by Ping Fu
There were always people who were skeptical about the virtual environment, complaining that it didn’t look real enough. We had a game for these doubters. We would create an image of a virtual conference room and ask them to verify whether or not the conference tables were the same height. Inevitably, when they bent down to take a closer look, people would rest their hands on the virtual tabletops for stability, only to find themselves stumbling forward onto the carpet, faces alight with wonder. They had experienced “computer-augmented virtual reality” for the first time.
Other projects I worked on predicted galaxies colliding, replicated synthetic blood cells, and simulated the impact of global warming from accumulated climate change over the past five thousand years. Before we illustrated the data using images, the world knew only pages of numbers that, placed end to end, would have stretched from the earth to the moon and back multiple times. Our programs turned these numbers, which scientists had calculated using supercomputers, into relatable and powerful images. “A picture is worth a thousand words,” the English expression goes. We changed it to: “A picture is worth a million numbers.”
I took a class from Donna Cox, a professor in the School of Art and Design at UIUC, on computer animation. She said, “Offering a different perspective and challenging the dominant worldview—this is a role artists always have played in culture.” Her words made me excited about the prospect of engaging people with technology in such a way that it changed their lives. Donna taught us that the most important ingredient for success in this line of work was storyboards. I had been a literature major in college, so that made perfect sense to me: the first step in luring anyone into your worldview was creating an engaging narrative.
We worked with Hollywood, whose studios used our supercomputers to render special effects for several major feature films. Donna’s students and other employees at NCSA thrilled millions of people with their visualizations for the Oscar-nominated IMAX film Cosmic Voyage. In 1990 and 1991, Industrial Light and Magic (ILM), a digital special effects company founded by George Lucas, collaborated with us to create the first partially computer-generated main character: the T-1000 in Terminator 2: Judgment Day. We turned the robot villain into a puddle of mercury through a process called “morphing,” which later became a household word. In 1996, my colleagues animated the scene for the movie Twister, in which cows flew through the air during a severe tornado.
As a child, I had always sought out beauty; it had been a critical part of my survival strategy. Now, creating beautiful objects from computer programs was an integral part of my everyday life. For the first time since I had been an undergraduate studying literature in China, I felt all sense of space and time evaporate as I lost myself deep within my work—the Taoist experience of being “in the flow.”
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By the early nineties, supercomputers—machines the size of blue whales that took up entire floors of buildings on the NCSA campus—were becoming passé; the new focus was on networking many desktop computers from different locations together. Scientists were replacing the old model of expensive, solitary monster brains by distributing their computing power among hundreds of smaller, less powerful, yet highly cost-efficient mini-brains. Now, experts across the globe were racing to figure out how to get these desktop computers to communicate more effectively. The Internet was still difficult to use and limited to a small audience of computer scientists, skilled academics, and government entities.
In 1992, I received a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and was able to hire a few students to work with me at NCSA. One of them was Marc Andreessen, a witty, upbeat, and extremely bright undergraduate who had done some user interface programming in Austin, Texas, as a summer intern at IBM. We talked about building a browser, which is a graphical user interface, to manage our public domain Web site at NCSA. We were bored with telling people to type cumbersome network addresses in order to access free software and research papers. We thought people ought to be able to click on a link to pull up words and images.
Our group began by studying the information wall created by Xerox PARC in Silicon Valley and discovered the hyperlink, a method for connecting information on different Web sites by underlining and highlighting the relevant text. But it was Marc who came up with the most ingenious improvements, which he shared during our weekly team meeting one gray autumn day.
“This ‘view source’ command would allow people to view, cut, and paste an existing page and customize the content without knowing HTML,” Marc explained. “I also think that the browser ought to allow images to be viewed in-line, rather than having them appear as separate pop-up windows. For ease of use, the browser should include clickable navigation arrows to enable people to move from one topic to the next.”
Building the browser wasn’t rocket science, technologically speaking; many of the coding components already existed. Nevertheless, I was impressed when Andreessen and another colleague, Eric Bina, put it all together in just six weeks. They introduced Mosaic early in 1993, and NCSA offered free downloads of the software to the public. While the program was originally developed for Unix, our group released versions of Mosaic for PCs and Macs soon after the initial success became apparent.
One morning in February, I arrived at the office early to find several members of our team scrambling frantically at their computers. They seemed to be simultaneously cringing with embarrassment and laughing with delight. “What’s going on?” I asked.
Eric glanced up from the computer where he was coding. Taking a large swig of coffee, he grinned like a child with a secret. “Downloads of Mosaic have exploded! We’ve crashed the university’s servers because they can’t handle such high-volume traffic.”
“We’re a hit. I knew it!” Marc added with a smirk.
In total, two million users downloaded versions of the software during its first year. While Mosaic wasn’t the first Web browser, it was considered the first to make the Internet easily accessible to non-techies: available for every desktop, for free.
In 1993, both the White House and the United Nations came online, creating .gov and .org domain names. I wasn’t able to go to the White House to install the NCSA Mosaic software because I did not have the security clearance required, but we sent a few programmers there at the behest of then vice president Al Gore.
Mosaic was a desktop application and fell outside the supercomputing mandate for which the federal government funded NCSA, so the university asked us to license it, to make a “technology transfer.” But no one seemed interested—not Apple, Hewlett-Packard, Silicon Graphics (SGI), or IBM. Only Marc, now a senior in college, seemed to grasp the potential of the world’s first multimedia browser.
Frustrated and excited, Marc talked to me about quitting college to start his own company. He was only a semester away from graduating. “Marc,” I said, “you should finish your degree.”
“Why? Bill Gates dropped out,” Marc replied.
I laughed. “I know—he did that already. You should be the next Bill Gates, but with a bachelor’s degree.”
Marc graduated from the University of Illinois and moved to Mountain View, California, that summer. Three months later, he met Jim Clark, who had recently left Silicon Graphics and was looking to start something new. They teamed up with several of their former colleagues from SGI and NCSA early in 1994, secured financing from venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers, and founded Mosaic Communications, Inc. The rest would go down in history.
But before the idea of starting a business ever crossed my mind, I had an important journey to make. I wanted to return to the country of my birth. The reunion with my family and memories it called to mind, the knowledge I gained about my ancestors, and my experiences of modern-day China would bring me newfound peace with and confidence in my life in America. Only then would I know for certain: I was precious.
{ FOUR }
Blood Is Thicke
r Than Water
HOMECOMING: 1993
WHEN I LEFT China, I put my past out of my mind. A decade later, in 1993, I was well on my way to U.S. citizenship. Yet, strangely, the closer I came to becoming an American, the more Chinese I felt. I had grown so homesick that I had begun to dream of China. The past would blossom at night, fragrant and spiked with a sense of nostalgia and loss that I could not ease. When I awoke, I would feel my entire being crying out for me to return.
As soon as I had a U.S. passport, I booked my first trip back home. Right before I left, I found out that I was pregnant. I was thirty-five and excited to have a child. I liked the feeling of carrying my unborn baby to China, and imagined her tasting for the first time in my womb what had I missed all these years: authentic Chinese cuisine.
My chest felt heavy with pent-up feelings as I boarded the plane, recalling my lonely journey from China to the United States when I’d been exiled. What would it be like to see my Shanghai and Nanjing parents again, I wondered? We had exchanged letters on occasion, and I had heard updates about them from Hong upon her arrival in America, but I had no context for understanding their lives, given how fast China was changing now.
I nearly screamed in nervous excitement when, in a happy reversal of the farewell scene ten years earlier, I saw my entire family—both sets of parents, my five cousin-siblings, as well as various aunts and uncles—waiting in the crowd gathered behind the glass at Shanghai International Airport. I broke into a trot, pushing my luggage trolley in front of me like a bulldozer to move aside the tourists and returning locals who blocked my path.
As soon as I could make my way to them, Shanghai Papa took my hand. He examined my face carefully, and then broke into laughter. “Ping-Ping, you look exactly the same. You haven’t changed at all,” he said, patting my hand affectionately. I noticed that he looked quite distinguished. Dressed in a Western suit, he commanded an aura of elegance.
Shanghai Mama squeezed in. “Let me see my Little Apple,” she said, touching my face with her palm. She was just as I had imagined, forever young and beautiful. True to character, my Nanjing parents were not as openly affectionate, standing outside the circle of people who had gathered around me. Still, I could feel how happy they were to see me.
I was so excited to share all my good news with my family that my words twisted like pretzels; I simply couldn’t speak fast enough. I had a job that I absolutely loved, I told them, as well as an intelligent and handsome husband who was also a professor like Nanjing Father. I let them know that soon I was going to be a mother. They nodded graciously but with eyes hazed over, as though they were confused. I realized that just as I had trouble imaging what their lives were like in the new China, my family didn’t have any reference point for understanding my life in America or how I had made it there. More than anything, they simply were content that I had survived and that I looked healthy and happy.
I eagerly listened to their updates. My cousin-siblings were back home after having been exiled to the countryside; all had jobs and were now married with children. Shanghai Papa had survived years of forced labor, returning home halfway through the Cultural Revolution. When it ended, he started an accounting company, which brought Motorola and GM to China. At sixty-five, he was studying law at Jiao Tong University. “I must make up for lost time,” he said excitedly. Shanghai Mama showed me that she had brought my favorite dish with her, into which she always put a heavy dose of love.
As for Nanjing Mother, we always had struggled to find our mother-daughter connection. On this trip, I found that the years had mellowed her. Although my time with her felt strained, I enjoyed her sharp mind. She seemed to grasp the essence of what I said about my life in the United States more than anyone else, and I could tell that she was proud of me.
China itself was changing at a rapid pace, and I didn’t necessarily like what I saw. It was as though a Chinese version of the Berlin Wall had just come down, and the society was in chaos. The government maintained tight control over political freedoms, as witnessed by the world during the notorious Tiananmen Square student protests of 1989. Yet at the same time, China was liberalizing its economic policies and becoming more capitalistic, allowing for greater foreign investment and privately held businesses.
As much as I had suffered under the brutality of the Chinese Communist regime, the corruption of state officials, and the impunity of the Red Guard during the Cultural Revolution, the country had at least manifested a certain social purity at the time. People had talked about noble ideas such as the common good, equality, and health care for all. Now everyone seemed single-mindedly focused on making a buck as quickly as possible.
Shanghai Papa complained to me about our villa, where he and Mama continued to live. At the start of the Cultural Revolution, they had been forced into one room. The house had been co-occupied by a newspaper agency and several other families. Slowly, the government returned a few more rooms to them, but never the entire house. They now occupied the middle section of the house facing the scholar garden, including the old library. Nothing could prepare me for the emotional impact of seeing my happy childhood home destroyed. Its facade had crumbled like the wrinkled face of an old lady. Its overused rooms sagged like wilting roses given too little water to drink. I gasped when Papa walked me into the library, which had been turned into a shared storage area. In my favorite room, which had so enchanted me as a child, only one half-filled bookshelf remained.
Here among the remnants of our former life, Shanghai Papa encouraged me to continue his “legacy of entrepreneurship.” He owned and operated his own business, he reasoned; so, too, should I.
I rejected the idea outright because I disliked what I saw happening in China. Everywhere I turned, people were asking me, the “wealthy American,” to loan them money so that they could make more money, though they had no idea how to go about it. Money, it seemed, was an end in and of itself, which did not interest me.
“I’m sorry, Papa,” I said, bowing my head and gazing steadily at my hands. “But I will never start a business. It is not my passion. Anyway, I love my current job.”
He nodded sadly.
The longer I stayed, the more I felt out of place. The China of my memories, however horrific it had been in some ways, no longer existed. I traveled to Nanjing with my birth mother and father. The soccer field where I had eaten so many bitter meals had been converted into rows of undistinguishable condos. The canal that had run along the campus perimeter had been filled in to make more room for roads and buildings. The field where we had used old airplanes as our playground had vanished without a trace among the NUAA teaching facilities.
In the daily news, a heated debate had erupted around the construction of the Three Gorges Dam, the largest hydroelectric power station in the world. The question was whether the government should support economic development at the expense of destroying China’s collective memories, historical relics, and cultural treasures. Should these be flooded intentionally or saved and moved to higher ground? As I took a boat ride from Chongqing down the Yangtze River, passing through the Three Gorges area, I became lost in a dense fog of memories. I realized that, like those opposing the dam, I was trying to hold on to the China of the past. As if by reconnecting with the China of my childhood, I might be better able to connect with myself.
FAMILY: 1970–1976
DURING MY FIRST few months at NUAA, I thought Hong had it easy because she was my younger sister. I managed the household, cooked meals for her, made up stories to tell her at night, washed her, soothed her when she cried—and generally yielded to her frequent demands for more food and play. But I realized over time that she had also suffered. At least I had benefited from eight years living with my Shanghai parents and siblings, who had showered me with love. Hong had been sent to a Chinese full-time day care when she was less than a year old. She had spent most of her childhood prior to the Cultural Revolution away from home, receiving
limited attention and love from adults. She learned to fend for herself early on, and was unafraid of talking to strangers.
Hong was a carefree spirit who ate and played with gusto. Once, she eagerly dropped a glob of her saliva into a communal pot of soup so that everyone else would be too disgusted to eat it and she could have more for herself. When her tactic worked, she laughed and declared victory. She also had a limited attention span and could not sit still in study sessions. Unfortunately, these traits were frowned upon in China at the time, considered emblematic of someone lacking in virtue. People, even family members, made fun of her, calling her “the girl who loves to eat and play too much.”
A tomboy, Hong loved to run around with the boys in our neighborhood. It seemed I couldn’t leave her alone for a moment without her suffering some injury. Once, she broke her arm while sliding down an airplane wing at the abandoned NUAA airfield. Many days, she would come home from an impromptu soccer match covered in cuts and bruises, whining about how much her injuries hurt. I would sigh in exasperation and nurse her wounds with care.
In spite of her mischievous and accident-prone nature, I grew to know and love my little sister as a sweet, happy girl with many talents. Hong made our life at NUAA more colorful—sometimes literally.
One day when she was just five or six years old, I came home to discover that the formerly drab Room 202 had been transformed into a cheerful, cozy home. Our solitary wooden stool and single soiled mattress had been draped with brightly colored knit cloths, and curtains in spectacular kaleidoscopic patterns covered our windows. When Hong walked in the door a few minutes later, I was standing in the middle of the room, my jaw hanging.