A Force for Change: The Class of 1950

chapter 12

Students from faraway places

Tsung Wei Sze

Tsung Wei Sze lives in Pittsburgh, a long way from his beginnings. Sometimes life takes you far from where you start to places you never thought you would see.

And if life takes you to one place, it takes you away from another—away from a home and parents and brothers and sisters and friends, away from a world you understood to one that is quite different.

Before retiring in 1993, Sze had returned to teaching at the University of Pittsburgh where he did research and was a professor of electrical engineering.

Teaching and research were his first and last loves. In between, he served at Pittsburgh as associate dean and dean of the school of engineering and dean of graduate studies.

“I’m from Shanghai, China,” Sze says. “I was born in 1922. My father was a teacher. We had a depression in China, too. It was pretty bad. I will give you one example. Whenever there was a cold spell, a freeze, there would be corpses on the street.

“In 1939, I went to Chiaotung University to study electrical engineering. I had a scholarship, and Chiaotung had the best engineering school in the Far East at that time. With the fall of Shanghai, the school was moved to a wartime campus near Chunking. It had no electricity, no lab—nothing. However, the school did have dedicated professors.

“After my junior year, I volunteered for the Chinese Army. Because of my college education, I was assigned to work with the American Army. In the beginning, I worked with them in China, and then one hundred ofus were sent to the United States. I was an interpreter attached to the Air Force. It was our understanding we would go in with the invasion of either Japan or southeast China. I felt very relieved about the bomb being dropped.

“I was discharged from the service in 1946 while I was in the United States. I went to the University of Missouri to finish my undergraduate work and graduated in 1948. I applied to Purdue and was admitted for my master’s. Purdue has an engineering program known all over the world.

“I lived in Cary Hall at Purdue and belonged to the Chinese Student Association. There were about a hundred of us at Purdue at the time. We didn’t intermingle very much with the other students. It was still pretty hard for Chinese students to get housing in West Lafayette. When a Chinese student was successful in finding a house that would take him, he helped others get a room also—usually in the same house.

“The Chinese Student Association met monthly. We had potluck dinners, and we went to Urbana, Illinois, to the University of Illinois to be with Chinese students there. We had volleyball matches and played bridge, and we returned the courtesy—the Illinois students came to Purdue.

“I felt the United States was a very good place to stay, but I always considered myself a guest. I always thought after I finished I would be going home to China.

“No matter how well we did in our studies at Purdue, it was very hard for us to get an assistantship. The chairman of the department told me there were no assistantships for foreign students. That’s why I went to Northwestern for my Ph.D. I got married in 1952. My wife was also a student at Northwestern.

“I never did go home. The Communists took over China in 1950, and that settled that. My parents were still in China along with my two brothers and one sister. Although I had left China in 1945, because of the war I had last seen my family in 1941.

“For a long time, we were able to write, although letters were watched. Anything that came from the United States, even alumni office materials, my family had to pick up from the police. The mail from the United States caused them a lot of trouble. Finally, my wife’s mother wrote, ‘Please, don’t write anymore.’

“We stopped. There was a period of about twelve years when we didn’t really know whether they were alive or dead. It was very hard, indeed.

“I became a United States citizen in 1962.

“I was not able to return to China to see my family until after President Nixon opened it up. I returned in 1979, and I was able to see my family. It was very emotional. The meeting was still very much under the control of the Chinese government. They decided whom you could see and where you could see them. My family came to see me at my hotel—not all at once, but I was able to see them all. I had been invited to come by the Chinese to establish a research center in image processing, which was my field. I was treated very well.

“I have been able to go back to China five different times, and each time I worked with various universities and visited with my family. My parents have passed away now.

“I consider myself very lucky because some of my classmates who remained under the Communists had a very tough time. Some of them were driven to suicide. If I had not been sent to the United States by the Chinese Army, my life would be entirely different.

“These things make you appreciate life much more.”

Pedro Castillo

“At Purdue it was beautiful,” he says. “There were a lot of good exchange students and not just Latinos like me. I had a friend from India, who became a well-known scientist. I had a friend from Iraq, who was a graduate student.

“People told my friend from Iraq if he wanted to be Americanized he had to learn the game of football. So one Saturday he asked me to go to a game with him, but he had a lab first and he asked me to save him a seat. When he got there, the game had already started, and he came running up the stands. The run wore him out, he was breathing hard.

‘“Puff, puff,’ he said. ‘What’s the score?’

“‘Nothing to nothing,’ I said.

“‘Oh,’ he said, still puffing. ‘Who scored the first nothing?’”

Pedro Castillo is an easygoing, friendly man. He has been married since 1953 to Patricia, a woman he met in Lafayette. The Castillos have three children and three granddaughters. He works for a Lafayette furniture company.

Castillo was born in November of 1925 to a well-to-do family in the leather-goods industry in Arequipa, Peru, the country’s second largest city, eight hundred miles south of Lima, between the mountains and the coastline.

“We had a depression in Peru, too, but I don’t remember a lot about it,” he says, sitting on his living-room couch, a dog lying nearby on the floor. His wife is in the kitchen at a table. He checks with her about certain dates.

“During the depression, I had an uncle who lost a fortune in the wool business,” he says. “And I remember there was a person running the country whose policies caused a lot of discontent. The military came along and overthrew him in a big revolution. Everyone was very happy with the new leader. A few years later, he got killed. That’s my first recollection of politics in Peru.

“Peruvians did a lot of business with the German chemical companies. We bought a lot from them. And I went to school with a lot of Italians. We used to sing Mussolini’s national song in school. Before the war, all my intentions were to go to college in Germany. But the war came along, and it changed everything.

“Before the United States entered the war, feelings were mixed in Peru. There was a lot of sympathy for the Germans. Many of the Americans who came to Peru were the ‘ugly American’ type. The Germans were more friendly. After Pearl Harbor, however, everyone sympathized with the Americans. Peru was on the side of the Allies. But there was no draft of young men.

“I graduated from high school in 1947. I went to prep schools in the state of New Jersey. When I was ready for college, I decided the East Coast was too cold for me. My counselor told me to apply to UCLA and Stanford because the weather was more what I was used to. I did and I was accepted. But their semesters had already started, and I would have had to wait. So, I applied to Notre Dame, Rose Poly, and Purdue. I picked Purdue.

“I came to Purdue by bus in February of 1949, and we passed through miles and miles of snow. It was a good thing we went through at night when I couldn’t see it. I had no idea it would be as cold here as on the East Coast.

“I arrived on a Saturday, and on Sunday, I needed to go to church. I got directions to Saint Mary’s Cathedral in Lafayette. Afterwards, I was walking home and I heard a group of guys talking in Spanish. I thought, Oh man! That was my salvation. I made friends quickly.

“I never felt out of place at Purdue, but quite a few little things were difficult. There was a certain animosity against foreigners in Lafayette. I never really experienced it firsthand, but some of my friends did.

“I had Panamanian friends who were very dark, really black. They would go to the Lafayette Theater, and they couldn’t sit downstairs. They had to climb up to the balcony. It’s a good thing I didn’t see that because as revolutionary as I was I don’t know what I would have done.

“I remember once a friend and I were standing in a line somewhere and talking in Spanish. A man turned around and said, ‘Why don’t you talk English so we can understand you?’

“I never really had trouble on the Purdue campus. There was a lot of acceptance there. Many of the guys had come back on the GI Bill. They had been outside the country and came back with a much wider concept oflife in other countries. But some guys who had never been anywhere but the next county were a problem.

“I was studying mechanical engineering, but the money dried up and my grades were not so good. My family in Peru had been paying for everything, and economic inflation there was terrible. When I first came to the United States, it was 6.5 of our money for a dollar American. When I came to Purdue, it was 36 to a dollar. By 1950, it was worse. My family said, ‘Come back home and finish school here.’ I said, ‘No. I have a job.’ I thought I’d save some money and go back to Purdue. But I never did.

“In those days, I was just trying to have a good time, to have a good life. I’m older now, but still—if I had known then what I know now, I wouldn’t have changed anything. If I had gone back to Purdue and finished my degree, I might have been in a better job now.

“But I wouldn’t be any happier.”