ohn Tu was born in 1941 in Chungking, China. His father was from a poor family but his brilliance earned him a government-sponsored education at the University of Lyon. Upon his return to China the Nationalist government sent him to Shanghai where his French education and language skills would make him an effective liaison with the French, then later promoted him to minister of cultural affairs. Among Minister Tu's duties was overseeing the national acting school. One of its students was a woman who, upon seeing the young minister, was smitten by his air of integrity. She made up her mind then and there to marry him. Even at that young age, she was a woman of unusual will. She had lost her father at age 6 and, with her mother and sister, often went days without food. Through hard work she won a scholarship into a teacher's college, then into acting school. Soon after she met the elder Tu, Japanese advances forced the Nationalist government to move to Chungking. When the War ended in 1945 the Nationalist government moved back to Shanghai where the elder Tu outlined China's first censorship policy regarding imported western movies.
"I remember looking out my apartment window and seeing soldiers capture so-called communist spies," recalls Tu who was four when the family moved to Shanghai. "They shot them right there in the street."
Tu grew up in a turbulent time. Mao Tze-tung's peasant army was scoring solid victories against Chiang's corrupt Nationalist army. By early 1949 some two million Nationalists, including the Tu family, were scrambling to board a ship for Taiwan.
In school John Tu was more of a rebel than a scholar.
"I wasn't necessarily against authority," he recalls. "I was against the hypocritical system. The teachers would teach the traditional values, then when you turn around [what they prohibit] is exactly what they're doing.
"When I got to high school, I saw this was bullshit," says Tu who looked down on many of his teachers. He refused to participate in the system. He stopped studying. He cut classes. One semester, he simply stopped going to school. He would leave in the morning, meet some friends, play billiards and maybe catch a movie. His parents knew nothing, until he flunked his tests.
Prodded by his concerned parents, Tu opened the floodgates to years of frustration with Taiwanese society. He was surprised by his parents' philosophical acceptance, even agreement.
"All of a sudden I became a different person," says Tu. "Now I wanted to study." But his poor grades excluded him from the good Taiwanese universities. He dreamed of going to the U.S., but the only way he could qualify for a visa would have been as a graduate student. With compulsory military service breathing down his neck, he decided to go to Bremen, Germany where an uncle owned a Chinese restaurant.
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Tu was devastated to find that his uncle was no help at all in getting him started in Germany. His years of cooking in a Chinese restaurant had taught him a few words of German and little of its social system. Tu found himself despairing as he worked in his uncle's kitchen. He couldn't go back to Taiwan a failure but didn't know enough German even to register himself in school.
"Once you leave Chinese culture," says Tu, "you have to make it or you can never go back. Everyday I awoke with a sick feeling. How do I go to school?"
After only two weeks in the kitchen Tu threw down his apron, walked into the streets of Bremen and grabbed the first German he saw.
"Where's the church," Tu asked in broken English. In Taiwan Tu had been associated with the Catholic church. An English-speaking priest , he figured, might put him on the right track. Tu was lucky. The stranger he accosted was Catholic.
"I know a church where there's a priest who spent 30 years in China," he told the incredulous Tu.
The dialect of the Chinese province where the priest had spent his time was incomprehensible to Tu. They struggled in English. The priest sent him to a church-sponsored school to learn German. Four months at the school taught him enough to get by. But the more he learned, the harder things got.
Tu learned that he couldn't just go to college for electrical engineering. He first had to apprentice for two years. The school connected him with a shipyard in the northern town of Kiel, home to about five Chinese families and one Chinese restaurant. At the shipyard Tu learned welding and struggled to adjust.
"The toughest part was when the foreman tells you, 'Hey, Tu, here's two marks. Go get us some beer.'
"I had to make a decision. If I don't do it, I know my life would be very tough there. But as a Chinese, I especially felt humiliated."
The Germans at the shipyard had no knowledge of China. "They said, 'Hey, Tu, do they have electricity in China.'"
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ohn Tu was born in 1941 in Chungking, China. His father was from a poor family but his brilliance earned him a government-sponsored education at the University of Lyon. Upon his return to China the Nationalist government sent him to Shanghai where his French education and language skills would make him an effective liaison with the French, then later promoted him to minister of cultural affairs. Among Minister Tu's duties was overseeing the national acting school. One of its students was a woman who, upon seeing the young minister, was smitten by his air of integrity. She made up her mind then and there to marry him. Even at that young age, she was a woman of unusual will. She had lost her father at age 6 and, with her mother and sister, often went days without food. Through hard work she won a scholarship into a teacher's college, then into acting school. Soon after she met the elder Tu, Japanese advances forced the Nationalist government to move to Chungking. When the War ended in 1945 the Nationalist government moved back to Shanghai where the elder Tu outlined China's first censorship policy regarding imported western movies.
