Bend, Not Break

by Ping Fu

  From then on, Uncle W and I corresponded regularly, swapping letters several times each month. I wrote to him about daily life, my factory job, and Hong when she got into trouble or amazed me by quickly picking up new skills. Uncle W always had something wise to say. Once, when I vented to him about a Red Guard bullying me, he quoted the renowned Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu: “He who conquers others is strong. He who conquers himself is mighty.” He encouraged me to stay in a place of love toward other people, rather than sinking into resentment or fear. “Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage,” he wrote.

  Thanks to his kindness, love, and sage advice, and by bearing witness to my suffering, Uncle W helped me reconstruct the sense of self that I had lost over the years. I was able to heal from some of the traumas of my young life. I remembered that once I had looked at the skies and dreamed of being the first woman to walk on the moon.

  IN THE FLOW: 1988–1993

  MOVING TO NAPERVILLE, Illinois, was easy compared with my move to San Diego. I rented a one-bedroom apartment in a complex near Bell Labs, next to the Fox Valley Mall. Miles of monochromatic suburban landscape surrounded me, so unlike the beaches of Southern California. But I didn’t care—I was too excited about my job. Thankfully, Hong was independent, happy with her studies and her life in Albuquerque. I was able to focus exclusively on my career.

  My job in the 5ESS digital switch division was to help transform the telephone, which our company’s founder, Alexander Graham Bell, had invented just over a century earlier, from an analog to a digital device. A new technology called “integrated service digital network,” or ISDN, was about to replace traditional circuits. Up until that time, the telephone system had been viewed only as a way to transport the human voice. The key feature of ISDN was that it integrated speech and data on a single fiber-optic line, making possible all sorts of bells and whistles that had not been available with the classic telephone system. Our team developed features that people take for granted today, like caller ID, call forwarding, and multiparty conferencing.

  Bell Labs was a wonderful place for people who loved to learn. The company offered a wide variety of technical training classes as well as practical courses on time management, financial literacy, and human resources. I was like a kid in a candy store, signing up for as many as possible. These classes introduced me to, among other things, a new corporate vocabulary. Gender terms like “glass ceiling” and “affirmative action” puzzled me; in Communist China, women and men were treated equally in the workplace.

  Still, on the whole I found myself bored by the work I was doing. There were too many long meetings, and people didn’t seem to be bothered when nothing productive was accomplished. I missed the small company environment and realized that Lane had been right when he had cautioned me that I might not enjoy working at a large company as much as a start-up. At Lane’s company, the dynamic atmosphere had challenged and stimulated me. I had taken pride in my contributions, and my coworkers were also good friends. I looked back fondly on the days when I had collaborated with the founder to solve sophisticated client problems. Lane and I would stay up late laughing, debating, and getting our work done. I had to admit that I also missed the beautiful environment in San Diego, with waves crashing outside our floor-to-ceiling windows. At Bell Labs, I worked inside a generic building and my office looked out over rows of identical offices, with the same layout on every floor.

  I had accepted the Bell Labs position with a romantic notion of what it would be like to puzzle out masterful inventions alongside Nobel Prize winners at a place known for generating a patent a day. Instead, it seemed that most “technical staff”—the title my colleagues and I were given—just clocked in and out of work, not unlike the busboys and cleaning staff at the Chinese restaurant where I’d once waitressed. More troubling, most people who worked there lacked a big-picture vision of what the company was trying to accomplish—and didn’t seem to care.

  After I’d settled in, a supervisor handed me a binder the size of an encyclopedia. Thumbing through it revealed a precise and mind-numbing list of our tasks. I could have boiled the entire manual down to this: “Here’s the input. Here’s the output. Here is the description of what the software module should do. Now go program.” There was no explanation of why we should perform our tasks or what the end product would look like. I was stunned. My approach to work had always been precisely the opposite. I had sought to understand the why before what and how. It was as though we were masons constructing a magnificent cathedral, only without the vision being communicated or an architectural plan presented. How could we be inspired if we received nothing more than instructions about how to lay bricks?

  The more I asked around, the more confused I became by the complexity of the system. We had five thousand people programming a single piece of software. It was madness, an unmanageable situation. Looking back, I see it was also a time when much of the modern software-building environment didn’t yet exist—Bell Labs was just figuring the system out, as was every other company.

  One of my guiding principles is to find joy in whatever I do. So after a few months, I discovered a way to get excited about a data-mining project. I noticed that the data stored in our database was highly redundant and wasted precious computer memory, which was expensive at the time. For example, the area code, zip code, and city name would be repeated three times for each phone number. By designing intelligent relational database tables that reduced the repetition, we could enact significant memory savings and performance improvements. I proposed this project to my supervisor. He saw the merit in the idea and formed a group of people to work on it. Our team ended up saving $30 million for AT&T that year. The victory won our supervisor a promotion to department head.

  —

  Most of my coworkers left the office around five p.m. They headed home, went to the gym, or hit a few bars. I stayed at the office late into the night working to complete my projects quickly, just as I had done at Lane’s company. Sometimes I went home early like everyone else, but all I would do was stay in, cooking, reading, and watching TV. I was almost thirty years old and had no personal life. It had been more than five years since I’d landed in the United States, yet I still wondered, What was an American life exactly? I had much to learn and to experience if I wanted to make this country my home.

  I noticed that the women in the office dressed up more than I did. They styled their hair in fashionable updos and perms, and wore makeup, skirts, and high-heeled shoes. In Mao’s China, gender equality was promoted and sexuality kept under wraps. Women kept their hair short, dressed in uniforms much like the men’s, and wore no makeup. I still wore Chinese-style clothes—secondhand gender-neutral suits that didn’t fit me well. I didn’t own a single tube of mascara or lipstick. I had purchased my only pair of heels in Shanghai before coming to America. They looked dull in comparison with the shoes I saw on display in the Fox Valley Mall. I needed to get in touch with my “feminine side.”

  With a combination of curiosity and courage, I made an appointment at a nearby beauty salon. The next day, I walked into Bell Labs with a great deal of trepidation, wearing acrylic nails gleaming red and matching lipstick. In China, red was the color of brides and celebration.

  “Do you really expect to climb the corporate ladder looking like a hooker?” a female officemate joked. My face flushed until it matched the hue of my nail polish. The memory of being called “broken shoe” flitted across my mind. Noticing my reaction, my colleague quickly apologized, saying that she hadn’t meant to insult me; I simply looked out of character. The awkward moment passed. I reminded myself that it was up to me to create the life I wanted here in the United States, regardless of whatever may have happened in the past.

  I signed up at the Fred Astaire Dance Studio for lessons after work, but I was still painfully shy in social interactions. One South American teacher held me so close to him
while demonstrating the moves that I felt uncomfortable and requested a female teacher instead. I failed to comprehend how much more there was to the tango than where you put your feet. Or perhaps I simply wasn’t comfortable enough yet with my own sexuality to embrace the overt expression of it through dance.

  What finally transformed my personal life was not a class I took or a book I read. It was something totally unplanned and unrelated to these well-intentioned, purposeful efforts to make myself “fit in”: a romance.

  —

  Through Bell Labs’ PhD assistance program, I began taking graduate classes at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). The campus was a two-and-a-half-hour drive from Naperville, so Bell Labs brought some professors to our location to teach.

  One course I signed up for was taught by Professor Herbert Edelsbrunner, a brilliant mathematician from Austria. Professor Edelsbrunner was gifted in explaining complex concepts in a simple way. His style was exceptionally clear and illustrative, which made the advanced algorithm class an enjoyable learning experience.

  It was late fall of 1988, almost the end of the semester. Professor Edelsbrunner told the class that he would be visiting China for the first time. When he said that he would be going to Nanjing, I mentioned to him that I had grown up there but hadn’t been back since moving to the United States.

  Upon his return from China, Professor Edelsbrunner told the class that he had taken some pictures and wanted to show them to us. We all went to lunch with him at Bell Labs’ food court. But the other students, taller and more eloquent than I, surrounded him. I couldn’t squeeze in closer or see anything from where I sat at the far side of the table.

  When everyone had finished their lunches, I stood up to put my tray away along with the others, feeling disappointed. But Professor Edelsbrunner walked over to me and said, “Hang on a minute, Ping. I want to show the pictures to you.”

  Feeling strangely rattled, I lost my balance and spilled half a glass of unfinished orange juice when Professor Edelsbrunner placed a stack of pictures of Nanjing on my tray. He quickly gathered the photographs up as I rushed to find napkins to dry them. When we sat down a few moments later to look through the pictures, I saw one of a building on the NUAA campus.

  “This is where I grew up,” I said, my face lifting.

  “Then you should have the photo,” Professor Edelsbrunner replied, handing the picture to me. It was our first personal interaction.

  After the course ended and I was no longer his student, Professor Edelsbrunner told me to call him Herbert and asked if I would like to go for a walk with him at a local park. We had a technical conversation about the way fluid flows through space and the formation of the sound of the wind. I found an underlying beauty in what he said that reminded me of Taoism. I gazed at the colorful maple leaves turning brilliant yellow and orange, stretching beyond the horizon like an endless canvas, and thought about the geometry of life.

  —

  I didn’t see Herbert for a year. He returned to the UIUC campus and I stayed in Naperville. In the fall of 1989, I went to Urbana-Champaign to sign papers for graduation and ran into Herbert at Espresso Royal. We went to his office, where he played Bob Dylan’s album Desire for me. It included a song, “One More Cup of Coffee,” that my favorite teacher had played many times in class during college—and it was the only English-language song that I had carried with me in my head from China to America. Its melody and the raw emotions conveyed by Dylan’s voice had haunted me. I had tried to track down the music when I’d first come to America but failed. To hear Herbert play it, utterly by chance, seemed a confirmation of our connection. I intuitively knew in that instant that this was the man I wanted to spend my life with.

  Nanjing Father’s hesitant and socially awkward nature had always troubled me, and Nanjing Mother often had teased him about being a few inches shorter than she. I had made myself a promise in China: if I ever were to marry, my husband would be my birth father’s opposite—tall, confident, and eloquent. True to my word, the only commonality Herbert and Nanjing Father shared was that they both were professors. For many months, as I continued to work at Bell Labs in Naperville and he taught at the UIUC campus, Herbert and I saw each other only on weekends, commuting through hundreds of miles of cornfields each time. It wasn’t easy on either of us.

  Herbert recently had gone through a divorce and told me that he couldn’t imagine getting married again. Looking back, I understand that keeping distance was more familiar and comfortable to me than creating intimacy. I may have been thirty years old, but emotionally I was still a child.

  Nevertheless, when, in the winter of 1990, a technical position at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) opened up in Champaign, near where Herbert worked, he encouraged me to apply. When I toured NCSA, I was instantly attracted to the Renaissance Experimental Lab, which contained cutting-edge computer graphics machines. Displayed on the wall were visualizations of five thousand years of global climate change, and a poster of Tin Toy, the first computer-animated short film to win an Oscar. I was interested in converging art and science through the use of technology, and that was clearly being done here. And unlike at Bell Labs, I could sense the extraordinary team spirit at NCSA, with experts from all fields of study coming together to work under the same roof.

  My unconventional life trajectory—which had taken me from Chinese literature to software databases to computer networking—made me a perfect fit for this environment. I’d never felt so excited about a job. For the first time in my life, I felt a sense of belonging, that this place was my destiny. To my delight, NCSA extended an offer for me to join.

  And yet from a personal standpoint, my decision to go was not so simple. I had grown up in cities and worried that life in a small town in the middle of nowhere would prove unfulfilling. I wondered whether it was a bad idea to move for a man who was not fully committed to me. At the same time, my job at Bell Labs continued to underwhelm me, and I was ready to quit. I also found myself gradually, if unsteadily, opening up to Herbert.

  As I was questioning the move to Champaign, I realized that I wanted more: more of a challenge at work, more of a connection to Herbert, and a deeper sense of resolution in my life. Herbert proposed in the fall of 1991, the year I moved to Champaign. He didn’t want a wedding, so I called Hong to fly out and witness our civil union at the courthouse. Secretly, I wished that I could have a traditional Chinese wedding and that my family could attend. But I was not welcome in my home country, and in the early 1990s obtaining a visa for travel to the United States was exceptionally difficult for Chinese nationals. So instead, I wrote to them—Shanghai Papa and Mama, Nanjing Father and Mother—about the good news. They blessed me from afar, wishing me a loving marriage with children soon to follow.

  When we spoke on the phone to make the arrangements, Hong and I giggled with amusement at how our lives had taken such similar yet opposite turns. After graduating from UNM, she, too, had met a man and fallen in love, and was making plans to start a family. But we had swapped career paths. In China as an undergraduate, Hong had studied electrical engineering. She had then chosen to pursue a more artistic major, architecture, in America. Now she was working at her dream job, building magnificent homes, office buildings, and public school libraries in Santa Fe. I, a Chinese literature major, had switched to the far more technical field of computer science.

  I informed my boss at Bell Labs of my decision to leave. He asked if there was anything he could do to make me reconsider. I told him no. He advised me to take an unpaid leave of absence rather than quitting outright. “Ping, you never know what might happen. I want the door to be open to you should you ever want to come back. You are the kind of person we want to keep around.” His sincerity touched me.

  I never did return to Bell Labs. My career at NCSA ended up exceeding my expectations. What’s more, it led me down a totally unforeseen path—to startin
g a company with Herbert.

  —

  The National Center for Supercomputing Applications was on the vanguard of innovation. So it was not surprising that working there introduced me to not just one but many transformative technologies. When I joined at the beginning of 1991, the center had just come to the attention of the worldwide scientific community with the release of NCSA Telnet, an Internet connectivity tool that was made available to the public at no cost.

  Taking on what were dubbed the “grand challenges of science,” we worked on analyzing the folding of proteins, mapping the human genome, predicting earthquakes, and revealing the nuances of quantum mechanics. Every day I had fun, was challenged, and felt happy. Here in the middle of the endless cornfields, some of the computer industry’s greatest and most creative minds had converged. We had few budget constraints and no limits set on our imaginations. We wrote history in scraps of software and tossed much of it into the public domain. We took the work of theoretical scientists and gave it dimension, color, and transparency. As I romped with my colleagues through the playground that was NCSA, much as I had gone freewheeling with other children across the NUAA campus during my youth, we made one noteworthy contribution after another to the field of computing: image processing, scientific visualization, massive storage, and user interface.

  One of my early team projects was to create 3D digital objects for CAVE, a large virtual reality theater located in a conference room. The walls of the CAVE were made up of rear-projection screens, and the floor was made of a downward-projection screen. High-resolution images were displayed on the screens via mirrors, creating virtual surroundings that could be breathtakingly beautiful and serene. Users wore special 3D glasses while inside the CAVE, which made objects appear to float in midair. We could simulate downhill skiing, white-water rafting, or flying to the moon. But it wasn’t all just fun and games. Engineering companies used CAVE to enhance product development. Caterpillar was able to test tractor movements, driver visibility, and bucket-loading capacity using a virtual prototype before a single penny had to be spent on physical parts.