00:00:00VAN BENSCHOTEN: We'll start with when and where were you born.

XIONG: June 5, 1958, in a city called Nanchang. The city of Nanchang in China, in the south part.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Okay, could you tell us a little bit about that city? What is it like?

XIONG: It's a city about the size of--let me see--Charlotte, and geographically 00:01:00it's also similar in that it is not on the coast, but it's not very far away. But it's a pretty poor city. The whole province is relatively poor, and that was not a good time in China, back in 1958, and I obviously don't remember anything. But from what I heard from my parents and from what I read in books or newspapers, those were pretty bad years in the modern history of China. The whole country was-- There were two things. One is a disaster from a drought. And another thing is political. The government is regulated by the Communist Party; it was really messing around, and so combined, it was really causing a very bad situation for the next three years, '59, '60, and '61. Those were the famous--what did they call it?--three bad years or three disaster years, and a 00:02:00lot of people died of famine during those years.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: And so part of that I have heard was natural, but a part of it, again, was due to poor administration.

XIONG: Right. One was a natural disaster, and in different areas for different reasons. I don't know what the natural [disaster] was in the southern part where I lived, but politically, the government, the Communist Party, they started the so-called--what's it called?--the Long Jump Movement or something along those lines.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Oh, the Great Leap Forward.

XIONG: Yeah, that's what's it called. My first name, if translated directly, is "jump." Yeah. And that's because that's the year I was born.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Oh, really?

XIONG: Yeah. [mutual laughter] Yeah, so in China a lot of people, when they heard my name, would guess I was born in 1958. Yeah, the Great Leap, that's 00:03:00right. That just totally [does] not follow the rule or law of how the economy should be governed. So combined, the effect of natural disaster and the misguidance from the top was really causing a terrible situation for the next few years. I don't remember anything myself, but from what I heard from my parents [Shenggao Xiong, Zhiyeng Peng], especially my mother, it was pretty bad.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right. Okay. What are some of your earliest memories of growing up in Nanchang City?

XIONG: I'll try to see what is the earliest I remember, and it's difficult now to tell what you actually remember or what you've been told repeatedly by your parents. [laughs]

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right.

XIONG: Yeah. So the earlier days were not very good. I really had a very strong 00:04:00family even though the situation was so tough. It was pretty tough, actually. From what my parents told me, I think it was like one week after I was born, my father was almost thrown into prison.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Why?

XIONG: Because there was the famous movement called the anti-Rightist Movement, starting from '57.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Oh, right. I've heard of that.

XIONG: It was started by Chairman Mao [Zedong] and the leadership of the Communist Party. From what you read from the newspapers, they said initially that they had this good intention to invite intellectuals to criticize them, to make comments, to make suggestions about the leadership, about where the country should go, along those lines.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: To criticize the Communist Party.

XIONG: Or the government.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right.

XIONG: Both the central government as well as the local government. So my father 00:05:00was one of those people being invited. He was only like three years after graduating from college. Back to the early 1950's, graduating from college was not very common, because not many people could attend college. He made some comments and the funny thing is-- I keep asking him nowadays, I say, "Exactly what did you say that got you into trouble?" He says, "To be honest, I can't remember specifically what I said, but certainly it was not anything that threatened the government or was anticommunist, anything on those lines." It must have been something pretty specific about trying to increase efficiency of the government, along those lines. But that was enough to get him into trouble. Right. He was not making any outrageous comments or anything like that. It was because the whole government, or the Communist Party, felt that they were being threatened, because the comments or criticisms, a lot of them, were also pretty widespread or critical. They probably felt they were being threatened somehow, 00:06:00so the whole thing was turned around. Instead of inviting them to give comments, they let them speak and then said, "Well, a lot of them are making comments or starting to throw off the government or be anticommunist," so the whole thing became like just letting them speak and then saying, "Well, I caught you."

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Exactly, brought them out, in a way.

XIONG: Yeah. Brought them out. That's what exactly happened to my father. And so in late '57 or the early part of '58, he said the whole thing was supposed to be going pretty well and he was pretty happy making these comments, and it looked like the leadership and local government were coming down to listen to you. But then in the spring of '58, things started turning around.

So the worst came during my mother's pregnancy or at the time when I was born. So six days after I was born, he was handed a piece of paper saying he was 00:07:00stripped of his profession and his job. He lost his job and he was supposed to be sent to prison.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Wow. That's pretty severe.

XIONG: Well, it's very severe. Almost got him killed. He said he was sent to one of the hard-labor camps. He could hardly do anything. He was pretty thin, pretty slim, and he's one of these people that's always writing things, and he was studying the forest at the time. He's highly technical, not really involved in management actually.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: I'm sorry. Just to be clear, he was studying-- He was in forestry?

XIONG: Forestry.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Oh, just forests?

XIONG: Yeah, studied forestry, like wood development, forest development, along those lines. It's a very technical job and it's not managing anybody or, you know, some kind of position to do any kind of management, right? So after-- I 00:08:00don't how long he actually stayed in the camp, but he was discovered by one of his previous bosses from when he was working in the city. Oh, by the way, the city of Nanchang was the capital of the Jiang Xi province. That's where he was working.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Okay.

XIONG: Right. And so that guy said, "Man, you could die here," and so he dug him out. He said, "If you stay here working like this, you're not going to survive." So they relocated him to another farm. So that's relatively less severe than the labor camp, and otherwise he would not have been able to survive. So that's my father. I didn't get to see him in the next four years.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: So from '57--

XIONG: '58 to almost '62 or '63.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: That is a long time.

XIONG: It's a long time. I don't remember my father at all. All I remember, I guess. And a lot is what I've been told rather than what I actually remember, 00:09:00because after he left I stayed with my mother. My mother was also sent out, not stripped of her position or job or anything, but it's not a whole lot different. So she was sent to a county government to do accounting. She was doing accounting for an insurance company in the capital city of Jiang Xi, and it's the same city with my father, but after that she stayed for a couple of more months, then she was sent to a local county office and worked as an accountant. And my mother said when I was only a few months old, she just took me and filled a briefcase and just left the city where they lived for the last five or six years, a lot of good memories.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Now, was her leaving punishment, partly, because of--?

XIONG: Well, it's not directly, but obviously it was associated with my father. They officially told her, "We'll relocate you for another job," but the 00:10:00understanding is that it was a kind of punishment. So I lived with my mother for the first almost five years, the three of us: my mother, myself, and my grandma--my mother's mother.

So the early days, what I really remember was not the hometown I was born in. Instead, it was this small city called Gao An, where I spent my first five years with my mother. My grandma died when I was two years old, I believe.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: And what was her name?

XIONG: Who? My grandmother?

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Yeah.

XIONG: I actually don't remember her name, and I know her-- No, I don't think anybody actually told me what her name was. I don't even know-- She had her own name after marriage. In the early days, those old Chinese women, they actually, once they got married, they seemed to just use their husband's last name. They didn't have their own name, in most cases. And they didn't have a job, obviously. They just stayed home taking care of the kids and they didn't go out 00:11:00for jobs for anything. And only vaguely, I remember, my grandma was short, very thin. I can't remember much about her.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: This is a good transition though. We'll get to the five years that you spent pretty much fatherless, but if you could maybe discuss a little bit about your father's background, his family, I guess.

XIONG: My father was born in a family of four in the countryside outside of Nanchang City, about fifty miles away.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right.

XIONG: Depending on what standard you use-- If you use a standard of today, it 00:12:00was a pretty poor family, but at that time his family had a some small piece of farm or land, and they could survive and feed their kids relatively better than other people in the same village. My grandfather had a small piece of a business. It's just shopping or selling something. I don't know exactly what he was selling at that time. I never saw my grandfather. My grandfather and my great-grandfather, they both died three months apart, when my father was nineteen years old. That was pretty devastating to him.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Sure.

XIONG: And my father was just married and still young and had not even gone to college yet. And before that point, they seemed to be fine until both his father 00:13:00and his grandfather died in their early forties and late fifties. So that really devastated my grandma and my father, because my father was the only male left and in those days if you didn't have any strong male in the family it was very difficult. In those early days, the females didn't make many decisions and they couldn't really help anything outside the families, and even though you still had some property, that was not going to last for long. Everyone knew. Especially my father didn't know anything about how to farm, and then he was sent to schools and high school, so he didn't know anything about farming. So that was pretty difficult.

So one of the most difficult moments that came to my father was [when] they had to sell some farms in order to bury my grandfather and great-grandfather. In the 00:14:00early days, selling your property was considered something very, very bad--or you're so incapable--very shameful, and the success of the family is measured by how much property, how much farm land you can continue to accumulate. But now you're selling them, so that was very, very devastating for him, and so for that part-- And he quit school after high school and stopped for a few years and [did] not enter the college after graduating from high school. He tried to get some kind of job so he could make some income to support the family. I think that was two or three years, he was nineteen-- Either '47 or '48 or '49, I don't know which year.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: So just before the end of the civil war.

XIONG: Right, right. You actually know the history pretty well. Right. So that was the country situation and it was really tangled, a lot of unsettled business going on across the country. The Communist Party had just taken over from the 00:15:00Nationalist Party control, the whole country was really changing dramatically. I think a year or two later, after the Communist Party took over the country, my father's family was labeled as so-called landlords. Direct translation means you have a piece of land, but landlord was bad at the time. Yeah. [mutual laughter]

VAN BENSCHOTEN: You didn't want to be a landlord.

XIONG: It was not good. Yeah. And then, I mean, the whole family just lost all their properties, all their land, anything, so--

VAN BENSCHOTEN: They lost it because that land was collectivized.

XIONG: Yeah, just basically stripped off. Stripped off and given to the poor people, and that's across the country, not just to their own family.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right. And they received nothing in return, right? The land was just taken from them.

XIONG: No. Just like that. It's very simple. Just your whole property, all your land, your house, everything just was taken away. Overnight. So overnight, my 00:16:00grandma almost became homeless. Yeah, and so she could only stay with her relatives and they still gave her a small house she could stay [in]. My father now really had to work, somehow, to support himself. My mother at the time was married with my father for a couple of years; [she] was the one actually supporting my grandma.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Really?

XIONG: Yeah, and she got a job at a local insurance company. Through my uncle she started learning something, because my mother couldn't afford to go to college, or go to school. Not that she was not able to afford it, it's because traditionally women didn't go to college in China so she did not attend any school. And she actually learned from my uncle; he graduated from college and he was the one [who] really taught her some basics. And for that my mother up to 00:17:00nowadays still remembers those days. She said if not for my uncle she would not have had any skill to make a living, but things changed so dramatically and because of the limited amount of knowledge she learned from my uncle, she was able to go out looking for a job and got a small job and supported my grandma while my father just basically didn't know what he could do. And then I think it was 1949 or '50 and my father [took] an exam and finally he applied for college. He was accepted by a few, but he picked the one at a place called Wuhan University.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: I'm sorry. What was that called?

XIONG: Wuhan. And the reason was pretty simple, because that university, supported his tuition and also [gave] him some stipend so he could live by himself.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Oh, how did he get that?

XIONG: He just applied to a number of the ones. Wuhan University was not the best one he got in, and he got into another university that's even more 00:18:00prestigious in China, but he could not go to it. And Wuhan University was a public school at the time that took them, and the student could live there and support a living. It was not a whole lot, but to him at that time it was very important. So I think that was probably '50 or '51. So finally, he got into college. And he had the first few years--that was from '51 to '58--and he said he had a few good years. Studying in college, finally the life become more or less normal or stabilized, and after '54-- I think he graduated in 54' or 55' from college, and then got this job right away in Nanchang City, the capital of the province, and reunited with my mother after graduating from college. Had three good years together and then--phew--it's over.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Chaos. So when he was going to college, he didn't live with your mother, then?

00:19:00XIONG: No, they separated from--gosh, that was pretty long--'50 all the way until '55, after he graduated. Not only were they separated when he was in college, but before that when he was just traveling around anywhere he could find a job. He did several different jobs as a teacher or as a helper, and several things--I don't remember what else he did--and tried to find a way to support himself. He was not even allowed to support his family back then.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Really?

XIONG: Yeah, well your family was the landlord, the enemy of the country. My mother was okay, because she was poor, relatively, and so when she made a living, she wanted to send some money back to my grandma, but she had to get permission from the government. She [had to] do that because my grandma was labeled as an enemy of the people. So if you wanted to do that, you had to get 00:20:00permission. The early days were not so bad; the Communist Party had only started taking over, so people [did] not draw the line so clearly but still considered that this is your mother-in-law and that your supporting her is reasonable. So they let her do that. My grandma actually died in a relatively peaceful situation, even after all this chaos for a few years. My mother [took] care of all the burial while my father was away. So there were a few years when they were-- And for four, five years they were not living together and they were pretty much just on their own.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right. But from about maybe 1955 to '58, they're together briefly.

XIONG: Oh, there were good times. Yeah, they actually remember a lot of those good days, and I remember when I grew up and they took me back to Nanchang and pointed out, "Well, that's the little apartment we used to live in for those three years," and I can tell they had a lot of good memories and finally they 00:21:00were able to live together, and--

VAN BENSCHOTEN: He was making money.

XIONG: They had a reasonable income and they were not any burden, and no kids yet, and so they were able to go to, like, a party once a week. And they were young, and my father had just graduated. That was pretty rare at the time, for a college graduate to come to a city like that. So they had a very good time for a few years.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right. Sounds good. Why don't we talk a little bit about your mother's family.

XIONG: My mother's family was doing business or retailing, and it was a big family--she had three sisters [Lan Ying Peng] and three brothers [Jia-Liu Peng, Jia-Pin Peng, Jia-Bin Peng]--and it was not very rich using today's standard, 00:22:00but at the time they had a shop and that was a pretty big deal back in the late forties or early fifties. But unfortunately, during the transition from 1949 to the 1950's, because they were working so hard that they had a piece of property and business, they were labeled as enemies of the people just like my father's family. As I just mentioned, my mother, just like most other Chinese women, could not receive any reasonable education and was not sent to school at all, and just stayed home to help my grandfather while every one of her brothers, all three of them, went to school. The biggest one went to college. She still remembers the early days, and really envies her brothers, [who were] able to go out for school and then come back and just know more and more and more and more. But they, especially my mother, had such a close relationship with her brothers 00:23:00and every summer, when her brothers [came] back for summer to help the family, they taught her a lot. Those early teachings from her brother--not from her father, not from her school--really made a huge difference for the later part of her life. If not for that, she would have just stayed at home just like every other woman. She married my father just before the chaotic transition, and all of a sudden both her family and my father's family lost all the properties and were just almost like not much better than homeless. And all the family was pretty much just gone at that point. So that made a big difference to her, the encouragement of her brother, and she realized that she had to try to get a job to support herself.

00:24:00She went out looking for a job and found one in a small bank. Not only [did] that [make] a huge difference to her, but also made a huge difference to myself and my two sisters [Yifeng Xiong and Wen Xiong], because from early on she had been teaching us to be independent, to work hard, to make your own living. To hear that from your father is not too unique, but to hear that kind of education or that kind of teaching from your mother, that's pretty rare, because traditionally Chinese women, they didn't go out to work. They didn't go out to work and so they just wanted to make sure you were healthy or you're happy. They didn't really teach you a lot [about] working hard or studying hard and pursuing a career. That had a lot of influence on me and my sisters as well, because my mother really had learned in a good way, and a hard way, and if not for her brother, she would not have been able to get this job, but if not for the revolutionary change [Chinese Civil War], she probably [would have] just stayed 00:25:00home as a housewife.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right.

XIONG: So just like my father's family, after 1949 and the 1950's, her part of the family also lost all their properties. And her brother actually ended up in the labor camp as well, later.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Oh, he did?

XIONG: Yeah.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: The one who went to college?

XIONG: Yeah, the one who went to college. And even worse--my father was at least studying forestry, that's pretty technical--my uncle was studying law, so that really got him in trouble.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right. Okay. I was going to ask if you had sisters or brothers. You have two sisters, then?

XIONG: Yeah, I have two younger sisters.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right. Okay. And what do they do?

XIONG: Right now?

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right.

XIONG: One [Yifeng Xiong] is living at San Diego. She graduated from UC [University of California] Irvine and got her Ph.D. in organic chemical synthesis. And I have another younger sister [Wen Xiong], right now in China, 00:26:00and she is a high schoolteacher. So my family had five of us.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Where does she teach there?

XIONG: In a city in China called Shenzheng, teaching English in high school.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right. And how are the three of you related? In other words, who's the oldest?

XIONG: I'm the oldest and my sister in San Diego is the second one--she is seven years younger than I am--and the other one in China is nine years younger than I am.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Oh, okay. So how did you get along with your sisters?

XIONG: And the part of reason you realize how old you are--I'm seven years older than my second sister in San Diego--is probably because my father and my mother were separated--

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Oh, that's right.

XIONG: --for five years. So then they were living together.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: So they had another child. She was born in '65.

00:27:00XIONG: Yeah, and only after 1964 when they're living together, and then they had my second sister.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right. Sort of pick up again and continue their family life.

XIONG: Right. Now my sisters and I had a very close relationship, and I think a lot was influenced by the close relationship between my mother and her brothers.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Now is that both of the sisters, or just the--

XIONG: Both of them.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Both of them.

XIONG: Yeah.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Okay, if you could talk a little bit about your sisters.

XIONG: I had a pretty close relationship with my both sisters, and very early on when they were little, that was pretty much as I was like a babysitter for them. 00:28:00When they were growing up they really looked up to me; I was their teacher for a year or two. And after I graduated from high school, I went back to where my parents lived and was not studying and was working on a farm for four years before I was able to apply for college; we [will] come back to that later. And so I did all kinds of jobs. I worked on a farm and also taught in the middle school. Actually middle school and the elementary school for two and a half years. I was my sister's teacher.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Oh wow. [mutual laughter]

XIONG: Yeah, for a couple of years.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Now, when you say teacher, you mean her real teacher in the classroom?

XIONG: Real teacher. Yeah, yeah. Real teacher.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Okay. In what other ways was your relationship close with your sisters?

XIONG: Okay. At the beginning it was more of they would listen to me and respect 00:29:00me and look up to me and just try to follow my example. And I-- Especially after 1978, when the country was finally out of this chaotic situation led by Mao Zedong, the country tried to get back to normal, and one of the things was the reopening of the colleges and universities, which were completely shut down during the ten years of the Cultural Revolution. And that year, 1977, the country--for the first time in ten years--reopened college and university, allowed kids, young men and women, to apply to it, and they were accepted, admitted by examination. That was not happening for ten years, and for the first time we realized we actually could go to college. And so I got in in 1978 and that was a huge deal to my family.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right.

XIONG: To finally realize that, politically, they could have a normal life. To 00:30:00start changing from being an enemy of the people to become like normal people. And my father wrote a memo, I remember. And in that memo, as to what was many of in his conversations, he said that 1978 was a big turning point for the whole family. And one of the major things happening in 1978 was that I was able to go to college. And to them, that was really a turning point of [their] whole life.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: So that had a big influence on your sisters?

XIONG: A huge one.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Yeah.

XIONG: A huge one, because now they realized-- They were young, they probably [did] not fully appreciate, but then, just looking around the whole farm, the whole village, I was the only one [who] got into the college. And before that point, I was not even allowed to apply. One of the funny things that happened was during the ten years of Cultural Revolution, from 1966, when the university and college was first shut down, to 1977-- The first seven years, the whole university was shut down, nobody could go anyway. But then in the last three 00:31:00years, from '73, '74, '75, they reopened the universities. But you could only go there upon recommendation, not by taking an exam. The recommendation was funny; you were recommended by the people you were working with. Those were people that were working on the farm. They'd say, "Yeah, there's a good kid, he should go to college." I don't know how I'm going to explain this in the future to my daughter [Jessie Xiong].

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right

XIONG: Yeah, it's unbelievable. So my chance to go to college and get a recommendation by the workers was out of the question, because of my family.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right.

XIONG: Yeah, so that was out of the question. And so after '78, they realized, well, now things seemed to be turning around and I could go to college. And it was a huge deal for my family and it was also a huge surprise for the village. "Wait a minute! How come the kids from 'the enemy of the people' go to college? 00:32:00Why can't my kids go there? Why would people need to take an exam to go to college?" So they just felt very, very surprised that people could go to college by taking an exam. [laughs] Yeah.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right. When we get a little bit further along into your education, that would be interesting to talk a little bit more about that transition, because that sounds fascinating. It was not only for your family too an amazing transition, but for the entire country, wasn't it?

XIONG: Oh, yes, it's unbelievable, yeah.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Okay, well, let's go back a little bit, chronologically, and talk a little bit about your early schooling, sort of elementary school.

XIONG: Yeah. My first couple of years, I was taken care of by my grandma, my mother's mother, and she died when I was between two and three years old and I don't remember much at all about her. And after that point, my mother was practically a single mother, taking care of me while my father was separated 00:33:00from her, from 1958 all the way to 1962, I believe. Luckily, I was in this county government, the county and the government, had this day care center. The day care center was not common in China in those days at all. So I was lucky; I was able to attend one of those. I was able to receive some early education. And it was pretty good, compared with a lot of kids: 90 percent of them lived in the countryside; they couldn't go to any day care or the preschool at all. So that part actually had a lot of good things happen to me. And I was able to go to day care and the preschools and learn something early on, while my mother went to work.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: So why do you think you were allowed to do that? Are you--?

XIONG: That's partly because I was separated from my father, and my mother 00:34:00herself-- She was very poor when she married my father. So she herself was not labeled as an enemy of her country. She was labeled differently from my father. So they kind of were still implementing this policy that if you were the one guilty, you were the one that should be punished, not your family. They tried not to associate. And so that was my mother, and once she was separated from my father in living, she was working very hard. And they still treated her as herself, not as the wife of my father.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right.

XIONG: And so she was still receiving normal treatment. And together with the fact that she worked very hard and she performed better than a lot of her colleagues at the time and the coworkers, she had a few good years. During those bad years and being separated from my father, when she was alone for those few 00:35:00years-- And she did pretty good on her job. And had a lot of good friends. And I was able to just go to day care just like every other kid.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right.

XIONG: In the city council, I guess that's what it's called.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right.

XIONG: Yeah. And so that actually made me [different] from a lot other kids in the countryside who couldn't find a school to attend.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right. And how did you like school?

XIONG: I don't remember a whole lot of the preschool. I don't remember anything bad. If I remember anything specific-- And those were pretty heavy days for me. I was a wild boy and I was running around, was pretty smart in the class-- What my mother keeps on telling me is that I was very competitive when I was young.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Really?

XIONG: I don't know if she made it up or not, but she keeps on telling me how 00:36:00competitive I was. For example, she said the school actually rewarded kids [for] coming on time. And early on, my mother said I was always trying to get up earlier and go to school and try to be the first one in the school instead of staying home.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right. [laughter]

XIONG: She said that a couple of times I was not the first one and I was pretty upset. [mutual laughter] Yeah. There aren't a lot of details; from what my mother said, that was not bad, except I just never remember anything about my father. And he was allowed later, in I think it was '60, to come to visit my mother once a year. And later, when their condition was a little relaxed, I don't know, maybe twice a year. He came for up to a week. And I don't remember anything about him. Yeah.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: I'm sorry, for a week then, you could see your mother and your father?

XIONG: My father [would] come visit us. And he brought some food, because he was working the farm himself and they would be allowed to grow something like 00:37:00vegetables or yams and then he brought some with him when he come to visit us. In those difficult years that meant a lot, because nobody had enough food. My mother says I ate a lot when I was growing up. Allowances were very limited for everybody, and it was never enough for me. And so she had to just keep on letting me eat her part for that, and she never had enough food herself and developed a disease of nutrition deficiency.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Yeah, which was common. I mean, the Great Leap Forward, one of the problems was that.

XIONG: Oh, very common. Very common. And the people were hungry all the time. [There] was just not enough food for anybody to eat. Especially my mother; there's just nothing you can do about it. The stern government and the very restricted rules-- You cannot go anywhere to grow something yourself, you cannot 00:38:00buy anything yourself [from the free market], because that's against the rule. So all you can do is just eat whatever you are rationed. And it was never enough for her to begin with.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: So rationing was common, then, at that point.

XIONG: It's the only thing allowed. Yeah. It's the only thing you have. There was not even enough for herself, not to mention that I was eating twice as much as I was allowed, as I was given. So she suffered this nutrition deficiency for about three years.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: So you're going to school, you're getting there earlier than all the other students. Did you have many friends? What were your interests at that time?

XIONG: I don't remember the early days. I was a pretty good at making friends. My mother always said even early on I had a lot of good friends, pretty close friends. And even when I was little. One of those things is I-- My mother always said that when we occasionally got the chance to [buy] some candies and cookies 00:39:00at home, I would be so good to my friends. And so I would [bring] them, just open the candies, or they would finish eating in one bite. [mutual laughter]

VAN BENSCHOTEN: I could imagine.

XIONG: Yeah. And I don't remember this, but my mother said that when my father came and visited us and brought some peanuts--and he [grew] them himself, and that was pretty rare at the time--I was so happy. I just brought all my friends. [mutual laughter]

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Wow.

XIONG: Yeah. So the kids, I guess they must have been happy.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right, yeah. They probably liked you quite a bit. When you're about six--which I guess is what, 1964?--your father has returned.

XIONG: Yeah, right, so after--I think it was 1963 or '64, I don't exactly know what time--the country was getting back to living more normally after three 00:40:00years of disaster across the country. My father was-- How to put that? He was technically not in the prison, but it was called being released from the farm. So it was half prison, half the farm work. So it's not like a typical prison [where] you are sentenced for many years, but it's not a normal job either. But after '63, 1963 or early '64, he, I presume it was, completed or-- Whatever you call it, it's not a sentence, but the punishment or whatever, okay. And so he was allowed to come out. Then he was not to go back to his job anymore. So he was sent to a farm outside Nanchang City, in the pretty rural country. But he 00:41:00was allowed to reunite with my mother. So my mother [gave] up her job in the county as accountant, then moved in with my father. And then [there were] three of us, my father, my mother, and myself, finally lived there.

Then we move to a new place called Nanhu farm, where I lived for quite some years. It's a farm in the rural country called Nanhu. I have a lot of memories of that place. So I [grew] up pretty much in that place. That is where I actually remember something.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right.

XIONG: I was four and half or five when I first moved there and I left in 1978, when I went to college.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: You spent a long time there.

XIONG: Yeah, so that's the place I really grew up.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: What was it like growing up there? What do you remember?

XIONG: Yeah, it's a pretty rural country area. And when we first got there, and I actually remember a little bit, boy, it was all woods. It's a pretty rural 00:42:00place. But it was a farm and they started farming the areas, and they had a department from the university, from the agricultural university in the city there. So by that association, we were associated with some kind of educated people, intellectual people. And so that was separate from the really truly rural country, [where] you don't see any outside world, you never know anything about education or the intellectual or anything like that. So that part, and we were associated with a relatively intellectual or educational environment, better than some other countryside kids, yeah. And, so that's the environment actually that I grew up in.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Now, was that accidental, or did your father just happen to find a job there, or did he seek a job there?

XIONG: No, he asked for it. He asked for it. Because the farm he was sent to 00:43:00from '58 to '61 was a farm associated with this place called Jiang Xi Agricultural University. It's a farm, but for the agricultural university; the students need a farm for their study. So that was the farm that my father was sent to, or was taken out from hard labor in the camp into this place. So when he was released, he asked that he go to another farm also associated with a university that is more rural areas, and so he was permitted, and they went to that place. And the good sense was that there were some students and college students and some teachers. So that actually was a pretty good environment as far as my growing up and my education was concerned.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Yeah, very much.

XIONG: Yeah.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: When he returns, you say he worked on a farm; did he have any tie to the university as well, though?

XIONG: Not really, and he was never allowed to go back to teach.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Yeah.

XIONG: Yeah, and it was not until 1979 that he was asked, "Well, do you want to 00:44:00[go] back to the classroom to teach again?" And he said, "Well, what can I teach them now?"

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Yeah.

XIONG: He said, "I mean, there's nothing I remember, it's all forgotten. So, I might just retire now." [laughs]

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Yeah.

XIONG: No, he was never able to go back to teaching after he was stripped of his job in 1958. But he did do some technical work when he was in the farm, For example, they tried to build up this big dam along the lake to create some fields for growing rice and because he studied forestry, he [knew] how to design things like that. And so that was the part [where] he was able to use something he learned in his college years. And so that was considered technical, and it actually made him feel pretty good for a few years until 1967, when the Cultural Revolution started and the whole country and whole family became chaotic again. 00:45:00So from 1964 to early '67, I think they had two or three years of good life again.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right.

XIONG: Well, relatively speaking.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Relatively, yeah.

XIONG: So at that time they had my first sister.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right.

[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE 1]

VAN BENSCHOTEN: You were talking about your family and that sort of brief period before the Cultural Revolution, I guess, when your father had gone to this Nanhu farm. Right.

XIONG: Right, so they had about two or three years of relatively peaceful life-- So my mother continued working as an accountant in the accounting office for the farm and my father was able to do some designing job to build the dam and buildings like that, using some of his knowledge he learned from college. That made them feel they actually could live relatively normally. The whole country 00:46:00was going through this transition between the chaotic three years in '59, '60, and '61 to the Cultural Revolution, another ten years. Those were relatively calm years for three years. So when the political environment was relatively calm, my father's life--like many other intellectuals that were being labeled as antirevolution, antigovernment--also was more peaceful. But they were still labeled as enemies of the people, but they were not treated so harshly as they were. And [they were] allowed to do the work and use their technical expertise, so that made them feel good.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right.

XIONG: Yeah. And their colleagues [did] not treat them whole lot differently, even though they [knew] it, and he was not allowed go back to teach. Of course, 00:47:00he could not take any managing job and like that. But as long as he was allowed to use some of his technical expertise that made him feel very good about it.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right. At least he's with his family, right? He's not--

XIONG: Right, with his family, and so that was when my first sister was born; two years later my second sister was born. And then the next ten years--

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Chaos?

XIONG: [laughter] So, that was '67.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: '67?

XIONG: Yeah.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: So between, let's say, '62 to '67, you're eight. No you're nine. You're getting into sort of almost middle school now.

XIONG: Still in elementary school.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Elementary school. What do you remember-- What are your first memories of school there?

XIONG: Very easy. [laughter]

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right.

XIONG: It was very easy. I didn't have to do anything. And, well, I guess I was smart enough in the class, because-- And I did have good education from my 00:48:00mother and from the day care and the preschool before I lived with my father again. So compared with the education of other kids in my class, I had a better preschool education. The class was not difficult at all for me. So that, actually, I remember quite a bit. The school condition was very poor, was so poor that there were always two classes in one room.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right.

XIONG: The first and second grade in one room, and the third and fourth in another. The whole school only had four or five teachers, so each had to teach two different grades in one room. So we sit in the half. So one half in the first grade and the other half second grade. So when the teacher was teaching one grade, the other was doing their homework, and then they switched. I remember this, and this is what I remember: the teacher was asking a question 00:49:00for the higher grade and I was sitting in, so I answered the question for them. [mutual laughter]

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right.

XIONG: Yeah. Well, I knew they were doing their homework, so the kids were just amazed. So I didn't get to study or anything, but it was also pretty easy for me.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: You say your mom was helping you. In what way did she help you, though, through your study?

XIONG: At home. I don't know specifically what she was teaching. Simple math or Chinese, that's the two major subjects the kids study in the fourth or fifth years in the school. Math and Chinese. And they don't start anything like natural science or social until they are in sixth grade. I think that is still the case. So that's one thing different from here, the kids study early on, not just English and math. They also study lots of other subjects. But in Chinese schools, the first four years they only study two things: Chinese and math. Yeah. Those things my mother was able to teach me. And my father taught me some 00:50:00after we lived together again. So early school life was pretty fun for me. And very easy. [laughs]

VAN BENSCHOTEN: You say the focus was on math and Chinese. Do you know if that was the case, too, before the revolution? Or was that something that the Communist Party, that the government--

XIONG: Early education in China-- [tape recorder off]

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Okay, you were talking about your school years.

XIONG: Yeah, that was fun, I had enough time to play. That was really fun. The only thing, looking back, I didn't have enough of--like almost everyone else in China--were books to read. Yeah. But fairly speaking, compared with other kids-- And I did have a lot of help from my parents. My father traveled quite a bit during those three years when he was responsible to design this dam and building the farm was [being] built up, and he was traveling around for a lot of 00:51:00purchasing. Whenever he traveled around, he always brought back a book for me. That's the one thing I benefitted from tremendously. It was not a whole lot of books, but compared with kids that just have a notebook other than just one book of Chinese, one book of math, I really had the chance to read something outside the classroom. It's difficult to determine specifically what kind of influence that early reading had on me, but that's one thing I do remember pretty clearly. I was given the chance and had the opportunity to read a lot, since even for the children books--

Very few kids had a chance like that. My parents, like many other Chinese parents, traditionally, they really emphasized the education of the children. 00:52:00They really do. They really do. They were pretty poor. We could just barely live and feed ourselves. It was better than a few years early on. [There] was not much money left, but still they tried to buy me some books, as much as they could. When I was five or six years old, my father bought a radio. Boy, that was a big deal, because in the whole village no one had a radio. So my father brought one back and I lived with a radio for a number of years. It was our radio. We listened to something outside, and then again, it's difficult to say specifically how that influenced me. But I remember clearly, every day I would hold the radio and listen to something.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: So what kind of books did your father bring you?

XIONG: Just a children's book. And whatever he could find from the bookstore or 00:53:00from the shop. It did not even come close to the quality and how wide a range [there] are these days. But still--

VAN BENSCHOTEN: You were sustained.

XIONG: These books and the books I could have in the classrooms-- And of course, those were the children's books and they talked about stories for children, but it's not like the book you can read today. The content of those books were pretty revolutionary. And of course all those books must pass the inspection by the government, but still, a kids' book.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right. And when you had the radio, do you remember listening to any particular program? What would you listen to?

XIONG: Yes, I do. I do. There was this particular program for the kids and it was called-- I don't know what's the-- There's no equivalent. No, there could be the equivalent in here. It's something similar to Sesame Street. But the content 00:54:00was completely different. But it was a regular program, it was not a TV program, it was a radio program. And once every day, afternoon, I remember. I don't remember the contents right now, but that's the program I remember, and when I got home, I listened every day. That really caused a lot of my friends and my classmates to be envious, that I could have a radio to listen to.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right.

XIONG: Yeah.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Did you bring your friends over or did they--?

XIONG: Yeah, well, you didn't have to bring them over, because--

VAN BENSCHOTEN: They're there. [laughter]

XIONG: It's just one big house, and they-- In the village, kids always play outside. So when I listened, they would come too, next to me, and read my books and [listen to] my radio. So I remember when I grew up-- A lot of kids still remember those days when they'd come to our house and read my books. And then, this is the one day I remember. Father was pretty upset when he brought my new books back, asking me, "Where's all the books?" I'd lost all of them. I'd give 00:55:00them out to all the friends. [mutual laughter] "I'm not going to buy them again. You had almost, like, twenty books. They're all gone!"

VAN BENSCHOTEN: So in a sense you had sort of a lending library there, you know, your friends come in, right--

XIONG: It was always like that. Even later when I was [grown] up and I was able to get more books, people still could come to my house and read some books. They borrow it, I give them, and I never get them back. [laughter]

VAN BENSCHOTEN: In a sense.

XIONG: So my father actually [wrote] down the number; he [knew] how many books he bought for me. I still remember a small box that he made for me, say when I finish it, put those books back in those boxes. There was nothing there. [mutual laughter]

VAN BENSCHOTEN: In a sense there, your father educated the entire community, in a sense. Unwittingly, but he did.

XIONG: Right, he did. And it was not intentional. But a lot of kids benefitted, of course-- And I was one that really benefitted the most.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Yeah.

XIONG: Right. So those were three or four years of peaceful time, and that's one 00:56:00of the reasons why the people in our village made friends with him and respected him, and the revolution was not so strong in the people when the revolution was not so propagandized and when the country was not so chaotic. And the ordinary people, they respect intellectuals. Historically, traditionally, Chinese people respect intellectuals.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right.

XIONG: They see you have education and you received some education and they respect you. So my father had a few good years with our neighbors. Most of them were just ordinary, uneducated people. But they had pretty good relations with my father.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: This interesting relationship your father had with, you know, his neighbors, was he under the shadow of being one of the pariahs, sort of--?

XIONG: Yeah. That's exactly right. Because-- And he had a good relation with them. And when the chaotic period started up, no one could help him. But later 00:57:00on, some of those early neighbors, they really helped him out. They still are friends up to now. They are still friends up to now, just because of those early days.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right. Now, when you're growing up in this period, how aware are you of politics?

XIONG: Nothing.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Nothing. I mean, do your parents talk about politics?

XIONG: No. I don't know if they did it on purpose or not, they'd never-- I don't remember that they ever talked to me, that they were so-called bad people or enemies of the people or enemies of the country or anything like that. I don't know [if] it's because they felt shameful or they tried to not let me be negatively influenced or tried to give me a normal path of growth, but I never had any impression of that at all.And so I was just like every other boy and girl on the farm. I felt no difference whatsoever until 1967.

00:58:00VAN BENSCHOTEN: When you're growing up, too, I mean, you don't live-- Let's put it this way, the situation you were in, let's see, in '62, '63 was better than three or four years earlier, clearly. Were you aware as a boy growing up that your family was not living the life of Riley, definitely, but--?

XIONG: No, I don't remember at all. And I had absolutely no memories in the early years that we were living in a bigger city and a better life or anything like that. And my whole impression was that's where I grew up, on that farm. Nanhu farm is where I grew up. That's the only thing I remembered. Yeah. Those early years were pretty normal. So I only had a good memory of those first three years on that farm.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Okay, so you're listening to the radio, you're reading books, you're playing a lot, because you're doing really well at school, and that frees up a lot of time.

XIONG: I probably did the best in the school. It's not intended that it's so 00:59:00easy. [mutual laughter] I really don't remember if I was studying hard or anything like that. It was just so easy.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: It just came to you.

XIONG: Yeah. Just so easy. And so I didn't have to do anything, bring any homework. I could finish all the homework before the class even finished.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right.

XIONG: Yeah. But probably the homework was not that big a deal anyway.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: So what other activities or interests do you have now on this farm when you're growing up?

XIONG: Oh, that was good time. And I remember, because it was still rural country, right, we could do all kinds of stuff. And I remember one thing we did was go fishing. Not fishing the fish, but fishing the frog. Fishing the frog is fun. You can see the frog is pretty dumb. Yeah, they eat bait, they lose it, you feed them, and they eat it again. [mutual laughter] I remember those early days. That was fun. And I can't believe that if you caught a fish and you lost it, they would ever come bite again. But frogs do.

01:00:00VAN BENSCHOTEN: What kind of games did you play when you were growing up?

XIONG: Yeah, all kinds of games. And there's not similar games here. I don't know how to describe this. I don't know what you call that stuff. They can rotate. I don't know [if] you know that kind of toy or not.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Probably like a top or--

XIONG: If you put it on the ground, on the floor, they keep on rotating, but it keeps on-- Splash it and they keep on rotating.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Oh, I see, yeah.

XIONG: I don't know what kind of-- I don't see kids here play that kind of stuff. That was fun. And we could play along the way to school or on the way back. Of course, like other kids, we would play a lot hide and seek, games like that.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right.

XIONG: Yeah. That was a very playful time, my first few years at elementary school. First three or four years.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right.

XIONG: Yeah. I went there for three years. The class was so easy. After my first grade and they said, "Man, you don't need to go to second grade, why don't we 01:01:00put you in third grade?" I didn't know what it means, jumping grades, but later on they told me, "We will jump you for one grade." But to me it was not a whole lot of difference, because it was still pretty easy.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Okay. Your parents, I mean, are helping you at school. Your father is bringing home books. Did they express to you their expectations about, you know, what you should do when you get a little older, about college?

XIONG: Not much.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: No.

XIONG: Not much. And I don't remember that. Thinking back, I can understand why is that. It's because they didn't know what kind of expectation they could have. And I was too young. And they were still living in the shadow. They didn't know what kind of future I could have, because even though they were saying that you're not guilty by association, you are. You are. And a lot of kids born in 01:02:00family like me, they were not allowed to have opportunities available to other kids. So they were pretty aware that those situations could happen to me.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right.

XIONG: Even though they were still trying to give me a normal life and encourage me, try to be positive, I don't remember that we talked about a lot what I want to be. What I could become when I grow up. I remember that I dreamed a lot of things I wanted to be when I was little. But that was out of reading those books, not really from my parents.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right.

XIONG: But one thing I did not dream was to become a scientist. I didn't know what a scientist looked like. I had no way to dream that one. The thing I did dream for was I dreamed of being a surgeon. One was to become a surgeon. I just somehow, I guess, saw an image, I said, "Man, that's pretty powerful. It's pretty simple. Straightforward. You take a simple knife and you cut and you cure 01:03:00the patient. That's it." [mutual laughter] The second was to become a general in the army. I said, "Man, that's pretty powerful, too." And the third thing was to become an astronaut, not really fly in the sky, but to study. So that's one thing I learned by my father. He liked that kind of stuff. So I remember in the summer it was pretty hot to stay inside, so we all stayed outside and just had leisure time in the early evenings. We'd look at the sky, and I remember quite clearly, he would tell me the names of individual stars and how to recognize them. That was pretty fascinating.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: About religion, did you have any type of religious training? Did your parents have?

XIONG: No, that was not even allowed to be mentioned in China. Yeah. Religion in 01:04:00China is a pretty interesting phenomenon. There is not a religion like Christianity in Western countries. But Chinese culture does have a religion, but not the one that could overwhelm in the history or the whole country. If you call the culture as a religion, that's the one being consistently and educated people for thousands of years, they inherited and the people learned. But that's not really religious. It's Confucius. It's more a philosophy and it emphasizes education, but it's not religious. It's nothing to worship.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right.

XIONG: Right. And of course, by the time I was growing up, after 1949, even the culture was not allowed. And the only thing you can study religiously is communism.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: So even Confucius, that was--

01:05:00XIONG: Was not allowed.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Prohibited?

XIONG: It's prohibited, yes. And the only thing you can now study is communism. Yeah, there was not even an emphasis on socialism. Of course, capitalism was the worst thing in the whole world.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right.

XIONG: When I grew up, I read, for instances, very dark images about capitalism, about the United States, about the whole Western country. I knew very little, but every time we thought about this, it was bad.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right, and how did you come--? I mean, how did you learn about the United States? How did you receive this propaganda?

XIONG: Not much at all. And it was all based on the government's control of the propaganda and everything was bad. In the sixties, the only thing we learned was America is invading everybody, particularly Vietnam. They send their troops to invade, to occupy other countries. They are bombing other countries. And the United States or the Western countries are full of drugs and violence. There's nothing good at all. We were never told that science and technologies were 01:06:00pretty advanced or that freedom is a better world. A free world is a better world. That free world means capitalism, means the bad place.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: So religion is prohibited, but is it still being practiced, though, in some form, underground? No.

XIONG: You could easily go to prison just for that. It was completely prohibited. You could be killed even if you did it secretly. Once discovered, you'd be in huge trouble. You'd definitely go to prison for practicing religion; keep in mind, in those early days it was very much a police country. They didn't necessarily have a policeman living in every village, but the whole country operated like a police country. They controlled on every level, very, very 01:07:00tight. Everything you said, everything you did, and there was no way you could keep any secret. Your bank account was being controlled or there's no bank account, actually, for most people. And how much you are receiving and what do you do and what do you say to your neighbor or to your family-- There's nothing secret. The government encouraged, if not required people to report anything your friend, your relative might have said that was not very good or nice to the government or to the Communist Party. They strongly encouraged people to denounce their relatives.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: That's amazing.

XIONG: That's one of the worst things that happened during the Cultural Revolution. Not only the country, but development was delayed. In my view, I think the worst thing that happened during the Cultural Revolution is they really damaged the relationship between family members and between friends. Just 01:08:00a simple word to describe that is "betrayal". The government encouraged that and required that. The husband reporting the wife, and the son and daughters reporting their father or mother saying, "Well, my father said something yesterday. He said something like that." This happened all the time. And at the end, nobody could trust anybody.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right.

XIONG: Yeah. That just really broke the basic bone of the human society. If there's no family relationship or there's no friendship between friends, this won't be any stable society. And that I can't say is beyond repair, but I think we are as a society still suffering from it. People always say, "No, don't trust everybody completely." Because they could always [give] an example of something you said to a close friend of yours, and the friend turns you in and only saves himself. This happened just all the time.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: It's interesting, because I remember reading, too, that one of 01:09:00the effects of the Great Leap Forward was that it did break down the family, and it seems to me with the beginning of the Cultural Revolution and this sort of self-policing--

XIONG: It was so bad. Self-policeman, yeah. It's really-- Everybody experienced that. We were supposed to tell the government, tell the party what you heard about your friend, your family. You could be turned in by your family or your friend. You no longer trust anybody. I don't see what can be worse than that. The factories could be shut down and educations lost, and those things can be repaired. You can get back to normal, and if you lost ten years, you say, "Well, I'll spend the next ten years in development." But the people's relationship like that is fundamental to society. And it takes a generation to repair it. Nowadays, even now, twenty years after the Cultural Revolution, talk to older 01:10:00generations like my parents, they're still real suspicious to people. And to just being hurt. They experienced such a bad experience. And to see so much, experience first hand. They always tell me, "Be careful of your friend." There is no loyalty by the end. Just totally destroyed.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: All right, you've got these three years, then, at Nanhu farm that sound pretty idyllic. They sound pretty nice.

XIONG: Yeah, that was a very good life.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right, then your parents have two daughters, your younger sisters, and then the Cultural Revolution starts, which is another entire period of turmoil. Describe a little bit what it was like growing up for you.

XIONG: Oh boy. That was pretty bad. Now, I remember those days and that was pretty bad. So I think '66 was the year the country started on this path, but it was not in effect locally until 1967. I was nine years old; I was already in 01:11:00middle school. And then the whole country was chaotic and my family was chaotic, oh boy. That was probably the worst time I can remember, my whole family when I grew up. So my father was forced to separate from my mother again, from the family. And he was taken out of the family and put into the camp and physically beaten all the time.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Oh my God.

XIONG: Yeah, all the time. I remember one night, after he came back from the camp, we slept on the same bed. And he held my hand to touch him. He came back with three broken ribs.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: In his rib, just under his [inaudible] right rib.

XIONG: Three broken ribs. I couldn't say anything. He didn't tell me what happened to him. I didn't see the worst part, but I know like many other people, so-called enemies of the people, he was beaten pretty badly, physically, not to 01:12:00mention mentally. That was really, really traumatic for both my father and my mother. Quite a lot, sometimes. It's much worse than the four years between '59 to '62. They were separate, they still worked, but nobody beat you. But this was much worse.

And also it was very bad for me as well. So I was living not with my parents anymore; now I was living in middle school. And everyone [knew] that my parents were bad people. So I was a kid from those bad families and I was treated differently. And I was not-- There was no respect from my classmates anymore and 01:13:00they beat me as well. They teased me and they beat me. I was little in the class, because I jumped a class, a grade. And so I-- Those were pretty bad years. We try not to talk too much with my parents, but those were very bad memories.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Now, while this is happening, you're a kid, you're nine and ten. How did you understand what was happening? How do you explain it?

XIONG: I don't. I don't understand it completely. I don't remember now. I felt I was different from other kids, but that was happening to me all the time. I think I don't understand a lot then, I see those big labels on my father. They humiliated him, both of them, my father and my mother. They really humiliated them in a way that nowadays people just cannot imagine. For example, they had to go in the middle of the day in the middle of summer and just on their knees for 01:14:00an hour, and a sign, a big label, hung from their neck saying why they're bad. They had this meeting every week or every couple of weeks. They had to go to stay just on their knees and be beaten by the people and people yell at them. They had to self-criticize and to confess what kind of crime they had committed. Something-- I don't know how they did it. There was no crime. But you had to make up, you are anti-communist, you are anti-party or anti-government and [an enemy] of the people, and you are bad people. You had to keep saying how bad you are, to make a so-called confession. And this time my mother was not able to escape, so she was also out and was treated just as bad as my father. So I knew I was in a bad family and I was different from my classmates.

01:15:00But that was not the worst part. The whole family of five people was living in four different places, my father in the camp, my mother in the family. I lived in the school. And my mom could not afford or could not have energy, any energy at all and after all this she was taking, to care of my two younger sisters. So both of them had to be sent to their relatives. So my sisters, they grew up in the first couple of years [with my relatives] and they were not even with my mother.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: It's amazing.

XIONG: Yeah. And the worst time came in, I think it was early 1968, and finally they told my mother, "You cannot even live here. So we're going to send you to an even poorer place and now you have to separate from your family, from everyone else. Now we're going to send you to a rural place." That was a very, very rural place, there's no electricity, no running water, no contact. It's not 01:16:00a whole lot different from the regular camp. So she had to move all by herself.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: This was part of a larger movement--right?--to bring all intellectuals back to the countryside?

XIONG: Yeah, yeah. You actually know that pretty well. Yeah, that's part of it. And she had to send out, even though she was already in the country, but in that part of the village, and so that was-- There were still, like, a number of families associated with a department of the university, so you were sort of living in a relatively good environment in the farm, but now she [was] sent out to a very rural village. It was only, like, five or six families in the whole village. When she got there, I think it was the first week or so, the Red Guard come into the house and-- What do you call this? What do you call when the FBI [Federal Bureau of Investigation] comes to somebody's house and they just check and they examine?

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Oh, yeah, sort of-- What's the word for it?

XIONG: This would describe what was happening. They really hung around just looking for anything.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Yeah, they're doing a sort of search and seizure kind of thing, yeah.

01:17:00XIONG: Search, yeah. Search and-- Probably it was even worse than that, because I don't know how the FBI searches people's house, but when the Red Guard came to your house there was nothing for them to search, you've been searched ten times already. They still came to search you and to see whether they could find anything. I don't know what they were looking for. Anything that could be labeled as antirevolutionary. I mean, like, you would think this is ridiculous and crazy.

They found one textbook my father used when he was in college that was in Russian, I believe. Yeah, my father studied Russian when he was in college. They said, "How can this guy study Russian?" Because the Soviet Union then was fighting with China; that was labeled also as a bad country. So he must be a spy for the Soviet Union.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: That's amazing, because if it had been five or six years earlier, that would have been fine, wouldn't it? Because there would have been better relations between--?

XIONG: Yeah, it was good relations with the Soviet Union [during the fifties]. And they just criticized things like that. And if you had good clothes, "Wow, 01:18:00you're living in such a good life. Where did you get the money for those ones?" You just couldn't reasonably explain anything. But the worst was in the end, when they finished the search and the whole house was like totally messed up, they just left it like that. You cleaned up. But after you cleaned up, they'd come back again. I don't know how many times they searched like that. And anybody could go, anybody could go to our house and search anytime they want.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: In the name of the Red Guard or--?

XIONG: Yeah, at any time they want. They didn't need to get permission from anybody. They just felt, "Well, today let's search somebody's home. Let's go there and just dig it out and just turn it upside down," and in the end they left. And tomorrow maybe some other group would come in again.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: So you had no privacy, either. You were being invaded, in a sense.

XIONG: There was nothing. They could come to your house anytime they want. So it was the worst time my mother could live. Yeah, there was a day she remembered 01:19:00when she had written a suicide note.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Oh, wow.

XIONG: And so she asked somebody to call me back. She couldn't get to my father, she couldn't even contact him; my sister was sent away. So she asked me back and, I guess, wanted to just talk to me one more time. That's the instance she still remembers nowadays. And whenever she thinks about that one she still would cry. Just so close, on the brink of committing suicide, just couldn't live anymore. She said-- I don't remember the details, but I can remember vaguely that I sensed that something was going to happen. So I told her that no matter what happens, you've got to live. I was ten or eleven years old. And my mother keeps on saying I saved her life, yeah, and she still remembers that very clear.

She said I saved her twice. That was once. The second time is the time she had a 01:20:00heart attack; I got her to have the operation. She said she wrote a note and she didn't give it to anybody and she just probably gave to me. And the whole house was just totally messed up. There was a search again that day. And she just lost whole, complete, whole energy to clean up, to put it back. Not like before, not with the searching, that she would put it again. This time it was just give up. There's no point to put it back, because they just--

VAN BENSCHOTEN: It's an amazing upheaval.

XIONG: And for that I was pretty grateful, that my mother was tough enough to survive. Otherwise, I don't know what would have happened to the three of us. There wouldn't be a family. So many people were not able to survive. And you hear people committed suicide all the time.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Oh, yeah. In fact, the numbers about those who died--

XIONG: I actually know a number of them myself, even [when] I was little. I 01:21:00remember one of our neighbors, and his grandma just jumped in the-- Just suicided, just jumped into a well. Yeah, it happened all the time.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Okay, so this is around '67, '68, '69.

XIONG: Yeah, the worst, I think, it was '68 and '69. That was the worst time in the whole country, as well as for my family.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: And you say they humiliated your family. They went in and searched your house. Are you talking about people that you knew in this community, who would come in? You know them by name and--?

XIONG: I still knew them. I mean, this was the people. They lived with you, and they were your neighbors and your coworkers, and now they just hung around and just treated you like dirt.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right.

XIONG: Yeah. So that's why one of the worst things that happened in the Cultural Revolution is not just the loss of technological development or the production 01:22:00like that. They just turned the people against the people. These people were neighbors, were ordinary neighbors. Now, all of a sudden, one comes to another house and just searches and becomes an enemy.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right.

XIONG: Yeah, just like that.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Okay. Your family, then, is separated. It's fragmented at this point. But take us through the years, say, '70 to the time, maybe, when you get up to college or just before college? What are those years like?

XIONG: Yeah, there were three or four years of very, very bad times, and two years were so bad and the whole family was so bad. And so from that point on, I was never really living with my family until I graduated from high school. So I lived outside in middle school and high school for almost six years, in a boarding school in a sense. Educationwise, I was not getting much at all, because there was nobody doing any teaching at the time. It's still called a school, though.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right.

XIONG: But they probably studied a couple of hours a day and they were just 01:23:00reading Mao's Little Red Book. That's just about it. There was not much education. No mathematics, no chemistry, and no physics teaching, even though it was called middle school. And this was for the first couple of years in my middle school.

Then most of the time, [we] actually worked. I was eleven years old, I remember, and we were having to go to a field to grow rice to feed ourselves. And that was not a good time. That was not. Not only the hardship of the work, but also mentally. I started realizing that even though I'm not necessarily a bad kid, I am from a bad family and that's one thing I could not change. I was being taught and told constantly that I had to make extraordinary efforts to perform better than my classmates so that I can be considered as normal or just like one of them, because I carry this extra burden. And I don't think I understood 01:24:00completely. But I did realize I was different from other kids.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right. You knew the punishment. Even though you couldn't understand why.

XIONG: I knew the punishment. I'd been punished, actually, another time. And so I had to make a self-criticism in front of my entire class for something. And, I can't even remember what I said. And something, anything that could be labeled. It might have been my showing any kind of sympathy to my family and then I would self-criticize for that. Anything I said I did, for example if I would go home on the last weekend to help my mother do something, I would self-criticize and confess. So, "That was a mistake, that was wrong, I will not do that again," just things like that.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: How often did that happen, that self-denigration in front of a class?

XIONG: Pretty often, actually. The worst time was probably '69. I did this several times.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Now, were there other students like you, who were from these 01:25:00sort of "bad families," who had to make these public confessions of wrongdoing?

XIONG: I think I was the only one in the class. I did know a few other kids like me, but not in my class. I don't think I was the worst one being treated. I remember there was a girl one or two grades above me, had a very similar family situation like mine. She was kicked out. She was not even allowed to go to school. And at least I was able to stay in this school with other boys and girls in the class, still as a student, quote unquote, and was able to learn something, even though only an hour a day. That was important; if you were out of school, you could never go back. Which meant you were out, even though you were only eleven or twelve years old. [Being] unable to go to school is probably 01:26:00a more severe punishment than anything else with the kids. Even worse than [if] you had to make a self-criticism or confession in front of your class and get humiliated, but still probably better than not [being] allowed even to go to school.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: In a sense you were lucky, you know, in a strange way.

XIONG: I was luckier than that other girl. I remember that girl and she was never able to get back to her normal life. So after the Cultural Revolution she was never able to go to any high school. And then she just stayed in the countryside.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right.

XIONG: There was no career and she was not even able to, even though she was allowed later on to apply for the university, because she never got any education above seventh grade. Just out.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Why do you think you were allowed to stay in the school? Do you know?

XIONG: Depends on how they treat it. It was so chaotic and it was just depending on one time what a person said and, I don't know, maybe her father did something more--

VAN BENSCHOTEN: So it was unpredictable.

XIONG: --more dramatic or more annoying to some leaders or [inaudible]. I don't 01:27:00know what the different-- There was no reasoning behind all this. So I could be the one kicked out and she could be the one [who] stayed in. There was no specific reason for that.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Now, in class, you said they were reading Mao's Little Red Book, about the only thing that's being read, for the most part. What was your conception of Mao? I mean, had you ever--?

XIONG: He's a god. That's all he was described as, was a god. There was nothing. If you ask anything, what's my first impression of Mao? He's not a person. He's not a human being; he's a god. I cannot possibly relate to him and I [did] not try to imagine what he's like in an ordinary sense. Except like a god.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Okay. What happens after the middle school, where do you go? First of all, where is the middle school?

01:28:00XIONG: Still on the same farm, Nanhu farm. I think by '69 or '70, the country started to calm down a little bit. Still pretty chaotic and that was a time when all these high school graduates were sent to the countryside and that there was no college anymore. But beating was decreasing. People still had to go to work and make a living and grow rice, but it was calming down. So I think my second year in the middle school--

And I spent three years in middle school, from '68 to '71. From '69 or '70 or '71, it was a little bit calm, but there was not much learning at all. We had, actually, chemistry class, believe it or not. And that was like seventh, eighth grade. And we actually had a little bit of chemistry class, it was amazing. We even had English class, believe it or not. The only thing we learned was the 01:29:00twenty-six letters and one was wrong, I remember. [mutual laughter]

VAN BENSCHOTEN: That's amazing.

XIONG: Yeah, the teacher could not pronounce the "W" right. And I remember pretty clearly, I think he told us to pronounce "W" as a vowel. I don't know how he got that class. So I remember the way I learned English, it was, S, T, U, V, Vay! Instead of S, T, U, V, W. So that's all the English I learned, you know, in high school.

So by the time I graduated from the middle school in 1971, all my education was pretty much at elementary levels. I graduated about when I was thirteen years old, when I graduated from middle school. And I was very little, very short. I just can't do anything. To do any job physically was just not possible. So my mother was very, very concerned and didn't know what she could do for me. So 01:30:00there was no further education available to anybody. After middle school, that was it, okay, there was not even high school available to anybody at the time. A lot of high school kids were sent to the countryside. And there, of course, were not any colleges. So I was thirteen years old and then my mother was really wondering what she could do for me, and not much. So I worked on the farm for several months and just went with other people. They were older than I was and a little bit stronger. And I remember the project we were working on was to dig a well. Pretty cold days, and that's pretty hard labor.

[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE 2]

VAN BENSCHOTEN: We were talking about your schooling, and I think we've gotten up to 1971. You just left, I think, middle school. Your mother [Zhiying Peng] 01:31:00was wondering where you should go from there.

XIONG: So that was one critical point in my life. We were at a loss about what I was going to do, so young and going nowhere. So one day-- If not for this accident, I don't know what would have happened. My mother encountered one of the people she knew at the time who had just come back from a meeting in Nanchang City, where the headquarters of the university is located. Remember this farm was hosting a department for veterinary medicine, but that department actually belonged to this Jiang Xi Agricultural University. The university itself was not in the farm. The university itself was about a hundred kilometers 01:32:00away from that department.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right.

XIONG: In Nanchang City. And so that was a very funny arrangement, because they argued that to run a department of veterinary medicine, you can't have it in the city. You have to go to the farm or the countryside so you can really see those animals. So the farm had a connection with the headquarters in Nanchang City, the university headquarters. People were going back and forth for meetings or business.

So one day my mother encountered a person who had just come back from a meeting, from the university and he mentioned to my mother that things had started calming down a bit, that universities now were considering reopening their high school. I was not alone, apparently. There were so many kids [who] just finished middle school, and they were about thirteen, fourteen, fifteen years old and had 01:33:00nowhere to go, and they [would] think about either they now go to the countryside to start farming or-- And they couldn't do anything else. So they were thinking about reopening high school. And so my mother heard this and then immediately she asked, if not begging, for this person--who actually was in a management position on the farm we lived on--asking him for help, whether he could help me to go to high school if it really reopened. And that person said, "Well, yeah, I'll be going to a meeting again next month at the university, I'll look into this," because he was the director running the farm at the time, actually. He was not a very close friend, but he himself is an intellectual, and he appreciated that to get education is important. He also realized how young I 01:34:00was, how little, actually. I just couldn't do the work in the field. So he said he would look into this next time he went to a meeting.

He went to the meeting, came back again, and in two weeks he told my mother that, yeah, he talked to the high school, the principal or the president, and said that, yeah, so they would take me into the high school if I could go there and somehow make a living there, because that meant I would live away from my family. That was almost like boarding school, because that was, like, sixty miles away. So I couldn't come home until, like, summer vacation.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Oh, yeah.

XIONG: And he was asking, "Well, is your son too young to live there?" My mother, "No problem, I'll send him over." And so my mother just took me with her and went to the school, and just drove me there and brought all the clothes and 01:35:00left money enough to go to the cafeteria. It was not really a cafeteria, it was like a dining room. Without that, I don't think I would be sitting here.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: You're right.

XIONG: Yeah, I mean, I would just be like the girl I was mentioning. Just go to the countryside just like everyone else. But the middle school education I received, that was virtually nothing compared with what I already learned in elementary school. So even though technically or formally I graduated from middle school, educationwise, it's just like graduating from elementary school.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right.

XIONG: Right. So that made a huge difference and I was able to go to high school. That was only the beginning. We come to 1971 or 1972 and there is a guy, Deng Xiaoping. You probably know his name, right?

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right.

XIONG: So he was allowed to come back and to govern the country again. And that was before the second time he was stripped of his job. He came back and the 01:36:00country was so chaotic. That was the year after this guy called Lin Biao fled to Mongolia and died over there; he was basically tried and then [ran] away from the prosecution by Mao Zedong. Then he was destined [to be] the successor of Mao Zedong, was the second man in the country, in the power--

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right.

XIONG: --to run the country. So even him, he [felt] life was so unstable and even if he says something criticizing Mao, he could just be stripped overnight. And then Mao also realized the country was just so unstable going like this, sooner or later the country would get into a civil war. So the whole country, after that running away, that flight by Lin Biao, and Mao realized that the country needed to calm down a little bit, because the whole country was a really 01:37:00on the brink of collapse-- And economically there was nobody working. Everybody was going to the streets for the Revolution, for the Cultural Revolution. So that was a time when they were hoping to come back and said we need to calm down, we need to do some work, we need get back to work. And the people in the factory need to get back to work, the farmers need to get back to the farm to grow the rice, and students need to go back to the classroom to study. And so Deng was really trying to reform, in a sense.

And one of the things he tried very hard, which a lot of us benefitted tremendously from, was he pretty much ordered--Deng Xiaoping--that the high schools must reopen. Teachers must go back to teaching, students must go back to learning. And before that point, the student beat the teachers.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right.

XIONG: And they said, "You can't do that anymore." And I was lucky that one of 01:38:00the high schools, one of the best high schools in the whole province, Jiang Xi province, in Nanchang City, the whole high school was relocated to this university. Because this was an agricultural university, it's outside of the city. They said that all the high school teachers can't stay in the city, so they just moved them out. And they happened to move into our university. That's the best high school, one of the best high schools in Nanchang City, or maybe in the whole province. So along with the movement of the high school, all those teachers came down. The students had left. They were sent to countryside. But those high school teachers, the whole group of high school teachers were now a part of the university. They didn't know what to do. Until nowadays they said, "Well, we're going to reopen the high school, so you come back to teach." So I 01:39:00was so lucky, being able to attend high school in that two years and exposing and being taught by some of the best high school teachers for that two years.

It's only a year and a half before Deng Xiaoping was stripped again by Mao. You remember, Deng Xiaoping was stripped three times! No, twice, but he came back three times. So that was the second time he came back to work and was stripped again. So that was a lucky two years for me. And all I learned for the high school of six years was pretty much concentrated in that year and a half.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Really.

XIONG: Yeah. And those are some of the very best high school teachers that we ever had. And I still remember them. Whenever I get a chance to go back, I still go to visit them if ever possible.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right.

XIONG: They were good. They were good.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Well, go ahead and talk about some of them, if you would.

XIONG: Yeah. Oh boy, they were good. They were good. I remember every one of them, and my math teacher, my chemistry teacher, my physics teacher, my Chinese 01:40:00teachers, they were really good. For example, my math teacher, I love him so much, that guy; he liked us a lot. And he was still single at the time, and-- They must [have] felt so happy being able to teach again.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Yeah.

XIONG: And so we were fascinated, and the classroom teaching was actually different from what was being taught in the last three years. We were not learning anything, basically. We were told that there's something called a real textbook. There's a whole book about chemistry, a whole book about physics, a whole book about mathematics. [mutual laughter] Yeah, so everybody was happy. And everybody was so tired and so traumatized by this chaotic three or four years before. And the teachers felt happy that they're not beaten by the students, they're actually teaching students. And we were thrilled that we actually could learn something in the classroom. And those were good days. Those were really good days.

01:41:00I remember my math teacher was a very smart guy, and he was single and he didn't have a whole lot to do during the weekend and we would hang out with him, even on the weekend. And that was fun. And I remember the way he taught and he had like three classes every morning. You know, we had three classes in our grade, that was the equivalent of eleventh or tenth grade here. And he didn't even bother to go to his office, because there were ten minutes between classes. He would just walk from one class to the next classroom. And just walking in, he would just write a math formula on the board.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right.

XIONG: So we just started learning right away. Yeah. And I liked that and that was fun. Yeah. That was fun. I liked spending the weekend with him. It's not common to become somewhat personal friends with your teacher. I don't think I 01:42:00can call him my personal friend, he was, like, much older than I was and was really a good teacher, but I think we had developed some kind of relation even outside the classroom with my math teacher. And I remember my chemistry teacher was a big fellow. He's got so much sense of humor.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right.

XIONG: And the teaching comes, and it was so easy for him. And then all of a sudden you learned so much from him. And I also remember my physics teachers. And it's a couple. They were both great. They could explain complicated mathematics and physics in such an easy way. Also I remember my Chinese teacher was this old man and just about to retire. His sight was very-- He was very nearsighted, [wore] these very thick glasses, and he taught Chinese in a very easy way for us to remember it, and he really emphasized that what you learn in the classroom should not be separate from your daily life. And students set out 01:43:00writing something and they came back, he criticized and commented on our essays. And we were writing essays. I remember reporting this--what do you call this?--oh, sports event.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right.

XIONG: Yeah, I remember it. And he would say, "When you are describing people running very fast, don't you remember you just learned a few days ago, there's an article we studied in the classroom describing how fast these things can happen in the sky, like lightning? And that's a good sentence. Why doesn't anybody remember that, describing how fast people can run?" And he could come up with lot of examples like that and he showed us that what we learned in the book is what you can use in real life.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right.

XIONG: Yeah. Those were some first-class teachers and we did not appreciate 01:44:00fully how good they were at the time. Only to realize after they returned back to Nanchang City, to their old high school, after nineteen-- I think it's '76 or '75, we realized that those are the best teachers and we were the last class they taught, because after that, when the country really started back--for the normal work they were moving back to Nanchang City. They each-- Most of them became like--what do you call it?--the director of central education for the subject. But in the whole city there was like ten or twenty different schools separate in the whole city district.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right.

XIONG: And there's a central group that supervises individual schools for mathematics, for chemistry, for physics, and for Chinese, for history, like that. Those teachers who taught us were the directors for each course.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right.

01:45:00XIONG: Yeah, so they were really good teachers. And they-- Luckily or unfortunately, we only received three semesters of normal education, because after that, the country moved back to chaos again.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Oh, it did?

XIONG: Because Deng Xiaoping was stripped of his job, I think it was later, 1973. And then the normal education in high school stopped again. Yeah. But luckily I had three semesters. One of my early classmates from high school just came to see me recently, and she was a visiting scholar at Harvard [University] right now. And we never saw each other for seventeen years. So we met and we were thinking back about the early days. We were so lucky then that we had that three semesters. It meant a lot to us.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Was there any particular topic that you were very interested in 01:46:00or was this all pretty interesting?

XIONG: Oh boy, I was hungry. I loved everything I learned and I don't remember anything I didn't like. I was not particularly good in physics. I was very good in Chinese, in mathematics, in geography, and chemistry as well. I was not particularly good in physics. And I remember we had a competition, olympic competition for Chinese, and I got number two, and we had an olympic competition for math for the whole high school, and I was number three or something along those lines. I was never able to compete for physics. And that was a good time.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right.

XIONG: That was a good time. [mutual laughter] I just remember, gosh, we were so hungry and we didn't realize it was so much fun to learn. And it's very much like you don't feel food is good, but after you've been starved for a couple of days, you say, "Man, food is good."[mutual laughter] That's the very exact 01:47:00feeling I had. Yeah. I remember pretty clearly those days.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: So while you're at this school, are you staying in touch with your family? I mean, do you know where your sisters [Yifeng Xiong and Wen Xiong] are? Your father [Shenggao Xiong]? Mother?

XIONG: They were still living in the Nanhu farm. I was growing up, but I didn't get to see them often at all and was only able to go home for summer vacation and winter vacation and could not afford to go to see them in the schooltime, because I would take a train. The ticket cost about-- Well, you can't use today's dollar number. It was probably ten cents or less to go home, but a dollar meant a lot, and we were very, very poor at the time. The money was just enough to feed ourselves. There was no money left to buy anything, any books or anything. Yeah. But luckily, the teachers were great. Yeah.

01:48:00VAN BENSCHOTEN: Okay, when these teachers leave, though, what happens to you after that?

XIONG: Right, so I graduated from high school in 1974. Those teachers stayed with us until we graduated. And stayed for two years, but after 1973, the country went back to chaos again and they couldn't do their normal teaching anymore. There was just no examinations and no real formal teaching anymore. So after '74, I graduated from high school and I was sixteen years old. So now I really had nowhere to go but go to the countryside.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right.

XIONG: And before that, in 1972, Deng Xiaoping attempted to reopen the university and the college, the workers in the factory and peasants in the farm recommended young men and women to go to college. So you were admitted into a 01:49:00college or university, not by your score, not by your performance in the exam, instead by recommendation from the people that never received any education. I don't know anywhere else this has ever happened in the modern history of the whole world.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right. It's not intuitive.

XIONG: It can't be more ridiculous than that. And so I was just totally out of the question for any possibility of being recommended to go to college or universities because of my family. So that was just out of the question, like many other ones. And so I was a graduate from high school in '74. I went to the countryside, I worked in the countryside for four years.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Wow.

XIONG: Yeah, well, that was-- I was sixteen years old. It was not so bad, I had grown up little bit more than three years ago. So at least now I could go to work in the field.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: What did you do for those four years?

01:50:00XIONG: Oh, all kinds stuff. I grew rice and drove buffalo in the field. I worked in the orchard and grew, like, peaches, pears. All those kind of farm works. I did a number of things. And I also taught two and a half years in the middle school where I used to study myself.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: That's where your sister--

XIONG: Right. That's the time I taught my sister who was just getting to middle school. There was no formal educational college available to anybody and so a high school graduate teaching high school was pretty common. So I was asked to teach for two and a half years in middle school. So I did all kinds of stuff.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Now, did you split your time between the farming and the teaching? Or did you--?

XIONG: No. I did a year and a half in the farm and then I was asked to go to 01:51:00teaching. After one semester, they said, "Okay, you're done, go back to farming." After several months, they said, "Okay, we need some people to help," I went back again. So I, in total, probably spent a year and a half in the four years in the field and about two years, two and a half years, in the school, to teach. I taught everything. I taught Chinese, I taught physics, I even taught physical PE, or physical education. Believe it or not, I even taught English.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right.

XIONG: I taught English.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: How good was your English at that point?

XIONG: Oh boy. That was very funny, I taught English. I didn't know how to read English myself. How could I teach? But at least I knew there was something called English; no one else even knew it!

VAN BENSCHOTEN: So, how did you like teaching?

XIONG: I loved it.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Yeah.

XIONG: I loved it and the kids loved me. I was very energetic and I loved teaching and had a very close relationship with the students. Some were even 01:52:00older than I was at the time, and I loved it. I was a very good teacher, actually. I heard a lot from the parents and teachers. The one thing I remember the most is that, "This guy," meaning me, "is so bad, he comes from such a bad family, otherwise he'd be a great teacher, and the teachers love him." Yeah. And those kids, those students, they did love my lectures.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right.

XIONG: Yeah. I taught a lot. I was one of the best teachers in the school at the time. I enjoyed it a lot.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: What did you love specifically about teaching?

XIONG: I taught physics, I taught Chinese, and that's the two main classes I was teaching. I did a little bit on the math, but mainly Chinese and physics I was teaching them. I think my lecture was energetic and I tried to do as good as I 01:53:00could. In those days, teaching was not difficult if you actually know something, because compared with other teachers in the same office-- A lot of them didn't even receive the same education that I did. Not to mention I was a pretty good student. At least I knew the content. And lots of teachers, they didn't understand what they were teaching. Whether or not they could do good teaching is not even a question.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Yeah.

XIONG: Yeah, so at least I knew the stuff myself. Whether I could communicate with students, at least I could try. For some of them, they could not even try it. All they could do is pretty much just read the book. That's one of the reasons students liked my lectures so much.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: It sounded like you had good models too, because of those teachers that you had earlier, maybe.

XIONG: I think that I really followed them, but I don't think I could, because they had much more education than I had, but they influenced me a lot. Obviously, if not for that three semesters of education I got from them, it 01:54:00would not be possible to teach myself. Yeah. The one consistent and striking feeling I had during that four years from '74 to '78, when I was unable to go to college, that four years, and the one thing I do remember clearly is I was so hungry for anything I could grab. Books. And I just couldn't get enough to read. I was really starved.

At that time the living was getting back to normal and the stomach was not hungry anymore. We could feed ourselves. Life started calming down, was not so chaotic as the early seventies, and so the country was trying to get back to normal. People had a relatively normal life, so to speak. But one thing we really didn't have was-- I was just so hungry for learning. There was no chance, 01:55:00no opportunity, because the university was closed, the library was shut down, there were just no books, no one I could talk to, I could learn from. I was not very close with my father. He could teach me something. I don't know, he was just totally beaten down or just in no mood or was so afraid to teach me anything that could cause him trouble or me trouble later on. So I did not learn anything from my father. From a textbook.

So one thing I did that helped me a lot was I was able to bribe one of my high school teachers. Her job was working to maintain the library that was shut down. Just clean up, just watch it. Nothing, it was just shut down.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: That's amazing. All that knowledge rusting away in there.

XIONG: It's amazing, the whole library just shut down. It's a big library, actually, there are all kinds of books, and they just collected them from anywhere. They were just locked in that room. So she was the one just supposed to clean up. And I don't know what the library was for, because it was not 01:56:00open-- Nobody was allowed to go in there anyway. So that was her job. And so I was able to bribe her and say, "Please, just let me in," and I brought something to her, we try to make friends with her. She actually allowed me to go in there with a bag and I half borrowed, half stole. I was able to grab a whole bag of books to take home.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right.

XIONG: You would not imagine what I was reading. I was reading anything I could grab. It was not by choice. It's by what I could get. I was not reading much about physics or chemistry, anything like that, because that's something you cannot really teach yourself without any teachers. I couldn't find anybody. I was reading a lot of Chinese books, like Chinese literature or history or poems. I was reading the world history books. I read a couple of pretty good world history books. And I was even reading, like, economics books! [mutual laughter] 01:57:00I had no idea what I was reading. I just read whatever I could grab. Yeah. But it made a difference, because no one else was reading, was studying at all. And after graduating from high school, none of my classmates was studying. And at least I was still studying, I was still reading. So that made me somewhat different from the rest of my classmates.

The worst part in that four years, for me and everybody else, was hopelessness. So all you're feeling was now your education is over, you work there, you find a girl, get married, have kids, and be just like the rest of the farmers. There's no hope-- You are not allowed to go anywhere looking for a job. There's no university; you can't get any education. There's nothing happening in the whole farm. So you're just thinking about how you just would be just like one of them. 01:58:00So the first year in the countryside, I still feel somewhat fresh out of the classroom.

But I remember very clearly the last couple of years, especially '73 or '74, [feeling] just totally hopeless. I started growing up, getting to the age of seventeen or eighteen or twenty. And they started finding girls, and they just feel that's your life. That's about it. And there's no hope-- You are reading books, but you do not have any dream that you can possibly go anywhere for any further education. [At] that time I knew there was a place called a university or college, and I knew that if you belong to a good family, you might have a chance to be recommended to go to college! That there is someplace called a college, but that's not my dream. I could not go to it. And the hopelessness was a really realistic feeling. And for the last couple years when I was in the countryside, it was very pessimistic.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right.

XIONG: So that's the one thing. It was not physically hard, I was growing up, I 01:59:00could work. I was doing pretty well in the classroom and the students liked me, but I just felt that my career or my growing up was about it and that I was going to spend the rest of my life on the farm.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right.

XIONG: Yeah. I can't go anywhere, I can't possibly get any education.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: And then, as you know, an important year, 1976, was when Zhou Enlai died first, then Mao Zedong died.

XIONG: Yeah, I remember that year very clearly, from the January Zhou Enlai died. We were very sad about this, because-- I don't know how we got this impression, from somewhere, but we had a very good impression about him, even though we [knew] very distantly what he looked like and what he was doing. But he did give the ordinary people the impression that he was the one practically running the country, doing the business, whereas Mao was like a god. At the time, we could not possibly think that Mao was a bad person or anything like 02:00:00that, but Mao did represent revolution. But Zhou represented normal life.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Yeah.

XIONG: And so people started feeling that normal life was what they wanted. So he died and a few months later Deng Xiaoping was stripped again, was just kicked out of the party and the government. You just felt the whole country was just about starting another revolution. We did not have a real feeling about what could happen, but you could feel that this chaos was happening again. It's about to happen again. And the people become, like, used to it, and every few years there's a chaotic movement, a political movement, so to speak, from the early fifties, from early days, like [when] my father was labeled as anti-revolutionary or rightist. And every few years something like that happened. You just felt, "Well, this is another cycle." And then, whether you liked, it's almost just like getting used to it. Yeah, it's just, like, 02:01:00happening again. And then, of course, [we] come to September, when Mao died. That was a big shock.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right.

XIONG: We could not understand, or appreciate the impact at the time. But that probably was more important than anything else for the country and for myself. So we could not grab the implications in the first few months. And then you just felt, we're going to feel-- And the frozen period is becoming melted, until sometime in early '77. You didn't feel anything in the beginning.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Now, before we move on, I just want us-- In '72, it was a big news story that [Richard M.] Nixon went to China and sort of, you know, opened up China to the United States. I mean, were you aware of this trip? I mean, you're fairly young, though. You're what, fourteen, fifteen? Did that make any impact on you at all?

XIONG: It did, actually, because I was very into world politics, even when I was 02:02:00young. I liked it. I was never really into it, but I liked it. I listened to the radio and I was fully aware of this stuff. But of course, all I knew was from the radio broadcast, but the very fact that the American president came to visit China was already big enough to [make you] think, "Well, it cannot be everybody's a monster in the United States."

VAN BENSCHOTEN: He has two legs and two arms-- [mutual laughter]

XIONG: Yeah, so that's pretty clear. And that was in the middle of the period when the country was trying to get back to normal. So I don't remember any very bad feeling towards the American president at the time, even though what we heard was very limited and very restricted, but clearly we were not thinking the American people or American president was some kind of monster. It's a bad person still, the U.S., and it still represents capitalism, but it's not like 02:03:00the monstrous impression I had when I grew up. Right. Practically, the only impact it had on me or to people like me at that kind of level was that we realized that there is another world out there. But we were not importing anything, were never getting a chance to see any American product, anything like that. But we did start to have the impression that the outside world, they're more advanced technologically and lifewise. We start hearing words like television and air conditioning. We start to hear those words, even though we don't know exactly what they were.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right.

XIONG: But everything was still-- The whole media was controlled by the government, and there was just nothing you could-- There was no channel [where] you could get any news by yourself. Listening to, like, an American broadcast was completely illegal. That itself could get you into prison. Even though if 02:04:00you had a shortwave radio, you could receive it, but that's illegal. That's illegal, right. So that's the way to categorize that one is less chaotic and people are trying to return to a normal course. But it's very, very still isolated, okay.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right.

XIONG: So there was no direct impact by the opening to the West at the time, but we still start to feel there is another outside world out there. Because not only Nixon, but several other leaders from Western countries followed up to visit China. "Wow, there is another world outside." That's how it felt; I can remember it.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right. Okay, you say that in '77, after Mao's death, there's sort of a thawing. How did you--? What were signs of that thawing for you?

XIONG: The first, actually, was not a feeling of a thaw; the first was pretty scary. And then my father, I remember, he was pretty scared, he thought this was just another political movement that's just going to come in. You have to be 02:05:00really careful, shut your mouth, not say anything, because when every political movement has come in, the people like him would be the first target to be hit. So anything he says or I say can cause him trouble again. So the first few months or so, we were actually pretty scared at that point. I didn't say anything. It just felt unrealistic, that Mao cannot be-- He's a normal human being, he also can die. And it's not like a god who would live forever, because that's what we were chanting for years, was "Long live Chairman Mao, long live Chairman Mao!" And you know, here he actually died. During the first several months, nothing really happened. They're kind of calm. If you think back to what was the first sign of a thawing, is-- There actually was no actual political movement.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right. That was the sign.

XIONG: That was the sign. Everyone said, "Now something big is going to happen again." It was not. Nothing was happening. We also [knew] at that time, even for 02:06:00the ordinary people like me, that if we could have people like Deng Xiaoping come back into power, that was good for us. There was a rumor starting around that he might come back. The fact that a rumor could spread around, which means that people could privately talk about a rumor, was already a big sign, because before that point, people could say nothing-- Nobody dared to say anything along those lines. People started spreading the rumor that people like Deng Xiaoping might be coming back into power, along with a lot those old leaders coming back. That was a view, that was a sign of changing-- The country might come back to normal.

But of course, the big thing that happened, the big thing that happened, the event after Mao's death was the arrest of his wife [Jiang Qiang]. Even we knew that those groups of people represented by his wife were really revolutionary. 02:07:00They were not caring much about normal life, not about normal work, and working to restore classroom teaching or factory work or anything like that. They were really just behind one political movement after another. We knew that's what they were for. So the fact that they were being arrested, that made you feel, "Wow, that's good."

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Yeah.

XIONG: That's good, so if there really was a first sign, that's the arrest. And of course the next-- The big thing that happened to me was hearing the rumor in the summer of 1977 that the university might reopen again and this time students would get in not by recommendation, instead, by testing. That was like-- I don't know how to describe that. It's unbelievable that could happen. And people 02:08:00started spreading the rumor in the summer of '77 that that could happen. And I didn't hear the rumor until September of 1977. That actually could happen. And everybody was allowed to take part in the exam, including people like me.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Yeah, that is amazing.

XIONG: And among the classmates, we started talking about that. And finally, I think it was either October or November, I don't know what time, we were told that could happen. We could register to take part in the exam that would be [held] very soon. And I don't know what time. We started grabbing around what would be tested. So that was like-- [For] ten years, there was no real classroom teaching for any high school student except our three semesters I just mentioned. And we didn't even know what this college entrance exam was supposed to be.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right.

XIONG: No one had any idea.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: You have to reinvent it all again.

XIONG: Yeah. We had no idea what would be tested and we just tried to remember 02:09:00what we learned. That's the time when the three good semesters of classroom teaching I had in '72 and '73 that made a difference-- It's the only thing I remembered. I think the test, the national exam, was [held]-- I forgot what day, I think it was in November or something, and nobody had prepared for it. We were just told that we were allowed. So we had no idea what we were anticipating and what would come out. But that was like the biggest thing the whole year. I forgot what was the number. I remember the final statistics say that one in a hundred had a chance of being accepted.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: One out of one hundred?

XIONG: Yeah.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Wow.

XIONG: One percent of the people [who] participated in the exam could be accepted. So that's a ratio between how many people took the exam and how many could be accepted. So the standard joke was that, like, half the people in this room can go to university, because each classroom of the examination [held] about fifty people. So when we walked in that room for the exam, that's the joke 02:10:00we told. So only half of the people in this room can go. Yeah, but that in itself was already a big enough shock to everybody, that you could go to college by taking an exam, not by recommendation.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Yeah.

XIONG: Right. And that had a huge impact on every one of us. Even though the first exam I [took] in 1977, I had no idea how to prepare. We didn't even know what to prepare. And we were out of touch with the classroom, with our teachers, for two or three years. So we just grabbed teachers and made something up. I did pretty damn well. I did. But next thing came as shock. So I passed the exam, my score was good enough, but I was stripped, not allowed to go.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Really?

XIONG: Yeah, because of my father.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Oh, my God.

XIONG: Oh, that was one of the worst times I had in my life and probably in my parents' as well. Because he had just seen his hope, finally, after all these years. But-- You actually did it. Did pretty well. And you feel that you might 02:11:00have a real life now-- Boom! It's been stripped.

So that was very devastating and I remember that whole winter of early '78. And so we were just waiting and waiting to get the notification, whether I'd been accepted. And the post office was shut down, so my father and my mother, they walked several miles in the cold winter to another place to pick up the mail, to see when I could get these notifications. But this hope just started to slide and just slide away day by day. And because-- And everyday you hear somebody, somebody is being admitted to university.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right.

XIONG: And somebody, somebody is being admitted. And I was not receiving anything. The most encouraging time was a rumor that there were a group of people actually coming to our university, the Jiang Xi Agricultural University, to look at my material, my paperwork, which means they were getting so close. 02:12:00They turned it down. The only reason is because my father was still "rightist" or "anti-revolutionary."

VAN BENSCHOTEN: So how did you find out that was the case?

XIONG: The first rumor I heard was somebody came to-- What do you call it? Each university sent two or three people to individual provinces to look at exam scores and then they looked at their paperwork, okay. At that time the score was not enough, they would look at the paperwork. The paperwork meant your family history.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Yeah.

XIONG: And so my paperwork was asked for by Nanjing University, I heard. And the rumor was I did pretty well. I never [knew] my final score, though. But that was new to everybody. The management was not so efficient. They never told every student what score you have. But I heard my score was pretty good. And this university I applied to was a very good university, a very prestigious one. They looked at my paperwork, I assume my score probably was good enough. But they 02:13:00never sent out an admission letter. And the only reason we found out is [when they] looked at the paperwork, they found my father was still "anti-revolutionary." So they turned it down, my application.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right.

XIONG: And yeah, that was a pretty bad time. And my father felt so bad that-- He just felt that he--and just because of him--killed my career. I couldn't bear to go home. I remember those days and every time we had lunch or dinner, there was no one talking.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Yeah.

XIONG: And devastating. There was no one talking. I was so angry. And I just had my hopes lifted and then it just vanished.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: The doors closed.

XIONG: Yeah, shut you out like that.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: You didn't know whether it was ever going to be open, that's the trouble.

XIONG: Well, I know the university will be reopened. But I can't change the history of my father. So I probably will never get the chance to go there if that's the case. Even though the newspaper was saying that the policy is only 02:14:00based on your score, not your family, that's not what's happening in reality.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Yeah.

XIONG: So, I got so angry. So I wrote a letter to Deng Xiaoping myself. And he actually got the letter. And I found out that later, because they have this national education meeting. The president of our university actually went to the meeting. And when he was in the meeting, somebody from Deng Xiaoping's office [came and said], "Now who's the representative from Jiang Xi Agricultural University?" So the president said, "I am." And, "Do you know this guy Yue Xiong?" And he said, "Yeah, I know him pretty well, actually," because he was a long-time friend of my parents. They knew each other for quite a long time, since the early days [when] my father was sent to the farm.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right.

XIONG: Yeah. He said, "What's happening?" He said, "Can you pass the notes to him that his letter was received by our office, Mr. Deng Xiaoping's office, and please tell him that he's not alone."

VAN BENSCHOTEN: That's amazing.

XIONG: "He's not alone, and we will address this issue, nationwide," because 02:15:00there were a lot of people like me and I was not alone. He said "We're going to change the policy and really implement this policy that kids can only be admitted to university solely by the testing, not by associations with their family." But the chance was already past for '77.

[END OF TAPE 2, SIDE 1]

[END OF INTERVIEW]

VAN BENSCHOTEN: I had a few follow up questions from the last interview that we had. How did your mother [Zhiying Peng] and father [Shenggao Xiong] meet? Do you know?

XIONG: Oh. They didn't meet. They were married by the arrangement of family.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right.

XIONG: Yeah. I think that's pretty typical. I think they probably met. I 02:16:00remember they said they actually met before they actually married. But "met" is in a different sense from [when] we say "met" here.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right.

XIONG: When we say met here, they get to know each other, they communicate with each other, then they fall in love with each other. So that's not what happened to them. So they were pretty much arranged by the family even though they had had a chance, saw each other. So "met" probably is more accurately described as "saw each other." Yeah. It's a little bit better than most other people at the time, that never see each other--

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right.

XIONG: --before they get married. But I don't think they had any kind of communication before they got married.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Was there a marriage broker involved? Or how did that--? I mean, who arranged that?

XIONG: Oh, family.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Family did.

XIONG: Family. I don't know how they knew each other, because they were not far away. There's only-- My father's family and my mother's family is only ten miles 02:17:00away-- So, fifteen kilometers away. So they're pretty close. Yeah. So they kind of knew each other.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: And when did they marry, again? Was that just before the end of the Civil War?

XIONG: Just in the middle of it.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Oh, in the middle.

XIONG: Yeah, I think it's '47, '48.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Okay. In the interview yesterday you said that your mother said that you were a "wild boy." What did she mean by that? Or what did you take her to mean by that?

XIONG: Yeah, it's pretty easy to describe that. [mutual laughter] For one thing, I never really studied when I was little. I told you yesterday the homework was so easy so I never really needed to study much. Well, another thing is when I was little, they both had to go to work. There was no day care available after they moved back together in 1960, late '63 or early '64. So there was no one at 02:18:00home to take care of me. And my grandma died early on, when I was two years old. So all they could do was just lock me in the home when they're out, and by the time they come back in one second and then my mother would say as soon as they opened the door, I would disappear.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right.

XIONG: Yeah. Before that, my mother always says that when she was raising me alone, before we reunited with my father, whenever I got the chance, I'd run away from the classroom. It was so difficult to find me. I would always try to be the first one in the class, but as soon as class finished--it was day care, not really class--just difficult to find me.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right.

XIONG: Yeah. But that's why I have some pretty good memories from my boyhood. Very playful. There was not much homework, not like nowadays and not even 02:19:00mention the homework, it was so easy. I always just tried to play around.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: I know that sometimes mothers today have pagers on their children so that they can find out where they are. [laughs]

XIONG: No, my mother always had difficulty finding me. She said the one thing she remembers is that there was a river outside where we lived, outside a fence. She said I loved to go there. By the time she found me, very often, there was nothing on me. The clothes were lost and pretty much is a naked boy. They couldn't find my clothes. [mutual laughter]

VAN BENSCHOTEN: That's funny. Okay, at one point, I think in between 1958 and '62, when your father is gone--

XIONG: Right.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: --you said that your mother suffered nutritional deficiency for about three years.

XIONG: Right.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Because she was feeding you and there was rationing, and it was just a difficult time in general for China. Was there any long-term impact on your mom physically? Or mentally?

02:20:00XIONG: Yeah. It had. She developed this disease [Oedema], I don't know what it's called in English, but the whole leg swelled up. There's a term for that. I looked for it one time, I couldn't find it. I can't remember now. For that-- There was a story for that, actually. Because she actually developed this ugly disease and not just because she was starving; she was given an extra allowance for beans, yellow beans.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right.

XIONG: That was actually considered at the time an actual food. Not everybody could have it. So I liked it. My mother said one time I went to her and said, "Mom, look, I got swollen, too," because of all those beans.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right. [mutual laughter] Okay. Just to sort of complete your father's career, and your mother's career as well, at one point you said--this happened in 1979, I think--that there was the possibility of your father 02:21:00teaching, perhaps, but that his knowledge was sort of outdated by that point and he decided not to. Did he remain, then, a farmer?

XIONG: No. I think it was 1979 or '80 and I was already in college-- So finally they-- What do they call it? There's a specific term in Chinese, to the people they wrongly treated before. Now they tried to clear them. I think that's the word, "clearance." They said, "Well, we wrongly accused you." So they didn't really apologize, they just said, "Well, you were wrongly treated and so now you are back to normal, just like everyone else."

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right.

XIONG: So they restored his salary. I don't know if they ever actually compensated for what he had lost over the previous--what? From '58 to, what?--twenty years. I don't think they really compensated what he had lost in 02:22:00that twenty years. But I do remember they gave him something like six hundred Chinese dollars. That's about it. I don't know how that six hundred was calculated, but it actually was a pretty big deal at time for him, because it let him feel that he had been somewhat compensated, even though that was by no means complete compensation.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Is that a large amount or a small amount?

XIONG: At the time, six hundred Chinese dollars was a relatively large amount, the equivalent of about one year of his salary. Yeah, that's about right. But of course that was not even close to what he had lost in the previous twenty years. When he was stripped of his job, not only did he lose his job or position, he also lost all his salary, income. So that was never really repaid back. But even that small amount of money just made him feel somewhat compensated. On top of 02:23:00that, the university, the Jiang Xi Agricultural University, where we associate with, asked him-- Say, "Now we'll restore your job as well."

Before he was stripped of his job, he was actually not faculty at the university. He was working in the capital town, capital city of Jiang Xi province, Nanchang, managing forest development, so it was not an education or academic job. It actually was a technical management job. So now, because he moved, they asked him to go back to teach, and he thought about this and then he said, "Well, there's no point for me to go back to teaching after twenty years. I couldn't remember anything. There was nothing, anything in my expertise, what I learned in the college. I can't remember anything. I have not read a single page of my books all these years." So he did not take the offer. And so instead 02:24:00he remained doing his technical job for designing gardens or development of land, landscape. That's what it was.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Okay. And he did that until he retired, I take it.

XIONG: Pretty much.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Now, is your father still alive?

XIONG: Yeah. He's here, actually.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Oh, he is?

XIONG: Yeah, he came here to comfort my mother for her heart surgery a few months ago.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Oh, okay, good. Okay, then let's finish out your mom's career, too. She started out-- Or at least at one point, she was an accountant.

XIONG: Right.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: And then there was the upheaval of the Cultural Revolution. She was on a farm, full time.

XIONG: Very hard labor. For-- So my mother actually only has two careers: Accounting and the real farming. For the real farming there was four or five years, really working in the countryside. That was actually a very difficult 02:25:00time. Not just mentally, but actually physically as well. She was short and physically was not very strong. She had not been involved in any hard labor work until that point. She spent the previous [time] in an office doing accounting work. So all of a sudden she was sent to the countryside, doing the fieldwork with everyone else. It was pretty tough on her. It was very tough on her. Not only the physical part is tough, but also there was a specific disease in that area. There's no such disease [schistosomiasis] in the United States. I think in Asia at one time it was pretty bad, and right now if not completely eliminated, it [has been shrunk] to very small areas. It's a small infective agent that can infect you and infect your liver and enlarge your liver and eventually, if you are repeatedly infected, it could ultimately lead to liver cancer. Yeah, so it 02:26:00was pretty bad at the time.

The government eventually paid very [much] attention. So if you were diagnosed with the disease, infection, you have to undergo treatment. The treatment's very harsh. It makes you throw up and have diarrhea and a loss of weight and loss of appetite for a couple of months. Very harsh treatment.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right.

XIONG: Right. So she was infected twice. My father was infected three times. So that was pretty specific in that area along the lake. Yeah. When I finish, I will try to find the name of that. It's not a virus. I don't-- It's not a mosquito either. It's-- I think it's a type of insect. I'll find the name for you.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Okay, good. Okay, when she leaves the farm, though, what does she do? Where does she go?

02:27:00XIONG: I think it was '72 or '71, after Lin Biao died, and remember, Lin Biao escaped or fled. So at that point, the whole country calmed down somewhat. So that was the time I was going to high school, and that was a time when Deng Xiaoping came back to power the second time, tried to restore the normalcy of the country. He said, "Well, the worker should go back to the factory to do their job, the farmer should go back to the farm, the student should go back to the classroom." So that's the time my mother was asked to go back to her accounting job. Yeah.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Okay.

XIONG: So that returned somewhat some normalcy. That was seventy-- I think most likely '71 or '72.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Okay. And she did that right up until she retired?

XIONG: Yeah, very much so.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Now, do your mother and father live here?

XIONG: Right now?

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Yeah.

XIONG: No, they still live in Nanchang. They retired about, what? five or six 02:28:00years ago, probably longer than that. But they have been pretty frequently visiting us. This is their fourth visit to us in the United States. Yeah.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: That would be interesting to talk with them at some point and to obtain their impression of the United States. We'll get to your impression as well.Those first impressions are always interesting, I think.

XIONG: Right, right. It has changed quite a bit, but still you can see the difference [between] the impression I have versus what impression they have. So one is that we-- Their contact with this world is much less than the way we have been. They can't drive, they can't read English, so what they know about the United States--even though they live here four times--a lot is from what we've been telling them and from reading some Chinese version of the U.S. papers.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right.

XIONG: Not through direct contact with the American people or community like that. The other reason is that culturally, the ideology could be quite 02:29:00different. They just subconsciously refuse to take some American culture. They don't say we're doing wrong, but they just simply cannot accept it. Especially [when it] comes to kids' education. They don't like it. They really think we spoil [our] daughter too much.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right. Let's pick up, then, where we left off yesterday. And let me summarize that. You had taken a test to enter college, you were denied entrance, probably again, because of the problems that your father had with the government. And then you wrote a letter to Deng Xiaoping, which was actually maybe not personally received by him, but it definitely had an impact. Because then a person from the government had come to your province and said, "You know, let's look at his record," and told you that you were not alone, that there were other people as well. Go ahead and pick it up there, if you would.

02:30:00XIONG: Okay. That was a very upsetting time. Finally you saw the hope mentioned. During that four years in the countryside between my high school and my college, the physical labor was not the most difficult part. The most difficult part was the [fact that] you don't feel any hope for your life. You're young, you still want to learn. You have this hunger for the knowledge. But you can't find any books to read. And the worst part is you just don't know where you're going in your life. I clearly remember those feelings and just the feeling that I will be like every other young man and woman like me, being sent to the countryside. I was the youngest one in my whole class. So I just saw them, what happened to them, ahead of me. After two or three years, you just don't know what you're doing. Can't get any good job outside the field, and you can't go to any college. You can't get any further education. So you find a girlfriend or 02:31:00boyfriend, and get married and have kids and that's about it. The farm life will be your whole life. And that hopeless feeling is the most difficult one.

So after '77 and '78, all of a sudden you feel that a whole new world has come in front of you. And you are actually allowed to apply to college, and you could have a chance to have a test. That's what, at least, the government had told us. That's what the newspapers said. And actually, I did pretty well on the first test in '77. And you just feel, God, a whole new world is coming, and just all of sudden, overnight, the dream has been shattered again. "Well, sorry, you still cannot go because of your father." That is something you cannot change. So that was a very, very down time for me and all my family. And very spontaneously, I wrote a letter to Deng Xiaoping. He was the real leader at the 02:32:00time for the country. We all knew that he's behind this whole reform. The country tried to get back to the so-called Four Modernizations. So he's really the one behind all this. I wrote to him pretty spontaneously. I don't remember if I told anybody or mentioned it to anybody afterwards. And I was actually surprised that the letter was actually received. I didn't really expect that the letter would have any impact. I was just feeling so upset, not hoping that something could happen or the letter could solve something or help me. So that's the situation as I remember it.

It was so surprising the letter was actually received. And a few months later was a meeting in Beijing, a conference discussing how the country should reform its education. And all the major universities sent a representative to Beijing, including the president from Jiang Xi Agricultural University, where we lived. And the president of the Jiang Xi Agricultural University is actually a longtime friend of my mother and my father, because they know each other very long, 02:33:00through the bad time and okay time previously. Because during the Cultural Revolution, he himself was beaten down as well, just like my father and my mother. So they actually [knew] each other for a very long time. So he went there for the meeting, and he was very surprised at being called up by Deng Xiaoping's office. "Well, is the president of Jiang Xi Agricultural University here?"

He said, "Yeah I'm here. What's up?"

He said, "Well, is there a young man in your university called Yue Xiong?" He say,

"Yeah, I know him."

He says, "He wrote a letter to our office." He was really surprised by that; he didn't know I wrote. He said, "Please tell him we got his letter. I don't think we are going to reply to him individually, because we got many letters like that, and tell him that his case is not alone. So we need to set and implement a policy to deal with a situation like this around the country, and start dealing case by case. And tell him that the policy will be implemented, that admission 02:34:00to the university will be solely dependent on merit, your testing score, not by association with your family." And even though they said that beforehand in the first test, the policy was never really implemented. And then locally he said "We're going to really enforce implementation of this policy. We're going to do a better job in the second year, and tell him to prepare for the second test."

So that was a very huge encouragement for me. So you felt that for the first time, your comment could be heard by someone in the top, and you could see the whole country's moving forward.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right.

XIONG: They had a lot of this discussion in the newspaper. They did actually publish someone else's letter, not my letter. And it was a very similar situation: Someone else from another province, and the kid had very good testing [scores] but couldn't go to school for the same reason, because his father or his mother was still labeled as a bad person or enemy of the people. So they 02:35:00used that as an example, and said the policy will be implemented this year, solely based on the merit of the applicant, not by the family. And in parallel, they tried to clear us, to apologize to a lot of people that were wrongly accused for all those years, but that was an accumulation of twenty years of political movement. So that takes time. So my father was not cleared [until] after-- Two years after I was in the university, actually. So you can see-- You can feel that the whole country's moving forward.

So I was able to get, like, I think about two months of leave of absence to study full time, to prepare for the '78 exam. And I did pretty well; I was second in terms of score in the whole area. I don't know how many applicants participated in that test. It was just as big as the first year, and the number 02:36:00we heard for the first year was, like, ten million people participated--

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Wow.

XIONG: --and less than one million people were admitted. So the chance was-- No, less than that, it was just about one hundred thousand, because the ratio was just about 1 percent that could be accepted by the university. And the second year was even more, because people felt, "Wow, this is real, this is not joking, that you can just participate in the test and if you do well you can go to college." So I did pretty well in the second year and got in. That was a huge deal for me. It's almost impossible to overstate how big an impact it had on me and for my family, as well as the whole farm.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right.

XIONG: Because on the whole farm, there's more than a thousand people working the farm. They couldn't believe that one actually could go to college just by having a test, not by the recommendation from somebody who never even received a high school education.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right.

02:37:00XIONG: That's what had been in the previous ten years. So that had a lot of impact. And I was the only one who got in that year.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: You set a precedent. Now other people in the province look up and say, "Well, you know, you got through, so--"

XIONG: It's probably more a political signal to the people that things are really changing. You can read from the newspaper, you can hear from the radio, but at least it's an actual person we know for years, and he actually comes from such a bad family and his father is antirevolutionary, his mother came from this bad family--because my mother's family also had a piece of property before 1949, so this is by any definition a bad family--and is an enemy of the people or the country or government. And yet he was able to go to a university, one of the best in the country, just because he had a good score on the test. So that was a pretty [big] shock to many people, and they really scratched their heads. They couldn't believe this.

And then my mother told me the story, I didn't hear this myself, and said there 02:38:00was another family and--it was actually a friend of ours--this was a very, very poor family before 1949. So by definition he was a good person, good family and revolutionary family, because they were really poor. So he was the poorest one in the whole farm, which meant he had the best family history, according to the standards of the Communist Party. He was really confused. He said, "Why is Yue Xiong going to the university, not my daughter?" He was genuinely confused. Why? How could that happen? Because that was just totally different from [what] he had been taught all those years. Yeah.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Okay, so you eventually end up, though, at Fudan University, right?

XIONG: Yeah.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: And the first couple of years you take basic requirement courses, really, and it was very intense, right?

XIONG: Very intense. Although actually, pretty much a whole three years, except 02:39:00the last semester, when we were doing the graduate thesis experiment. For the first three years, if not three and a half years, it was very, very intense. Every semester we were taking a lot of classes, and not only because the traditional Chinese education is to try to feed students as much as possible--they're still doing that right now, it's different from here--but also the system of education is different from here in that the students didn't have a whole lot of choices. They just take whatever is being given. Here a lot of classes [are chosen] by the student; you have a curriculum, you have a requirement, and there's a core, but on top of that, that's not enough for your credit, and then you have to choose some classes yourself. But in China, pretty much you are given what you're supposed to be learning. And another thing that's different is the student was accepted into college in their major already. Here, you decide after you get into the university. You are accepted by the 02:40:00university, not by a specific department. That was different in China. You are accepted by a specific department in a university. So I knew I was going to study biology even before I got into college.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Oh, you did?

XIONG: Yeah. Yeah. I was accepted by Fudan University biology department, even though I didn't know anything about biology at the time. [mutual laughter] At that time, high school was-- Biology was never taught in high school.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Now, is that because you scored well, too, on the biology part of this exam, or was this simply--?

XIONG: No. No. Because biology was not part of the test.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right.

XIONG: Okay, so the test consisted of six subjects: Chinese, politics, mathematics, physics, chemistry, English. So biology was not part of it.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Okay, so you get on to Fudan University. Talk a little bit about those years. What were they like?

XIONG: If you're asking me now what's a single word or single sentence to 02:41:00describe those four years, it's "hard study." It's very hard studies, because we actually went into the university with a deficit from high school. I mentioned that in the six years from my middle school and high school years I only had three good semesters. And then the rest of the time was pretty much just working, never really sitting in classroom learning anything. So we have two things to finish. One, to finish what we were missing from high school, and the other, to catch up on the college classes.

But the good thing is that we were so hungry. We were working so hard, studying so hard, and all the faculty were so willing to teach. They felt so happy about it. They knew us for years. This was such a class of students. They were so hungry to learn. They really wanted to learn. They were such a positive group of 02:42:00students. So they must-- They had as good, positive a feeling as we did. Because, well, obviously, I mean, we felt so positive, so ecstatic, so happy just because we were able to go to college. Professors were so happy that [they were] again able to teach, to teach someone who really wanted to learn it. And I mentioned yesterday that during the ten years of the Cultural Revolution, the whole system was upside down in that for a few years, where the college was reopened, it was faculty teaching students, but then students managing the university, because students were being recommended by the workers and the peasants. And they were coming to university not only for learning--actually, not many for learning--it was actually to reform the university, to manage the university. Just something, you just never can imagine it. So the teachers got very confused. They didn't know if they should listen to students or if they should teach the students. So it was a very upside down relationship. So all of 02:43:00sudden now the whole thing [got] back to normal. So they must have felt so happy as well, just like we did.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: So a sort of a euphoria in a way, on both sides.

XIONG: Absolutely. Absolutely. So it was very intense, and looking back, it was incredible how much we were able to learn in that four years. Not only [did] we learn what we missed in the high school years-- So we had to start from scratch, really from actually below the scratch. And from what we were missing for the mathematics, for the basic chemistry and basic physics, because they had to teach us back to make sure we all came to the standard before teaching us what [we were] supposed to be learning in the college. So we got an extra load of curriculum to learn. And we did it. We did it. So that's the one thing to describe those four years.

There's one thing, I don't know how specifically I can describe how much I 02:44:00benefitted from it, but subconsciously I do know that I personally benefitted a lot and, different from my classmates, is that I had this habit to learn something outside the classroom, always. The interest is-- My interest was always obviously broader than my classmates' and sometimes that got me into trouble, because I didn't spend enough time on my textbook, on my courses. So I was never doing outstanding or excellent in my class. For all the tests in those four years, my class had about between thirty or thirty-three students, depending on each year. So we had a lot of tests every year, midterm and the final. The scores were open to everybody, so we all knew everybody's score. I hardly scored on the top in those four years. Occasionally I was on the top, and I think we had about twenty or twenty-five courses. I probably did pretty well 02:45:00on a few ones I like, like genetics and math, I don't know what else. Probably in no more than five courses I reached the top five, but for most courses, I was average. And I was ranked-- In the class of thirty-something, I was ranked consistently, like, number ten, eleven, twelve, along those lines.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Now, because of this broad curiosity you sort of brought, you were doing a lot of outside study.

XIONG: That's part of the reason. I was really studying hard as my classmates into the textbook. And I liked it, I studied. But I always tried to find some time and always wanted to spend some time to read something else that I could grab. And at the time, actually, I think I was doing the right thing. No one knows how important that would be. It was not very emphasized back then that you learn broadly. Instead, traditionally the Chinese education emphasized textbook 02:46:00education. So you learn what you are given and you try to memorize your textbook and you are not really encouraged to learn broadly, to think yourself. So I think that's the one consistent deficit of a Chinese traditional education.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right.

XIONG: I think a lot of people realize this now and try to change it. But still, it's difficult to change it, because even from high school, from elementary school, students just learn very narrowly in what they learn. They carry so much homework directly derived from their textbook. They have little time to study outside the textbook. All the way from elementary school to high school to college. It's still the case right now. So they train the students, including a lot of smart students, but in very narrow vision.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right.

XIONG: So that's one thing the system is not doing good. But on the subject, 02:47:00they know really, really well, they know so much, so deep, just not broad enough. So I was a little bit different. Well actually, quite obviously different than a lot of my classmates in that standard. It was almost getting me into trouble, not being outstanding, because at the end of your graduation, what kind of job you get, whether you can go to graduate school, [has] a lot to do with your GPA [grade point average] and the accumulation of four years. And my GPA--if GPA was a critically important factor--was not outstanding from college. Because no matter how much you learn, how much you read outside of the textbook, there's no way it can be tested and it will not be counted. Or [there is] no way to count it, anyway.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: It doesn't fulfill any of the Four Modernizations, right, if you learned about Greek architecture.

XIONG: Right, and so it was only for my own interest. And subconsciously, the more you read, the more you realized that the good scientists, they do emphasize that you need a broad knowledge to make discoveries. But that's something you 02:48:00cannot teach in the classroom.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right.

XIONG: And the fact is that they don't emphasize those. But something just made me feel that is the right thing to do, ultimately.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: So did you have any teachers or mentors that stood out at college, at this time, at Fudan?

XIONG: Not the first couple of years. I don't remember anybody my first couple years, because-- The way they taught in the university is somewhat different from here in that the department of mathematics--that's not my department somehow, because I was supposed to be in the biology department--provides the math education for the whole university. So they have this whole section of faculty that just does this basic mathematics education for the first year college students. So after that, we never got to see them. We never got to see those faculty.

And I do remember then, my math professor was a woman and did pretty well, but 02:49:00was not very-- She was a very good professor teaching and explained everything very clearly, but I don't have the impression that her teaching was very inspiring. It was very formula dependent in the sense that-- And just teaching exactly what the textbook says, and very clear. It was very competent, and she could explain very clearly, but never beyond that. So I was never inspired to anything by that. And the same thing applies to my early chemistry teaching. And we learned a lot of good chemistry, like quantum chemistry and physical chemistry, but I don't remember clearly that anybody was particularly inspiring. Yeah, it was very basic and it was very solid, very solid. Solid is the word to describe it.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right.

XIONG: But I don't remember that any of my early physics, chemistry, and math 02:50:00professors would inspire me to research around the direction they were teaching, which I would assume was what a professor was supposed to do, inspire your students. Get them interested. That didn't happen to me in the first two years.

But in my third year, that happened. I actually remember very clearly, it had a lot of impact on me in my biochemistry class. Okay, so biochemistry was taught by a faculty, and her last name was Shen, [Dr. Ren-Quan Shen]. She and her husband [Dr. Zhu-Jia Sheng] were both educated at Columbia [University] early on.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Wow.

XIONG: Yeah. And they must have had a tough time during the Cultural Revolution as well, because they were so happy to go back to the podium, to teaching students. And at the time [there] was not even a textbook available, so they had to write a textbook, they had to incorporate what they had just read and just try to remember what they had been taught years ago. And so that was as 02:51:00contemporary as possible. And so she walked in class-- Boy, she was great. She was great and I remember a lot of the details she taught us. And it was a big class. We had a class together with the '77 class, they just combined the two together. It was a big class and she had several TA's [teaching assistants], and that just made that even more extraordinary, because a TA was not common back then in China. The TA is not like here. Here the TA job is carried by a graduate student. The TA was carried by actual faculty. Junior faculty. So you just feel, "Wow, this must be pretty serious." Because those junior faculty--and we called them teachers, we called them professor--now they were actually sitting in the same classroom just like us, learning this. So that just made you feel even more serious about this class. And that was just a really heavy class.

I remember for that whole semester, whenever the biochemistry class was, three 02:52:00times a week-- When it started-- And it was a filled, a condensed hour and very dense in the class. We were studying from basic biochemistry all the way to modern molecular genetics and the way she taught was chronologically, and very inspiring in one specific way. That is, she would describe an original experiment, all right, and she would pause. After describing the original experiment, she would ask what interpretation could [there] be for this experiment, and what was the question the experiment was designed to answer. She was very a good teacher. Very organized. The content was the best ever, because that was describing the golden stage of modern molecular biology.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right.

XIONG: And we're talking about from the establishment of the law of genetics, from the early days of T. [Thomas] H. Morgan, and then studying more and more, 02:53:00concentrating on molecular biology between 1940's to 1960's. That was a period during which DNA was discovered as genetic material and then the double helix structure was elucidated. Then a lot of the experimental approach was taken to demonstrate semi-conservative DNA replication and the illustration of genetic code. And that was-- There was a time for the biology, and together with the best teacher I ever had, I just felt fascinated.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: So she taught not only basic concepts and language, the terminology, but also the history.

XIONG: Right.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Which we don't always get even today in a U.S. college.

XIONG: No, you don't. And that was a very, very good way to teach, so that-- It was very clear how the molecular biology was developed, and it had a lot of impact on me. And I remember not long ago, last summer when I was on a beach vacation, I was reading this book, The Eighth Day of Creation [: Makers of the Revolution in Biology by Horace F. Judson]. I thought, "Gosh, where do I 02:54:00remember this?" And it was in 1979, 1980's when I was in college. It was amazing I actually learned those early stories.

And I always try to think about [whether] I should do the same thing to the students here and I never get a chance, because I am not involved in teaching any undergraduates here. I was only teaching graduate classes. So I never get a chance to really give me enough time to teach a class on a basic level and to tell students how molecular biology was developed, because this is very good science. And people argue--I think it's a very reasonable argument--that the only other discipline of science that has a comparable golden age as molecular biology during the fifties or later forties is quantum physics early in this century.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right.

XIONG: Yeah. It was just one major discovery followed by another and they just totally revolutionized how biology was studied. And together with the fact that 02:55:00Dr. Shen was such a terrific faculty, teacher, I think I was not alone in being inspired by that. We were so ecstatic, [we] realized, "Wow! This is biology." That was a time-- And it's such a sharp contrast that we were learning the anatomy of animals, anatomy of the frog. You can't have more a contrast than that, because you're learning all this anatomy of the frog and-- And I think boring is not an exaggeration.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right.

XIONG: I can't tell you those ones. I was amazed that some of my classmates were able to [be] interested in and remember the terms, and I couldn't. I tried hard, I just couldn't. I was joking, I said, "How can you possibly remember all this?" This is just memorization, this is-- There was no thinking anymore, they just memorized that this particular frog is in the same family or genus with this 02:56:00one, and so on and so forth. I say-- It's completely descriptive. I said, "There's no thinking behind this." Only a little bit of evolution, that only takes a couple of lectures, all the rest of the whole semester is descriptive. The shape of the leaf, the height of the tree, and the distribution of this particular species. I mean, that's-- You can't remember all this. And so it totally suppressed your interest in biology if that's what I would be learning in the rest of two years. And so fortunately, we started learning biochemistry and molecular bio-- It was not even called molecular biology, actually.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right.

XIONG: Yeah. And we had a couple of lectures by another faculty [Dr. Jia-Zhen Tan] at the time. He had a big impact on how the department ran the classes, even though he only taught us for a few lectures. He was a student of T. H. Morgan.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Wow.

XIONG: Yeah. And he actually had a class early on at Columbia. So this Dr. Shen 02:57:00actually was his student and after taking his class, he sent both to Columbia. And he's an alumni. So traditionally, Fudan University was the best during those years--I don't know what's now in terms of molecular biology and molecular genetics education--in the whole country. They got so strong.

For those people who actually remember this early argument between the molecular genetics represented by T. H. Morgan of the United States versus Miqui Lin of Soviet Union-- There was a big argument, not in the academic field, but also politically in China. And there's strange things happening here. Because even though the United States of America was considered the enemy of the communist world, socialist world, because China had this big argument with Soviet Union, 02:58:00Mao Zedong actually got involved in this for some unknown reason. I never figured why he would be interested in genetics. He actually met with Dr. Tan three times and tried to learn genetics, and tried to learn the genetics of Morgan and Munder [Gregor Mendel] and then-- So that Soviet genetics was never introduced seriously into China. And that's one of the main reasons why the molecular biology was so behind in the Soviet Union, because they were really hurt by this pseudoscience championed by Lishengke and his associates. That hurt the Soviets a lot. But that was not really brought into China, especially in Fudan, because all the professors, all the senior professors, a lot of them were taught in the United States in the late '40's, so they never taught Soviet 02:59:00genetics to us. So that was another strange thing happening during those days.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Yeah. It was very fortunate, then, just to be at Fudan.

XIONG: Right. And so that was the time-- And he only taught us a few lectures, but his students were the real ones teaching us the real biochemistry or molecular biology as we know now and that was very inspiring. Yeah. It's hard to over-describe those experiences.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right.

XIONG: Every class we had, it was so quiet. People just listened. There was more than a hundred in the class; it was so focused around just listening. And I heard that was the last-- That Dr. Shen only taught three years, then she started teaching graduate school. So we were fortunate, as the first of three classes of the Cultural Revolution, and everybody was so eager to learn and faculty to teach.

03:00:00[END OF TAPE 3, SIDE 1]

VAN BENSCHOTEN: As you're getting near the point where you're going to graduate, how are you conceiving of your future? What were the your goals?

XIONG: It's probably quite clear, and we don't know whether we can reach that goal, but it was quite clear. Because by then, the whole higher education was getting back to normal pretty rapidly and the first was the reopening of the university and having a standard entrance exam, nationally standard. Then the next thing happening was the opening of graduate school. For the first time we learned there's something beyond college education called graduate school. We never heard this one. We [did] not understand what that means. We [did] not understand why would people still need education after graduating from college. So we heard that. And probably my second or third year in college, the goal for 03:01:00me, as well as many of my classmates, was very clear. And the best students go to graduate school. Yeah.

So by the third year, or by the late third year or maybe early fourth year, we all concentrated on preparing the graduate school exam. Again, that was given nationally and together with individual research institutes or research universities. Each of them come with their own set of questions together with--I think it was two or three national exams. One is English--that's national, doesn't matter what major you're going to apply to--and one is politics; I think they still have the politics exam.That's pretty strange. Yeah. And then probably general biology or general physics or general mathematics for the big disciplines, the big areas. And after that, then each research institute had their own set of questions. Yeah. So our goal was very clear. At the latest my 03:02:00fourth year, my senior [year] in college, the goal was to try to get into graduate school, because the alternative would be that if you did not get into graduate school by the time you graduate, you'll be taking a job assigned by the government.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Okay. You eventually take the exam. You clearly pass it. And what was the next step after that?

XIONG: Right, a lot was happening in that year. That was 1982. We were graduating. The last semester was not very busy; I think we were only taking, like, one course and then we were doing the lab research, in the lab. I was doing some kind of fermentation research, because I was majoring within the biology department, I was majoring in microbiology. And then we were taking the graduate class exam. And then, the student or applicant had choices as to which 03:03:00faculty or which professor do you want apply to? So I picked Dr. [San-Chiun] Shen. Not the same Dr. Shen, another one.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Oh, okay.

XIONG: Okay. In the Chinese Academy of Science, and it's not in a university because--[It's] still the same case--research, most research in China was not carried out in universities, unlike here, instead it was carried out in the research institutes, [which] belonged to the Academy of Science.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Oh, that's interesting.

XIONG: Yeah, it's totally separate.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right.

XIONG: They're totally separate and the Chinese Academy of Science, they don't carry any teaching, they only do the research. Now they were starting to do graduate school teaching, but no undergraduate teaching involved at all. Zero. It's completely separate. But here there are some small research institutes around the country, like the one [where] I [went for] my post-doctoral research. But the situation's very different from China, because my estimation was like 75 03:04:00or 85 percent of research was carried, not in the university, but in the research institute. So if you really want to do research, you go to the Academy of Science. Yeah. Only a few major universities like Fudan University or Beijing University have decent basic research programs. I mean real researching programs, beyond undergraduate teaching. Yeah.

So I picked out Dr. Shen, first name San-Chiun. I didn't know him that much, and so we were looking for the categories and how many openings were available to us. And what was already clear to me was I want to study molecular biology or molecular genetics, and so we were just looking for anything along the 03:05:00molecular, and there were very few back then. And a lot of research positions or graduate positions opening were still doing the traditional biology research, and, like, microbiology or animal research or plant physiology, along those lines.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right.

XIONG: Very few people studied real molecular biology. And the reason was pretty simple. It's because after, I think, the late fifties, the country was shut down from contact with the outside world. That was the time molecular biology was really taking off. And so China was just shut off.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: So it had never been established.

XIONG: Not established. No one knew what is molecular biology or what is molecular genetics. They heard the term. They didn't know how to study that.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right.

XIONG: Yeah, and only a few people who came back after receiving their education from the United States or in western Europe in the early fifties knew what it was about, but after that the whole training was disconnected. So that's why 03:06:00there were only a few people doing molecular biology or molecular genetic research. And Dr. San-Chiun Shen is one of them.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right.

XIONG: He got his Ph.D. at Caltech [California Institute of Technology]. I think it was later-- Probably late forties or early fifties.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Wow.

XIONG: And he was involved in the golden stage of molecular biology training. And [it was] also amazing because in the middle thirties to early forties a lot of early genetics was carried out by T. H. Morgan and his associates or his students in Columbia University, then they moved to Caltech and that was supposed to be the origin of molecular biology. A lot of people like Max Delbrück, Linus [C.] Pauling, and a lot of those early people were starting to do research at Caltech. And that's the time Dr. Shen was starting his Ph.D. over 03:07:00there and he had the first direct contact with early molecular biology. So he knows all those ones. And a lot of early friends of his are still, not acting, at least not acting right now, but still at Caltech right now. Including people like E. [Edward] B. Lewis and a number of other people. And so Dr. Shen took a lot of classes from those people. So he knows them. So that's why he's one of those people, few people, in China in the eighties, working on the molecular genetics--

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right

XIONG: Because of his early training. And he had his own story. He came back to China in nineteen--early fifties--and got through a lot of troubles. He was almost prohibited from coming back and he really went back and he loves the country and he really wanted to do some science, and he did great. He really made some key contributions to the early molecular genetics in China, no matter how small an operation was there in the whole country. And he was [one of] a few 03:08:00people actually doing that. That's [what] got me attracted in the first place. I didn't know him in person in the first place. All I knew was he has such a strong background and was one of a few people doing real molecular genetics. That's what I wanted. So that was very clear to me. And I didn't want to do anything else.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right.

XIONG: Not traditional biology as we had been taught. Instead, I wanted to learn some modern molecular genetics. I don't think I was alone in thinking that, but I don't think there were many people thinking along those lines. And so I have to say, I have to attribute some of that kind of thinking or conviction to the outside of classroom reading I had been doing.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right.

XIONG: And so I-- Through those readings I learned that molecular biology is a really hot topic, really represents the contemporary biological science studies. 03:09:00One book I read had a lot of impact on me. In China at that time the English textbook was not readily available. It's pretty limited, and I am trying to remember how did I get my hands on that book. I couldn't remember it. But the book was written by Jim [James D.] Watson.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Oh, yeah.

XIONG: The Molecular Biology of the Gene.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Oh yeah, I know that's a really famous book.

XIONG: Very famous book.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Very small, but very large in its impact.

XIONG: It's not The Double Helix, though; it's the other one. It's a textbook.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Oh, okay.

XIONG: It's a textbook on The Molecular Biology of the Gene. Looking back, it's very simple. And molecular biology in the early seventies and was just taking off, and was [very] primitive if using today's standard. But the way he wrote the book was such an easy way. That was very critical to me, because my English was still limited. I couldn't read the very complicated ones, nor could I read 03:10:00any textbook containing a lot of contemporary ongoing research. But the textbook was written by Dr. Jim Watson for the undergraduate, the first and the second year at Harvard [University], initially, so it combined his lecture notes. So it was not taught for the grad student; it was for the undergrad student. I was in my fourth year, so I was just about able to understand the book. So that was terrific. The way he had written was so clear, so simple. But it was fascinating, it complemented so nicely what I learned from the biochemistry class by Dr. Shen and I said, "Man, this is great! This is fun! This is really fun!" Because I learned chemistry and physics and mathematics, [which] emphasize a lot of logical thinking. But then there's-- Once I was entering my third year for biology training, you're taking a lot of classes, don't need much thinking, just memorize, memorize and memorize, and you feel pretty bored by that. Now 03:11:00[you] come back to realize, "Hey, you can study biology and do all the thinking, logical thinking." And it was somewhat similar to math, that was my favorite. I said, "Wow, this is great." And that really combined with what inspired my biochemistry class and got me convinced into wanting to study molecular biology or molecular genetics.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right.

XIONG: Right, so those two things now I remember pretty clearly.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: So in a sense, then, the Watson book is about problem solving. I mean, you had the information you had to memorize, but there's also now a way of thinking through biological problems.

XIONG: Right. It's probably more important that it is-- And the way he wrote the book, the way that he described molecular biology--

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right.

XIONG: --is posing the question first.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Yeah.

XIONG: And that's different from traditional biology, [where] you go out and just observe and then you think and you summarize, but you don't know what you might be observing. You don't have specific questions before you start doing the research.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right.

03:12:00XIONG: But the molecular biology is different. It has questions, very specific questions. What is the structure of genetic material? What is genetic material, chemically? And what's in those DNA? You want to know, what is the structure of DNA? And why would DNA be capable of carrying genetic information? And how is the DNA replicated? Those are very specific questions and he had these questions, and you'd design an experiment and then you test those questions. That's what today we call hypothesis-driven research. So you have these ideas and then you test them. Unlike anatomy of animals, and then-- Yeah, you can ask, "I want to know, what is the structure of the pig?" And you open it. And you just write down what you observe. You don't need much thinking about this.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right.

XIONG: You can't design a pig to test; you just take whatever you have to test it. And so that's what's really fascinating to a lot people, myself included.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Okay, so what did you begin to work on, then, in Dr. Shen's laboratory?

XIONG: Oh, I didn't do anything at all, actually. A lot of things happened 03:13:00during the summer of 1982, and first we took exams, and so we passed the written exam part. Then we had to go to an interview, to meet Dr. Shen directly, one by one. He asked me questions and I had no idea how well I was doing, but later on he told me I did great, and both my interview score and my written score were far better than the second guy. Yeah, so I did pretty well, so that I have to credit to my college teachers, because it is not something you can study yourself, only a small part of it. And on his own test I did very well. So that was not covered by textbook, and that I actually have to credit somewhat to myself, to the outside readings. He was amazed, actually, that I knew more than I had been taught in the school. And after the interview I was formally accepted by the Chinese Academy of Science and into the graduate program under the supervision of Dr. Shen.

03:14:00And that was a time, that was a year that a lot of things happened in China in terms of opening to the outside. One thing happening was a group of American faculty, American professors or American-Chinese professors-- They were born in China, were Chinese, but they came to the United States and received an education and stayed here, working here, established in the United States. So now they felt the country is back to normal, they wanted to go back to China to help them. And led by Dr. [Chen Ning] Yang at [State University of New York] Stony Brook, he's a physics [professor], and Dr. [Tsung-Dao] Lee at MIT [Massachussetts Institute of Technology]-- They both shared a Nobel Prize for the discovery of this famous Yang-Lee formula in physics, I think it was 1980 they initialized the program. The way they did it is they realized that China, actually the whole country, didn't know how to send student abroad to study.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right.

03:15:00XIONG: The whole process was unknown to anybody. And we didn't even know how to-- The country didn't even know how to apply it. How to contact and how to take an exam and what kind of questions [would be] asked, anything like that, so they decided to help by initiating this program in conjunction, in collaboration with the higher education committee in China. So the way they did this was they were the ones organizing the test, so they were responsible for organizing a program. And the China part, they selected a couple of hundred students in China to participate. So once they passed the exam, those few American professors would send letters out to a number of American universities, tell them, "This is a group of students we selected from China. They have not received any education in English or abroad. They have only been taught in China, but they are smart 03:16:00kids. They're brilliant, and we had a test, just one test. And so this is our recommendation. Would you [be] willing to participate in accepting this student?" That helped a lot, because otherwise the American graduate school would not be able to determine how good those students were.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right.

XIONG: There's no way they can test, because no one met any student in China and all the courses, the whole curriculum is different from here. They can't determine it. But with those famous faculty behind this program, a lot of programs say, "Well, yeah, we know the people giving the test, we are going to take part in." Dr. Ray Wu at Cornell University at Ithaca, he was the one [who] organized the biology program. And so the program was like this, he invited a couple of American faculty--one from the University of Chicago and another one from, I think, MIT. I forgot his name--and organized a committee and came up 03:17:00with a test, questions in English. They send this test--pretty extensive, I think it took a whole two days to finish up--to China. The Chinese Education Committee would organize fifty top universities and together with the Chinese Academy of Science, select-- I forgot how many, I think it was two to three hundred graduate students who had just been accepted into the graduate school in various universities or in the Chinese Academy of Science, and recommended by each individual university and Academy of Science to participate in this written test. So those students were selected after they already had passed the national exam for the graduate school; they were doing the best in their individual university undergraduate program. So about two hundred across the country. So 03:18:00about seventy or eighty were selected after the written exam. And then the three U.S. faculty, led by Dr. Ray Wu, would fly to China and interview us one by one.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Very elaborate.

XIONG: Yeah. And the program is called CUSBEA.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Oh, yeah. I've heard of that.

XIONG: Yeah, it stands for China and the United States [Biochemistry Examination and Application] program. I think that's what it stands for. Right. And so I was selected by Dr. Shen and the Chinese Academy of Science to participate in the exam. So the exam was taken just like a month later after my previous exam that got me into the Chinese Academy of Science, so I passed this exam as well. And then I had an interview with the people from the United States, I think that was in early September. It's very fast paced. As soon as we finished the exam, the exam was graded right away, and then those people just flew into China and just interviewed us. I think by the middle of September everything was determined 03:19:00already. So of those seventy or eighty applicants being interviewed, fifty were selected.

And [we were] all sent to Guangzhou for one year of English training. And during that English training we started applying for individual graduate programs in the United States. So that's how we came to the United States.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Oh, I see, okay. So it's sort of a crash program, the Guangzhou. I mean, it was sort of a crash program in English, set you up for the graduate studies that you would do and pursue in the United States.

XIONG: Right, it was a complete English and cultural training. There was no science involved.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right.

XIONG: There was no biology involved. It was very important for us, if not necessary, because we know nothing about the United States in 1982. We never heard anything about this, and [our] English was very poor. We just barely understood those questions in those tests, but in terms of daily living, we didn't know anything about it. And so we-- That helped us a lot. And besides, we needed some time to prepare those applications, and now we were starting to get 03:20:00into the regular applications program just like every other graduate student application in the United States. Except we were not taking any GRE [Graduate Record Exam] or TOEFL [Test of English as a Foreign Language] exam. The graduate program in the United States had to take the word and recommendation by, or written by the group of three or four American faculty [who] went to China to interview us and based on the test questions we had and the score we had. We had no idea how they compared us with our classmates in the United States in the same class. You know, we did not take the GRE exam. But we heard we did pretty well. And they were pretty impressed from Yang. So the schools participating in the exam are all very good schools.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right.

XIONG: In that program.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Now, when you're at this center, I mean, are you just studying English?

XIONG: Yeah.

03:21:00VAN BENSCHOTEN: Or are you also pursuing your studies under Shen?

XIONG: Once we passed the exam, I only spent a few weeks with Dr. Shen. But then we were sent to the Guangzhou English training.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right.

XIONG: You know, it's totally separate from the Chinese Academy of Science. So everyone in the center, called GELC--I think it stands for Guangzhou English Learning Center. That's what it stands for.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right.

XIONG: GELC--that's what's we still call it--and everybody would study English. And everyone was disconnected, in terms of education, from their graduate adviser. Although everybody was already accepted by an individual university or academy of science, but once you got to the center, you were not a part of it. Yeah, you did have a formal relationship, but you never saw each other. At GELC, 03:22:00that was a good time, that was good a time, and the only bad thing is that I broke up with my girlfriend.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Oh, sorry to hear that. [mutual laughter]

XIONG: Other than that, it was a great time. And this four years of hard studies was over, and then we know we're going--about to go to the United States. We're learning English, it was not very hard and we had a lot of fun. And we had a group of teachers from UCLA [University of California at Los Angeles] and for the first time we learned there is something called a party. [mutual laughter] We never had a party before and we didn't know what the party was for.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right.

XIONG: We probably read somewhere in English articles about parties. The party means that you go to the apartment of those teachers and they bring some food, and we were just joking and drinking and talking. [mutual laughter]

VAN BENSCHOTEN: So, you eventually, though, get your M.S., right?

XIONG: Yeah.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: From Dr. Shen, from the Chinese Academy.

03:23:00XIONG: I think-- I don't think formally I did.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: No?

XIONG: No, I did not. To get your master's degree, you have to complete three years of classes. I did not. So what happened was I started applying, and then I got a detour of a year. We spend nine months at the Guangzhou English Center, and start applying, and by the spring you receive admission in the fall and go to school. The admission I got from the University of Rochester was not for the fall semester, it was for the next spring semester. I was only one of two people who just stayed behind, whereas all my classmates went out. Instead of going to spring semester, I decided, "Why don't I just stay and [go] to the next year?" So even though I was supposed to come to the United States in-- If on schedule, it was supposed to be in 1983 and then instead I couldn't [go until] 1984. So I actually spent one year with Dr. Shen, from 1983 to 1984.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Oh, I see.

XIONG: Different from other people, because most other classmates, they didn't 03:24:00have any real education with their professors as I did. And that one year made a big difference on me in two aspects. One, I got to know Dr. Shen a lot, and he had a lot of impact on me. Not just he taught me the science part, but also taught me a lot about early molecular biology. And he is a pure scientist up to these days. And I actually talked to him yesterday morning--

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Really?

XIONG: Yeah, I told him I'll be going to China next week and I will stop by to visit him. And he's a classical, traditional scientist by any standard, any sense. He doesn't like doing any administrating job. He doesn't want to be rich; he does want to become famous, though. He just wants to do the research. He just wants to do experiments. He's eighty-some years old right now, eighty-two or eighty-three--

VAN BENSCHOTEN: That's amazing.

03:25:00XIONG: He still wants to do experiments. He's still running the lab. I told him, "Dr. Shen, look, you are doing too much. Just retire, just have some good life and write some books, don't go to the lab," because his eyesight is very, very, very bad. I said, "It's not good for you." He still wants to go to lab, still reading. I don't know that I will be able to do just like him. So he is a classical, traditional scientist in any standard.

But on top of that, he had one big impact on me, and I don't know [if] I can meet his expectation. He had very high expectations of me. I don't know how he [got] started, but I heard, not from him directly, but from other people, that he had very high expectations of me very early on. He must have his reasons. And [he] taught me not just to become a scientist, but to try to become a great scientist.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right.

XIONG: And then he really taught me that scientists are not all the same. A good 03:26:00scientist is different from a great scientist. So he was called a big scientist and was asking big questions and working hard and focusing and sticking to it. So that had a long impact, even nowadays.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: So a very important mentor.

XIONG: [He was] a very big, very important mentor to me. And he didn't [teach] me a lot specifically [about] how to do the experiment by hand--that was by someone else--but this kind of conversation, plus my huge respect to him, in those days had a very big impact. My own ambitions just make me wonder nowadays whether actually I can possibly meet his expectations. No matter how well I'm doing, he says, "You're doing great." And I just don't feel that I can meet his expectations. His standards are very high. It's very high. Even though his whole career was severely impaired by the political movement in China--because he 03:27:00moved to China and he was able do serious research in the early 1950's--but then once this political movement started, he's known-- He's no exception, just like my father, and on and off and on and off. He was not able to do much research. So during the whole ten years of the Cultural Revolution he was at a complete stop. He was begging people to let him back to do the experiment.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: That's amazing.

XIONG: And another person [who] had an impact on me, my early research life, was Dr. Ow, David Ow. He graduated from Harvard. And he's an American-born Chinese who went to Harvard after he graduated from UC [University of California] Berkeley, he went to Harvard for his graduate studies and worked on nitrogen fixation. Because of his Chinese origin, he always wanted to go to China and do some collaborative research and to help China, and he came into contact with Dr. Shen because they work in the same field of research. There's a nitrogen 03:28:00fixation gene regulation part. And he arranged go to China and spend a year in China doing research. It's very much independent, even though it's almost like postdoc research, technically speaking. But having someone just graduate from Harvard at the time and go to China to do research--bench research--was never heard of at the time. And not only he brought a lot of new knowledge, but he was actually on the bench doing experiments himself. Not like Dr. Shen. And he needed somebody to assist him, to help him, to translate for him, and I was the one to do that job, because that was 1983, and I was told that I would not be able to go to the United States in 1983 because my admission was in the spring semester, not regular fall semester. So I went back to Shanghai and Dr. Shen said, "Well, that's good timing. We have a visiting scholar [who] comes from Harvard, and why don't you work with him; he actually needs somebody like that. 03:29:00So you can learn a lot. You can help him." So I worked with him for-- Not a whole year, I think it was eight or nine months. So that's my first real experimental experience on the bench with him.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Wow. So he gave you the technical part.

XIONG: Technical part. And he was the one [who] taught me to use a pipette, taught me the very first bench experiment, my very first molecular biology experiment, yeah.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: It's amazing how all these different influences are coming together.

XIONG: Yeah, and that was very fortunate, and I didn't realize how fortunate I was. And I came to the United States and I thought I was behind my classmates by a whole year.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right.

XIONG: And then, once we started the class on the bench, they were so shocked that I can just go to it and do the experiment. They said, "How did you learn all this? We never even heard this in China." Then I realized I was taught probably better than I would have been, because one on one, for nine months by 03:30:00an outstanding graduate from Harvard, that was something not everybody could have. After 1984, I came to the United States, and Dr. Ow, David, went back and took a faculty job at UC Berkeley, and that's where he remains right now, at The Plant Gene Expression Center and a faculty member of UC Berkeley.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: You end up at the University of Rochester. How did you end up there?

XIONG: It's not by my choice. In this CUSBEA program, you're just given five applications. You apply to these five schools here, not by choice. We don't know anything. Only thing we know is Harvard, MIT, that's about it. We don't know what other universities are there in the United States. So I just applied to five schools and I was assigned. Rochester was one of them. I got in there. And I also got into Tennessee [University] and I never heard of Tennessee.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Not a popular venue for Chinese tourism.

XIONG: Right. And I asked around, "Where's Tennessee?" So Dr. Shen said, "I think Rochester can give you a better education. You should go to Rochester," so I turned down Tennessee and came to Rochester.

03:31:00VAN BENSCHOTEN: Did you take down a map and say, "Okay, where's Rochester?"

XIONG: No idea. Well, I had absolutely no clue. All I knew was Dr. Shen told me Rochester is cold. [mutual laughter]

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Well, that's true, very cold.

XIONG: He said, "Well, it's cold." I said, "Okay." [mutual laughter]

VAN BENSCHOTEN: All right, so what was your first impression of coming into the United States?

XIONG: Bloody.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: What was that?

XIONG: Bloody.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Really?

XIONG: Yeah. You know how I got impression? Because on the flight here from China we had an in-flight movie. You know what was the movie? First Blood. [mutual laughter] You can't be more distorted by that, because that was the first real American movie I watched. Before that it was something nice, like The Sound of Music. You know that's not real life, right?

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Very old, too.

XIONG: Very old. And that's almost like fiction, like movies. I think First 03:32:00Blood was the first American movie I watched. Gosh, that was--

VAN BENSCHOTEN: "That's where I'm going!"

XIONG: You don't know what to expect. And so anything you can just-- "Okay, that may be it." But you don't have a hundred percent guarantee that that will be what it is. Just take whatever you're exposed to. And so I arrived in New York and spent three days over there. My classmate [Yi-Hao Yu] let me stay in his apartment. That's my college classmate [who] participated in the same CUSBEA program [and came] a year ahead of me. And so I learned from them, through contact, that the graduate student life in the United States is very, very tense and very hard.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right.

XIONG: Because you have to combine the language problem, and you have to do TA-ing, you have to take classes, and you have to do your own research. It's very tough, yeah. And so that was not too surprising that that will be the way it is. But the material life, the real life was a shock. The real life was a shock.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right, in what way?

03:33:00XIONG: [The first] sight you could see before we landed at the [John F.] Kennedy [International] Airport-- [I] just couldn't believe there were so many cars. Never could understand [why] there's a whole lot of light. So one side is white, the other side is red. Then someone explained to me that white is the cars driving this way, the red is the tail lights driving that way. That was funny for us. The second thing was that we stayed in a room with air conditioning. We knew [there] was air conditioning, but that's the first time I actually--

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Felt it, experienced it.

XIONG: Felt it. Yeah. The first thing I remember is we went shopping with my classmate. He said, "Okay. We've got to go shopping; my refrigerator is empty." We went to shop in the supermarket. We heard the term supermarket, but we didn't exactly know what it meant. Then I realized, "Oh, gosh." The food was so abundant, so plentiful.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: A wonder of the modern world, seriously.

XIONG: Yes! You can just pick anything you want. So that was a shock. There was a lot of shock. I didn't have-- I had a lot of shock impressions my first three 03:34:00days in New York, but I cannot say it's really a good one.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Yeah.

XIONG: It was so crowded and it was not very clean. It's very rich and the building was so tall and so many cars. And so-- But it was not very nice, somehow. And I don't know, it's because I started changing my real knowledge and I tried to memorize whether I had any good impression of New York City in that first three days [when I] arrived in the United States. And then after that, I finally waited to fly and go to Rochester. So that was the beginning of my new life. I spent the next five years in Rochester.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Okay, before you get there, though, how about food, American food? Was that a difficult transition to go from what you were familiar with?

XIONG: There was no need for transition, because [it was] so abundant, just great food. We just could not imagine the food was so abundant, so plentiful. 03:35:00That was 1984, the country was trying to get back to normal and that's already a lot better than the middle seventies or early eighties, but still, there was no comparison. We hadn't even felt it on a high tech part like air conditioning, automobile, television, electronic, those kind of stuff. Just by looking at the food you could realize. The meat, eggs, vegetables and the fruit was unlimited, so that was a shock.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: How about your impression of American people? Because on the one hand you're surrounded by them, especially when you're in New York City, but being surrounded by them and getting to know them are two different things.

XIONG: I didn't get to know any real American people in New York City. I just saw them and crossed them. They seemed to be polite, but I got the impression they were much more polite when I got into Rochester, because on the New York 03:36:00street it's different things. And we were warned a lot that New York City is not safe. So you're subconsciously trying to be safe and it's a little bit scary or nervous. But nothing happened to us.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right.

XIONG: But it just-- We'd been told by the people from UCLA that taught us English that the city's not safe. You should not carry any big dollar bills with you, not let your wallet be seen, and always watch around, and don't walk around in the dark by yourself and don't go to subways without anyone else, things like that.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right.

XIONG: You get the feeling there's crime everywhere. And so that prohibits you from really enjoying it.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right.

XIONG: We did look around, but you got this first impression-- Not impression, but you got this subconsciously that something could happen to you next minute. Yeah, it was pretty nervous.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: That does cramp your enjoyment, I guess.

XIONG: It's very nervous, that's all. But after a few days, then we started adjusting. And then I only stayed for three days.

03:37:00Going to Rochester is a whole new world. It's more of a countryside setting. So fresh, so nice. It's September. And that's the best time of the year. Yeah.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: When do you meet Thomas [H.] Eickbush?

XIONG: Probably my second semester. That was late '84.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right.

XIONG: Rochester was so fresh. It was so new and I learned so many things, then realized that people are so nice, so polite. And we-- There weren't many Chinese students at Rochester at the time. We were the so-called early classes of Chinese students that came to the United States to study. I think I was [in one of] the first classes. And the first class was only one or two people. One was Deng Xiaoping's son [Zhi-Fang Deng]; [he] was my classmate.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Oh, really?

XIONG: He was studying physics. We lived in the same apartment. Well, not the same apartment, but in the same complex. But in his class, only two people came 03:38:00in the whole year. Only two Chinese people. So I don't know how they lived, and so by the second year there were three. And we were the third one. And I think we had four or five. So altogether we probably had a dozen Chinese students--

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right.

XIONG: --in the whole greater Rochester area, that's about it. If we wanted to have a group activity and everybody was joining in, all we needed was three cars. The whole Chinese student society could go in three cars. They were not very good cars. [mutual laughter] And we have so many good memories in the early days, and I remember one time we said-- That was after first term exam. I don't know who called this one. We went to a party in a state park called the Letchworth. And so we all got together in the parking lot outside the dorm, only 03:39:00three cars, and we all fit in, we go there. And I was riding in a car with my classmates; in front of us was the car, the big car, driven by Deng's son. The car was so poor, it stopped in the middle of the highway.

I said, "What happened?"

He said, "My car ran out of water." All five people in the car couldn't go. The car was so hot. We were asking the driver in our car if she would drive faster. She said, "I can't drive fast."

I said, "Why not? You just keep pumping more gas."

She said, "I can't, because, in this car, the maximum speed I can drive is fifty-five miles per hour. Beyond that speed the car will shake!" And she bought the car for $250. That tells how good a car we had. [mutual laughter]

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right.

XIONG: So one third of the people couldn't go to party because Deng's car died 03:40:00in the middle of the highway. That's the best time of the year, the highway was such a clean highway, the leaves were turning colorful, it was just so enjoyable.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Yeah. It is beautiful in upstate New York in the fall.

XIONG: Yeah. Apart from that, I think that's where I met my wife [Qing Yang]. Yeah, so everything came together. And life was-- I felt life was great. It's really great.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: So, how did you meet her? Was she in a class that you were taking?

XIONG: Yep. And she's also a CUSBEA student, but in a different class. She was in the third class with CUSBEA, but she came to the United States on schedule and I came in delayed for one year. So I guess that brought us together. Coming to Rochester, I think it's two weeks apart. That was great.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Well, great. So tell us a little about the work that you were doing there, the research, when you get to Rochester.

XIONG: The graduate programs at Rochester is very much like many other graduate 03:41:00program across the country. That first year you do a lot of rotations. So I had to do three rotations. The second one was with Tom Eickbush. My first one, I didn't get anything done. I did it with Dr. Martin Gorovsky, my chairman of the department. For two reasons: a) he didn't talk much with me, he was very busy at administration jobs; and b) I couldn't even find where the sodium chloride was on the shelf.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right.

XIONG: Everything was in English and I couldn't find it.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Yeah.

XIONG: And of course, on top of that I met my wife. We fell in love very hard. So I could hardly concentrate. Right, so my first rotation, I didn't get anything done. I was busy taking care of my classes. And after my first encounter with my adviser for the graduate studies-- We had a specific adviser. The department assigned an adviser for [each] individual grad student.So I met with him and he asked me--He's supposed to be supervising me as to what classes 03:42:00I should take. So he asked me what classes I had been taking in China and he recommended, he said, "You're taking this biochemistry and enzymology."

And I said, "No."

And after these days, every time when he introduced me he said, "This the guy, when I met [him] the first time, he [knew] what he wanted. And then he [gave] me the impression what he wanted." The reason I didn't like that was because I don't like to learn this metabolism of biochemistry. To me that's not a whole lot different from the anatomy of a frog. It's just memorization. It's passive. I learned that once already. I just didn't want to memorize one more time.

I said, "Why don't I take some other classes on gene expression and that stuff?" And somehow, I just behaved so bluntly, so determined. And he listened to me. He's a very tough person. He doesn't usually do that. He told me later, he said the way I said it, there was no negotiating, no discussion.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: He's done.

XIONG: "Done! I'm not taking it!"

03:43:00He said, "Okay," and he just let me take the advanced gene expression class. I didn't realize how tough it was. It was very, very tough, and so I had to lock myself in the library from morning until night, and both Saturday and Sunday. The class, I just barely passed. I think I got a B+, that's about it.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: How was your English now? I mean, was that still a problem, trying to communicate with fellow humans.

XIONG: In the daily conversation it was not so bad. But we never trained in China to study by reading original research articles and every education was textbook based.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right.

XIONG: Right. So that's the first time we had to go to the library, find a journal and--which is another thing new to me--copy the paper and read it. Lots of them, since we didn't understand. The class was really intense.

I am really modeling the same way I learned to the class I'm teaching right now, because that was the first time-- It's an entering graduate molecular biology 03:44:00class. It's not taught according to a textbook. Instead it's topic by topic. One topic like oncogene, two lectures; it comes with probably twenty articles. The professor just tells you something basic and you go back and read it yourself.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right.

XIONG: So I still want to do that, because it's very tough. But if you want to learn it, that's how you learn it. And you have to make the transition from textbook reading into reading research articles or the original articles. So that was one of the best classes I took, but it was very tough. Fortunately, it didn't kill me, though. [mutual laughter]

VAN BENSCHOTEN: What doesn't kill you only makes you stronger, right?

XIONG: Right, and, well, I could feel it, I could. But I had no idea what to expect. I was just naively thinking I could do anything. [mutual laughter]

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Yeah.

XIONG: Right. Combine all these, and I didn't get anything done in my first rotation.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Okay, but your second rotation was Thomas Eickbush.

XIONG: My second rotation was Tom Eickbush. And then and ever since, things started back to normal. So my wife and I start calming down somewhat.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right. Enough said. [mutual laughter]

03:45:00XIONG: And I started learning to do some basic experiments, and that tough class was over. So I could focus, do some experiments. And the experiment I was involved [in] in my second rotation involved all the DNA sequencing. And this was very new and very difficult. But that was the one technique I happened to be already doing in Shanghai with Dr. Ow for several months. So that made my life much easier.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: It was all familiar.

XIONG: I was able to get a lot done. And actually I published a first-author paper out of my second rotation, and [that's] something not many people can do. So that got Tom--Tom Eickbush ended up my thesis adviser--extremely impressed. I heard--he [didn't tell] me this; he told other people--he said, "This kid, this guy came in rotation. He did something the regular students take two years to finish, the project. I don't know how he did it." That started the joke in the 03:46:00department, that and I was a magician with my two hands, using pipettes in two hands. And it's getting to be a standard joke. The fact that he'd tell the students, "Go look at Yue. He had pipettes with two hands." And a couple students actually came to look at me, how I would do the experiment. They thought that might be possible.

[END OF TAPE 3, SIDE 2]

VAN BENSCHOTEN: You were talking about your first experiments in Dr. [Thomas H.] Eickbush's lab and you were saying that an article came out of that, a very important article, right?

XIONG: It was just one small article. I don't know, I don't think it's the best article. It's about the molecular evolution of a multi-gene family called chorion. It's a protein for making eggshells. It's a multi-gene family, [which] 03:47:00means that there are more than a dozen genes closely related, but they are coordinately regulated. The research I was involved in through my rotations was determining the sequence of individual genes by DNA sequencing. That was before automatic DNA sequencing was invented, and we had to do the sequencing manually. That was one thing I did pretty well. And once [we] determine DNA sequence, then by comparing DNA sequencing, we can determine how that whole family of genes were co-evolved during evolution, compare the sequence and variations. And so I made a pretty good paper on this, on the topic of gene conversion. And I don't think I understood very well what the project was in terms of its interpretations, even though I knew pretty well what I was supposed to do on the bench. Just make all those sub-clones and make DNA prep, make a single strand 03:48:00DNA and conduct DNA sequencing. So that part was no problem. I could carry it out all by myself. So at the end, when I finished the project, Tom was pretty surprised at how much I was actually [able to] complete. He said one thing, that this guy could in one shot of rotation finish [what] someone [else] would take a semester to finish. So that was a very productive rotation.

The short part is, just like every junior student in the beginning of first year grad students beginning, I don't think I understood very well. I didn't think a whole lot; it's more of just a student not thinking about much. So luckily, working with somebody, with Tom, made a whole lot of difference, not only just with that project, but also in the next four years, [because] Tom had a relatively small lab--only five or six of us--including one technician, himself, 03:49:00and one undergraduate assistant, and then three graduate students; there was no postdoc. So what that means is I could have a lot of his time. Or among three of us grad students, whoever had more results got more time from him.

And that's the one thing I keep on telling the students nowadays is to try to get as much time as possible to directly contact, discuss, and try to use your faculty and professors. That's the most beneficial thing a student can do. They know a whole lot more and they care a whole lot more than anyone else about your research. And to stick your hand on your own desk, on the bench, is absolutely not the right way to do it. You have to find a way to interact with your professors as much as possible to get the most out of it.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right.

XIONG: That's the one thing Tom did a lot, and I think I wrote that in my introduction to my thesis. Someone like Tom really made a difference to me.

03:50:00My English was not that good at the time in terms of communicating and I was uncertain about my scientific ability, and I needed some encouragement. If I encountered a faculty who was very quiet, not very interactive, I could misinterpret as I was not doing well. So that could be a misinterpretation. And with Tom, it was not like that. He's very outgoing and very interactive and we had lot of conversations in the daytime and sometimes the evening. I remember in the early days, he still came back to lab in the evening to write something. We would talk a lot. The one thing I still remember early on is for some reason he doesn't like to wear his shoes in the lab. [mutual laughter] He would [take] his shoes off and wear his socks walking between the lab and the office. [mutual laughter] I don't know if he still does or not, but that's what I-- One thing I do remember. And we had a board outside the lab, and we used it a lot when we 03:51:00discussed. So that's one of the first things when I set up my own lab is have a board outside, so I can-- Like this one outside the lab or anywhere in the lab--outside the lab in the hallway, my office--so that whenever I talk with people, I have something I can draw [on]. That's the place we had a lot of conversations. It was very encouraging to me. Extremely beneficial to me as well.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right. And how did you get along with other people in the lab? It's a fairly small lab.

XIONG: Very small lab, but we got along very well. And I think probably Tom played a major role in having a lab like that. For example, and I still hear [it's] his tradition, that every summer he would have a summer party in his backyard--pretty big backyard--where we would play volleyball or badminton or even softball.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right.

XIONG: Every summer and every Christmas. We had at least two parties or 03:52:00gatherings in his house every year. We also had a chance to go out together for meetings, only-- If we don't include undergraduate helper, we only had, like, five of us. One minivan is enough to carry all of us to go to a meeting together. That was fun. And we went to meetings locally, as well as one time we drove all the way to Boston--the whole lab in one van--for a meeting, that really brought a closeness around a few of us. And [there were] only three of us, plus a technician. Plus Tom, five of us, and we interacted very closely.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right. Now, is your soon-to-be wife [Qing Yang] in another lab at this time?

XIONG: Right. And we're in the same class, in the same department, and we're rotating through, and she entered a different lab for her research project. And that's Dr. Bob [Robert] Angerer. And he was the one [who] actually served as my 03:53:00first year adviser. He was the one telling people that I knew exactly what I was doing, even though I didn't. And so my wife and I spent the next five years, actually, in the same building together and eating out sometimes. And that was a great time. That was one of the most productive times of my career, as well as my personal life. We were very simple, single minded, that's the way to characterize [us].

And people always ask nowadays how come the early class of CUSBEA [China United States Biochemistry Examination and Application] students ended up so successful in terms of their career development. Each class would end up with like fifty of us coming to the United States, entering different grad programs around the 03:54:00country, and-- I forgot what's the last number, but at least more than half of us have continued doing basic research and conducted very successful or very productive graduate studies as well as postdoc researches and have moved on to take independent assistant professorships in various good, decent, or prestigious universities around the country. So the ratio is extremely high, and is probably higher than any other classes we have heard of. So people are always wondering why we do so well. And my simple answer is, when we first came here, we didn't know a whole lot, what else can be, and we were very narrow-minded or very focused. I don't know how to say it.

VAN BENSCHOTEN: Right, yeah.

XIONG: And all we wanted was to work hard and study hard and publish good papers and move on to good research and, as a postdoc, then to go back to China to serve the country. We never thought there was an alternative other than doing the lab research. And that's why in the first five years, my wife and I had such 03:55:00a simple and enjoyable life. There's nothing else; it's just doing the research and, on the weekend, have a later sleep, get up, and go to lab again.