Other highlights (32)
“People busy doing things rarely have time to think about the past, but in the quiet of the night, when I occasionally look back, what I miss most is not the period after thirty-three, when my career began to achieve some success, but rather the first half of my life.”
“At eighteen I entered Harvard University in the United States. Among more than a thousand classmates with blue eyes, I was the only Chinese. For a whole year I had only American friends, used only English, and absorbed Western culture like a sponge. Even now, several decades later, that year at Harvard remains the most unforgettable and most exciting year of my life.”
“At nineteen I entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where I learned my livelihood skills at the highest institution”
“At twenty-four I entered the semiconductor industry; at that time the semiconductor industry itself was only three years old.”
“Brother Yu Youcheng invited me to write a preface for his new book, “I See Intel” (published by CommonWealth Publishing) [1]. He said, “About two thousand words will”
“Just then, one night I reopened the Hemingway collected works [2] that I loved, and turned to his short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.” The protagonist is a writer who develops gangrene at the foot of Mount Kilimanjaro in Africa, cannot move, and waits to die while gazing at the snow-covered peak. The following are his hazy thoughts before death:
Now he could never write the stories, the ones he had saved up to write when he could write them better. Maybe at least he had not written them badly. Maybe he would never be able to write them any better, and that was why he had been putting off writing them. In any case, everything was unknown now.”
“Yingdai’er is Intel (Intel), *My View of Yingdai’er*, 1995, Commonwealth Publishing.”
“From Xuzhou to Luoyang, we used every kind of transportation we could: when we could take a truck we took a truck; when there were rickshaws or tricycles we took rickshaws or tricycles; when there were no vehicles at all we walked. When crossing the front line, we of course chose a section where there was no fighting, but there was absolutely no guarantee that there would not be gunfire or artillery; that section was entirely on foot. The journey from Xuzhou to Luoyang took several days. Each night we stayed either in small inns, or in small shops, or in temples. During wartime, in places close to the front line, troops often came to inspect travelers. I remember that one night, the ones who came to inspect us turned out to be the Nationalist army; for the first time since leaving Shanghai, smiles appeared on my parents’ faces!”
“In late March 1943, we set out from Shanghai. At the time of departure we only knew the general route; as for how long the whole journey would take, what means of transportation we would use, and where we would stay along the way, we had only incomplete and uncertain information that my father had inquired about. The first leg of the trip was the most reliable: taking a train to Nanjing, then transferring to a train to Xuzhou. Xuzhou was in Japanese hands at that time, but it was already very close to the front line where the Chinese and Japanese forces were fighting. After passing Xuzhou, the goal was Luoyang. Luoyang was in Chinese hands, so from Xuzhou to Luoyang we had to cross the battle line.”
“that time I deeply understood the truth of “The road to Shu is hard, harder than climbing to the blue sky,””
“Over the past several decades of life, I have already traveled a million miles, but no matter how comfortable or even luxurious travel in recent years has been, the journey I miss the most, the one that has the greatest meaning for me, and the one that left the deepest impression in my mind, is still the trek from Shanghai to Chongqing when I was eleven.”
“My mother decided to let me attend Nankai’s summer class: on the one hand I could review my schoolwork, and on the other hand there was also the chance of doing well and being recommended. Nankai’s rule was that all students had to live on campus. This was based on practical considerations: although Shapingba was only twenty or thirty kilometers from Chongqing, transportation was inconvenient at the time, and commuting was impossible for the vast majority of students. But setting practical considerations aside, requiring students to live on campus was actually a very good educational policy. In my experience, the periods when I learned the fastest, felt the happiest, and made the most good friends were all periods when I lived in the school dormitory.”
“After my father arrived in Hong Kong, he very firmly believed that I must study science and engineering so that after graduation I could make a living. Where could I go to study science and engineering? At that time Hong Kong had only one university, the University of Hong Kong; not only were science and engineering not strong there, but the entire school was not very highly regarded. Forced into it, my father believed I had only one path: to go to the United States to attend university. He still had the ability to cover my first year’s tuition, fees, and living expenses. As for after one year, it would depend on how things went for him in Hong Kong; and after I had become more accustomed to the American environment, I should be able to apply for scholarships, or work part-time while studying. My mother told me frankly that even my first year’s expenses were already a heavy burden for my father: “Fortunately you are an only son; otherwise we would not have the ability to send you abroad.””
“Under these circumstances, my parents decided to send me overseas. My third uncle, Mr. Zhang Sihou, was then a professor at Northeastern University in Boston, and he chose for me to apply to Harvard University. Why choose Harvard? First, Harvard is a world-famous institution; second, Harvard is in Boston, and my third uncle could look after me nearby. But Boston also had another world-famous school, one that specialized in science and engineering: the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Why, after my father had clearly told my third uncle that I was going to study science and engineering, did my third uncle still not choose MIT for me? About this, I later asked my third uncle. He smiled and said, “The you I knew was the you at Nankai in Chongqing, when you loved the humanities. Later I heard you wanted to study business. It wasn’t until you got to Hong Kong that I heard you wanted to study science and engineering. I thought you should have time to gradually establish your own interests. Rather than rush you into the very specialized MIT, it would be better to let you have a buffer period at Harvard. Besides, Harvard’s science and engineering are also top-notch—it’s just not as specialized as MIT.””
“In 1949, the United States stood at the pinnacle of prestige and authority. Only four years had passed since the end of World War II; it was the most important victorious nation, and also the only country whose homeland had not been destroyed during the war. Militarily, America’s army, navy, and air force had already displayed their might across battlefields around the world during the war, and it was also the only country to possess the atomic bomb. Economically, although its population accounted for only 5% of the world, its gross national product accounted for 40% of the world’s total. The standard of living of the American people at that time was unmatched by any other country: a U.S. worker’s wages for a few months could buy a car, and in two or three years could buy a house. Almost every household had a refrigerator and a washing machine, and many families were also purchasing the rapidly emerging television sets of that era. Employment among married women was still not common, so most families had only one working person, yet even a single salary could enable the whole family to enjoy a fairly comfortable material life.”
“The freedom of the American people was conditional—it required obeying the law, and the law was quite clear, with little ambiguity, and enforcement was quite strict. For someone like me, a survivor of war who had come through a chaotic era, the rule of law in the United States in 1949 seemed like another world. Of course, there was often crime news in the newspapers, but in the lives of most of the people in the city of Cambridge where I lived, it seemed that no shadow of crime intruded. “No need to bolt the door at night, and nothing left lying on the road would be picked up” truly was a depiction of life at that time.”
“On the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor are the following lines of poetry:
“Keep your ancient lands, keep your legendary splendor!”
She cries out silently,
“Give me your tired, poor, fearful people,
They want to breathe the air of freedom.
Send those who have lost their homes and long endured storms over here,
I raise my lamp,
Waiting quietly beside this golden gate!” [1]”
“In that one year at Harvard, the amount and breadth of my reading were something I never again matched later. I read Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Galsworthy, Sinclair Lewis, Jane Austen, Shakespeare, and Shaw; Churchill’s memoirs of World War II; famous speeches by modern American presidents; American history; Wells’s world history; several English books about China; and I also ventured into a few classical giants such as Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, and even Marx’s Capital. Besides these major works, I subscribed to two newspapers, The New York Times and The Christian Science Monitor published in Boston, as well as Time magazine.”
“At that time, among the professors in MIT’s mechanical engineering department there were many master-level figures. In applied mechanics there was Den Hartog; in fluid mechanics there was Shapiro; in thermodynamics there were Keenan and Kaye; in materials science there were Orowan and Chao. A few months ago, a vice chancellor from the University of California, Berkeley came to visit me. He was a few years younger than I and also came from mechanical engineering, though not from MIT. When he discovered that I studied mechanical engineering at MIT from 1950 to 1955, we could not help recalling the past. He said that at that time he greatly envied MIT’s faculty and academic standards, and he also agreed that the 1950s truly deserved to be called the golden era of MIT’s mechanical engineering department.”
“At that time I was “in the mountains without knowing the mountains,” and did not know that I was living in a golden age, but I did have a deep impression of the master-level professors.”
“The master-level professors’ attitude toward handling questions also left a deep impression on me. American students like to ask questions; the level of questions varies, some are very childish, but some are also quite profound.”
“Master-level professors never despised any question. They of course answered simple questions quickly; for more difficult questions, they also remained unhurried and composed, thinking while speaking, and at the same time writing on the blackboard the staged conclusions of their thinking. After a few minutes like this, a problem we considered very difficult would be solved by him. If he had not completely figured it out at the time, he would say, “Let me go back and think about it some more, and I’ll tell you in the next class.””
“A master is indeed a master—he seems never to be stumped; the harder the question, the more it is an opportunity for him to demonstrate his method of thinking.”
“Smart students can also learn from it a way to solve problems, and grow through learning under the dual education of “teaching by words” and “teaching by example.””
“In my senior year, I once had the idea of transferring to the physics department or the electrical engineering department. Among all the science and engineering courses I had taken, I liked physics and mathematics more. Of course these two sciences are required in the physics department, and the electrical engineering department also takes more of them than mechanical engineering. But I discovered that if I changed majors, I would have to delay graduation by at least one year, perhaps even two. Given the premise of graduating as soon as possible, I gave up that idea.”
“Just as in my naive thinking before choosing to study mechanical engineering, machines are used everywhere. But places that use machines do not necessarily need mechanical master’s graduates, and the prospects for mechanical engineering graduates are not necessarily better than those of other engineering departments. At that time, America’s rising aircraft industry and enormous automobile manufacturing industry employed large numbers of mechanical engineers; the steel industry and machine tool industry, which had begun to decline, also employed quite a few mechanical engineers.”
“Life’s turning points can sometimes be so unpredictable! A short phone call, plus a young man’s momentary impulse, ended up binding me to semiconductors for a lifetime!”
“The characteristics of a semiconductor are exactly as its name suggests: its electrical conductivity lies between that of a conductor (such as metal) and an insulator (such as wood or stone). Semiconductors have another characteristic: their conductivity can be changed by adding “impurities.” Scientists had known of the existence of semiconductors for many years, but did not know how to use them. It wasn’t until 1948 that scientists at Bell Labs, making use of the properties of semiconductors, built the transistor—and everything changed.”
“The applications of the transistor were immediate and obvious: it was far smaller, far lighter, and consumed far less energy than the vacuum tubes that were already very important at the time, and it would soon eliminate vacuum tubes. Moreover, because transistors are small, light, short, and energy-saving, they can do many things vacuum tubes cannot do—for example, serve as the main components of computers, missiles, satellites, and so on.”
“In short, once the transistor was invented, its practical importance was recognized by the scientific and technological community. In just a few years, “semiconductor” changed from an academic term into an industry.”
“Today, many people call Taiwan’s semiconductor industry the integrated-circuit industry. They are not wrong: the overwhelming majority of semiconductor manufacturers’ products are indeed integrated circuits. However, when it comes to the development of technology, I too am an incurable optimist. I firmly believe semiconductors are endlessly profound; integrated circuits are only their embodiment today. One day—perhaps in a few years, perhaps in a few decades—another invention based on semiconductors will appear. So I like this broader term: the semiconductor industry.”
“The importance of the transistor’s invention was no less than that of the electric light, the telephone, or steam power. The three inventors—Bardeen (John Bardeen), Brattain (Walter Brattain), and Shockley (William Shockley)—also jointly received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1956.”
