Page 90 - How China Is Winning the Tech Race

He’s looking for what’s going to be top of the list two years from now; then
he lays out a plan for the short to middle term.”

Great survival instincts

If there’s one quality in Chen that his venture capitalists treasure, it’s his survival
skills. On a follow-up visit with Chen a few months later, we sat at a local coffee
shop for two hours as Chen related his fascinating life journey. Chen grew up
in the populous industrial city of Wuhan, the geographic equivalent of Kansas
City, the son of civil engineers who were sent to work in the countryside during
the Cultural Revolution. He remembers summers so hot that he would sleep
outside on a bamboo bed with mosquito netting. As a young boy fascinated
with building model boats and airplanes, he fantasized about becoming a Nobel
Prize winner in physics like Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen Ning Yang, who in 1957
became the first Chinese to receive that honor.
He was a junior studying physics at Wuhan University when his family
got clearance to immigrate to the United States in 1989. They joined dozens
of relatives outside Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where his uncle ran a mushroom
farm and a supermarket. Within three days of landing, Chen got a job flipping
burgers at Wendy’s, but he soon quit to take English-language courses at a
Delaware community college. By 1993, he had earned an undergraduate
degree in physics from the University of Delaware at Newark, supporting
himself by helping his father load trucks and deliver produce on weekends.
One of two students in his class to get into the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, he earned a master’s degree in mechanical design theory in 1995,
spending many hours in the library crunching numbers on FORTRAN
computer programs. Thriving in an environment where Nobel Prize winners
such as Dudley Herschbach hung out, he began studies for his Ph.D. He
dropped out when he realized that his professors “were a lot smarter than I
was” and that he had missed the heyday of physics since “there was more
exciting stuff being discovered during Einstein’s time.”
Meanwhile, romance beckoned. After a multi-year transcontinental
courtship and some 10,000 love letters, according to Chen, Chen’s sweetheart
from his hometown of Wuhan joined him in Cambridge, and they got married
in 1995. Somehow missing the recruitment season for MIT grads, Chen looked
for a mechanical engineering job through a career directory. He ended up in

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