Journey of a thousand miles : an extraordinary life 9780776625676, 0776625675, 9780776625683, 0776625683, 9780776625690, 0776625691, 9780776625706, 0776625705

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Journey of a Thousand Miles

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Journey of a Thousand Miles An Extraordinary Life Dr. Ruey J. Yu with Kate Jaimet

University of Ottawa Press 2017

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The University of Ottawa Press gratefully acknowledges the support extended to its publishing program by the Government of Canada, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, and the University of Ottawa. Copy editing: Susan James Proofreading: Lesley Mann Typesetting: Édiscript enr. Cover design: Édiscript enr.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Yu, Ruey J., author Journey of a thousand miles: an extraordinary life / Dr. Ruey J. Yu with Kate Jaimet. Issued in print and electronic formats ISBN 978-0-7766-2567-6 (softcover) ISBN 978-0-7766-2568-3 (PDF) ISBN 978-0-7766-2569-0 (EPUB) ISBN 978-0-7766-2570-6 (Kindle) 1. Yu, Ruey J. 2. Dermatologists—United States—Biography. 3. Pharmacologists—United States—Biography. 4. Autobiographies. I. Jaimet, Kate, 1969-, author II. Title. RL46.3.Y9A3 2017

616.50092

C2017-905715-4 C2017-905716-2

Printed in Canada © University of Ottawa Press, 2017

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Table of Contents Foreword, by Eugene J. Van Scott Prologue: Taiwan, 1946 Chapter 1 Coal Dust and Daydreams Chapter 2 Bowing to the Emperor Chapter 3 A “City Monkey” in the Country Chapter 4 Starvation and Surrender Chapter 5 Return to Hsinchu Chapter 6 The Tale of the Poor Scholar Chapter 7 A Diamond in the Trash Chapter 8 Pedalling Through Taipei Chapter 9 Pure Chemistry Chapter 10 Quemoy Chapter 11 Snowed Under Chapter 12 Coming to America Chapter 13 A Life-Changing Discovery Chapter 14 Taking a Gamble Chapter 15 Avon Calling Chapter 16 A Wrinkle in the Business Chapter 17 Head to Head with the Pink Lady Chapter 18 Moving Forward, Giving Back Chapter 19 New Research Directions Epilogue: Philosophy and Vision of My Life Afterword: Ruey Yu as a Child of Taiwan, by Scott Simon

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A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. lao tzu

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Foreword my career in medical and biological science research has been divided into two distinct phases: the before-Ruey Yu period and the Ruey Yu period. Throughout both, I sought to associate with and work with those who would be my teachers in areas of science where I was less knowledgeable. Since 1968, Ruey has been the scientist/teacher for me. He has a dogged determination to continually expand the scope of his own knowledge and capabilities, to become expert in new fields through relentless, intensive study. Examples are many. After Temple University failed to obtain a patent for our initial discovery of compounds to promote skin pigmentation—i.e., esterified derivatives of dihydroxyphenylalanine (DOPA)—he took it upon himself to write a new patent application that resulted in the granting to us of a valid patent from the U.S. Patent Office. Thereafter, all our patent applications were first drafted by Ruey before being sent to a patent attorney. Later, when the dermatology department where we were conducting our joint research was abolished, our only alternative was to try to launch a business whose revenues could help us to continue our research. After our efforts to explore collaborations with joint-venture entities floundered, Ruey took it upon himself to become knowledgeable in business operation, while continuing to pursue new frontiers in bioscience. How this singularly talented man came to be, physically and intellectually, is a challenge to scientific comprehension. Although he grew up severely deprived of nutrients, his brain developed a spectacular intellectual capacity. Perhaps the horrific conditions of his early life are what propelled his lifelong commitment to finding preventatives, cures, and solutions for humankind’s illnesses, imperfections, and needs. Whatever the factors involved, Ruey is an extraordinary human being. To have had decades to collaborate so closely with such a complex, talented man has been a reward I continue to cherish. Actualities achieved from our working together are essentially two. Primary are the discoveries of quite a few biochemical determinants of dermatologic form and function; we were still finding new ones as of the time of this writing in early 2016. The second is establishing a prestigious company that provides products ix

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x Journey of a Thousand Miles

Dr. Eugene Van Scott and Dr. Ruey Yu have enjoyed a long and fruitful scientific collaboration.

Ruey has repeatedly said to me, “We do not need to have good luck. We do need to have the absence of bad luck.”

for preventive and therapeutic dermatologic care, as well as for healthy skin appearance. The company has distinguished itself by scientifically testing products against comparator products or formulations, and by publishing or otherwise publicizing the results for open scrutiny. The company’s management team over recent years has enthusiastically shared Ruey’s and my goals. Ruey has repeatedly said to me along the way, “We do not need to have good luck. We do need to have the absence of bad luck.” Luckily, events along the way have turned out in our favour. eugene j. van scott, m.d.

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PROLOGUE

Taiwan, 1946 fate stepped into my life one tropical spring day in 1946. I was a fourteen-year-old boy with a passion for math and sciences. I was small for my age, my growth stunted by hunger and hard labour during the war years. But the war lay behind me now, and ahead lay a future of knowledge that I hoped to pursue. I had risen early, as usual, that day for the long walk to the Hsinchu elementary school—through the sootchoked air of the railway yards near our home, down the dusty, windswept streets of the city, past rows of houses interspersed with bomb craters and piles of rubble. In the classroom, the atmosphere was hot and humid, hinting at the sweltering summer to come. An end-of-school feeling hung in the air—a buzz of excitement and uncertainty— when the teacher singled out me and three other boys for a special opportunity. For most of the students in my class, elementary school graduation would mean the end of formal education. They would leave school and find low-paying jobs in service industries or manual labour. But the top four students had a chance to continue their education at the Hsinchu vocational junior high school, the teacher said. And I stood among those top four students. “There are only two majors: mechanical engineering and chemical engineering,” the teacher told us. “Which do you choose?” I glanced at the other three boys. It was easy to imagine becoming a mechanical engineer. In dozens of small shops around Hsinchu—the fifth largest city in Taiwan— we’d seen mechanical engineers at work, building and

I glanced at the other three boys. It was easy to imagine becoming a mechanical engineer. But chemical engineering? The very words meant nothing to us. “Mechanical engineering, sir,” all four of us answered.

1

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2 Journey of a Thousand Miles

repairing tools, fixing motorbikes or broken appliances. But chemical engineering? The very words meant nothing to us. “Mechanical engineering, sir,” all four of us answered. “I see we have a problem,” said the teacher. There were not enough spots for all of us to enter the mechanical stream, he explained. Two of us must choose chemical engineering. The teacher sent us home to discuss the matter with our parents. I laid the problem before my father that evening, in the simple, two-room dwelling where we lived with my mother, grandmother, and younger brother. The house had a dirt floor, no indoor plumbing, and a bamboo kitchen table made permanently wobbly by the resident termites that chewed at its legs. My father was a good and gentle man, but he had no education and couldn’t read or write. A railway station janitor, he had spent his entire life scraping by on meagre wages that often didn’t suffice to put shoes on our feet and rice on

Ruey Yu’s father, Ah-Shain Wei, worked as a janitor in the Hsinchu railway station.

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Prologue 3

our table. To him, the choice was clear. A certificate in mechanical engineering meant a guaranteed job and a good income. A certificate in chemical engineering seemed like a path to nowhere. “Chemical engineering? I’ve never even heard of it. You won’t find a job,” he said. “No. Tell your teacher you must be a mechanical engineer.” But when I brought my answer to my teacher the next day, the three other boys all had the same response. “I see we have a problem,” the teacher repeated. He resolved that we should draw lots to choose our career paths. I drew my slip of paper out of the bowl and, full of trepidation, looked at the characters written on it. Chemical engineering. Tears sprang to my eyes. To have come so close to securing an education that would lift my family out of poverty—and to have failed. What would I tell my father? “Please,” I implored. “My father will never forgive me.” “You drew this lot,” the teacher said, not without sympathy. “Tell me, in your heart of hearts, what would you like to study?” At that moment, I experienced a mental dissociation that I can’t explain, even to this day. I knew what I needed to say. I knew what my father expected of me. My brain was shouting: “mechanical engineering.” I opened my mouth and spoke two words. Two words that would set me on a path to a career, a wife, a family, a new life in a new country, and to success and honours beyond those I had ever dreamed possible. Two words that changed my destiny. Chemical engineering.

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I opened my mouth and spoke two words. Two words that would set me on a path to a career, a wife, a family, a new life in a new country, and to success and honours beyond those I had ever dreamed possible. Two words that changed my destiny. Chemical engineering.

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1

Coal Dust and Daydreams my memories of early childhood are shrouded in a fog of coal smoke and the din of freight trains clanging through the railway station behind our home. Amid those hazy recollections, one scene stands out forever in my mind—a scene that, even today, hits me with the raw force of childhood emotion. I was a very young boy, perhaps three or four years old. I was playing in the dirt yard outside our front door, while my mother occupied herself inside. My father, as usual, had gone to his job cleaning the grime and coal dust from the railway station. Like the other families of the railway labourers, we lived in a single-room unit in long, low row of wooden barracks behind the station. Our unit housed three adults—my mother, father, and grandmother—along with three children—me, my newborn brother Juiming, and my half-sister Chi-Ying. Chi-Ying was a chubby little girl of seven or eight, who often took care of me while my mother was busy cooking, cleaning, washing, and sewing. But that day, something was happening to Chi-Ying. Something terribly wrong. Neighbourhood women gathered around our doorstep, sobbing. The door opened and Chi-Ying and my grandmother came out. The neighbours pressed around them, calling “farewell.” Even my mother, the pillar of strength at the core of our family, broke down in tears. I was bewildered. But no one took time to explain things to a little boy. The next thing I knew, Chi-Ying was gone. A cloud of smoke and the whistle of a railway train marked the last traces of her departure. “Where is Chi-Ying going?” I asked my mother. “When will she be back?” But Chi-Ying wasn’t coming back. My parents had sold her as a domestic servant to a rich family in Taipei. I wouldn’t see my half-sister again for another twenty years. Chi-Ying’s departure followed the common pattern for girls of poor families on our island. Though I didn’t know it at the time, I had an older half-sister who had been sold when I, the first son, was born. My father’s salary barely sufficed to feed and clothe his wife and two sons. Daughters were a luxury, an extra mouth to feed. No one questioned Chi-Ying’s fate. A poor family had to make sacrifices to survive. That was life in Taiwan in the 1930s. 5

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6 Journey of a Thousand Miles

* I was born on March 23, 1932, at a time when Taiwan lay under Japanese occupation, and much of the world lay in the thrall of the Great Depression. Once part of the Chinese empire, the island of Taiwan had been ceded to Japan in 1895, in the peace treaty following the Sino-Japanese War. The majority of the population was descended from Chinese ancestry, and our Japanese rulers taught us to believe that we belonged to an inferior race. While Japanese men held almost every position of power in government and commerce, most Taiwanese remained small farmers and labourers. To the Japanese, the native Taiwanese were little more than slaves; the Japanese, with their heavenly Emperor Hirohito, represented the pinnacle of civilization. My father, Ah-Shain Wei, grew up in the farming village of Fangliao, a twohour walk inland and upland from our coastal city. He had come to Hsinchu as a young man, hoping to find fortune and excitement in the big city. He’d begun as a noodle vendor on the city’s bustling streets, but Ah-Shain was kind-hearted to a fault and had no head for business. He let customers haggle down his prices until the few pennies he earned in sales proved insufficient to cover his own expenses. Broke and uneducated, he had finally taken a menial job as a janitor in the Hsinchu railway station. My mother, Shian-May Liu, was wedded to my father in a marriage arranged by a professional matchmaker, a common custom in Taiwan at the time. She too had seen her early hopes in life disappointed. Her first husband, a mailman by the name of Yu, had divorced her in favour of a younger mistress. After the divorce, my mother was left to fend for herself with her two young daughters and her mother-in-law—Yu’s mother, Lin Kuei—who was no longer welcome in her son’s house after his marriage to his new young wife. Father, mother, grandmother, and two elder half-sisters—this was the family I was born into in the barracks behind the railway station. In the normal course of events, my name should have been Ruey Wei, after my father, Ah-Shain Wei. But a condition had come attached to Ah-Shain’s marriage to Shian-May, that their first-born son should be named “Yu” after Shian-May’s first husband, who had no sons of his own. In deference to my grandmother—who didn’t want to see her son’s name die out, despite his callous treatment of her—my father accepted the condition. So, though I never laid eyes on the faithless mailman who had divorced my mother, I was designated to carry his name. Ruey Yu I became. My mother ruled the household with a keen mind, a strong will, and a bamboo rod to keep disobedient little boys in line. Survival was a struggle, and she was determined to win that struggle through resourcefulness, discipline, and hard work. Our room in the barracks served as kitchen, dining room, and bedroom all in one. It had a dirt floor that flooded with several feet of water when the monsoon

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Coal Dust and Daydreams 7

rains pelted the island every year from September to November. In the winter, cold winds from Siberia shivered through the paneless windows. Our entire family slept together in a single large bed, and the feeling of being dry and warm in bed after a day of rain is one of the few physical comforts I remember from my childhood. My mother cooked on a small metal stove, stoked with a fire of charcoal or wood. We ate rice and vegetables, and once a month we could afford a small portion of chicken or pork—never enough to satisfy the hunger of a growing boy. We usually ran out of rice by the last week of every month, and as I lay in our communal bed at night, I would overhear my parents discussing which neighbour they might ask to lend us rice until my father’s next payday. We had no indoor plumbing. Instead, we shared an outhouse with several other families and drew our drinking water from a communal tap a few blocks away. Tiny worms would settle to the bottom of the bucket as I carried the water home to my mother. We would scoop our water from the top and boil it before drinking—even then, it often caused bouts of stomach ache and diarrhea. From our barracks, I could see the much finer houses of the Japanese railway officers. These had separate bedrooms, indoor plumbing, and roofs that didn’t leak in the rain. As a boy, I daydreamed that one day I would live in such a house; one day, I would have shoes on my feet and eat my fill at dinner every night. The railway dominated my childhood, as it dominated the city of Hsinchu. My father toiled there every day, mopping the floors, cleaning the toilets, emptying the garbage bins, and serving tea to the Japanese office clerks. Afflicted with asthma, he wheezed and coughed in the air polluted by coal-burning engines. The passengers who bustled through didn’t see our poor living quarters behind the station, where barefoot children played in the dirt, mothers hung out their family’s one spare set of clothes on the laundry lines, and coal smoke thickened the air, so that our handkerchiefs came away black when we blew our noses. Instead, passengers saw only the prosperous commercial façade of the railway: the busy passenger carriages clickety-clacking along the tracks, and the powerful black

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Our room in the barracks served as kitchen, dining room, and bedroom all in one. In the winter, cold winds from Siberia shivered through the paneless windows.

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8 Journey of a Thousand Miles

freight engines towing their boxcars full of coal, steel, rice, and sugar—products sent from Taiwan to fuel Japanese industrial development and expansion. On the siding, rows of parallel tracks eighteen abreast held the freight cars waiting to be filled, emptied, or transferred to another line. The railway cut the city in half. To the west lay the business district, with its shops and restaurants and the vast indoor market building where farmers from the countryside came to sell their meat, rice, and vegetables. To the east, where we lived, lay the residential district: the streets lined with one- and two-storey brick houses with peaked roofs, built in the traditional Chinese style. Despite our poverty, I have many happy memories of my boyhood before the Second World War. Full of energy and curiosity, I loved to leave the house and explore the dirt streets and paths of the city. I would chase after anything: snakes in the grass, frogs and fish in the river. As I grew older, my friends and I would sneak into the municipal swimming pool through a hole dug under the fence to avoid the entrance fee. I walked barefoot, since we couldn’t afford shoes, and the soles of my feet soon became as tough as leather. I could walk over gravel and broken glass. Only occasionally, when I stepped on a nail, would the sharp point pierce the skin and draw blood. Though I had lost both my half-sisters, at a young age I formed a close bond with my little brother, Juiming. As soon as he was old enough to walk, he trailed around after me. Like most younger siblings, he worshipped his big brother, and I lorded it over him, bossing him around mercilessly. Yet from a very early age, I knew it was my duty to protect and provide for him. I remember one day toward the end of the month when my father’s salary was running out and there was little money left to buy rice. Both of us were hungry, but Juiming, being younger, took it harder. We had been playing some game outside, when the pangs of hunger overcame him and he began to wail. His crying was so intense that I grew alarmed and ran to my mother. “Juiming is starving!” I cried. Frantically, I stoked a wood fire in our little stove and fanned the flames with a bamboo fan. My mother wearily measured out a small portion of rice. “Quickly! Juiming is dying of hunger!” I urged. “Don’t be silly,” my mother snapped. “People don’t die of hunger, just like that!” Her words stunned me into silence. How could my own mother be so cold? Yet in the times ahead, I would learn the truth of her words: my brother and I would endure years of hunger and suffering, and still, somehow, we would survive.

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2

Bowing to the Emperor i turned seven years old in the spring of 1939. It was a year of war throughout the world, and though our small island remained relatively sheltered, it would soon be drawn deeper into the global conflicts. In Europe, Hitler’s Nazi army invaded Poland and brought the Allied powers of Britain and France into the Second World War. In Asia, the Imperial Japanese Army—which had already occupied the great Chinese cities of Beijing and Shanghai—continued to fight against Chinese troops, seeking to extend Japan’s empire. Events had been playing out in China and Japan in the preceding decades that would soon change our lives in Taiwan, though we had no inkling of it at the time. Because the events were to have such an impact on my later life, I must pause here to briefly sketch the historical background for the benefit of the reader. In the early years of the twentieth century, China was an empire ruled by the Qing dynasty. But the Qing government was weak and unpopular, and in 1911, the army and the Chinese people rose up in a series of rebellions, dethroned the emperor, and attempted to establish a Chinese republic. Unfortunately, after the fall of the Qing rulers, the various groups behind the rebellions began fighting among themselves over control of the country. After more than a decade of internecine struggle, two important groups emerged: the Kuomintang, or Nationalists; and the Communists, who had once been a faction within the Kuomintang but split from the party over ideological differences. During the 1920s, the Kuomintang raised a powerful army, and by 1928, General Chiang Kai-shek, leader of the Kuomintang, was proclaimed president of the Chinese Republic. The Communists were forced to flee to the northern province of Shaanxi. There, they established a rebel stronghold under their leader Mao Tse-tung and continued to defy Chiang Kai-shek’s government and fight for the establishment of a Communist republic in China. While the Chinese were fighting among themselves, the rulers of Japan nurtured ambitions to expand their empire across Asia. The disarray within China offered them an irresistible opportunity. In 1931, the Japanese army invaded Manchuria, a far northern province of the former Chinese empire. The following year, the army marched south, crossed the Great Wall, and conquered the province of Rehe. In 1936, Japan formed an alliance with Nazi Germany, and 9

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10 Journey of a Thousand Miles

For me, the biggest event of 1939 was my entry into first grade at the Hsinchu elementary school. No longer merely an ignorant urchin, I became a proper schoolboy, taking my first eager steps on the path of education.

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in 1937, Japanese imperial troops attacked the heartland of China, conquering the great cities of Beijing and Shanghai. By 1939—the year I turned seven—Japan occupied all of northern China including Inner Mongolia, as well as a coastal swath of eastern China from Manchuria in the north to the Yangtze River in the south. Japan held all of China’s major industrial cities, coastal ports, and the northern railways that linked China to Europe via Russia. However, Chinese armies—commanded by the Communists and the Kuomintang—held the vast western interior of the country and continued to fight against the Japanese occupation. But I was a boy at the time, with no knowledge of these happenings on the world stage or how they would come to affect my life. For me, the biggest event of 1939 was my entry into first grade at the Hsinchu elementary school. No longer merely an ignorant urchin, I became a proper schoolboy, taking my first eager steps on the path of education. I rose early each day, for school began at eight in the morning and I had to walk several kilometres through the dirt roads of the city to arrive at the two-storey grey-brick school building. Elementary school education in Taiwan was mandatory but strictly segregated: the Japanese children attended one school, the Taiwanese children another. All schools taught the Japanese curriculum, and classes were conducted in the Japanese language. Any student who dared to speak our Taiwanese-Chinese dialect of Hokkien was punished with a beating. At the beginning of each school day, the students assembled in rows in the schoolyard for morning exercises, which the teachers led from a platform in the front. After exercises, we formed into lines and walked briskly to our classrooms. In each classroom hung a portrait of the Japanese Emperor Hirohito. We bowed to the heavenly emperor upon entering the room, then sat at our desks to begin lessons. Since school was to be taught in Japanese, but we all spoke Hokkien at home, we began in first grade with the very basics: learning Japanese vocabulary and the Japanese writing system. I loved school and picked up the

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Bowing to the Emperor 11

new knowledge quickly. We learned ethics, Japanese history, and Japanese geography, but nothing about Chinese or Taiwanese history. We also learned the values of hard work, persistence, honesty, honour, and respect. As my education progressed, I soon discovered a special love of mathematics. One day our teacher asked us to solve an arithmetic question: What is 99 x 99? It seemed like a difficult task until she showed us a trick: Take 99 x 100, and subtract 99. By looking at a problem in a different way, a difficult puzzle suddenly had a simple solution. This was an insight I could apply not only to one mathematical question but to all sorts of problems that confronted me in school and in life. I was born with a great deal of natural curiosity and a propensity to ask questions and to look at situations from many different angles. Although this made me an enthusiastic student, it also caused me problems with my teachers. In the Japanese school system at the time, children were not supposed to ask questions. Many times, I got smacked for opening my mouth; still, I couldn’t help myself. We students had to sweep the classroom floor at the end of each school day. One day, I suggested that instead of sweeping around the desks and chairs, it would be a better idea to move the desks and chairs to the side, sweep the floor, and then move the furniture back into place. Smack! Another time, I asked my teacher why we always started marching on the left foot when we walked in a line from the schoolyard to our classroom. Why couldn’t we start on the right foot? Smack! My female teachers sometimes allowed me to get away with this sort of cheekiness because of my enthusiasm and good grades. But my male teachers wouldn’t put up with my insolence. If I asked a question or made a comment that was too far out of line, a male teacher would haul me out of class and order me into the schoolyard. There, with a lightning-quick motion, he’d judo-flip me onto my back in the dirt. That would show me who was boss. Yet the more they tried to beat the curiosity out of me, the more I kept asking questions. I even loved judo, despite

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I was born with a great deal of natural curiosity and a propensity to ask questions . . . In the Japanese school system at the time, children were not supposed to ask questions. Many times, I got smacked for opening my mouth; still, I couldn’t help myself.

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12 Journey of a Thousand Miles

the fact that it was used as a weapon against me. After all, the idea in judo is to turn an opponent’s momentum against him, so that a smaller but more skilled fighter can beat a stronger and heavier adversary. Judo provided a way for the underdog to win, even with the odds seemingly stacked against him. For a penniless Taiwanese boy facing the hurdles of poverty and low social status, this was an idea that could inspire dreams. * In 1940, the railway company transferred my father out of Taiwan to Japaneseoccupied mainland China. Japan planned to conquer a wide circle of territory in continental Asia and the Pacific islands, in large part consisting of colonies held by Western powers, such as Hong Kong, British Malaya, Netherlands East Indies, French Indochina, and the American protectorate of the Philippines. With the European powers battling for their lives against Nazi Germany, Japan planned to seize these colonies and unite them into an Asian empire. To do so, it needed to enhance its supply lines by building railways across its newly occupied Chinese territory. My father was recruited as a labourer for this work, like many thousands of Taiwanese who laboured in the Japanese war effort. Because we had no telephone, and Ah-Shain’s illiteracy prevented him from writing letters, we would hear no news from my father for the next two years. My father’s departure left our family destitute. The railway company evicted us from the barracks behind the station since my father no longer worked there. From then on, any money that my father sent home would have to pay not only for food and clothing, but for shelter too. Somehow, my mother found a place where we could afford to live. It was a one-room shack on the grounds of a brick factory, with a dirt floor and drafty mud-and-bamboo walls. The tin roof was so leaky that I could lie in bed at night and look up through the holes to count the stars. More like a toolshed than a home, the shack had never been meant as a human dwelling. It was built into the side of a hill, so that the top of the shed lay on the same level as the road on the hilltop above. People passing by often mistook our tin roof for a gutter. I remember my humiliation one day when a mother and her young daughter were walking on the street above our home. The girl asked, “Mother, do you think someone lives here?” I was just underneath, and I heard the mother say: “I think so. But they shouldn’t. A place like that isn’t fit for human beings.” Another time, when I was leaving for school in the morning, I turned around in the doorway and said “goodbye” to my mother in Japanese, as our teachers had taught us to do. At that moment, one of the teachers happened to be walking past. He stopped and stared at me with his mouth wide open. He couldn’t believe that such a well-behaved boy could emerge from such miserable living conditions.

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There was nothing we could do but make the best of it. I worked hard in school and helped my mother and grandmother in the evenings. My mother found a way for us to earn a little extra money by making bamboo baskets. She would pick up the materials from the basket-shop owner; then she, my grandmother, and I would weave them into baskets and return them to the shop for a few pennies apiece. Juiming, still a preschooler, was too young for such work. With my nimble hands, I could make baskets twice as fast as my grandmother, though the bamboo cane often cut my bare fingers and drew blood. * On December 8, 1941, Japan launched a massive, coordinated attack on several fronts—the first strike in its offensive to expand its empire in the Pacific islands. Japanese bombers struck the Philippines and Hong Kong, while army troops marched into British Malaya. Simultaneously, 360 Japanese aircraft flew across the International Dateline toward the American naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. The planes dropped their bombs at 7:55 a.m. December 7, local time, in a surprise attack that killed 2,330 American military personnel, injured 1,140, sank all eight American battleships in the harbour, and destroyed 180 U.S. aircraft. The following day, the U.S. Congress declared war on Japan. Undeterred, Japan continued its attacks using all the power of its mighty army, navy, and air force. Dotted with Japanese military bases, Taiwan served as a launching pad for air attacks, as well as a source of coal, steel, food, and troops for the Japanese military. Because of its strategic importance, Taiwan, including the city of Hsinchu, became a target of American bombers. No longer could we remain sheltered from global events; the Second World War had caught us in its bloody grasp. Everything we knew about the war we learned through the filter of Japanese propaganda. We were told that the Japanese emperor was fighting to save the people of Asia from American capitalism. The Japanese empire would bring civilization to the barbaric peasants of the Pacific

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No longer could we remain sheltered from global events.

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14 Journey of a Thousand Miles

islands. We heard nothing about the brutality on the front lines or the strength of the American forces. We were brainwashed to consider ourselves part of the glorious Japanese empire. Food grew scarce. There was no cooking oil, no meat. Those valuable foodstuffs were sent to the front to feed the Japanese troops. Several times a week, air raid sirens sounded and we ran for the shelter of underground bunkers. In those trenches, covered by dirt roofs, I huddled with my brother, praying to Buddha, listening for the shuuuuuu of the bombs dropping from the sky and the boom as they hit the earth. Some fell so close the entire dugout shook. One time after an air raid, we returned home to find that the Americans had targeted the brick factory where we lived. A bomb had torn a gaping hole in the bamboo wall of our shack, and on our bed lay a huge chunk of steel shrapnel. I couldn’t help imagining what gruesome fate would have befallen us if we’d been tucked in bed, asleep, when the bomb hit.

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3

A “City Monkey” in the Country in 1943, my father returned home from mainland China and resumed his job at the Hsinchu railway station. His return brought an improvement in our living conditions. Dissatisfied with the shack at the brick factory, Ah-Shain took matters into his own hands. Together, we gathered bricks and wood from the bombed-out buildings around the neighbourhood and built a small house, with two rooms and an outdoor privy, on a vacant piece of land near the railway station. Although the station itself stood unscathed by American attacks, the barracks where I’d grown up had been smashed into piles of rubble. Every day, the air raid sirens sounded and the American planes dropped destruction from the skies. One day in 1943, a farmer from my father’s home village of Fangliao knocked on our door. He had risked the trek into the city to bring Ah-Shain important news. Ah-Shain’s father had died, and he needed to return to the village to take care of the funeral arrangements. Though I was only eleven years old, as the eldest son I accompanied my father on this solemn task. My father and I set out on foot through the war-scarred streets of the city, up the dirt track into the foothills, with the mountains looming in the distance ahead. We passed fields where farmers grew peanuts and potatoes, and rice paddies where yoked buffalo pulled plows through ankledeep water. After a two-hour walk, we reached Fangliao. The village consisted of a few shops, a school, and a cluster of houses built along the road. The farmers lived in long brick buildings that housed several families, one family in each room. But my grandfather’s house was a simple one-room hut with mud walls. We passed through the

Together, we gathered bricks and wood from the bombedout buildings around the neighbourhood and built a small house, with two rooms and an outdoor privy, on a vacant piece of land near the railway station.

15

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16 Journey of a Thousand Miles

doorway into the dim interior. On the floor, an old man lay dead. For a child, it was a horrifying sight. My father touched his face and began crying. I had never seen Ah-Shain cry in my life. My father made the funeral arrangements, speaking to the villagers in a dialect that I didn’t understand, for the rural people in Taiwan spoke a different dialect from the one spoken in the city. One of our relatives dug a grave in the hillside. The next day, we buried my grandfather and held a small ceremony. Following the ceremony, we returned home to Hsinchu. But the house in the village now belonged to my father, and the visit had planted an idea in his mind—an idea that he discussed that evening with my mother and grandmother. Ah-Shain wanted to move his children out of the city—the target of American air attacks—and into the safer countryside. Though we were shielded from the truth by Japanese propaganda, in fact by 1943 the tide of war was turning against Japan. In 1942, as part of its expansion across the South Pacific, Japan had captured the small but strategic island of Guadalcanal, about 1,500 kilometres off the northeast coast of Australia. Alarmed at the Japanese presence so close to a major ally, American marines had launched a counter-invasion of Guadalcanal in August 1942. After seven months of jungle warfare and thousands of casualties, the Americans captured the island in February 1943. The Japanese withdrew from Guadalcanal, having lost six hundred aircraft and more than twenty thousand soldiers. From this point on, the U.S. campaign in the Pacific became more aggressive, as the Americans sought not only to contain the Japanese empire but to win back conquered territory, pressing gradually closer to the island of Japan itself. As ordinary citizens of Taiwan, we didn’t know what was happening in the larger theatre of war. All we knew was that in 1943, American bombing raids on Taiwanese cities became more frequent and more dangerous. My deceased grandfather’s small mud house in Fangliao provided a sanctuary. Seeing the opportunity to protect his family, Ah-Shain sent my grandmother, my brother Juiming, and me to live in the village. * There I was, a “city monkey”—short, skinny, with a funny dialect—trying to fit into a new school filled with brawny farm boys. But I was a feisty kid who loved sports and games, and I had cousins in the village who became my first allies and friends. One day, I judo-flipped my cousin to show him the skills I’d learned from my Japanese teachers in the city. He was so impressed, the next day he went to school and told everyone I could do judo. I flipped one kid after another, gaining in stature after every victory, until they sent the strongest boy to challenge me. His

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A “City Monkey” in the Country 17

brute power outmatched my limited skills, and I quickly found myself lying in the dirt. But I’d bested many of the others, and they had to acknowledge that I wasn’t as weak and scrawny as I looked. The Fangliao elementary school was staffed with Taiwanese teachers, though like everyone else on the island, they taught the Japanese curriculum in the Japanese language. My command of Japanese and my eagerness in class impressed the teachers. While most of the country boys spoke poor Japanese and weren’t interested in academics, I was caught up in the love of science and math. One of the teachers gave me extra lessons after school and I worked ahead in the curriculum, reading borrowed books in the evenings by the light of the oil lamp at our bamboo table. I couldn’t get enough of school: as long as I was learning and studying, my mind was engaged in the world of knowledge and distracted from the hardships of our everyday life. For life in Fangliao was difficult. Though farmland surrounded us, we had inherited only the house and no land for ourselves. Whatever money my father could spare never stretched until the next payday, though my kind grandmother always fed my brother and me first, even if she had to do without. Our relatives in the village tried to help, but after feeding their own families and buying necessities, the farmers had little left over for their impoverished cousins from the city. My grandmother was old, and Juiming was young and weak. I knew it was up to me to provide for the family. Outside of school hours, I scrounged food any way I could. During harvest time, I worked in the fields and rice paddies alongside the farmers and their sons. Toiling shirtless under the sweltering tropical sun, my skin became so tanned and tough that when it rained, the water droplets pearled up and ran off my back. At the end of a day of labour, the farmer would reward me with a bunch of radishes, a bag of potatoes, or a sheaf of rice. My grandmother stripped the rice grains from the stalks and hulled them by hand before setting them to boil. After the potato harvest, I went through the farmers’ fields, digging up the blighted and deformed spuds they’d

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I couldn’t get enough of school: as long as I was learning and studying, my mind was engaged in the world of knowledge and distracted from the hardships of our everyday life.

At the end of a day of labour, the farmer would reward me with a bunch of radishes, a bag of potatoes, or a sheaf of rice.

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18 Journey of a Thousand Miles

When Grandfather Lee saw our destitute circumstances, he told me that if I fetched him some bamboo, he would make me something interesting. With skilled fingers, he fashioned a trap for catching crabs in the river.

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left behind. Once, a cousin gave us two new-hatched goslings. Every day after school, I took them down to the river and fed them grass until they grew into fat geese. That year at least, we had meat for dinner on the New Year’s festival. Not long after we arrived in the village, a man came to visit us who introduced himself as my Grandfather Lee. It turned out that he was my father’s biological father. The story, as I heard it through the family, was this: Grandfather Lee had fathered seven sons. Since he couldn’t afford to feed that many children, he had sold my father Ah-Shain to a neighbour, who needed a son to carry on his family name—an important consideration in traditional Chinese culture. That neighbour was my recently deceased Grandfather Wei. When Grandfather Lee saw our destitute circumstances, he told me that if I fetched him some bamboo, he would make me something interesting. I cut down some stalks that were growing wild and brought them back to him. With skilled fingers, he fashioned a trap for catching crabs in the river. Similar to a lobster trap, the funnelshaped opening of the trap allowed crabs to crawl in while preventing them from crawling back out. One day while fishing, I found a live shell in the river, which had dropped from an airplane and failed to explode on impact. Normally, the Americans didn’t drop bombs in the countryside, but recently they’d attacked a line of trucks carrying Japanese soldiers across the river. I picked up the unexploded munition, thinking I could sell it as a souvenir. My grandmother was shocked when I carried it through our door. “Foolish boy!” she exclaimed. “Don’t you know that’s dangerous?” “I’ll take it back,” I told her. But she plucked it from my hands and carried it out of the village, depositing it in the barren hillside where it wouldn’t do any harm. Life went on that way for two years in Fangliao. I learned to speak the village dialect, joined in sports and games, and studied hard in school. On the weekends, we made the two-hour barefoot trek to the city to visit my mother and father, returning in time for school on Monday.

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A “City Monkey” in the Country 19

At the end of elementary school in Fangliao, my teacher came to pay a formal visit to my grandmother. The visit had two purposes: first, to congratulate my grandmother for my perfect two-year attendance record; and second, to make a special proposal for my continuing education. “Your grandson is the best student I’ve ever taught,” he said. “I would like to recommend him for the Japanese middle school in Hsinchu.” This was an extraordinary honour and opportunity. Very few Taiwanese students were allowed to attend the Japanese schools—only the best of the best. While Taiwanese schools focused on technical training, the Japanese schools taught history, math, sciences, and other academic subjects. I longed for the opportunity to study with the best teachers. More importantly for my parents and grandmother, education at a Japanese school would allow me to work as a clerk in an office, earning more money and respect than most Taiwanese could dream of. But there was one catch. “To study at the Japanese middle school costs 180 yen,” the teacher said. One hundred and eighty yen! He might as well have asked for a million. To us, it was a fortune—far more than my parents could scrape together. “I’m sorry,” my grandmother said. “We cannot afford it.” The teacher nodded sympathetically. He exchanged a few more courtesies with my grandmother, then he mounted his bicycle and pedalled home. After he left, my grandmother sat by the dim light of the oil lamp and cried in humiliation at our poverty.

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4

Starvation and Surrender as 1944 crept toward 1945, our hunger edged toward starvation. There was no food to be had anywhere in the village. Even the farmers couldn’t control their harvest. The Japanese soldiers confiscated the crops to feed the war effort, locking hundreds of pounds of rice in a heavily guarded storage house in the village. I didn’t dare to steal vegetables from the farmers’ fields, but sometimes I would sneak in and pick the leaves off the potatoes or radish plants. If the farmers saw me they chased me, but I took off too quickly for them to catch me, sprinting through the rows of crops, vaulting the fences and running for home. When the pangs of hunger became too much to bear, I turned to eating grass in the fields. Some kinds of grass were sweet, especially the flowers, but other kinds were poisonous and would leave me doubled over with stomach pain and diarrhea. The trick lay in not eating too much of a new kind of grass all at once; I would eat just a little at first and wait to see if it made me sick. When I knew what was safe to eat, I brought my little brother, Juiming, out to the fields. “You follow me. I’ll teach you how to eat grass,” I told him. It was our only way to survive. One day, I heard a mouse rustling in the rafters of our home. That gave me a brilliant idea. The next day, I took some bamboo to my Grandfather Lee and asked if he could make me a mouse trap. He created a clever contraption, baited with a peanut tied to a string. If a mouse took the peanut, it would yank the string, which would cause the door of the cage to fall shut. That very night I set the trap and lay in bed, trying to ignore the hunger pangs in my stomach as I listened for the mouse. Sure enough, soon I heard a scurrying noise and the “snap” of the cage door. My prey was trapped! I jumped out of bed and grabbed the cage. I had to act quickly, before the mouse chewed through the bamboo bars. I plunged the cage into a pot of water to drown the rodent. Then my grandmother boiled the mouse and skinned it. We ate everything, even the bones, discarding only the stomach and intestines. It tasted like chicken. But with three mouths to feed, the meat didn’t go far. Over the following weeks and months, I trapped every mouse that dared to set a paw in our hut. When the mice were gone, I tried to catch the rats in the rice fields, but they were too fast and too smart and had too much other food available to fall for my trap. 21

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22 Journey of a Thousand Miles

The Japanese school year began in April, with a spring term that lasted until mid-July and a summer break from the end of July until the beginning of September. In the summer break of 1944, I worked for a few pennies a day, hauling rocks to build an irrigation dam in the river. I was twelve years old, a weakling of a kid working side-by-side in the sweltering heat with big, strong farm boys and farm girls. We’d pick up rocks from downstream and place them in baskets balanced on either end of a bamboo pole. When the baskets contained as many rocks as we could carry, we’d hoist the pole across our shoulders and trudge three hundred metres uphill to the site of the dam. There, we would deposit the rocks and march back downhill for another load. Because I could only carry a small load of six or eight rocks at a time, I earned less than the other children. Still, every penny helped in those desperate days. Eventually, work on the dam was abandoned so that the cement and other construction materials could be diverted to the war effort in the Pacific islands. The propaganda told us that Japan was winning the war. But in fact, throughout 1944 and 1945, tens of thousands of Japanese soldiers were slaughtered in bloodsoaked battles against the Americans. In 1944, we started to see a new kind of American airplane appear in the skies above Taiwan. They were enormous: nearly thirty metres from nose to tail, with four engines and two bomb bays. These were the B-29 Superfortresses, which could fly a five-thousand-kilometre round trip without refuelling and carry a bomb load of up to nine tonnes. With these powerful aircraft, the Americans intended to retake the Pacific islands conquered by Japan at the beginning of the war and bomb the island of Japan itself into submission. In July 1944, the United States took Saipan, a tiny but strategic island 2,300 kilometres southeast of Japan, which became the launching base for American air attacks on Tokyo. That autumn, U.S. forces landed in the Philippines. As the Americans drew closer and closer to Japan itself, the Japanese soldiers fortified their defences on the islands surrounding their homeland, preparing to fight to the last man. Soldiers dug heavily fortified complexes of underground bunkers and tunnels on the islands of Iwo Jima (1,200 kilometres from Japan) and Okinawa (650 kilometres south of Japan), and on my own island of Taiwan. In the spring of 1945, I began junior high school in Hsinpu, an hour’s walk from my village. But there was no schoolwork to be done that year. Instead of books, we were handed shovels and told to help the Japanese soldiers dig trenches and bunkers to defend our island against the expected American invasion. The Japanese soldiers had taken over several rooms in our school. The captain looked so elegant in his boots and uniform that I wanted to be like him; I wanted to be an officer in the Imperial Japanese Army. I dug holes for them and carried bamboo to build bunkers in the mountains. When the day’s work was done, I trailed around after them, awestruck. They tolerated my presence as a kind of

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Starvation and Surrender 23

curiosity: a cute little savage who spoke their language and picked up the chicken bones that they threw on the floor after eating the meat, begging them to let me take them home to my grandmother to make soup broth. Chicken—we were starving, and the Japanese officers had chicken to eat! Sometimes they would give me the bird’s heart or liver, garbage to them but delicacies to us, and sustenance to ward off starvation. I was so hungry that my ribs showed through my skin and I often fainted on the walk to and from school. If the war had continued, I could not have lasted much longer. The Americans landed on Iwo Jima in February 1945. More than twenty thousand Japanese defenders, holed up in caves and bunkers, awaited their attack. Cave by cave, the Americans routed their enemies. By the time they captured the island a month later, only a thousand Japanese soldiers remained alive. Meanwhile, in Taiwan, the government-controlled news reports still told us that Japan would win the war. Each day, the newspapers and radio stations would announce how many American ships and airplanes Japan had destroyed; they never said how many Japan had lost. Yet I remember wondering why the only planes we saw in the air were the American bombers. Even a child could figure out that “our” Japanese planes had been taken down by U.S. fighters. One day a few months before the end of the war, the Japanese soldiers went away on deployment, leaving the warehouse full of confiscated rice unguarded. A rumour swept around the village that the farmers would break into the warehouse at nightfall and distribute the rice to anyone who needed it. I asked my grandmother if I could go, and she agreed. Were the villagers driven by bravery and defiance or by hunger and desperation? Perhaps it was both. For me, the starving face of my little brother, the selfsacrifice of my grandmother, and the empty pit in my own stomach were reasons enough to risk a desperate act. Darkness fell and the moon rose over the mountains in the east. There was no electricity in the village; the only illumination came from the moon and starlight. I left the house and walked barefoot down the main road of the

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In the spring of 1945, I began junior high school in Hsinpu, an hour’s walk from my village. But there was no schoolwork to be done that year. Instead of books, we were handed shovels and told to help the Japanese soldiers dig trenches and bunkers to defend our island against the expected American invasion.

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24 Journey of a Thousand Miles

village. When I arrived at the warehouse, a crowd of people blocked the entrance door. I couldn’t see anything over the tall bodies of the adults. Ducking through them, I squirmed my way to the front of the crowd. Inside the warehouse, a surprisingly orderly scene prevailed. One farmer had been designated to act as a quartermaster: he wrote down the name of each person who took a bag of rice, to ensure that each family received only one bag. He looked down at me; I was the only child among the throng of adults. “Do you want a bag of rice?” he said. “Yes,” I answered, and he wrote down my grandmother’s name, Lin Kuei. Another farmer picked up a bag of rice from the pile and dropped it over my shoulders. I nearly crumpled under the burden. I’d expected a five- or ten-­kilogram sack; this was a fifty-five kilogram bag that weighed more than I did. I staggered a few paces and then dropped it. I couldn’t carry it home, but I couldn’t leave it there, either. This was enough food to feed us for months. I began to roll it end over end, slowly making my way out of the warehouse and down the darkened road. I hadn’t gone very far when I heard a burst of machine-gun fire. People began shouting and running in all directions. In a split second, I realized the Japanese soldiers had returned. I sprinted for home, abandoning the bag of rice on the road. I was small and fast, and the night was dark, and I thought I’d evaded capture. But the next day, a Japanese officer knocked on our door. My grandmother answered. “Lin Kuei?” the officer asked. “Yes.” “Your name is on this list.” The officer held the list of names written down in the warehouse the night before. “You stole a bag of rice.” My grandmother bowed her head. “I thought my grandson would take only a bowl of rice,” she apologized. “He took a whole bag.” “We don’t have it,” I broke in. “I dropped it in the road, outside the warehouse door.” “We did not recover any such bag,” the officer said. “You owe the government one bag of rice, and you must pay for it.” “But we have nothing,” my grandmother pleaded. One glance around our bare house told the officer she was telling the truth. “Then someone has to go to jail.” The officer looked at me. “That kid, he stole it. That’s a lot of nerve, for such a little kid to steal such a big bag of rice.” I trembled with fear and guilt. We had learned in school that it was wrong to steal. Stealing a bag of food from the government was like robbing the emperor. How could I have done such a thing?

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Starvation and Surrender 25

“You’re a bad kid. You stole from the government, so you have to go to jail,” said the officer. “But I study hard in school!” I protested. I was so young, so naive. “Ask me any math question, and if I get it right, then forgive me!” The officer remained stone-faced, yet he couldn’t bring himself to throw a child in jail. At last, he turned to leave, but not without a final warning: “You owe us a bag of rice and you’ll have to pay.” For the remaining months of the war, we lived in fear that the Japanese soldiers would return demanding payment—or worse still, take me away to prison. On April 1, 1945, American forces landed on Okinawa, an island that lies only 730 kilometres northeast of Taiwan. It was the closest the fighting had ever come to our home island. Off the coast of Okinawa, more than three hundred Japanese kamikaze pilots crashed their planes in suicide attacks against the ships carrying American troops, arms, and supplies. On the island itself, sixty thousand American soldiers advanced with tanks, artillery, and air and sea bombardment, while the Japanese soldiers launched counterattacks from their network of caves and subterranean bunkers, fighting for every inch of land. On April 30, Hitler committed suicide and Germany surrendered to the Allies. Peace was declared in Europe on May 8, 1945. Meanwhile, Japan continued to fight in the Pacific islands, mainland China, and the Philippines. On June 21, the Japanese commander on Okinawa, Lieutenant General Mitsuru Ushijima, committed suicide, and the island fell to the Americans. The futile defence of the island had cost more than a hundred thousand Japanese lives. On July 26, the Allies issued a declaration calling on Japan to surrender unconditionally. The Japanese refused. In Taiwan, we continued to dig bunkers, fearing that our island would face invasion next. Little did we know that the Americans had developed a weapon so powerful they wouldn’t need any more ground invasions to end the war. On August 6, 1945, an American B-29 plane dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. The explosion killed seventy thousand people on impact and generated fires that burned ten square kilometres of the city. When Japan didn’t immediately surrender, the Americans dropped a second bomb on Nagasaki three days later, killing forty thousand people. The people of Taiwan didn’t know this new weapon was an atomic bomb. We didn’t understand the full scale of the destruction. All we knew was that on August 15, 1945, Emperor Hirohito took to the radio for the first time in his reign and broadcast a message of surrender. “The enemy has begun to employ a new and most cruel bomb, the power of which to do damage is, indeed, incalculable, taking the toll of many innocent lives. Should we continue to fight, it would not only result in an ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation, but also it would lead to the total extinction of human civilization,” the emperor said.

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26 Journey of a Thousand Miles

What would become of us? Who would determine our fate?

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“Such being the case, how are we to save the millions of our subjects, or to atone ourselves before the hallowed spirits of our imperial ancestors? This is the reason why we have ordered the acceptance of the provisions of the joint declaration of the [Allied] powers [calling for the surrender of Japan].” My family didn’t have electricity or own a radio, so we didn’t hear the emperor’s words directly. In school, we were told that the Americans had committed an unspeakably barbaric act, and the emperor had surrendered to protect his people from further suffering. The war was over, but in Taiwan we felt no elation. We had been ruled by the Japanese for fifty years. When they left, who would take control of our island? What would become of us? Who would determine our fate?

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5

Return to Hsinchu in the spring of 1946, my grandmother, my brother, and I packed up our few belongings and returned to Hsinchu to live with my parents. We found the city in a state of absolute chaos. The Japanese had formally given up authority over Taiwan in September 1945, and all Japanese nationals had been ordered to vacate the island by April 1946. I watched the soldiers leave with something like regret: they were so dignified, so orderly, even in defeat. Chinese soldiers and officials, including the new governor, Chen Yi, began arriving in Taiwan in October 1945. Their arrival came as the result of a deal struck between British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Kuomintang leader Chiang Kai-shek, whom the British and Americans recognized as the president of the Republic of China. The deal, first negotiated at the Cairo Conference of 1943 and reaffirmed in the Potsdam Declaration of 1945, gave Taiwan to China as part of the redrawing of borders at the end of the Second World War. After the Japanese surrender, Chiang Kai-shek moved quickly to establish a government and military presence on Taiwan. Taiwan would prove to be a critical foothold for Chiang, as the Kuomintang government on the Chinese mainland fell again into civil war with Mao Tse-tung’s Chinese Communist army, following the withdrawal of their common Japanese enemy. But though the Chinese soldiers and officials were expected to bring order and good government to Taiwan, in fact, they brought anything but. Living as I did near the railway station, I had the chance to observe the trainloads of Chinese troops disembarking in Hsinchu. What a difference from the soldiers who had just departed! Unlike the Japanese, who always lined up in orderly rows, the Chinese soldiers swarmed over the platform in disorganized mobs. When they were hungry, they sat on the ground and banged their spoons against their tin cups, demanding dinner. Having been raised with a Japanese sense of manners and decorum, the behaviour of the soldiers seemed barbaric to me—and didn’t bode well for the new government taking over administration of our island. During the period of transition between Japanese and Chinese rule, Taiwanese criminal gangs took advantage of the disarray to enrich themselves at the expense 27

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28 Journey of a Thousand Miles

of innocent Taiwanese citizens and departing Japanese civilians. Armed gangs of thugs roamed the streets, beating and robbing people at will. They broke into houses and stores, taking anything of value. Far from stopping this looting, the newly arrived Chinese soldiers joined in. Women and girls lived in fear of being attacked and raped. For once, our family’s poverty worked to our advantage: the gangs left us alone because we had nothing worth stealing. Somehow, despite the chaos, the railways were still running, and my father retained his job. But my mother, who had suffered for years from peptic ulcers, fell so ill that sometimes she would lie in bed groaning for days on end. Costly medicines and doctors’ bills strained my father’s meagre wages, while the price of food and basic necessities soared. Inflation ran rampant in Taiwan during the post-war years, as goods and foodstuffs were shipped to war-ravaged mainland China, driving up the prices on our island. Meanwhile, corrupt government officials lined their pockets with the profits from this lucrative trade. I was fourteen years old—nearly an adult by the standards of the time—and, as it had during the war, responsibility fell on me to help provide for the family. Fortunately, the war years had honed my skills as a scavenger, and the breakdown of law and order in Taiwan afforded opportunities for creative scavenging. When the Japanese left Hsinchu, many of them departed in haste, fearing that the Taiwanese would take revenge on them for the years of Japanese occupation. Their abandoned houses, full of fine furniture and other valuables, now fell prey to ransacking by criminal gangs. I wasn’t about to join the looting. I had learned my lesson about stealing from the incident of the rice bag in Fangliao, and I certainly did not have any wish to get involved with criminals. But after the houses had been pillaged, the thieves sometimes left things behind that were worthless to them but valuable to me. Day after day, I left my mother lying in her sickbed, my grandmother taking care of my little brother, and set off alone through the streets of the city, searching for abandoned Japanese houses. I would creep into the empty rooms through busted doorways or broken windows, looking for anything I could use or sell. Once I found a frying pan. Once I discovered a broken chair that I brought home for my father to fix. I collected glass bottles and ripped out lead water pipes—material that a local junk dealer bought from me by the pound. Once I saw a pile of money lying on a table, but I was too scared to touch it. I ran away instead. I had learned a bit about farming from my time in Fangliao, and it gave me an idea for another way to put food on the table. The barracks behind the railway station where I spent my early childhood had been bombed out during the war, and the bomb craters remained during this after-war period. The loose dirt around the edges of the craters made a good place for growing vegetables, while the rainwater that accumulated at the bottom provided a ready source of irrigation. I

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Return to Hsinchu 29

planted and cultivated several bomb-crater vegetable gardens that helped to feed my family in those difficult times. On our return to the city, I had transferred to the Hsinchu elementary school to finish the academic year. As one of the top four students in my class, I’d been offered the opportunity to enrol in the city’s vocational junior high school the following autumn. But when I drew the fateful lot that directed me toward a career in chemical engineering, my parents urged me to find a job instead of pursuing this seemingly dead-end course of study. However, with the post-war influx of mainland Chinese, unemployment ran high in Taiwan. Since the government favoured mainland Chinese for any available position, it was especially hard for native Taiwanese youth like me to find employment. That summer, my mother decided I should earn money by buying vegetables from the farmers in the countryside and selling them in the city. On Sunday mornings, and often on other days of the week, I would wake up at three in the morning and walk in the pre-dawn darkness toward the farm country in the hills east of the city. There, I would buy whatever produce the farmers had for sale: cabbages, eggplants, radishes, squashes, cucumbers, string beans, snow peas, or potatoes. I didn’t mind the walk, though I was nervous about stepping on snakes in the darkness in my bare feet. But I would rather have stepped on a dozen snakes than face the ordeal that lay ahead of me when I returned to the city: hawking the vegetables in the Hsinchu market. The market was in a noisy, cavernous building in the west end of the city. It churned with the shouts of vendors and buyers, the smells of green groceries and cigarette smoke, and the heat of crowds jostling and elbowing each other as they sought out the freshest food and the best bargains. The regular vendors had stalls where they sold their wares, but since I didn’t own a stall, I had to squeeze myself into the space between other vendors and catch the attention of shoppers by crying out “Vegetables! Fresh vegetables! Only 10 cents!” Or, if my mother had made a cake of sticky rice for me to sell: “Cake! Sweet cake! Delicious cake!” That, at least, was the plan. Yet my courage failed me every time I stepped into the hurly-burly of that loud, sweltering market hall. I would find a place to stand, feeling

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I planted and cultivated several bombcrater vegetable gardens that helped to feed my family in those difficult times.

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30 Journey of a Thousand Miles

I couldn’t find a job and I couldn’t make a living as a salesperson. Since there was nothing better for me to do, my parents decided that I might as well go to school.

small and insignificant among the crowds of adults, and try to raise my voice to peddle my vegetables. But the words would stick in my throat. I couldn’t do it. I simply couldn’t. It felt too humiliating. Sometimes I just stood there, not knowing what to do, while the people jostled me, and the competing vendors shouted: “Go away, kid—you don’t belong here!” At noon, when the vendors closed up their stalls and left, I would be left standing there with my unwanted vegetables or half-sold rice cakes. Sometimes a few stragglers would buy my wares. But more often than not, I returned home with produce left over, having lost money on the entire endeavour. I wanted to please my parents, but I wasn’t born to be a huckster. I told myself: In the future, I will succeed. I will be a success at something else, but not at this. I couldn’t find a job and I couldn’t make a living as a salesperson. Since there was nothing better for me to do, my parents decided that I might as well go to school. In September 1946, I entered the Hsinchu vocational junior high school to study chemical engineering. * In school, I once again found myself in my element. As so often before, the world of science and knowledge afforded me an escape from the hardships of everyday life. Our curriculum focused on the fundamental concepts and theories of math, physics, and chemistry. For three years, I earned straight As and won the school’s top prizes. But as the light of education burned brightly within those walls, outside on the streets of Taiwan the darkness of military dictatorship descended. Corruption ran rampant in the administration of the Chinese governor, Chen Yi, and anger seethed just below the surface among the Taiwanese population. That anger boiled over in an incident that became known as the 2-28 Incident after the date it began: February 28, 1947. I didn’t know the details of the affair at the time, but it has since been described in history books and the memoirs of people who observed it.

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It began when a woman with two small children set up a stand in a park in Taipei, hoping to sell a few packages of cigarettes. Agents from the government’s Monopoly Bureau appeared and accused the woman of dealing in contraband. When she protested the seizure of her goods, the agents struck her down and beat her. At this, a crowd of people gathered around and moved in on the agents. Feeling threatened, the agents fired on the crowd, leaving one person dead and the cigarette vendor severely injured. The next morning, a crowd of about two thousand people marched to the Monopoly Bureau headquarters and then to the governor’s office, demanding redress. Soldiers guarding the building fired on the unarmed crowd, and several people were killed. This set off a wave of street riots that began in Taipei and spread to cities and towns throughout the island. Governor Chen Yi declared a state of martial law and sent military patrols into the streets in an effort to quell the protests. Meanwhile, a delegation of leading Taiwanese citizens approached the governor, demanding redress for the deaths and reform of the government. Chen Yi made a show of listening to their concerns, but behind their backs he contacted Chiang Kai-shek’s central government in mainland China and asked for the army to be sent into Taiwan. On Saturday, March 8, 1947, thousands of Kuomintang troops landed on the island. In the days that followed, the soldiers gunned down people randomly in the streets. Over the ensuing months, they rounded up and executed anyone suspected of opposition to the government. I remember setting out on my walk to school one day, only to find the streets full of Chinese soldiers carrying machine guns. We were told there was a revolt against the government, fomented by underground Communists. This story had some plausibility, for back in mainland China, Mao Tse-tung’s Communists were still at war with the Kuomintang government—and Taiwan, through its Governor Chen Yi, was ruled by the Kuomintang. To quell dissent, the government of Taiwan suspended civil liberties. People were rounded up and shot. There were no defence lawyers, no due process of law. Many people were shot secretly, but sometimes the authorities would announce a public execution. The condemned

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I remember setting out on my walk to school one day, only to find the streets full of Chinese soldiers carrying machine guns. We were told there was a revolt against the government, fomented by underground Communists.

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32 Journey of a Thousand Miles

person, carrying a wooden placard with the words “I’m guilty of revolt against the government” would be taken to the park and shot in the head. The first time I saw such an execution, I was shocked. It made me feel ill. That was how the

Ruey Yu as a high school student, with his two half-sisters and their children, 1949.

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government sent the message to people not to revolt. In the month of May 1947 alone, George Kerr, who served as a U.S. diplomat in Taiwan, estimated that government forces killed between five and ten thousand Taiwanese. At first we were told that the government authorities executed only gangsters and criminals. But as the months and years went on, we realized the government would carry out a massacre of anyone connected with anything. Intelligent, well-educated people were killed—professional people and college students. The government started to carry out executions every morning. Bodies were piled up, mass graves were dug. Sometimes corpses were dumped in the ocean. People were nervous; people were scared to talk about what was going on. You couldn’t have meetings or criticize the government. In 1949, my last year of junior high school, Mao Tsetung’s Communist army overran Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang troops in a decisive turn in the decadeslong civil war in mainland China. In Beijing on October 1, 1949, Mao Tse-tung officially proclaimed the Communist People’s Republic of China. Though Kuomintang soldiers continued to fight for several months, the war on the mainland was lost. In December 1949, Chiang Kai-shek fled to Taiwan with two million supporters, including half a million soldiers. The next spring, Chiang Kai-shek took over as president in Taiwan. He proclaimed Taiwan, and its capital Taipei, as the seat of the government of the Republic of China and claimed that someday his troops would return to the mainland and defeat the Communists, uniting all of China under Kuomintang rule. Chiang Kai-shek claimed that Taiwan was a democracy under his presidency. The Taiwanese people knew it was a military dictatorship.

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People were nervous; people were scared to talk about what was going on.

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6

The Tale of the Poor Scholar when i was in junior high school in the late 1940s, the Buddhist monks in our neighbourhood would stage a play one night a month in the public square outside their temple. As night fell, the drummers struck up a dramatic beat and the monks appeared beneath the electric stage-lights, dressed in lavish costumes and makeup. They would act out ancient stories of Imperial China: stories of moral choices, of love and hardship. But the story I liked best was the tale of a poor boy like me. The story went something like this: Long ago, in Imperial China, there lived a very poor boy. He had no shoes on his feet and barely any rice in his bowl, but he was smart and he worked hard in school, and he dreamed that one day he would become a great scholar. The boy studied day and night. He suffered many hardships because of his poverty, and he often went to school on an empty stomach, but he continued studying until he rose to the top of his class and was accepted into the best institute of higher learning in the land. After spending many years at the institute, he became a great scholar and his reputation for wisdom and knowledge spread far and wide. One day a messenger from the emperor came to visit him. He felt humbled because, though he had become a great and renowned scholar, in the bottom of his soul he was still just a poor, barefoot boy. But the messenger bowed to him and said that the emperor wished to grant him a great honour. In light of his superior scholarship, the emperor had decided to bestow upon him a knighthood and name him the number-one scholar in the empire. And so the poor boy’s dream came true, and he became the most powerful, most honourable, and most privileged scholar in all of China.

Returning home after the show, I vowed that I would be that boy. I would study hard, and one day I, too, would become a great and honoured scholar. But like the boy in the story, I faced a long and often difficult road ahead. * 35

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As I accumulated academic honours in junior high school, I began to develop a reputation in my neighbourhood as “the smart kid” and “the A student.” This filled me with a mixture of pride and embarrassment: pride at my success, but embarrassment at my poverty, which seemed to make a mockery of my achievements. How could I hold my head high when my clothes were tattered and my feet were bare? Poverty had been easier to endure when nobody noticed me. When people singled me out for attention, it seemed to shine a spotlight on all of my inadequacies. One task more than any other filled me with this burning feeling of humiliation: the task of gathering slop to feed our pigs. After the war, in their endless efforts to put food on the table and clothes on our backs, my parents had hit on the idea of earning money by raising pigs. We built a pen in the yard outside our house, and in the spring of every year, I was sent to the countryside to buy two little piglets. The piglets were cheap, but when full grown they would fetch a price of several hundred dollars—a huge sum of money to us. Of course, the pigs had to eat. A farmer’s family would have fed them table scraps, but we were so poor that we never had any scraps. Fortunately for the pigs, I had an uncle who owned a noodle restaurant in the city’s commercial district, and he agreed to give us his kitchen leftovers to feed our livestock. Every evening, I had to go and pick up the slops in two buckets, which I hung on either end of a bamboo pole slung across my shoulders. I would wait for twilight to perform this humiliating task, hoping that no one I knew would see my face. But the shops in the commercial district were lit with electric lights, and by unfortunate coincidence the shop next to my uncle’s noodle restaurant belonged to the father of a boy in my school. He would often be hanging around when I arrived at the restaurant’s kitchen door to pick up my delivery. I tried to avoid him, but if he spotted me, he’d call out: “Hey, aren’t you the A student? Aren’t you the best in the school? What are you doing carrying pig slops?” I wouldn’t reply, only bow my head in shame and hurry home. In the end, raising pigs proved to be one of the best business decisions my family ever made— but that turn of good fortune would not come until years later. * When I graduated in 1949, I was the only person in my extended family who had ever finished junior high school. Not only that, I finished at the top of my class. By this time, I had become something of a celebrity in my neighbourhood, and the neighbours had begun asking my father: “Mr. Wei, your eldest son is so smart. Why doesn’t he have your name?” My mother’s first husband was dead and gone by that time, and since my grandmother no longer had any objection, my father decided that, indeed, I

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should bear his surname. No sooner said than done: he went to the county office and registered my name as Ruey Wei. At that time, the railway company in Taiwan was changing over from coalpowered engines to diesel engines, and they needed educated people to work as train engineers. As a graduate of junior high school, I was qualified to write the exam. Becoming a great scholar was a noble dream, but what seventeen-year-old boy wouldn’t love to work as a railway engineer? Of course I signed up to write the exam—using my new name, Ruey Wei. A day before I was scheduled to take the exam, a letter arrived in the mail informing me that I was not eligible. There was no record of a junior high school graduate named Ruey Wei; my diploma had been issued in the name of Ruey Yu. My father hastened to the county office to change my name back again. But by then, it was too late for me to take the train engineer’s exam. My prospects of employment had yet again failed to materialize. I was fated to continue my education. * Between junior high school and senior high school, I obtained an unpaid summer internship in a government-owned chemical factory that manufactured fertilizer and calcium carbide. Calcium carbide was an important product because it combined with water to produce acetylene, which was used as a lamp fuel in rural areas of Taiwan that lacked electricity. The factory, employing hundreds of workers, was the size of a football field, with a tall chimney that belched coal smoke—the only industrial chimney in Hsinchu. I worked alternate weeks on the production floor and in the control lab. In the production unit, tonnes of coal and lime were burned in industrial furnaces. The heat caused the lime to react with the carbon from the coal, producing huge stones of calcium carbide, which were then cut into smaller pieces and sold to householders. By the end of each day, a thick film of coal soot coated my clothes and skin. I preferred my alternate weeks in the quality control laboratory—the first real lab I’d ever worked in. There, we analyzed samples to test their chemical composition. I was fascinated by the finely calibrated instruments and the chemical reactions used to test the composition of the samples. Unlike the teachers in my Japanese elementary school, the lab manager encouraged my curiosity and answered my questions. I wanted to continue working there when the summer ended, but the lab would hire only senior high school graduates. Still, the experience gave me an idea of what chemical engineers did; the words were no longer meaningless to me, and I returned to school with renewed ambition for the future. While my life was opening up in front of me, my mother’s life, sadly, was drawing to an end. The doctors had no treatment for the ulcers that ravaged her

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I liked to think about braintwisters, like Einstein’s theory of relativity and the question of whether, by travelling faster than the speed of light, you could leave your house today and come back yesterday.

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stomach and intestinal tract. While I went to school, she lay in bed, unable to eat, groaning in pain as she slowly bled to death inside. Her sickness cast a pall over our entire household, our grief compounded by the endless worry of how to scrape together enough money to pay for the doctor to come periodically and inject her with a dose of painkiller. By the end of her life, her body was reduced to little more than a skeleton. When she passed away during my first year of senior high school, we found consolation in the fact that at last her suffering had come to an end. Gradually, light and laughter came back to our home. Without the expensive medical bills to pay, we had more money for food and clothes. Our poverty became less of a burden, and I could focus on my studies rather than on the need to find work and help support the family. In senior high school, we moved beyond the basics of physics and chemistry and studied practical applications. We learned the chemical processes for making things like ceramics, fertilizers, and synthetic fabrics. Always on the lookout for ways to earn extra cash, I concocted soaps and cosmetic creams, which I sold to the ladies in my neighbourhood. Little did I know that someday, my knowledge in compounding lotions and potions would become a key element in my scientific success and material fortune. The 1940s were a time of development and innovation in the field of chemistry. Nylon had been discovered by the DuPont chemical company in 1938, and the fabric had caused a sensation in 1940 when nylon stockings came on the market to rival and eventually replace silk stockings. Chemists were experimenting with variations on the basic molecular structure of nylon, to create materials that could be turned into products like tents, parachutes, guitar strings, fishing line, and commercial food wrapping. I was fascinated more by the theoretical than by the practical aspects of physics and chemistry. I liked to think about brain-twisters, like Einstein’s theory of relativity and the question of whether, by travelling faster than the speed of light, you could leave your house today and come back yesterday. But I didn’t let this daydreaming distract me from my studies, for long years of hard work had taught me discipline. I achieved high marks, but I wasn’t the most

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naturally brilliant student in my class. That distinction belonged, I believe, to my friend Chan Wei Ki. The son of a farmer, Chan Wei Ki had come to live with us while he attended high school, since it was too far for him to walk every day into the city. He could memorize facts in an instant and beat even professional players at chess, but he was more interested in having a good time than in schoolwork. Chan Wei Ki was handsome and charming. He was always a perfect gentleman, paying girls compliments, holding doors for them, and serving them tea. While I stayed home studying in the evenings, he’d go out on the town with one of his many girlfriends. Then, the day before a big test, he’d come to me and ask what he needed to memorize to pass. He’d cram all night and somehow, he’d always manage to pull it off. While I helped him with schoolwork, he tried to help me with girls—but his best efforts to turn me into a ladies’ man never succeeded. I was a bashful bookworm who only wanted to talk about science. One thing I did share with Chan Wei Ki was a love of athletics. Together, we joined the school baseball team, and by a strange coincidence, it was baseball that led to the next step on my career path. In our first year of senior high school, our baseball team won the regional championships and advanced to the national championships in Taipei. It was the first time I’d ever visited the Taiwanese capital—a big, dirty city, with streets full of people and air choked with the smoke of factories. To warm up for the championship games, our team held a practice on the baseball field of the National Taiwan University. This university, which had been founded as the Taihoku Imperial University by the Japanese colonial administration in 1928, was the most famous and revered place of higher learning on the island. Standing in the outfield, I gazed at the elegant red-brick university buildings with their rows of windows framed by classical Roman arches. I dreamed of the laboratories and classrooms behind those windows, where eager students pursued knowledge taught by the country’s best professors. The

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I dreamed of the laboratories and classrooms behind those windows, where eager students pursued knowledge taught by the country’s best professors.

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surroundings reminded me of the play about the poor Chinese boy who rose to become the most celebrated scholar in the empire. If that boy had lived in Taiwan, I thought, this is where he would have studied. At that moment, I resolved that someday I would become a student at the National Taiwan University. This was easier said than done. Of five thousand students who wrote the entrance exam each year, only two hundred were accepted. The vast majority of these came from the upper and middle classes of Taiwanese society and had attended academic high schools where the curriculum prepared them for the university. It was unheard-of for the son of an illiterate janitor to gain admittance to such a prestigious institution. My vocational high school didn’t even teach the subject matter I needed to pass the exams. Yet, like the poor boy in the folk story, I was determined to let nothing stand in my way. When I explained my plan to Chan Wei Ki, he immediately offered to help. It happened that he had a wealthy friend who attended an academic high school in Hsinchu. Chan Wei Ki arranged for his friend to give me a list of the textbooks I would need to study. I bought second-hand copies with the money I made at odd jobs. Chan Wei Ki’s friend also passed on his old test papers to me, which I used to quiz myself. By starting on my resolution during my first year of senior high school, I had nearly three years to prepare before taking the university entrance exams. Evenings, weekends, and throughout the summers, I spent my time studying. While Chan Wei Ki went out socializing with pretty girls, I would take my books to the park, sit under a tree in the shade, and work my way through the math and science questions or the strange vocabulary of the English language. In the summer afternoons, I would return home to help weed and hoe our vegetable garden or muck out the pig pens and feed the swine. Much as I resented them, those pigs proved their worth one day during my senior high school years. It happened when my father received notice that our house, which he had built on vacant land during the confusion of the war, was actually situated on a piece of property that belonged to a private individual. However, this individual was willing to sell the land to Ah-Shain for a few hundred dollars. It was a princely sum, but luckily we had two full-grown pigs ready for market. The proceeds from the sale of the pigs—together with some money from academic prizes that my brother and I had won—enabled my father to purchase the property. Thanks to the pigs, for the first time in his life, Ah-Shain became a landowner—though he didn’t realize how valuable that land would one day become. At last, at the end of my third year of senior high school, the time came to write the university entrance exams. By this point, the other students in my school had heard of my plan, and a few of them, including Chan Wei Ki, decided to write the exams as well. Unlike me, though, they hadn’t put in three years of preparation. On a hot day in July, half a dozen of us boarded a train for Taipei. One of the boys had a relative who owned a candy store in the city, so we had a floor to sleep

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on for the three days that it would take to write the series of five exams. The air in the classrooms was sweltering hot as five thousand hopeful applicants from across the island sweated their way through hours of mathematical calculations, chemistry and physics questions, essays on Chinese literature and philosophy, and translations of English vocabulary. Some of my friends gave up in despair after the first day; they couldn’t even finish a quarter of the questions. But I persevered through the five gruelling tests. By the time we took the train home to Hsinchu, I felt quietly confident that I had passed the exams. But would my score be high enough to win a coveted entrance spot? There was nothing to do but wait for the results.

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But would my score be high enough to win a coveted entrance spot?

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7

A Diamond in the Trash in those post-second world war days of the 1950s, Taiwan stood on the front line of the Cold War between Communism and Capitalism. Chiang Kaishek’s Republic of China, which controlled Taiwan, and Mao Tse-tung’s People’s Republic of China, which held the mainland, each claimed to represent the “true” China. The global superpowers were divided, with the Soviet Union supporting Mao and the United States supporting Chiang. This put Taiwan in a precarious position. If not for American protection, our small island 160 kilometres off the coast of mainland China would be vulnerable to attack and conquest by Mao’s Communist army. But American involvement in Taiwan was a double-edged sword. To keep the Communists at bay, the United States supported the corrupt government of Chiang Kai-shek. Military dictatorship was the price we paid for security. The atmosphere of fear and repression touched everyone. The central government controlled the county and township governments and even developed a system to control people at the level of the family. It set up local groups of ten families each, who were instructed to spy on each other and report any anti-­ government thought or actions to the authorities. The government outlawed the Communist Party, imprisoning and executing people as Communists on the scantest of evidence. Once, a young teenage cousin of mine was sent by her teacher to deliver a package to another teacher. The teacher who gave her the package was accused of Communist activities, arrested, and shot. My cousin was sent to jail on Green Island, a small island off the coast of Taiwan, where she died five years later. While anyone suspected of being a Communist stood in danger of their lives, special privileges were accorded to members of the ruling Kuomintang Party. Party membership helped ambitious people to advance their careers in the civil service and secure appointments to high-ranking official posts. It wasn’t surprising, therefore, that my senior high school principal, Mr. Lin, belonged to the Kuomintang. In fact, as a native Taiwanese, he probably never would have risen to become a high school principal if he hadn’t had party connections. The principal took an interest in me because of my academic success, and this interest grew in my final year, when he learned that I intended to write the 43

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entrance exams to the National Taiwan University. He advised me to join the Kuomintang, and since he was my principal, I took his advice. At meetings, local party leaders would sometimes call me forward and show me off as an example of a good, hard-working, loyal Taiwanese youth who supported the government. Thus, in a small way, I served as a pawn in the Kuomintang’s propaganda. One day, not long before I graduated from high school, the principal asked me if he and his wife, who belonged to a wealthy, well-connected family, could come to my house to meet my father. The principal’s wife was astounded— and no doubt appalled—to see our rudimentary dwelling, with the termites crawling over the dirt floor and the single electrical bulb that my father had wired from the ceiling above our kitchen table. Still, she remained polite during the visit and she couldn’t help being impressed that such a good student had come from such humble circumstances. The principal later said it was like finding a diamond in the trash. Though I didn’t know it at the time, the two of them began to consider whether I might make a suitable match for their niece, a girl of my age who lived with her widowed mother in Keelung, a port city just outside Taipei. * For the son of a railway janitor to become a university student seemed like nothing short of a miracle.

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Three weeks after I wrote the university entrance exams, one of my high school classmates came bursting through the door: “Ruey! You made it! I heard it on the radio, you got in!” I ran at once to buy a newspaper and found my name on the list of 200 students accepted to the National Taiwan University. I was the only one from my school, and the only one from my entire city district, to have gained a spot in the most prestigious academic institution in the country. I was ecstatic. As the news spread, neighbours, friends, and relatives crowded into our house to offer their congratulations. It was completely unprecedented. No one in my neighbourhood had ever been to college. Few of the kids even finished high school. For the son of a railway janitor to become a university student seemed like nothing short of a miracle.

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People who had looked down on my father for his entire life suddenly treated him with respect. His bosses at the railway station gave him a promotion. “Mr. Wei,” they said. “Your son is a university scholar. You shouldn’t be cleaning toilets and serving tea.” My father, to whom all of this schooling had often seemed like a waste of time, finally began to appreciate the value of an education. As soon as they found out I’d been accepted to the university, friends and family couldn’t resist advising me on my course of study. Most of them urged me to become a medical doctor. Just think of it! I’d be rich! Well respected! Fathers would come to my door, begging me to marry their daughters! I’d never have to worry about my future again! But I didn’t want to study medicine. For one thing, I was afraid of death. My childhood memory of opening the door to my grandfather’s cottage and seeing him lying dead on the floor still filled me with horror. More recent, and more painful, was the grief and suffering that surrounded my mother’s terminal illness. And there was another experience of death in Fangliao that haunted my mind. It had happened just at the end of the war. I’d been looking for a job to earn some money, and a friend had offered me a chance to join him as a doctor’s assistant, filling prescriptions for patients. I’d been on the job for only three days when a man in the last throes of illness was carried in by his family on a stretcher. He lay on the bed, yellow, pale, dying. The doctor could do nothing for him. He told the family to take the man to the hospital, but the hospital was too far away; they couldn’t carry him there in time to save his life. There was nothing the family could do but watch the man die before their very eyes. The experience filled me with such terror that I ran away and never went back to the doctor’s office—not even to collect my pay for three days of work. Contemplating my career choices at the end of high school, six years later, I knew the promise of riches couldn’t overcome my overwhelming dread of human mortality. But there was another, far more positive motivating factor at work. If medicine filled me with despair, the pure sciences inspired me with passion. I felt a calling to become a research scientist: to invent things, to discover things. I wanted to study atoms and molecules and unlock their mysteries. No one around me understood this burning desire, except for one person—my high school chemistry teacher, Wang Pao Ki. When I found out that I’d been admitted to the university, I went back to my high school to thank Wang Pao Ki for his guidance in my studies. He gave me two valuable gifts. The first was a jacket: I didn’t own one myself, and he said I would need it as a university student. The second was a piece of advice. He told me to study chemistry—not chemical engineering, but pure chemistry. He believed I had a gift for science, and if I followed it, it would take me far. And so, against the

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common-sense advice of my family, I enrolled in the National Taiwan University to become a chemist. As I prepared for my new life in Taipei, I said goodbye to my high school friends, including my best friend, Chan Wei Ki. Despite his brilliance, Chan Wei Ki had failed to gain acceptance to the National Taiwan University. His strategy of last-minute cramming, which had got him through high school, wasn’t sufficient for the academically rigorous entrance exams. But Chan Wei Ki would go on to forge his own successful path in life. A few years after graduating from high school, he used his knowledge of chemistry to start a company that manufactured and exported ceramics. This sort of entrepreneurship was common among my high school friends: many of them opened small factories to take advantage of Taiwan’s cheap labour force and economic ties to the United States. People like Chan Wei Ki helped to create Taiwan’s postwar economic miracle, where small and mid-sized companies sprang up to produce textiles, plastics, ceramics, fertilizer, electrical components, and a multitude of other products. With American economic assistance and native entrepreneurship, Taiwan’s gross domestic product tripled between the early 1950s and the mid-1960s. Later in my life, the example of my friends like Chan Wei Ki and the practical education I gained in my technical high school would serve me well in founding my own company. But I didn’t imagine at the time that I would ever become an entrepreneur. All I could do was bask in the thrill of being accepted to the university and dream of the academic discoveries that lay ahead of me.

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8

Pedalling Through Taipei in the fall of 1952, I arrived in Taipei to begin my studies. It was the second time in my life that I’d moved away from my hometown of Hsinchu. Nearly ten years before, I’d been the smart city boy, arriving amid the country bumpkins of Fangliao. Now my role was reversed: I was the wide-eyed provincial lad, coming to live among the sophisticates of the capital. Taipei in 1952 thrummed with the energy of the post-war boom. Black motorcars swept past stately government buildings, carrying the members of the Kuomintang elite. On busy commercial streets, restaurants, bars, teahouses, and noodle shops competed for space with a jumble of storefronts offering clothing, shoes, appliances, housewares, and groceries. Coal smog and tobacco smoke filled the air. Rickshaw runners dodged among throngs of shoppers, American and Chinese soldiers, and hundreds upon hundreds of riders on newly minted Taiwanese bicycles. Those bicycles were one of the first and most obvious signs of Taiwan’s transformation into a post-war manufacturing powerhouse. Like many Taiwanese, I’d coveted a bicycle since I was a young boy. But my family couldn’t afford the Japanese-made, steel two-wheelers. After the war, Taiwan began making its own bicycles out of lighter materials—not as sturdy as the Japanese bikes, but cheap enough that even a college student could afford one. I bought a bicycle and, after a few days spent learning how to ride, happily joined the throngs of people pedalling through the streets and around the university campus. Since I wasn’t immediately able to secure a place in the university dormitory, I spent my first six months in Taipei living with the brother of my high school principal, a banker who owned a house twenty minutes by bus outside the city. It was the kind of home I’d dreamed of living in when I was a small boy growing up in the barracks behind the railway station: a many-roomed house made of brick, with a maid who cleaned up and served dinner. For the first time in my life, I could eat my fill at every meal. In fact, the lady of the house frequently complained that I would eat her out of house and home! But I’d been poor for so long, I couldn’t resist the opportunity to satisfy my hunger. Like the school principal, my new hosts were well-connected in the Kuomintang. High-society people constantly whisked in and out of the house, on business or for 47

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social events. Among them, the principal had one particular sister-in-law, a very snobby lady who owned a private motorcar, which was a rarity in those days. One time at a party, he asked her to give me a lift home. The lady could barely contain her distaste at sharing her vehicle with such a lower-class specimen as I! Yet it would have been appallingly impolite to refuse her brother-in-law’s request. Against her will, she gave me my first ride ever in an automobile. It was through the principal’s connections that I obtained my first tutoring job, teaching the son of the top army general in Taiwan. It was also through his family that I met my girlfriend, Ho-Chin. In those days, to be a student at the National Taiwan University carried enough prestige that even a bookworm like me had no trouble finding dates. One young woman in my class positively pursued me, promising that her wealthy parents would support us in style if we got married. But I wasn’t attracted to her. None of the girls I met seemed interesting enough to draw me away from my studies. That is, until the wife of my high school principal took me aside one day and asked if I would like to meet her niece, Ho-Chin. She said the girl was studying law in college and though she came from a wealthy family, she wasn’t spoiled. The girl sounded interesting and, besides, it would have been impolite to turn down this offer by the wife of my benefactor. It was arranged that I should call on her the following weekend. With some trepidation, I approached the red-brick house in the commercial district where Ho-Chin lived with her mother. My status as a university student gave me some confidence—no longer was I merely the penniless son of a low-level janitor—but nevertheless, the prospect of meeting a girl from a well-­ educated family made me nervous. It was clear from the moment I walked in the door that the home belonged to cultivated people: works of art decorated the walls and a piano stood in the music studio, where Ho-Chin’s mother taught private violin lessons. Ho-Chin was beautiful. She was stylish. She wore makeup and high heels. I was smitten from the moment I saw her. Yet I had no idea how to charm a woman. That expertise belonged to my old friend Chan Wei Ki. He would have known how to flirt with her! After some polite conversation, I asked her mother’s permission to take her out on a date. We went for a walk in the park, then for a bite to eat in a restaurant. With the money from my tutoring job jingling in my pocket, a new bicycle, and a girl on my arm, I felt like quite the man-about-town—a new and pleasant experience! Shyly, I told her about my passion for science and my ambition to one day become a successful chemist. She told me that she loved to go out dancing. I confessed that I couldn’t dance. Still, she must have liked me because she agreed to go out with me again. But there were plenty of young college men who were also chasing after her. How could I compete with those wealthy, silver-tongued law students?

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Six months after beginning my studies, I was offered a spot in the university dormitory. For all the good food and rich lifestyle I enjoyed at the banker’s house, I was happy to move out and take up residence on campus. In the dorm, we slept in bunk beds, six to a room, with a meal plan that offered little in the way of meat,

Ho-Chin (left) as a child, with her mother, father, and two brothers.

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All my life, I’d grown up among people who, through no fault of their own, lacked education and knowledge of the outside world.

The more I got to know Ho-Chin, the more deeply I fell in love with her.

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but plenty of rice, beans, and tofu. This change in material fortunes didn’t matter one bit to me. On the university campus, I was surrounded by new friends, free to pursue my interests and to live the life that I’d dreamed of and worked toward for so long. University was a revelation to me. All my life, I’d grown up among people who, through no fault of their own, lacked education and knowledge of the outside world. In the university, I suddenly found myself rubbing shoulders with young men and women from professional families, people whose fathers were doctors, lawyers, and government officials. These were people who could talk knowledgeably about science, literature, history, philosophy, and art. I soon became fast friends with a fellow chemistry student, Wen-Zon Lin. Lin and I talked together for hours about our philosophies of life and our dreams for the future. Both of us swore that one day, we would win a Nobel Prize. With Lin, my ambition to become a great scientist no longer seemed like a daydream, but rather like a goal that lay within my grasp. Once a week, Lin and I would attend a session put on by the university’s music students, where we would listen to recordings of the great European classical repertoire—music by composers like Tchaikovsky, Mozart, and Beethoven. I grew to love classical music and through it found a connection to Ho-Chin and her mother, who often played violin for me when I visited them at home. As time went on, my relationship with Ho-Chin deepened. I took her out on dates, riding double on my bicycle. Like me, she had lost a parent at a young age: her father, like my mother, had died from gastrointestinal ulcers. Despite their nice house, I learned that Ho-Chin and her mother were not rich. After being widowed, Ho-Chin’s mother had worked hard to earn a living teaching kindergarten and taking in private violin students. That left Ho-Chin to take on household duties at a young age. She was very resourceful, sewed all her own clothes, and knew how to make a delicious meal out of cheap cuts of meat. Losing her father at an early age had taught her strength of character. She never complained about her misfortune but instead worked hard to find a way forward. The more

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I got to know her, the more deeply I fell in love with her. To my delight, Ho-Chin began to reciprocate my feelings. She was starting to find the young men in her social circle too superficial. Though her friends couldn’t understand what she saw in me—a bookish science student from a poor family—she liked the fact that I had ambition, and she could see that I was working hard to make something of myself. The work at the university was hard, but it was rewarding. Besides lectures, lab sessions, and studying, I rode my bicycle to the army general’s mansion three times a week and tutored his son. Two evenings a week, I tutored other high school students in Taipei. On weekends, I took the train home to Hsinchu to visit my family and deliver some of the money I’d earned to my father and grandmother. While I pursued my university studies, my younger brother, Juiming—inspired, I like to think, by my example—stayed in school through junior and senior high. In my third year of undergraduate studies, Juiming was accepted into Taiwan Provincial Cheng Kung University to study mechanical engineering. My father’s pride and reputation soared: he now had two sons attending a university. It was unprecedented! Since Juiming hadn’t won a full scholarship, I helped to pay for his university expenses with the money I earned tutoring. My father, ever humble, continued to raise pigs to supplement the family income. *

My father’s pride and reputation soared: he now had two sons attending a university. It was unprecedented!

For all the personal freedom and intellectual stimulation that I enjoyed at the university, there was a cloud that hung over all of us in Taiwan in the 1950s—the cloud of political repression. The military dictatorship created a society where it was impossible to trust anyone. Even people who seemed to be friends could turn out to be spies, and anyone who criticized the government or talked about Communism could wake up the next day in jail. Beneath the façade of obedience and conformity, most people hated the government. It was corrupt and it discriminated against the native Taiwanese in favour of the mainland Chinese who had come to Taiwan with Chiang

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Every night, the prisoners would say goodbye to each other, and the next morning some of them would disappear.

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Kai-shek. The people in power handed out favours to each other, while anyone who didn’t belong to the Kuomintang faced obstacles in getting ahead. The autocratic and corrupt nature of the government drove some of my colleagues at the university—good, intelligent people—to join the Communist Party as a form of opposition. This was extremely dangerous. I had one friend who was the editor of a college magazine where some of the writers were Communists. My friend was arrested and thrown in jail for several years. He told me later that every morning, prisoners would be taken out into the yard and shot by a firing squad. Every night, the prisoners would say goodbye to each other, and the next morning some of them would disappear. The government killed a lot of smart, politically active young people that way; it was their method of maintaining control. As for me, I became the head of a Kuomintang student group at the university. I had no love for the government of Chiang Kai-shek, but I owed allegiance to my benefactor, the high school principal, and I was dating his niece Ho-Chin. Her entire extended family was highly connected in the party. I’d been a member of the party since high school, when I’d joined on the advice of the principal, and if I’d left the Kuomintang while attending the university, I would have been watched very carefully. Our student group was a fairly innocuous affair. We had idealistic discussions about how to improve society and we studied the philosophy of Sun Yat-sen, a Chinese revolutionary who led the overthrow of the Qing dynasty in 1911 and founded the Kuomintang. Sun’s principles of nationalism, democracy, and social justice were good ones, but the methods of the Kuomintang government in Taiwan were wrong: taking bribes and killing people. Unbeknown to me, two of the members of my group were actually Communist infiltrators. One day they disappeared, taken away by the authorities like so many young Communists. I was lucky that I wasn’t arrested, too, as the head of the group. Perhaps through my associations with the principal’s family, the authorities knew me well enough to understand that I was innocent of any subversive activities. Fundamentally, I wasn’t interested in politics; I only

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wanted to be a scientist. But at the National University, in the capital city of Taipei, under a military dictatorship, at the height of the Cold War, it was almost impossible to avoid politics. * In 1956, I graduated from National Taiwan University with a bachelor of science in chemistry. I was offered an assistant teaching position, which included a salary and a free allowance of rice, while I worked on my master’s degree. At twenty-four years old, with my future now looking reasonably assured, my thoughts turned to marriage and starting a family.

Ruey Yu graduates with a B.Sc. in Chemistry from Taiwan National University in 1956.

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I was fortunate to have dated Ho-Chin for long enough to know that we were right for each other. One day while we were walking in the park, I turned to her and said, “Let’s get married.”

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My courtship of Ho-Chin had been progressive for its time. Taiwan was still a traditional society in those days, and it wasn’t unusual for a bride and groom to be brought together by a professional matchmaker, having no chance to get to know each other before the wedding. Typically, the young man would be invited to the young woman’s parents’ house for tea. He would arrive with a gift of money, and the girl would appear—sometimes with her face covered by a veil—and silently serve him a cup of tea. After those proceedings, the young man and young woman would have to decide whether they consented to the marriage. I was fortunate to have dated Ho-Chin for long enough to know that we were right for each other. One day while we were walking in the park, I turned to her and said, “Let’s get married.” Ho-Chin agreed, but we still required permission from two people: her mother and her aunt— Principal Lin’s wife, who had acted as our matchmaker. The following day, I paid a formal visit to her house, where her mother and aunt gave their permission for me to take Ho-Chin’s hand in marriage. Weddings in Taiwan can be elaborate; the richest families celebrate for three nights in a row, inviting different guests every night. Although our wedding wasn’t nearly that extravagant, we splurged to celebrate in style. Ho-Chin chose a bridal dress from a rental shop, and her grandmother gave her a gold wedding ring. Her uncle, my old high school principal Mr. Lin, offered to let us use his car and driver. We rented a tent, tables, and chairs for the outdoor wedding banquet and invited about a hundred friends and family, including Ho-Chin’s uncle as our guest of honour. As a chef we hired my uncle, who owned the noodle restaurant where—in a past that now seemed so distant—I’d suffered the humiliation of picking up pig slops. Our wedding banquet would offer sixteen courses, starting with soup and progressing to chicken, shrimp, seafood, fish—every kind of delicacy that my uncle’s culinary skills could provide. My only concern was that I didn’t have a proper suit to wear. It was cheap enough to hire a tailor, but good-quality cloth was expensive, and I couldn’t afford anything that I

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Ruey Yu and Ho-Chin on their wedding day.

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56 Journey of a Thousand Miles

felt would be worthy of my bride. That was when Juiming stepped in. The girl he was dating had given him some fine fabric, which she expected him to have made into a suit for himself. Instead, he offered it to me. Thanks to my little brother, I was able to dress in style for my own wedding. When the wedding day came, I picked up Ho-Chin at her home in the car provided by Mr. Lin. She looked radiant in her floor-length, white lace wedding dress. Together we drove to my father’s house, where we bowed in front of the shrine of our ancestors. With that simple ceremony, our marriage was sealed. As husband and wife, we stepped over the threshold and took our places at the head of the wedding feast, to celebrate the happy day amid family and friends.

Ruey Yu and Ho-Chin (centre) celebrate their wedding with Dr. Yu’s father Ah-Shain (right) and college supervisor Dr. Chang (left) and his wife.

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9

Pure Chemistry

during my university studies, chemistry became the great passion of my life—a passion that has grown and intensified the longer I’ve worked in the field. For me, the great fascination of chemistry lies in the fact that it is so fundamental and yet so mysterious. The universe is made up of chemistry, and chemistry has a seemingly fantastical power to transform one thing into another. Here’s a simple example: at room temperature, hydrogen and oxygen are both invisible gases. But put them together and you have a transparent liquid: H2O—or water. Neither carbon dioxide (CO2) nor water (H2O) has any nutritional value, but green plants can combine them and convert them into sugar (C6H12O6), providing the fundamental source of food energy for every animal on earth. Chemistry is not only all around us, it’s inside us. At any given moment, myriad chemical reactions are taking place within our own bodies, orchestrating the metabolic functions that keep us living, eating, breathing, moving, even thinking. Many of these reactions remain unknown or poorly understood, providing a vast field of research and discovery for the scientifically curious. For my master’s degree, I studied Grignard reactions, a type of chemical reaction named after the famous French chemist François Auguste Victor Grignard, who won the Nobel Prize in 1912. Grignard reactions provide a way of combining organic molecules to build compounds that can be used, for example, to develop medicinal drugs. My master’s studies didn’t focus on practical applications, however. Instead, I studied Grignard reactions themselves, in an effort to better understand them. I conducted experiments to discover how molecules would

The universe is made up of chemistry . . .

Chemistry is not only all around us, it’s inside us.

57

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Gazing at my child, it was hard for me to imagine how my mother had sold her daughters into servitude.

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react at different temperatures or in the presence of different catalysts. This sort of pure chemistry may seem impractical, but such basic science often lays the foundation for the discovery of many practical applications later on. As a master’s student, I wanted to gain as much knowledge as possible about the nature and processes of organic chemistry, in the belief that this knowledge would lead me to making worthwhile contributions to the field in the future. Ho-Chin became pregnant during our first year of marriage and went to Hsinchu to live with my father and grandmother, where she would have more support. My elder half-sister was also living in Hsinchu at that time. I had never known her while growing up, since she was sold to another family around the time I was born, with the intention that she would marry the family’s eldest son when she came of age. But the relationship hadn’t worked out, and she had returned as a young adult to my father and grandmother. While Ho-Chin lived in Hsinchu, I continued to work and study in Taipei, returning every weekend to see her as the pregnancy progressed. At last, one weekend in September, I returned home to find that Ho-Chin wasn’t there. She had gone into labour, and my sister had taken her to the hospital in a rickshaw. The hospital lay across the railway tracks on the other side of town. I hurried there as quickly as my legs would carry me, to find my wife resting comfortably in bed with a baby girl in her arms. The child was beautiful. We named her Li-Yin, a melodious name that reflected Ho-Chin’s musical upbringing and my own love of music. Gazing at my child, it was hard for me to imagine how my mother had sold her daughters into servitude. I knew she was driven to it by poverty—as happened to so many families in pre-war Taiwan—and I felt an immense sense of gratitude that I had risen above the circumstances of my childhood. I vowed then and there that my children, boys and girls, would always be treated equally and that I would give them every possible opportunity in life. Li-Yin’s birth was a happy occasion, but I had no time to stay home and enjoy my newfound fatherhood. Ho-Chin and I walked home from the hospital together, carrying

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Ruey Yu with his first daughter, Elie (Li-Yin) in Taiwan, late 1950s.

our newborn baby. When the weekend was over, I took the train back to Taipei to continue my work at the university. During this time, most of my fellow students, including my close friend Wen-Zon Lin, were furiously applying for doctoral studies in Europe and North America. In Taiwan at the time, well-educated young people felt a frenzied desire to get out of the country. Several reasons existed for this. From a purely academic standpoint, Taiwan had no university that granted doctoral degrees. To pursue advanced studies, and perhaps even win the Nobel Prize as both Lin and I aspired to do, studying abroad was a necessity. But there

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The lack of free thought and free speech stifled our intellectual development and cut us off from advances being made in the rest of the world.

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was more than that driving the thousands of Taiwanese students who left the island each year. The lack of free thought and free speech stifled our intellectual development and cut us off from advances being made in the rest of the world. I remember one day in the fall of 1959, when a colleague of mine returned from a trip to Japan with a smuggled newspaper. The newspaper reported that the Soviet Union had successfully sent a rocket to the moon. It was the Luna 2, a spherical, unmanned spacecraft that hit the lunar surface on September 14, 1959. The news of this momentous scientific feat didn’t reach the people of Taiwan; the government had censored it, on the grounds that it was treasonous to say that Russia, the ally of Communist China, had landed on the moon before the United States, the ally of Taiwan. In fact, my colleague was lucky that no one reported him, since he could have been thrown in jail for even possessing the newspaper. That was the extent of repression in Taiwan: telling the truth was considered a crime.. But if we despised the repression practised by our own government, we feared invasion by Communist China even more. In the 1950s and 1960s, Taiwan found itself on the dangerous front lines of the global struggle for supremacy playing out between the United States of America and the Soviet Union. Tensions ran high between the Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek in Taiwan and Mao Tsetung’s Communist government on the mainland. The threat of invasion by Mao’s Communist army was far from theoretical. Many of our neighbouring countries had been engulfed in civil wars where one side was supported by the United States, the other side by Communist China and the Soviet Union. The Korean peninsula, for example, had been held as a joint protectorate between the USA and the USSR after the defeat of Japan at the end of the Second World War. But as the Cold War developed, control of the country became divided between a Soviet-backed Communist government in the north and an American-friendly government in the south. In 1950, North Korean forces, aided by Communist China and the Soviet Union, invaded the South, beginning a three-year-long civil war that killed millions of people.

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The war ended in a stalemate in 1953. In the late 1950s, Korea remained a country divided at the 38th parallel, with the potential to break into war again at any time. In Vietnam, a similar situation prevailed. At the end of the Second World War, a rebellion led by Ho Chi Minh had sought to overthrow the French colonial rulers and establish the country’s independence. But this conflict became enmeshed in the Cold War, when mainland China and the Soviet Union supported Ho Chi Minh while the British and Americans supported the French. After four years of war, the country was formally partitioned at the 17th parallel in 1954, with Ho Chi Minh’s Communist government in the North and a government friendly to France and the United States in the South. But Northern-backed insurgents continued to wage war and terror against the Southern government, assassinating local officials and staging guerilla attacks on units of the Southern army. The ongoing conflict would lead the United States to send American troops into Vietnam in 1965, resulting in full-blown war. In Taiwan, we knew that the only things preventing a Communist invasion were the American forces stationed on the island and the American ships patrolling the Strait of Taiwan. But how long could we count on American support? Many times in its history, Taiwan had served as a pawn in global affairs, bartered from one occupying power to another. China had given Taiwan to Japan in 1895

Ruey Yu, after receiving his MSc in Chemistry from Taiwan National University, 1960.

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62 Journey of a Thousand Miles

as part of a peace treaty after a border war on the Korean peninsula. And at the end of the Second World War, Taiwan had been handed over to the mainland Chinese government, rather than being granted its independence by the liberating Allies. Would the United States someday decide to barter away its protection of our country in the pursuit of some larger geopolitical goal? Our life in Taiwan seemed unbearably precarious. As a husband and father, leaving the island was both more difficult and more expensive for me than it was for my bachelor friends. So I stayed, focusing on my family and my chemical research. Li-Yin took her first steps. I published my first article in an academic journal. I tried to ignore the geopolitical events around me, but there was one reality that could not be ignored. The post-war situation in Taiwan meant that every able-bodied man was required to serve a term in the Kuomintang army. I had delayed my mandatory service by stretching out my master’s degree as long as possible: it took me four years to complete it rather than the usual two. But in 1960 I finally graduated, and soon after that I received a draft notice, ordering me to report for basic training.

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10 Quemoy

in the summer of 1960, I reported for duty at the military base in Taichung in central Taiwan. Before me lay three months of gruelling boot camp in humid, hundred-degree weather. We rose at six in the morning every day, performed drills, learned to load and fire automatic weapons, and marched for many kilometres with heavy loads on our backs. After eight years of living as an academic, the physical exercise left me with sore and aching muscles. But having done manual labour in the past, I still endured it better than many of my fellow recruits. Most of the trainees were college graduates from white-collar families. Some of them broke down so completely they had to be hospitalized. For me, the physical strain wasn’t as bad as the loss of liberty. For nearly a decade, I’d lived a life of independence and intellectual stimulation. Now, I was forced to mindlessly obey orders barked at me from the time I got up in the morning until I fell exhausted into bed at night. Only the trips home once a month to see Ho-Chin and Li-Yin kept up my spirits. After three months of training, each soldier was assigned to a unit for further deployment. The enlisted soldiers were consigned to two years of hard manual labour: clearing fields, building barracks, and digging trenches. My lot as a college graduate was more fortunate: I would only be required to serve for nine months after basic training, and with the rank of second lieutenant, I would be exempt from manual labour. That was the good news. The bad news was that I would be sent to Unit 132—an army base on Quemoy, a disputed island that lay barely three kilometres off the coast of mainland China. Quemoy consisted of 153 square kilometres of hills, farms, and military fortifications. One of the first places where Kuomintang loyalists had fled in their retreat from the mainland, the island lay on the front line of the standoff between Capitalist Taiwan and Communist China. In 1954, Mao’s People’s Liberation Army had bombarded Quemoy from batteries on the mainland and sent an invading force to capture the island. Thanks to American military help, the Kuomintang army had repulsed the attack. In 1958, the conflict had flared up again, with the PLA bombarding the island and demanding that the Kuomintang surrender. Once again the Americans had come to Taiwan’s aid, sending U.S. warships to guard the island. By the time I was sent to Quemoy in 1960, shelling continued 63

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64 Journey of a Thousand Miles

Ruey Yu, after completing three months of mandatory basic training at the military base in Taichung, 1960.

I tried not to think of my worst fear: that I would be killed on Quemoy and never see my wife and daughter again.

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every second day, a form of harassment that reminded us of the military might of the People’s Republic of China and its unrelinquished claim on all Chinese territory. In the fall of 1960, I bade farewell to Ho-Chin and Li-Yin and prepared to ship out for an unbroken nine-month tour of duty. I tried not to think of my worst fear: that I would be killed on Quemoy and never see my wife and daughter again. At the military docks in Kaohsiung, I boarded a transport vehicle in the company of one other equally nervous new recruit. The vehicle was a massive landing craft built for amphibious assaults. It consisted mainly of a cavernous steel cargo hold, large enough to transport tanks. Into this dimly lit hold we descended. It was devoid of bunks or mattresses—anything resembling comfort—and half-full of supplies to be shipped to the military bases on Quemoy.

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Flat-bottomed and ungainly, the vehicle proceeded slowly across the 320-kilometre strait, pitching and rolling with every wave, while my stomach churned with dread and nausea. The captain had timed our crossing to reach the island in the dead of night, so that we could land on the beach without being seen and shelled by the Communist military. We anchored just below the high-water mark and waited until the receding tide left our craft sitting on the sand like a beached whale. In a few hours, the tide would turn and the incoming seas would float the vessel for its return trip to Taiwan. In the meantime, soldiers swiftly unloaded the cargo, and a sergeant arrived to escort me and the other new recruit to our new living quarters. We walked up a dark path to a warren of manmade caves and tunnels, dug into a mountainside near the shore that faced the Chinese mainland. The installation reminded me of the bunkers I’d dug for the Japanese soldiers at Fangliao near the end of the war. In the damp interior, lit only by oil lamps, men slept ten to a cave in folding bunk beds. I began my duties the next morning. During the day, the enlisted men performed hard labour, improving and

We walked up a dark path to a warren of manmade caves and tunnels, dug into a mountainside near the shore that faced the Chinese mainland.

Ruey Yu serves as second lieutenant in the Taiwanese army, patrolling the island of Quemoy, 1960.

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66 Journey of a Thousand Miles

Imagine how my nerves trembled, as I walked that dark and lonely stretch of beach—helmet fixed on my head, machine gun slung over my shoulder, pistol resting on my hip, grenade strapped to my chest . . .

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enlarging our system of subterranean bunkers. As an officer I had an easier task, organizing our makeshift library and teaching politics, math, and reading to the soldiers. Apart from the separation from my family, this part of my military service was not onerous. The worst of my duties took place at night. As mentioned, Quemoy faces the Chinese mainland across a narrow straight. The island lies in a bay, surrounded on three sides by the Chinese coast. It offers many kilometres of sandy beaches where Communist soldiers could land and stage an attack. Each platoon was responsible for patrolling a stretch of beach several kilometres long. Every night we took shifts in pairs—one officer and one enlisted man—pacing up and down the beach to watch for signs of enemy invasion. The enlisted men were supposed to protect the officers, but the poor lads were usually so tired from digging trenches all day that they could barely keep from falling asleep on their feet. As for me, fear made me vigilant enough for both of us. Imagine how my nerves trembled, as I walked that dark and lonely stretch of beach—helmet fixed on my head, machine gun slung over my shoulder, pistol resting on my hip, grenade strapped to my chest—too anxious even to turn on a flashlight for fear it would give away my position to a sniper hidden in the darkness across the strait. Sometimes a shell would whistle above us and land with an explosion in the rural hinterland, reminding me of the bombs that dropped on Hsinchu during the war, when I cowered with my brother in the underground bomb shelters. The shells fell at random times and places—sometimes they contained live explosives, other times they were filled with propaganda pamphlets, boasting slogans like “The Communists are on the side of the people.” Their very randomness made them all the more unnerving. More terrifying than the bombs, though, was the danger of an ambush by the commando soldiers known as “water ghosts.” These were elite assassins of the People’s Liberation Army who swam across the channel from the mainland and crept silently ashore to attack our patrols. Sometimes they murdered our men with quick and silent

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strangulation, leaving the bodies to be discovered by their platoon-mates the next day. Other times, they would kidnap a soldier, forcing him to wade or swim out a short distance to where an accomplice waited in a rubber boat. These kidnapped soldiers would be taken to jail on the Chinese mainland, sometimes never to be heard from again, sometimes the subject of a prisoner exchange between the two hostile governments. As I walked those stretches of desolate beach, I strained to hear any irregular splash amid the rhythmic lapping of the waves, any odd sound that would alert me to a human intruder. The nightmare went on for months. Because of the location of Quemoy and the logistical difficulties of travel, visits home were out of the question. At last, after some time on the island, I learned that I could be released from military service one month early if I applied for doctoral studies abroad. One month may seem short, but in Quemoy a single day was a long day. A single night was a long night. Patrolling two hours was two long hours. In Quemoy, one month was a lifetime. I told my sergeant I planned to apply to study in North America and asked him to submit the paperwork requesting my release. A few weeks later, my sergeant got a notice from his superior officer, releasing me from the army. Relief and joy washed over me with the knowledge that I would soon leave this fortress of an island and return to my wife and child. At last the night came when the military transport vehicle was scheduled to make its landing on the beach. I said goodbye to my fellow soldiers in our underground bunker, donned my metal helmet for the final time, and followed the sergeant through the darkness, along a secret route to the beach. The amphibious craft waited off the coast, prevented from landing by enemy bombing. Taking cover, we waited and watched. If the tide went out completely before the bombing stopped, the vehicle would not be able to land that night. But at last, the artillery fell silent. The landing craft floated in. The tide receded, leaving it stranded on the sand. As soldiers hastened to unload supplies, I ran across the beach and ducked into that dark, metal hold. After what seemed like an interminable wait, the rising tide lifted us on its wake and we began our journey, at last, for home. Seasick and nauseous, I nevertheless felt as though a great weight had lifted from my chest. When we docked in Kaohsiung, it was all I could do to resist the urge to fall to the ground and kiss the ground of Taiwan. When I returned to Taipei, I found the city much the same as I had left it. A faculty position as a lecturer awaited me at the university, and at home, Ho-Chin and Li-Yin welcomed me with open arms. As I took up my position lecturing at the university, I joined the throng of Taiwanese graduates applying to study abroad. All of my friends from undergrad days were leaving or had already gone. Wen-Zon Lin, who dreamed with me of winning a Nobel Prize, had left to study in the United States, where he eventually earned a PhD and became a research scientist.

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Ho-Chin (back row, left), her mother (front, left), Elie (Li Yin; front, right), and other family members.

Everyone wanted to get into the Ivy League schools: Harvard, Stanford, or Princeton. But competition for scholarships to those universities was fierce. I took a different approach, believing that my success wouldn’t depend on the name or the prestige of the university I attended but on my own accomplishments, no matter where I studied. Applying to the smaller, lesser known universities would increase my chance of acceptance and, ultimately, of success. One summer day, Wen-Zon Lin’s younger brother, who was still in Taiwan, offered me an extra application form that he had for a PhD scholarship for foreign students at the University of Ottawa in Canada. I’d never heard of the University of Ottawa. The only Canadian universities I knew were McGill in Montreal and

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the University of Toronto. My friends thought I was crazy to apply to study in Canada. It would be covered in snow all year long, they protested. But I remembered seeing a picture in a magazine of a girl wearing a bikini in Ottawa, which proved the country must have some kind of summer season. Truth be told, by that time I was so eager to study abroad that I would have been willing to go to Alaska and live among the Inuit. I wrote the university’s English exam, and the answer came back in a few weeks. A position was waiting for me at the University of Ottawa, beginning in the fall semester of 1962. Unfortunately, this good news meant another separation from Ho-Chin and Li-Yin, since I couldn’t afford to bring them with me. My wife supported my decision to take the position at the University of Ottawa, believing that our future lay in North America and that we would eventually be reunited. Yet Ho-Chin worried about what she and Li-Yin would live on if I left my job at the university and went to study in Canada. I told her that I would send money back every month.

Ruey Yu, Ho-Chin, and Elie (Li-Yin). Elie was only a toddler when Ruey Yu left for Canada in 1962 to begin his PhD at the University of Ottawa.

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Juiming (centre) poses for his wedding portrait with Ruey Yu, Elie (Li-Yin) and Ho-Chin (right), father Ah-Shain (left) and grandmother (centre front).

To pay for my plane ticket to Canada, Ho-Chin and I borrowed money from relatives and sold the gold wedding ring that had been a gift to Ho-Chin from her grandmother. I promised her that I would replace it someday, when I had made my fortune. As protection against the dreaded Canadian winter, I packed a bag with the warmest clothes I possessed—including the jacket given to me by my old high school chemistry teacher Wang Pao Ki—and set off on a journey halfway around the world.

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11

Snowed Under my overnight flight landed in Seattle, where I had a layover of several hours before I was scheduled to board a connecting flight to Vancouver. Rather than leaving me alone in the airport during that time, the airline had assigned a Chinese employee to accompany me. This was not a case of courteous hospitality or good customer service. Rather, her assignment was to make sure that I didn’t run away and illegally enter America. At that time, Taiwanese students were becoming notorious for absconding from American airports while supposedly en route to Canada. They would make their way to New York’s Chinatown, where they worked under the table washing dishes or peeling vegetables in Chinese restaurants. My “minder” told me that the airline would be charged $7,000 by the U.S. Immigration authorities if I escaped her watchful eye and entered the country illegally. She needn’t have feared; I was eager to go to Canada and pursue my scientific research. I finally boarded the plane for Vancouver; then after an overnight flight to Toronto and a short connecting flight to Ottawa, at last I reached my new home. Knowing that Ottawa was the capital of Canada, I had expected a large and bustling airport. After our small plane touched down on the runway, I was surprised to find that we dismounted via a flight of portable stairs and walked across the tarmac to a simple, one-room building, boasting nothing more than a few luggage carousels, check-in counters, and basic security screening. It all seemed rather sleepy and provincial. I found a cab in the lineup outside the airport and handed the driver the address of a house on Osgoode Street, where I had arranged to rent a room through an acquaintance named Kun-Pao Wang. Kun-Pao Wang was a Taiwanese student who had won a PhD scholarship in science to the University of Ottawa the year before. I had obtained his address through mutual friends and written him a letter, asking him to help me get settled in the new city. Kun-Pao Wang was happy to assist, since he was homesick and had moved to Canada only at the urging of his mother. The prospect of having a Taiwanese friend in the same school appealed to him as much as it did to me. As the cab whisked me toward downtown Ottawa, I admired the fiery orange and red of the autumn leaves on the trees that lined the roadway. Ottawa was a clean and beautiful city, and the air was fresh under the brilliant northern sky, 71

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Ruey Yu pursues his graduate studies in chemistry at the University of Ottawa, 1963.

unlike the smoggy atmosphere of Taipei. The cab took me to the university quarter, a historic area of town known as Sandy Hill. The campus sat at the top of the hill, overlooking the Rideau Canal, a waterway lined with grassy parkland that wound its way northward toward the Parliament Buildings and the Ottawa River. Sloping down from the campus, the residential streets were lined with autumncoloured trees and rambling red-brick houses, whose owners often rented out extra rooms to students. After meeting my landlord, an immigrant from Hong Kong, and settling my luggage in my furnished room, I joined Kun-Pao Wang and two or three other Chinese-speaking students for dinner. I was surprised by their

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simple meal of rice and chicken livers, wondering whether food in Canada was so expensive that they couldn’t afford better fare. But it turned out that these young bachelors had simply never learned to cook. In the weeks to come, I would discover Ottawa’s ByWard market, where fresh meats and vegetables were cheap and plentiful. Kun-Pao Wang helped me to navigate my way through the registration process at the university. After passing the mandatory exams to prove I was ready for graduate studies, I was shown the chemistry labs and introduced to my PhD supervisor, Dr. Hans Baer. Dr. Baer was a young scientist who had arrived in Canada from his native Germany just the previous year. He was well-known in Germany for his work on the chemistry of carbohydrates, and the University of Ottawa had recruited him as part of its efforts in the 1960s to expand and improve its faculty of science.

I was surprised by their simple meal of rice and chicken livers, wondering whether food in Canada was so expensive that they couldn’t afford better fare. But it turned out that these young bachelors had simply never learned to cook.

As a graduate student at the University of Ottawa (1963), Ruey Yu worked on developing synthetic antibiotics.

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Dr. Baer’s work focused on the question of how to create synthetic antibiotics that would be both effective and cheap enough to mass produce. This was extremely important work. Not only are antibiotics scientifically fascinating, they represent one of the great achievements of medicine and public health of the twentieth century. The reader must therefore permit me a short digression into the history of natural and synthetic antibiotics, as a background to understanding Dr. Baer’s work. September 3, 1928, is often cited as the beginning of the modern age of antibiotics. On that day, Alexander Fleming, professor of bacteriology at St. Mary’s Hospital in London, England, returned from vacation to discover a strange phenomenon in the petri dish where he had been cultivating a colony of staphylococcus bacteria. He found that, in his absence, a patch of mould (known by the scientific name of Penicillium notatum) had grown in the dish and that the area around the mould was clear—as though the mould had secreted a substance that killed off the bacteria. Fleming created an extract of “mould juice” and discovered through experimentation that this extract destroyed a wide variety of diseasecausing bacteria. A decade later, scientists at Oxford University isolated and purified the active ingredient, penicillin. In the 1940s, American pharmaceutical companies mass-produced penicillin by growing mould in industrial-sized vats. The drug saved the lives of countless soldiers injured on the battlefields of the Second World War by preventing infection of their wounds. After the war, the use of penicillin became widespread to treat infections and bacterial diseases like strep throat, scarlet fever, and diphtheria. Annual production of penicillin in the United States shot up from 21 billion units in 1943 to 133,229 billion units in 1949. Yet producing penicillin organically was a painstaking process that involved many steps: growing the mould, extracting the active ingredient, and purifying it to the point where it could be ingested by humans. What if the penicillin molecule could instead be manufactured artificially in a lab? In 1945, scientists at Oxford University discovered the structure of the penicillin molecule. But recreating that molecule in a lab wasn’t easy. It took John Clark Sheehan, a scientist at MIT, nine years of research before he successfully synthesized penicillin in 1957. In the decades that followed, scientists searched for ways to synthesize other naturally occurring antibiotics. Dr. Baer contributed to this field with his study of the chemistry of carbohydrates. Carbohydrates are a fundamental component of the large and complex molecules that constitute antibiotics. While in Germany, Dr. Baer had discovered a chemical reaction that allowed scientists to create carbohydrates in a lab. At the University of Ottawa, he was working on finding new ways of synthesizing antibiotics that would be both more effective and cheaper to produce than existing drugs, making them more accessible to patients.

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When we met, Dr. Baer asked me if I wanted an easy assignment or a difficult assignment for my PhD thesis. The easy assignment would involve working with the reactions that he had pioneered to create components of antibiotics that were closely related to ones he had already successfully synthesized. The difficult assignment would be to discover a way of synthesizing a component of a different type of antibiotic, known as an “aminoglycoside” antibiotic. Produced naturally by a certain type of bacteria, these antibiotics had been isolated from biological sources in the 1950s but had never before been created in a lab. These important medications are still widely used, including paromomycin (to treat amoeba infection in the intestines), neomycin (to decrease the risk of infection after intestinal surgery), and gentamicin (to treat a wide variety of bacterial infections). I don’t know whether it was ambition or arrogance, but I chose the difficult assignment. In the months that followed, the city of Ottawa became snowed under—and so did I. I began my work with confidence and high hopes. The University of Ottawa’s chemistry laboratory was miles ahead of anything I’d experienced in Taiwan. The beakers and test tubes were made of thick, high-quality glass that wouldn’t break or shatter while I was conducting experiments. We had laboratory-grade plastic wrap to cover the tops of our test-tubes and prevent contamination—still a novelty at that time, although today Saran Wrap can be found in every household kitchen. My supervisor was helpful, my fellow-students were friendly, and I enjoyed a kind of liberty in Canada that was unthinkable in Taiwan. The country was open to the world. People could freely discuss ideas. In the newspapers and on television, people debated questions and frankly criticized the government. There were no soldiers on the streets, no officials stopping people any time of the day or night to demand their identity papers. I felt invigorated with endless possibilities. October turned to November. The leaves fell from the trees, leaving bare, grey skeletons. The days grew shorter and the nights grew longer. The sun didn’t peek above the

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In the months that followed, the city of Ottawa became snowed under— and so did I.

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Dr. Yu with graduate students from the Department of Chemistry, University of Ottawa.

horizon before seven in the morning and had already set by five o’clock in the evening. After a long day of classes and lab work, I would walk home in darkness to make a quick meal on the hotplate in my room, then return to the lab to work late into the night. The pleasant autumn nip in the air turned to an uncomfortable chill, then to a biting cold. In December it began to snow. And snow. And snow. I rummaged through thrift stores to equip myself with warm boots, mitts, a hat, a scarf, and a coat. Muffled from head to toe, I would venture onto the icy sidewalks to climb the hill from my boardinghouse to the university. As snowplows cleared the streets after each blizzard, the snowbanks grew higher and higher until I could barely peer over them. My friend Kun-Pao Wang, utterly miserable and homesick, broke down crying every time it snowed. To keep his spirits up, I would invite him and the two or three other Chinese graduate students who lived in our neighbourhood to play cards or go out to movies on the weekends. I missed my wife and daughter terribly, but I wrote weekly letters to Ho-Chin, slipping photos and Canadian cash into the envelopes. In January the Rideau Canal froze over, and the Canadian students did something that astonished me—they went skating on it. The city was gripped in a deep-freeze, and the Canadians were actually enjoying it.

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If my choices lay between breaking down in tears or strapping on a pair of skates, I decided to follow the wisdom of the old saying: “When in Rome, do as the Romans do.” I bought a pair of skates and, after many falls, learned to glide along the ice with my Canadian classmates. In April the snow melted, and in May the tulips bloomed, filling the flowerbeds along the Rideau Canal with swaths of vibrant colour. I moved out of my $25-a-month boardinghouse and took a cheaper room at just $20 a month in a home owned by a French-Canadian woman, known to her lodgers simply as “Madame.” Madame had a family of seven children; after the oldest ones grew up and moved out, she began renting their rooms to students. Each student had a hotplate in his or her room and shared a communal fridge in the hallway—a situation that once led to a funny incident. Every Saturday, I would go shopping for food in the ByWard Market with Kun-Pao Wang and our small group of friends. One day as I walked among the market stalls, I noticed a farmer holding a pig’s head. In Taiwan, a pig’s head was an expensive delicacy—after all, each pig has only one head. However, I’d learned that many things that counted as delicacies in Taiwan were sold cheaply in Canada because they weren’t part of the normal North American diet. I asked the farmer how much he would charge me for the pig’s head. “I’ll give it to you for ninety-nine cents,” he said. Sold, on the spot. Pleased with my purchase, I took the pig’s head home and put it in the communal fridge. I was studying in my room later that evening, when a blood-curdling scream shattered the silence of the house. I rushed to the door of my room and saw one of my Canadian housemates standing in the hallway with the fridge door open and a look of horror on her face. The poor girl had come face to face with my decapitated pig’s head. Although it hardly made me popular at Madame’s house, that pig’s head fed me for a month: every time I needed a meal I would simply butcher off a piece of it. No doubt my housemates were relieved when I finally heaved the flayed skull into the trash.

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I bought a pair of skates and, after many falls, learned to glide along the ice with my Canadian classmates.

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The many strangers who gave my engine a boost taught me to appreciate the neighbourliness of Canadian people.

Dr. Baer encouraged me to keep trying. He told me the purpose of PhD studies wasn’t to have immediate success, but to tackle a difficult problem, attempt many different approaches, and learn by trial and error.

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The ByWard Market lay about a twenty-minute walk from the university campus, which was a long way to carry heavy grocery bags, especially in the winter. By my second year of studies, I’d become part of a group of eight Taiwanese friends. To facilitate our weekly grocery expeditions, I decided to buy a car. I didn’t have much money, but one of Madame’s daughters was married to a man who had connections to a junkyard in Montreal. Not to worry, Madame said, her son-in-law could fix me up with a car. He found me a rusted 1952 Chevy for $200, which I financed in $10 monthly installments. Every Saturday, the eight of us would pile in the car and fill it with groceries until it rode so low that every pothole posed a major hazard. The transmission fluid leaked, and the battery was so old that I had to carry jumper cables with me at all times in the winter. The many strangers who gave my engine a boost taught me to appreciate the neighbourliness of Canadian people. I couldn’t afford repairs or maintenance and finally had to give up the car when the bottom rusted out, the battery died, and the transmission failed. Yet for all its faults, I was very fond of my first car. By the end of my first year at the University of Ottawa, I had adapted to Canadian life, but my attempts to synthesize antibiotic components were going nowhere. I began to doubt whether choosing the difficult assignment had been the right decision. The graduate students who had chosen the “easy” assignment were enjoying success and publishing papers. I, on the other hand, had nothing to show for all my hard work. Dr. Baer encouraged me to keep trying. He told me the purpose of PhD studies wasn’t to have immediate success, but to tackle a difficult problem, attempt many different approaches, and learn by trial and error. Besides encouraging me in my academic work, Dr. Baer helped me in my private life. He had a daughter named Nicki who was the same age as my daughter Li-Yin, and as a father himself, he understood how hard it was for me to be away from my family. In my second year of studies, he wrote a letter to the immigration authorities supporting my application for permanent residency in Canada and the visa applications of my wife and daughter. In 1964, our

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Ho-Chin, Elie (Li-Yin), and Ruey Yu, after reuniting in Ottawa, 1965.

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applications were accepted, and Ho-Chin and Li-Yin left Taiwan to join me in Canada. I can’t describe the joy that I felt when I met my wife and daughter at the airport. Ho-Chin was as beautiful as ever, though she’d become slimmer in the two

A proud moment as Dr. Yu, accompanied by Ho-Chin, receives his PhD in chemistry from the University of Ottawa, 1966.

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years since our separation. My daughter Li-Yin had grown from a toddler to an adorable little five-year-old girl. In anticipation of their arrival, I rented a flat on the top floor of an old brick house three kilometres from the university, in a neighbourhood known as the Glebe, near the Lansdowne Park Stadium where the Ottawa Rough Riders played CFL football. The day after their arrival, we took Li-Yin to the local elementary school to start classes. The child didn’t speak a word of English, but the teacher advised us not to worry—she would quickly pick up the language through association with her schoolmates. Sure enough Li-Yin, who adopted the nickname Elie, soon made friends and learned to speak English. One of her favourite playmates was Dr. Baer’s daughter Nicki, and the friendship between the two girls brought our families closer together. Moving to an English-speaking country was difficult for Ho-Chin, but she fitted right in to my Taiwanese social circle; once or twice a week, she and the other women would get together to socialize and cook a communal dinner. It wasn’t long before we were enjoying many Canadian pursuits. I bought a Volkswagen, and every weekend in the summer we drove to a lake to camp and fish. In the winter, I taught Li-Yin how to skate. Her homesickness disappeared as she adapted to our new life in Canada. The arrival of my wife and daughter coincided with a change in my fortunes in the laboratory. After trying many different approaches, I finally began to produce small amounts of crystals—indications that I was on the right track. Finally, in 1965, I was able to successfully synthesize a molecule called 2-Deoxystreptamine—an important component of aminoglycoside antibiotics. Unfortunately, the method of synthesis that I discovered was not efficient enough to be commercially viable. Still, the work had taught me a lot about experimental chemistry and enabled me to earn my doctoral degree. After my formal graduation in 1966, I could proudly call myself Dr. Ruey Yu, PhD.

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12

Coming to America after finishing my PhD, I received a two-year post-doctoral research fellowship in the Division of Bioscience at Canada’s National Research Council. My research objective was to study chemical and biochemical aspects of pathogenic fungi that infect human skin. Though I wasn’t rich, the fellowship covered basic life expenses for our family of three, and the work was intellectually fulfilling. Besides me, the Division of Biosciences included foreign post-doctoral fellows from Russia, Czechoslovakia, Scotland, and South Africa. I was interested in learning more about life under Communism from my Russian colleague, but he remained tight-lipped. He was receiving support from the Soviet government and believed the RCMP had him under surveillance. The two-year fellowship allowed us time not only to advance our research but also to look for a job that would take us farther on our career paths, whether in academia or private industry. Companies from the United States and Canada came to the National Research Council looking for potential employees. Although I had interviews with several major American companies, I wasn’t interested in working for private industry. I dreamed of becoming a research scientist at a university and eventually earning a promotion to full professor. One day I saw an ad for a research scientist in the mycology section of Temple University Skin and Cancer Hospital, Department of Dermatology, in Philadelphia. It happened that the fungal samples I’d been studying at the National Research Council came from Temple University, and my supervisor, Dr. Claude Bishop, was a friend of Dr. Fritz Blank, the head of the mycology section at the Skin and Cancer Hospital. After turning the prospect over in my mind for a while, I approached Dr. Bishop to ask about the job, and he wrote a letter recommending me to Dr. Blank. Dr. Blank asked me to come to Philadelphia for an interview on February 12, 1967. It was a bitterly cold winter’s day in Ottawa, with several feet of snow on the ground, when I boarded the train—first to Montreal, then overnight from Montreal to New York City. Waking up in New York, I was surprised to find the ground bare of snow. As I travelled by Greyhound bus from New York to Pennsylvania, the temperature grew warmer, until I disembarked in Philadelphia 83

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to the sight of spring flowers in bloom. Feeling heartened by the change of climate, I found my way by city bus to the Skin and Cancer Hospital. The hospital was in a new, 3900-square-metre building on the North Broad Street campus of Temple’s Health Sciences Center. The ground floor served as an outpatient clinic where doctors treated people with a broad range of skin conditions. There were administration offices and classrooms on the second floor, chemistry labs on the third floor, and an animal research unit with mice, small pigs, rabbits, and guinea pigs in the basement. The job I was applying for would involve working in the third-floor research labs. My research would seek to answer the question of how a certain type of parasitic fungi—known as Trichophyton mentagrophytes or T. mentagrophytes—infects the skin, causing ringworm, jock itch, and athlete’s foot. During the interview, Dr. Blank warned me that the scientist who previously held the position had quit in frustration after three years, unable to solve the puzzle. I replied that I liked challenges. At the end of the interview, Dr. Blank offered me the job and I accepted it on the spot. I had obtained my Canadian citizenship by this time, but now I needed to apply to immigrate to the United States. The application form listed various different occupational groups, among which were “scientist-academic” and “scientist-­skilled.” After working so hard to achieve my PhD, I wanted to apply for “scientist-academic,” but an immigration department official advised me that I would have a better chance of being accepted if I applied as a “scientist-skilled.” Somewhat insulted, I swallowed my pride and filled out the form. The advice turned out to be good: within a few months, my family and I received immigrant visas from the U.S. government. Although I was excited to begin my new job, I felt some regret at moving away from Ottawa. It was a clean, quiet city with friendly people and it had treated me and my family well. Still, we packed up our old Volkswagen Beetle and drove the 720 kilometres to Philadelphia, labouring up the Pocono Mountains as the traffic behind us honked and fumed. We rented a two-bedroom apartment in Roxborough, a pleasant neighbourhood with parks, schools, and shops in easy walking distance. While Ho-Chin managed the household and Li-Yin attended the local public elementary school, I settled down to long hours at the lab, often beginning work before seven o’clock in the morning and returning home late in the evening. To crack the puzzle of how T. mentagrophytes infects human skin, I began by studying the properties of the fungus. One interesting fact about T. mentagrophytes is that it can grow on a clump of horsehair. Since fungi, like all living things, require energy and nutrients to grow, this means that T. mentagrophytes can somehow break down and digest the tough, fibrous horsehair so as to extract energy and nutrients from it. The only way it could do so, I reasoned, was to excrete some kind of an enzyme.

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Dr. Yu and Ho-Chin with daughter Elie (Li-Yin) and baby son Kenneth (Chien-Po) in Philadelphia, 1970.

Horsehair is primarily made up of the protein keratin, and this is interesting because the top layer of human skin—the layer that is vulnerable to infection by the T. mentagrophytes fungus—is also primarily made up of keratin. Therefore, I reasoned, the way that the fungus infects human skin is by excreting an enzyme that breaks down the keratin in the skin cells. By feeding on broken-down keratin, the parasitic fungus could grow and thrive, I hypothesized. After formulating this hypothesis, I tackled the task of isolating and identifying the enzyme secreted by the fungus to break down keratin. I placed horsehair and a small amount of fungus in a beaker of water. I then added glucose (a simple sugar) and a mixture of vitamins and minerals as a “fertilizer” to speed the growth of the fungus. After letting the fungus grow for several days, I raised the heat to kill it, then filtered off the horsehair and the dead fungal matter. I was then

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It took me two years to isolate the enzyme out of the solution, gradually refining and purifying it.

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left with a beaker full of liquid. According to my hypothesis, this liquid would contain the enzyme that the fungus had secreted to break down the keratin in the horsehair. Unfortunately, the liquid also contained other things, such as additional chemicals secreted by the fungus and by-products of the keratin breakdown. To separate the liquid into its component parts, I used a technique known as column chromatography. I then tested each of the ten resulting components to see which one would digest horsehair. When I hit on the component that digested horsehair, I knew that it contained my mystery enzyme. All of this may sound fairly straightforward, but in fact it was a long and painstaking process. It took me two years to isolate the enzyme out of the solution, gradually refining and purifying it. There was great joy in the lab when I announced that I had definitively discovered and isolated the enzyme that allowed fungus to infect human skin, an enzyme I dubbed keratinase-1. Around the time that I was doing this work, the Skin and Cancer Hospital recruited as an associate director a very famous dermatology scientist and clinician named Dr. Eugene J. Van Scott. Dr. Van Scott had established the Dermatology Service at the National Cancer Institute, part of the U.S. National Institutes of Health, and had risen to become scientific director for General Laboratories and Clinics. He was the nation’s foremost expert on serious skin disease. After nearly twenty years at the NIH, Dr. Van Scott had decided that he wanted to concentrate on research while also maintaining a clinical practice; the Skin and Cancer Hospital offered him that opportunity. His arrival at Temple created a buzz of excitement—all the more so because he brought with him a large grant for skin cancer research. However, since he was researching cancer and I was working with fungal infections, our paths didn’t immediately cross. After he’d been working at the Skin and Cancer Hospital for about a year, Dr. Van Scott began asking around for a chemist who could help him with a certain project he had in mind. My supervisor, Dr. Blank, recommended me. I must admit, I thought that the project proposed by Dr. Van Scott was a bit odd. He wanted to invent a topical lotion

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Dr. Yu and Dr. Van Scott belonged to a large research and clinical team at the Temple University Skin and Cancer Hospital in the 1970s.

that people could apply to darken their skin, giving them the appearance of a suntan. As an Asian person, I couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to deliberately darken their skin. But he explained that among Caucasians, bronzed skin was seen as the height of fashion, and the hugely popular suntanning fad was causing an alarming increase in rates of skin cancer. Since it was difficult to fight against fashion, Dr. Van Scott had conceived the idea of inventing a lotion that people could apply to give themselves the appearance of a tan without having to bask in the sun. We got to work and in a few months developed what may have been the world’s first “tan in a bottle.” The product had certain drawbacks that made it commercially unviable: it took too long to dry and wore off too soon. But Gene Van Scott and I enjoyed working together so much that we began to collaborate on more and more projects. He was experimenting with nitrogen mustard as a treatment for a certain type of skin cancer, and I helped him to develop a formulation that was effective without being overly irritating to patients’ skin. Finally, to the dismay of Dr. Blank, I left the mycology department and joined Gene’s research team.

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*

The young man’s face and entire body was covered from head to toe with thick, grey skin that looked like large fish scales.

Meeting this young man moved me profoundly.

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One day in 1972, Gene invited me into his consulting room to meet a patient afflicted with a rare and horribly disfiguring genetic skin disease called lamellar ichthyosis. The young man’s face and entire body was covered from head to toe with thick, grey skin that looked like large fish scales. As Gene informed me, the name of the disease derived from the Greek word ichthys, meaning fish. Like all lamellar ichthyosis patients, the young man had been afflicted with the disease since birth, causing him to suffer both physically and psychologically. As a child, his classmates teased him. As a teen, his peers shunned him. He had no friends, let alone romantic partners. His thick, dry skin frequently cracked and bled; large flakes dropped from his body like dandruff. He had trouble exercising because he became overheated, his sweat glands blocked by the thickness of his epidermis. Like other ichthyosis patients, he was susceptible to infection by skin-dwelling fungi and parasites. He had come to Gene, the foremost dermatologist in the country, hoping desperately for a treatment that would enable him to overcome his disfigurement and live a normal life. Meeting this young man moved me profoundly. For years, I had shied away from contact with sick people out of a lingering horror at the memory of my mother’s terminal illness. But standing in that consulting room, I discovered that my feeling of horror was gone. Now I felt only compassion and a desire to help this young man in any way that my skill would allow. At the time, the standard treatment for ichthyosis was a cream with a certain percent concentration of salicylic acid. The treatment caused only a marginal improvement: it peeled off some of the dead skin cells but still left the patient with a skin that looked thick and diseased. It also had unpleasant side effects, such as ringing in the ears, and could be severely toxic to young children. For the next few days, Gene and I discussed ideas about what kind of substance might be a better candidate treatment. We had two fundamental criteria: the compound must be non-toxic, and it must be able to penetrate the patient’s diseased skin

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Coming to America 89

because a product that stayed merely on the surface could have no possible therapeutic effect. Since I had studied carbohydrate chemistry under Dr. Baer, my thoughts turned to the various natural acids involved in carbohydrate metabolism. We came up with a list of candidate substances: glycolic acid (extracted from sugar cane), lactic acid (from milk), citric acid (from oranges), and tartaric acid (from grapefruit). All of these belonged to a family called “alpha-hydroxyacids” or AHAs. In addition, we decided to try acetic acid (common vinegar). As a control, we selected the standard treatment, salicylic acid. At that point, the compounding skills I had learned during my chemical engineering studies at the technical high school in Taiwan came in useful. Working in the hospital’s third-floor laboratory, I compounded twelve different skin creams, each one containing one of the candidate substances in either a 5 or 10 percent concentration. I tested the creams on my own skin to make sure that there were no adverse side effects. Then I filled twelve jars with the twelve different creams, numbered them, put them in a box, and presented the box to Gene. Neither he nor the patient knew which cream contained which ingredient. Gene drew six circles on each of the patient’s arms, numbered to correspond to the numbers on the jars of cream. He instructed the patient to apply the creams twice a day, the cream from each numbered jar to be applied to the corresponding numbered circle. We asked the young man to return in two weeks, when we would see which, if any, of the creams had had an effect on his skin. When the young man returned for his follow-up appointment, the results were astounding. In the circles treated with some of the AHAs—notably glycolic acid, tartaric acid, and lactic acid—the thick, grey scales had disappeared, exposing healthy, smooth skin. Excited, we hurried to the lab and compounded a larger batch of AHA cream for the patient to take home and use on his entire body. When he returned in three weeks, it was as though he had been reborn. No longer disfigured by a grotesque layer of skin, the young man looked and felt like a normal human being. His joy at being able to lead a

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When he returned in three weeks, it was as though he had been reborn. No longer disfigured by a grotesque layer of skin, the young man looked and felt like a normal human being.

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90 Journey of a Thousand Miles

normal life was matched by my own pleasure at having discovered the treatment for such a deforming condition. I knew then that my path as a chemist lay not purely in the lab, but in using my skill to find treatments and cures for disease. As one of our ichthyosis patients, Ken Kripps, would say years later, after being treated with AHA cream: “When you feel good and you look good, you want to sing from the rooftops. It’s an amazing feeling.”

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13

A Life-Changing Discovery in 1974, Gene and I published a landmark paper in the scientific journal Archives of Dermatology describing the effects of alpha-hydroxyacids on ichthyosis. The paper caught the interest of dermatologists across the United States and around the world. Some doctors sent us their patients. Others asked us to send them jars of AHA cream. We compounded large batches for shipments across the continent and overseas, but I couldn’t keep up with the demand. After all, our cream was a treatment, not a cure, and each patient’s supply had to be continually renewed. Although ichthyosis is rare, it still affects hundreds of thousands of people. The mildest form of the disease, ichthyosis vulgaris, manifests itself as extremely dry skin, and is present in about 0.3 percent of the population. Lamellar ichthyosis, which afflicted our original patient, is fortunately much rarer, occurring in about one in 300,000 individuals. After securing the patent for our discovery, we published the formula for making the AHA cream, which allowed compounding pharmacies and hospitals anywhere in the world to prepare the treatment. Unfortunately, many small hospitals and drug stores lacked compounding labs and qualified pharmacists. Requests for me to make the cream continued to pour in. Gene and I soon realized that our best hope for getting the product into the hands of all the people who needed it lay in convincing a commercial pharmaceutical company to produce and sell it. We approached several companies before receiving a positive response from Bristol-Myers (now Bristol-Myers Squibb), a company with a long history of research and discovery. Bristol-Myers wanted to make a prescription-strength cream, which would require extensive testing to secure approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. On the positive side, a prescription drug would be more likely to receive coverage by patients’ health insurance plans, most of which would not cover over-the-counter drugs. We agreed to grant Bristol-Myers a licence, although we knew it would take many years before the product came to market. Although the results of our treatment were plainly visible to patients, many people in the medical and pharmaceutical communities remained unconvinced that alpha-hydroxyacids were anything special. My own department chair at 91

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92 Journey of a Thousand Miles

Temple University was a skeptic: he told me that AHAs simply stripped off the top layer of dead skin and that any other acid would accomplish the same thing. But we knew he was wrong. Research told us that alpha-hydroxyacids had a specific effect not common to all acids. After all, our original experiment had also included acetic acid and salicylic acid, and neither of them had had the same effect as AHAs. And although AHAs certainly did have an exfoliating effect on the top layer of dead skin cells, we strongly suspected that their function went beyond that to influence the biochemistry of the deeper layers of skin. After witnessing the astonishing results with our first patient in 1972, we had asked ourselves the same question that skeptics were now asking: were the results specific to alpha-hydroxyacids, or would other organic compounds achieve the same effect? In the years between our initial discovery and the publication of our paper in 1974, we tested hundreds of compounds. We tried a class of chemicals called esters, which are similar in chemical structure to hydroxyacids. We extracted potentially active ingredients from vegetables like green beans. We even boiled chicken soup, filtered it, reduced it to a powder, compounded the powder, and tried that. Nothing worked like the alpha-hydroxyacids. But how did the AHAs work? And what made us think they had a deep, rather than merely a superficial, effect? To understand that, the reader must understand a bit about the biology of the skin. The top layer of the skin is called the epidermis. In normal, healthy skin, the cells of the epidermis have a lifespan of about twenty-eight days. Each epidermal cell originates in the lower part of the epidermis, called the basal layer. During its four-week lifespan, it slowly migrates to the top of the epidermis, where it becomes part of the stratum corneum—the tissue that we see covering our bodies. During its migration upward, the skin cell gradually becomes filled with the protein keratin. By the time it becomes part of the stratum corneum, the cell is dead, in the sense that there are no longer any biological functions happening inside the cell. However, this layer of “keratinized” skin cells still serves an important biological purpose—namely, to protect the body from infection and injury. To form the continuous surface of our skin, each cell in the stratum corneum is bonded to its neighbouring cells by means of certain chemicals in the cell walls. In normal skin, the stratum corneum is about sixteen to twenty cells thick, and the topmost cells continuously shed off in tiny, invisible flakes as new cells migrate upward to replace them. The process of cells migrating to the top of the epidermis, filling with keratin, dying, and eventually shedding off is called “keratinization.” In ichthyosis, a problem occurs in this process of keratinization: the dead cells at the top of the stratum corneum fail to shed off and instead remain stuck to their neighbouring cells. This causes the skin of the stratum corneum to become dry, scaly, and ten to twenty times thicker than the skin of a healthy person.

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A Life-Changing Discovery 93

In a person with normal skin, the entire epidermis is less than a millimetre thick on most parts of the body. Beneath the epidermis lies a different and deeper layer of skin called the dermis. The dermis communicates with the epidermis by means of chemical messages. These messages—sent upward from the dermis into the epidermis—direct the process of keratinization. To return to our AHAs, the question before us was this: did the AHAs simply strip off the top layer of thick and diseased stratum corneum, like a solvent stripping paint off a piece of furniture? Or, did the AHAs penetrate deep into the dermis and influence the skin’s chemical signalling system, spurring the body to produce normal, healthy skin instead of abnormal “ichthyotic” skin? Our clinical observations of patients indicated the latter. If the AHAs simply had a superficial effect, then during the course of treatment, the body would continue to produce diseased skin and the AHA cream would continuously strip it off. If the patient ceased treatment, the diseased skin would return within a day or two. This, indeed, was the effect we observed when patients used the old treatment of salicylic acid. But if the AHAs had a deeper effect on the biochemistry of the skin, then this effect could be expected to last for some time after the treatment was discontinued, as the AHA molecules continued to linger in the body. In fact, we found that when patients ceased treatment with AHAs, their skin would remain normal for a week or more—in some patients, as long as a month.

Dr. Yu with his brother Juiming (left) in Ottawa. Juiming emigrated to Canada in the 1970s, where he obtained a master’s degree at the University of Western Ontario.

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We could deduce, therefore, that the specific chemical structure of alphahydroxyacids allows them to interfere with the biochemical messaging system between the deep layer of skin (dermis) and the superficial layer of skin (epidermis), signalling the body to produce healthy skin instead of diseased ichthyotic skin. In other words, the AHAs provide chemical signals that help to direct the process of keratinization itself. We didn’t know exactly how the chemical signalling system worked or what other effects the AHAs might have on skin biology, but we did know that we had hit upon an important avenue for further research. Despite the skeptics, even within our own department at the university, we resolved to continue our research. In addition to these research developments, the 1970s brought many changes in my family life. Our move to Pennsylvania was difficult for Ho-Chin. She didn’t speak English fluently and she had left behind a close circle of Chinese-speaking friends in Ottawa. She knew no one in Philadelphia and none of our neighbours spoke Chinese. She also had a growing family to care for: in addition to our daughter Elie, who was ten years old when we moved to the United States, our second child, Kenneth Chien-Po Yu, was born in 1969, followed quickly by our third child, Megan Hai-Chia Yu, in 1970. We took out a mortgage and bought a house, and while I spent long days at the hospital research lab, Ho-Chin stayed home, caring for the children and running the household.

Dr. Yu and Ho-Chin with children Elie (back row, right), Kenneth (front row, right), and baby Megan (Hai-Chia), 1971.

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It must have been difficult for her to raise three children without close friends or relatives living nearby, but she never complained—another proof of her strength of character. Her social life brightened in the late 1970s when her brother, an engineer, moved to Philadelphia with his family. Meanwhile my brother, Juiming, had immigrated to Canada at my urging, where he completed a master’s degree in engineering at the University of Western Ontario and took a job at the Rubbermaid plastic factory. This kind of exodus wasn’t unusual among educated professionals in post-war Taiwan; two-thirds of my graduating class from National Taiwan University ended up living in America, most of them becoming university professors. In 1972, we took out a bigger mortgage and moved to a bigger house in the Philadelphia suburb of Ambler. It was a huge stone house that resembled a castle, with turrets and a pointed roof, and we fell in love with it at first sight. For someone who had dreamed as a boy of living in a real Japanese house—with wooden floors, indoor plumbing, and a roof that didn’t leak—owning this “castle” seemed like the fulfilment of a childhood fantasy. Its price seemed

For someone who had dreamed as a boy of living in a real Japanese house . . . owning this “castle” seemed like the fulfilment of a childhood fantasy.

Dr. Yu (right) and brother Juiming (centre) enjoying happy times with their families in the 1970s.

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96 Journey of a Thousand Miles

Ho-Chin and Dr. Yu nurture a growing family: Elie (in tree), Kenneth (centre front), and Megan (right front), 1974.

remarkably affordable, until we discovered—soon after moving in—that, for all its charms, the house was what realtors call a fixer-upper. Weekends would often find me devising methods to keep the squirrels and raccoons from scampering down our chimney, or hoisting my forty-foot ladder to patch the (ironically) leaky roof. Still, the big old house, which cost half the price of a newer house, was a wonderful place to raise our children. With my career and family life settling into place, I took the opportunity in the early 1970s to visit my father and grandmother back home in Taiwan. Flying in to Taipei and travelling by train to Hsinchu gave me a taste of the rapid transformations happening in the country. Everywhere, huge government-sponsored construction and industrialization projects were underway, a sign of the economic development that saw Taiwan’s per capita gross domestic product shoot up from US$213 in 1952 to $2,385 in 1980. New high-rise apartment buildings dotted the

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skyline, as the population more than doubled from eight million in 1952 to 17.8 million in 1980. Despite the rapid modernization, many things in Taiwan remained familiar. Coal smoke still choked the air of Taipei, and when I arrived in Hsinchu, my father’s house looked much the same as I had left it. He still had no shower, and my grandmother still slept beneath an old blanket patched together out of several pieces of cloth. Unable to bear the thought of her shivering her way through another winter, I bought her a new comforter. She slept beneath it while I was visiting, but my father later told me that, after I went back to America, she folded it up and put it carefully away. Having lived through so much poverty and deprivation, perhaps she didn’t feel as though she deserved even that small bit of luxury. Not long after returning from Taiwan, I sent my father a plane ticket to visit me in Philadelphia. He’d never been on an airplane in his life, and he spoke only one word of English—“hello”—but he was eager to see America. I was at the airport when his plane touched down, but I began to worry when he didn’t appear among the throng of passengers streaming through the arrivals gate. I waited and waited. Finally, the doors opened, and a flight attendant escorted him out. Confused, disoriented, and unable to communicate, he had nevertheless arrived safely in the New World. I showed him the sights: the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia and the Statue of Liberty in New York. He admired the enormous size of the cars and houses, yet the things he enjoyed most in his week-long visit were playing with his grandchildren and tending the garden in our backyard. America seemed like a fairy-tale world to my father, and his son’s success like the happy ending. Yet, a few years later, his own life would take a fairy-tale turn. The reader will recall that when I was in high school in the 1950s, my father sold two pigs and used the proceeds, in addition to our scholarship money, to buy the land where he’d built his house during the latter part of the Second World War. One day in the late 1970s, a real estate developer knocked on his door and offered him $3 million for his property. The developer was buying up land around

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My grandmother still slept beneath an old blanket patched together out of several pieces of cloth. Unable to bear the thought of her shivering her way through another winter, I bought her a new comforter.

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98 Journey of a Thousand Miles

the Hsinchu railway station to build skyscrapers, and Ah-Shain immediately agreed to the bargain. He bought himself a new house with half of the profits, retired, and lived on the other half. Numerous distant relatives came out of the woodwork to borrow money from him, and my father, always generous to a fault, gave a good deal of his newfound wealth away. Still, he lived in comfort until he passed away at the age of seventy-eight from complications related to the toxicity of his asthma medications. Overall, the decade of the 1970s was kind to my family and me. As the 1980s dawned, I looked forward to watching my children grow up and continuing to apply my knowledge of chemistry in the search for cures to skin diseases. After many changes and struggles, I thought I had finally reached a straight and even road in my life. Then trouble at the Skin and Cancer Hospital threw both my job and my research into jeopardy.

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14 Taking a Gamble

in 1980, I received a letter from the dean stating that my job would be cut to part-time. This was my first inkling of the dire things to come at the Skin and Cancer Hospital. My salary, previously around $30,000, was reduced to $11,000—a little less than the $14,500 earned by the average American household at that time. Yet I had survived far worse in Taiwan. Thanks to our modest lifestyle and Ho-Chin’s ability as a household manager, we tightened our belts and carried on. The obvious course of action would have been for me to apply for a job at another university or pharmaceutical company. But that would have meant moving away from Philadelphia and abandoning our research, which I simply couldn’t bring myself to do. Gene and I formed an inseparable scientific team. Not only did we connect on a personal level, but we complemented each other professionally. He knew more than anyone in America about the clinical aspects of skin disease, while I brought a profound knowledge of practical and theoretical chemistry. Together, we were deeply involved in investigating the effects of AHAs on skin diseases and skin biochemistry. Following our discovery of the effects of AHAs on ichthyosis, we were conducting experiments to determine whether these organic acids could treat warts, acne, age spots, and other skin conditions. As well, we were searching for a cure to psoriasis, a mysterious chronic skin disease that has baffled physicians for centuries. Psoriasis affects about seven million people in the United States and more than a hundred million people worldwide. From the point of view of a skin biochemist, it’s a fascinating pathology that is characterized by skin

Gene and I formed an inseparable scientific team. Not only did we connect on a personal level, but we complemented each other professionally.

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cells that multiply seven times faster than normal. As these quickly multiplying cells reach the skin’s surface and die, they build up, causing raised, red plaques covered with white scales. These itchy, painful lesions often crack and bleed. In severe cases, the plaques of irritated skin grow and merge into one another, covering large areas of the patient’s body. Psoriasis waxes and wanes over the course of a patient’s life, sometimes flaring up and sometimes lying dormant. It is believed to be genetically transmitted, yet its ultimate cause remains unknown. Besides the physical pain, it can be psychologically damaging, as patients can be socially ostracized and suffer from loneliness and depression. Gene had sworn that within his lifetime, the cause and cure of psoriasis would be found, and I had committed to join him on this scientific quest. When the university cut my job to part-time, we were in the process of testing literally hundreds of compounds as possible psoriasis treatments, including a derivative of vitamin B-3 that seemed, at the time, to hold promise. Our clinical research was intimately intertwined with more basic research into the biochemistry of the skin. We knew that more than half of all skin diseases involve an abnormality in the keratinization process. Based on our previous research, we strongly believed that AHAs affected keratinization. If we could discover the chemical steps that directed keratinization, it could perhaps lead us, or other researchers, toward cures for many serious skin disorders. Because the formation and rupture of chemical bonds occurs at the subatomic level, it was impossible for us to observe the actual biochemical processes. We could only deduce them from our observation of their visible effects. How do skin cells form the continuous tissue that covers our entire body? We know that individual skin cells stick to each other through groups of adhesive proteins known as “desmosomes” and through electromagnetic bonds between positively and negatively charged molecules embedded in the cell walls of adjacent skin cells. In normal skin, these bonds weaken as the cells age and die, allowing the top layer of dead skin cells to slough off. But in conditions like ichthyosis, the skin cells don’t shed off, instead creating a layer of thick, diseased skin. How did AHAs reverse this process and trigger exfoliation of the skin? Through experimentation, we discovered that applying high-concentration topical AHAs doesn’t make the skin “flake” off, like dandruff, but rather causes the skin to peel off in large sheets, separating from the body at the lower part of the epidermis, near the borderline with the underlying dermis. In an article that would be published in the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology in November 1984, we expounded the theory that the exfoliating effect of AHAs lies in their ability to interfere with the skin’s chemical signalling process. We hypothesized that AHAs, by interfering with certain enzymes, lessen

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Taking a Gamble 101

the number of negatively charged sulphate and phosphate molecules that are created in the cell walls of newly forming epidermal skin cells. With fewer negatively charged molecules, the electromagnetic bonds between cells are weaker. With sufficient application of AHAs, the weakening of the bonds between skin cells eventually allows a layer of skin to detach and peel off. But as we immersed ourselves in this painstaking biochemical research, a state of budgetary crisis was unfolding all around us—in the Skin and Cancer Hospital, the School of Medicine, and Temple University as a whole. Enrolment was declining at the university, from 36,500 students in 1977 to 31,500 in 1982. This resulted in a decrease in revenues. As well, the university was feeling the effects of the city of Philadelphia’s decision in 1977 to close its municipally funded Philadelphia General Hospital. Following the closure of that public hospital, patients without health insurance had turned to the Temple University Hospital for their emergency health needs. Their inability to pay their hospital bills had resulted in the hospital—and therefore the university—losing $6 million annually, according to a lawsuit that the university would later file against the city. In March 1982, the university president, Marvin Wachman, sent a memo to staff warning of “staggering deficits in the immediate future” and announcing that the university would have to trim $13 million from its budget over the following three years. The following month, the university sent letters of dismissal to fifty tenured professors and eight non-tenured faculty. Dozens of instructors on one-year contracts were informed that their contracts would not be renewed. In 1983, the university cut my salary again: this time to just $200 a month, or $2,400 a year. Even the resourceful Ho-Chin couldn’t make ends meet on that meagre income. I couldn’t give up my working relationship with Gene, which had already produced a treatment for ichthyosis and which I felt had every chance of leading to many more scientific breakthroughs. But with two teenaged children and a daughter in university to support, the cutback to my wages made my family’s financial situation untenable. Fortunately, another source of income existed only an hour’s drive away from home—the casinos of Atlantic City. Atlantic City in the 1980s was a glitzy boomtown, drawing tourists from all over the United States with its flashy casinos and heavyweight champion Mike Tyson’s multi-million-dollar prize fights. Ho-Chin and I both enjoyed gambling, and we’d often drive there for a day on the town. But that had been for fun; now, I needed to consider the casinos as a serious source of revenue. As always, I took a scientific approach to the problem. I decided to focus on blackjack, a game that relied on the calculation of mathematical probabilities.

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102 Journey of a Thousand Miles

In the midst of this bad news came a ray of hope. A royalty check arrived in the mail from Bristol-Myers, which had begun clinical testing on an ichthyosis medication that used our patented AHA discovery.

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The odds in blackjack are such that, over time, the dealer will always win, yet with a little luck, a player can make money by following certain mathematical rules. In preparation for my new part-time career as a gambler, I studied several books that laid out the rules systematically and resolved to follow them: I would never take a card if I had 17 points or more in my hand. If my hand had 12 to 16 points, my decision on whether to hit or hold would depend on the value of the cards showing in the dealer’s hand. If I had less than 12 points in my hand, I would always take a card. And I would be sure to follow the old maxim, “quit while you’re ahead.” Finally one Saturday, with a pocket full of dollar bills and a roll of pennies for Ho-Chin to play the slot machines, we left Elie to care for the two younger children and set out for Atlantic City. I took a seat at one of the $2 blackjack tables. The most I could win was $4 per hand, but since the most I could lose was $2, I didn’t risk gambling away a fortune. That day I won $200—the same amount that I earned in a month at the Skin and Cancer Hospital. From that day forth, I embarked on a new routine. From Monday to Friday, I pursued my lab research, putting in long hours for $50 a week. On Saturdays, I supplemented my income through blackjack, bringing home an average of $200 to $300 in winnings. In 1983, the university’s new president, Peter J. Liacouras, announced further budget cuts. Late that year, I received my final layoff notice. In the midst of this bad news came a ray of hope. A royalty check arrived in the mail from Bristol-Myers, which had begun clinical testing on an ichthyosis medication that used our patented AHA discovery. At this preliminary stage, the licensing fees amounted to only a few thousand dollars. Still, it was the first royalty check I’d ever received, and coming at that difficult time it seemed like money that had fallen from heaven. By 1984, I added a third small stream of earnings to my blackjack winnings and my Bristol-Myers royalties. I had been taking part-time courses in acupuncture at the International Acupuncture Institute, and after graduating

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I set up a private consulting room in my home where I saw patients for $20 a visit. I also began taking off-campus courses from local colleges, including Temple University, to receive my medical degree in oriental medicine from Samra University. Although I wasn’t rich, the income that I cobbled together allowed me to stay in Philadelphia and continue my research. Meanwhile, the Skin and Cancer Hospital’s financial fortunes continued to deteriorate. We gradually moved my research activities from the hospital lab to a private laboratory space near the university that I had purchased in the 1970s, where we continued our research, though we received no pay for it. Gene opened a private dermatology practice in the Philadelphia suburb of Abington, while continuing to see patients part-time at the Skin and Cancer Hospital, whose first-floor clinic remained open after the research laboratories had closed. I hoped against hope that one day the university would overcome its financial problems and re-open the dermatology research labs. But the Temple University Hospital—which, like the Skin and Cancer Hospital, fell under the budget of the Temple University School of Medicine—continued to suffer. The city of Philadelphia refused to pay for patients who had no Medicare and no private health insurance, leaving the university to cover the cost of their defaulted medical bills. Serving the poor as well as the rich, the Skin and Cancer Hospital lost hundreds of thousands of dollars annually because of unreimbursed medical bills. And since few dermatological problems were acutely life-threatening, the School of Medicine saw cutting services at the Skin and Cancer Hospital as a tempting way to save money. Eventually, after years of cuts, the Skin and Cancer Hospital would close completely in 1989. Through it all, Gene and I continued our clinical work and laboratory research. One day in 1987, I was working in my lab when the phone rang. It was Ho-Chin. A FedEx envelope had arrived from Bristol-Myers, and she wanted to know if she should open it. The company had recently obtained FDA approval for its prescription ichthyosis cream and had begun to sell the cream under the brand name Lac-Hydrin. I had been expecting this envelope, which would contain a check for my share of the quarterly royalty payments from the sales of the product. I told her to go ahead and open the envelope. After a few moments, her voice came back on the phone. “How much is it?” I asked. “A hundred thousand dollars.” I couldn’t believe it. I’d never had that much cash in my life. We celebrated that evening with dinner at a fancy restaurant. The following weekend we hit the Atlantic City casinos—not to make money, but just to have fun.

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I had fulfilled my promise to Ho-Chin to replace her grandmother’s wedding ring.

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That year, I took Ho-Chin on a Caribbean cruise. In a jewellery store on the island of St. Thomas, famous for its diamonds and Colombian emeralds, I told her to buy anything she liked. As she chose from among the glittering array of jewels, I felt proud that I had finally fulfilled my promise to Ho-Chin to replace her grandmother’s golden wedding ring, which she had sold more than twenty years before to pay for my ticket to Canada.

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15 Avon Calling

some people might have thought I was crazy to continue my chemistry research for years without pay. But research was my driving passion, and in the end my gamble paid off, both scientifically and financially: in 1986 Gene Van Scott and I made a discovery that would turn us both into millionaires. I’ve mentioned that after discovering the effects of alpha-hydroxyacids on ichthyosis in 1972, Gene and I had spent the more than a decade trying to understand skin biochemistry and to determine whether other skin conditions could be treated with AHAs. One particular patient in our studies was an elderly woman with age spots (technically called “keratoses”) on her face who came to Gene’s private office for treatment. We were testing to see whether an AHA cream, applied over several months, would make the spots fade. In reviewing the “before” and “after” photographs, we noticed something remarkable: the wrinkles on the woman’s face had become smaller and less visible after several months’ application of the AHA cream. Could alpha-hydroxyacids have the power to smooth wrinkles? Seeking to conduct a study on a larger number of subjects, we put out a call for volunteers. We had no trouble finding willing participants: patients, lab technicians, even the hospital administrative assistants were eager to try the cream that held out hope of a more youthful-looking skin. After several months, the results were in: long-term use of AHA cream diminished the size and appearance of facial wrinkles. How did AHAs accomplish this? We didn’t know the mechanism when we made the discovery in 1986.We only knew that the effect of AHAs on wrinkles was real.

Gene and I had spent the more than a decade trying to understand skin biochemistry.

Could alphahydroxyacids have the power to smooth wrinkles?

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We wrote an article about our findings, which would be published in 1989 in the dermatological journal Cutis under the title “Alpha Hydroxy Acids: Procedures for Use in Clinical Practice.” We also applied for a patent on our discovery of “Amphoteric Compositions and Polymeric Forms of Alpha Hydroxyacids, and Their Therapeutic Use.” The patent would secure our right to use AHAs in antiwrinkle formulations and to collect licensing fees from companies that wanted to develop anti-wrinkle products using AHAs as the active ingredient. As an independent scientist without a position at a company or university, I needed a source of income to support myself, my family, and my research. The royalties I received from Bristol-Meyers for the Lac-Hydrin ichthyosis cream had given me a taste of the possibilities of commercialization. Yet ichthyosis affects less than one percent of the population, whereas wrinkles eventually affect everyone. The huge potential market for an AHA-based anti-wrinkle cream meant huge potential royalties. The royalties in turn could pay for the lab equipment and supplies that Gene and I needed to continue our research into skin biochemistry and dermatological treatments.

Dr. Yu founded the skincare company NeoStrata with Dr. Van Scott in 1988, based on their discoveries of the anti-aging properties of AHAs.

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We informed the academic and clinical world of our findings, but we could not find a pharmaceutical company that was interested in licensing our discovery and developing a commercial product. Finally, we decided that our only course of action was to start our own company. We named it NeoStrata—“neo” meaning “new” and “strata” meaning “layer.” Our products would promise customers a renewed, more youthful-looking layer of skin. Since neither Gene nor I knew anything about running a business, we formed a partnership with Milton Sarkin, the president and owner of a small skin-care products company called Dermatologic Cosmetic Laboratories Ltd. (DCL), in North Haven, Connecticut. Mr. Sarkin contributed his business knowledge, production facilities, and marketing expertise in exchange for 50 percent ownership of our new company. In 1988 NeoStrata began operations, producing an initial line of four antiwrinkle products and one skin-lightening product, distributed and sold out of dermatologists’ offices in the continental United States. As the former head of the Dermatology Service at the U.S. National Institutes of Health, Gene was a well-known clinical and research dermatologist, something that helped our products to gain a rapid foothold in our specialized market. Although we earned enough profit to reinvest in further research and product development, we didn’t have the facilities for mass-market production and distribution. Then Avon came calling. In contrast to our small company, which chalked up less than $1 million in annual sales, the multinational cosmetics giant Avon netted sales of $3 billion in 1988. And we had something that Avon wanted: a product that could diminish wrinkles. As Avon noted in its 1988 annual report, the world’s population was undergoing a dramatic demographic shift. That year, for the first time in history, more than half of Americans were over the age of thirty-five. As a beauty company, Avon needed to target its research and development toward products that could defer the visible signs of aging, making people look and feel younger. The head of Avon’s research and development department had read our journal article and believed the anti-wrinkle effects of AHAs were real. He told me privately that the company had spent two years and millions of dollars trying to come up with a skin product that had the same effect as AHAs without infringing our patent— and had failed. As a result, Avon wanted to license our discovery and develop its own line of AHA-infused anti-aging skin products. We agreed to sell Avon a non-exclusive licence to use our discovery in exchange for a royalty of six percent of net sales of AHA products. Part of the royalty payments went directly to Gene and me as the patent holders, while a large portion was reinvested directly into NeoStrata. As Avon went about developing its product line, Gene and I continued to develop new products for NeoStrata and pursue our research into skin disease

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and skin biology. In particular, we discovered more about the mechanism by which AHAs help to keep skin smooth and youthful. I mentioned earlier that human skin is composed of two layers: the upper layer, called the epidermis, and the underlying layer, called the dermis. One could imagine the skin as being like a mattress: the epidermis is the thin layer of fabric covering the mattress, while the dermis is the inner part containing the springs and stuffing. When the mattress is new, the springs and stuffing make the mattress plump and firm so that the fabric lies smoothly over the surface. However, as the mattress ages, the stuffing breaks down, the springs lose their elasticity, the structure of the mattress sags, and the fabric on top becomes loose and wrinkled. The same is true of the skin. In youthful skin, the dermis is full of collagen, elastin fibres, and molecules known as glycosaminoglycans (GAGs). The collagen and elastin act like the springs in the mattress, giving the skin firmness and elasticity. The GAGs, which retain water, act like the stuffing in the mattress, keeping the skin plump. When the dermis is firm and plump, the epidermis lies smoothly on top of it, like the fabric on a new mattress. But with age, the elastin, collagen, and GAGs in the dermis degenerate, causing it to shrink and sag. This results in the outwardly visible wrinkles of the skin. In our research, we discovered that when alpha-hydroxyacids are absorbed into the dermis, they provide chemical signals that stimulate the skin cells to produce collagen, elastin, and GAGs. The result is to “plump up” the dermis, thus smoothing out the wrinkles in the skin. As we knew from our prior research, AHAs also have an exfoliating effect on the top layer of skin. Together, the combination of exfoliation and plumping yield a more youthful-looking skin. In February 1992, Avon introduced the world’s first AHA-infused skin-care products to the consumer market with the launch of its Anew Perfecting Complex for Face. That single cream racked up sales worth $54  million in the United States and an additional $16  million in foreign markets in its first year on the shelves, making it “the best-selling skin care product in Avon history,” according to Avon’s 1992 annual report. The following year, Avon expanded its Anew line to six products, including a cleanser, moisturizer, foundation, and body lotion. Sales of the Anew product line in 1993 increased to $70 million in the U.S. and $105 million in foreign markets, for a total of $175 million worldwide. Women’s magazines buzzed with news of the “miraculous” wrinkle-fighting compounds. Suddenly, every cosmetics company in America scrambled to jump on the AHA bandwagon. In 1993, Estée Lauder launched its Fruition Triple ReActivating Complex. Chanel introduced the Day Lift Refining Complex, and Dermalogica hawked its Skin Renewal Booster. Macy’s department store in New York City devoted an

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entire bank of windows to the launch of Prescriptives’ All You Need moisturizer. In September, Mary Kay cosmetics introduced its AHA-based Skin Revival System, which consisted of a gel and a moisturizing cream packaged and sold together. Racking up more than $40 million in sales over the first six months, it was the most successful product launch in Mary Kay’s history. The problem was that none of these companies had asked our permission or paid licensing fees to use our discovery of AHAs as a wrinkle-fighting treatment. In our view, this was clearly a case of patent infringement. If we let them get away with it, not only would we forgo millions of dollars in potential royalty revenue, but Avon would question why it was paying us royalties for a discovery that others were using for free. Our sudden riches, and the urgency of protecting our patents, convinced us that we needed to take full control of NeoStrata and reorganize the business. In 1993, we bought out our partner Milton Sarkin and reincorporated NeoStrata in the state of Delaware, moving our labs, offices, and production facilities to an industrial park in Princeton, New Jersey, near the corporate offices of Johnson & Johnson and Bristol-Myers. We created a wholly owned subsidiary named TriStrata that was responsible for holding our patents, issuing licences, and fighting patent-protection court battles, while NeoStrata itself focused on researching, developing, and producing skin care products. It may have seemed to the outside world that Gene and I had become “overnight” millionaires. In fact, our newfound wealth came as the result of many years of research and hard work. I’ll confess that I enjoyed splurging on a few indulgences: a new car, jewellery for Ho-Chin, and annual Caribbean cruises with my family. But Gene and I both agreed that the best way to spend the bulk of the royalty income was to reinvest it in research and development. Scientific research was my world, and my vision for NeoStrata was to be a company that focused primarily on research. The way I saw it, Gene and I would continue to work as we always had, researching and testing new formulations to treat various skin conditions—albeit with far greater financial resources, thanks to the royalties from

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The problem was that none of these companies had asked our permission or paid licensing fees to use our discovery of AHAs as a wrinkle-fighting treatment.

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In the years to come, Les would shake up NeoStrata in ways that I had never imagined.

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our patents. We would direct some of our research toward cosmetic applications but would target a large part of our money and effort toward the search for cures to serious skin diseases, including psoriasis. We would pass on our discoveries to our staff at NeoStrata, who would then develop them into skin-care products with professional packaging and labelling. Produced in modest amounts, the products would be sold through dermatologists’ offices and could also be shown as samples to larger cosmetics companies interested in purchasing licences to use our discoveries. The money from those licences would be reinvested in further research and development, creating a virtuous circle. Not being a businessperson, I didn’t have any particular strategy to grow the company. But soon after our reincorporation, we hired a CEO with grand ambitions to expand NeoStrata’s reach around the globe—a heavy-hitter in the world of skin-care products named Lester Riley. In the years to come, Les would shake up NeoStrata in ways that I had never imagined.

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16

A Wrinkle in the Business prior to joining neostrata in 1993, Les had been the president of the Dermatological Division of Ortho Pharmaceutical Corporation, a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson. Before ascending to that role, he’d been a high-placed sales and marketing executive at Ortho, at a time when the company experienced phenomenal success, but also generated high-profile controversy, with sales of its prescription skin-care cream Retin-A. A derivative of vitamin A, Retin-A had been approved by the FDA for treatment of acne since the 1970s. But when a clinical trial in 1987 indicated that Retin-A could also minimize wrinkles, Ortho funded dermatologists to go on media tours and press conferences to spread the word about the cream’s anti-aging properties. The strategy worked: sales of Retin-A more than doubled from 1987 to 1988, and the number of U.S. prescriptions for the drug shot up from 1.2 million in 1985 to 2.7 million in 1989. Most of the increase was for patients over thirty-five years of age who didn’t have acne—a sign that it was being used as an anti-aging cream. Clearly, Ortho did a brilliant job of getting the word out to the public about the potential wrinkle-fighting benefits of Retin-A. Perhaps too brilliant, because under American law, while doctors are allowed to prescribe a drug to treat a condition for which it has not been FDA-approved—so-called “off-label” prescriptions—pharmaceutical companies are not allowed to market the drug for those “off-label” purposes. A controversy arose at the highest levels of the American government as to whether Ortho had broken the law. In 1990, the FDA referred the matter to the Department of Justice for further investigation. Though I didn’t know it, that investigation was still ongoing three years later, when Les left Ortho and came to work for us at NeoStrata, bringing with him five Ortho colleagues to form the core of our new executive management team. Gene and I felt we’d made quite a catch in hiring Les and his team. They knew the market for the type of product that NeoStrata produced, they had top-level managerial and executive experience, and Ortho’s phenomenal success with Retin-A seemed to speak well of their sales and marketing ability. On top of that, our new CEO was charismatic and full of energy. He had a big-company mentality, and he brought big dreams to NeoStrata. 111

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In the early 1990s, Gene and I developed a method of regenerating and deeply exfoliating skin called “glycolic acid peels.” These formulations incorporated a high percentage of glycolic acid and could be used by dermatologists to peel away the uppermost layers of dead skin cells in a patient’s epidermis. The glycolic peels were effective in treating acne, keratoses, and superficial scarring. One day, Les observed Gene treating a patient with a glycolic acid peel and noticed that the patient’s skin after the peel had a smooth, glowing appearance. He pitched the peel as a cosmetic treatment and began renting ballrooms in conference centres around the country to show dermatologists how to perform the procedure. This led to the “lunchtime peel” cosmetic craze of the mid-1990s, when Hollywood stars nipped into their dermatologists’ offices at lunch for a quick exfoliation, emerging with soft, rosy cheeks. But Les’s ambitions for NeoStrata reached far beyond lunchtime peels. He intended to build an international distribution network to sell our products in countries around the world. He hoped to find an international investor who would inject money to grow the company; once NeoStrata was big and profitable enough to attract takeover bids, he aimed to sell it to a larger company, realizing a profit for us and turning NeoStrata from a small American firm into multinational brand. Les would also profit from the deal, since he owned shares in NeoStrata as part of his executive compensation package. To realize his vision, Les needed a substantial sum of money to kick-start his expansion efforts. The opportunity to obtain the money fell into our laps one day, when Avon called and offered to buy out its AHA licences. Instead of continuing to pay us a royalty every year on its AHA product sales, the company wanted to buy out its licence for a single lump sum. We authorized Les and our attorney, Kevin McGovern, to undertake negotiations. Les emerged from the negotiations with the sum of $14 million. Some of it went to fund our ongoing legal patent battles; some of it Gene and I kept, investing a large part in our biochemical research; and some we earmarked to pay for our company’s expansion efforts under Les’s leadership. Les travelled around the globe at great expense, meeting with potential distributors and wooing foreign businesspeople. He jetted across Europe and Asia, setting up licensing deals and training distributors. Under his leadership, we spent many millions of dollars setting up a branch office in Taiwan and entering into business ventures with a company in Shanghai, China. Despite his best efforts, he didn’t find an investor who would inject capital to enlarge the company or buy NeoStrata outright and make us all a fortune. Yet he did establish distribution deals in about two dozen countries. Meanwhile, on the legal front, we assembled a first-class team of patent lawyers and litigators from the leading law firms in the United States. The legal team, under the leadership of the high-powered law firms Mayer, Brown & Platt and

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Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, began sending official letters to the companies, notifying them of their patent infringement and offering them an opportunity to take licences to use our discovery—or face legal action. Between lawyers’ fees and our CEO’s efforts to grow the company, we were spending money as quickly as we were making it. Then, on January 11, 1995, a bombshell dropped. That day, the news reported that Les’s former employer, Ortho Pharmaceutical, had pled guilty to conspiracy and obstruction of justice for corruptly persuading employees to destroy documents during the Department of Justice’s investigation of the company’s alleged off-label marketing of Retin-A. Ortho had agreed to a $7.5 million fine, under a plea bargain that ensured it would not be further prosecuted for illegal marketing of Retin-A. But if the company was immune from further prosecution, Les wasn’t. During the investigation, an employee who worked under Les had confessed to shredding thousands of documents in an effort to conceal Ortho’s role in publicizing the wrinkle-fighting properties of Retin-A—and had pointed the finger at Les for allegedly ordering the shredding. The news reported that Les had been indicted on charges of conspiring to defraud federal regulators and persuading others to destroy documents. If convicted, he could face up to five years in prison for the conspiracy charge and ten years in prison for each of the three document-destruction charges, as well as hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines. Les was in China on a business trip when the news hit. I called him into my office immediately upon his return. I was angry that he hadn’t informed me about the document shredding or the ongoing investigation, and I told him as much. Les said that he was completely innocent of the charges: he hadn’t ordered anyone to shred any documents. He believed that Ortho had done nothing illegal in its marketing of Retin-A and that the company should have defended itself in court. But instead, the company had chosen a fine and a plea bargain as the cost of doing business—and had left Les to take the fall. Despite his protestations of innocence, I felt that he had done the wrong thing by not informing me when I hired him about the document-shredding allegations and the investigation against him. As the CEO of my company, his criminal indictment reflected badly on NeoStrata. I told him I felt that I had no choice but to let him go. We agreed that he would leave the company and I would buy out his NeoStrata stocks. It was a deal that cost me millions, but it gave Les a dignified and profitable exit, and it allowed me to avoid a situation where an ex-employee continued to own significant shares of my company. Les had built up incredible loyalty among the staff at NeoStrata, and many of them were in tears at his dismissal. In the end, he was found innocent: a jury acquitted him in November 1995. But he never came back to NeoStrata. Ultimately,

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we had different visions: He wanted to grow the company and sell it; I wanted to return to my original idea of a small company focused on research and development, and leave the conquest of global markets to the multinational big boys. * After letting Les go, I immediately froze all spending and sat down to take a look at the company’s books. I was shocked at the expenses we’d incurred in our global expansion efforts. Besides flight and hotel bills, there were whopping restaurant and bar tabs, as well as lavish entertainment expenses. If we continued down the path we were on, I believed it could only lead to financial ruin. The branch office in Taiwan and the business ventures in Shanghai cost us millions each year without any foreseeable profit. Gene and I decided to terminate all these commitments because they were not cost-effective. Fortunately, we had a source of revenue that wasn’t tied to sales of NeoStrata products: our AHA patent royalties. As cosmetic companies one by one yielded to pressure from our lawyers and signed licensing agreements, our royalty revenues gradually increased. But while some companies gave in to our demands after receiving a lawyer’s letter, others fought back by challenging the validity of our patent. If our adversaries could convince the U.S. Patent Office to invalidate our patent, it would mean that everyone including Avon could use our discovery without paying a single cent for it. On October 28, 1996, a re-examination request was filed with the Patent Office concerning three critical patents held by Gene and me. The first was our original patent dealing broadly with the anti-aging properties of AHAs, filed in August 1989. (This patent had been challenged once before, in 1992, and found valid.) The second patent, filed in 1994, described a method for using lactic acid to treat wrinkles. The third, also filed in 1994, dealt with using glycolic acid, lactic acid, or citric acid to alleviate signs of dermatological aging. Each of these patent documents described in some detail how to formulate bioavailable AHAs into a topical application that could pass through the outer barrier of the skin—the stratum corneum—and penetrate into the dermis to repair the structural degeneration that caused wrinkles. Our patent documents were detailed enough to give chemists from rival companies the information they needed to formulate their own effective AHA products. It was galling to think that certain companies had relied on that information to create million-dollar products, while at the same time arguing that the patents themselves were invalid. The challenge at the Patent Office was a nightmare. I couldn’t sleep. If the patents were struck down, everything else would come tumbling down with it: NeoStrata would go bankrupt. We would have no money to conduct our research into skin diseases. Psychologically, it would be an official rejection of all our work,

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a denigration of our groundbreaking discovery. Besides millions of dollars in income, my professional pride as a scientist was at stake. It took months for Gene and me to muster the evidence to defend our patent. We gathered the before-and-after photos of patients using AHA creams to show that they were effective. Since anyone can doctor a photo, we went further. Gene performed skin biopsies on patients before and after AHA treatment, and we sent them to a pathologist to analyze the changes in the cellular structure of the dermis. We also gathered evidence showing that AHAs had not been used prior to our discovery to treat the skin conditions covered by our patents—obviously, if AHAs were already known to be a treatment for wrinkles, it meant that we had not made an original discovery and therefore could not patent it. On July 15, 1997, nearly a year after the re-examination began, the Patent Office issued its ruling. The examiner upheld all three patents, vindicating the work that Gene and I had done. Our victories at the Patent Office convinced most of the infringing companies to fall into line. We soon signed over ninety separate licensing agreements with virtually everyone in the dermatology and skincare business, including Chanel, Estée Lauder, Chesebrough-Ponds, Elizabeth Arden, Johnson & Johnson, L’Oréal, Boots, Beiersdorf, Bristol-Myers Squibb, and many others. Only Mary Kay cosmetics continued to defy our demands. Our licences provided a revenue stream worth millions of dollars annually, which enabled us to recover from our unsuccessful expansion efforts in Taiwan and China, hire a new executive team, and refocus the company. Our vice-president, Leigh Ann Catlin, took the helm of our international business development efforts, and over the following years concluded many deals and agreements that profitably expanded our international distribution. I convinced my brother Juiming to move to Pennsylvania and take a job as director of quality control for NeoStrata. He grumbled about it, saying that he had just got used to life in Canada after moving away from Taiwan, and now I wanted him to move again. But since I was his older brother, he agreed to come. He made a very fine manager.

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The challenge at the Patent Office was a nightmare. I couldn’t sleep. If the patents were struck down, everything else would come tumbling down with it: NeoStrata would go bankrupt.

The examiner upheld all three patents, vindicating the work that Gene and I had done.

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We offered companies three ways of taking advantage of our patents. First, they could simply buy a licence to use AHAs. Alternatively, we could compound the alpha-hydroxyacids complex and sell it to the client company, which then incorporated it into its own cosmetic formulations. Third, we could formulate the entire product, subcontract the manufacturing, and allow the client company to package and brand the product as its own. Meanwhile, we also continued to develop and sell new products under the NeoStrata brand. Up until 1997, our NeoStrata products were sold exclusively through dermatologists’ offices. These products had higher concentrations of active ingredients than cosmetic-store products and were therefore best used under a doctor’s supervision. However, seeing the popularity of over-the-counter AHA creams, we decided to develop our own line of consumer skin-care products. We came up with formulations for a range of products, including moisturizers, cleansers, facial masks, and eye creams, and in 1997 we launched our Exuviance line in department stores such as Dillard’s, Elder-Beerman, Marshall Field’s, and Nordstrom. In addition to our AHA formulations, NeoStrata developed and marketed a line of sensitive-skin products containing poly-hydroxyacids, which are related to AHAs but have a larger molecular structure. These products were based on our discovery that poly-hydroxyacids have many of the same rejuvenating effects as AHAs but take longer to penetrate the skin and are therefore less irritating. After a rocky start, our company enjoyed a prosperous and productive period through the late 1990s. Alpha-hydroxyacids proved so effective that at the height of their popularity, over 90 percent of all topical anti-aging products had one or more AHAs in the formulation. In fact, from the time Avon launched Anew in 1992 to the expiry of our original AHA patent in 2009, companies paid many millions in licensing fees for AHA technology, and AHA products generated more than $10 billion in retail sales. In addition to the royalties we received from other companies, our own NeoStrata and Exuviance lines enjoyed modest success both in the United States and through international distributors in Canada, Asia, and Europe. With our company running smoothly, I was able to get back into my lab and continue my research into skin biochemistry, aging, and dermatological diseases. Between 1989 and 2010, Gene and I would publish twenty-three scientific papers on skin biology and dermatological treatments, including an entire chapter on organic acids in the authoritative Textbook of Cosmetic Dermatology. One weekend in 2003, the scratching of rodents in the attic of our home told me that it was time once again to climb to the roof of the “castle” and wield my handyman’s hammer. But when I picked up the ladder to hoist it to the roof, it felt so heavy that I could barely lift it. Of course, the ladder hadn’t gained in mass. I was simply getting older. I was seventy-one years of age, and my work in the chemistry lab continued apace—but

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my work as a home handyman had to come to an end. Stubbornly, I ascended to the roof and made the necessary repairs. Later that day, however, I told Ho-Chin we needed to start looking for a new home. We found a spacious modern two-storey house in the Philadelphia suburb of Chalfont, next to five acres of woodland and with an expansive lawn in the front and flower and vegetable gardens in the back. I took special delight in the gardens. The sight of plump zucchinis and luscious red tomatoes took me back to my childhood, when I’d planted vegetables in the soil on the edges of bomb craters. Although I’d never cried as a child, as a seventy-yearold man it sometimes brought a tear to my eye to stand amid the abundance of that garden and think of how, as a young boy, I’d lain in bed with an empty belly and dreamed of someday eating my fill. By the time we moved into the house in Chalfont, our children had grown up, and Ho-Chin and I had the financial freedom to truly enjoy our lives. We bought a cabin in the Pocono Mountains on a dirt road lined with wild raspberry bushes. The back door looked out onto a small lake where I could stand on the dock and indulge in my love of fishing, a favourite pastime since boyhood. Ho-Chin took up the harp, and we still enjoyed the occasional gambling trip to the Atlantic City casinos. It would have been an idyllic time, if not for one irritant—our ongoing legal fight with Mary Kay Cosmetics. We had wanted to avoid a costly court battle with the billion-dollar Pink Lady of the cosmetics industry, but Mary Kay’s continued refusal to pay royalties for its AHA-based Skin Revival System left us no choice. In 2001, we filed a lawsuit in the United States District Court in Wilmington, Delaware.

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I took special delight in the gardens. The sight of plump zucchinis and luscious red tomatoes took me back to my childhood, when I’d planted vegetables in the soil on the edges of bomb craters.

We bought a cabin in the Pocono Mountains. The back door looked out onto a small lake where I could stand on the dock and indulge in my love of fishing.

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17

Head to Head with the Pink Lady the wheels of justice grind slowly, but in March 2005, our date in court finally arrived. Our legal trial team, led by the famous trial lawyer Michael Ciresi, flew in from as far afield as Minneapolis and New York City. We rented the entire floor of a hotel to accommodate the attorneys, their assistants, and the boxes full of documents needed to argue the case. Fans of television legal dramas might imagine a courtroom packed with media hordes and sobbing witnesses. The truth was far more mundane. Besides the judge and jurors, the occupants of that spartan and impersonal courtroom included a phalanx of lawyers, a few corporate executives, and some scientific expert witnesses like me, who felt more at home in the lab or medical clinic than in a court of law. With a bang of the judge’s gavel, the trial got underway. One of our lawyers and one of Mary Kay’s lawyers each rose in turn to present opening arguments to the jury. Since I knew the substance of our own patent-infringement argument, I was most interested to hear what the counsel for the Pink Lady would say in the company’s defence. Mary Kay’s lawyer Roy Hardin gave a long speech, in which two points stood out: First, Mary Kay intended to prove that our patents were invalid, even though they had been upheld previously by the Patent Office. Second, Mary Kay intended to argue that, even if the patents were valid, the Mary Kay products did not infringe on them. How could the company argue that their products didn’t infringe, when their own marketing material boasted that the Mary Kay Skin Revival System contained the AHA lactic acid and that it reduced the appearance of fine lines and wrinkles—the very substance of our patent? The argument for the defence came down to Mary Kay’s definition of the

The argument for the defence came down to Mary Kay’s definition of the word “wrinkle.”

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word “wrinkle.” I admit there is an element of the absurd in two companies spending hundreds of hours and millions of dollars in a fight over the definition of the word “wrinkle.” Yet the lawsuit hung on this critical point. The reader is already familiar with my explanation of how wrinkles originate in the underlying dermal layer of the skin. But Mary Kay argued that there was a different kind of wrinkle, one not covered in our patents. They claimed the existence of “epidermal wrinkles,” which, they said, occurred in the 0.1-millimetre-thin upper layer of the skin, the epidermis. Mary Kay insisted that the lactic acid in their products never penetrated through to the underlying dermis, but instead stayed on the surface of the skin, attacking these so-called “epidermal wrinkles” and—together with the other ingredients in their formulae—effecting the dramatic cosmetic results depicted in their Skin Revival System ads. Of course, the idea of an “epidermal wrinkle” was scientifically absurd. But the jurors were not scientists. Would they believe Mary Kay’s argument? Millions of dollars depended on the answer. As the plaintiffs, we bore the responsibility of presenting our case first. Under the rules of civil litigation, the burden fell upon us to prove that Mary Kay was guilty of patent infringement. If we did not present enough evidence to prove guilt, then the jury would find Mary Kay not guilty, by reason of insufficient evidence. As the defendant, Mary Kay did not have to prove its own innocence; all it had to do was to raise enough uncertainty in the minds of the jurors that they would give the company the benefit of the doubt. As we soon found out, Mary Kay’s defence lawyer, Roy Hardin, would do his best to raise those doubts with hard-hitting cross-examination. Our lawyer, Jan Conlin, began to systematically lay out our case, and in due course she called me to the stand to describe my work with Gene, our discoveries, patents, and the previous reviews of those patents by the Patent Office. She then asked to explain the structure of the skin and the biological process of skin degeneration that causes wrinkles. “Are wrinkles formed in the epidermis?” Ms. Conlin asked me. “No.” “Why not?” “There are two reasons,” I said. “Number one: the epidermis is too thin. It’s only 0.1 millimetre. And number two, the skin of the epidermis renews itself. If it were in the epidermis, you wouldn’t need treatment; no one would have wrinkles.” “Now, Doctor,” she continued. “If we looked at our fingerprints: very fine lines, correct?” “Yes.” “Are they in the epidermis or the dermis?” “The dermis, of course.” “How would you ever get rid of your fingerprints?”

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“The only way you can get rid of them is to destroy the dermis, not the epidermis.” My testimony continued in a scientific vein for some time, until finally our lawyer sat down and Roy Hardin rose for Mary Kay’s cross-examination. The man was bound and determined to make me admit that wrinkles could exist in the epidermis alone. “Good morning, Dr. Yu,” Mr. Hardin began, quite civilly. “Good morning, Mr. Hardin,” I replied. “Would you agree with me,” Mr. Hardin continued after a few more formalities, “that in order to treat the dermal layer of the skin, one has to formulate products with an intent that they actually pass all the way through the epidermis and get into the dermal layer of the skin?” “Yes,” I agreed. “Now, in your way of speaking and thinking, Doctor, the word “wrinkle” always and only refers to dermal structures; is that correct?” “Yes.” “You were here for my opening argument, correct, Doctor?” “That is correct.” “And in that opening, I have a slide of a statement your company made.” Mr. Hardin put the statement up on an overhead projector so that the jury could see it. “This statement by your company says: ‘Lay consumers lump wrinkles and fine lines together into a group that includes both ridges and furrows caused by dermal degeneration, and ridges and furrows caused by decidedly superficial/epidermal irregularities (dryness, cracking, irregular exfoliation.)’” He pinned me with his eyes. “Now, do you disagree with the statement of your own company that wrinkles can include ridges and furrows caused by decidedly superficial epidermal irregularities, Doctor?” I looked at the slide. I had no idea who had made this statement, but it certainly wasn’t me. “I do not agree,” I said. “Because all these words in parentheses—dryness, cracking, irregular exfoliation—all these are epidermal conditions.” The lawyer seemed taken aback. “You don’t agree with this statement?” “I don’t agree the wrinkles can really be improved by epidermal conditions,” I said. Mr. Hardin tried another tack: “Now, would you agree with me that well after the date of your invention, well after 1986, that scientists that were studying AHAs and knew about AHAs would believe that fine wrinkles were associated with the epidermis and not the dermis?” the lawyer pursued.

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“In fact, I’m not aware of this,” I answered. “They can say anything they want. I don’t agree.” The lawyer wasn’t about to give up. He pointed out that AHAs were used in certain formulations to exfoliate dead cells in the upper layer of the skin. This was certainly true; after all, Gene and I had used this property of AHAs in our ichthyosis creams and glycolic acid peels. But that was different from the AHAs’ wrinklefighting properties, although the lawyer clearly wanted to conflate the two. “Now,” Mr. Hardin continued. “If I were to put an AHA composition on my face that was formulated not to reach the dermal layer, but simply to stay in the stratum corneum and exfoliate and increase cell renewal, if I do that for a month, you would agree that it would be possible that I could reduce the visible appearance of a wrinkle, wouldn’t you, Doctor?” “I do not agree with your conclusion,” I said. “Doctor, isn’t it true as you sit here today, you don’t know whether or not extended use of AHAs to simply exfoliate the epidermal layer of the skin will or will not reduce wrinkles?” the lawyer insisted. “I’ve not done it, that simple exfoliating can reduce wrinkles,” I answered. “You’ve not done the test?” “I have not done that.” “It could or it might not,” Mr. Hardin persevered. “You’ve just never tested to see if that’s possible?” “Because you already said the conclusion yourself: it’s only renewal,” I explained. Did he really not understand the science, or was he deliberately trying to trip me up? I added: “And you don’t know what kind of formulation you’re using. Maybe the AHA is really getting to dermis.” “But,” the lawyer persevered. “The answer to my question is, you have not run a test and so you do not know whether just exfoliating the skin will reduce a wrinkle, correct?” His insistence on this illogical point was exasperating. “Just exfoliating will not scientifically,” I said. “It will not?” “Will not.” “And even if I do it for a month?” “Or two months,” I said. “Exfoliating alone will not do it.” “Didn’t you tell me at your deposition that you would have to run a test because you didn’t know?” he insisted. “I don’t know, but there are two answers,” I said. “Personally, I have not done a test by just exfoliating to improve wrinkles. Number two is: I’m a scientist. I answer scientifically. Okay?”

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“So theoretically, you don’t think it’s possible, but you have never actually done the test to find out for sure; is that correct?” the lawyer insisted. “I have not done that,” I answered. What more could I say? It was a relief to leave the stand after this truly frustrating testimony; yet I worried that Mr. Hardin had raised a doubt in the minds of the jurors. If the jury was willing to believe that wrinkles could exist in the epidermis alone, all Mr. Hardin had to do was convince them that the Mary Kay products worked their wrinkle-fighting magic on the top layer of skin, without ever penetrating through to the dermis. If the jury believed that, then the Mary Kay products wouldn’t violate our patent and we would lose the lawsuit—and potentially millions of dollars in royalties. It was critical for us to prove to the jury that the Mary Kay Skin Revival System products did, indeed, penetrate into the dermis. To do so, we called as an expert witness Dr. Norman Weiner, a PhD in pharmaceutics who had taught at both Columbia University and the University of Michigan and who specialized in designing formulations for products applied to the skin. In preparation for the trial, we had retained Dr. Weiner to study the exact formulations of the Mary Kay Skin Revival System products and determine whether they infringed on our patents. He determined that they did and agreed to testify in the case. “Dr. Weiner, could you briefly tell the jury how wrinkles are formed?” Jan Conlin, our lawyer, began as Dr. Weiner took the stand. “Yes,” said Dr. Weiner. “The skin, as I try to explain it, is two separate layers, and it’s divided into the epidermis and the dermis. “The purpose of the epidermis is to create this barrier that keeps us alive, the stratum corneum. It’s an amazing barrier because the easiest substance to penetrate any membrane is water; but the stratum corneum is designed that it’s so impermeable that it keeps the water from leaving our body. So the stratum corneum is keeping things from leaving, like water, but also keeping things from going in. “Now, the dermis has a number of functions, but clearly, the most important function is to give us this structural function of the skin. We can press down and it will bounce up.” “Well, let me ask you that,” Ms. Conlin interjected. “What is skin firmness due to?” “Well, skin firmness is due to a particular protein called collagen,” Dr. Weiner answered. “My cousin is an engineer, so this is the way I explain it to him: if you could think about the skin as an elevated highway, the collagen fibres in the dermis are the structural rods that hold it up. And the epidermis is merely sitting on top of it. In fact, if you look at collagen under the electron microscope, that’s exactly what it looks like. It looks like bundles of rods.”

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“How are wrinkles formed?” Ms. Conlin continued. “Just generally explain it briefly.” “Think about these rods holding things up, and as they begin to deteriorate, they’re not as good structural elements anymore,” Dr. Weiner explained. “And what happens is you begin to see sags. But this does not happen all at once. It’s not like one day you have beautiful unwrinkled skin, and then you wake up the next morning and you have deep wrinkles. So it starts fine and then, as more damage occurs either by age or exposure to sun, the little lines become little wrinkles, and the little wrinkles eventually become big wrinkles.” “What structural components, if any, exist in the epidermis?” Ms. Conlin asked. “There are no structural components,” Dr. Weiner replied. “There’s just cells in an aqueous medium.” “Could you have, in your mind, a wrinkle in the epidermis?” “No.” “Why not?” “Well, you know, first of all, there’s no structural units, and so there’s nothing that you can do to create a wrinkle. You couldn’t do it, period. But if you go even further and think about a visible wrinkle—a visible wrinkle in something the thickness of a hair as looked at from a couple of feet away—I cannot envision anyone having good enough eyesight to see that.” Having described the structure of skin and the process of wrinkle formation, Dr. Weiner was then asked to testify as to whether the AHAs in the Mary Kay products would penetrate through the barrier of the stratum corneum, into the dermis, where they could affect the structural elements of the skin to prevent wrinkling. Dr. Weiner told the jury about two factors that influence whether a formulation will penetrate into the dermis. The first is the pH of the formulation. The second factor is the presence of chemicals known as “permeation enhancers.” These permeation enhancers temporarily open up chemical pathways through the epidermis, allowing the AHAs and other elements of the formulation to pass through to the dermis, Dr. Weiner explained. Ms. Conlin then put the master formulation for Mary Kay’s Skin Revival System up on an overhead projector and asked Dr. Weiner to tell the jury about it. “This cream is what is called an oil and water emulsion,” Dr. Weiner began. “We all know that oil and water don’t mix. So to keep the oil drops from separating out, we have to add something called an emulsifier.” “Okay. What is an emulsifier?” Ms. Conlin asked “An emulsifier is an ingredient or set of ingredients, and they form around the emulsion droplet and keep it stable.” “Are there other properties to an emulsifier?” the lawyer pursued.

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“Yes. The very property, the same exact property, that makes it an emulsifier— makes it protect the droplet—also gives it the property of being a permeation enhancer,” Dr. Weiner replied. “And a permeation enhancer, if I recall your testimony previously, is something that allows material to more easily penetrate through the skin?” the lawyer asked. “That’s exactly right.” “Now, are there formulation guidelines on how many emulsifiers are needed to keep this oil and water from separating?” Ms. Conlin continued. “Yes,” Dr. Weiner replied. “There’s a general rule that people use when they make emulsions. It’s the rule of ten to one. In other words, for ten parts of oil, you will generally need about one part of emulsifier.” “How many parts emulsifier actually exist in this particular formulation?” the lawyer asked, indicating the Mary Kay Skin Revival formula. “Well, let’s add ’em up.” Dr. Weiner said. Directing the jury to the list of ingredients on the overhead projector, he tallied up the ingredients labelled by Mary Kay as emulsifiers. “We have about seven parts of emulsifier to ten parts of oil. That’s an awful lot,” he concluded. “In your opinion, Dr. Weiner, why would a company include seven times the amount of emulsifiers that they need to keep the oil and the water together?” Ms. Conlin asked. “Well, they’re well known as permeation enhancers. That’s the only other potential use that I see,” Dr. Weiner said. “So the additional ingredients that are listed as emulsifiers here are actually being used to enhance penetration of the product through the skin?” “Absolutely.” “In your opinion, Dr. Weiner, is the lactic acid concentration of these products as it exists in these specific formulations sufficient to penetrate the stratum corneum and affect the dermis?” “Oh, absolutely,” he said. Next, Ms. Conlin turned to evidence of Mary Kay’s own clinical test results of its Skin Revival products. These tests, conducted over an eight-week period, showed that people who used Mary Kay’s AHA-infused cream experienced a reduction in the number and depth of fine lines and wrinkles and an increase in the firmness and elasticity of their skin; those who used a placebo cream showed no improvement. “Did you ever consider, Dr. Weiner, doing your own tests on the Mary Kay products?” Ms. Conlin asked. “I considered it, yes.” “And did you do it?”

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“No, no. Once I saw the internal documents of Mary Kay and their own tests, I said that there’s absolutely no need for me to do any other tests because the tests as I saw them were conclusive.” To Dr. Weiner, the tests were conclusive because he knew that wrinkles originated in the dermis, and therefore the Mary Kay product must have penetrated to the dermis to produce the wrinkle-fighting results shown in the tests. This, combined with the permeation enhancers in the Mary Kay formula, meant there was no doubt in his mind—or in mine—that the Skin Revival products breached our patent. But Roy Hardin was not about to let the case rest there. Instead, he would use Dr. Weiner’s decision not to conduct independent testing as a way to raise doubts in the minds of the jury. “Good afternoon, Dr. Weiner,” Mr. Hardin said, as he rose in cross-examination. “Good afternoon,” Dr. Weiner replied. “Now, would you agree with me that there are two factual issues that have to be demonstrated to this jury?” Mr. Hardin asked, coming straight to the point. “One is that the products that Mary Kay gives its customers have AHAs formulated in a manner such that the AHA will penetrate the stratum corneum and enter the dermal layer of the skin?” “I agree,” said Dr. Weiner. “Okay. And that can be easily tested: the actual movement of AHA from the top of the skin into the dermal layer of the skin, that can be tested using a cell? And you, in fact, are an expert in how to do that testing; isn’t that correct?” Mr. Hardin continued. “That’s correct,” Dr. Weiner agreed. “You can determine the amount that will go into the skin and into the dermis.” “And you can do that test in about twelve or thirty-six hours?” “It’s a little complicated, but I won’t argue with you on that.” “And you could do it for several thousand dollars, two or three thousand dollars?” “I won’t argue with that either.” “So it’s very possible, completely feasible, to take all of these Mary Kay products, put them on a Franz cell, and within a matter of days and several thousand dollars, you could come in and tell this jury that Mary Kay’s product penetrates through that skin, through that stratum corneum and delivers AHA below, correct?” the lawyer demanded. Sitting in the audience, I felt a sinking sensation as the significance of Mr.  Hardin’s questioning dawned on me. Clearly, the lawyer meant to sow a doubt in the jury’s minds: if this famous expert, Dr. Weiner, had the ability to test the skin-penetrating abilities of Mary Kay products, why hadn’t he done so? Did he fear the results that the test would reveal? Did he have something to hide? “Why would I want to do that?” Dr. Weiner shot back.

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“You could.” “Sure.” “You absolutely could?” “Sure, I could.” “You have not?” “No.” “Okay.” Mr. Hardin would have been happy move on, leaving the unstated implication hanging in the air, that Dr. Weiner had deliberately avoided conducting the tests, because he was afraid that the tests would prove that Mary Kay’s products actually didn’t penetrate to the dermal layer. But Dr. Weiner wouldn’t let him get away with that. “You don’t want me to tell you the reason?” he interjected. “You can explain your answer, go ahead.” “Okay,” Dr. Weiner said. “Franz diffusion cells and Franz diffusion tests are done to evaluate and compare formulations, as to which of the formulations you’re going to use for clinical testing. Since the clinical results are in, I don’t see any reason whatsoever why I would do Franz diffusion cells.” Dr. Weiner had repaired the damage done in cross-examination as best he could, but I feared that Mr. Hardin had still succeeded in raising the possibility of a suspicious ulterior motive in the minds of the jurors. The legal sparring went on that way for several days. Every time we brought a witness to the stand, the Mary Kay lawyers sought to trip them up in cross-examination. At last we presented our final witness, and it was Mary Kay’s turn to present its defence. The company brought in its own experts to testify that fine lines on the upper surface of the skin, such as those caused by dehydration, could be construed as “wrinkles.” It brought evidence attempting to show there was no absolute proof that the Mary Kay products penetrated to the deeper layers of the skin. And in case the jury didn’t buy its arguments about “epidermal wrinkles,” it put on the stand a dermatologist named Dr. Zoe Draelos to testify that our patents were not valid in the first place. In preparation for the court case, Dr. Draelos had scoured the scientific literature for evidence that AHAs had been in use as wrinkle-fighting agents before Gene and I filed our patent. If so, our patent would be invalid; after all, we would have had no right to patent an invention that we didn’t actually invent. If this were proven, the court could declare our patent invalid on the basis of “prior art.” In this part of the court case, we held a certain advantage. In the first part of the case, when we accused Mary Kay of infringing our patents, it was up to us to prove Mary Kay guilty. The jury had yet to decide on that question. But now that Mary Kay—as part of its defence—was trying to strike down the validity of our patents, the burden of proof shifted. The Patent Office had already

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upheld our patents and dismissed arguments of prior art during its patent reexaminations in the 1990s. To strike down our patents now, Mary Kay would have to find new examples of prior art that were more pertinent than those considered by the Patent Office, and prove by “clear and convincing” evidence that our patents were invalid. “Dr. Draelos,” Mary Kay’s lawyer Charles Phipps began, after a few opening formalities. “Tell us what you concluded in this case.” “I have concluded that the patents are invalid,” Dr. Draelos answered. “Okay. And please explain to us how you reached that conclusion.” “I evaluated prior-art references that disclose the use of lactic acid applications to the skin to ultimately achieve reduction in dermal degenerative changes, known as wrinkles.” Dr. Draelos claimed to have found four written references that proved clinical dermatologists had been using AHAs to treat wrinkles since long before Gene and I filed our patent. The first was a paper published in 1941 that described the use of a lactic acid “peel” to rejuvenate the skin. The second was a similar article on chemical “peels” from the 1946 Illinois Medical Journal. The third reference, a 1983 book entitled Younger Skin: How to Get It, How to Keep It, discussed the use of AHAs as moisturizers. The last was a consumer beauty book titled Wrinkles: How to Prevent Them, How to Erase Them, written in 1978 by Dr. Lida Livingston. Mr. Phipps took Dr. Draelos through each reference in turn, lingering on the book Wrinkles: How to Prevent Them, How to Erase Them. After formally entering the book into evidence, he handed it to Dr. Draelos. “Was this book considered by the Patent Office?” the lawyer asked. “No.” “What’s important about this book?” the lawyer continued. “I actually think it’s just as important as the medical articles, because it describes what the consumer knowledge base was at the time, what was being told to people who were looking at ways of getting rid of wrinkles,” Dr. Draelos said. “And what discussion out of the Defendant’s Exhibit 22, the wrinkle book, is important for your opinion?” “There’s a section in here called ‘skin peelers,’” Dr. Draelos said, flipping to the correct page. “And it says: ‘Every once in a while, you’ll notice ads about skin peelers or other abrasives that get rid of wrinkles. These products or treatments take off the epidermis layer and sometimes part of the lower dermis, too.’” “Thank you, Dr. Draelos. Continue.” “A little further down it says: ‘Another type of peeling agent comes from the acids of fruits…You’ll be astonished to see the dry skin that will come off and delighted by the refreshed and glowing look of your skin.’”

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“What do you understand this reference to be referring to when it references acids of fruits?” Mr. Phipps asked. “It would be referring to the category of acids of fruits that are a lot of times used synonymously with hydroxyacids, and that can include glycolic acid, lactic acid, and citric acid,” Dr. Draelos replied. Dr. Draelos went through the three other prior art references in the same manner, seeking to prove that Gene and I had discovered nothing new in using AHAs to treat wrinkles. By the time she finished, her evidence may well have seemed persuasive to the jury. The time had come for our lawyers to earn their milliondollar fees and tear apart her testimony in cross-examination. Rising from her seat, Jan Conlin turned the court’s attention to the book Wrinkles: How to Prevent Them, How to Erase Them. “You have referenced this section of this particular publication as, in fact, anticipating the claims of the patents in this case, correct?” said Ms. Conlin. “Yes,” Dr. Draelos answered. “Now, you understand that, in order to find the patent invalid, there has to be clear and convincing evidence, correct?” “That’s correct.” “Not just a preponderance, but something clear and convincing, correct?” “That’s correct.” “And you also understand that the references that you rely on for the purposes of invalidating the patent have to be more pertinent than those that were considered by the examiner at the Patent Office, correct?” said Ms. Conlin. “Yes.” “In fact, you believe that this particular section is more important than all of the references that the examiner looked at?” Ms. Conlin pressed. “I think that’s an important reference because these are beauty people, not medical people, and this is what they are writing about at the time,” Dr. Draelos explained. “A lot of what’s done in doctors’ offices is never written and put in the literature. It’s practised. It’s taught, but it’s not written in medical journals.” “Okay.” The lawyer opened the book. “Now, in this particular reference, what you believe is more pertinent than anything considered by the examiner, it first talks about products that take off the upper epidermis layer and sometimes part of the lower dermis layer, too. Do you see that, Doctor?” “Yes, I do.” “What would happen if you took off the lower layer of your dermis?” The lawyer sprung her trap. “Well, this is . . . this is a consumer book, so I understand what she means here,” the witness faltered. “But medically, if you took off the, very, very bottom of the dermis, you would take off the entire skin and create a scar.” “You would bleed heavily and then scar, right?” the lawyer insisted.

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“Well, if you took off the lower layer of dermis, you would remove all the skin. The dermis is the very bottom of the skin,” Dr. Draelos said. “I guess would that take care of the wrinkles, then?” Ms. Conlin quipped. Dr. Draelos went on the defensive. “Well, this is a consumer person writing now, and so I don’t think they’re talking about the lower, lowest, bottom of the dermis,” she said. “But they’re referring to the fact that they believed these products could have epidermal and dermal effects. They’re not talking about a third-degree burn, which removes all of the skin and the very bottom of the dermis.” Having made her point about the reliability of the text, Ms. Conlin moved on: “Does it mention the type of formulation that you would make to make this acid of fruit peel? What are the ingredients?” “No. That’s not listed in this discussion.” “Okay. But, in fact, later on in the book, it does talk about peels, doesn’t it, Dr. Draelos? “Yes. There are many chapters in this book.” “And it talks about making peels using papaya or pineapple juice, correct?” “Yes.” “Now, do you think that papaya juice can take off the lower level of your dermis?” Ms. Conlin asked. Mary Kay’s lawyer rose from his seat. “I’m going to object. This mischaracterizes the document.” “It’s cross-examination, your Honour,” Ms. Conlin replied. “The objection will be overruled,” said the judge. “Can papaya juice take off your skin?” Ms. Conlin repeated. “I should hope not,” said Dr. Draelos. “How about pineapple juice?” “I should hope not either. If you spilled your juice on you, you would be in trouble in the morning.” “Are either one of those alpha-hydroxyacids?” “Consumers talk about them as being fruit acids because they come from fruit, but pineapple actually contains bromaline, and papaya contains bromaine, which is a meat tenderizer,” Dr. Draelos said. “Chemically, technically, they are not. But they’re fruits and they’re acidic and so, you know, sometimes you have to make a distinction between what’s important to a consumer and what’s important to an organic chemist.” Fortunately, our patents and their formulae depended on organic chemistry, not on consumer fads, and Ms. Conlin had made her point that a half-baked mention of fruit acid peels in a consumer beauty book could not invalidate a scientific patent. Ms. Conlin made similar short work of the other references brought forward by Dr. Draelos to prove prior art. By the time the dermatologist left the witness

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stand, her testimony had been shaken, and our right to the patents vigorously defended. Still, I could feel some sympathy for Dr. Draelos, having been through my own gruelling cross-examination. After five days of testimony, the case finally concluded on March 8, 2005, with lawyers from each side presenting a final summation. The judge gave his instructions to the jury, and the jury retired to consider its verdict. For two tense and sleepless nights, I fretted over the outcome. Then, on March 10, the jury announced it had come to a verdict. For the final time, we reassembled in the courtroom. The foreperson rose to deliver the verdict: The jury found Mary Kay guilty on six counts of patent infringement. In compensation, the jury awarded us a royalty of 6.5 percent on $405 million of sales of Mary Kay products—a sum that amounted to just over $26 million. Mary Kay filed an appeal, but a year later, the appeals court upheld the jury’s verdict. Calculating pre- and posttrial interest, the appeals court ordered Mary Kay to pay us $40 million in missing royalties. It was a moment of sweet satisfaction. By upholding our patents, the court vindicated the value of the scientific discoveries that Gene and I had made. Though much of the money went to the lawyers or was reinvested back into our company, my portion of the settlement ensured that I would live in comfort for the rest of my life and that I would have enough money to pursue any type of scientific research I wished. It also meant that I could give back to the institutions that had helped me to achieve my success—and in so doing, help other young scientists to pursue their dreams.

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It was a moment of sweet satisfaction. By upholding our patents, the court vindicated the value of the scientific discoveries that Gene and I had made.

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18

Moving Forward, Giving Back after the mary kay case, business continued at NeoStrata under the excellent guidance of Mark Steele, whom we hired as CEO in 2006. In 2009, our original patent on AHAs as a wrinkle-fighting treatment expired, and the knowledge entered the public domain. This ended a lucrative revenue stream based on royalty payments from companies that had licensed our technology. Gene and I made it clear to NeoStrata management that the company would have to operate on a selfsustaining basis, without depending on royalty payments to make up for deficits in sales of our NeoStrata products. To their credit, Mark, his executive team, and the employees rose to the challenge, and the company operated with both financial and scientific integrity for the following seven years. Over those years, we received several offers from large companies wanting to purchase NeoStrata. Some of these were private equity buyers that intended to buy NeoStrata, cut costs (usually by laying off workers), and resell the company at a profit. Needless to say, I wasn’t interested in these mercenary propositions. Other offers came from reputable large pharmaceutical companies that saw value in NeoStrata’s products and our brand. However, I wasn’t tempted to sell until Johnson & Johnson approached us in 2014. It’s funny how things sometimes come full circle. More than a decade earlier, Les Riley had left Johnson & Johnson to become CEO of NeoStrata, where he had sought an international purchaser for our company. Now, it was Les’s former employer that was making overtures to us. A huge company with 250 subsidiaries, $70  billion in annual sales, and 127,100 employees worldwide, Johnson & Johnson initially approached our CEO Mark Steele about licensing some of our recent discoveries in skin care. The company was interested, for example, in a synthetic molecule that Gene and I have developed called A-33, which mimics the natural amino acid tyrosine derivative, used by cells to build proteins. Through discussions with Mark, the Johnson & Johnson representatives learned more about our company, our research, and the new products we were developing. As a result of these discussions, they made an offer in 2014 to license some of our new technologies. Mark rebuffed their offer, telling them it did not offer fair value. Still, he kept the lines of discussion open and invited them to come back with a better offer. 133

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We wanted to make sure that selling the company wouldn’t destroy it. We wanted to make sure that it went to a good home.

Their hard work had contributed to my success, and I was happy to share with them the fruits of my good fortune.

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In 2015, Johnson & Johnson came back with an aggressive offer worth many millions of dollars—not to license NeoStrata’s technologies, but to buy the entire company. The offer was excellent; still, I hesitated. NeoStrata represented a large part of my life’s work. We had 100 employees, many of them loyal, long-time workers. We wanted to make sure that selling the company wouldn’t destroy it. We wanted to make sure that it went to a good home. Gene and I met personally with the senior management of Johnson & Johnson to discuss their plans. They assured us that NeoStrata would remain as a separate, premium product line within Johnson & Johnson. The existing management team would stay in place, and no employees would lose their jobs. As well, Johnson & Johnson agreed that two laboratories where Gene and I were conducting biochemical research would not be part of the sale, but instead we would move them off-site and continue to operate them independently. Gene and I agreed: it was a financially fair offer that aligned with our ethical and scientific values. We accepted the proposal and on May 27, 2016, ownership of NeoStrata was transferred to Johnson & Johnson. I had one final order of business to accomplish before totally relinquishing my involvement in NeoStrata. Gene and I had agreed to set aside a significant portion of the money from the sale of the company and divide it among all NeoStrata employees. I sat down with Mark to divide up the money proportionally among our 100 employees, depending on their salary level and years of service. The payments enabled some employees the pay off debts or mortgages, or fund their children’s education. As we gathered for a final farewell party in June 2016, I was very touched to hear their stories and to receive thank-you notes from each employee. Their hard work had contributed to my success, and I was happy to share with them the fruits of my good fortune. I was in tears when I left the party. Though I struggled with poverty for many years, since achieving financial success I have practised a philosophy of giving back. I sponsored scholarships for students at my vocational high school in Taiwan and gave money to my elementary school to buy books for their library.

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Dr. Yu reunites with his former supervisor, Professor Hans Baer, at the University of Ottawa, to hand out the inaugural Dr. Yu Scholarships, 2008.

In 2008, after winning the court case against Mary Kay cosmetics, I donated $500,000 to the Department of Chemistry at the University of Ottawa, whose graduate scholarship for international students had allowed me to leave Taiwan in 1962 and start a new life in North America. With a matching donation from the University of Ottawa, a $1-million endowment fund was set up, which today grants thousands of dollars in scholarships every year to outstanding graduate students. In April 2008, I returned to the university to hand out the first Dr. Yu scholarships in person. In some ways, the city hadn’t changed. The winter was as long as I remembered it: while the cherry blossoms bloomed in Philadelphia, snow blanketed the ground in Ottawa. The century-old rooming houses of the student district where I’d lived in the 1960s still clung to the hills leading up to the university campus, and on the Rideau Canal, the slushy, late-season ice reminded me of learning to skate more than forty years before.

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In some ways, the city hadn’t changed. The winter was as long as I remembered it: while the cherry blossoms bloomed in Philadelphia, snow blanketed the ground in Ottawa.

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Not only do scholarships help young scientists to realize their dreams, but those young scientists in turn make their own contributions to the betterment of society.

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But the university itself had changed almost beyond recognition. Around the historic core I remembered, stretched block upon block of modern buildings. Though many had been constructed in the 1970s, some were brand new—like the impressive Biosciences Complex with its state-of-the art laboratory facilities. When I’d studied at the University of Ottawa in the 1960s, I was one of just 4,300 students, only a handful of whom came from abroad. By the time I returned in 2008, the university had a total enrolment of more than 36,000 students, who hailed from all corners of the globe. My old mentor Hans Baer welcomed me warmly back to the Chemistry Department, where he had taught for more than forty years. In the time since we’d worked together, Dr. Baer had built a distinguished career and earned worldwide acclaim for his work on oligosaccharides and nitro carbohydrates, used in antibiotic research. He had won the American Chemical Society’s prestigious Claude S. Hudson Award in Carbohydrate Chemistry and mentored generations of international students at the University of Ottawa, yet he remained as humble as I remembered him. In my speech to the three scholarship winners, I urged them to embrace the changes that life can bring. “Life is full of ups and downs. But if it was all smooth, we would not have excitement,” I said. “It is important to pursue your interests where they take you and to pursue excellence.” After Dr. Baer died in 2014, I created the Professor Hans Helmut Baer Scholarship in Chemistry, awarded annually to one international student admitted to a graduate program at the University of Ottawa’s Department of Chemistry. And in 2015, when Temple University’s School of Medicine re-established its Department of Dermatology, Gene and I made a combined gift of more than $1 million to create an endowed fund that supports innovative clinical research. I strongly believe in helping other people and working to create a better society. Not only do scholarships help young scientists to realize their dreams, but those young scientists in turn make their own contributions to the betterment of society. A young researcher named Phil

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De Luna, who won one of the University of Ottawa’s Dr. Yu scholarships in 2015, is now using experimental electrochemistry to discover catalysts for solar fuels. The goal of his research is to use renewable energy to turn carbon dioxide—a gas whose increasing concentration in the atmosphere is one cause of global climate change—into a clean source of fuel. As I’ve said before, chemistry is all around us. By understanding and harnessing the power of chemistry, we may be able to cure diseases and solve environmental problems that threaten our planet. Since my childhood, I have seen many advances in science, technology, and society that have improved life for millions of people. Human rights and liberties have increased in many places: in Taiwan, poor girls are no longer sold into domestic servitude. In fact, in 2016, a woman was elected president of Taiwan for the first time in history. The advances in medicine have been astounding: the gastric disease that killed my mother is now easily treatable. Technological innovations and rising living standards have alleviated much of the manual toil that

Dr. Yu’s daughter Megan pins a rose on his lapel at the Foundation for Ichthyosis and Related Skin Types (FIRST) testimonial dinner, 2008.

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used to fill people’s days, leaving them more time to pursue their interests and reach their potential. Yet many terrible diseases remain incurable, and the world of chemistry—especially biochemistry—still holds many unsolved mysteries. Scientific research requires a great deal of patience, and significant discoveries are sometimes not recognized until years or decades after they occur. But when it comes, recognition by one’s peers is a great reward. In 2003, I received the Gold Medal from the International Academy of Cosmetic Dermatology. That same year, the Foundation for Ichthyosis invited Gene and me to a testimonial dinner. It was a privilege to speak about our research to a room filled with specialists, ichthyosis patients, and their families.

CEO Jean Pickford (left) and President Dave Scholl (right) of the Foundation for Ichthyosis and Related Skin Types (FIRST) honour Dr. Yu and Dr. Van Scott for their discovery of AHAs as a treatment for ichthyosis at a testimonial dinner, 2008.

But the greatest honour came in 2011, when the Dermatology Foundation gave Gene and me its prestigious Discovery Award. Unlike other awards, which are granted every year, the Discovery Award is bestowed only on rare occasions, to recognize achievements that substantially advance scientific understanding of skin disease and treatment. The Dermatology Foundation held its 2011 awards ceremony in a glamorous hotel ballroom in New Orleans. A few months before the ceremony, I had fallen

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Dr. Yu (left) and research partner Dr. Eugene Van Scott (right) receive the Discovery Award from Dermatology Foundation President Dr. Richard Edelson, 2011.

and hurt my back while taking down Christmas lights. (Despite my pledge to give up work as a home handyman, I couldn’t seem to stay away from ladders.) I’d considered skipping the ceremony but decided it was too important to miss, although I was in pain and could barely walk without crutches. The ballroom was beautifully decorated, the tables set with candles and glistening silverware, while black-tied waiters served a sumptuous meal. Dermatologists from all over the continent came up to me and shook my hand. Dr. James Leyden, professor emeritus of dermatology at the University of Pennsylvania, gave a speech in our honour, harking back to the publication of our first scientific paper on AHAs in October 1974. “Van Scott and Yu found that these small molecules have multiple effects on skin. Recognizing the similarity to the effects of topical retinoids, they studied the AHAs in other skin disorders and found significant benefit in acne, photo damage, and aspects of aging skin. Forty years after their original observations, AHAs in various formulations and applications are used daily by dermatologists around the world. Van Scott’s and Yu’s discoveries led to the genesis of a whole industry based on AHAs,” Dr. Leyden said, as he beckoned us forward to receive our award. With my sore back, and Gene nursing arthritis in his knees, we rose creakily from our seats and hobbled toward the stage, each leaning on the other for

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For forty years, Gene and I had metaphorically “leaned on each other” in our scientific research. Alone, neither of us could have made the discoveries that we accomplished together.

support. The sight we made to the assembled multitude might have been comical, but in a way it was also fitting. For forty years, Gene and I had metaphorically “leaned on each other” in our scientific research. Alone, neither of us could have made the discoveries that we accomplished together. As I said in my acceptance speech, I had never dreamed of receiving such an award for contributions to dermatology. Meeting Dr. Van Scott was truly one of the miracles of my life. Though my work on dermatology with Gene continues to this day, in recent years I have begun to move away from research focused solely on dermatological problems and toward seeking treatments and cures for other serious medical conditions. In particular, I am involved in investigating the ways in which science can use the body’s own chemical signalling system to alter the course of disease.

Dr. Yu (left) and research partner Dr. Van Scott (right) receive the Dermatology Foundation’s Discovery Award in recognition of their work with AHAs, 2011.

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19

New Research Directions since founding NeoStrata in 1988, I had never stopped pursuing my research into skin biochemistry and dermatological diseases. Although our company’s profitability depended on creating products to treat wrinkles and aging skin, in fact only about 20 percent of my time was spent on those cosmetic problems. I put 80 percent of my research effort toward looking for cures to more severe skin diseases like psoriasis and eczema, and striving to understand the biological processes involved in the function of the skin—our body’s largest organ. This work—as well as my studies of Oriental medicine—had given me a broad interest in the biochemical basis of disease. Growing older, I found that many of my friends and colleagues were afflicted with serious ailments. Gene suffered from painful arthritis, and my former supervisor in the mycology lab at Temple, Dr. Blank, had died of pancreatic cancer. I began to ask myself if I could apply my knowledge of biochemistry to developing new, more effective treatments for a range of serious ailments. The problem with the majority of drugs used in conventional medicine is that, over the short or long term, they produce toxic side effects in the patient’s body. I asked myself the question: how can we develop treatments that do not have toxic side effects? The answer, I concluded, lies in using the organic chemicals produced by our own bodies. Discovering the structure and function of the individual biochemicals coursing through our bodies is no easy task—let alone synthesizing them in the lab. As I thought about this new approach, I couldn’t help remembering the many long days and nights I had spent in Dr. Baer’s lab as a PhD student, trying to synthesize a single component of aminoglycoside antibiotics. Yet the knowledge and equipment for creating synthetic biochemicals had progressed a lot since I was a doctoral student in the 1960s, filling me with confidence that my approach was not only theoretically sound but practically feasible. It’s evident that our body needs food to produce energy for survival. This food consist of three major chemical components: proteins, fats, and carbohydrates. After eating foods rich in proteins, such as meats and eggs, our body digests the proteins into small chemicals called amino acids. There are twenty common amino acids, which the body then reassembles into larger molecules 141

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Dr. Yu keeps a well-stocked library in his home outside of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

called peptides. These peptides, in turn, can be assembled by the body into larger molecules such as proteins, hormones, or other chemicals required for bodily functions. In the 1990s I started to compile a list of these bioactive peptides. I mentioned to several friends that I dreamed of forming a new company specializing in biopeptide research for treating disease. In 1996, an old friend of mine, Ted Chiang, Ph.D., who had just retired from a seventeen-year career at Johnson & Johnson, approached me about conducting research together. Gene and I rented a laboratory space from NeoStrata and hired Ted to manage a basic research lab. He set to work synthesizing various derivatives of amino acids and testing their biological properties and therapeutical potential on topical application to the skin. These amino acid “derivatives” are synthetic variants of naturally occurring amino acids, in which the chemical structure is slightly changed, allowing the molecule to more easily penetrate human skin and bind to receptors in target tissues.

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By this method, we created synthetic derivatives of the amino acids tyrosine and proline, which eradicate itch in eczema lesions within a few minutes of topical application and, over time, improve the symptoms of skin aging. NeoStrata currently incorporates these molecules in some of its products, and the technology has also been licensed to Avon. Though we were successful in synthesizing amino acid derivatives in the 1990s, my dream of synthesizing the larger peptide molecules remained unattainable, since my research team lacked both the technology and the experience. However, in 2009, a young chemist named Sachin Vyas, who had extensive experience in peptide synthesis, joined our research team. With newly purchased equipment, Sachin was able to synthesize hundreds of peptides and dipeptides. After extensive testing, we discovered that certain of these dipeptide derivatives had marked therapeutic effects in eradicating itch, healing eczema lesions, and improving age-related skin changes. In 2011, we rented a second lab space from NeoStrata for tissue and cell culture research, where we could carry out in-vitro tests on all of the compounds that we synthesized. Besides studying anti-aging and skin-lightening effects of synthetic peptides, we began to look at creating synthetic endomorphins that could treat pain when applied to the skin in the form of a cream or lotion. Endomorphins are derivatives of tetrapeptides (molecules made up of four amino acids) and are involved in many bodily processes, including pain perception, stress response, reward, arousal, and vigilance. We know that millions of Americans suffer from pain and that the drugs used to treat pain have a range of side effects, including stomach bleeding (from anti-­ inflammatories), high blood pressure (from steroids), and risk of addiction (from opioids). If we could create a chemical in the lab that would mimic the natural endomorphins found in the body, we hoped it might offer a safe way to alleviate pain. Since beginning our research, we have created synthetic endomorphins and related derivatives that eradicate pain almost immediately after topical application, with an

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By this method, we created synthetic derivatives of the amino acids tyrosine and proline, which eradicate itch in eczema lesions within a few minutes of topical application and, over time, improve the symptoms of skin aging.

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Our work involves systematically analyzing the blood samples of patients suffering from various diseases, including Alzheimer’s disease, breast cancer, pancreatic cancer, and melanoma . . .

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analgesic effect that can last for many hours. So far, our case studies on individual subjects indicate that topical application of endomorphin-related derivatives can successfully treat pain from shingles, bursitis, tendonitis, sunburn, headache, migraine, osteoarthritis, psoriatic arthritis, neck and back aches, rotator cuff pain, and dental pain, as indicated in a patent application we filed in 2016. This research is ongoing. The initial research results were just published in British Journal of Pharmaceutical and Medical Research, Volume 02, Issue 04, 2017. Of course, endomorphins are only one example of the chemical signals used by our bodies to regulate all life functions—growth, movement, sleep, respiration, and digestion, to name but a few. In fact, human blood contains over a thousand different peptides, proteins, enzymes, and glycoproteins, many of which serve as chemical signals. When the wrong chemical signals are sent out, it leads to a malfunction in the body that we call a disease. If we can find out what chemical signals trigger a given disease, we may be able to develop treatments, based on the organic chemicals produced by our own bodies, that can interrupt or correct the faulty chemical signals. This in turn should be able to halt or reverse the progress of that disease without toxic side effects. In 2014, I founded a new company, called BioMark LLC, focused on researching the biochemical pathways of serious diseases, with the aim of developing tests and treatments. I hired two of my old friends, a retired biochemistry professor and a neuroscience professor, as consultants and board members. In 2016, I leased two laboratory spaces in the Princeton area, one for basic research, including peptide synthesis, and the other for cell cultures and immunological assays. I also hired two assistants to help Sachin Vyas. Our work involves systematically analyzing the blood samples of patients suffering from various diseases, including Alzheimer’s disease, breast cancer, pancreatic cancer, and melanoma, to determine which specific biochemicals are more abundant in the blood of these patients than in the blood of healthy individuals. These are known as “biomarkers.” Though some chemical biomarkers are likely the results of the disease, others may prove to be causal agents.

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If we can isolate the biochemicals that help cause a disease, we may be able to develop antibodies against those chemicals and, in a process similar to vaccination, stimulate the patient’s own immune system to defend itself against the disease. As well, pinpointing the biomarkers that appear in a patient’s blood before full-blown onset of the disease may allow us to develop early screening tests, allowing patients to make lifestyle changes that can delay the development of the disease or mitigate its symptoms. This field is exciting but very challenging, as it can take years to find one or more specific biomarkers for any given disease. As of December 2016, we had identified about 230 biopeptides from the blood samples of various patients using a process called “two-dimensional electrophoresis.” We had produced about 200 rabbit antibodies against the biopeptides and used immunoassays to find biomarkers. We had discovered biomarkers for breast cancer and pancreatic cancer, as well as one possible biomarker for Alzheimer’s disease.

This field is exciting but very challenging, as it can take years to find one or more specific biomarkers for any given disease.

Still passionate about chemistry, Dr. Yu continues to work in his lab every day.

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Within the next few years, we hope to develop a test kit for Alzheimer’s disease that is as simple and easy to use as a pregnancy test kit. At the same time, we will continue to develop a treatment or cure for Alzheimer’s disease. Equally important, we want to establish a basic approach that will allow researchers to develop treatments for a broad range of serious and life-threatening diseases. In my life, I have published more than fifty scientific papers and at one point held more than a hundred patents. Many of my friends have advised me to retire. They say it’s time for me to rest on my laurels and enjoy my golden years. But the unsolved mysteries of chemistry continue to fascinate me. My wealth allows me to pursue my own research, and my advanced age means that I have more experience than almost any other chemist working today. I agree with the great English poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson, who wrote: Death closes all: but something ere the end, Some work of noble note, may yet be done. I am still pursuing work that I believe will be “of noble note.” I haven’t given up on my childhood dream of achieving great success and becoming, like the poor boy in the classical Chinese story, the most honoured scholar in all the empire. I intend, as Tennyson said, “to follow knowledge like a sinking star, beyond the utmost bound of human thought.” My life has indeed been a journey of a thousand miles. Until I take my last breath, my journey of discovery continues.

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EPILOGUE

Philosophy and Vision of My Life certain components of my philosophy of life were developed early in my childhood, from the combination of inherited factors and environmental conditions. Over the years, I’ve developed a more mature philosophy and vision of my life from continued learning, education, and social and environmental interactions. The components of my life philosophy include: (1) to live an active life with discipline (2) to be positive and persistent (3) to be creative and productive, with a time-effective approach (4) to be responsible and accountable (5) to be fair and reasonable (6) to strive for education, success, and contribution (7) to value joy and pleasure (8) to enjoy health and precious life 1) To live an active life with discipline During my childhood, I lived through poverty, hardships, starvation, war, and all kinds of natural disasters, including earthquakes, typhoons, hurricanes, and floods. Through all of this adversity, I developed a strong will and determination and somehow found a way to survive and live actively and vividly with no complaints or excuses under any circumstances. I learned to appreciate what I had, including health, happiness, and the minimum necessities for survival. Over the years, I have developed the discipline to check and balance my routine life so that I can control my daily schedule and handle the pressures of a heavy workload, including research work, company business, and issues

Through all of this adversity, I developed a strong will and determination and somehow found a way to survive and live actively and vividly … I learned to appreciate what I had, including health, happiness, and the minimum necessities for survival.

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related to patent applications. This discipline includes the following elements: (a) exercise and do tai chi every morning, (b) go to bed early and wake up early, (c) no heavy brain work before bedtime, and (d) eat plenty of vegetables and fruits.

I also appreciated that positive thinking and persistence could overcome hardships and problems. All I needed was no bad luck.

2) To be positive and persistent During my childhood and afterwards, I developed positive thinking whenever I encountered hardships or difficult problems. Very often I encountered difficult issues, but with persistence and different approaches, I was able to solve or overcome most problems and issues. I realized life had ups and downs. I also appreciated that positive thinking and persistence could overcome hardships and problems. All I needed was no bad luck. 3) To be creative and productive, with a timeeffective approach When a situation is not satisfactory, I like to apply a new approach to correct or improve the situation, instead of just accepting as it is. I believe that such creative strength comes from both inherited virtues and environmental experiences. I believe that life and time are precious and limited. I developed a strong sense and consciousness of the importance of using time effectively and efficiently so that a job can be done well in the minimum amount of time. Such creative and productive approaches are the mother of success for business ventures. Because time and life are precious, control and effective use of time are very important for productivity. Before starting any project, I think about the best way to reach maximum results by using minimum time. 4) To be responsible and accountable Since my childhood, I have had strong feelings about responsibilities. During starvation times, I would go out to catch some fish or pick some leftover potatoes in the farmland to help feed my grandma, my younger brother, and myself. Later on, I appreciated that being responsible is also important in business ventures. If you do not have a strong sense of responsibility for what you have promised,

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you will lose trust and credibility. Business can never succeed without responsibility and accountability. If you make a promise, you must keep your promise; otherwise you will lose credibility and you cannot succeed in anything, including business. 5) To be fair and reasonable In life and business, it is important to be fair and reasonable with other people, including your own family or friends. An unfair situation always provokes bitterness among friends and family members. I studied Confucius’s teaching and learned early in life that I should treat people fairly and reasonably. In business negotiations and deals, I have found that with fairness and a reasonable approach, negotiations usually go smoothly and successfully with a win-win situation for both parties.

If you make a promise, you must keep your promise; otherwise you will lose credibility and you cannot succeed in anything, including business.

6) To strive for education, success, and contribution I have found that education and continued learning are very important for future career development and success. I have also learned that persistent practice of what you have

Dr. Yu enjoys the gardens at his home outside of Philadelphia, 2015.

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learned can lead to success in your career. With a successful career and business, you should contribute to society and make a better life for humankind. Contributions can be in many different forms, including money, inventions, and achievements, such as finding a new cure to help people suffering from terrible diseases.

Love, care, kindness, and harmony are very important factors for survival when you experience hardships.

7) To value joy and pleasure Many people in different countries are still very poor, but even under such harsh conditions they still have love and kindness. The love they receive from their family members keeps them going through hardships. When I grew up, my parents always said good health was important. As long as you had good health, you could overcome hardships. Love, care, kindness, and harmony are very important factors for survival when you experience hardships. Love, kindness, and harmony play a vital part in all families, rich or poor. Happy families are due to the love, kindness, and harmony among family members. A happy life cannot be sustained without feeling joy and pleasure. There are two aspects of joy and pleasure: material rewards and mental satisfaction. Material rewards include money, food, clothing, car, house, and so on. But

From left to right, Dr. Yu, Ho-Chin Yu, Kenneth Yu, Chris Stahley, and Megan Yu.

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the most important reward is mental satisfaction, which includes being with your family, having good friends, taking vacations, playing golf, or just enjoying a good life. 8) To enjoy health and precious life Health is the most single important thing in life, and without it life is compromised. Sickness and illness can be genetic, from environmental factors, or caused by lifestyle. For example, lung cancer can be caused by genetic factors, pollution, or smoking. Being overweight by more than 20 percent can result in obesity, leading to high blood pressure, heart disease, stress, or type 2 diabetes. From my own experience, the best natural approach to controlling weight is to get regular exercise and eat a diet rich in green vegetables and healthy fruits. Ideally, a healthy body will result from a natural approach of not taking any medications, thereby avoiding uncontrollable side effects or a compromised immune system. By following these principles, I believe one can enjoy a healthy body and a rewarding and fulfilling lifestyle, while also contributing to the good of humankind.

From my own experience, the best natural approach to controlling weight is to get regular exercise and eat a diet rich in green vegetables and healthy fruits.

Staying healthy and active, Dr. Yu enjoys a round of golf, 2015.

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AFTERWORD

Ruey Yu as a Child of Taiwan Pre-colonial Taiwan the island of taiwan, baptized Ilha Formosa (“beautiful island”) by sixteenthcentury Portuguese explorers, emerges from the Western Pacific Ocean like a verdant fortress of rainforests, windswept plains, towering mountain peaks, and teeming life, all in an area half the size of New Brunswick, that is, 36,000 square kilometres. Part of the seismic “Ring of Fire,” where the Philippine Sea and Eurasian tectonic plates collide, each earthquake pushes the earth upwards to make this one of the most densely alpine territories on the planet. Some 165 mountains tower above 3,000 metres, the largest being Jade Mountain in the centre of the island. In a terrain ranging from tropical shores to Arctic-like tundra in the highlands, Taiwan is one of the world’s biodiversity hotspots. Neolithic settlement in Taiwan dates to around 5500 BP, followed by an explosive out-migration from around 4000  BP toward the island of Luzon and then outwards through the Pacific to Palau, the Marianas and beyond. While Austronesian seafarers colonized the Pacific, their stay-at-home relatives thrived and diversified on Taiwan. The Siraya society, in what is now Tainan, was structured by male age-grade service of warfare and ritual head-hunting. Men married uxorilocally (taking up residence in the families of their wives), but only after they had finished age-grade service in their forties. Taiwan’s great diversity is shown linguistically in the way its peoples had developed the oldest and most diverse branches of the Austronesian languages. Socio-political structures surely varied just as much, but like similar societies in Borneo and New Guinea, they all had practices of warfare and head-hunting that excluded outsiders from their territories. Taiwan’s Austronesian inhabitants were what French anthropologist Pierre Clastres (1974) called societies “against the state.” Even within their own small communities, people intentionally avoided political dynamics that would lead to state formation. They intentionally chose egalitarian political forms that precluded the accumulation of power in the hands of a few so that a minority of 153

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people could expect obedience and compliance from other segments of society. Such egalitarian societies continue to exist in many parts of upland Southeast Asia (Scott 2009). The seas protected Taiwan for a relatively long period of time. Long unknown to the Austronesians on that island, the great state-based civilizations of China, beginning with the legendary Xia  Dynasty of the Yellow River Valley around 2070 BCE, and Japan, with the legendary first Emperor Jimmu around 660 BCE, developed and expanded beyond their original areas. Up until the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644), by which time the Chinese frontier had reached its maritime limits in the east, Chinese knowledge of the island was vague. Around 1592, Japanese daimyoˉ Toyotomi Hideyoshi sent an envoy to Taiwan asking to establish tribute relations, but his envoy was unable to find a central state or ruling authority and returned to Japan empty-handed (Clulow 2013, 5–6). In 1603, Chinese scholar Chen Di accompanied an anti-pirate mission to Taiwan. Writing Dong Fan Ji, one of the first Chinese sources about Taiwan, he described the island’s inhabitants as warriors who took pride in hanging human skulls from the doors of their homes (Andrade 2008, 25). Trade with China and Japan accelerated, and Taiwan became known as a source of valued deer hides. These early trade networks eventually attracted the attention of powerful outsiders. Like the First Nations of North America, the peoples of Taiwan had autonomous societies and histories until the colonial era, when relations between peoples and trading networks were all dramatically changed by their rapid incorporation into a new Euro-centric economic world system (Wolf 1982). Serial Colonialism on Taiwan Like most of Oceania and Southeast Asia, the contours of Taiwanese society emerged from colonial imagination and colonial projects that channelled the possibilities for post-coloniality. The name “Taiwan” itself emerged from colonial encounters. At first, “Taiwan” was the name of a small local enclave, the original area of Dutch settlement on the southwest coast, what is now the suburban edge of Taiwan. The Dutch called this coastal area “Tayouan” or “Taiouwang,” after the Austronesian tribe that lived there (Mair 2010). The Dutch arrived on Taiwan from 1624 to 1662; they crafted friendly alliances with some groups, fought with others, and initially acquired only sufficient territory for a trading post in Formosan deer hides. They eventually expanded into agriculture, brought missionaries to local people, and attracted other outside peoples to their budding colonies (Hauptman and Knapp 1977). The Dutch period altered both regions forever. On Formosa, a Pax Hollandica (Dutch Peace) made it possible for Chinese traders to establish permanent settlements on the island without fear of constant raids from warrior tribes. As the

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Dutch extended their territories inland and began planning sugar plantations, they encouraged Chinese settlers to come from Fujian (Hokkien in local language) as traders, workers, and farmers. Since the indigenous inhabitants already had good lives based on hunting and horticulture, they had little incentive to work for the Dutch. The Dutch thus referred to the Hokkien immigrants as “the only bees that give honey” (Andrade 2008, 159). Dutch endeavours on Formosa were interrupted by political upheaval on the Chinese mainland. The Ming Dynasty (1368–1644), which saw the flourishing of Chinese governance, philosophy, and technology, and the construction of such great monuments as the Great Wall, was the last imperial dynasty led by the Chinese. The Ming became weakened by peasant revolts and famine during the climate change event known as the Little Ice Age in the early seventeenth century, making it possible for the Manchus to attack from the northeast and expand their grip on northern China. After Beijing fell in 1644, a Ming loyalist court was established in Nanjing. Among the powerful people who rallied around the Ming cause was merchant-­ pirate Zheng Zhilong, who basically controlled Hokkien maritime trade throughout the China Seas, worked briefly for the Dutch, and became the military commander of Hokkien Province by 1640. His son, Zheng Chenggong, in some ways a symbol of Taiwan because he was born of a Hokkien father and a Japanese mother, received from the loyalist Ming Longwu Emperor the title Guoxingye, or Lord of the Imperial Surname. Pronounced as “Kok seng ia” in southern Hokkien, this transformed into Koxinga, as he was known by the Dutch and subsequent Western historians (Andrade 2008, 210). The Chinese welcomed Koxinga, the aboriginal people offered little resistance, and even some Europeans joined the Koxinga’s forces. Koxinga’s own life ended with madness, perhaps caused by syphilis (Andrade 2011, 302), and death from malaria in June 1662. He was succeeded by his son Zheng Jing, and subsequently by two grandsons, who ruled the Kingdom of Tungning in the southwest of what is now Taiwan. Their rule was short-lived, as they were evicted in 1683 by a Manchurian invasion force led by Admiral Shi Lang. The Dutch had paved the way for Taiwan to come under Chinese political rule for the first time in the island’s history. The incorporation of Taiwan into China was remarkably slow. When Admiral Shi  Lang reported his victory back to Beijing, the Emperor is reported to have said, “Taiwan is no bigger than a ball of mud. We gain nothing by possessing it, and it would be no loss if we did not acquire it” (Andrade 2008, 260). Although the Emperor and most of his advisors preferred to abandon Taiwan, Shi Lang’s arguments about the fertile resources and strategic location of Taiwan ultimately prevailed and the island was named a prefecture of Hokkien. By the first half of the nineteenth century, the western coasts of Taiwan were known as the “granary

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of China,” but the mountains and the east coast inhabited by the indigenous peoples were still “off the map” (Andrade 2008, 261). From an aboriginal perspective, the Zheng family rule and the Qing Dynasty were colonial powers of the same nature as the Dutch East India Company. They were all outsiders who arrived on Formosa with advanced weaponry and technologies, with the goal of taking over the plains for agriculture and settlement. Beginning from Tainan, settlers from China spread across the plains, moving southward to establish such cities as Fangliao, where Ruey Yu’s family settled, and northward to such places as Hsinchu. The majority of the early settlers, like the Zheng family, were Hokkien speakers. They were later joined by Hakka people (literally “guest families”) from Canton. The Hakka, said to have originated in North China around the Yellow River, migrated over centuries throughout South China, ultimately reaching Taiwan and Southeast Asia. Arriving in Taiwan after the most fertile lands had already been taken by the Hokkien, they ended up in the foothills in the northwest (such as Hsinchu) and in the south around such places as Fangliao and Meinong. This is the historical process that created the ethnic mix remembered by Ruey Yu from his childhood. Qing expansion across the island was a saga of warfare, rebellions, land grabs, and the creation of complex land tenure and taxation systems with differential rights for settlers and aborigines (Shepherd 1993). Hakka settlers competed with Hokkien communities for land and water, but were simultaneously under constant threat of attack from Paiwan aboriginal peoples in the foothills. Such frontier conditions fostered extensive cooperation for defence among unrelated lineages, whereas communities without such hostile exterior forces could develop stronger lineage organizations and a “patrilineal ideology” (Pasternak 1972, 146). Settler colonialism also contributed to a form of métissage, ethnic intermarriage and mixing, especially because Qing edicts forbade women from moving to Taiwan during historical periods. One elder in a highland Seediq group used to say, “When the Chinese came to the plains, they killed the men and married the women.” In a more poetic fashion, Hokkien people say of their ancestors, “We have a Tang Mountain (China) grandfather, but not a Tang Mountain grandmother.”1 The end of the nineteenth century saw a major shift in relative power between China and rapidly industrializing Meiji-era Japan. The Qing military at the time was also engaged elsewhere, challenged by conflicts with European powers claiming territorial concessions, but also engaged in their own conquest of Xinjiang (literally, “New Territories”) in the West (Spence 2013, 212). This context made distant Formosa, with its tropical diseases and troublesome savages, 1. In Hokkien: “uˉ tn^g-soan kong, bô tn^g-soan má.”

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seem more like a burden than an asset. In 1894, the outbreak of the First Sino-Japanese War on the Korean Peninsula brought the threat of foreign incursion close to the Qing’s Manchurian homeland. After the Qing defeat, the Manchurians were forced to pay wartime reparations, recognize the independence of Korea, and make territorial concessions. Qing officials were probably quite relieved to ultimately keep Northeast China under Manchurian control, but ended up ceding Taiwan and nearby islands to Japan “in perpetuity” in the Treaty of Shimonoseki, signed on April 17, 1895 (Spence 2013, 215). China thus seemed to solidify its position in the West, while Japan asserted itself as a maritime power in the East. Japanese Administration and the Modernization of Taiwan From a Taiwanese perspective, the subsequent fifty years of Japanese administration were important because they brought modernity to the island, inadvertently shaping a new social identity as “Taiwanese.” Ruey Yu’s narrative is an important contribution to understanding this part of Taiwanese history because he provides a relatively unfiltered account of childhood during the Japanese period. His accounts of childhood provide important insights into the existential dilemmas of colonialism and warfare. Although Taiwan was handed over from Qing Dynasty China to Japan in an international treaty, the actual hand­ over was anything but peaceful. In May 1895, local elites declared the establishment of the Republic of Taiwan with its own flag, militia, and a national capital in Tainan (Morris 2002). Although this new state was ignored by European powers and formally repudiated by the Qing state, the resistance of the people of Taiwan meant that the Japanese had to secure the island by military force. After defeating the Hokkien and Hakka peoples on the western plains, Japanese forces turned to the mountainous interior, slowly bringing the indigenous groups under their control. For the first time in history, all of Formosa was under the control of a single state. Beginning in 1920, Japanese law was to be applied in Taiwan, with the goal of assimilating Taiwanese people to Japan (Gold 1986, 41). By

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Ruey Yu’s accounts of childhood provide important insights into the existential dilemmas of colonialism and warfare.

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all accounts, it looked as if Taiwan was destined to become a Japanese prefecture in a powerful, multicultural Japan. From the beginning, it was a priority for Japan to develop Taiwan’s economy. They dredged and modernized the ports of Keelung and Kaohsiung, improved agriculture with massive irrigation projects, built hydroelectric dams and an electricity grid, and invested heavily in transportation and communications. In the early years, Taiwan was largely a producer of rice and sugar, exporting these commodities to Japan in exchange for manufactured goods. Eventually, however, Japanese firms and Taiwanese partners also invested beyond the crops into such ventures as sugar refineries, leather tanneries, and other modern industries. In 1936, the Taiwan Development Company was created to mobilize industrialization, with economic control concentrated in Japanese hands (Gold 1986, 44). One of the most visible and lasting legacies of Japanese industrialization was the railroad system, as Japanese-era train stations are now considered to be among the most important heritage buildings in such cities as Hsinchu, Taichung, and Tainan. The train station described by Ruey Yu as a child remains an enduring symbol of colonial modernity. As humble of a childhood as Ruey  Yu had, that experience was actually the beginning of social mobility for Ruey Yu and his family. Ruey Yu as a child looked in envy at those people who managed the station. Yet he also expressed pride about overcoming such conditions. At that time, Taiwanese families who aspired to upward mobility worked hard to master the Japanese language and Japanese rituals of politeness that Ruey Yu’s father gained from working at the train station with Japanese officials. Without a doubt, his life trajectory would have been very different if the Japanese colonial system had not given his father this new opportunity. Education was the cornerstone of Japan’s colonial policy, designed to transform the people of Taiwan into modern Japanese citizens. Based on the Meiji models that had been implemented on the Japanese mainland by education experts trained in the United States, compulsory six-year common schools were established to teach ethics, Japanese, classical Chinese, arithmetic, music, and gymnastics to children aged eight to fourteen. Unlike the previous schools, education was offered to girls as well as to boys, even though it was difficult to convince families to enrol their daughters in the early years of the policy, until courses for girls were offered in such skills as sewing (Tsurumi 1977, 29). From 1919 to 1936, as Japanese policies in Taiwan shifted to goals of assimilation and home rule, the educational options were expanded to include middle schools, vocational schools, and even universities. Agricultural schools, bringing research and extension services to rural communities across the island, transformed farming practices. The Taihoku Imperial University, precursor of what is now National Taiwan University in Taipei, opened in 1928 as a full research

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institution. Without a doubt, Japanese education policies transformed Taiwan. The percentage of school-age children enrolled in elementary school rose steadily from 4.5 percent in 1907 to 71.31 percent in 1944 (Tsurumi 1977,  148). Considering that schools came to Taiwan as part of a comprehensive package of innovations that also included railways, electricity grids, irrigation systems, banking, police stations, clinics and public health, they brought with them the implication that Japan represented prestige and modernity. Ruey  Yu’s childhood memories give us a glimpse into this system, beginning with his first year of elementary school in Hsinchu in 1939, followed by a rather seamless continuation in Fangliao after 1943. This kind of mobility and the universality of elementary school education had never before been available to Taiwanese people. The fact that this educational system was imposed in a colonial situation is also very important. Although the colonial educational system was based on U.S. models in terms of pedagogy and ideals of universal education that cut across gender and class, the gap between educational goals and day-to-day practices in schools remained as wide in Japanese Formosa as it was in the United States or Canada. In Taiwan, the Japanese teachers had a strong sense of racial and class superiority over the local Taiwanese, which was expressed through such practices as corporal punishment and discouraging children from speaking out in class. Ruey  Yu recalls learning that “the native Taiwanese were little more than slaves and dogs; the Japanese, with their heavenly emperor Hirohito, represented the pinnacle of civilization.” One of the unintended consequences of colonial education was that even young students acquired a strong sense of Taiwanese identity. For young Ruey Yu, this meant that Taiwanese and Japanese students attended different schools, although all students studied the same curriculum of Japanese, Japanese history, mathematics, and ethics. It seems that these experiences of racism and poverty—and overcoming them through hard work—set the foundation for Ruey Yu’s successes later in life. Ironically, the most important part of this education may have been

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Ruey Yu’s childhood memories give us a glimpse into this system, beginning with his first year of elementary school in Hsinchu in 1939.

These experiences of racism and poverty set the foundation for Ruey Yu’s successes later in life.

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the Japanese ethics classes that taught him “the values of hard work, persistence, honesty, honour and respect.” This is a set of values that many Taiwanese people, even today, call the “Japanese spirit” of this colonial-trained generation. This colonial education system, although it appears oppressive to our post-colonial sensibilities, enabled Ruey  Yu to study chemical engineering at the Hsinchu Vocational Junior High School after the war. Wartime Taiwan Ruey  Yu’s story gives us a rare insight into the often forgotten era of wartime Taiwan. Amid the celebration of the Chinese and Allied victory over Japan, in Taiwan as well as in the West, it is usually overlooked that Taiwan lost the war— for the simple reason that it was part of Japan at the time. The years from 1937 to 1945 were very difficult times in Taiwan. In July 1937, the Japanese military began its invasion of China and transformed Taiwan into a base for southward expansion. On Taiwan, this meant a radical shift from the “discriminatory assimilation” policies known as doˉka (Ching 2001, 109) to the more radical policies of “imperialization” or koˉminka. Wartime priorities meant that Japan could not afford to tolerate any mixed loyalties on Taiwan. Koˉminka was thus a society-wide effort to convert the Taiwanese into full-fledged Japanese citizens, loyal to the Emperor, and willing to contribute to the war effort. Among other things, this meant a full suppression of Taiwanese languages in schools and workplaces (Ching 2001, 95). During the war, industrialization was stepped up to supply Japanese military forces with the equipment they needed. Men, especially Aboriginal men, were encouraged to volunteer in Japanese war efforts in Southeast Asia and the Pacific. Ruey Yu was too young to join the war effort, but his childhood memories are a poignant reminder of the hunger, fear, and violence experienced by Taiwanese civilians and their families. The end of the war was an existential shock to most Taiwanese people. Unlike other parts of Asia, where civilians had been resisting the Japanese for years, the Taiwanese had just spent fifty years learning to be Japanese. Their wartime lives, and sacrifices, thus resembled those of people in Kagoshima (Japan) more than those of people in Xiamen (China). Suddenly at 12:15 p.m. on August 15, 1945, they heard Emperor Hirohito announce on the radio that Japan had unconditionally surrendered. As they struggled to rebuild their lives from the rubble, they had no way of knowing what this rapid “decolonization” would mean. An entire generation of people who had learned to live Japanese lives suddenly felt “left behind” (Morris 2015, 20) as their Japanese colleagues, teachers and friends departed from the island, only to be replaced by a new group of strangers from China. Ruey Yu recalls that he “watched the soldiers leave with something like regret.” He was not alone.

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Chinese Revolutions In recognition of the Republic of China (ROC) war initiatives targeting Japan, the Allies determined that all territories surrendered to Japan in the 1895 Treaty of Shimonoseki would return to China. In the absence of a peace treaty, Taiwan was technically still part of occupied Japan, and the U.S. decided to place it under ROC administration. ROC troops and civilian administrators, including the new governor Chen Yi, began streaming into Taiwan. From a Taiwanese perspective, if Ruey  Yu’s memories are typical, the contrast between the orderly and disciplined Japanese and the uncouth Chinese was startling. The sudden incursion of large numbers of Chinese led to street crime, inflation, and unemployment. As the Chinese “Mainlanders” took over the railroads, schools, and other modern institutions that had been built by the Japanese, they tended to prefer hiring other Mainlanders rather than local “Native Taiwanese.” The relationship between Mainlanders and Native Taiwanese was tense. There were linguistic barriers, because few Mainlanders spoke Hokkien, Hakka, or Japanese, whereas few Taiwanese spoke Mandarin Chinese. The Taiwanese were horrified by the bad manners of the Chinese. The Chinese, who had just spent fourteen years in violent conflict with Japan, were disgusted by the Taiwanese people who spoke Japanese, wore Japanese clothing, and had visibly enriched themselves by collaborating with the colonial regime. The violence that followed the “2:28 Incident,” named for the date of February  28, 1947, would leave an indelible mark on Taiwan, crystallizing the social identities of Mainlanders and Native Taiwanese. On the evening of February 27, officials from the state Monopoly Bureau arrested Lin Chiang-Mai, a 40-year-old widow selling contraband cigarettes in Taipei, seizing her goods and her money. When she protested, people rushed to her aid. In the following scuffle, one of the officers fired his pistol into the crowd. One person was killed and Lin was injured. The following day, crowds gathered in front of the Monopoly Bureau to demand redress. Soldiers fired on the unarmed crowd and some people were killed. In the following days, Taiwanese elites appealed to the government for help and demanded some degree of local self-rule. Governor Chen Yi promised to negotiate, but instead called for help from China. Apparently on the orders of Chiang Kai-shek himself, troops arrived in Keelung and spread across the island, randomly killing civilians along the way. The troops rounded up anyone suspected of anti-government activities and summarily executed many of them (Kerr 1965; Lai, Myers, and Wei 1991; Simon 2003). Since the authorities focused on the well-educated people who had dared to speak up, they basically decimated the Native Taiwanese middle class. Chiang’s forces, which had violently purged Communists in China, had equally little tolerance for any Taiwanese people suspected of fomenting Communism, promoting Taiwan independence, or challenging their rule. An entire generation grew up in fear.

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Far from being a “Liberation,” the arrival of the ROC on Taiwan was the beginning of a forty-year period of martial law that the Taiwanese experienced as a brutal dictatorship. Japan renounced Taiwan in the 1952 San Francisco Treaty of Peace. On the day that treaty came into force, Tokyo signed the related Treaty of Taipei, in which all residents of Taiwan became citizens of the ROC. Young people like Ruey Yu concentrated on their studies, learning Chinese and trying to survive in the new system. Ruey glosses over the difficulties, but it was no easy task for a youngster trained entirely in Japanese to rapidly learn Mandarin Chinese and pass the entrance exams to Taiwan National University. The experiences of this generation made them feel that they were neither Japanese nor Chinese. They were Taiwanese, and they felt oppressed by two successive waves of colonial rule. Coming of Age in the Cold War The ROC, and its ruling party the Kuomintang, made big changes on Taiwan. Most important, Taiwan became an ideological battleground on the front lines of the Cold War. The Soviet Union supported the Communist People’s Republic of China (PRC), and the United States supported the ROC. Despite the fact that the Kuomintang had lost China, the ROC claimed to rule all of China, with Nanjing as their capital, a retreat to Taiwan being only a temporary setback. With U.S. support, they were able to maintain this political fiction for a very long time and even held China’s seat at the United Nations Security Council until October 25, 1971, when the General Assembly passed Resolution 2758 to recognize the PRC as China’s “only legitimate representative” to the UN and to expel “the representatives of Chiang Kai-shek from the place which they illegally occupy.” The Taiwanese paid a high price for hosting this exiled government. This was the time when Ruey Yu gained his education in chemistry, an era when intellectual life was marked by what he calls a “cloud of political repression.” The government mobilized the fear of Communism to keep the Taiwanese under constant surveillance. People accused of Communist activities could be imprisoned or even executed on the scantest of evidence. He tells the story of a teenage cousin who was asked by her teacher to deliver a package to another teacher. That teacher was arrested and shot, while Ruey’s cousin was sent to prison, where she died. Ruey had his own brush with authorities as a university student, when he and other students established a reading group to discuss Sun Yat-sen’s ­philosophy. Apparently, two of the students were “Communist infiltrators,” and were taken away. Ruey was spared because he was close to high-ranking Kuomintang members and had no interest in politics. Whether or not the risk of Communist infiltration was real, most Taiwanese people hated their government, which they perceived to be corrupt and discriminatory against the Native Taiwanese. The ROC justified their rule over Taiwan with a two-pronged strategy. They launched ideological campaigns to convince the Taiwanese population to see

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themselves as Chinese. Most Taiwanese experienced these drives to establish a “national language” and to promote a national culture as a second wave of assimilationist policy, reminiscent of the Japanese koˉminka policies many still remembered. Secondly, as the United States opened up their consumer market with low tariffs, Taiwan was transformed into a manufacturing powerhouse. This was a time of rising living standards, as we see in Ruey Yu’s descriptions of courting his future wife by bicycle and riding in a car for the first time in his life. In this social context, and faced with discrimination if they wished for jobs in the government or education, most Taiwanese focused their efforts on small-scale entrepreneurship. Those who could afford it also looked abroad for educational opportunities. A New Life in Canada Ruey  Yu married his fiancée Ho-chin and, after brief military service, left for Canada in 1962. He studied at the University of Ottawa, embarking upon the career in chemical engineering and entrepreneurship described in this book. The trajectory of an immigrant to North America was certainly not easy, especially at a time when Canadians still saw their country as “bi-national,” a land run by the French and the English. But Ruey had been accustomed to a similar situation since early childhood. In his lifetime, Taiwan had been dominated by the Japanese Empire and the Republic of China. He grew up speaking Hokkien Taiwanese, but went to school in both Japanese and Mandarin Chinese. Life quickly taught Ruey and his entire generational cohort that they could never be fully Japanese nor fully Chinese, which meant that they had to work even harder to prove themselves. As a child, Ruey knew what it was like to be surrounded by more powerful ethnic others, to learn their language, to assert himself, and to thrive in their midst. These were certainly important skills for life as an immigrant in both Canada and the United States. The period of martial law in Taiwan was especially important to Ruey  Yu’s generation. Native Taiwanese people were excluded from positions of power in the government and even faced discrimination in such careers as education. A repressive regime left almost no possibility of resistance. Most Taiwanese people thus poured their energies into technical studies and, most of all, private entrepreneurship. Many who could afford to do so left for studies and careers in Japan, North America and Europe. Some of those emigrants joined forces to promote Taiwanese independence or create international pressure for Taiwan to democratize. Most of them, however, were like Ruey Yu, dedicating their lives entirely to their careers and other new endeavours. Made in Taiwan, they had the skills and the attitude necessary to make important contributions to the societies that became their homes. scott simon, University of Ottawa

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References Andrade, Tonio. 2008. How Taiwan Became Chinese: Dutch, Spanish, and Han Colonization in the Seventeenth Century. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2011. Lost Colony: The Untold Story of China’s First Great Victory over the West. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Ching, Leo T. S. 2001. Becoming “Japanese”: Colonial Taiwan and the Politics of Identity Formation. Berkeley: University of California Press. Clastres, Pierre. 1974. La Société contre l’État. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit. Clulow, Adam. 2013. The Company and the Shogun: The Dutch Encounter with Tokugawa Japan. New York: Columbia University Press. Gold, Thomas. 1986. State and Society in the Taiwan Miracle. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe. Hauptman, Laurence M. and Ronald G. Knapp. 1977. “Dutch-Aboriginal Interaction in New Netherland and Formosa: An Historical Geography of Empire.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 121 (2): 166–182. Kerr, George. 1965. Formosa Betrayed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. Lai, Tse-han, Ramon Myers, and Wei Wou. 1991. A Tragic Beginning: The Taiwan Uprising of February 28, 1947. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Mair, Victor H. 2010. “How to Forget Your Mother Tongue and Remember Your National Language.” Pinyin.info. http://www.pinyin.info/readings/mair/taiwanese.html#n4, last consulted February 7, 2017. Morris, Andrew. 2002. “The Taiwan Republic of 1895 and the Failure of the Qing Modernizing Project,” in Stéphane Corcuff (ed.), Memories of the Future: National Identity Issues and the Search for a New Taiwan. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 3–24. Morris, Andrew (ed.). 2015. Japanese Taiwan: Colonial Rule and its Contested Legacy. London: Bloomsbury. Pasternak, Burton. 1972. Kinship and Community in Two Chinese Villages. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Scott, James C. 2009. The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia. New Haven: Yale University Press. Shepherd, John Robert. 1993. Statecraft and Political Economy on the Taiwan Frontier, 1600– 1800. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Simon, Scott. 2003. “Contesting Formosa: Tragic Remembrance, Urban Space, and National Identity in Taipei.” Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, 10: 109–131. Spence, Jonathan. 2013. The Search for Modern China, 3rd ed. New York: W. W. Norton. Tsurumi, E. Patricia. 1977. Japanese Colonial Education in Taiwan, 1895–1945. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wolf, Eric. 1982. Europe and the People without History. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Biographies and Memoirs Series editor: Marc-François Bernier

As the name suggests, the focus of this collection is to feature the life and work of prominent Anglophone and Francophone Canadians whose distinctive contributions have marked our collective society and history. In chronicling the lives of these leading figures, each title will also explore their life’s work and the era in which they were active. Combining scholarship with an accessible voice, the Biographies and Memoirs collection is contributing to building an archive of Canadian achievements in culture, science and beyond.

Previous titles in this collection Michel Bock, A Nation Beyond Borders: Lionel Groulx on French-Canadian Minorities, translated by Ferdinanda Van Gennip, 2014. Jacqueline Cardinal and Laurent Lapierre, Taking Aviation to New Heights: A Biography of Pierre Jeanniot, translated by Donald Winkler, 2013. Ralph Heintzman, Tom Symons: A Canadian Life, 2011. Additional titles related to this collection Andrew Donskov (ed.), John Woodsworth, Arkadi Klioutchanski and Liudmila Gladkova (transl.), Tolstoy and Tolstaya: A Portrait of a Life in Letters, 2017. Andrew Donskov (ed.) and John Woodsworth (transl.), My Life: Sofia Andreevna Tolstaya, 2011. Hartmut Lutz (editor and translator), The Diary of Abraham Ulrikab, 2011. Ernest Adolphe Côté, Réminiscences et souvenances, 2005.

www.press.uottawa.ca

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