Thread of the Silkworm by Iris Chang

Thread of the Silkworm Reviews

• 
  Avempace

  There are not one but several threads to follow in the fascinating story of Tsien Hsue-shen, the brilliant Chinese scientist who is the subject of this book. There is a story of lineages, of a scion of a family of mandarins and an uncle once removed of Roger Tsien, the 2008 Nobel prize Laureate and his brother Richard, a highly distinguished neuroscientist, both current US citizens. Yet another story is that of China and its convulsive century of revolution and change. Tsien Hsue-shen was born in 1911, the year of the Chinese revolution, and his life was shaped by the events that unfolded from that momentous occasion. Like many in the Chinese diaspora, he crossed continents in search of opportunity, finding scholarship and distinction in the United States as a proverbial rocket scientist. However, the currents of history were soon to entrap him in their vortices. At a time of recrimination in the US post the triumph of the communist Chinese in 1949, he was hounded by a McCarthyite witch hunt as a potential spy and sent back to China. Once back, he staunchly identified with his resurgent country and its ambitions and spearheaded its nascent missile program.
  
  Then there is the story of his host country itself, the United States, its rise to world hegemony and its bitter wars in Asia to assert and sustain that hegemony. At home this was an era of racial discrimination, of Asians, African Americans and Latinos, anyone other than whites, treated as second class citizens. The echos of that era are not all gone, as witnessed by the example of Wen Ho Lee, the Chinese American Los Almos nuclear scientist accused of espionage for China in the late 1990s. Finally, there is the story of the author herself, with the tale of Tsien Hsue-shen an implicit backdrop for her own search for identity as a second generation Chinese American. That search reverberated in her subsequent book, the Rape of Nanking, but was very palpable in this one as well. A very rich book, deeply provocative, illustrative of the twists of fate of individuals tossed around by cataclysmic forces much beyond their control.
• 
  Riley

  Tsien Hsue-shen was a Chinese-national rocket scientist at Caltech who was deported from the United States during the McCarthy era. It is not hard to see that as a blunder of colossal proportions, since he went on to spearhead China's missile program.
  
  But I also found myself having less sympathy for Tsien than other Red Scare victims, since he appears to be, at best, an amoral person in the often immoral calling of producing greater weapons. That's especially true considering his public embrace of many of China's disastrous policies, from the Great Leap Forward to the Tienanmen Square massacre.
  
  Here is author Iris Chang's conclusion:
  
  "The greatest tragedy of the Tsien story is not his deportation from the United States and the subsequent loss and increased threat to U.S. defense, or even the years of quiet suffering he had to endure at the hands of the INS and in China during its various political upheavals. Rather, the real tragedy is the extent to which Tsien himself has apparently betrayed his own principles and bought into the system once he returned to China. There Tsien may have gradually become his own worst enemy -- the very kind of rigid, unquestioning bureaucrat that he had once so despised within the INS and the U.S. government during the McCarthy era."
• 
  Hongbo

  Fantastic book!
  Being a significant contributor and founding father of both China and US's rocket science and application in the defense, Qian Xuesen (Tsien Tsieshen in book) is an enigmatic character. He is above-normal smart and yet very hardworking. At his youth, he preferred the beauty of math and classic music, so much so that he is actually quite a loner. This didn't change, or, even worsened after he went to USA to further his study. The study opportunity is from the Boxer Indemnity Scholarship, which is very competitive, and is the by far, the best international scholarship ever devised in history. All the awkwardness of his characters are irrelevant in his age, as he developed so much math skills that is in inseparable from his adviser and revered from his students. He is on a way to the star of the space age in america, if there is no cleansing in the 1950's from the McCarthyism. And here is when the book turns, and his life changes dramatically.
  He used to be a person only know math and its application to complicated engineering problems, now, back in China, he is treading waters of the politics. The notorious dictator in New China not demands EVERYONE in China's action, but effectively controls their MIND! He changed his mind in the long years in China. Although he, and solely because of him, changed the situation in China's rocket missile situation, and is conferred the state honor as a scientist. His ultimate life was considered a tragedy, that he was transformed to his ideological enemy.
• 
  Ke

  Due to limited sources, I understand that this book was more detailed in some parts than others. Still, that doesn't change the fact that Thread of the Silkworm leaves out many questions unanswered, especially about the later part of Qian's life.
• 
  Lynda

  Tsien Hsue-shen （钱学森）was born in Hangzhou, China in 1911 and had a privileged upbringing with both of his parents from well-to-do backgrounds. He demonstrated brilliance from a very young age and was sent to some of the best primary schools as a kid and then later studied mechanical engineering at Shanghai Jiaotong University.
  
  “The story of Tsien Hsue-shen is epic in scale, encompassing some of the greatest technological and political convulsions of this century. It winds from the crumbling of a four-century-old dynasty in China to the terror of Japanese air raids over Shanghai, from the secret American missile tests in a dry riverbed in southern California to the deadly concentration camp factories of the V-2 rocket in Germany, from Tsien’s imprisonment on a small island in the United States to his conferences with the most powerful members of the Soviet Union and China.” (Iris Chang's words in her Introduction.)
  
  Someone had recommended this book to me, and I was intrigued to learn more about a brilliant Chinese scientist who turned out to also be a victim of the hysteria of America’s McCarthyism scare owing to doubts about his loyalty to America and speculation about whether he was a spy working for Communist China.
  
  Readers who have a good grasp of and appreciation for modern Chinese history will find this book fascinating. One does not need to have a solid understanding of mechanical engineering, jet propulsion technology, or physics to read the book. The book is of course about the remarkable achievements of Tsien during his time at CalTech (and to some extent MIT) and later in China (when he moved back there in 1955, never to return to the U.S.) as he helped his home country build a missile program from scratch.
  
  But it is also a story of a life fraught with tumult, caught in the successive waves of change, including the change in atmosphere between China and the U.S., a story of exclusion, betrayal, culture shock, persistence, and adaptation. A story of one person’s endeavor, persistence and hard work to try to rise above their life’s circumstances and deal with external events beyond their control, and with perhaps a bit of sacrificing their integrity to ‘bend with the wind’ (as I saw it) in the enormously challenging times in China during the anti-rightist movement, The Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution.
  
  The book strikes me as very high quality, with very in-depth research, and demonstrates the author had conducted numerous interviews with a significant number of people (one including Tsien’s son) and a wonderfully fluid narrative was skillfully deployed that compelled me to turn the pages.
  
  The book came out in 1996 and was written by the late Iris Chang. I still have not summoned the courage to read her global best-seller ‘The Rape of Nanjing’, but I know I must read it someday. I have her ‘The Chinese in America’ on my to-read list, including a book about Iris herself called ‘The Woman Who Could Not Forget’ which was written by her mother in memory of her daughter who committed suicide in 2004.
  
  I cannot but help lament the fact that the world lost a great female talent, a great writer, a great historian. The fact that she tackled a fascinating subject such as the scientist Tsien Hsue-shen with such aplomb and competence (because physics and engineering were not her areas of expertise) makes me regard her even more highly. But of course, she explains in the foreword of her book that she felt intrigued by this man’s story more because of his deportation from the U.S. despite his twenty years of solid contribution in the field of jet propulsion technology (amongst other areas) including numerous papers written and speeches given to the academic community and the highest levels in the US government defense sector.
  
  Tsien Hsue-shen never made himself (he was very guarded about his life and apparently never gave any interviews once he returned to China) available to Iris for her book; instead, she spoke to his numerous contacts, his son, and of course conducted a ton of research for this book.
  
  Tsien died at the age of 98 in 2009 in Beijing. There is a film about him on YouTube for film buffs who might be interested. Of course, the movie is ‘sanitized’ and presents mainly the good and strong parts of his life unlike the book which presents a fuller picture. One can find the movie, complete with Chinese and English subtitles, here:《#钱学森/Dr. Qian Xuesen》陈坤张雨绮演绎"理工版才子佳人"（ 陈坤 / 张雨绮 / 林永健）乘风破浪的姐姐门面担当张雨绮挑战钱学森夫人一角【1080P Chi-Eng SUB】 - YouTube
  
  
  
• 
  James Crabtree

  Dr. Tsien Hsue-shen was a gifted academic, a man who rapidly reached the pinnacle of Chinese science in the early 20th Century and then went to America to continue his education. Originally trained as a steam-power engineer, Tsien rapidly showed himself to be a genius when it came to airflow physics, which in turn had ramifications in aviation and the United States' efforts in rocketry, which were paltry. He helped design American rockets BEFORE examples of the German V2 were available for study. Ms. Chang paints a portrait of a man driven by his love of science and his single-minded study of problems. Unfortunately, he ultimately chose to go to Communist China (as opposed to Nationalist China) and to give the benefit of his wisdom to a regime which would design missiles capable of reaching the United States with nuclear warheads, not to mention other weapons used against America and its allies. Well-written and illustrated with photos.
• 
  Dacy Briggs

  I am in love with Iris Chang’s writing. Another great page-turner, this time about Tsien Hsue-shen, the father of the Chinese space/missile program who trained with and was a professor in the United States for 20 years. This is against the backdrop of the beginnings of the spread of Communism in the East and McCarthyism in the United States, which led to Tsien’s downfall at Caltech and later deportation.
  
  I applaud Chang’s willingness 25 years ago to go so in-depth on a man that had been seemingly lost to history, just wished that there was more of her writing to fawn over than the 3 books that she wrote while she was alive.
• 
  Wan Peter

  It was the stupidest thing this country {USA} ever did. 1940 - McCarthyism. 2021 - Trumpism
• 
  Michael Connolly

  Chang tells the story of a rocket scientist, Tsien Hsue-Shen, who was born in China in 1911 and educated in the United States. He left China in 1935 to study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. During World War II, he worked with Hungarian engineer Theodore von Kármán at the California Institute of Technology and helped found the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. During the 1950s, the United States feared he might be a Red Chinese spy, so they deported him back to Communist China. Back in China, he created their rocket program, in particular, the Silkworm missile. Since this book was written, he passed away, in 2009.
• 
  Brandy

  This was just toooo much! I don't even know how to explain to anyone what this book was like. This was written by one of my favorite authors, the same lady that wrote the RAPE OF NANKING, (which I loved) but I just BARELY got through this one. It was so full of technical data, and dates, and such that each page put me one step closer to falling asleep.
  I guess it's cheaper than ambien though. Ugghhhh
• 
  Andrew

  A remarkable story that far, far too few Americans have heard of -- myself included before I picked this up. As she did in The Rape of Nanking, Iris Chang takes her sources seriously, and is very careful to parse her speculations from the established facts. I've said before (many, many times) that biography is a boring-ass mode of writing, but this is a rare example of one that rises above. Perhaps it helps that it is of someone I'd never heard of before by an author I had heard of. For anyone interested in the convoluted histories of China and America, this is a must-read.