From Darkness to Sight

by Ming Wang

  A few days later, our test scores were posted on a bulletin board in the hallway. My eyes widened when I saw the results. Analytical chemistry: 93, physical chemistry: 91, organic chemistry: 100, and inorganic chemistry: 72. These subject matter tests weren’t supposed to be easy, and a typical score was fifty out of one hundred. All three of us had received perfect scores on the organic chemistry test. We later learned that ours were the highest scores of any graduate student in the department in the past twenty years.

  The news of our high scores quickly spread well beyond the chemistry department … and the University of Maryland. Back in China, newspapers across the country boasted bold headlines that read, “Three Chinese Students Stun American University.” I imagined my family back home reading the newspapers, and I was delighted knowing I had honored the Wang family name across the globe. I hoped all the teachers who had worked so hard to help me pass the nearly impossible college entrance exam at the end of the Cultural Revolution years ago would see the headlines too. They would take such immense pride in the outcome of their extraordinary efforts. And such high scores weren’t just about me; they proved to the world that China was emerging from the shroud of the Cultural Revolution, placing its students among the world’s best. I felt the pride and gratitude of an entire nation surging through my body.

  “Let’s go celebrate!” I proposed to Jason and Ji-hong.

  “Where?” they asked.

  “Where else? McDonald’s!”

  * * *

  During our first weekend in College Park, we set out to find somewhere to stay for the next few months. On the list of apartments Marsha had given us, we saw the odd name “Knox Boxes.” I envisioned students living in actual boxes, and wondered how big these boxes were. In reality, the campus neighborhood was filled with small brick duplexes on a street called Knox Road. We ended up renting a windowless one-room basement apartment in a nearby house for about a hundred dollars a month, which we split among the three of us.

  It turned out to be the perfect size for us. The university dorms back in China packed in thirteen students per unit, so a room with only two other people felt roomy and spacious to us. We shared the basement’s bathroom with a couple who lived in an adjacent room, and when we wanted to cook, we had to ask the upstairs renters for permission to use their kitchen. But overall, we felt right at home.

  “What should we do for furniture?” one of the guys asked.

  As we strolled along Knox Road, we came across a dumpster brimming with things other students had discarded. Several twin-size mattresses were piled up against the metal bin. We took three of the better ones back to our room. After finding a few chairs and a roll of used carpet, we were all set.

  Jason, Ji-hong, and I bonded in our tight quarters and went everywhere together. One of the visiting Chinese scholars, Ms. Jing-yi Hong, who was an expert in world literature, called us the “Three Musketeers.”

  “Like in the Alexandre Dumas novel!” I responded, recalling the literature I read back at USTC.

  The name was fitting. The three of us became very close during those first two years together in a foreign land. Jason was three years older than I was, and he was the wisest and most diplomatic of our trio. If we had a conflict, Jason was the one to resolve it calmly and logically. He had been deported for several years to a poor region of western China during the Cultural Revolution, and the experience had given him his hard-earned maturity. Ji-hong was my age, and absolutely brilliant. He was the academic star of our trio. My unique quality was that I was well-rounded. I had the most diverse interests and often came up with fun things for us to do.

  For the two weeks prior to our first payday, we pinched pennies in every way possible. I wore the same two or three sets of clothes over and over. We had no washer or dryer, so I washed my shirts and pants by hand in the bathroom sink. I tried to set up a laundry line outside our door—a contraption like the one my father had constructed in our window back in Hangzhou—but the homeowner here in America laughed and said, “No way.”

  After our first two weeks of work, I received my first paycheck of $198, which equaled about 1,600 yuan in China. I was so happy; I was speechless. In just two weeks I had earned as much as my parents made in more than a year. But while it amounted to a lot of money back in China, it wasn’t enough to cover my living expenses in America, which were much higher than in China. So I had to take on some odd jobs like tutoring undergraduates, cleaning professors’ houses, and working night shifts at Burger King and weekend shifts at the local Best Western for $3.35 an hour. Besides paying my bills, I had to save up enough money for the eight high-priced items that the Chinese government allowed overseas graduate students to purchase and bring home without paying customs fees. For the next three years, I worked hard to be able to buy these items for my family.

  As soon as we cashed our first paychecks, Jason, Ji-hong, and I headed out to shop right away. I had budgeted fifty dollars for clothes, but when we arrived at the Salvation Army store, I realized I wouldn’t need nearly that much. I spent only fifteen dollars and went home with two big trash bags full of all kinds of used clothes.

  But this time, we turned even more heads than we did the day we showed up in three-piece suits. Evidently, all the clothes we had purchased at the thrift store were styles from the sixties and seventies—bell-bottom pants, brightly colored shirts, psychedelic patterns. So we had just morphed from yuppies into hippies. Our colleagues in the chemistry department were highly amused. They thought our formal attire had been strange, but now we had gone completely retro.

  As a teaching assistant, part of my job was to lead evening recitation classes twice a week for undergraduate students. During these sessions, I would review material presented by the professor to ensure that the students had grasped the concepts, and help them work through difficult homework assignments. These recitation classes weren’t mandatory for students to attend, but since they were quite helpful, there was usually a great turnout. Or so I had been told.

  Before my first recitation class, I studied extremely hard, as I wanted to do a good job. Since my English was very limited, I decided to actually write down everything I planned to say for the entire two-hour session, and I memorized the whole thing the night before the class.

  I arrived the next day well-prepared and excited to teach my first recitation class in America. There were one hundred and twenty students enrolled in the course, so I expected that many of them would come to my class. But when I walked through the doors, my heart fell to the floor.

  As the doors slammed shut behind me, I stared up at the auditorium seats in disbelief. Only two people had shown up … two out of one hundred and twenty students!

  It turned out that Jason, Ji-hong, and I were among the earliest exchange students from mainland China, so we were curiosities on campus. We wore silly clothes and spoke elementary English with heavy accents. In those first few weeks at school, my friends and I were regarded more as the Three Stooges than the Three Musketeers. That reputation had apparently spread to my undergraduate recitation class. The students heard that their new teaching assistant was foreign and difficult to understand, so nobody bothered to show up for my session.

  I was humbled by all the no-shows. I was disappointed because I had done so much work to prepare, but I suppressed my chagrin and began to teach. The two students who did show up were happy to get the personalized tutoring.

  The embarrassment inspired my desire to do a better job as a teaching assistant and improve my English as quickly as possible. To me a semester-long English class at the university would take too long, and in order to live and communicate in this country, I needed to learn the language more quickly than that. So I resorted to the tactic Le-ping and I had used back at USTC in China. I discovered a rundown movie theater called the Biography Theatre near Wisconsin Avenue in D.C.’s Georgetown district, at which I could watch two feature films a night for just a dollar. I went there at least once a week, mostly by myself, tho
ugh occasionally I would drag one of the other Musketeers with me. I saw many classic American films there, like Gone With the Wind, The Godfather, Some Like It Hot, Doctor Zhivago, On the Waterfront, and Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

  The movies did help me improve not only my English, but also my understanding of American culture. My favorite movie was It’s a Wonderful Life. I watched the main character, George Bailey, nearly give up on his life when he encountered seemingly insurmountable hardship. His guardian angel showed him that his life, no matter how difficult, had in fact made a positive impact on so many people. This story represented what impressed me most about American culture. Americans, as a whole, displayed an unbridled positivity toward life. I wanted to find the same freedom and confidence, and I wanted to make my life matter.

  I remembered my father’s words during the Cultural Revolution when I had lost all hope for my future. “Ming, you must always have hope,” he said. Facing all the years of deprivation and repression back in China gave me a fighting spirit and a singular focus on whatever I set out to do. I was acutely aware of how precious this opportunity to live and study in America was, and I knew how hard I would have to work to succeed. I couldn’t let the no-shows get me down, but the students weren’t the only ones who saw me differently, as I would soon find out. Being accepted and respected in this new country was something I could never take for granted. I would be forced to prove myself again and again.

  Chapter 8

  The Yellow Dot

  Not long after our scores on the subject matter tests were posted, Jason, Ji-hong, and I became the talk of the chemistry department. Professor McNesby was delighted with our performance on the tests, and later that week he addressed about one hundred students and faculty who had gathered in a lecture hall for a department meeting.

  “We’ve got three smart cookies from China who are setting a good example for our students,” he said, beaming from the podium.

  My faculty advisor, on the other hand, wasn’t convinced.

  “You just got lucky.”

  His name was Jerry Miller, and he advised me on the required classes for my graduate program. He was tall, strong, and straight-faced. Professor Miller didn’t believe that a minority student like me could succeed in American higher education. He made that clear in our first meeting with his dismissive response to my scores. It wouldn’t be the last time I experienced his prejudice against me as a minority, nor would he be the last person to shun me based on my ethnic origin.

  I was, however, very shocked to encounter such prejudice from my academic advisor. Being in America, I thought I had finally found the fairness and equality that had eluded me back in China. During the Cultural Revolution, I was part of a family of doctors and intellectuals who were reviled by the communists as the “stinking ninth class,” the lowest rung of the entire social order. But I thought it was going to be the opposite in America; I was supposed to be respected for my knowledge and education. I could not get over how Professor Miller could be so contemptuous toward me simply because I was a minority. I realized that life isn’t always fair, even in a great country like America.

  On the other hand, many other professors were delighted at our academic achievement, and vied to be our thesis advisors and recruit us for their research teams. I went out to eat with at least four different professors, including Dr. McNesby, who hosted all three of us for dinner at his home one evening. Only one other faculty member, John Weiner, invited me to dinner at his home.

  At the time, Professor John Weiner was not yet forty years old, but was already a rising star in laser applications in chemistry and physics. He had dark, curly hair and an intense gaze. He was curious, focused, and driven. While I owed so much to Professor McNesby for his assistance in getting me to the States, I was drawn to Professor Weiner and his intriguing work with lasers.

  Professor Weiner and his wife, Denise, lived in a beautiful home decorated with reproductions of European art. Denise was French, and the couple had spent a considerable amount of time living overseas. They were lively and laughed a lot, and I felt at ease in their presence. After a hearty meal of homemade lasagna, Professor Weiner and I retreated to the living room to play a game of backgammon. He started lining up the red checkers on his side of the board, leaving me with the black pieces. I joked that we should switch colors since I was from Red China, to which he laughed.

  “You could focus on any number of topics for your thesis,” he said, as he moved one of his pieces on the board. He leaned forward, his elbows resting on his knees. “Why the interest in lasers?”

  I told him about being wide-eyed in Professor Ma’s laser lab back at USTC and in the movie theater watching Star Wars, and I added that I wanted to devote my life to this exciting, emerging technology.

  “Are you ready to play Star Wars for real?” he asked.

  “Yes, absolutely. That’s what I’ve always wanted to do.”

  I was convinced that lasers would transform the world. Using lasers, we could better determine the safest and strongest materials for space shuttles and satellites, and the best elements for electronics and computer parts. Lasers would eventually be considered one of the greatest inventions of the twentieth century, and although I imagined so many inspiring possibilities, I didn’t know then just how crucial lasers would later become to my career and my life.

  “Welcome to the team,” said Dr. Weiner. “We’re going to do great things together.”

  The early years at the University of Maryland were spent mostly in classes for my graduate program or on the undergraduate courses for which I served as a teaching assistant. I juggled school, multiple side jobs, and occasional lab experiments. Despite my busy schedule, I still found time to pursue my favorite hobbies like piano, ballet, and ping-pong. I made many new friends, and for the first time in my life, I even fell in love.

  Her name was Shu Chen. We met at a Christmas party at the end of my second year in Maryland, and talked throughout the evening. I found out that her family had come to the U.S. from Taiwan when she was in junior high. She loved science and was planning to go to medical-school after her undergraduate studies were completed. I told her about the generations of doctors in my family and the medical-school classes I had audited illegally back in China. She was lovely, lively, and intelligent, and I felt completely at ease with her.

  Not long after our first encounter, Shu and I began dating. On the weekends, she often accompanied me to the rundown theater in Georgetown. I was a big fan of Bruce Lee, so we watched a lot of old kung-fu movies together. I didn’t have any female friends growing up, and I had never had a girlfriend before, but our relationship blossomed over the next few years, and Shu and I were engaged by the time we finished school. I didn’t know then that our relationship would fall on very difficult times because we were both too young to understand the balance between a healthy marriage and demanding careers.

  Success in school was paramount to me and many other minority students fighting to prove ourselves at American universities. No matter how many A’s I got in my classes, Professor Miller was never supportive or happy for me, but when I got a B in a difficult physical chemistry class, he asked, “Sure you want to keep going? Can you handle the rest of your courses?” When it came time to formulate a doctoral thesis, Professor Miller doubted my ability to create and defend the proposal, or to conduct the experiments. I couldn’t understand how he could still just fixate on my ethnicity and remain so blind to my actual abilities.

  Miller had inherited a perception of the Chinese based on a century of fear and misunderstanding between our cultures. The only Chinese immigrants he was aware of weren’t the visiting scholars or the capable students, but rather only the hundreds of thousands of poor immigrants from the Guangdong Province who first came to the U.S. in the nineteenth century. Those immigrants had come for the Gold Rush, and stayed on to build the transcontinental railroad, start businesses like laundromats and restaurants, and fight decades of extreme legalized discrimina
tion. I didn’t stand before Dr. Miller as a person in my own right; in his mind, I was apparently just one of many little “rats” that had jumped ship from China. I was endlessly frustrated that nothing I did—no amount of good work—could ever change his mind.

  Fortunately, most of the other faculty members were not like Dr. Miller. They were open-minded and supportive toward students of all ethnic origins. Contrary to Professor Miller’s predictions, I did successfully defend my doctoral thesis proposal, and research with Dr. Weiner began in earnest during the second half of my graduate program. With basic coursework completed, I spent much more time in Dr. Weiner’s laser lab.

  The lab was an immense room with thick concrete walls and flooring made of dark brown anti-corrosive tiles. One side of the room had windows that were kept permanently draped, but the room would light up from all kinds of laser beams bouncing off mirrors from different angles. The main attraction was a stainless-steel gas chamber that was hooked up to a variety of electronics. The contraption was as big as a king-size bed and stood at chest level. Panes of glass allowed us to observe what was happening inside the chamber.

  Weiner’s research team included me, two other graduate students named John Keller and Regina Bonanno, and a postdoctoral fellow named Mattanjah de Vries. We studied the interaction of colliding atoms in this huge laser-lit machine. The goal of our work was to create the most conducive environment for getting one atom to bond with another. Atoms that have bonded into molecules create a lot of the matter in the world, as when two hydrogen atoms bond with an oxygen atom to produce a water molecule. We used the sodium atom as our experimental model, and our endeavor was to create dimers, structures made up of two sodium atoms bonded together. We considered ourselves “molecular matchmakers,” since we were studying lonely atoms traveling through space and evaluating how we could set a mood that would encourage these singles come together and settle down into more stable molecular pairs.