Looking back at episodes of our lives, we reflect on how people meet and how such meetings change lives. Information technology, broadly interpreted as means of communication among people, is always part of these narratives. But central to such narratives are nearly always people themselves and the content of their communication, rather than the means of their communication.
I wrote in Part 1 about my childhood memories of information technology: the semiconductor radios, the loudspeakers, the mainframe computers, and the TVs. I wrote about the Internationale and the East Is Red. I wrote about the reception on campuses of Alvin Tofler’s book, The Third Wave. That was 1980’s. Farsighted intellectuals had looked beyond the scar of the Cultural Revolution, and had seen ways to leap-frog the western technologies. Those were the heydays of intellectual life on campuses, in retrospect.
To college students in those days, a prosperous China seemed to be possible, yet distant in the future. The best hope, so it seemed to many of us, was to go to graduate schools in the United States. In late 1970’s, Deng Xiaoping opened the country to the world. In his youth Deng himself studied in Europe . After he took power, the government began to sponsor scholars to study abroad. The amount of money needed for study abroad was simply far beyond what could be afforded by the average Chinese.
Huajian Gao was a hero among students in Xian Jiaotong University. In 1983 he won a scholarship from a World-Bank loan to the Chinese government, and went to Harvard to study with Professor James R. Rice. While the significance of Harvard and Rice was hazy to undergraduate students in a provincial city in China, the scholarship and the World Bank sounded grand.
With Huajian as a role model, we students worked hard in college to study English, mathematics and mechanics. These were more than interesting subjects; they were the keys to a bright future. To our great disappointment, there wasn’t any scholarship available to students in mechanics on our campus in 1985, the year I graduated. Professor Xing Ji, my undergraduate thesis advisor, took me on as a graduate student.
In the spring of 1985, Professor John W. Hutchinson came to Xian to see the Terracotta Army and to give a seminar at Xian Jiaotong University. Seminars were a novelty to undergraduate students, and there wasn’t a reliable way for the Department to send out announcements to us. We did not have emails, phones or offices. Professor Ji asked Pengfei He, a senior graduate student, to find me in the dormitory and bring me to the seminar. The seminar room was not very large, but was packed. Hutchinson lectured on the propagating instability of a pipe under compression. It was over two decades later I read his paper on propagating instability. (Hutchinson has recently posted pdf files of his papers on his web page.)
Professor Ji found a gap in Hutchinson’s schedule, and arranged us to meet. Professor Hutchinson encouraged me to apply for graduate study at then the Division of Applied Sciences at Harvard University. If I was admitted, he said, the Division would provide a fellowship to cover tuition and living expenses. He told me to write to the Division to ask for the waive of the $30 application fee. (This fee was more than the monthly salary of my parents.)
What a surprise! A Chinese student could study in a great American university and get paid. Scholarship from the Chinese government was not the only way to pay for study abroad. Of course, in those days, there wasn’t any World Wide Web to explain such a counter-intuitive idea. The word of mouth took time to reach a provincial city in China.
In the summer of 1985, Huajian Gao came back to Xian Jiaotong University for a visit. He was a former student of Professor Ji, and Professor Ji arranged us to meet. Huajian was already a star student at Harvard. His success opened the door of Harvard to several of us from Xian Jiaotong University. Years later, Jim Rice would say that Xian Jiaotong University was the Chinese version of Lehigh University. Good students could come from anywhere, he would say. (Both Jim Rice and John Hutchinson are alumni of Lehigh University.)
When the application forms came in the mail from Harvard, I learned about GRE. I had known TOEFL for a long time, and had prepared for it. But GRE was new to me, and there wasn’t much time to get prepared. I mailed a letter to Hutchinson to ask if I could apply for admission without the score of GRE. For months I did not hear from him. I went on to take both TOEFL and GRE, and got a good score for the former but a mediocre one for the latter. Both scores were automatically sent to Harvard.
Hutchinson’s letter finally came, saying that he was on sabbatical in Demark, and that he found my English adequate and there was no need for me to take either TOEFL or GRE. There must be many stories about Hutchinson’s sabbaticals in Demark!
I arrived in Boston in late August 1986.
Lost in communication
The advances in cyberinfrastructure, both hardware and software, in the last two decades have radically changed the way we communicate with each other. The other day my neighbour told me that, his co-worker was working from blackberry at National Mall in DC to exchange emails with the Virginia office, surrounded by one million some people at the Inauguration. While enjoying all these conveniences, often times we also find ourselves flooded in tons of emails, not to mention spam emails in the regular folder, or even worse, regular emails in spam folder. Never missing an important email becomes nearly impratical.
The differences in culture and language may get someone lost in translation, the massive information exchange could also make us lost in communication. Let's hope the advance in technology will address this issue in the near future.