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http://pr.caltech.edu/periodicals/CaltechNews/articles/v36/tsien.html
这是加州理工大学一篇关于钱老的文章。采访了当年的一位同事与好友Frank Marble，钱老乘船离开美国前几
天就是住在他家里。这位同事后受邀到中科院讲学，与钱老又有过几次接触，读起来很
有意思，文章很长，如果有人能翻译出来就好了：）
Marble是钱学森在美国最好的，可能也是唯一的朋友。当年钱学森被打成异己分子。国防部让Marble不与钱学森来往，否则就取消他的保密级别。也就是不能接触国防有关的文献，也不能做与国防有关的研究。Marble拒接了国防部的要求。在钱学森倒霉的5年里，他放弃了他的保密级别。
要知道，那时候，像林家翘等很多中国同行都不与钱学森来往。
这篇文章是Marble为了钱学森90岁生日的中国之行后写的。Marble把钱学森的六箱手稿整理后，运回了中国。这些手稿现在应该在西交大的图书馆吧。Marble跟我们说，因为他退休了，所以有时间把钱学森的手稿每一页都看了一遍。包括钱学森当年博士论文的手稿。
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Tsien Revisited
A life in interesting times: Tsien with Marble (right)
at Los Angeles Harbor in September 1955, preparing
to board ship to China.
Tsien with Marble in Beijing in 1991.
First he was accused, then detained, then deported. Any of this sound famili
ar?
But there was a twist to this tale. A Caltech professor talks about his long
friendship with the Caltech-trained scientist who became the “father of Ch
inese rocketry."
This past December, Frank Marble, PhD ’48, and his wife, Ora Lee, went to C
hina to visit and help honor their longtime friend Tsien Hsue-Shen, PhD ’39
. Many Caltechers, along with Americans who lived through the Red Scare days
of the ’50s, have at least a glancing familiarity with Tsien’s story: a b
rilliant student and later colleague of aerospace pioneer Theodore von Kárm
án, commended by the U.S. Air Force for his contributions to its technologi
cal development after World War II, the Chinese-born scientist was accused o
f harboring Communist sympathies and stripped of his security clearance in 1
950. Tsien and those who knew him best said that the allegations were nonsen
se, and no evidence ever came to light to substantiate them. Despite that, a
nd over a barrage of protests from colleagues in academia, government, and i
ndustry, the INS placed him under a delayed deportation order, and for the n
ext five years he and family lived under U.S. government surveillance and pa
rtial house arrest. In September 1955 they were permitted to leave for China
.
Received with open arms in his homeland, Tsien resumed his research, founded
the Institute of Mechanics, and, as one of the world’s leading authorities
in aeronautics, went on to become the “father” of China’s missile progra
m, a trusted member of the government and Party’s inner circle, and the nat
ion’s “most honored scientist.”
Early in the INS saga, Tsien and his wife had planned to visit China so that
their parents could meet their American-born grandchildren for the first ti
me. But the INS impounded his luggage and charged him with concealing classi
fied documents—the most “secret” of which, suspected of containing securi
ty codes, turned out upon inspection to be a table of logarithms. In the mea
ntime the FBI had decided that Tsien posed a security risk and imprisoned hi
m in San Pedro; he was freed two weeks later after Caltech president Lee DuB
ridge, among others, flew to Washington to intervene on his behalf. These in
cidents undoubtedly helped Tsien to conclude, as he confided to friends, tha
t he had become “an unwelcome guest” in the country in which he had spent
his whole scientific life. In any case, he was determined to avoid such prob
lems again, and when he sailed to China, he deliberately left all of his res
earch notes and papers behind.
Among the handful of people who saw the Tsien family off in 1955 were Frank
and Ora Lee Marble. Marble and Tsien had struck up a warm friendship as aero
nautics colleagues, and the Tsien family had stayed at the Marbles’ Pasaden
a home during their final weeks in the United States. After Tsien’s departu
re, he and Marble corresponded intermittently; then, with the onset of the C
ultural Revolution in China, Marble stopped hearing from him. In 1979 Caltec
h named Tsien a recipient of the Distinguished Alumni Award in recognition o
f his pioneering work in rocket science, but Tsien, although he sent a graci
ous acknowledgment, did not come to campus to collect it.
Time passes. In 1981, Frank and Ora Lee received an invitation from the Chin
ese Academy of Sciences to come to Beijing and teach combustion technology a
nd English. respectively, at the Academy’s newly established Graduate Schoo
l of Science and Technology, a small research institute partly modeled on Ca
ltech. Shortly afterward, the Marble and Tsien families were reunited for th
e first time in 25 years. Marble recalls his feelings before they met. “We
had had very different experiences and lived in such different circumstances
. Would our old, easygoing friendship and discussions resume? Or was that so
mething that just wasn’t going to happen?” After half an hour, he says, he
had his answer. “There was no obstacle.”
The two families kept in touch after that and saw each other again in China
in 1991. In the years since Tsien had returned to China, Marble had taken on
the project of collecting and organizing the extensive research notes—two
large file cabinets worth, it turned out—that Tsien had left at Caltech. Ts
ien repeatedly said he did not want them back, telling Marble at their 1981
reunion, “Frank, American students need them much more than Chinese student
s.” A decade or so ago, however, he had a change of heart, and, with the he
lp of Tsien’s colleague Cheng Che-Min, PhD ’52, Marble returned the collec
tion to China. Some papers went to the Institute of Mechanics, founded decad
es earlier by Tsien, and others now form the core holdings of the Tsien Libr
ary, which the Chinese government had established at Xi’an Jiatong Universi
ty, about 600 miles southwest of Beijing. The Chinese Academy of Sciences su
bsequently brought out selections from the collection as an elegant, coffee
table-type book entitled Manuscripts of H. S. Tsien 1938–1955, whose public
ation coincided with the December 2001 symposium cele-brating Tsien’s 90th
birthday.
When Marble went to visit Tsien for that event, he went both as a friend and
as the official emissary of Caltech and President Baltimore, bringing with
him the Distinguished Alumni Award that the Institute had presented to Tsien
in absentia 23 years ago. Tsien is now permanently confined to bed, so Marb
le made the formal presentation at his bedside in a ceremony that received w
idespread coverage in China, and at last provided a fitting coda to Tsien’s
long, complicated, and never completely sundered association with Caltech.
•
Marble, who is Caltech’s Hayman Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Pro
fessor of Jet Propulsion, Emeritus, spoke with Caltech News editor Heidi Asp
aturian about his recent trip and earlier visits with Tsien in China.
Tsien does not speak much English any more, but his family tells me that he
still understands it quite well. He was thoroughly aware that I was presenti
ng Caltech’s highest honor to him at the official request of David Baltimor
e, and I think he was deeply impressed with and appreciative of that.
We weren’t able to talk much during my most recent visit, but when I saw hi
m in 1991 and again in 1996, we had some very interesting conversations. I t
hink in general we both felt less constrained than we had during our reunion
in 1981. One comment he made to me in 1991 particularly stands out: “You k
now, Frank, we’ve done a lot for China. People have enough food. They’re w
orking and progress is being made. But Frank, they’re not happy.” He felt
very bad about that—almost, I think, a little bit responsible for it, altho
ugh it was not an area he was involved in at all. His area of activity was m
ilitary and civilian rocketry, and this was strictly a personal observation.
That was about as far as he ever went in saying that things were not ideal.
He obviously has good memories of Caltech. He speaks of the Institute most f
ondly, and I think that he feels that his time on campus was one of the most
enjoyable of his life. In a letter that his wife, Tsiang Ying, wrote us aft
er our recent visit, she said that Tsien still loves to reminisce about Theo
dore von Kármán and the wonderful times he had at Caltech and to tell the
old von Kármán jokes. So I think he stills feels very emotionally tied to
the Institute. But it’s important to remember that during the entire five-y
ear episode with the INS, Caltech was very good to him. The Institute contin
ued to honor his professorship and to respect his reputation. My understandi
ng is that Lee DuBridge, who vigorously supported Tsien, had difficulties wi
th the Board of Trustees, some of whose members were embarrassed by Tsien’s
situation.
Once Tsien returned to China, I don’t think he ever made another trip West.
He did travel once to the Soviet Union. Evidently he did not endear himself
to his hosts, and he never went back. Otherwise, so far as I know, he did n
ot leave China. I would guess that this was largely by choice—he never was
a great one for traveling. I think that he felt he had so many things to do
at home that he had no real desire to go elsewhere.
Tsien never spoke to me about how his life and scientific career in America
had ended. He was not a person for looking back or for ruminating about how
things might have been. He was very much a realist, and my feeling is that h
e just tuned those last five years in America out. I do know that he felt, a
t least when all this started, that he would be able to do better work in th
e United States than he would initially in China, where research conditions
at the time were very primitive. I believe that once he returned to China, w
hat he found there was pretty much what he had expected. But he did have ver
y able people working with him. Many of them had studied in the United State
s, and they were devoted to him. I met a few of those who had worked with hi
m in the early days, and they had the highest praise for the way he had laid
out and directed the program for rocketry development. I think that Tsien a
lso had the great personal advantage of being technically and scientifically
on top of things, and he also had the ear of the government. By virtue of h
is expertise and reputation he could convince officials of what needed to be
done and accomplish things that other people couldn’t.
He did not talk about his experiences during that era. We were both very car
eful to avoid discussion about anything that touched on sensitive issues. We
would talk about every other subject—family, music, literature, and some s
cientific work that was mutually interesting. He was very enthusiastic and i
ntrigued about some of the work I was doing on combustion processes in vorte
x flows and told me, “Frank, you have been more honest to von Kármán than
I have.” What he meant was that I was still involved in the fundamental re
search areas that von Kármán had worked in, but that he
was now in a very different mode of operation.
Tsien, of course, became a high-ranking, trusted Party official, but it was
evident that he had had trouble during the Cultural Revolution. I heard from
his colleagues, but never directly from him, that like many leading scienti
sts and intellectuals, he wrote one or two letters of “confession.” Ying,
his wife, had a very interesting experience. She was head of the Western Voc
al Music Department at the Beijing Conservatory, and commuted between work a
nd home on a motorbike. Apparently the Red Guard was after her in some way a
nd so for several months—maybe as long as a year—she just lived at the con
servatory until she thought it was safe to go out again. Her students brough
t her food and other necessities.
I also spoke to one of Tsien’s close colleagues, Ch’ien Wei-Zhang. He had
earned his doctorate in Canada, was a postdoc at Caltech, and had worked wit
h Tsien at JPL. He also went back to China and pursued a very productive car
eer there. During the Cultural Revolution, the Red Guard accused him of all
sorts of things, and he wound up spending some time in the countryside, stok
ing an open-hearth furnace for a time at a steel-manufacturing facility. He
had a very difficult time of it. So both Tsien’s family and his research ci
rcle were affected, although Tsien himself does not talk about that period b
eyond referring to it as “the 10 lost years.”
Many people have said that during his last years in Pasadena Tsien was bitte
r. I never sensed that. He was no doubt hurt, but I never saw him brooding a
bout it. It was something that had happened, and, as he saw it, he had to re
act in a way that was appropriate. When he felt he was no longer welcome, he
resigned from all the technical societies and sometimes his letters were a
bit curt. That was about the extent of it. Apart from the first six months b
etween the cancellation of his security clearance and the INS hearing, he an
d his family more or less went on with their lives as usual. Their circle of
acquaintances and friends did narrow, which must have been hard. A lot of h
is former colleagues had become a bit afraid of associating with him sociall
y.
His children were both born here, and they have spent time in the United Sta
tes as adults. His son did graduate work at Caltech. His daughter studied me
dicine on the East Coast and has had quite a successful practice there, but
she recently decided she would return to China this summer. Each of them now
has a little boy. One of the tender-est pictures I have of Tsien shows him
sitting in the backseat of his chauffeur-driven car with one arm around each
little four-year-old grandson.
I do think that after his problems with the INS, Tsien lost faith in the Ame
rican government, but I believe that he has always had very warm feelings fo
r the American people. That came through again and again in the public state
ments he made, both here during the INS hearings, and after he returned to C
hina. But once he went back to China, I don’t think he wanted ever to deal
with the United States in an official capacity again. When Caltech’s former
president Harold Brown visited China as secretary of defense in 1980, Tsien
avoided seeing him. When I saw him the next year, I said, “Tsien, you made
a big error. Harold Brown is a great admirer of yours and a brilliant guy.”
And he said, “I know. It was a mistake on my part.” But that is how he fe
lt about it.
Looking back, I think the most remarkable aspect of the five years he was de
tained is the resilience with which he returned to his teaching and research
, making this period one of his most productive and innovative. He was instr
umentally involved in the development of the Daniel and Florence Guggenheim
Jet Propulsion Center, Caltech’s academic focus of instruction and research
in jet propulsion.
There’s always been a kind of single-mindedness about his work. He decides
what is to be done and he organizes it and does it. He does not stop to thin
k halfway through, is this really what I should be working on? And I believe
he adopted the same attitude once he returned to China. He did not take tim
e to indulge in speculation or fantasies about “what might have been.” He
never indicated to me that he had. He was confronted with a new set of probl
ems, and he devoted himself to working full time to solve them. |
Revisited, Tsien, 加州, 理工, Revisited, Tsien, 加州, 理工, Revisited, Tsien, 加州, 理工, 钱学森
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