Not long after our scores on the subject matter tests were posted, Jason, Ji-hong, and I became the talk of the chemistry department. Professor McNesby was delighted with our performance on the tests, and later that week he addressed about one hundred students and faculty who had gathered in a lecture hall for a department meeting.
“We’ve got three smart cookies from China who are setting a good example for our students,” he said, beaming from the podium.
My faculty advisor, on the other hand, wasn’t convinced.
“You just got lucky.”
His name was Jerry Miller, and he advised me on the required classes for my graduate program. He was tall, strong, and straight-faced. Professor Miller didn’t believe that a minority student like me could succeed in American higher education. He made that clear in our first meeting with his dismissive response to my scores. It wouldn’t be the last time I experienced his prejudice against me as a minority, nor would he be the last person to shun me based on my ethnic origin.
I was, however, very shocked to encounter such prejudice from my academic advisor. Being in America, I thought I had finally found the fairness and equality that had eluded me back in China. During the Cultural Revolution, I was part of a family of doctors and intellectuals who were reviled by the communists as the “stinking ninth class,” the lowest rung of the entire social order. But I thought it was going to be the opposite in America; I was supposed to be respected for my knowledge and education. I could not get over how Professor Miller could be so contemptuous toward me simply because I was a minority. I realized that life isn’t always fair, even in a great country like America.
On the other hand, many other professors were delighted at our academic achievement, and vied to be our thesis advisors and recruit us for their research teams. I went out to eat with at least four different professors, including Dr. McNesby, who hosted all three of us for dinner at his home one evening. Only one other faculty member, John Weiner, invited me to dinner at his home.
At the time, Professor John Weiner was not yet forty years old, but was already a rising star in laser applications in chemistry and physics. He had dark, curly hair and an intense gaze. He was curious, focused, and driven. While I owed so much to Professor McNesby for his assistance in getting me to the States, I was drawn to Professor Weiner and his intriguing work with lasers.
Professor Weiner and his wife, Denise, lived in a beautiful home decorated with reproductions of European art. Denise was French, and the couple had spent a considerable amount of time living overseas. They were lively and laughed a lot, and I felt at ease in their presence. After a hearty meal of homemade lasagna, Professor Weiner and I retreated to the living room to play a game of backgammon. He started lining up the red checkers on his side of the board, leaving me with the black pieces. I joked that we should switch colors since I was from Red China, to which he laughed.
“You could focus on any number of topics for your thesis,” he said, as he moved one of his pieces on the board. He leaned forward, his elbows resting on his knees. “Why the interest in lasers?”
I told him about being wide-eyed in Professor Ma’s laser lab back at USTC and in the movie theater watching Star Wars, and I added that I wanted to devote my life to this exciting, emerging technology.
“Are you ready to play Star Wars for real?” he asked.
“Yes, absolutely. That’s what I’ve always wanted to do.”
I was convinced that lasers would transform the world. Using lasers, we could better determine the safest and strongest materials for space shuttles and satellites, and the best elements for electronics and computer parts. Lasers would eventually be considered one of the greatest inventions of the twentieth century, and although I imagined so many inspiring possibilities, I didn’t know then just how crucial lasers would later become to my career and my life.
“Welcome to the team,” said Dr. Weiner. “We’re going to do great things together.”
The early years at the University of Maryland were spent mostly in classes for my graduate program or on the undergraduate courses for which I served as a teaching assistant. I juggled school, multiple side jobs, and occasional lab experiments. Despite my busy schedule, I still found time to pursue my favorite hobbies like piano, ballet, and ping-pong. I made many new friends, and for the first time in my life, I even fell in love.
Her name was Shu Chen. We met at a Christmas party at the end of my second year in Maryland, and talked throughout the evening. I found out that her family had come to the U.S. from Taiwan when she was in junior high. She loved science and was planning to go to medical-school after her undergraduate studies were completed. I told her about the generations of doctors in my family and the medical-school classes I had audited illegally back in China. She was lovely, lively, and intelligent, and I felt completely at ease with her.
Not long after our first encounter, Shu and I began dating. On the weekends, she often accompanied me to the rundown theater in Georgetown. I was a big fan of Bruce Lee, so we watched a lot of old kung-fu movies together. I didn’t have any female friends growing up, and I had never had a girlfriend before, but our relationship blossomed over the next few years, and Shu and I were engaged by the time we finished school. I didn’t know then that our relationship would fall on very difficult times because we were both too young to understand the balance between a healthy marriage and demanding careers.
Success in school was paramount to me and many other minority students fighting to prove ourselves at American universities. No matter how many A’s I got in my classes, Professor Miller was never supportive or happy for me, but when I got a B in a difficult physical chemistry class, he asked, “Sure you want to keep going? Can you handle the rest of your courses?” When it came time to formulate a doctoral thesis, Professor Miller doubted my ability to create and defend the proposal, or to conduct the experiments. I couldn’t understand how he could still just fixate on my ethnicity and remain so blind to my actual abilities.
Miller had inherited a perception of the Chinese based on a century of fear and misunderstanding between our cultures. The only Chinese immigrants he was aware of weren’t the visiting scholars or the capable students, but rather only the hundreds of thousands of poor immigrants from the Guangdong Province who first came to the U.S. in the nineteenth century. Those immigrants had come for the Gold Rush, and stayed on to build the transcontinental railroad, start businesses like laundromats and restaurants, and fight decades of extreme legalized discrimination. I didn’t stand before Dr. Miller as a person in my own right; in his mind, I was apparently just one of many little “rats” that had jumped ship from China. I was endlessly frustrated that nothing I did—no amount of good work—could ever change his mind.
Fortunately, most of the other faculty members were not like Dr. Miller. They were open-minded and supportive toward students of all ethnic origins. Contrary to Professor Miller’s predictions, I did successfully defend my doctoral thesis proposal, and research with Dr. Weiner began in earnest during the second half of my graduate program. With basic coursework completed, I spent much more time in Dr. Weiner’s laser lab.
The lab was an immense room with thick concrete walls and flooring made of dark brown anti-corrosive tiles. One side of the room had windows that were kept permanently draped, but the room would light up from all kinds of laser beams bouncing off mirrors from different angles. The main attraction was a stainless-steel gas chamber that was hooked up to a variety of electronics. The contraption was as big as a king-size bed and stood at chest level. Panes of glass allowed us to observe what was happening inside the chamber.
Weiner’s research team included me, two other graduate students named John Keller and Regina Bonanno, and a postdoctoral fellow named Mattanjah de Vries. We studied the interaction of colliding atoms in this huge laser-lit machine. The goal of our work was to create the most conducive environment for getting one atom to bond with another. Atoms that have bonded into molecules create a lot of the matter in the world, as when two hydrogen atoms bond with an oxygen atom to produce a water molecule. We used the sodium atom as our experimental model, and our endeavor was to create dimers, structures made up of two sodium atoms bonded together. We considered ourselves “molecular matchmakers,” since we were studying lonely atoms traveling through space and evaluating how we could set a mood that would encourage these singles come together and settle down into more stable molecular pairs.
If we were molecular matchmakers, conducting these experiments was like staging singles parties. We inserted a block of sodium into a metal cylinder, and then warmed them up using electrical wires wrapped around the cylinder. As the heat increased, the atoms would vaporize and begin to move very quickly, until they shot out of the tiny opening at one end of the cylinder into a large reaction chamber. These atoms’ intended partners were beamed into the same chamber from a second cylinder oriented at a 90-degree angle. The laser was key to increasing a single atom’s receptivity to another. It was like introducing two people who each had their arms folded tightly across their chests. The yellow laser was used to help a lonely sodium atom “unfold his or her arms” and thus become more receptive to another atom, so they could have a chance to become a sodium couple.
Over and over again, we threw these atomic singles parties with various configurations, trying to see if a couple would form from each effort. We would know when it happened because the newly formed pair would emit a distinct yellow light.
Many evenings each week I would key up the atom beams, set up the electromagnetic components, and fire up the laser. Once everything was ready, the rest of the experiment was conducted in the dark. The only light came from the lasers traversing the room, bouncing from one mirror to another. The laser light would pulsate, making a tap-tap-tap noise, like incessantly dripping water. I was like a ghost in the dark, hovering over the machine until two or three in the morning, tortured by that repetitive rhythm. I remembered experiencing a similar rhythm when I was wrapping books at the factory at the end of the Cultural Revolution in China, but the difference was that back then I was sad because I had no hope for a future, but now I enjoyed it since there was a greater, more exciting purpose.
It was a long, tedious, often frustrating process, but thinking back, my Eastern upbringing and work ethic helped to sustain me. Dr. Weiner was pleased with my efforts. During a faculty and student party at his house, he told colleagues about the diligence and creativity that I regularly applied to the tasks. But once again, my faculty advisor, Professor Miller, was not impressed at all. When he heard Professor Weiner’s complimentary remarks about me, he turned around and asked, “What do most Chinese do in this country anyway?”
“They’re in the restaurant business,” answered another professor.
“Exactly,” said Miller. “Weiner is just using Ming to do some precision cooking.”
I stared at him in disbelief. An awkward silence hung over the group, and then Professor Miller started laughing at his own joke.
Regardless of my performance, from record high test scores to extremely delicate atomic experiments, Miller would never perceive me as a fellow scientist standing equally shoulder to shoulder with him. In his mind, I was just a Chinese cook in Dr. Weiner’s kitchen. I looked over Dr. Weiner’s shoulder to where Miller stood near a window. I had endured his slights and insults for years, and I was suddenly consumed with the urge to punch him like Bruce Lee would do in his kung-fu movies. Even though Miller was much bigger than I was, I imagined myself leaping up and kicking him in the jaw so hard that his whole body would fly through the glass window and land outside with a loud thud.
But I didn’t want to be like the Red Guards in China, who assaulted and dishonored their teachers. Restraining my fury, I instead forced a slight smile.
Professor Miller’s constant discriminatory rebuffs only made me more determined to succeed. Late one night, our research team had been working for hours, and we were ready to call it a night. It was the dead of winter, the temperature outside had been falling, and forecasters were warning of nasty, freezing rain. We were worried about getting home before the road conditions became dangerous. But I continued tweaking the electrical current around the cylinder and readjusting the laser light, with no results. Just before shutting down the entire apparatus, I decided to give it one last try by boosting the current just beyond its limit.
“Be careful, Ming,” warned John, my lab partner. “If you turn it up too high, the coil could melt and then we’ll have to spend months rebuilding the whole machine.”
I nodded, nervous that I might ruin our entire project, but then increased the heat anyway. I just didn’t want to give up, as I hoped that maybe under hotter conditions, the atoms would fly a bit more quickly and our odds of atomic coupling might increase. Under the higher electrical current, I smelled the coil start to sizzle. My stomach fluttered and my breath was shallow. I knew I couldn’t keep the machine running this hot for very long because in a matter of minutes, the cylinder’s coils could melt.
By this point, I had done everything I could think of and had reached the limit of my capabilities. I felt helpless, and I longed for assistance from a power greater than myself. I hadn’t had much exposure to religion and spirituality except for the world literature I read back in China. The concept of faith was still very foreign to me, but at that moment I thought that if there was indeed a God in the universe, this would certainly be the time for Him to show up.
Peering into the chamber window, I whispered, “God, if you do exist, please come help us!”
I took a deep breath, and as I looked through the glass again, I saw something I had never seen before. There in the middle of the gas chamber, a bright yellow dot was glowing.
“There it is!” I shouted. As John rushed over to look, I ran out of the lab and straight into Dr. Weiner’s office to deliver the news. He was just about to go home, but he dropped his bag on the ground and hurried ahead of me back to the lab. He leaned over and saw the bright yellow dot in the middle of the chamber, our first successful atomic marriage. He then fell to his knees, lay down on the floor with his arms and legs spread out to each side, and sang loudly.
I laughed at the sight of my esteemed professor lying on the floor being as joyful as a kid on Christmas. At long last, a sodium dimer was formed and was glowing with atomic happiness … and so were we. After two years of effort, we had finally gotten the atomic collider to work. Not only had we seen it with our own eyes, but the detector on top of the machine also confirmed the results. I was filled with a sense of awe, not just that the experiment had finally succeeded, but also that I felt as if something supernatural had occurred. But I was a scientist, and there was no room in the scientific mindset for the supernatural. Yet I couldn’t deny the overwhelming sense that perhaps God did exist, that He did hear my simple prayer, and that He showed up in the bright glow of that yellow dot. I began to imagine that this God might be real and powerful and infinite, extending from the grandeur of the universe to the infinitesimal specks of subatomic particles.
On my way home, I was grateful for the empty roads. I was driving an old car I had bought with my roommates, a white 1973 AMC Matador so massive that we nicknamed her “M1” after the giant U.S. military combat vehicle. M1 was temperamental and stalled out every ten minutes when she was driven. But that night, I didn’t care when M1 choked, shook, and sputtered. In fact, she seemed to be celebrating with me! I was utterly ecstatic, whooping and hollering at the frosted windshield, singing in the icy rain. M1 and I careened joyfully from side to side across the slick streets and swerved our way home.
The next day, our team recorded the details of the molecular miracle and redesigned the machine to work safely at a higher level of electrical current. Now that we had produced a state-of-the-art collider, I spent the rest of my time in the doctoral program elevating the experiment to a more sophisticated level. We still needed to determine the best speed for the atomic coupling. If the atoms were traveling too slowly with respect to each other, they wouldn’t get close enough to bond; but if they went too fast, on the other hand, they would fly right past each other. Eventually, I fine-tuned a novel technique to measure the ideal speed and direction for forming new atomic couples using the Doppler Effect, a physics principle that links the speed of a moving object and the color of light perceived by it. I was the first author on a series of original articles published by Weiner’s lab team in the authoritative physics journal, Physical Review A. Our work was cited by scientists like Yuan T. Lee, Steven Chu, and William D. Phillips, who all won Nobel Prizes for chemistry and physics with atomic beam experiments which were similar to ours, but more refined. Each of my Physical Review A papers became a chapter in my thesis. I finished my doctorate in about four-and-a-half years, but I stayed on for another year in a postdoctoral fellowship to continue our team’s work.
Toward the end of my graduate program, I began pondering what to do next. Watching Shu prepare for medical-school had rekindled my childhood dream of being a doctor. I remembered being a teenager, standing in the circle of medical students in Hangzhou, watching my father leading rounds at the hospital. I was so filled with pride and hope back then, and the years in America had helped me find the freedom and confidence I had been longing for. Maybe now I could finally pursue this beloved dream I always had, but once thought was lost forever.
And like the sodium atom pairs in my team’s experiment, I had bonded with someone and planned to settle down. Shu and I were married before she left for medical-school in West Virginia. I may have been an excellent molecular matchmaker, but what worked in the lab didn’t work the same way in life. Shu and I eventually discovered that our marriage was not very stable. For years we lived, studied, and worked in separate states. The distance would eventually be our undoing, as our career paths launched us into very different orbits.