A Conversation on Princeton with Hu Chao 趙瑚 *78

Hu Chao 趙瑚 *78 is an electrical engineer and an entrepreneur. He is a co-founder of Etron Technology 鈺創科技, TXC Corporation 台晶科技 and ESMT Ltd. 晶豪科技. He is a pioneer in Taiwan's DRAM industry. He graduated from the National Taiwan University (NTU) in 1968 with a B.S. in Electrical Engineering. He received a Ph.D. in 1978 from the Department of Electrical Engineering of Princeton University where he studied under Walter C. Johnson and Murray A. Lampert. His dissertation is titled "A Combined Corona and Photoemission Technique for Studying the Electronic Properties of Thin Insulating Films, with Application to Silicon Dioxide and Silicon Nitride". 

Before you went to Princeton University you studied electrical engineering at the NTU. How did you decide to major in electrical engineering? 

I decided to study engineering because liberal arts were my weakness, while science and engineering were my strengths. When I was selecting a major for college, I asked my dad, "Which engineering field do you think is better?" The field I understood best was actually civil engineering, because my dad had a bunch of civil engineering books at home. But he convinced me not to pursue it. In his rather old-fashioned thinking, the first few years of civil engineering require going to construction sites, often in remote areas; he believed I couldn't handle going to remote construction sites. He thought electrical engineering would have better prospects.

Another choice would have been medicine, but I didn't want to be a doctor. I had poor health when I was young and often went to see doctors. I could see that being a doctor was really such hard work. This was in 1964, and making a living was quite important. I thought engineers were able to find jobs easily. So when I filled out my major for college, by process of elimination, I put electrical engineering at the top.

Since you didn't know too much about electrical engineering, did you like it?

In the first year of college, all the courses were required. Which subject I was interested in depended mostly on the teachers, not the subject itself. At NTU, the teachers I liked were both EM (electromagnetic) professors. Teachers have a great influence on students, so I studied EM. When I first came to America, I didn't start studying semiconductors right away, and I didn't go to Princeton.

Which university did you go to first?

I went to Syracuse University. When I was applying to schools, both of my sisters were at Syracuse already. My brother-in-law was in the chemical engineering department, my oldest sister was working, and my other sister was studying animal science.

Except for a few very large schools, not every electrical engineering department has all the sub-fields. For example, Princeton didn't have EM. I knew roughly which schools would give scholarships to us. My grades at NTU were not the very best. If you didn't count the overseas Chinese students, I was probably in the top 20%. This wasn't the official ranking, but I had a sense of my own abilities compared to others.

At that time NTU asked each student to only apply to three graduate schools. They didn't want the top students to apply to a bunch of schools and squeeze out their own people. Under these circumstances, for someone at my level, my chances of getting into the first-tier schools such as MIT, Stanford and Berkeley were not great.

I looked at the rankings of the various electrical engineering departments' graduate programs. Syracuse was surprisingly ranked 15th in electrical engineering. I knew it had EM and was quite strong. Since I only applied to three schools, in the end, Syracuse gave me a scholarship, while the other two schools didn't give me money. So the choice was simple.

How long did you study at Syracuse?

I studied for one year. After the first semester, I discovered that because I wasn't an American citizen, it would be very difficult to find work in America after graduation, because most companies required security clearance. And Taiwan didn't have that kind of work either. So I decided to give up EM after the first year and transfer to another school quickly.

I applied to the State University of New York at Stony Brook in late January, and they gave me a fellowship from the National Science Foundation. I believe someone else turned down the offer and I was the replacement. I stayed at Syracuse for the summer to finish the work my advisor assigned to me. Normally I would get $240 a month, but in summer it was $480. Over three months, it was quite a boost, especially since my living expenses at that time were about under $100 a month.

Syracuse was one of the few schools where master's students also had to write a thesis. Generally, a master's degree is two years, but I finished in one year.

Before we talk about Stony Brook, when did you decide to study semiconductors, instead of other electrical engineering subjects?

Electrical engineering was divided into two sides. One side could be called applied math, like computer science and control, which needed a very good math background. The other was applied physics, which included EM and solid-state physics; semiconductors are one area of solid-state, and the most promising one. So when I stopped doing EM, I couldn't just jump to the other side. Plus, I had learned a bit about semiconductors when I was in college.

How long did you stay at Stony Brook?

I arrived at Stony Brook in September, one day before the start of classes. I met my advisor to discuss my future plans. He said I needed to take these courses. Afterwards, for the rest of the semester, he never came to find me again, and I couldn't find him either. He didn't seem to have much interest in me as a student. In the second semester, I did very well in my coursework—all A's. For the summer, my advisor gave me a topic that required a very strong background in chemistry. I said to him, "Why didn't you tell me to study chemistry in the first semester? My chemistry background is not sufficient to do the work." He said, "You can learn." He then went on a year-long sabbatical and handed me over to another professor; at that time, Stony Brook only had two professors for solid-state.

My advisor had some equipment that his previous student had bought to do this topic, but that student was nowhere to be found. I didn't know how to use the new equipment, and there weren't any documents either.

At that time, I thought I had only two choices. One was to go find a bunch of chemistry books and start studying. I had to learn organic chemistry to be at the level of a college graduate. But I felt doing those chemistry things was going down the wrong path—not something someone with my background should study, at least not something I wanted to learn. The other option was to transfer again. I figured as long as there was a school that wanted me, I didn't mind being a year late. However, if I wasn't successful with the transfer, I would have to look for a job. At that time, practical training was two years. You entered a company and hoped the company could help you apply for permanent residence.

So I was back to applying to schools again. I applied to three schools: Stanford, UC Santa Barbara, and Princeton. At that time, my dad said if I couldn't get a scholarship, he could support me for one to two years. But I knew that was half of his savings. UC Santa Barbara was my safety school, and they gave me a scholarship. I was accepted at Stanford but without funding. Princeton put me on the waiting list. And when I went back to Taiwan for the summer, I received a phone call from Princeton, telling me I had been accepted off the waitlist. That's how I got to Princeton in 1972.

What was your impression of Princeton at that time? After being at Princeton, was it different from what you imagined?

I had only seen Princeton from photographs. I didn't have any big thoughts when going to Princeton. I only knew that this time I couldn't mess up. I couldn't transfer again, and I had to succeed.

I tried to ask around, but contacting my former classmates already at Princeton wasn't very easy. We didn't have mobile phones like we do now. I didn't even know where they lived. And they themselves weren't clear either, because living in dorms meant you moved to a different place every year. There were no phones in the dorm rooms, only in the hallways. So finding people wasn't that easy unless you wrote letters.

My sister drove over from Morristown and dropped me off at the dormitory. I was very impressed when I arrived at Princeton. I felt the buildings were very similar to those English colleges you saw in movies. I was a bit disappointed that I wasn't living in the Old Graduate College. I lived in the New Graduate College next to it. The new and old parts were connected. Later I learned the new part had some advantages—the radiators were better and not as noisy.

Did you have a roommate? What were the students like?

Single rooms were rare. Most were doubles, which consisted of two rooms: a living room with two desks and a bedroom with two beds. It was quite spacious. My roommate turned out to be from Hong Kong who went to college in the U.S. He spent most of his time with his Hong Kong classmates and usually only came back to the room to sleep. He was in computer science. When I entered, he was in electrical engineering, but by the time he graduated, the two departments had already separated. I tried to learn Cantonese from him, but my language ability was too poor.

I quite liked the environment at Princeton, which I could feel within the first two weeks. First, everyone living there was very serious about studying. The atmosphere was very good, though of course there were one or two exceptions. 

At that time, there was a guy in the physics department who people said was the best student in physics. Every day after dinner, he would just wander around looking for people to chat with. No one had time to talk with him, and everyone tried to avoid him. He was just so smart that he didn't need to work very hard. He graduated in three years, and afterwards joined the physics department.

Some people said Princeton people were very boring, that everyone was too serious. Maybe that was me as well. But I felt very comfortable. Of the four universities I attended, Princeton was my favorite. I felt at home. The graduate students at Princeton were all very gentle. I feel those few years were a highlight of my life. It was a very good four years.

There were some relaxing situations. We had a bar in the basement that opened at nine o'clock, where you could go drink beer and eat peanuts. But it only stayed open for a little over an hour. Of course, you could continue to stay there, but no more beer was served. I only went once to experience it. After dinner, I usually went to the large lounge to read the New York Times for half an hour. Afterwards, I would go back to my room to study.

I know in the old days the graduate dining hall required the students to wear black robes. Did you have to wear a black robe?

At that time, there were two dining halls. Both sides had the same food. One was formal where people served you. The servers would pour water for you, and when you finished drinking, you had to wait for them to come to refill it. I felt very awkward and didn't like it. I only went to the formal dining room a few times. I didn't buy a black robe and only borrowed it from someone else. There were people who liked the formal setup. The doors opened and everyone would be seated about ten minutes later. We would pray together then eat. It was very formal, just like in the movies.

The students at the two dining halls were different. The reason they opened an informal one was the number of students had increased too much; the formal one couldn't fit everyone. Later on, the informal one did better business than the formal one.

I often went to the dining hall alone instead of as part of a group. Sometimes I would meet people from different countries. The dining experience really depended on whether the person next to you had some interesting topics to talk about.

There was one table where people all spoke Chinese. They were all Chinese students with only one foreigner, who was a student of Wen Fang 方聞 studying Ming dynasty paintings. I think he took eight years to finish his PhD. He spent two years in Taiwan. His Chinese was very good. He said when he first came to Taiwan, no one could understand him because he spoke with a Beijing accent.

It sounds like your life was very regular at that time. You would go back to the dining hall for dinner at the same time every day.

At that time, if you didn't go back to the dining hall, you had nothing to eat.

So during the day you were just at E-Quad. Did you walk or ride a bicycle? The E-Quad is very far from the Graduate College.

Do you know why the Graduate College was placed so far away? The first Dean of the Graduate College really disliked the President. He deliberately put it in a very remote place, even separated by a golf course. I bought a second-hand bicycle, which was only useful for going from the Graduate College to the edge of the main campus. During class time, there were many people on the main thoroughfare, and you couldn't really ride fast. Sometimes I had to get off the bike and just push it. Also, parts of the campus have a steep slope. So I ended up selling the bicycle.

Where did you eat lunch?

Usually lunch was a sandwich that I made myself. At Princeton, the cost of the dorm plus dinner was very expensive—$200 was gone. At that time, prices were rising very quickly. I remember in the first year we had London broil once a week, and they even let us take seconds. In the second semester, no more seconds. After another year, sorry, no more of that stuff, only meatloaf. The inflation at that time was incredible, over ten percent a year. In the first semester, I thought the food was very expensive but the quality was very good. After the second semester, I felt things started going downhill.

Did the students from Taiwan often get together?

Basically everyone was busy with their own things. People were in different departments, so it was very hard to discuss with each other. So it was just during dinners everyone would gather for a bit.

Several of your classmates from NTU's electrical engineering department were also at Princeton.

Three people from my class went to Princeton: Chin-Tay Shih 史欽泰 *75, Shang-Yi Chiang 蔣尚義, and Zhuang. Among these three, I knew Shang-Yi the best. But he and I didn't overlap at Princeton. He transferred to Stanford after a year at Princeton. I did overlap with Chin-Tay.

How did you like the coursework at Princeton?

The first semester was mostly required courses. Princeton had a rule, at least in the electrical engineering department, to cut people after the final exams of the second semester. Usually 30% of the students would not continue. Actually, they would call you after the midterm exams. If the results were not good, you would need to be prepared to leave.

So some people would just get a master's degree and leave?

Whether they gave you a master's degree depended on how you chose your courses. With 24 credits, you could get a master quite easily. But if you didn't take enough courses, you would get nothing because Princeton didn't have summer school. You couldn't make up the credits. I didn't know Princeton was like this before I arrived.

In your first year, did you have to take courses from other departments such as in physics?

I mentioned before that electrical engineering had two sides: applied math and applied physics. For those in the applied math section, it was mandatory to take courses in the math department and have math as the first minor. They focused more on communication, so their second minor was usually computer science.

For us on the applied physics side, two of the four courses were in the physics department. Physics was our mandatory first minor. You could choose your second minor. Ching-Chu Chang 章青駒 *76 was the only one who chose math. The math we learned in college was very far from real math; Princeton's math was very strong. So you had to compete with students in the math department, which was extremely tough. After he went and studied math, our advisor (we had the same one) told all of us not to take math anymore.

Besides math, the other choice was chemistry. So I took a course on physical chemistry. It wasn't real chemistry. What they were actually teaching you was the physics needed to do physical chemistry.

With our two physics classes, the system basically forced us to compete with the students in the physics department, which was very strong. The more senior students in our department told us to pay special attention to the two courses in physics. If you didn't do well, you might be cut. The courses in our own department weren't a problem. 

I read an interview with Shang-Yi Chiang 蔣尚義 where he said Princeton was too academic and that was why he transferred to Stanford. Did you feel the same way about Princeton?

I think Princeton's teaching method, which focuses more on fundamental things, is correct. The chance that what you learn and what you use later will be the same is very small. And after you start working, what the industry needs, especially in semiconductors, will keep changing constantly. So the most important thing is to get the fundamentals right and get some concepts right.

You might say an undergraduate degree is enough, but in reality undergraduate coursework isn't quite sufficient. Graduate school gives you a very good base. The chance that your graduate school thesis topic is the same as the R&D topics you work on later is almost zero, unless you stay in the university. Like me, it was completely different, because what industry wants and what school teaches are two different things, at least in semiconductors. So what do you learn when you are doing your thesis?

What I learned is when you get a problem, how to look at that problem. This problem must be new, otherwise it won't be your thesis topic. So how do you look at this problem? How do you approach it? Graduate school gives you the time to tackle the problem. Once you enter the industry, they won't give you that much time. At school, you can spend one or two months pondering how you should tackle and study the problem. You go discuss with your advisor. This is a training process.

Shang-Yi later went to work on III-V compounds. One thing Stanford was definitely better than Princeton at was Stanford had more choices. From a ranking perspective, the semiconductors program at Stanford was also better. And if you were interested in entering the semiconductor industry, then you should go find teachers who were already collaborating with the industry. This was another area where Stanford was stronger. Princeton was more remote. But I don't think Princeton's teaching method was wrong. I think it was right. 

Did you have to be a Teaching Assistant?

Our department didn't have many Teaching Assistants (TAs). But Princeton's system required all Ph.D. students to have one semester of TA experience. People usually did it after passing the preliminary exam. I was an assistant for the undergraduate lab. Being a TA wasn't a burden, although I knew I wasn't very good at explaining things. I did the preparation work well and made sure every instrument was working before the class started. There were 12 people, all quite good and very serious. Towards the end of the semester, I asked everyone what they planned to do after graduation. To my surprise, not a single one was going to continue in EE. Several wanted to go to medical school, and a couple wanted to get an MBA. I wondered if I had a particularly strange class. My advisor said this problem had been bothering them for two or three years already. We didn't know the reason. Maybe the students just decided that EE didn't have much to offer.

Can you talk about your advisor?

I didn't get to choose an advisor. Our applications went to the EE department, which did the first screening. The remaining applicants would be discussed by the professors. The professor with the funding would decide which students he wanted. However, when you got the scholarship, the school didn't tell you who you would be working with. This was because they were afraid of some changes later. You only found out when you got to school.

My advisor Walter Johnson came to Princeton in 1937. I was born in 1947. He was well established. He didn't have a Ph.D., only a B.S. At that time, Ph.D.s were not that common. Nevertheless, it was still uncommon for someone with just a BS to become a professor at Princeton, which showed he was very special. His technical knowledge was very good. He worked at Bell Labs and was later recruited to Princeton. He wrote a book on electromagnetics. But I never read that book because it was already outdated by then. When he arrived at Princeton, the EE department was slowly starting to change—moving from industrial electronic power and slowly changing to semiconductors and communications. He was involved in a lot of curriculum planning—how should it change and how should an electrical engineer be trained?

My other advisor was Murray Lampert, and he didn't have a Ph.D. either, just a master's. He was very, very sharp. Johnson thought more deeply but not very fast. Lampert was fast and fierce. We were all afraid of him, especially during preliminary oral exams. He was very tricky. At my exam, he kept pressing me with one question about silicon: if an electron hits a silicon atom, how much energy is needed to knock it out? I said, "I don't know, I'd have to look up tables to calculate." I thought this question was unnecessary. He forced me to answer. I told him three times, "I don't know," before he gave up. He then asked me whether hitting a silicon or germanium atom requires higher energy. I said germanium. "Why?" "Because it's heavier." He said, "Correct," then told me the answer. This was a trap. If I had answered randomly by guessing, I'd be in trouble. Basically, he was saying when you do academics, you shouldn't guess. If you don't know, say you don't know. But he still wanted to test whether you understood the theory. What does it take to knock something out? Someone studying chemistry might think it's related to chemical bonds. Actually, it has nothing to do with that in this context—it's momentum and energy. Heavy things need more energy. He was testing you on this.

At that time, we had a weekly seminar where our professors would invite outside people to come speak. Everyone had to attend as it was mandatory. Missing once or twice was okay. Everyone knew the two old professors would look around the room to see who wasn't there. These talks let us get in touch with the outside world. The people who came were usually quite famous. I remember one time they invited a rising star from Bell Labs. He was in his thirties. After he spoke for a short time, Professor Lampert started questioning him. He pinned the speaker down and didn't really let him continue. He thought the speaker's assumptions were wrong. He paid a great deal of attention to assumptions. Assumptions must be correct; otherwise, everything that follows is garbage. In the end, Lampert still allowed him to present his results even though the assumptions were wrong.

This was also an education—some things you take for granted, but after you put them together and integrate them, you need to check again. Otherwise, you have contradictions in the middle, and what you produce is garbage. I heard Tsung-Dao Lee 李政道 was even fiercer than him—in such situations he wouldn't let people continue speaking. Why waste everyone's time? Lampert was still more polite.

Our teachers knew people from Bell Labs and industry, which made job hunting more convenient. But when you came out in the wrong year, it still didn't work. Semiconductors are very big now, but in the seventies, semiconductors were very small compared to other things. It was highly dependent on government funding. When the government caught a small cold, we got pneumonia. So I was very nervous before job hunting, because two classmates ahead of me went out and couldn't find jobs. Ching-Chu Chang 章青駒 couldn't find work. If such a smart guy couldn't find work, wasn't I doomed? He returned to Taiwan. Han-Sheng Lee *76 first went to Southern Methodist University as a postdoc for nine months or so before going to GM's Research Lab.

When did you start looking for work?

In 1976. I gave Professor Johnson periodic updates on my progress. He said I had enough data from the lab work and could start to write my dissertation. The fact that he felt I had enough was the key. After all, I could have continued to do more, such as study another material.

Johnson also asked if I had financial problems. By then I was married, and prices kept going up. My monthly stipend only increased to $300, and I couldn't get into the university housing. Princeton graduate housing guaranteed first-years a place to live. Second-years had the highest priority. Third-year students needed to be lucky. Fourth-years had zero chance. I found a big room on the side of a big house. The owner partitioned the room and rented it out for $280. After paying some taxes and bills, I basically had nothing left. We were eating into our savings and had to borrow money from home. Professor Johnson told me to look for a job and to write my dissertation while working. So I quickly went job hunting.

Can you talk about your dissertation?

In the EE department at that time, basically the school expected your advisor to support you plus people in the department who couldn't get money. Princeton had an overhead of 100%. If you got two dollars from the government, one dollar went to the university and the other dollar went to the engineering school. Your one dollar got divided again because some of it had to go to pay for the overhead in the E-Quad. Basically, all the private universities were like this. Frankly, what we chose to research was all decided by DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency). How DARPA decided which topic to assign, I don't know. Our group was all looking at the interface between the semiconductor films and insulating films. Several people's theses, such as Ding-Yuan Yang 楊丁元 *75, Ching-Chu Chang 章青駒, and Han-Sheng Lee, all revolved around this. Our work was monitored by the Naval Lab.

At that time, the U.S. Department of Defense systematically wanted to foster electric engineering talent. Their basic research gave money to schools to do some relatively less applied and more fundamental studies. At that time, MOS was the preferred transistor. There were two types of transistors—MOS and bipolar. Everyone was optimistic about MOS being able to do large-scale integration. Around 1975, Intel's 8080 came out, the first one that could be used for PCs. Prior to that, these things existed in the military but weren't mass-produced. The Department of Defense was very interested in studying these things and using them to make military equipment.

So job hunting was equally difficult for you then?

I thought it would be difficult, but it actually wasn't. In just one year, the whole environment had improved, and I quickly found three jobs. The first was at GM Research Lab where Han-Sheng was already working. Apparently he was doing well. After only six months, his boss called Professor Johnson to ask if there were more people who could come work. Two weeks later, I had an interview at Texas Instruments (TI). The third offer was from David Sarnoff Research Center at RCA. TI's pay was the lowest, only $20,000. Sarnoff was $23,000, and GM was the most generous at $25,000. I asked Johnson which one I should accept. I didn't want to go to GM because semiconductors weren't the main part of their business, and Michigan was too cold, colder than Syracuse. I really liked the Princeton area and wanted to stay in New Jersey. But Johnson said RCA was already in the second tier. If I really wanted to do semiconductors, I should go to a mainstream place like TI or Intel. So even though the salary was the lowest, I accepted the offer from TI. Johnson paid a lot of attention to the industry. I really appreciated Johnson for giving me advice from his perspective as an elder to a young person. You couldn't ask for more from an advisor.

In retrospect, going to TI was the right choice?

Yes, otherwise I would have gone in circles and wouldn't know where I'd end up. When I left Princeton, Johnson told me, "When you are at work, you'll find some people don't like you. And if you can't find a reason why, then they just don't like you. Avoid these people if you can. If you can't and if you have to work with them, then change job." He was talking about racial discrimination. He said you can't win on this thing. For him to be willing to say that was really rare. I don't think any graduate school advisor today would tell their students this kind of thing. He also said, "Don't let this affect your thoughts about other people." This was another very important point. He was a remarkable advisor. After I started working, I would go back to visit him once a year.

How long did you work at Texas Instruments?

A year and eight months. I finished my dissertation, but I still had to go back to Princeton for my thesis defense. At Princeton, Professor Johnson asked me how things were at TI. I told him I would arrive at work at 8:30 in the morning, and I would be dealing with things in the processing lab as well as the measurement lab. Except for lunch, I didn't sit down at my desk until 3:30 in the afternoon. Then there were usually a pile of things for me to look at. This was pretty good for the first year because I learned a lot. But I didn't have time to think.

Johnson asked if this was just my boss or the whole company. I said the whole company had this trend, but our group was especially busy. He said, "Do you want to change companies?" I said I wanted to go to a real research lab. He said there were only two places—Bell Labs and IBM. He said he knew people at both places and would make some calls. So I later went to work at IBM. I ended up working at IBM for thirteen years before coming back to Taiwan.

The interview was held in 2025 in Taipei. The interview has been translated from Chinese and edited for clarity.

A Conversation on Princeton with Hui-Wen Lu 盧慧紋 *03

Hui-Wen Lu 盧慧紋 *03 is a Director and Professor of the Graduate Institute of Art History at National Taiwan University (NTU). She is also the Director of the Art Museum of the Graduate Institute of Art History at NTU. She graduated from NTU in 1993 with a B.A. in Economics and in 1996 with a M.A. in Art History. Her Master’s thesis advisor was Shen Fu 傅申 *76. She received a Ph.D. in 2003 from the Department of Art and Archaeology of Princeton University where she studied under Wen C. Fong 方聞 ‘51*58. Her dissertation is titled, A New Imperial Style of Calligraphy: Stone Engravings in Northern Wei Luoyang, 494–534 and is a study of calligraphy’s role in the construction and reinforcement of political cultural values in early medieval China. Through a historical, archaeological, and stylistic reconstruction of Luoyang calligraphy, the dissertation uncovers an ancient imperial tradition of Chinese art that has largely been overlooked. 

Before we talk about Princeton, I want to start by asking, how did you go from majoring in economics in college to going into Chinese art history for your graduate studies? 

I wanted to go into the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at NTU. But my father said no, and that I should do something more rewarding. He made me sign up for the Department of Economics. It was interesting. I met some good friends and great professors. I also did a National Science and Technology Council Fellowship (國科會大專生計劃) with one of the professors. I was not completely against economics nor uninterested; I was actually pretty devoted. I took a lot of courses with very few students, which were like seminars. We had to do a lot of readings in English. But economics requires a lot of math that I could not do. A lot of my friends were preparing for a MBA or for a career in banking. I just decided that was not what I wanted. So I took a lot of random courses in my senior year, such as on the history of Chinese music and the history of Chinese painting. 

I still remember the course on the history of Chinese painting was taught by Ms. Tsui-Hsing Hou 侯翠杏. She was a painter herself and from a well-to-do family. The class took place outside of the main campus. She would arrive in a huge black Mercedes and her driver would be waiting for her outside. She was always dressed like a princess for class and then just read from the book. We didn't have any slides. A lot of my friends and classmates were not listening. One time I decided that I wanted to try to understand what she was talking about, but I just couldn’t. It seemed like a disaster.

But Ms. Hou took us to the National Palace Museum, and back then every fall there was a big show of national treasures. She would show us Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountaisn 富春山居圖 by Huang Gongwang 黃公望 and works by Fan Kuan 范寬 and Guo Xi 郭熙. She asked us write essays on the artworks. To do the assignments, I had to do a lot of readings which I found quite interesting. 

How we were taught in art history is very different from how we teach now. Lillian Lan-ying Tseng, who graduated from NTU before me and is now teaching at Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, New York University, also took Ms. Hou’s class in college. We used to talk about how we were educated yet we turned out okay. 

I also sat in undergraduate and graduate classes by Professor Shou-Chien Shih 石守謙 *84 and Professor Pao-Chen Chen 陳葆真 *87. I didn’t learn art history in any systematic way before graduate school. But I think that the education of art or art history has two tracks: one is in the academics and the other is in the museum. As long as one of these tracks is open, you can have a way out. My own experience taught me to believe in museums and in making art accessible to all. I decided to prepare for the exam to get into graduate school. My English score on the exam was very high, and I think that was what got me into graduate school. So that was how I started. 

What did your father think about the change in your career? 

I did finish four years of economics so he didn't say anything. But many years later my mother told me that they were really worried about my decision to go into art history. She went to Xingtian Temple 行天宮 to ask about my fortune. Luckily she got a good result so they didn't say no you cannot do this. But when I was working on my Ph.D., my father urged me to take the civil service exam; he was still worried about my future. It is just very typical of Asian parents. Now that my daughter is going to college this year, it has given me more perspective and understanding of where my parents were coming from. 

Did you come from a family with interests in the arts or this was something you developed on your own? 

Not on my father’s side as they are mostly doctors, lawyers, or in business. But on my mother's side, my grandfather was very interested in art and one of my uncles was a painter. They were very into a lot of the do-it-yourself things, such as painting the walls and fixing things at home. They had these huge toolboxes in the house and they would tell me that I should get one as well. They liked working with their hands. My family is really traditional, so I just had to get good grades and go to good schools.  

You studied with Professor Shen Fu for you graduate studies. What was he like as a teacher? 

I got into the graduate program in 1993 and Professor Fu came back in 1994, my second year. In the first year, I took a lot of courses with Professor Shih. If Professor Fu didn't come back to Taiwan I probably would have just studied with Professor Shih. But Professor Shih encouraged us to study with Professor Fu and to concentrate in calligraphy, which I was interested in doing.  

After his recent passing I wrote an essay in remembrance of him. ‘94 was his first year back in Taiwan and he didn't have much experience in teaching. As students we were a bit nervous. At that time I didn’t feel he was nervous, but looking back I feel he was learning how to be a teacher. He was always dressed in a suit with shiny shoes and his hair was always well coiffed. He would come to class with loads of slides and ask us to talk about the images. He didn't say much, instead he just asked students to try our best to come up with something. 

Because you have to say things in class you have to be prepared — read before the class, flip through the catalog, or at least remember some names. There are many kinds of teachers. Some of them would just hold your hands and show you things. Others would just have you try yourself and if you have questions just ask; the results of the students would be very different with some being very good and others very bad. With Professor Fu, it was really up to the students to decide their own standards. 

What was your idea of Princeton before you went? 

My teachers all went to Princeton, therefore I felt that was where I should go if I wanted to pursue a Ph.D. in painting and calligraphy. But in the late 90’s Princeton was probably not the most popular choice. A lot of students got into Princeton but decided not to go. Instead, they went to Harvard with Wu Hung 巫鴻, Stanford with Richard Vinograd, or Yale for Richard Barnhart *67. Back in the late 90’s Princeton seemed so old school. There were more trendy things happening elsewhere. At Princeton, Professor Fong was still talking about the dating of early paintings from Song and Yuan dynasties. The trend back then was to go into archaeology with a lot of these new discoveries in mainland China or study the later periods such as, Ming, Qing or even 19th and 20th centuries, or to approach Chinese art and visual and material materials with social theories.

Were you thinking about going to other universities? 

I didn't get in to other schools because no one would take me with my proposal in Chinese calligraphy. I felt like I was on the margin of the field. People were doing studies on painting, archaeology, and Buddhist sculptures. With these fields, you have a lot of people to talk to even in the western academic world, but not so much with calligraphy. So I think Princeton was the only place I could go, but I was very lucky to have the opportunity to study with Professor Wen Fong. I am also very grateful to Professor Shih for encouragement and for his recommendation.

Did you have some expectation before you go to Princeton and did anything surprise you when you got to Princeton?

Do you know Freda Murck *95? She and her husband were living in Taipei in the 90’s. When she found out I was going to Princeton she invited me to her house for a party. She said, Now you're going to Princeton we have to prepare you. I didn't know what to expect. After I got to Princeton, I still received letters and cards from her encouraging me; it was really heartwarming. I think she was really worried if I would survive. Li-Chiang Lin 林麗江 *98, who was a few years ahead of me, told me that when you are facing Professor Fong, you can never back down and you have to earn his respect.

In my first year at Princeton, there were a lot of cultural shocks. I learned how to do small talk, which I didn’t know before. I had to learn how to cook for myself. I was not on a meal plan because I did not live in the graduate college. I lived in the Hibben-Magie Apartments, which were pretty far from the art history department. I often stayed at the library until it closed at midnight and then walked home; Princeton was very safe. I had two roommates who were both first-year graduate students. I didn’t cook much and often opted for Burger King on Nassau Street. I didn't have a car. If I needed to shop for groceries I had to take the shuttle. 

In Taiwan I thought my English was pretty good. But if I had to make a presentation in English I had to do a lot of preparation. Writing was really difficult for me as well since I never really learned how to write in English. I was invited to write some entries for the exhibition catalogue, The Embodied Image: Chinese Calligraphy from the John B. Elliott Collection, and it was a challenge. The format and the requirements for a catalogue essay or entry were something I was not prepared for. Robert Harrist *89 at Columbia University was the editor of the book and really helped me a lot. Dora Ching *11, currently the Executive Director of the Tang Center for East Asian Art at Princeton, also helped me with my writing. If one of my students are going to start graduate school in the U.S. now, I would tell her to take some writing courses. 

In my second year I moved to Butler Apartments down by Lake Carnegie. My second year roommate was my classmate Christine Tan *01. She's from Canada and a native English speaker, so that helped with my English speaking and fluency. We also had The New York Times delivered to our place. In the morning I would make coffee for myself and read the Times. Reading the Times gave me so much pleasure and I learned from the writing. I also liked the sections on art and architecture or exhibition and dance reviews. I would notice how they described the buildings and art exhibitions. I would write down specific sentences to analyze and learn from their writing styles.

Criticism in the public domain is one thing that we don't really have in Taiwan. A year before you arrived at Princeton, the National Palace Museum had a show at the Metropolitan Museum. A few years after there was a symposium on authenticity based on the painting Riverbank 溪岸圖 by Dong Yuan 董元. Chinese art was very much in the news in the U.S. and much of that involved Princeton because of Professor Fong. Did these things have an effect on you as a student?

The debate was indeed one of the most noteworthy events during my Princeton years. We discussed the painting in class. We all attended the symposium as well. Some scholars say the painting is from the 10th century and others say it is from the 20th century by Chang Dai-Chien 張大千, and yet some others say it’s in between. It's not a difference of a hundred years, but a thousand years. These scholars in the debate were very established in the field, so it was not like a random person off the street. So you can imagine it could have been a crisis in our field. 

All his life, Professor Fong was trying to establish step-by-step the dating of paintings. You can take a painting and according to its formal features you can decide on its date and attribution. I remember one time he took us to the storeroom at the Metropolitan Museum and brought out the Riverbank 溪岸圖 and asked us for our opinion. I said that this looks very similar to a work by the 11th century painter Guo Xi 郭熙 at the Palace Museum in Taipei. He was not satisfied with the answer because he thought it was a 10th century painting. I thought it was just another discussion in class, but many years later he still remembered that moment. He would ask me if I still thought it was an 11th century painting. He cares so much about the difference between the 10th and 11th centuries because he believes there is a significant distinction in the development of Chinese painting history. The 10th century still belongs to the previous stage, characterized by the visual habits and ways of depicting nature that have been in place since the Tang Dynasty, while the 11th century marks the beginning of a whole new era.

I didn't realize it was sort of a crisis. I just thought it was kind of interesting that they had a whole symposium on one painting, I thought it was open ended and the question was not determined that day. I still remember the collector, Chi-Chien Wang 王季遷, said at the end of the day in Chinese that 真金不怕火煉 (true gold doesn’t fear fire).

You were at the symposium? 

Yes. At that time I was living and working in New York City. I was free for the weekend so I went and stayed for the whole day. Actually my classmate at Princeton, Joseph Cho ‘94*97, was the graphic designer for the book, Issues of Authenticity in Chinese Painting.

People outside of the field thought if the experts could not even agree on the date of a painting, and the difference was between the 10th and 20th century, there must be something wrong with the discipline. Professor Fong and his team at the Metropolitan Museum were directly tackling this challenge. They extensively collected examples of early paintings, both from museum collections and archaeological finds, utilizing the stylistic analysis methods that the Princeton School excels at for analysis and comparison. They also employed scientific testing methods to conduct a thorough examination of the painting Riverbank. For us graduate students, witnessing all of this has been an unforgettable learning experience. Today, almost no one claims that it is a work by Chang Dai-Chien. As Fu Shen said, those who claim that this painting was done by Chang Dai-Chien neither understand ancient paintings nor have a proper understanding of Chang Dai-Chien himself. Fu was an expert of both. However, there are still some disagreements regarding whether Riverbank is a piece from the 10th, 11th, or even 12th century, as well as whether it is an authentic work by Dong Yuan. Professor Fong often said that he felt like a dinosaur when he listened to some lectures by other professors and scholars at conferences. He thought that he was outdated. But in fact his beliefs and methods have always been effective. 

Professor Fong has been described as a formalist and a stylist. Was he more interested in the development of styles rather the the individuals?

It's not exactly like that. He talked about the style, technique, composition, and brushwork. You can follow certain elements to understand a Chinese painting, that includes its date, authenticity, and attribution. He believed that there's a history of painting. He also talked about the background of the painter, the meaning of the painting, and the symbolism of the elements. But in the 90s, the field was no longer satisfied with this, and turned toward more complex things, such as putting more emphasis on the social context of the artwork. For archaeology, scholars are interested in how the entire arrangement of the tomb reflects the views on life and death of people at that time. Professor Fong would try very hard to communicate with the wider community. He used a lot of Western philosophies and theories in his articles. He would also show his articles to his western colleagues and ask them for comments and feedback. But for us, those theories make his articles hard to read and to understand and sometimes irrelevant to what he wanted to say. But his later articles, such as Art as History, were more clear. 

For us to go on job market, I was somehow lacking confidence. I didn’t think people would be interested in my Princeton background, in my specialty in calligraphy, or in the problems I solved in my thesis. But looking back on that I feel that it was my own problem. My excessive humility and self-doubt came from an Eastern society where you would always feel that you are not good enough. In America you really have to learn to promote yourself and convince others of your expertise.

What Professor Fong was like in class? Based on what I read, he sounded like a very demanding teacher.

We always had our seminars on Monday afternoons. We started at around 2 o'clock and we would go on to around 6 o'clock or even later. When I was there, he was working on a large essay and some sections for The Embodied Image: Chinese Calligraphy from the John B. Elliot Collection (1999). He would take his drafts to class and read them to us. We would just sit there and listen and take notes. Afterwards he asked for our comments and input. We also had to do presentations. I remember my first presentation was on Zhao Menfu 趙孟頫. After the presentation I just went back to my apartment and lied down on the couch. I couldn't do anything else because I was so exhausted. It was partly a language issue and also the pressure I felt with presenting for the first time in front of my professor and my peers. There were around five or six students in the class. 

Professor Fong spent a lot of time working with individual students. When he was working with the students on their dissertations, he would ask the students to bring in all the images and they would talk in the seminar room. There were always a lot of books, catalogues, and photographs mounted on cardboard. The photos were kept in the drawers and we would lay them out on the tables. We would organize the images by putting one next to another and shuffling things around. Everything was centered around the artworks, and arguments would come with the moving of the images. He would help you develop your ideas by moving the images. In doing so you would come up with new ideas and arguments. I realized this was where my professors at NTU got their ideas on how to teach us. 

There is a Chinese translation of a long article by Professor Fong on Chinese calligraphy. I was asked to write an introduction* to Professor Fong’s research, and I talked about this process. I said the process usually involved rising tempers where either the professor or the students would get mad. Inevitably someone would be disappointed over the failure of someone else not seeing the concept. Because the process took long hours, it had a tendency to get people to lose their confidence. Now we only have PowerPoint files and everything is fixed and linear. It will be great if one day we can have a big screen as a table to shuffle images around.

* Hui-Wen Lu, “Introduction: Wen Fong’s Research on Chinese Calligraphy,” in Wen C. Fong, Chinese Calligraphy: Theory and History (translated into Chinese by Hui-Wen Lu and Che-ying Hsu) (Shanghai: Shanghai Shuhua Chubanshe, 2019), pp. 7-20. 盧慧紋，〈導讀：書為心畫──方聞的中國書法史研究〉，收入方聞著，盧慧紋、許哲瑛譯，《中國書法：理論與歷史》（上海：上海書畫出版社，2019），頁7-20.）

Tell us a little bit how you decided on your dissertation topic or what are some other ones that you considered but rejected.

My dissertation topic was on the Northern Wei engravings and calligraphy. If you look at all the other topics by Princeton graduates, mine is not a typical one. A typical Princeton dissertation topic would be about a piece from the Metropolitan Museum collection or the Princeton collection. It would be one piece that you study thoroughly. You focus on how the trees, the rocks, and the mountains are done, study the inscriptions on the painting, the inscriptions attached to the painting, and all the seals. Then you study about the artist and his purpose; at what stage of his life and to whom he was trying to communicate with his art. Ultimately the focus is on one single piece where you start with small things to argue for a bigger picture. For mine, I have always been intrigued by how Northern Wei calligraphers and craftsmen made these great calligraphy pieces. There are these very sharp carved traces, not written, in very tectonic and robust styles, which I have always liked. I suggested this topic to Professor Fong and he didn't say anything. But we decided that the larger meaning of this topic could be how Chinese calligraphy transformed from Clerical script to Standard script around the 5th century. My dissertation will contribute to our understanding of one of the most important events in the history of Chinese art: the formation and development of regular script before it took its modern form under Tang court calligraphers in the seventh century. For him it was important that the topic served a larger purpose. The topic only worked if it was about the big picture, here being a transformative stage in the development of calligraphy.  

The pieces from Northern Wei were anonymous as opposed to specific artist. This seems to fit with Professor Fong’s idea about developing a period or style.

He did care about individuals, but he also focused on the collective. You wouldn’t want to focus on one tree instead of the forest. However, in Northern Wei there were many anonymous pieces.  

There were many steles in your dissertation. How many trips did you take to China?

My trips served all different purposes, not just for my dissertation. For my dissertation, the main trip I took was in the summer of 1999. I went to Henan 河南 and Shanxi 陝西 provinces; to the big cities and also some remote areas with caves. Being at a prestigious university in the U.S. made mainland China accessible to me. If I wanted to visit a particular institute, Princeton would open the door for me. That was something I appreciated about the Princeton education. Taiwan in the late 90’s was not that open to mainland China. The U.S. and China had more connections between the people and the objects and that made things a lot easier. With Professor Fong’s recommendation letter I would be well received by the heads of the various art and archaeology institutes.

Let’s talk a little bit about Northern Wei. One part of your dissertation was about the political and historical background of that period. Professor Ying Shih Yu 余英時 has described that time as one of the freest periods in Chinese history. Was that one of the factors that attracted you to that period of time?

The first thing that drew me to this topic is the calligraphy itself. If you think about the entire period, all these different political centers had their own way of visual expressions, and these engraved calligraphies were a part of it. One of the major arguments I make is what we called Northern Wei style 北魏體 was a product of very high, concentrated political power. The style appeared in 494 when the Northern Wei relocated its capital to Luoyang in central China, and then when the Northern Wei regime fell apart this style went away too. I believe the crisp, angular edges of strokes and the reduction of three-dimensional turns into flat shapes are effects that were deliberately pursued by the Northern Wei Luoyang calligraphers. It arose from a collaborative effort between the calligrapher and the carver. But it was only present for 40 years. Even within the 40 years, which was not very long, you could still see the development. You see the interplay of the chisel and the brush. And at the end of the Northern Wei, around the late 520s and early 530s, it was a mess. It echoed the political situation at the time.

Hui-Wen Lu, , A New Imperial Style of Calligraphy: Stone Engravings in Northern Wei Luoyang, 494–534, 2003, p.364

Is it fair to say that the styles are always driven by politics or by a larger force?

This is just one aspect of it. If you look at the long history of Chinese calligraphy, you can make a very rough division between the emphasis on the monumental with a concern for publicity, demonstrativeness, and political authority, and what served the ideology of self-expression. This philosophy was also from Professor Fong, who thought that there is a dynamic relationship between the two. These two divisions impacted each other. If you have a very strong government and political power, it will overpower the private segment. During the Northern Wei period, it was chaotic. But during those 40 years, it was a very tightly controlled government where you would have a specific calligraphic style made for it. Every period and every government had its own public and private styles. It's our job to chart how the styles developed and how they varied across different time periods.

I find the time you were at Princeton to be quite interesting because it seemed to be a period of transition. Professor Fong retired in ‘99, and the Department brought in a new professor, Jerome Silbergeld. Was it really a time of transition and were things changing between the start of your Princeton school career and the end of your dissertation?

I was the last student that studied with Professor Fong, but I was not the last one to finish. I said this earlier that in the late 90’s, we all felt that Princeton was so old-schooled. However, it was not like what you imagined. It was not like this powerful figure left and chaos ensued. We always had a sense of crisis as if we had to work hard to avoid being wiped out.

Wen Fong Retirement Party on June 6, 2000 (from left Ping Foong, Wen Fong, Anna Suh, Hui-Wen Lu, Christine Tan, Dora Ching)

I assume you had to take another language for the Ph.D. program. What did you take? What were some of the courses you took outside of your department?

Japanese and French. My field of specialty required Japanese. The Department of Art and Archaeology required us to take a Western language other than English. I took Japanese in Taiwan. But at Princeton they asked me to take Japanese again. I said that would be too much for my first year. I told the Japanese professor that I took many years of Japanese in Taiwan, and I asked for a waiver. The professor was not too happy and as a means of discouragement, he asked me to read a Japanese article on the spot. Even if I could do it with perfection, I knew it’s best for me to retake the language. Eventually I agreed to take Japanese over the summer and actually went to Hokkaido for my Japanese course. If you wanted to study Japanese, Princeton could send you to Japan. I couldn’t imagine that. The top one percent of the universities do this. It was so luxurious to be able to travel for a language course. In Hokkaido I had a host family and I took a Japanese course every day for the summer, which really helped me improve. 

Another summer I had to take French which was mostly for reading. I couldn't speak a word of French, but I could do translation. For a summer I had to translate documents from French to English and we learned the basic rules of grammar. You would look up the French words in the dictionary then rearrange them into English. I took a lot of courses in the East Asian Studies Department with Yu Ying Shih 余英時, Yu-kung Kao 高友工 and Yang Lu 陸揚 *99. I also took a class with Susan Naquin, who focused on material culture, and Qing history and culture. She was very strict but helpful. I remember once I showed her my grant proposal and asked what she thought. She just said it’s different. I didn't know it meant bad. I didn’t know how to write a grant proposal.

I took Professor Robert Bagley's course and it was really interesting. He asked the graduate students to take his lecture that was for undergraduates. At first I thought I already knew bronzes from my courses at NTU, why did I have to take a course with the undergraduates? Bagley’s course was totally different. He was a really great lecturer and his students love him. He would show a bronze on the screen and when he described it, your eyes would open. I was very familiar with the names of the objects, where they were found, and the dates. But I realized I never really looked at them so closely before. For example there was this Four-Goat Square Zun 四羊方尊, a 11th-c. BCE vase with four rams from southern China. He would say here’s the ram’s head, body, and feet, and show you how they transformed to something else. It was really a shock to me. I felt like I was blind before. He would also take us to the Princeton Art Museum to look at the works. I held an oracle bone in my hand. Although I was not unfamiliar with oracle bone inscriptions, I had never held a piece of oracle bone in my hand before. It was another huge shock for me as a student from Taiwan.

One of my biggest regrets at Princeton is I didn't take the course with Professor Bagley. I took many art history courses, but mostly on Western art.

My regret is I didn't take any Western art history course. One reason was I was too busy with the rest of my courses, but another reason was that I was overthinking. I was worried about the language barrier and insecure about my knowledge.  

We all seem to have some regrets. Tell me a little bit about what your typical day was like? Earlier you said you spent many hours in a library until the library closed.

I usually would go to the library at around 10 o'clock in the morning. If I had class in the afternoon, I would go earlier in the morning to cram. Besides my carrel in Marquand, sometimes I would go to Firestone Library and find a spot in the basement with the beautiful skylight. I remember there was just so much reading, especially for the class by Professor Naquin. I had to learn how to skim: read the introduction, read the conclusion, look at the structure of the book, read at least one chapter carefully, remember to see who the author mentioned in the acknowledgment, and then try to come up with one or two questions.

In my first year at Princeton, Li-Chiang Lin came back to finish her dissertation. She would come by around noon and we would go out for lunch. I also often had lunch with Cary Liu ‘78*97, Dora Ching, and other graduate students at Chancellor Green. After lunch we would have coffee and then went back to our work. With Li-Chiang, sometime she would ask me to afternoon tea at around three o’clock. She would then do a little shopping and I would sometimes go with her. Afterwards, we would work late into the evening.  

I want to talk a bit about the Princeton Art Museum mainly for two reasons. First, I assume it was very much part of your coursework at school. Second, you now run a museum at NTU. How does your time at the Princeton museum influence the way you use or run the museum here?

Back then in Taiwan we didn’t have anything like the Princeton Art Museum. The art history department and the museum is in the same building. When I got to Princeton, I couldn’t believe such a museum existed. There was a lot of interactions between the professors and the staff in the museum. I heard about this beforehand, but seeing it in person was still something else. The students had a lot of chances to see the artworks. 

For Bagley’s precepts we had a lot of sessions in the storeroom. I was amazed that students and professors could go into the storeroom and take the things out for a class. While Princeton’s museum is related to the department, it is also independent with its own staff. For students like us it was very helpful if we needed anything. And if we had visitors to the Department who wanted to see an artwork we could just go together. 

For us back then the Metropolitan Museum was the same. We would have classes in the galleries and also in the storeroom. For my third year I received a pre-doctoral fellowship from the Met. I believe every student of Wen Fong got this fellowship. The funding helped students finish their dissertations, but you had to help the museum with some work. So I went to the museum once or twice a week, just day trips. That year was very meaningful for me because the Met had a visiting scholar, Lianqi Wang 王連起, from the Beijing Palace Museum. Mr. Wang didn't speak English so the museum assigned me to be his translator. They provided us with easy access to the storage room. It was a very nice experience. Aside from working closely with him for an extended period, there is no other way to learn about how a traditional connoisseur does his work. My friendship with Mr. Wang continued even after he went back to China and I came back to Taiwan. At that time I also arranged trips for him to visit other museums and we went together to see many Song and Yuan paintings in various US collections. All of that was unimaginable for me if I just stayed in Taiwan. I didn’t know as a graduate student you could do all of that. 

In the late 90’s the Palace Museum in Taipei was more bureaucratic. Things were not so accessible. What I love about the U.S. is if you can prove that you can do something or you are an expert or becoming one in the field, you can have access to what you need.

So back to what I'm doing now. The museum at NTU is not a separate entity from our department. Therefore I have much more freedom. If I want to do something I can choose the students to be involved accordingly. In this way I think it probably works better for us here than an established museum like at Princeton, because everything is still mixed together. But more freedom usually also means more work. When I do a show here, not only do I have to do the academic work, I have to worry about the lighting, the paint, etc. The museum is indispensable to an education in art history.   

The Art Museum of the Graduate Institute of Art History at NTU 

One thing I read about Professor Fong was his emphasis on just looking at the objects.

Yes, Professor Fong used to say objects never lie. Whether something is from the 10th or 20th century, you just have to ask the right question. Sometimes he said objects are like rocks from the moon. If you want to know about the moon you can ask the rock. The rock won’t lie to you but you have to ask the right question. I think everybody would agree on this but the tricky thing is we have different ideas on what’s the right question.

Since you talked about your students, recently there are very few students from Taiwan going to Princeton to do graduate studies. Are the students here going to other universities or simply not going abroad? Do you encourage your students to study abroad?

Of course I do. But it’s becoming more and more difficult for Taiwanese students because the requirement for English proficiency is higher than when I was a student. A lot of the newly admitted students in the U.S. programs are either native English speakers, went to college in English speaking countries, or already have a master’s degree from an English-speaking country. This makes a lot of difference. I think that's one of the primary reasons that is holding back the students from Taiwan. Back when I was applying, of course, English was important. But for someone like Professor Fong he also wanted to make sure that the student had enough knowledge. The students from Taiwan had a lot of advantage. Now the ability to make a compelling argument is much more important, especially in the humanities.

In the acknowledgment of your dissertation you thanked a few of your fellow students such as Yujun Yang *03. Did you hang out with other Taiwanese students?

We had an association of Taiwanese students. For one year I was actually the President of the association but we only had around a dozen students. We would play badminton every Saturday afternoon at Dillon Gym and have Chinese food at Lee’s Castle afterwards. It was really comforting after a whole week of hard work and eating Burger King or my own terrible cooking. The psychological support from fellow Taiwanese students was precious.

Was funding during graduate school difficult? Did you have to teach?

I was not on a scholarship from Princeton, I had the national scholarship from Taiwan for three years and then I had to apply for other grants. I remember we would compare the national scholarships from different countries, I think Singaporeans got the most and we were all envious. Back then, if you took the scholarship, you would have to come back to Taiwan for at least two years. 

There was no chance for graduate students to teach in my department because all the professors did everything themselves. Professor Bagley did all the precepts by himself for 50 students with five groups of ten students. We would envy others who had more teaching experience, but for them it was more of an obligation. 

I taught at Oberlin College in Ohio for a year before I finished my dissertation. But it was a challenging year because I was simultaneously trying to finish my dissertation while teaching for the first time, and searching for a job for the next year. People warned me about this but I was eager to do something to prove myself. I applied for this one year teaching position at Oberlin. I taught two courses each semester and it was my first time teaching in English. The winter there was so gray and cold. It was only after I finished everything in late May, I took a walk on campus and for the first time realized the Oberlin campus was pretty. At that time my husband was studying at Ohio State University in Columbus. We didn’t get married until after I finished my Ph.D. We actually had the wedding ceremony at the Princeton Chapel. I remember my mom had a dress made for me and it cost less than my graduation gown. At that time I only cared about my work. For my post-doc I went to the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, MD for a curatorial position. I worked for one year before I moved back to Taiwan.

Hui-Wen Lu with parents at Princeton University Commencement in May 2004

What made you decide to come back to Taiwan, or did you always plan to come back? 

Actually, if possible, I would have liked to stay in the US for a few more years. But my government scholarship required me to come back to Taiwan after finishing Practical Training. The three-year Mellon curatorial fellowship at the Walters was quite generous and was meant to prepare you to be a curator. My supervisor at the Walters, Southeast Asianist Woody Woorward, was very supportive. But Walters’ collection was not strong in Chinese painting and calligraphy, but rather in Buddhist figures, ceramics, and sculptures of South East Asia. I wrote an article on the collection there about the 19th century illustrations of ceramic pieces. When artists did the illustration, they put the vases by the windows and there were these reflections of the buildings across the street. I could track the way they did the drawings, where they put the vases, and at what time of the day. I also talked about ordering of the knowledge of Chinese ceramics in late-19th c. America and Europe. I presented this topic in 2003 for the festschrift for Professor Fong. This seemed like an abrupt and strange choice of topic, unrelated to what I have learned at Princeton. I don’t know what Professor Fong thinks of it. But I think he can be understanding of my eagerness to prove that I have grown up. 

In Taiwan I can focus on my research in calligraphy which I really appreciate. I don’t think I can do this work anywhere else. If I was in the U.S. I would probably work on a wide variety of topics and calligraphy would not be such a big part of my work. Writing in Chinese is very different from writing in English because your intended audience is totally different and the logic of presenting or structuring your material is also totally different. My Chinese articles cannot be translated directly to English. You would have to do a lot of rewriting, and some of them are just not suitable. My career path would be very different depending on where I decided to settle down. In recent years, I am gradually extending into other fields, including contemporary art, and also engaging in curating. With a solid foundation in traditional calligraphy research, I have a unique perspective and viewpoint on contemporary ink art that differs from others. 

I have faced setbacks during the job search process. Looking back, they aren't really significant. After all these years, now I always tell my students not to get discouraged so easily. What may look like a big failure now may not be so important five or ten years later.

The interview was held on August 2, 2024 at the National Taiwan University in Taipei. The interview has been edited for clarity.