by Ping Fu
Aba gazed thoughtfully at the road. “Hmm. I wonder which is worse: to be born with black blood or black skin?”
We had many discussions about civil rights. It was Aba who first showed me a tape of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. His message inspired me to pursue my own dreams.
I missed cities and was eager to see more of America, so I used the first few hundred dollars I saved to buy a plane ticket to New York City for a three-day vacation. I had never bowed to statues of the Buddha or pictures of my ancestors in China, as people did prior to the Cultural Revolution; Mao had forbidden it. But in New York, I bowed to the Statue of Liberty, the “mother of exiles,” and begged her to protect me.
—
A year later, after I had further honed my waitressing and English skills, asked a classmate to teach me how to drive, and purchased a beat-up used car, I went to work at a fancy Chinese restaurant that had just opened in Santa Fe. Americans were accustomed to Chinese food being cheap, fast, and no-frills. But this restaurant’s owner, a famously flamboyant reporter from Taiwan, had different ideas. He brought in chefs from five-star hotels and made a point of pampering his guests. I was thrilled to get the job, though I was not comfortable with the work uniform, a tight-fitting qipao, or traditional Chinese dress, with an unusually high slit up the leg.
Santa Fe was an artistic city, and many Hollywood stars had second homes there. Linda Evans, John Wayne, and Miles Davis all came to our restaurant. I didn’t know who any of these people were, so my boss often assigned me to wait on them, knowing that I wouldn’t get starstruck or ask for autographs.
One night, a large, muscular man with dark hair and an asymmetrical face came into our restaurant. The boss told me to serve him.
I approached the table. “What would you like to drink?” I asked.
The man said nothing, but startled me by reaching around and grabbing my rear end with his enormous right hand. Without hesitating for a second, I slapped him on the cheek, hard. Then I gasped. What had I done? Surely the boss would fire me for such insolent behavior.
The man sat quietly for a heartbeat, staring me straight in the eyes. Then he laughed and said, “Do it again.”
I raced back to the kitchen, still convinced, with my Chinese mentality, that I would lose my job. But everyone who had witnessed the event was cheering. “Ping, you slapped Rambo!” they squealed with delight. Even the boss, who had followed me to the back room, was chuckling. The customer, they told me, was Sylvester Stallone, a famous action hero.
In a matter of weeks, business was booming. I kept my tips in a jumbo-sized Coke cup, stuffing coins and bills in through the plastic lid. One night, I filled the cup to overflowing. Each time I pushed another bill inside, the lid would threaten to pop off. The moment came when the built-up pressure was too great—the plastic cup exploded, propelling wads of cash up into the air. Dollar bills drifted to the ground like fall leaves. Everyone in the back room laughed, saying that clearly I made too much money for my own good.
Suddenly, I felt liberated and independent. For the first time, I knew that I had enough money to not just survive, but thrive. The pressure of scarcity to which I had grown accustomed since the age of eight finally lifted. The thought came: I will never eat another banana for lunch again.
Even later in life, when I became a skilled professional, knowing that I could always be a waitress gave me an immense sense of reassurance. If I ever selected the wrong job or career, I could always afford to go searching for a better opportunity while serving tables. I was able to pursue my passions with peace of mind.
—
Waitressing proved the ideal transition into my new life in America. It was choosing to study computer science that switched the trajectory of my journey, both personally and professionally.
After completing the English as a foreign language course in a year, I was able to pass the TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language) and enroll as a full-time graduate student at UNM. I knew by then that I didn’t want to study literature, but what should I pursue? A few classmates suggested that I check out computer science. I had never heard of it. An equally clueless American student told me that it was a man-made language that people used to make stuff. Her description intrigued me because I had enjoyed learning how to make things while working at factories in China.
Computer programming was a new field of study in the early eighties, and there were almost no women interested in it. I was accepted as a computer science master’s student even though I had no prior course work in the subject. Nearly everyone was starting from scratch, just like me, which helped me keep up.
In my first CS class, the professor explained that computer language was based on binary numbers. I could remember, when I was very young and he was still a professor of aeronautical engineering, Nanjing Father showing me early computer punch cards printed with zeros and ones. I had chosen a field of study that was not entirely foreign to me.
At the computer lab, I came face-to-face with a modern computer for the first time. Terrified that I might break it, I barely touched the keys. The student sitting next to me laughed. “Don’t worry. You can pound away on that thing—it won’t break,” he said. He typed fast, slamming the keys so hard that it sounded as though he were playing drums.
Calculus class was mandatory. I could follow most subjects if professors taught them from the beginning, but in this course, a great deal of mathematical knowledge was presumed. I had learned some math in an unstructured way throughout the years—from my older siblings in Shanghai, Nanjing Mother, older children at NUAA, counting money to manage my household, and doing calculations while working at factories during my teenage years. But when the professor put fractions on the chalkboard, I stared blankly at the strange notation, which I had not seen before. I stopped him after class.
“What does that mean?” I asked, pointing at the chalkboard.
The professor looked puzzled. “Can you be more specific?”
I placed my index finger on a fraction. “That. What does it mean when you put one number, then a slash, then another number under it?”
“You don’t know fractions?” he asked, squinting his eyes at me.
“No,” I replied, feeling shorter even than my five-foot frame.
The professor was blunt. “Well, you need to go back to high school.” He must have wondered how I had been accepted into the master’s degree program in the first place.
I went to the city library and started thumbing through math textbooks. I didn’t find fractions in the high school math book, nor did I find them in the middle school texts. Finally I found them in the second-grade math textbook. Even high school math was too advanced for me. I ended up checking out the entire arithmetic curriculum from first grade on. I knew how to add, subtract, multiply, and divide. But other than that, some basic concepts such as fractions, long division, square roots, and logarithms were unfamiliar to me.
I plunged into the textbooks, studying them in every spare hour that I had. I’d also ask other students to tutor me. “You don’t need to know much,” they counseled. “As long as you get the basic concepts, then you can use a scientific calculator to do the actual calculations.”
I found myself falling in love with math, geometry in particular. The poetry of shapes and formulas mesmerized me. Above all, I reveled in the opportunity to learn, as I had enjoyed only four years of formal education at Suzhou University in China. I earned a C on the calculus midterm. But by the end of the term, I was doing so well on the exams that my professor called me out in class. “Is your brother the famous winner of the math Olympics? His last name is also Fu,” he said with a smile.
My face blushed pink. Rarely before had I been praised in public.
—
Programming was fun and addictive for me. Sometimes our homework was assigned as group projects. Even though I was not the stronges
t programmer, I discovered that I was often good at software design. Programming is as much art as science: software design is about structure and flow, just like literature. It came naturally to me.
In a computer logic class, the assignment was to design an intelligent traffic light control system, one that would respond based on approaching cars from each direction. Typically, students created a highly technical logic flow on paper. I had a different idea, and convinced my group to go along with me. We went to Radio Shack, where we bought resistors, capacitors, transformers, and soldering materials. Then we went to a toy store and bought a Hot Wheels set with racetracks and a traffic light. Together, our team built an actual intelligent traffic light control, which we demonstrated with the toy cars. The professor gave us an A-plus.
From then on, it was easy for me to recruit teammates. The engineers were gifted at solving problems, while my creativity helped with the design. We asked many whys: Why do we need to solve this problem? Why is this relevant in the real world? It was so much fun to work as a team. We would celebrate together if a project turned out well; I’d bring Coca-Cola and M&Ms. I was still shy then, often sitting quietly in class and rarely taking the presenter’s role. However, I was assertive in our assignments, going above and beyond the professor’s requirements and driving our team to achieve excellence. Years later, I would find this approach written about in business management textbooks: it was a leadership style known as “servant leadership.”
—
The Chinese government was growing more lax about allowing its citizens contact with America, and I was thrilled to be able to get occasional letters from home. Hong wrote to tell me that she was depressed without me and wanted to join me in the United States. By the time she arrived, eighteen months after I did, I had a rented apartment, two jobs, a blue 1973 Opel, and a full academic load. I got her a job at a Chinese restaurant and invited other students over to make a party out of teaching her how to mix drinks like fuzzy navels and screwdrivers.
“Say ‘gracias’ to the fry cook when you pick up your food,” I told her.
Hong hated America at first, and complained that I had failed to tell her the truth about how hard life was going to be. When she came home from work hurt by the injustice of a boss who made her clean up beer that someone else had spilled, I let her have it. I wasn’t her mother anymore, and she was nearly as grown up as I was. “So what if it’s not your fault? No job is too small and every job has some problems! It’s your life. America is what you make it.” If she couldn’t take it, I told her, I’d buy her a ticket back to Shanghai.
As it turned out, Hong adjusted quickly and stayed on to earn a master’s degree in architecture at UNM. I was the one who left.
—
I was talking with one of my computer science professors at UNM, Henry Shapiro, one day over lunch. He felt that Chinese students shut themselves out of American life. “You guys come over here, get your master’s degrees in two years, and then work in cubicles without ever knowing what you’re missing in the outside world,” he said.
“What should I do if I don’t want to live a life like that?” I asked.
He replied, “Well, do an undergraduate degree. Mingle with the American students. Have you ever taken a class on the American Constitution? Learn more about this country and live the life of a typical American college student.”
I nodded, thinking about what he had said and what I needed to do.
“Go to a better school if you do that,” he added.
Professor Shapiro could not have guessed that I would take his advice literally. Many years later, he told me he must have been in a bad mood that day to say such nonsense.
Less than one year away from completing my master’s degree in computer science, I dropped out of the University of New Mexico. Hong had met a few friends at school and was happy with her studies. She decided not to come with me. I packed up my few belongings in my Opel and drove off west.
I chose a school in a city that had been described as having eternal spring: San Diego. As I cruised along Highway 101, the sparkling blue ocean on one side and beautifully blossoming flowers on the other, I thought, This is paradise.
I walked into the admissions office at the University of California at San Diego (UCSD) and told the middle-aged woman behind the desk that I had come to study there as an undergraduate in the computer science program. The admissions officer peered at me over the top of her glasses, asked my name, and then disappeared into a separate room. “I couldn’t find your application,” she said when she returned to the desk.
“I didn’t apply yet,” I said lightly, not knowing anything about the American college transfer student application process. “I can do it now.”
The admissions officer looked surprised. “I’m sorry, miss. It’s the middle of spring quarter. You wouldn’t be able to enroll until the fall. Anyway, there is no guarantee you’ll be accepted.”
“I thought this was a free country,” I said.
“Yeah,” she said. “Free to reject you.”
—
Like a deflated balloon, I drifted away from campus and down toward the beach at La Jolla to contemplate my next move. Rent was far more expensive here than it was in Albuquerque. I supposed that I would find a waitressing job while I applied to UCSD. I stood facing the ocean for a long time, mesmerized by the rhythmic power of the waves.
A handsome thirty-something man walking along the sand approached me and asked if I’d like to walk with him. I said yes. As we strolled down the beach together, I told him how I had gotten here and about the rejection from UCSD.
“You should kill that professor,” the man said, shaking his head in disbelief. Then he gave me a bright smile and a fatherly handshake, using both of his hands. He introduced himself as Lane Sharman, and explained that he was the owner of a computer software company, Resource Systems Group. He gave me his card and told me to stop by if I needed a job.
I spent the night at the Red Roof Inn and showed up at Lane’s office the next morning. It occupied one big room with a floor-to-ceiling window overlooking the ocean, waves crashing onto a wide and unspoiled glittering white sand beach. Lane told me that he had worked for NCR, a renowned computer company. But he loved to surf every morning, and missed out on it far too often at that job, so he started his own database software business. He offered me a job as a computer programmer at fifteen dollars an hour. I enthusiastically accepted.
That spring and summer, I audited four classes and got all As. I was admitted to UCSD in the fall. I managed to transfer enough credits from UNM and Suzhou University to start as a junior. While I rapidly pursued my undergraduate degree in computer science, taking five classes per quarter, I also became fluent in database software systems by working at Lane’s company. I befriended the two talented, sweet, and nerdy computer programmers that Lane already had working for him, who taught me a great deal.
Lane asked one day if any of us would be willing to work nights. We would earn double our usual hourly rate, he said, and get paid for every hour that we were on call, regardless of whether a service request came in. I immediately volunteered. Not only could I make more money working the night shifts, but also I would have the time to take any classes that I wanted to during the day.
For the next two years, I answered calls in the middle of the night, mostly from legal clerks working at law firms that handled time-critical court cases. I would drive to the clients’ offices during the wee hours and fix their hardware or software problems, which sometimes meant simply rebooting their system. By the time I graduated, I was earning close to eighty thousand dollars a year.
—
While I was in San Diego, Nanjing Mother wrote to me every month. Her letters were my windows to China’s further political opening and economic development. Hong and I talked on the phone sometimes, but not too frequently. She told me how she was making friends at
UNM and had developed a crush on an American classmate. I visited her in Albuquerque in the fall and bought her a microwave. She sold it a few months later when she was short of money.
I worked all the time, either for Lane or on homework. One day, Lane asked me if I would like to go out to lunch. “No,” I said. “I prefer to work.” He asked me again the next day. Again I said no.
“What do you like for lunch, then?” Lane asked.
“Instant noodles.”
Lane shook his head. “Ping, you need to learn to live a little, have some fun.” I ignored his advice and continued to work. From then on, Lane kept the kitchen stocked with instant noodles.
I valued my time working for Lane Sharman immensely. The experience offered me my first taste of entrepreneurship. I watched Lane deal with difficult clients. I traveled with him to San Francisco to pitch to venture capital firms, and observed how he kept going even after having the door slammed in his face. I saw him cope with a crisis when the bank froze his assets. In an ironic twist of fate, for a short time he had to borrow money from me and even drive my car. We had a terrific relationship based on camaraderie and mutual respect.
And yet, when I graduated from UCSD in March 1988, I told Lane that I was quitting his company to join Bell Labs. I wanted to work for a large, well-established, prestigious American business. I was still Chinese at heart, and in China working for a state-owned enterprise was considered a privilege for the individual and a source of pride for the family. A secure job was called an “iron bowl,” meaning that you could always count on being able to put food on the table. I had a dozen job offers, including ones from Arthur Andersen, Honeywell, IBM, HP, Xerox, and AT&T Bell Laboratories. Most recruiters loved that I had a few years of real work experience under my belt in addition to a prized CS degree. I chose Bell Labs because it was world famous for its groundbreaking innovations and home to many Nobel Prize winners. The company also offered to pay 60 percent of my salary, full tuition, and room and board if I pursued a PhD.