My Elder Brother

By Tang Lingyu

We are direct descendents of the second son of Tang He (1326-1395), a military general that helped found the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644). In his evening years, Tang He headed military forces to defend Zhejiang from being harassed by Japanese pirates. The general has been memorialized in Zhejiang as a hero since then. Today, Ningcun, which used to be a defense citadel built by Tang He in southern Zhejiang, still celebrates the general annually at a local memorial temple of Tang He.

My grandfather was the 19th–generation grandson of Tang He. He was good at math and accepted a job offer in Hangzhou. That was how he came to the capital city of Zhejiang. He worked as director of the provincial map bureau and taught at a college-level school in Hangzhou. Among his students were many who later became important in history.

My brother Tang Linwu and I were born in Hangzhou. In 1936, he entered Hangzhou Senior High School, a key provincial secondary school in the province. The war broke out next year and the school migrated to inland. My brother did not go with the school. He stayed in Hangzhou and studied high school subjects by himself at home. After passing an examination in Shanghai in 1940, he won a government scholarship and went on to study in Japan. After doing a crash course on the Japanese language for a year, he began a preliminary course at Tokyo Institute of Technology. He noticed some teachers did not take Chinese students very seriously. He felt that some Japanese really did not expect Chinese students to get a useful education and that they just wanted to cultivate Chinese who would be pro-Japan in China in the future.

My big brother again studied hard on his own. Later he signed up to study farmland water conservancy at the department of agronomics of the Imperial University. When the war went on, many of his Japanese classmates were either conscripted or sent away to do some military projects. He transferred to the department of civil engineering where he studied river and harbor engineering. After graduation, he came back to Hangzhou.

In 1945, our cousin got a job offer in Taiwan and asked my elder brother to go with him. Tang Linwu agreed to go. In 1946, he began to work at Taizhong port. It was here that he successfully applied his knowledge to practical use and decided he would take port engineering as his career. He came back to Shanghai and got married at the end of 1948. The newlyweds went back to Taiwan. We were separated until 1995 when I went to New York.

We chatted about everything after the reunion and I learned that he had done pretty well as an engineer, professor and authority of international renown on coastal engineering.

He made significant contribution to the islands coastal engineering. He did field studies in Japan. He acquired PhD in engineering at his Alma Mater in Japan. In 1973 he became fully established as the top authority on coastal engineering in Taiwan. He was invited to lectures in Japan. He served as advisor for all the departments engaged in coastal affaires in Taiwan. He also worked as a guest professor at Hanover University. In 1992 he was honored with a top prize at a meeting at the International Conference of Coastal Engineering in Venice.

Among the descendents of Tang He, many are poets and artists, but few are scientists or engineers. My elder brother Tang Linwu has added honor to our ancestor by doing an outstanding work as a scientist. □