Chaim Amalek: “Years ago I met an old ABC (American born Chinese) friend from still further back who made it big in some corner of software design. He spoke of all the engineers he had hired. In China. And all he was doing to “help his Motherland prosper.” It took me a while to realize that he was speaking of the People’s Republic of China.”
The New Yorker reports about Chinese spy Greg Chung:
Greg Chung was at home on February 1, 2003, when the space shuttle Columbia fell from the sky. His son Jeffrey called to tell him the news: the ship had broken apart while returning to Earth, and all seven astronauts on board had died. “That’s not a good joke to make,” Chung said. An American citizen who was born in China, Chung lived with his wife, Ling, on a cul-de-sac in Orange, California. Until his retirement, a few months earlier, he had worked on nasa’s space-shuttle program. Among other things, he had helped to design the Columbia’s crew cabin. When he realized that Jeffrey was telling the truth, he hung up the phone and wept.
In 1972, nasa outsourced the design and development of its space shuttles to the Rockwell Corporation, which was later acquired by Boeing. For three decades, Chung was a structural engineer in the stress-analysis group. The work was repetitive, but he was well suited to it. He rarely left his office, even for coffee; instead, he sat at his desk, running computer models that predicted how the fuselage would hold up under various intensities of heat and pressure.
After the Columbia accident, nasa asked Boeing to improve the design of the next shuttle. Chung had been one of the best analysts in his group, and his former supervisor called to hire him back as a subcontractor. Though he was seventy, he was glad to postpone retirement. He returned to his former habits, coming home late for dinner and then working until midnight. He was driven not by the prospect of a promotion or a raise but by the pleasure of the work. “He’d tell me how much money he had saved for Boeing,” Ling told me later. “I always teased him: ‘your Boeing, your Boeing.’ ” . . .
