When I landed in Los Angeles in 1987, Mohan, whom we had known well from our Neyveli days, picked me up from the airport. It was a long drive to Pasadena, where he and his wife lived. A newly married couple, they were looking for a home of their own to buy and they took me along for a drive to scout a few neighborhoods in those old days before the internet.
At one point during the drive, he pointed out Caltech and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL.) Caltech I was familiar with right from my undergraduate days. It was where the ultra-brainy engineering students wanted to end up for their PhDs. Caltech was also the home of Richard Feynman, who was like a demi-god for many of us who loved physics.
Though JPL was new at that time, it became a common name once I started living the life of a graduate student in the company of other students. I even came to know an Indian-American who worked at JPL as a project manager in NASA's Deep Space program. He had interesting stories to tell about having to document every day's activities to the national security folks any time he went abroad because of the deep-seated worries that commies around the world might trap him into sharing advanced technology.
What I did not know then, and which I came to know only from reading Malinda Lo's book, is that one of the co-founders of JPL was a genius researcher who was born in China.
The main character in the book, Last Night at the Telegraph Club, which is set in the 1950s, is a Chinese-American high school student, but Lo tells a wonderful story that is a lot more than high school teenage drama.
Lo brings up the story of JPL's co-founder, Hsue-Shen Tsien, when the teenager's family is worried about McCarthyism that made every person of Chinese origin a possible communist. When I read that, I put the book down and reached for Google.
What a complicated story that Wikipedia offers about Hsue-Shen Tsien! For a country that was worried about commies, the US certainly did China a huge favor by deporting him:
Upon his return, he helped lead the development of the Dongfeng ballistic missile and the Chinese space program. For his contributions, he became known as the "Father of Chinese Rocketry", nicknamed the "King of Rocketry". He is recognized as one of the founding fathers of Two Bombs, One Satellite.
In the book, the teenager's family discusses how differently the US government treated this Chinese rocket scientist and the Nazi rocket scientist, Wernher von Braun. Unlike the Chinese scientist who was forced to leave the US, von Braun, who developed the V-2 rockets for the murderous Nazi regime, was secretly airlifted to the US and was given prestigious assignments to develop rocketry that put America on the path towards space travel.
A couple of decades ago, I happened to be in Huntsville, Alabama to visit with friends who lived there. One of the first big signs that I saw welcomed us to the Rocket City. Given the jokes about Alabama, one wouldn't easily imagine such a moniker for a city there. Driving around, I noticed that their civic center was named after von Braun. Yes, named after von Braun. He was such an important figure there.
From the Nazis we got von Braun, and we expelled Hsue-Shen Tsien to China. To understand such complications in life, we need a lot more than rocket science!
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