Tainan
Jen-Hsun Huang was born on February 17, 1963, in Tainan, on the southwestern coast of Taiwan, a city old enough to have been the island’s capital under three different flags before it was anyone’s hometown. By the time of his birth, Taiwan was under martial law and had been for fourteen years, ruled by the Nationalist government that had retreated there in 1949 after losing the Chinese civil war, and would go on being ruled that way, under the same law, for another twenty-four. It was a small island claiming to be the legitimate government of a very large one, and the claim was already wearing thin. None of this touched the Huang household directly. It shaped the air the household breathed.
His father, Huang Hsing-tai, was a chemical engineer, and his work put him inside the part of Taiwan’s economy the government cared most about proving to the world: refineries, plants, the unglamorous industrial machinery of a country trying to manufacture its way into relevance. His mother, Lo Tsai-hsiu, taught grade school. At home the family spoke Taiwanese Hokkien, the language of the island’s majority long before 1949, which the Nationalist government discouraged in classrooms and official life in favor of Mandarin — one more small daily negotiation, in a country full of them, between the language people actually lived in and the language the state preferred they be seen using. Jen-Hsun was the younger of two sons. Middle-class by the standards of the place and moment, the family moved often, following the father’s postings from one industrial assignment to the next, never quite settling long enough for any single address to matter more than the next one.
Taiwan in those years was in the middle of a transformation that economists would later describe, a little grandly, as a miracle: a small island rebuilding itself from war and a colonial past into an export economy, moving from sugar and textiles toward the heavier industrial capacity a country needs before the rest of the world will call it developed — steel, plastics, refined petroleum. Chemical engineers were not glamorous figures in that story. They were essential to it, in the way plumbing is essential to a house nobody visiting ever stops to admire. Huang Hsing-tai belonged to a generation of technically trained men whose careers were, without much ceremony on anyone’s part, load-bearing walls in a national project few of them would ever have described in those terms.
One of those earlier postings had been unusual enough to leave a mark. At some point before his sons were born, Huang Hsing-tai had traveled to the United States for a training program with an American manufacturer — air-conditioning equipment, the kind of unglamorous industrial technology that quietly explains how tropical cities function — and had come back with the sort of impression that doesn’t fade: that America was a place that worked, and worked in ways worth wanting for one’s children. It is a small fact, and an easy one to overstate. But families do not send their sons across an ocean on a whim, and somewhere in the calculation that would eventually get made, this earlier trip belonged.
Long before that calculation, though, there was simply a childhood — brothers, boredom, the particular chaos of a household with more people in one place than the place could reasonably hold. In an interview decades later, Huang would describe the family at one point living crowded onto a single floor of a two-story house, and would credit that crowding, half-seriously, with teaching him something about concentration: how to think in a room that never stopped being loud. It is the kind of thing a person only notices was useful in hindsight, the way a fish notices water last.
When Jen-Hsun was five, his father’s work took the family to Thailand, where he would spend roughly the next four years. Bangkok in the late 1960s sat at an angle to a war it was not fighting but could not ignore. Just across Thailand’s eastern border, American forces were fighting in Vietnam in numbers that would peak the same year the Huangs arrived in Southeast Asia, and Thailand itself had become one of the conflict’s quieter engines — air bases, supply routes, an economy partly reorganized around a war next door. A child of five or six does not register geopolitics as geopolitics. He registers a new school, a new set of sounds outside the window, a mother suddenly serious about English in a way she had not been before.
The city hosted, in those years, a whole minor economy of foreignness — oil-company families, embassy staff, engineers like Huang Hsing-tai posted in from elsewhere in Asia — and the boys were enrolled in one of the international schools built to serve exactly that population: children who would be gone again in two or three years, taught in English by teachers who assumed, correctly, that almost none of their students had learned it at home. It was the first stretch of Jen-Hsun’s life in which being foreign was simply the ordinary condition of the classroom, rather than something that set him apart from it — a small, temporary normalcy that the next few years of his life would not repeat for a long time.
That seriousness took a specific, almost domestic form. Each evening, or so the story has been told many times since, in interviews and commencement speeches where Huang has returned to it as one of the few childhood details he offers without embellishment, his mother would open a dictionary, choose ten words at random, and require her two sons to learn them before the next day. She did not, by her own son’s later account, speak fluent English herself. That was not entirely the point. The ritual was preparation for a departure that had not yet been announced, arranged by a woman who seems to have understood, before her children did, that fluency was going to be one of the few things they could carry with them that no customs agent could confiscate and no boarding school could take away.
Around them, the political ground kept shifting in ways that mattered more to the adults than to the boys memorizing vocabulary. In October 1971, the United Nations General Assembly voted to expel the Republic of China — Taiwan’s government, the only government the Huang family had ever held a passport from — and seat the People’s Republic of China in its place. It was a diplomatic event, decided in a hall in New York that neither parent had ever seen, but it landed on ordinary people in Tainan and Bangkok alike as a kind of ambient loss: an argument about who they were, decided by other people, whose result they simply had to absorb and continue living inside. For a family already accustomed to moving because a government or an employer required it, one more piece of evidence that the ground under an entire island could be renegotiated without anyone in the household being consulted was not, perhaps, the deciding factor. But it was not nothing, either.
By 1972, with the war next door still unresolved and no clear sense of how long the region’s instability might last, Huang Hsing-tai and Lo Tsai-hsiu arrived at the decision that would define the next several years of their sons’ lives more than anything that came before or after it: the boys would go to America first, ahead of their parents, to begin an education their parents believed the region could no longer reliably offer. It was not, on its face, an unusual decision for the era. Taiwanese families with any means at all were sending children abroad throughout the 1960s and 1970s in growing numbers, education being one of the few forms of insurance available to a country whose sovereignty was actively being voted away in foreign capitals — a whole generation of parents making the same wager independently of one another, that whatever happened to the island itself, a child educated in America would land somewhere safe. What made the Huangs’ version of that wager unusual was the arrangement underneath it. The parents would not be coming along, not yet. An aunt and uncle in Washington State, on the American side of the Pacific, agreed to take the boys in — relatives who were themselves recent arrivals to the United States, still learning its systems, its schools, its paperwork, the particular vocabulary of American bureaucracy that no dictionary drill quite prepares a person for.
What exists of the arrangement now is mostly its shape rather than its details: correspondence crossing the ocean in both directions, an aunt and uncle agreeing by letter to a responsibility that would turn out to be larger than any of them understood at the time, a nine-year-old boy and his older brother named as the subjects of paperwork neither of them had any say in filling out. Whatever the exact date, whatever airport it left from, the flight itself was the plain physical fact underneath all of it: two children, traveling without their parents across the widest ocean on the planet, carrying between them a shared language still built largely out of their mother’s nightly ten words, toward relatives they knew mostly as names.
It is easy, at a distance of more than fifty years, to read the outline of a plan and mistake it for something simpler than it was: two parents making a rational, forward-looking choice about their children’s futures, executed with the calm efficiency of people who had already moved house more times than they could easily count. It is worth resisting that reading, or at least sitting with its opposite for a moment. Whatever else it was, it was also two people putting their two sons on an airplane, to live with relatives those sons barely knew, in a country where they did not yet reliably speak the language, on the strength of ten memorized words a night and a father’s decade-old impression that America was a place that worked.
Both things were true. The decision was reasonable, and it was also a rupture — the first of several the family would live through before anyone involved could call the outcome a success. What awaited the two boys at the far end of that flight was not the education their parents believed they were sending them toward.
It did not.
The address the aunt and uncle had been given, and the description that came with it — a proper boarding school, the kind of institution an ambitious immigrant family imagines when it pictures its children’s American future — bore almost no relationship to what was actually waiting in the hills of eastern Kentucky. Nobody involved in the decision had lied. Nobody, in the most immediate sense, had even made an obvious mistake. An aunt and uncle new enough to the country to still be finding their own footing had done the best they could with a name and a brochure, and what they had arranged, in good faith, for two boys who had just crossed an ocean on the promise of a better education, was a religious reform school for troubled children.
