Jada Yuan
About the author
Jada Yuan, the only granddaughter of Wu Jianxiong and Yuan Jialuo (Yuan Shikai's grandson), was born in the United States, graduated from Yale University with a bachelor's degree, and is now a contributor to the style edition of The Washington Post, focusing on national politics. In 2018, she was the new York Times' inaugural 52 Places Traveler voyage around the world. Prior to that, she was a longtime cultural writer for New York magazine, covering film and figurative figures such as Steve Knicks and Bill Murray.
The world reveres Jianxiong Wu as a pioneering nuclear physicist who made a surprising discovery 65 years ago. But for me, she's Grandma – I'm eager to learn more about her private world.
(Drawn by Li Jing, Washington Post)
01.
Someone pulled the rope and the yellow curtain fell, revealing a statue of my grandmother, three stories high.
It was May 2012, and a statue of Wu Jianxiong by a sculptor stood in a town not far north of Shanghai (Taicang, Jiangsu). She was a pioneer in nuclear physics, traveled from China to the United States in 1936 to study, and, in many ways, never looked back. She overturned what was once considered the basic law of nature, raised my father in Manhattan, and taught me how to use chopsticks when I was young.
In real life, she may be just 5 feet tall and get shorter and shorter as she ages. The statue now recreates what she was when she was young, sitting on a pedestal, draped in that kind of academic robe, that I have only seen in the photographs of her sixteen honorary doctorates in science, one of which was at Princeton University, where such a degree was awarded to a woman for the first time. It took me a moment to realize that the statue was her. The bronze statue was so big, so green—the same mint green hue as the Statue of Liberty.
(Image from Sohu website)
My parents and I flew to Shanghai a hundred years ago, where my grandmother was born in 1912, and then drove an hour north to Liuhe, a fishing village at the yellow sea where the Yangtze River flows, where she grew up.
We had not reversed the jet lag and attended the centenary celebration organized by the local government for her in a daze. I didn't expect a police motorcycle team to open the way, with banners with her name across the street. There was also a raucous banquet with local officials every night, and the flowing Moutai wine at the banquet, a clear fermented sorghum wine that tasted like sweet turpentine. On such occasions, sociable people like my cousin Wu Su would walk around every table to toast everyone. Then you have to walk around all the tables like he did, toasting in quick succession, sneaking water into it every other cup so that you don't get drunk and fall halfway down the aisle.
Every time I visitEd China, I met with a dizzying array of relatives I never knew I had, and that noisy and familiar language, and my American-born father and I had never understood much in our lifetime. We are just at the mercy of others.
On the morning of the statue's unveiling, our relatives led my father, Vincent Yuan, Wu's only child, my mother, Lucy Lyon, and me (the only grandchildren) to a sea of folding chairs, each covered in red and yellow fabric. There were a lot of untranslated Chinese speeches during the ceremony, and somewhere in the speech I heard my father's name, and then my name. My cousin quickly motioned for us to stand up and wave, and then there was a round of applause. My mother was jewish, ethnically rather than religiously, blonde-haired and blue-eyed, and when she was introduced and stood up, thousands of people exclaimed in unison.
Going to China to commemorate my grandmother, we have experienced it before: in Nanjing, where she was an undergraduate, there is a memorial. Another bronze statue of her stands in Shanghai. On this centenary trip, we attended the opening ceremony of the Wu Jianxiong Exhibition Hall, which showcased her academic papers and the slit cheongsam she wore inside her white lab overalls. In her hometown, we visited the classrooms of the school founded by her father, whose main purpose was to enable her daughter to receive an education. There the children sang songs about Wu Jianxiong.
Chinese hero worship is impressive, and when your grandmother is the object of worship, it's a surreal experience. In New York, she walked back and forth between Columbia's lab and a nearby, rent-stable faculty apartment, living there with her grandfather, a particle physicist, and my father, who later became a nuclear physicist.
This kind of saintly worship can easily make people lose their understanding of the real personality. I still have memories of my grandmother, but not completely. The research work that made her famous changed the way scientists think about the universe. This has inspired countless girls and women who are still connected to me to this day.
However, the picture back to my memory is of my childhood: dancing around her in the party dress she gave me with dots, or rushing downstairs with her to see a Christmas carol show on Claremont Avenue. Today I am almost at the age when she makes great discoveries. Half of my life has been spent knowing her grandchildren.
Like many children from immigrant families—or from scientists, families through war and destruction—I didn't realize how shallow I knew about her life until my grandmother had passed away and didn't have a chance to ask her again. Stitch together the memories. Our family story has been repeated many times in official accounts and biographies, and it is not clear which version is true. The past is an ended chapter. The first generation struggled to distance themselves from old ways of life, language, and food. Second-generation grandchildren like me, looking back, eager to learn more about what it all was like when it all started.
United States Postal Service
My grandmother was like a rock star in China. Later, in early 2021, the U.S. Postal Service issued a permanent stamp in her honor, and she became a rock star in the United States. (You can also buy a T-shirt with her and other "STEM (Women in Science and Technology Engineering Mathematics)".) Recently, she and her stamps became part of the televised quiz show "Jeopardy!" A thread in "Famous Asian Americans." List price $800. My grandmother's stamp raised the total number of Asian-American women appearing on the stamp to two, alongside Joyce Chen, a chef who promoted wood-bearded meat.
The portrait of the grandmother in the stamp looks exactly like the woman I remember: intelligent, deep-eyed, with delicately combed high hair in a bun — an achievement in itself. The slyness on her face that seemed to be smiling always made me wonder what she was thinking.
Jianxiong Wu, nuclear physicist at Columbia University in New York (University Archives, Library of Rare Books and Manuscripts, Columbia University Library)
02.
In a way, we are all nothing more than theoretically interpreting the lives of those close to us; once they are gone, we deal with the materials and notes they leave behind.
I'm not an expert in nuclear physics, but that's my understanding: an experiment my grandmother conducted in 1956 proved a theory that shattered our understanding of the physical world. She accepted the challenge that no one in her field wanted to face, and she proved that "cosmology is not conserved", that is, the laws of nature are not completely symmetrical.
A natural phenomenon and its mirror image are not always the same. The universe sometimes distinguishes between left and right.
Janna Levin, an astrophysicist at Barnard College, told me why there was more matter than antimatter after the Big Bang — why is there matter in the universe instead of nothing? Why hasn't it been annihilated to the point of disappearing without a trace? At the end of the day, why did the universe exist as we know it today? This asymmetry that my grandmother found may have fundamentally answered these questions.
What kind of person was my grandmother? My feelings come from a lot of written sources, some of which are as reliable as peer-reviewed scientific papers. There is a biography originally written by Jiang Caijian in Chinese, as well as countless articles that come out every time he honors women in science. There was also a 2019 children's book, The Queen of Physics, which gave the most succinct account, which later found to be particularly useful for me to learn more about my grandmother.
What is the most important point about her career? The answer is this: the grandmother should have won the Nobel Prize.
I started hearing this statement even before I understood her job (not that I had the ability to really understand it). She is known all over the world as "Marie Curie of China" and "First Lady of Physics". At Columbia University, where she has been teaching for decades, she always asks students to be perfect at their jobs and stay in the lab for long periods of time, when disgruntled students will call her "Mrs. Wu" — or "Ms. Long." She prefers to be called Professor Wu or Dr. Wu. I call her grandmother, although a child who is more immersed in Chinese culture will call her grandmother.
Although she has not won a Nobel Prize, her name is often compared to that of the giants of physics who have won the prize, such as Curie, Einstein, Fermi and Feynman.
Wu Jianxiong and her uncle Wu Zhenzhi, who later paid for her travel to the United States (family photo)
Wu Jianxiong (fifth from left) dressed in black for a group photo with his family. Her father Wu Zhongyi is on her left, and her mother, Fan Fuhua, is on the far left of the photo (family photo)
When Wu Jianxiong was 11 years old, her parents' school could no longer teach her anything, so she left home to study. She was fortunate that she was a girl in her family who was ranked among two brothers, whose parents were politically progressive and who were true revolutionaries, advocating for women's rights and girls' right to education.
She trekked fifty miles of rugged country roads to a free girls' normal school in Suzhou. However, she secretly studied physics and math books borrowed from her classmates at night. Why Physics? She never told me, but it was the 1920s, and driven by Einstein's theory of relativity, was a series of exciting discoveries emerged in Europe and the United States. It's understandable to want to get involved, just as the young Patti Smith wanted to go to the East Village in the late 1960s.
In 1936, she boarded an ocean liner at the age of 24. Embark on a month-long journey across the Pacific to the United States. His travel expenses were paid by his uncle. She had to go abroad, and there was no place in China at the time to pursue a Ph.D. in atomic physics.
The threat of Japanese aggression against China was imminent, and those who had left the country knew what they were fleeing from. Her first battle, a year after she left for China, took place in Shanghai, 27 miles south of her hometown. Then there was the Nanjing Massacre, where the Japanese raped or massacred hundreds of thousands of civilians in the city where she had recently completed her undergraduate studies, where she also took the lead in protesting at the official residence of the Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek, demanding that he take more measures to stop the war.
She did not foresee that the war would spread into World War II, nor did she foresee that her brother and uncle would later be tortured to death during the Cultural Revolution. She thought she would be able to return to China in a few years.
When she waved goodbye to her parents on the ship, it was also the last time she saw them.
03.
When the stamp was issued, a reporter contacted my father and asked him about his mother. Father sent me a copy of his answer, and it was one time he had been more outspoken to me than ever before.
Can he talk about how she became a mother?
Father replied: She worked in the laboratory for a long time and came home late at night. "She takes care of me on the one hand, and she has to do her job on the other." She checked to see if he had done his homework, but didn't take it very closely.
What happy things have they had together?
The father wrote: "When it comes to fun, we don't have much in common, work is her life and pleasure. "She'd rather be with him when she's traveling than with him in everyday life."
The father learned something about his childhood from reading people's texts about her mother: "The students in her lab bought us two circus tickets so that she could leave the lab for two hours," he said. "But she came back less than half an hour away, laughing and saying she didn't have to go to the circus because the nanny had agreed to take me there."
I come from a family of physicists and grew up in Los Alamos, New Mexico, a secretly built town. Many of the adults around me have security clearances, and we kids have learned not to inquire about their work. They have had mysterious careers and are off-limits to me.
I did well in both science and math classes, but I prefer storytelling. So I became a journalist, wrote a lot of close-ups of well-known people, and liked to interrogate their lives. Somehow, I never tried to take away the cloak of my own family's reputation.
Even now it's hard, because if I dig too hard, I have to face the following thought: Wu Jianxiong has not balanced her work and family life in the process of achieving many achievements, and the impact of her choices has spread to my father, and then to me in a way that I have begun to understand after many years of treatment. The article took months to write, during which time I had a uterine surgery and frozen my eggs — afraid that at 43, I would cut off her family's bloodline.
04.
When my grandmother stepped off the ocean liner, she had planned to pursue a Ph.D. at the University of Michigan, but after visiting the University of California, Berkeley, she changed her mind and decided to enroll there. She was surprised to learn that the University of Michigan's student union would not allow women to enter through the front door. And the guide who led her to Berkeley was Yuan Jialuo, another Chinese physics graduate student, who is often referred to as Luke.
Luke was my grandfather, but there's another love story here that's less romantic for physicists — or perhaps more romantic: Berkeley happens to have the world's first cyclotron, a warehouse-sized device that accelerates charged particles along a spiral path and shoots them toward smaller particles. As soon as my grandmother saw it, she knew she had to stay here.
She had intended to return to China, but the Japanese invasion of China in 1937 cut off all hopes. I believe that the drift, combined with despair, led her to devote herself to the lab work, usually until 4 a.m. Every time she took the exam, she worried that if she didn't pass, she would be homeless. Every time she passed an exam — and always did — she would go to a Chinese restaurant to celebrate.
She began her life's work at Berkeley—studying β decay. This is one of the three main modes of radioactive decay (α, β, γ), a weak interaction phenomenon, the basic driving force that makes the sun glow. The world around her is collapsing, and she focuses on unstable atoms, which spontaneously emit small fragments and become stable again, releasing energy and becoming other elements in the process.
A constant topic in her difficult ascent is that she is a rare, usually the only woman, no matter which room she walks into, and she is still a Chinese woman. In 1941, the Auckland Tribune called her a "petite Chinese girl" in an article about her nuclear fission research, looking like an actress, an artist, or a wealthy lady who pursued Western culture. Almost all of the texts about her at that time praised her beauty in a somewhat erotic Orientalist tone, as if to express surprise that she was also what J. Robert Oppenheimer called the "authority" on the study of β decay.
My father and I had to reconstruct this experience in her life on the basis of written records, notably Sharon Bertsch McGrayne's 1993 book The Nobel Prize for Women in Science, whose author interviewed my grandmother and many of her contemporaries before they died.
Berkeley did not give my grandmother a permanent position. It was a heavy blow, which McGrey believed was the result of sexism coupled with the rise in anti-Asian sentiment during the war, especially on the West Coast. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was reinforced by the stricter Immigration Act of 1924. Soon after, a Japanese internment camp was established. At that time, not a single female physics professor was in the top 20 research universities in the country. (Even now, according to the National Science Foundation, fewer women have a degree in physics than any other field of science.) ）
Wu Jianxiong and Luke Yuan at their home in Pasadena, California, On May 30, 1942, at the home of Greta and Robert Milliken ( family photo)
My grandfather also couldn't get a well-paid position in Berkeley, he got a decent position at the California Institute of Technology and later a job developing radars for the U.S. Department of Defense in New Jersey. They married and moved to the east, and their grandmother migrated with her grandfather's career. She briefly taught at Smith College, where she fell in love with mentoring young women, but her teaching responsibilities left her with no time for research. A year later, in 1943, she signed to become one of princeton's first female physics researchers.
A year later, a secret wartime research project at Columbia University drew her in. Two physicists from Columbia University's War Studies department spent a day questioning her, but never said what she would do. After the questioning they asked her to guess.
She replied, "Sorry, but if you didn't want me to know what you were doing, you should have wiped the writing on the chalkboard clean."
According to McGrey, they hired her on the spot.
05.
Imagine a moment in the development of nuclear physics in which a series of major discoveries come at a frantic pace, and scientists squeeze into lecture halls that have no seats but only standing seats, or climb up pillars to see the equations on the blackboard. And my grandmother was at the center of such an occasion.
Until the 1950s, the symmetry of the universe, including left-right symmetry, the conservation of cosmology, was considered an irrefutable fact. The cosmology says that the universe is not left or right, and that the laws of physics apply equally to anything and its mirror image. This has been shown to be true for macroscopic objects such as planets and baseballs.
But at the level of the nucleus, this is not entirely the case. Scientists used high-energy accelerators to bombard particles into a pile of smaller particles, and the results were a little off. Either there is something wrong with the experiment, or there is something wrong with thirty years of physics.
In the spring of 1956, Lee Jeong-do, a colleague of my grandmother's at Columbia University, told her that he and Yang Zhenning of Princeton University were writing a controversial paper. The paper argues that cosmology may not be conserved in weak interactions, which are one of the four fundamental forces of the universe. (Gravity is another fundamental force; their theory is as unacceptable as saying that gravity only sometimes works.) ）
My grandmother was 44 years old at the time and was already known as a rigorous and meticulous experimenter. In the laboratory, it is precisely what proves whether the views of theorists like Li and Yang are true. She doesn't see physics as a crazy sprint to the first, she values precision and impeccable correctness.
If the scientific community had not thought That Li and Yang's theories were too unbelievable, there would have been a group of experimenters competing to prove their theories. Yang Zhenning later said that my grandmother was the only one who understood the urgency and importance of testing their theory.
She suggests testing the isotope cobalt 60, a strong β decay radioactive source, as the central axis and reducing it to temperatures close to absolute zero, eliminating all kinds of interference to make it easier to measure the path and direction of electrons emitted during decay.
Columbia didn't have the right equipment, so she worked with the Cryogenics team at the U.S. National Bureau of Standards in Washington, led by Ernest Ambler, an Anglo-American. Throughout the fall of 1956, she traveled back and forth between New York and their lab while still teaching at Columbia University, with her husband and a nanny caring for their 9-year-old son.
When reminiscing, my grandmother's former students often think of her rigor—spending long hours in the lab and sleeping on the floor overnight. One night, a student whispered that it was time to go home and prepare dinner for her son, and he called the lab several times to tell his mother that she was hungry.
She replied, "Oh, he got the can opener," and went on. My dad started boarding school in first grade. According to McGrey, Dr. Wu laid out the prerequisites for becoming a successful woman in science: a "good husband," a short commute, and good childcare. I saw my grandfather dedicate himself wholeheartedly to her. He was an accomplished physicist himself, cooking at home, driving her wherever she went (my grandmother never learned to drive), and often putting her needs first.
The preliminary results of her experiment were shocking. Most prominently and measurably, more electrons are emitted from the south pole of the nucleus than from the North Pole. She turned the spin upside down and got the same asymmetrical result.
On Christmas Eve, she boarded the train back to New York, bringing the good news to Lee and Yang Zhenning: Her work—later known as the "Wu Experiment"—appeared to prove that Yuh was not conserved in β decay.
It turns out that the universe is a bit like a left-handed.
Jianxiong Wu in the Columbia University Laboratory (Mani warman/University Archives, Library of Rare Books and Manuscripts, Columbia University Library)
She returned to Washington on Jan. 2 to validate her results.
Two days later, Lee shared the news with a group of Colombian scientists, even though my grandmother had asked him not to do so, not for the time being.
This is important because it directly affects the question of who is to blame for her discovery. Another group of Colombian scientists, led by Leon Lederman, was working on another experiment, and Ledman realized that his experiment could also be tested for non-conservation of cosmology with minor modifications. They confirmed my grandmother's results within four days.
The news spread. My grandmother felt the pressure to publish a paper before Lederman while repeatedly examining her results. In physics, whoever submits and publishes the results of a study first goes to whom the honor goes.
Lederman suspended submitting papers at Lee's request; such goodwill is unlikely to happen if they were not colleagues at Columbia University. It wasn't until January 9 that my grandmother's team took a rare bottle of 1949 Bordeaux Rafi wine from a drawer and toasted to the overthrow of the Conservation of The Universe. Both papers were published in the Physical Review of January 15, 1957. Lederman's paper admits that he started experimenting after hearing about my grandmother's results.
Colombia held a press conference to that end. The news hit the front page of The New York Times. According to a newsletter, at the annual meeting of the American Physical Society in New York in January of that year, a large lecture hall at Columbia University was "crowded with a huge crowd, and people tried everything they could to get in and occupy a place, and almost no one hung on the chandelier." ”
It was a victory, but in a sense, the damage was irreparable. Later that year, the Nobel Committee refused to award any prize money to anyone involved in experimentation; Li Zhengdao and Yang Zhenning won prizes for their theoretical work, becoming the first Chinese physicists to win the Nobel Prize.
It seems that there is sexism here, although it is not so explicit and public. In 120 years, only four women have won the Nobel Prize in Physics. Ms. Wu's work was highly acclaimed in the decades that followed: Princeton University awarded her an honorary doctorate in science (the president there called her "the world's top female physicist"); Columbia gave her tenured professorships; the National Medal of Science; the presidency of the American Physical Society; and Israel's prestigious Wolf Prize.
What kind of discussions were held during the Nobel Prize review, these records will not be made public until after the deaths of Li Zhengdao and Yang Zhenning (aged 94 and 99, respectively). But some factors can be seen that are detrimental to her winning: two competing papers (and a third from Chicago a week later); some insist that scientists at the National Bureau of Statistics should also share the credit; and there is a limit to the number of Nobel prize winners per discipline each year.
I don't know what my grandmother thought about it, or if she ever thought about it, because it involved feelings that were never talked to us.
My father said she was willing to let her job say it all.
06.
I wrote a post on Facebook about Wu's stamps, and my friends shared it with their respective circles. One person I didn't know answered that he wouldn't buy her stamp because she had done a key job in the Manhattan Project — developing uranium enrichment methods to increase fuel supplies for nuclear bombs.
Scientists blame the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; they have not stopped their governments. My grandmother, like her friend Oppenheimer, had tangled regrets. During her visit to Taiwan in 1965, she advised Chiang Kai-shek, the leader of the Chinese Kuomintang, never to go down the path of building nuclear weapons.
In many ways, the nuclear bomb was also what brought my family to New Mexico. I spent part of my childhood in the mountain town of Los Alamos, the main body of which was the National Laboratory Complex, built as part of the Manhattan Project, in a remote valley from which it took a full day to walk to the gas station in Ponce to buy Jolly Ranchers candy. When I was a child, my grandmother visited us once in the desert. The high altitude there was bad for her blood pressure. There is also no place to eat good Chinese food. She didn't like it there.
My father studied physics at university and received his Ph.D. from Columbia University. He was also a 1960s long-haired counterculturalist, and my grandmother thought he wasn't studying hard enough. My grandmother wasn't too pleased when he fell in love with my mother, who had long blonde hair and was a hippie with no Chinese flavor, and she later became a glass artist. My own rebellious personality options are limited, and not being a scientist is the most subversive thing I can do.
I've always wondered why my father studied physics – why did he follow in the footsteps of such a big man? Is it due to stress? Or do you want to strengthen your bond with your mother by doing his mother's favorite job?
He told me recently that he never thought about that. He enjoys being a science detective, working in a field where there are correct answers, and good experiments can prove the correctness of the answers.
Twice a year, usually during the holidays, my parents took me to New York to see my grandparents. In their apartment, between the jade carving and the vertical scroll scroll, there was a wall covered with frames of photos of my grandparents and various strangers. I didn't start asking who the people in the photo were until I was a teenager: Muhammad Ali, who was awarded the Ellis Island Medal of Honor with my grandmother, and Pope John Paul II, President Gerald Ford, and Zhou Enlai, the first prime minister of the People's Republic of China, whom she met after China reopened to the West in the 1970s.
The world of physics is small, and my grandmother has always been in the company of the greats in it. Ernest Lawrence, who invited her to stay at Berkeley, won the Nobel Prize for inventing the cyclotron. Her thesis advisor, Emilio Segrè from Italy, also won the Nobel Prize — he left his home country to come to the United States after Mussolini took power. Enrico Fermi, who built the world's first utility nuclear reactor (a key piece of equipment for the Manhattan Project), was confused that the reactor kept coming to an inexplicable halt, and Segerer asked him to "ask Miss Wu." She confirmed his suspicions: Xenon-135, a byproduct of nuclear fission, contaminated the reactor. My grandmother called Oppenheimer "Oppie," and Oppenheimer called her "Jiejie," an affectionate title that Chinese meaning "sister."
My father couldn't confirm the following story, but I often heard it: When he was born in Princeton in 1947, a friend of my grandmother's and a scientist fleeing the horrors of war visited her in the hospital. His name was Albert Einstein.
Vincent Yuan, Lucy Lyon and Jada Yuan attend the unveiling of the statue of Wu Jianxiong with relatives in Jiangsu Province, China, May 2012 (family photo)
07.
During a trip to China to commemorate my grandmother's birthday in 2012, during the commemoration event and on the bus, a relative asked: Shall we go to see a play tonight?
I think it would be nice to have a night out with close family members to avoid people's attention. But when we arrived at the theater, I saw the title of the show: "Wu Jianxiong", of course, it couldn't be anything else.
I remember when I was in New York, my grandmother took me to see Chinese dramas, the kind with more costumes, heavy makeup, less sets, someone pulling an erhu, and a dragon with huge bulging eyes swimming in the dark.
However, "Wu Jianxiong" is an elaborate modern drama. The curtain rises to tell the story of a little girl in a village in China with great ambitions to change the world. The play shows many real aspects: her love for her father, her rare good education. It also has (more) surreal plots. When she arrived in the United States, cardboard silhouettes of the Golden Gate Bridge, the Empire State Building, and the Presidential Portrait of Mount Rushmore appeared on the set at the same time, and the singers danced around the stage in roller skates, and I almost laughed out loud when I saw it.
The fact that my grandmother did not return to China seems to be a particularly sticking point: The play uses several solo songs to show that she studied in the United States to save China with science. A little boy who plays my father appears in the scene several times, including one when he ran into the room, waving a passport in his hand, and playfully asked: Who would want to leave the United States?
The actress who played my grandmother slapped him hard and he fell to the ground crying.
I turned my head to see my father's reaction.
He fell asleep.
On January 15, 1957, Wu Jianxiong and her colleagues, including the later Nobel laureate Lee Jeong-do (right), held a press conference at Columbia University to announce their breakthrough discoveries (University Archives, Library of Rare Books and Manuscripts, Columbia University Library)
08.
After those four years, we received an email from the post office labeled "Confidential." Ask if we agree with Wu Jianxiong to be one of the "Outstanding Americans" stamp series? It was only the "referral" phase at the time. They need to look at the probate documents. The Citizens Stamp Advisory Committee receives approximately 30,000 nominations for stamp subjects each year. We still don't know who submitted her name and how she was chosen.
As the executor of her will, my father received many requests of this kind. He didn't even bother to respond. My grandmother's fans and admirers often turned to me at the end, asking if I could urge my father to write them back. He's 74 years old, still working on a secret nuclear physics research project, and he doesn't use much of his personal computer, mostly to check my whereabouts and to play on the New York Nickelodeon basketball team or cleveland Browns football team. However, the only time I saw him reply to the post office's request was immediately.
We certainly knew not to take the matter as if it had been finalized, but two years later, the first draft of the portrait was sent to us— a tempera painting by Hong Kong-born Brooklyn artist Kam Mak. A few years later, the U.S. Postal Service received word that the stamp would be issued on February 11, 2021, the International Day of Remembrance for Women in Science. It will be a permanent stamp for regular mail.
Unless you're a stamp collector, a stamp is nothing more than a stamp – but it's different if your grandmother put it on a stamp. This stamp connects me with my grandmother's long-lost cousins and former students. Little girls who love science send a portrait of their new hero, Wu Jianxiong.
A friend in New York postaged Dr. Wu's stamp on 100 postcards calling for the "Stop Hate of Asians" campaign, and she encouraged people to send them to their congressional representatives.
I told her she paid 12 cents more per postcard. She said it was more important for my grandmother's avatar to appear on it.
In 1992, author Yuan Jiada (center) with her father Yuan Weicheng, grandmother Wu Jianxiong, mother Lucy and grandfather Yuan Jialuo outside the Claremont Avenue building where her grandparents lived (from left). (Family photo)
09.
My grandmother's apartment in New York, I like to think of it as a place where I learned to be proud of my Chinese. With its gorgeous tea set, the smell of boiled cabbage, and the Chinese conversation, this alternative world always makes me feel like my grandparents are talking about me in front of me.
Those years of visiting New York were filled with visits to various relatives, many of whom immigrated to New York with the help of my grandparents. Banquets are often held in elegant dining rooms with white tablecloths, and we are greeted by wooden-embossed dragons at the door. My grandmother knew where the best restaurants were hidden, and they always seemed to be under the overpasses of the highway. The children roamed the restaurant, receiving red envelopes filled with clusters of new banknotes and trying to escape from our uncles and uncles who let us eat sea cucumbers. My grandmother presided over these events like a queen – a highlight for Ms. Wu.
She wrote elegantly and fluently in English, but when I was young, I was often frustrated that I couldn't understand her accent on the phone, so I had to give the microphone back to my parents. I remember when I was 9 years old, she excitedly told me she would take me to see... What, Grandma? This is a word that begins with p. It wasn't until we squeezed through the crowds at the Bronx Zoo that I realized she was talking about pandas Yong Yong and Ling Ling, who had been borrowed from Beijing for a short-term exhibition.
It's much better for us to talk in person or through letters and postcards she's written to me from around the world. Issuing commemorative stamps, affixed to her favorite way of communicating, seems to be an appropriate way to celebrate her. I can't know to what extent language gets in the way of mutual understanding between us. However, this reduced the communication between us to the purest of feelings: I knew she loved me.
In my group of friends, I was the only person whose report card had been handed over to a near-Nobel Prize winner. I got a bad grade once when I was six and never got it again. My parents kept her up to date with my studies and my progress on the violin, and for a long time I was keen to practice violin because she took me to a teen symphony concert conducted by Yo-Yo Ma's sister, Yo-Yo Ma. She was a friend of her grandmother's.
I don't know if the story I'm telling here gives people the stereotype of a stern Chinese grandmother. In fact, she just wants me to see the infinite possibilities of life; to see what breaking through the obstacles around you can bring you. In an era when women and Chinese in America were rarely valued and respected, she strived to make herself valued and respected.
The author was with his grandmother when he was a child. (Family photo)
As early as 1965, she advocated for more women in the scientific community in her speech. At a symposium on women in science and engineering that year at MIT, she attacked the "unbreakable tradition" of treating science as a male domain and asked loudly: Are atoms or DNA molecules "biased" toward men or women as much as our society?
"In our current affluent and mature society, is it too much to provide excellent professional childcare services during the day so that mothers can get rid of monotonous chores and work in their preferred areas," she asked. "Scientists, she says, certainly need family life." Ideally, however, this noble human desire for devotion to partners and parents must also be shared equally by men. ”
I remember a conflict between us when I was an adolescent child and I proudly showed her my ear that had just been pierced. She was angry. How can I punch holes in my own body? I later learned that her father had been adamantly opposed to foot binding by girls, which was banned in the year of her birth, but it continued in many places. She escaped such misfortune by chance.
It's one of the generational distances between us — americans like me don't care about anything and her Chinese tenacity. Since the late 1970s, my grandparents were finally able to go back to China, many times, but never with their only granddaughter, who went back to meet relatives and learn about culture. China used to be their home, but I felt that for my grandmother, it was also a slight sense of loss, like the sense of loss that comes whenever I pass through the streets where she lives near Colombia.
My last memory of my grandmother is that she sat in an armchair covered in faded yellow corduroy, and she and my grandfather liked to sit in that pair of chairs together. I held her hand, which was shortly after her first stroke in 1996. She likes to look out the window at the Barnard College campus and marvel at the young women playing basketball through the large windows of the gymnasium.
She said: Look at how strong they are, how fast they are. Look at how hard they work.
10.
She died on a cold Sunday in February 1997, the first month of my second semester at Yale. My grandfather was preparing lunch for her when she collapsed in a yellow armchair. My roommate told me, "You've got to call your mom, and she's called you twenty times." "A classmate I didn't know read my grandmother's obituary from The New York Times before I did, and he told me he was very sad.
Decades have passed. My grandfather also died six years after her death, and he was hospitalized while traveling to China. Issuing commemorative stamps is a good thing – it gives me the opportunity to look back on my grandmother's life and talk to my parents about their memories. But I sometimes find it hard to maintain the illusion that we have an infinite passion for her memory. I don't need to know her from the history books. I just wanted to hold her hand again and ask her to tell me what it felt like: crossing the ocean, immeasurable sacrifice, war, the race against the clock of Wu's experiments, the unique joy of making scientific discoveries.
I thought about the drama that night, how much effort and effort people put into telling her life story, for the few performances that may never be seen again. The singer who played my grandmother cried when she met us. Part of what they tell is Wu Jianxiong's story, part of it's not her story — it's told from the perspective that China claims to own her.
This is an eternal and unchanging phenomenon. In an asymmetrical universe, a real person is different from his image extending into space and time, and people, institutions, and nations all want to claim to have her, just as I still want to have her. I accept the statement: Who is she? A large part of it is completely unknowable, and she exists in everyone's mind.
Hua Xinmin translated from "Discovering Dr. Wu", originally published in The Washington Post on December 13, 2021
Edition Editor|-Koguizuki-