Journey of a Thousand Miles

Ruey J. Yu, Kate Jaimet

• Editorial: University of Ottawa Press
• Año: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780776625690
• Categoría: Scienze sociali
• Categoría: Biografie nell'ambito delle scienze sociali

Born into poverty in Japanese-occupied Taiwan, Ruey Yu overcame near-starvation during the Second World War. Destiny, however, had other plans for him: he was to become an award-winning biochemist, then the co-founder of what would soon become the multi-million-dollar skin care company NeoStrata.
After living through the Second World War and the post-war military dictatorship of General Chiang Kai-Shek, Dr. Yu won a coveted post-graduate scholarship to study chemistry at the University of Ottawa. He subsequently took up a research position at the renowned Skin and Cancer Hospital (Temple University) in Philadelphia, where he collaborated with pre-eminent dermatologist Dr. Eugene Van Scott to develop treatments for serious skin diseases.
In 1972, Dr. Yu and Dr. Van Scott discovered that fruit acids, known as AHAs, could effectively treat the disfiguring skin disease ichthyosis, changing the lives of thousands of people who suffered from this debilitating illness. Their further research into the biochemical properties of AHAs led to the discovery of the anti-wrinkle and anti-aging effects of these natural substances—a discovery that was licensed by skin care companies around the world, sparking the multibillion-dollar cosmeceutical industry.

1

Coal Dust and Daydreams

MY MEMORIES of early childhood are shrouded in a fog of coal smoke and the din of freight trains clanging through the railway station behind our home. Amid those hazy recollections, one scene stands out forever in my mind—a scene that, even today, hits me with the raw force of childhood emotion.

I was a very young boy, perhaps three or four years old. I was playing in the dirt yard outside our front door, while my mother occupied herself inside. My father, as usual, had gone to his job cleaning the grime and coal dust from the railway station.

Like the other families of the railway labourers, we lived in a single-room unit in long, low row of wooden barracks behind the station. Our unit housed three adults—my mother, father, and grandmother—along with three children—me, my newborn brother Juiming, and my half-sister Chi-Ying.

Chi-Ying was a chubby little girl of seven or eight, who often took care of me while my mother was busy cooking, cleaning, washing, and sewing. But that day, something was happening to Chi-Ying. Something terribly wrong.

Neighbourhood women gathered around our doorstep, sobbing. The door opened and Chi-Ying and my grandmother came out. The neighbours pressed around them, calling “farewell.” Even my mother, the pillar of strength at the core of our family, broke down in tears. I was bewildered. But no one took time to explain things to a little boy.

The next thing I knew, Chi-Ying was gone. A cloud of smoke and the whistle of a railway train marked the last traces of her departure.

“Where is Chi-Ying going?” I asked my mother. “When will she be back?”

But Chi-Ying wasn’t coming back. My parents had sold her as a domestic servant to a rich family in Taipei. I wouldn’t see my half-sister again for another twenty years.

Chi-Ying’s departure followed the common pattern for girls of poor families on our island. Though I didn’t know it at the time, I had an older half-sister who had been sold when I, the first son, was born. My father’s salary barely sufficed to feed and clothe his wife and two sons. Daughters were a luxury, an extra mouth to feed. No one questioned Chi-Ying’s fate. A poor family had to make sacrifices to survive.

That was life in Taiwan in the 1930s.

*

I was born on March 23, 1932, at a time when Taiwan lay under Japanese occupation, and much of the world lay in the thrall of the Great Depression. Once part of the Chinese empire, the island of Taiwan had been ceded to Japan in 1895, in the peace treaty following the Sino-Japanese War. The majority of the population was descended from Chinese ancestry, and our Japanese rulers taught us to believe that we belonged to an inferior race. While Japanese men held almost every position of power in government and commerce, most Taiwanese remained small farmers and labourers. To the Japanese, the native Taiwanese were little more than slaves; the Japanese, with their heavenly Emperor Hirohito, represented the pinnacle of civilization.

My father, Ah-Shain Wei, grew up in the farming village of Fangliao, a two-hour walk inland and upland from our coastal city. He had come to Hsinchu as a young man, hoping to find fortune and excitement in the big city. He’d begun as a noodle vendor on the city’s bustling streets, but Ah-Shain was kind-hearted to a fault and had no head for business. He let customers haggle down his prices until the few pennies he earned in sales proved insufficient to cover his own expenses. Broke and uneducated, he had finally taken a menial job as a janitor in the Hsinchu railway station.

My mother, Shian-May Liu, was wedded to my father in a marriage arranged by a professional matchmaker, a common custom in Taiwan at the time. She too had seen her early hopes in life disappointed. Her first husband, a mailman by the name of Yu, had divorced her in favour of a younger mistress. After the divorce, my mother was left to fend for herself with her two young daughters and her mother-in-law—Yu’s mother, Lin Kuei—who was no longer welcome in her son’s house after his marriage to his new young wife.

Father, mother, grandmother, and two elder half-sisters—this was the family I was born into in the barracks behind the railway station. In the normal course of events, my name should have been Ruey Wei, after my father, Ah-Shain Wei. But a condition had come attached to Ah-Shain’s marriage to Shian-May, that their first-born son should be named “Yu” after Shian-May’s first husband, who had no sons of his own. In deference to my grandmother—who didn’t want to see her son’s name die out, despite his callous treatment of her—my father accepted the condition. So, though I never laid eyes on the faithless mailman who had divorced my mother, I was designated to carry his name. Ruey Yu I became.

My mother ruled the household with a keen mind, a strong will, and a bamboo rod to keep disobedient little boys in line. Survival was a struggle, and she was determined to win that struggle through resourcefulness, discipline, and hard work.

Our room in the barracks served as kitchen, dining room, and bedroom all in one. It had a dirt floor that flooded with several feet of water when the monsoon rains pelted the island every year from September to November. In the winter, cold winds from Siberia shivered through the paneless windows. Our entire family slept together in a single large bed, and the feeling of being dry and warm in bed after a day of rain is one of the few physical comforts I remember from my childhood.

Our room in the barracks served as kitchen, dining room, and bedroom all in one. In the winter, cold winds from Siberia shivered through the paneless windows.

My mother cooked on a small metal stove, stoked with a fire of charcoal or wood. We ate rice and vegetables, and once a month we could afford a small portion of chicken or pork—never enough to satisfy the hunger of a growing boy. We usually ran out of rice by the last week of every month, and as I lay in our communal bed at night, I would overhear my parents discussing which neighbour they might ask to lend us rice until my father’s next payday.

We had no indoor plumbing. Instead, we shared an outhouse with several other families and drew our drinking water from a communal tap a few blocks away. Tiny worms would settle to the bottom of the bucket as I carried the water home to my mother. We would scoop our water from the top and boil it before drinking—even then, it often caused bouts of stomach ache and diarrhea.

From our barracks, I could see the much finer houses of the Japanese railway officers. These had separate bedrooms, indoor plumbing, and roofs that didn’t leak in the rain. As a boy, I daydreamed that one day I would live in such a house; one day, I would have shoes on my feet and eat my fill at dinner every night.

The railway dominated my childhood, as it dominated the city of Hsinchu. My father toiled there every day, mopping the floors, cleaning the toilets, emptying the garbage bins, and serving tea to the Japanese office clerks. Afflicted with asthma, he wheezed and coughed in the air polluted by coal-burning engines. The passengers who bustled through didn’t see our poor living quarters behind the station, where barefoot children played in the dirt, mothers hung out their family’s one spare set of clothes on the laundry lines, and coal smoke thickened the air, so that our handkerchiefs came away black when we blew our noses. Instead, passengers saw only the prosperous commercial façade of the railway: the busy passenger carriages clickety-clacking along the tracks, and the powerful black freight engines towing their boxcars full of coal, steel, rice, and sugar—products sent from Taiwan to fuel Japanese industrial development and expansion. On the siding, rows of parallel tracks eighteen abreast held the freight cars waiting to be filled, emptied, or transferred to another line.

The railway cut the city in half. To the west lay the business district, with its shops and restaurants and the vast indoor market building where farmers from the countryside came to sell their meat, rice, and vegetables. To the east, where we lived, lay the residential district: the streets lined with one- and two-storey brick houses with peaked roofs, built in the traditional Chinese style.

Despite our poverty, I have many happy memories of my boyhood before the Second World War. Full of energy and curiosity, I loved to leave the house and explore the dirt streets and paths of the city. I would chase after anything: snakes in the grass, frogs and fish in the river. As I grew older, my friends and I would sneak into the municipal swimming pool through a hole dug under the fence to avoid the entrance fee. I walked barefoot, since we couldn’t afford shoes, and the soles of my feet soon became as tough as leather. I could walk over gravel and broken glass. Only occasionally, when I stepped on a nail, would the sharp point pierce the skin and draw blood.

Though I had lost both my half-sisters, at a young age I formed a close bond with my little brother, Juiming. As soon as he was old enough to walk, he trailed around after me. Like most younger siblings, he worshipped his big brother, and I lorded it over him, bossing him around mercilessly. Yet from a very early age, I knew it was my duty to protect and provide for him.

I remember one day toward the end of the month when my father’s salary was running out and there was little money left to buy rice. Both of us were hungry, but Juiming, being younger, took it harder. We had been playing some game outside, when the pangs of hunger overcame him and he began to wail. His crying was so intense that I grew alarmed and ran to my mother.

“Juiming is starving!” I cried.

Frantically, I stoked a wood fire in our little stove and fanned the flames with a bamboo fan. My mother wearily measured out a small portion of rice.

“Quickly! Juiming is dying of hunger!” I urged.

“Don’t be silly,” my mother snapped. “People don’t die of hunger, just like that!”

Her words stunned me into silence. How could my own mother be so cold?

Yet in the times ahead, I would learn the truth of her words: my brother and I would endure years of hunger and suffering, and still, somehow, we would survive.

2

Bowing to the Emperor

I TURNED seven years old in the spring of 1939. It was a year of war throughout the world, and though our small island remained relatively sheltered, it would soon be drawn deeper into the global conflicts. In Europe, Hitler’s Nazi army invaded Poland and brought the Allied powers of Britain and France into the Second World War. In Asia, the Imperial Japanese Army—which had already occupied the great Chinese cities of Beijing and Shanghai—continued to fight against Chinese troops, seeking to extend Japan’s empire.

Events had been playing out in China and Japan in the preceding decades that would soon change our lives in Taiwan, though we had no inkling of it at the time. Because the events were to have such an impact on my later life, I must pause here to briefly sketch the historical background for the benefit of the reader.

In the early years of the twentieth century, China was an empire ruled by the Qing dynasty. But the Qing government was weak and unpopular, and in 1911, the army and the Chinese people rose up in a series of rebellions, dethroned the emperor, and attempted to establish a Chinese republic.

Unfortunately, after the fall of the Qing rulers, the various groups behind the rebellions began fighting among themselves over control of the country. After more than a decade of internecine struggle, two important groups emerged: the Kuomintang, or Nationalists; and the Communists, who had once been a faction within the Kuomintang but split from the party over ideological differences.

During the 1920s, the Kuomintang raised a powerful army, and by 1928, General Chiang Kai-shek, leader of the Kuomintang, was proclaimed president of the Chinese Republic. The Communists were forced to flee to the northern province of Shaanxi. There, they established a rebel stronghold under their leader Mao Tse-tung and continued to defy Chiang Kai-shek’s government and fight for the establishment of a Communist republic in China.

While the Chinese were fighting among themselves, the rulers of Japan nurtured ambitions to expand their empire across Asia. The disarray within China offered them an irresistible opportunity. In 1931, the Japanese army invaded Manchuria, a far northern province of the former Chinese empire. The following year, the army marched south, crossed the Great Wall, and conquered the province of Rehe. In 1936, Japan formed an alliance with Nazi Germany, and in 1937, Japanese imperial troops attacked the heartland of China, conquering the great cities of Beijing and Shanghai. By 1939—the year I turned seven—Japan occupied all of northern China including Inner Mongolia, as well as a coastal swath of eastern China from Manchuria in the north to the Yangtze River in the south. Japan held all of China’s major industrial cities, coastal ports, and the northern railways that linked China to Europe via Russia. However, Chinese armies—commanded by the Communists and the Kuomintang—held the vast western interior of the country and continued to fight against the Japanese occupation.

But I was a boy at the time, with no knowledge of these happenings on the world stage or how they would come to affect my life. For me, the biggest event of 1939 was my entry into first grade at the Hsinchu elementary school. No longer merely an ignorant urchin, I became a proper schoolboy, taking my first eager steps on the path of education.

For me, the biggest event of 1939 was my entry into first grade at the Hsinchu elementary school. No longer merely an ignorant urchin, I became a proper schoolboy, taking my first eager steps on the path of education.

I rose early each day, for school began at eight in the morning and I had to walk several kilometres through the dirt roads of the city to arrive at the two-storey grey-brick school building. Elementary school education in Taiwan was mandatory but strictly segregated: the Japanese children attended one school, the Taiwanese children another. All schools taught the Japanese curriculum, and classes were conducted in the Japanese language. Any student who dared to speak our Taiwanese-Chinese dialect of Hokkien was punished with a beating.

At the beginning of each school day, the students assembled in rows in the schoolyard for morning exercises, which the teachers led from a platform in the front. After exercises, we formed into lines and walked briskly to our classrooms. In each classroom hung a portrait of the Japanese Emperor Hirohito. We bowed to the heavenly emperor upon entering the room, then sat at our desks to begin lessons.

Since school was to be taught in Japanese, but we all spoke Hokkien at home, we began in first grade with the very basics: learning Japanese vocabulary and the Japanese writing system. I loved school and picked up the new knowledge quickly. We learned ethics, Japanese history, and Japanese geography, but nothing about Chinese or Taiwanese history. We also learned the values of hard work, persistence, honesty, honour, and respect. As my education progressed, I soon discovered a special love of mathematics.

One day our teacher asked us to solve an arithmetic question: What is 99 × 99? It seemed like a difficult tas...

Índice

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Prologue: Taiwan, 1946
• Chapter 1: Coal Dust and Daydreams
• Chapter 2: Bowing to the Emperor
• Chapter 3: A “City Monkey” in the Country
• Chapter 4: Starvation and Surrender
• Chapter 5: Return to Hsinchu
• Chapter 6: The Tale of the Poor Scholar
• Chapter 7: A Diamond in the Trash
• Chapter 8: Pedalling Through Taipei
• Chapter 9: Pure Chemistry
• Chapter 10: Quemoy
• Chapter 11: Snowed Under
• Chapter 12: Coming to America
• Chapter 13: A Life-Changing Discovery
• Chapter 14: Taking a Gamble
• Chapter 15: Avon Calling
• Chapter 16: A Wrinkle in the Business
• Chapter 17: Head to Head with the Pink Lady
• Chapter 18: Moving Forward, Giving Back
• Chapter 19: New Research Directions
• Epilogue: Philosophy and Vision of My Life
• Afterword: Ruey Yu as a Child of Taiwan