WOMEN IN PLANT BIOLOGY

Thrown into Cold Water—Twice

I first came to the United States in August 1986, for a Ph.D. program at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. My initial culture shock occurred when I told the apartment manager that the undergrads in my neighboring rooms were too noisy and I couldn’t study in my room. He told me no one studied in their room and that I should study in the library. However, he had obviously said something to my neighbors. One night I had people standing beneath my window shouting my name, pronounced in the incorrect way that most Americans do when they try it for the first time, and something else, which I only understood enough of to know they were not friendly. When matters went from bad to worse, someone helped me report the incident to the Foreign Student Office. By then the original manager had been fired for something else he had done. One of the counselors from the Foreign Student Office forced the new manager to watch a film titled Thrown into Cold Water with us. The film talked about various bad experiences foreign students had when they first came to the United States, and it likened these experiences to being “thrown into cold water.” I remember feeling colder when I walked out of the room that evening. Not only because the manager had fallen asleep in the first five minutes, but also because I wondered: How could you make these people understand just by telling them how bad we felt?

Then came October and the weather turned cold, too (for me, at least). I remember asking the PI of the lab where I was rotating, “When is this miserable winter weather going to end?” I still remember the look of confusion on his face. After a few seconds, he managed to say nicely, “Probably next March.” Unfortunately, (for me, at least) the answer was the end of May, as my five years in Wisconsin taught me.

Two incidents have had the most profound impact on my attitudes toward survival in a foreign culture. I volunteered for some work in the Foreign Student Office when I felt I had my head above water. In one of the training sessions, a counselor from India told us that whenever an American would say to her, “You have a funny accent,” she would always say, “So do you!” The other incident is that I took a class co-taught by my adviser and another professor. For the final exam, they gave out 10 broad questions one week before the exam and at the time of the exam, they told us which five of the questions to answer. The Saturday afternoon before the exam, my adviser saw me studying in the lab. He asked why I had to spend so much time preparing for this exam. I told him that because English is not my primary language, I couldn’t just prepare an outline of the answers and then try to construct what I wanted to say during the exam. I had to write down the exact words of the answers and memorize them. He was surprised and said that he didn’t know that this exam style would cause an extra burden for foreign students. The next year, another foreign student in the lab next door took the same class. She didn’t finish what she wanted to write in the time allotted for the exam. She asked the other professor for some extra time because English was not her primary language. The other professor simply told her that if she really thought language was the problem, then she should not have taken the class because the exam style was announced at the beginning of the semester.

I can keep on recounting all the cold water I was dunked in. For example, I once had a classmate ask me if I knew what “chocolate” was after I told her that I had never done a crossword puzzle; I did my laundry using fabric softener, not detergent, my first few months in the States; and I was stopped by someone on the street asking me if I was from Korea when there was a hostage situation in North Korea. But to continue would be like removing the data not supporting your conclusion. In the years I was in the United States, I made some of the best friends of my life. They taught me everything from how to eat a burrito to how to drive, and introduced me to (and got me hooked on) mystery novels, gardening, and, good grief, the weak American coffee.

At the end of my seven-and-a-half years of study in the U.S., I applied for and was offered a job at the Institute of Molecular Biology (IMB), Academia Sinica, in Taipei. The offer seemed too good to turn down. Little did I know what kind of cold water awaited me there. The idea of mentoring and nurturing young scientists has not been established in our culture. For example, beginning faculty members usually have the heaviest teaching load during their first few years. The load is reduced as they become more senior and can transfer the load to other, younger faculty members (the exact saying is “the old daughter-in-law has finally been promoted to the mother-in-law”). Although I didn’t have to teach, I was given half a bench and no office when I first arrived because I was entangled in some complicated political fights and personnel transition. I tried to fight for an office and was immediately threatened with a negative vote on my future promotion. Then my brother was involved in a car accident. Instead of paying lawyers and insurance companies like one would do in the States, we had gangsters knocking on our door every night and we ended up paying the gangsters. At the beginning, I argued that things should be settled legally and offered to pay for the lawyers. My brother turned his eyes and said coldly, “You have become a foreigner!”

Because this is the “Women in Plant Biology” column, I should write something about being a female scientist in our culture. In Taiwan, the medical schools start at the undergraduate level, and in my time, medical schools were grouped with the biology departments under one category in our college entrance exam. Therefore, the biology departments in a lot of good universities have a high proportion of female students because the male students, owing to career concerns, would retake the exam year after year until they finally got into medical school. The IMB is a relatively young institute in Taiwan, and all the directors and current faculty are trained in the United States. Therefore, with a larger pool of women in college and an unbiased hiring practice, we have exactly 50 percent female faculty members in IMB. This is something unique in the world, and we are proud of that.

Outside the enclave of IMB, however, the traditional Chinese culture still dominates. When I told my Chinese friends that I once worked for a famous female scientist (Dr. Joanne Chory) as a postdoc, almost all of them asked, “Is she married?” None of my American friends ever asked that. I have also been offered well-intentioned advice to hide the plaques displaying my awards so that I don’t endanger my marriage. Even within IMB, all the married female faculty have spouses who are faculty in engineering or biology departments in academia, and almost all of us rely on nannies or housekeepers to let the candle last longer when it’s being burned at both ends.

My experiences of the “cold waters” have helped me understand myself better and appreciate the diversity of people around me.

Maybe that is why I have been blessed with very good luck in finding good students (and good housekeepers!). For example, four postdocs have come through my lab. I have had a great time working with every one of them. It’s amusing for me to think about how different they are in personality and in their approaches to science. We always have so much fun every time we have a reunion—because of their differences. My experiences have also made me stronger when dealing with the difficulties encountered by women in my culture. Of course, they have also made me appreciate how fortunate I am to be in a work environment where I can get intellectual support not only for research, but also for survival skills as a woman scientist. T

Hsou-min Li
Institute of Molecular Biology
Academia Sinica
mbhmli@gate.sinica.edu.tw