I don't remember when this picture was taken. According to my parents' description, apparently my brother was trying to light a firework on the ground, and I was mimicking the action over his head. This happened in front of our old home. One of the trees in the background was broken during a typhoon years later. I went to the kindergarden about 100 meters away. Most XMU faculty's children go there before the age of elementry school. The 2 things that I still remember from those days:  One day a boy a little bigger than me told me the vacation was beginning in a week. I didn't know what "a week" meant, so I didn't understand what he was talking about. 10 years later this guy became the champion of the Go Competetion of the Youths in Fujian Province. On another day, when I was drawing a spaceship on a piece of paper, a girl peeked at my drawing and laughed:"Is it the Sun you are drawing? So ugly!!" I have no idea why I remember these. But when I tried to recall the childhood life in the kindergarden, these two scenes always pop out first. I don't even know where this guy and this girl are now.

There's a pool named Fang4 Sheng1 Chi2 in front of the temple. Fang4 Sheng1, an activity of Buddism, is to free captive animals. Therefore we could find all kinds of water animals in the pool. Once my brother caught a small turtle in the pool (hush...don't tell the monks in the temple...:), and we raised it in a jar in our home for two whole years. It ate everything we gave it, rice, meat, fish...of course, all were small pieces. But finally it died on a deep autumn day, making me sorrow for several weeks.

I loved reading very much, one book after another, therefore at the 3rd grade I began to wear my first pair of glasses. It was a rare thing among children at that time. Everyone around me regarded me as an excellent student, and I was always selected by the teacher or otherwise by the children to the post of monitor. But I don't think I was a good leader.

Most pupils in this school are children of the faculty of XMU and the Third Oceanology Institute of China since it locates near them. As a result, many of my friends kept staying in the same school as I did from the elemetary school to the college -- 16 years.

I was appreciated by all the teachers, especially the Chinese teacher. He said I was born to be a writer. My compositions were often read to the whole class. I still remember one time the teacher just collected the compositions on the class, and without any hesitation, he picked out mine and began to read to the class. When finished, he said, " I knew it. Donghua's writings are always full of interesting plots. " I feel a little sorry as I didn't become a writer in the end.

But this was not the way it should go. I tried to learn to ride a bycicle. My brother taught me riding bycicle. I fell down again and again until finally I was all black and blue. Fortunately the bike didn't break.

In school I studied quite well. My father went to Northwestern University as an exchange scholar in 1985, and he stayed there for a year. After he came back, he forced my brother and me to study more English. But we were not so interested in this language. :) Well, actually I ranked top 2 in my class in English course. And in an Eastern-China Junior Middle School English Contest, I got a full mark, like other 4 students of our school. At the end they chose a girl from 5 of us to attend the final contest held in Nan2 Chang1, and she hardly got the champion. Now she is in Southern Methodist University.

My favorite subjects during the 3 years in junior high school were Physics and Chinese. I liked physics just because I had found and read quite a few books about the great physicians in my father's bookshell, Einstein, Newton, Galileo, ... As to Chinese, I loved it because it gave me chances to read and write.

Not long after my father went abroad, I launched a writing project secretly :). I kept writing Wu3 Xia2 (Kungfu) novels through all the 6 years in middle school. At a time I focused on the writing so much that even on the class there were nothing else in my mind but the plot developments of my novels. Even on the afternoon before our junior school graduation exam, I was still writing on a crucial plot in a borrowed room -- my parents borrowed that room for me to study for the exam. :)

To my surprise, I got the first place in the whole Xiamen city in this very exam. It was largely due to the mark of my Chinese. One of my friends ranked the second - he got 12 points more than I did in the other 5 subjects, but 13 points less than I in Chinese. :)) Now he is a postgraduate at University of Minnesota, his name is Huang2 Jian4

One afternoon in the summer of 1988, after school, as luck would have it, I was promoted by a sudden impulse and stayed at shcool, instead of going home right away. I saw a classmate rush into the classroom to take out something from his desk. I asked what he was doing, he said he just occupied a seat in the computer room but found that he had forgotten his floppy discs, so he came back to fetch them. Before he went out he asked me if I wanted to have a visit to the computer room. I'd never been to the computer room before. I hesitated for a second, and then followed him.

That's the beginning of the relation between me and computers. It's a really crazy beginning, I fell in love with computer abruptly, without any reason, without any expectation. :-) In those days there were only about 20 Apple-IIs in the computer room of our school and all were for the use of a computer-study group. I was not a member of the group, so I didn't have the proper excuse to use them. Each time when I was wild with joy before the screen and keyboard, the teacher would tap me on the shoulder and told me to give the seat to a group member who came late and could not find an empty seat.

But I still loved computer. :-) There were few books about computer at that time, I had to learn the most out of the least materials. Soon I was not satisfied with BASIC, so I taught myself the 6502 Machine Language of Apple-II. As I didn't have any Assembly tool, the only way I wrote programs was to write the assembly codes on paper, and translate them into hex numbers, then key in the hex numbers. By this means I finished my first machine language program, a simple but effective graphic editor. I found a chance to print the codes on paper, and sent it to the only computer journal I knew, "Students' Computer World" in Shanghai. After 3 long months waiting, when I thought there was no hope, one day, a friend told me it was published! This was in Jan 1989.

In fact I accumulated the experience and skills of programming by myself, since I couldn't get hold of valuable books. In those days there were two usual ways to translate the coordinates to the real address of memory, one was simple but slow, the other was fast but complicated. Every 6502 programmer knew these two ways, except I. :-) I just dived into programming immediately after I mastered the instructions. And, believe it or not, I found the third way to do this translation, simple and fast. I think this is like the Chinese saying :" White paper is the easiest thing to paint colors on". Had I learnt those two ways before I began programming, I might not think about another way to do the same thing.:-)

Even two years later I could still read an article on a computer magazine talking about this technique which I had been using in my first published program.

I spent too much time on computers. As a result, I couldn't stand in top 3 in my class. As the college entrance exams approaching, my parents hoped me to select economic or accountant majors in college, which were much hotter than computer science then. But I didn't give up my ideality. I insisted to choose computer science as my major, and told my parents it would be the hottest in future. :-)

Me and my good friends after the cruel College Entrance Exam. All the others in this picture have come abroad by 1995, except the 2nd guy from the left, who is now a big figure in a Xiamen automobile company.

When I entered Xiamen University in 1990, they told me I was among the top students in the Department of Computer Science. Compared to other freshmen students, I was a real veteran on computer. Most of them never or seldom touched computer before. So I was noticed by the Student Union soon. I began to write application programms for some activities in the department, and then for the college. That's the reason why I could sit in the front seats to watch those pop singer competitions in XMU -- I wrote the computer managing system, and of course I'd like to operate it by myself. :)

The teachers also noticed me. Prof Li Tangqiu(After being a visiting scholar at Carnegie Mellon University, now the department head) took me in his Machine-Translation research group when I was a junior student. Thus I was able to play in a certain lab that not everyone had the right to enter.:) I wrote a program called "Kara-OK Player" which could play Kara-OK songs in both English and Chinese. I felt proud of myself because in this programm I developed a fairly simple but complete noting language for users to input music notes. This programm was recommended to take part in a Science & Technology Competition in University Campus of Fujian. Most of the competitors were post graduates or from higher classes. I was the youngest in this competition. At last I got a third prize.

In the meantime, some friends and I originated the Students' Computer Association in XMU. The purpose was to spread computer knowledge and promote the use of computer in XMU. We held some activities such as computer saloon, computer typing competition, software exhibition, etc. The most remarkable thing was an exhibition in April 1993. A friend and I deliberately edited a special issue of joural, "New Cursor", for this exhibition. We kept working all day and all night until it was all over, and we were all over--tired.:) This exhibition and "New Cursor" were included in a special topic covered by Fujian TV.

I didn't spend much time on English, though I got 91.5 percent ("excellent") in the National College English Test Level 4. When it came to Level 6, I just got 78.5 ("pass"). Since the days when I was still in high school, all the relatives and friends had been advising me to work hard on my English and look for a chance to go abroard as I had some advantages others didn't have. But I kept avoiding this idea until a sunny spring day in 1993, when I was casually looking at a world map, a word suddenly came into my mind: "WORLD". Why don't I go to the world? Well, from then on I began to study English. A few months later, I took TOEFL in Oct 1993, and then GRE general in Feb 1994. The preparation was inadequate, I only got 597 in TOEFL and 1940 in GRE(Verbal--430, Quantative--800, Analytical--710). At this point, I found a chance in National University of Singapore (NUS), so I set out to apply to it.

I became very familiar with PC during this 4 years playing and was sometimes called a specialist by the students and even the teachers. :) Actually I'd got two articles published respectively on two very popular computer journals in China. One appeared on "China Computer Users", presenting a technique in Batch file; the other was printed by "Software Journal", discussing some faults of all the Chinese systems on PC that was never discussed openly before.

In April 1994 a friend asked me to help him kill a new virus, which had damaged some of his files, and could be detected by F-prot as "Immunity" virus but none of the known antivirus software could remove it. It was interesting because this virus appeared like an immunity to an executable program, and indeed, it could automaticaly remove the other viruses I put on it. Surely I had dealt with some other viruses before, but none of them was so cunning and tricky like this one. I tried to trace this virus, but failed at first. The writer of this virus was too crafty, he/she replaced the debugging interruption at the beginning of the codes and make use of this interruption to decode the main part of the virus itself at a certain rate. That's why you would be totally confused by the codes if you simply traced down the codes. Fortunately, After 2 whole days studying, I realized that I must skip a session of codes, in other words, I should just simulate this session's running in my brain, but not run it in the real debugging process, and then use the result of simutation to continue debugging the next session. Thus I was able to analyse the whole virus and finally wrote a program to kill it. The "Computer" journal intended to publish it at first, but my program was so large that they gave up at last.

I got some awards and prizes in college. When I was a senior student, they gave me "Zhong An award" of Xiamen city. And in the fourth year I won the "Zi Qin Award" of XMU. That's HK$1,000, heehee, so I was rich for a while. :-) Oh of course, I was not so poor before that since I'd earn some money by writing MIS programs for some corporations outside XMU. It was a tradition in XMU that one student can not win more than 2 major awards at or above the university level, but they made an exception to give me the third :"Computer World Prize", which was given annualy by the "Computer World" journal in Bejing to those candidates in all the computer-relative departments in China. It's the highest honor I've got.

During all 4 years in college, I kept the habitation of jogging every morning. I'm not born an athlete, but I don't hate sports too. :) I like pingpong, I like swimming, I like jogging, I like mountain-climbing. This was because XMU located at a right place -- just between the sea and the mountains. :)

I was, and still am a fan of Kungfu Fiction, Science Fiction and Detective Fiction. Because of my criticism on the science fictions on "SF World" magazine in China, I was elected "Best Reader" of it several times. I did make some effort to write SFs my self, but didn't succeed. :-)

Before graduation, I knew I would go to NUS. Therefore I didn't look for a job. But job was looking for me. :) In May 1994, all my classmates had found jobs. When Mr. She Yimou, a young Hong Kong businessman holding two bachelor's degrees in both Computer Science and Construction from University of Michigan, wanted to setup a software corporation in Xiamen, he came to our department, but there's not any graduate available except me. "OK," I said , "I'll work for you until the admission from Singapore comes. Second, I want RMB 1,500 a month." Mr. She was generous, he believed in me and agreed immediately. Few people I knew was making that much money then.

This CD was titled "Eastern Beauty". Yes, the concept was to make a multimedia album of beautiful girls in Xiamen. They scouted for such girls in Xiamen, signed contracts with them, then took photos and videos of them. Unfortunately it's not my job to accommodate the girls.:) My job was simply to sit in the office and write a program to organize all these pictures, videos, sounds, music and some funny traps, in a way as funny as possible. But sometimes some girls would come to the office to see the result. Wow! Really Pretty! :)

Those days I had to work all day and all night again. I never felt time so limited like that.:-) Mr She trusted my ability to learn a brand new thing and make use of it in a short time. I should not let him down. But, in the late Oct, I received a letter from NUS, asking me to go to Shanghai for an interview on Nov 1. After this interview, I was confident that NUS would admit me as a graduate(with research scholarship). I had to finish this software as soon as possible, and meanwhile I had to spend a lot of time going through all the formalities to get a passport. The first version of the whole software was not so satisfied compared to some other commercial CDs Mr She brought from Hong Kong. So we did it over and over, again and again, from top to bottom, from the music to the drawings, from the basic structure to the expressing way, until finally it was so fantastic that even the stiff supervisor -- Mr She -- nodded . :) And that's the New Years' Eve of 1995.

(Just heard that this CD didn't sell well, because the models wore too much :-( --Nov 14, 1995)

OK, then I left this corporation to do my own preparation related to going abroard. I knew there were still some bugs in my programms, but I had no time to get rid of them. Anyway, it's my first commercial software.

I went to Shanghai in Feb 1995 for the visa to Singapore. My father's old friend accomodated me very well. This picture was taken by him at one of the great bridges in Shanghai.

This picture was taken at the great soccer playground(Shang4 Xuan2 Chang3) in XMU before I left Xiamen.

 And then, in Feb 1995, I went to Singapore.

This picture was taken at the Xiamen airport on Feb 22, 1995, the day I left Xiamen for Singapore. I had always been in Xiamen together with my family. But this time I was flying to another country. My mother was proud since I was going to a better life, and sad since I was leaving her. Actually my father and brother both felt the same way too.

Singapore is a beautiful and clean island. NUS(National University of Singapore) is a quiet, and largely comfortable place.
 

I made a lot of friends in NUS. This picture was taken not long after I arrived there. We were living in College Green, a graduate dorm outside NUS. It took about 20 minutes' shuttle bus ride to go to NUS. We were not wealthy as students, but our life was happy. My friend and I went out playing around immediately after we received the first amount of scholarship.

Four months later we were forced to move out of the dorm to make room for the new students. It didn't matter, since we did intend to move to some place closer to NUS. I rent a room just opposite to the Buona Vista MRT Station(W7), 3 bus stops from NUS, or half an hour's walk. I lived there for 1.5 years. The house owners, an old couple, has been very nice to me. The old lady even cooked for me sometimes when I returned earlier than the midnight. But you see, I seldom returned before midnight.

Then what was I doing all day in school? Well, nothing much, just playing on the net. :-)

I was so addicted to the internet that everyday I spent at least a dozen hours on it. One of my major playgrounds was ACT, the newsgroup alt.chinese.text. I used the penname "Dong1 Xie2"(East Evil, or in Chinese, ¶«Ð°), and wrote a series of book reviews on the Chinese emprise novels. These reviews made me famous on the Chinese net, and were forwarded to virtually every place where there's discussion on emprise novels. You can find the articles here. And a version of ACT history here.

I made a lot of friends on the net through these writings and some other discussions on the net.

As to the academic works, well, I didn't have to take any course for the master's degree. Just doing research was sufficient. I wrote a bunch of programs and some papers. One of them was accepted by the authoritative journal Machine Translation. And that was my major academic achievement in NUS.
 

This picture was taken by my father when he visited Singapore in Aug 1996.

At that time I was preparing for TOEFL, GRE for the applications to U.S. PhD programs. I started the applications in Nov 1996, in hope that one of the good universities I applied for would like to pick me up. I knew the competition in the Computer Science applications is always very very intense. Yet I was still so ignorant that I thought a GRE general score of 2200 would be an advantage in my applications.

After a long waiting, I was dissapointed in the end. I began to receive the rejection letters one by one from the good schools in late Feb 1997, Yale, CMU, UIUC...

The other serious problem was, my scholarship at NUS expired in Feb 1997, which meant I had to do real job-hunting if I wanted to stay in Singapore. I had planned to leave Singapore after the scholarship was expired if I could get admission from good U.S. universities. Now that no admission was received so far, I had to make a good plan to stay in Singapore longer. Otherwise, if I just returned to China with nothing else, I would become a total loser.

I was lucky to find a contract programmer position with IBM Singapore through an agency CSA without much effort. My skill happened to be needed by that IBM project, that's all. I was very very unsatisfied with this settlement in the beginning, since the salary CSA paid me was low, and this agency didn't allow me to apply for Singapore Permanent Residence until I worked for 9 months. The only reason I accepted this job offer was a thought that, work experience with such a computer giant as IBM might become a real advantage in the next year's applications to U.S. PhD programs.

This thought was proven damn right later, not only in the PhD applications, but also in the next round job-hunting.

After I started working for IBM, I received other rejection letters from UCI, UMass, UPenn, and finally, even MSU rejected me in May 1997. You can imagine how I felt when I received the last rejection letter. Not only dissapointed. I was deeply depressed. Life was not beautiful anymore. I didn't have the courage to face my friends that I have bragged before.

Of course my friends were all consoling me. They cheered me up to face the reality, to try the second time.
 

 This was me, on the dreamy island -- Singapore. ^_^

Except for this, the work was also quite a happy life. When we were not rushing for project cut-over date, I could almost do anything I wanted in the office. I moved to a place very close to the office, and sometimes spent the whole night in the office to(well, don't tell other people, especially those from IBM^_^) apply for the U.S. PhD programs.

The project we were working on was infohub.asia. No, don't try this link. It became obsolete soon after I left IBM. It was believed that with the Asian economic crisis, IBM was also restructuring, just like the other companies in Singapore did. For some reason this project was chosen to be closed, although part of it was then merged into the digilib project organized by Singapore government.

I received the degree scroll of Master of Science in Sep 1997. That's almost the happiest day in the whole year 1997. I could temporaly forget all the unhappiness I had in the last PhD applications and worries I was already having toward the next applications.

In Jan 1998, I started applying for Singapore PR. Before the application was approved, it's real hard to take it easy. In fact I heard our project would verly likely be closed during that period, which meant my contract would not be extended - I might have to start another round of job-hunting if I didn't get PR before my contract expired. And at the same time there's no news from the U.S. schools yet. Worrying about three things at the same time(PR, job, PhD admissions), it was really the darkest time before the dawn.

Then good news came one after the other. With a M.S. degree from NUS, my PR application was easily approved. Faster than most people, I guess. Before I had the chance treating friends, an email from Duke told me they admitted me!

Life is Beautiful!!!

I was so happy, losing job didn't seem to be a big issue to me.

A couple of weeks later, Georgia Tech's offer also arrived. The headache I had then was to choose one from these two schools. Another kind of headache. A happy headache. I happily left IBM, with my boss's fairly good reference letter. :-)

I didn't hurry to find another job. Making money was good, but idling at home was also not bad. I read a lot of novels that I had long liked to read but had not got the time to do; I ate every kind of good food I could think of in Singapore; I watched movies and TV and VCD all the day...

Until one day an agent told me they found a temporary job position at Merrill Lynch Singapore for me. I felt the name was kind of familiar, but had no idea what this company makes. Before going to the interview, I did some research on the web...and...FAINT!!! That is the Number One stock broker in the world! It's BIG money that they're really making everyday! Hahah...What a dumb person I had been...

In Merrill Lynch I worked on a short-term database project. The workload was heavy since I had to finish it before I left Singapore. But everything went in the right direction, and my boss there even now still believes I am one of the two best programmers he has ever hired. :-)

I went to the U.S. embassy in Singapore to apply for the F-1 visa during this period work. The application got rejected in the first time, and approved in the second time. That's another long long story. If you can read Chinese, see my articles written on the "goabroad" board on bbs.xmu.edu.cn.

I returned to China before coming to the states. This picture was taken at the Xiamen Airport on Aug 12, 1998 I left Xiamen. The difference between this and the last airport picture is, my brother had already married.