu’s Art of War with my friend. He wanted me to interview first, and then he would use the same strategy. I could only agree. After all, if he didn’t get through the border, I’d also have problems leaving the country. If he didn’t get money from his father, I also wouldn’t have money for the proof of living expenses required for the visa. On the day of the test, I only understood one phrase from the first question: “University of Cincinnati,” but I had no idea what aspect of the university they were asking about. So I putting my tactics into play; I began to talk about the cooperative education system at the University of Cincinnati, why I had chosen to study at the world center for machine tools and so on and so forth, and kept talking until I got to what day classes started and how I had to rush to register. As soon as I stopped, the second question was posed. All I heard was “Taiwan Mechanics Corporation,” but hearing this, my anxiety dissipated. I had so much I could say about this company I had worked at for so many years! I began with the economics department of Taiwan Industrial Hub and the company’s mission in furthering Taiwan’s development, and went on about my past duties, present responsibilities, and future ambitions. My exposition hadn’t yet reached its peak when — perhaps the time was already up, or else he had just had enough—the interviewer pulled out the past experience form from his drawer and told me to go complete the physical examination. How strange that at that moment my speaking was fluid, and my listening improved too! With the most difficult barrier crossed, all I had to do was get my visa and go abroad.

My classmate then used the same strategy, but unfortunately for him, his speech did not have the continuity of a machine gun. His answers were more like intermittent riffle shots; when his word slowed or faltered, the interviewer mistook that he was finished and changed the question. Still concentrating on the first question, my classmate didn’t pay close attention to the second, and once he was nervous he became tongue tied. Even though his pronunciation and listening comprehension were both stronger than mine, his speaking was defeated by his stutter, and in the end he could not go abroad. Having influenced my proof of living expenses, he felt a responsibility to help resolve the problem. He wrote to a friend pursuing advanced studies in the US and asked him to send money to me instead of himself. A few days later, I got the money, but it still wasn’t enough. The rest I borrowed from my cousin’s bank account. Once I registered at the university, I returned all this money. Of my father’s four children, I’d gotten the most education, and also used the most of my family’s money. I was resolved not to use my father’s hard-earned money to go study abroad (lest my father be criticized he favored me or other such gossip). So I told my father I had a scholarship, and didn’t need any extra money for studies. He did not believe me and told my uncle I was deceiving him. My uncle recommended me to at least let my father pay a small part of expenses, so he could tell his friends and relatives he was sending me abroad. In the end, for the sake of being a loyal son, I asked my father to buy my plane ticket to the West Coast

Finally, having bode farewell to friends and family, I boarded a chartered flight for exchange students from Songshan Airport. I had an overnight transfer in Tokyo, and early the next morning boarded the next flight to San Francisco International Airport. The classmate who had lent me money picked me up at the airport and I spent the night at his dormitory. The next morning, he took me to see the University of California, Berkeley campus where he had gotten his PhD. I also went to the post office and sent a letter back to Taiwan, formally resigning from Taiwan Mechanics Corporation. Then he sent me off at the Greyhound station. It took three continuous days to get to the East coast, all on the same bus – the only stops were to change drivers. I switched buses to get to Cincinnati, where I found a house to live with other Taiwanese exchange students. The next day I went to the University of Cincinnati to register, and a few days later it was time to start class. When I first arrived and everything was unfamiliar, I lived in an old house next to campus with two classmates for one semester, then moved to a house that was farther away but nicer. I lived in that house until my family came to the United States.

When I was at Chenggong University, they collaborated with Purdue University. Our university library had all the books from Purdue. Everyone borrowed English textbooks from the library for special subjects and returned them at the end of the term. After coming to the US, I bought used textbooks – only when I couldn’t find used ones did I buy new ones. Studying after class was no huge deal; I just had to spend time to look up new words in a dictionary. But listening in class was highly exhausting, and speaking in class was impossible. My best bet was to scribble down everything written on the blackboard, and then study on my own with the original textbook after class. With my poor English I had to take a remedial English class for foreign students. Besides this, I chose as many math-based courses as possible, because math used very little English words. I could get the idea just by looking at the equations, and test results only depended on numbers as well. The required classes I had to make up were mostly during the day, so my time for part-time work was limited. The second semester was better. I mostly had evening classes, so I could do professional gigs during the day. My salary was higher and I could also train my English listening.

During summer break, foreign students could legally look for long-term professional work. Before the semester was up, I sent out my applications. I was experienced, so after my interview I was hired for mechanical design work. So as soon as final exams were over, I started work at my first company in the United States. Mechanical design work was paid by the hour; working overtime on evenings and weekends I could earn one and a half times the original wage, and on Sundays I could earn double. Soon I was sending money back to Taiwan to support my family. After I left Taiwan, my wife brought our children back to my hometown in the countryside to lead a farming life. But she was not a country girl after all and not fit for farm work. After dredging through summer break, she arranged for our son to go to kindergarten with his cousin, and moved to Taipei to live at her parents’ home, spending time training her English, cooking and making clothing, preparing for life after our reunion. I had no choice but to work to make money for my wife and parents.

Before the summer was over, the head engineer asked me to continue working once school started. I answered that if the company helped me out I’d be willing to stay; if the company let me design new machines as my graduate thesis, then I could keep working. Since I had registered for thesis credits, working could count for writing my thesis and would not break immigration laws. I had a scholarship at any rate, and did not need to pay tuition. The head engineer consulted with the chair, and wanted me to design an automatic pipe-shrinking machine. But the dissertation could not be publicly disclosed; the patent rights would belong to the company. Most of the time I worked on business projects – I only worked on pipe-shrinking when I had extra time. With my family situated, stable work and decent income, I decided to buy a used car for travel. The price included enough driving lessons for me to get a license, so it was worth it even though it was a bit pricier. The car owner would pick me up at my house for driving lessons and then drop my back off at home or class. Once I had my car I drove around to look at all the factory zones. I found most factories were in the same condition as before the Second World War, and were not developing towards a high-tech future. This industrial town was headed towards a fate of being eliminated by changing times. As such, I changed my elective courses for the new semester, focusing on newly opened courses in technology.

When the new term started, I discussed my thesis topic with my advisor. With his consent, I began to take thesis credits; for the rest of my credits I took night classes in technology, computer language and other new knowledge. While at work I did my best to find time for my thesis project. On weekends, I did homework and worked on writing my thesis. I finished writing my thesis before I finished designing the machine. I handed it in and took my graduate diploma to the immigration office to apply for permanent residency. But I could not leave the company before I had my green card. As I waited for my green card and immigration procedures of my family, I continued to take night classes on special topics in technology. At first, I payed out my own pocket, then at the end of the semester I took a copy of my report card to the company to request compensation for advanced study. Though I had no intent of studying for a PhD I couldn’t say no to the opportunity to study the latest technology at no cost.

Finally, my family could reunite with me in the United States. My roommates from school moved out so that my family could have the house to ourselves. My son went to the kindergarten nearby, and I continued to take evening classes in technology. Family life was very content. After about a year we had our second daughter and felt the house was getting too small, plus we wanted to have space for the kids to play. When we couldn’t find a landlord willing to rent to a family with three kids, our best choice was to buy a house in a new residential neighborhood in the suburbs. There were many children of similar ages, and little traffic, so we could be at ease letting the kids play outside. Pressed into buying a house after only four years was tight economically. But by the time we left, the new neighborhood already had a school, a bank, a hospital and a supermarket, and the house price had doubled. Now I understood that buying a house was smarter than renting one; this was my first lesson in economics in the US. After we moved into our new house, my academic advisor was promoted to be chair of the graduate department. He found I had already accumulated half the credits towards a PhD and offered me a position as an assistant professor. If I went back to school I would be able to finish a degree soon enough, but I had four mouths to feed, and loans for a new car and new house to pay. Relying on the compensation for assistant professor wouldn’t cut it. So I refused, but he still offered me a scholarship and asked me to formally apply for a PhD, encouraging me to keep taking newly offered night classes.

While the whole world had adopted the metric system, the United States still used imperial measurements. As a result, the market for American machine tools was in decline. Struggling with poor business, the company sent me to the nearby newly established nuclear instruments company to assist with designing the conveyor equipment for automatic transport machines. This would test the thickness and moisture of mass-produced paper products, in order to attain uniform thickness and prevent toughening. It was a large project, which included design, manufacturing, and installment. This was highly suited to my academic and on-site experience. It was not long before the head engineer asked me if I had any interest in changing companies. The new semester was approaching, and I had already taken all offered evening courses. I said I had a scholarship and did not need to pay tuition; if the company let me use an employee subsidy for coursework to take day-time classes, I would consider it. The next day the vice president formally made a bid for my employment: Not only would I get a higher salary, I’d also have two afternoon weekly to study at the University of Cincinnati. They also asked me to take English classes, perhaps because they hoped I could guide other employees. I accepted the offer left my former company. Two weeks later I was officially a mechanical engineer at my first company in the United States.

I was formally pursuing a PhD once the new semester started. I registered for some professional and English classes on Monday and Thursday afternoons to satisfy company requirements and prepare for the doctoral qualification exam. After two years, I passed the qualification exam. Then, after a summer of studying German to meet the language requirement for doctoral students of having reading ability in two foreign languages, and with pronunciation help from a language professor, I passed German and Japanese, and became an official doctoral student. The thesis topic had to first be approved by a consortium of professors. As the conclusion was to be made publicly available, if someone else presented on the same topic, it was better to start over and find another topic. Because of my area of expertise, and under the condition of not revealing company production secrets, choosing from a list of R&D programs, and using advanced mathematics to express the theory, the final chosen topic was “Theory of Mechanical Vibration of Steel Cables.”The actual product consisted of two sets of devices: one for measuring paper thickness and one for measuring moisture. Each set of paper had a transmitter on top and a receiver on the bottom. Paper flew at high speeds between the two devices with no contact. If the transmitter and receiver were not aligned, it meant there was a problem with the thickness or moisture. Thus, the chain’s vibration directly influenced the production quality of the whole process. Adopting a steel cable vibration model, it was easier apply mathematical equations, so no matter how complicated the results were, they could be explained with a computer. This project was a foundation for design and basis for future improvement.

With the topic settled, I began to write. I had a supervision from my advisor, and time at work also went towards my thesis, so I progressed quickly. After one year of hard work, all that remained was the abstract and I thought my work would soon be complete. I started applying for positions at technology companies, and after interviews, three offered to hire me. I brought my family to see the potential living environments, traffic and schools in the area, etc. In the end we decided on the largest computer company in the US at the time – it specialized in large computing equipment used by banks. My task was to develop an automatic system for statistical computation of checks. Said company was located nearby three of Michigan’s large universities, so in the future when our children went to college they would not have to live on campus. Finally, my dissertation was ready for submission, but the reviewing professors did not approve it for release. The reason was that theoretical dissertations had to be accompanied by a practical experiment to prove the results. Yet the answer calculated by my simplified computer model was not consistent with that measured by the multi-part machines of my company. Due to business pressure, the company that hired me asked me to report to work immediately regardless of when I could get my degree. I consulted with my advisor, who allowed me to leave, and recommended that I continue to put in the work and use the large computers at the new company to broaden my theory, incorporating more accessories, so that the theoretical results would match up with the vibrational frequency measured in practice. He offered up his weekend to continue discussing with me. So I began to learn the computer language used by the new company. Then I rewrote the theoretical equations in the new language and expanded them into multiple joint equations. I used the large computer to calculate the results and prove the correctness of the theory instead of doing a concrete experiment.

Those years after graduation were the most relaxed and joyous of my family life. The three kids were in elementary school, middle and high school, respectively. During summer vacation the weather was not too hot, and every weekend we would take tugboat and tent to the lakeside for camping, water skiing and fishing. Winter breaks we spent skiing. The kids were growing up right in front of my eyes, and before I knew it, all three were planning on going to college. My wife wanted to save some money for tuition, so she collaborated with three other women to start a Chinese fast-food place near Michigan State University. Then we bought up the store and changed it from a fast-food place to a proper restaurant. We hired experienced chefs, added more Szechuan food, and invested in advertisement. Business went through the roof. In order to help my wife manage the restaurant, I got a new job, and we moved closer to the restaurant. With the whole family mobilized, eating in the restaurant and reducing family expenses, we were able to solve the problem of costly tuition. Once the eldest son graduated from medical school, we shut down the restaurant as soon as the lease expired.

Throughout my varied professional and academic career, the cowboy within me never thought I would get a degree. It was always just about improving my living environment, living practically and going with the natural flow, working steadily for advancement; the degrees I obtained were a by-product of my quest for a better life. At the time I competed them with an attitude of storing excess luggage. But later, when the first company I had already worked at for two years saw my sheepskin doctorate diploma, they changed the name sign on my private office to red and added my title. They also reserved a parking spot for me and assigned an old engineer to help me with English. Taiwan sent me free copies of the Central Daily News for ten years. Later, mainland China opened its borders. The president of Nanjing university, accompanied by a mechanical engineering professor, came to the US seeking professors; the chair of the mechanical engineering department at Michigan State had been a regular at my wife’s restaurant, and he thought I would be the best fit, so he brought them to see me. Fearing that if I went to the mainland, I would never be able to see my family in Taiwan again, I refused. Then, before the restaurant closed, the Hsinchu Institute of Science hired me as a technical consultant. When I went to Chicago to deal with my visa, the director of the office invited me to a Japanese restaurant for lunch, and personally welcomed me to return and serve in my homeland. But even after many times of application I had still only been granted a single-entry visa. I felt deeply insulted and discouraged by the behavior of these awful politicians, and gave up on any ideas of giving back to the homeland.

Since I was firmly rooted in this foreign country, any contributions of new technology should also be made to this country. So I sent my resume to a large and high-level employment agency and was soon the target of employment for many companies. In the span of only three years, I changed companies three times and moved twice. I ignored the agency’s request for me to go to California for an interview. Yet that company was to become my seventh company after moving to the US. It was a new tech company that had just entered the stock market and specialized in the development of hard-disk memory drives for computers. After declining several interviews, from the snowy depths of winter in the Midwest, I suddenly got a call from the CEO of the company asking me to take time for a vacation on the mild year-round spring coast of Northern California. On the side I could visit the company and chat about the future etc. I was eager for a free vacation, and it would be a good chance to see my old classmate in Silicon Valley. I agreed to go see the company on Friday morning, and planned to spend the weekend catching up with my dear friend.

The morning of my arrival on the lush green West coast, I went to see the CEO, who was from India. After giving me a tour of the company and factory, he took me to see the deputy general manager. I had barely opened my mouth before they had offered me an employment contract and asked me to consider it, adding that the benefits were such that I wouldn’t be able to refuse. Indeed, they offered a high salary, plus five figures of stock-options. When I answered that I couldn’t afford the costly housing and double-digit interest on loans in the Bay Area, they immediately responded that of course the company would take care of it and I needn’t worry; what reason to refuse could I possibly have? I said that my wife did not wish to raise children in California, and had always been opposed to me working on the West coast. As a traditional conservative arriving in the US in the 60’s, seeing the overly free education system, hippies in college campuses and public spaces, and hearing talk of sexual revolutions, she thought life in California would be damaging to the children’s upbringing. I would have to persuade her otherwise before considering moving. The CEO was surprised – it was the first time he had heard of Chinese people not wanting to live in California. He asked for her to fly over immediately. Because our daughter was home from college, she did not want to come, so in the end he invited both mother and daughter to fly to the coast. He arranged for a pair of Chinese colleagues and their daughter to take me to pick them up from the airport, tour the sights of Silicon Valley and the coast, and go to China town to buy gifts. Once my wife was persuaded, my daughter flew back to college and the two of us remained to look for a house. We paid the deposit for the house, and then I went back to the company to accept the employment contract. A couple weeks later I was working for my last company. I continued working there until seven years later when the company reorganized and the R&D department underwent a merger. We couldn’t bear giving up the eternal spring of Northern California and didn’t want to part with this retirement home we’d prepared for many years. I quit work, and before the age of 60 was retired from the fast-paced constantly progressing world of high-tech employment.

Last summer I unexpectedly encountered a man from the same village I was raised in, Hengshan Village in Hsinchu county, who had immigrated to the Bay Area. He was Hsing-ching Liu, a Taiwanese state-recognized comic master, who later specially made a trip to visit this American Dream paradise I had made. Another month later, he came back to my retirement home and presented me with a great gift: a three by three-foot drawing. He asked me to hang it on the wall by the dance floor. This is a hand-copied print of his masterpiece; it depicts my life in my silver-haired old age, and fruit ripening from our hand-grafted trees.