CHAPTER 1THE GOLDEN CHILD
Tony would have been the first to admit that as a child he was obsessed with one thing: making money. Though his family was comfortably middle-class—his father, Richard, worked at Chevron, and his mother, Judy, was a psychologist—he understood early on that money equaled liberation. “To me,” he later recalled of his childhood, “money meant that later on in life I would have the freedom to do whatever I wanted.”
In his early years, this took form as a mildly successful string of garage sales, and then some failed ventures—including the sale of Christmas cards to neighbors one year—before he joined the workforce as a newspaper boy. His route would begin and end at the same address: 28 Coast Oak Way, Mont Marin, the two-story house where Tony and his two younger brothers grew up. About twenty miles north of the Golden Gate Bridge, the sliver of brick and weatherboard homes of Mont Marin were within the sunny enclave of the city of San Rafael, an eternal snapshot of Americana. The Hsiehs, one of the few Asian families in the suburb, lived in a house toward the bottom of the sloping street, surrounded by the rolling greenery of Marinwood and Lucas Valley. Two palm trees stood to one side of the black driveway, swaying tall above the home’s terracotta-tiled roof.
Tony—a slight boy with aviator-framed glasses that seemed more suited for a geriatric and took up a third of his tiny face—would pedal through the quiet, winding streets of Mont Marin, past well-groomed front lawns. As he hurled copies of the local newspaper, his haphazard fencing of bangs would flutter in the wind.
It was the mid-1980s, and across the headlines was talk of the burgeoning technology industry that was slowly but surely stretching across the region, from the hills of San Francisco down to the Peninsula and across the expanse of the South Bay. The semiconductor industry had already laid down its roots in the region a decade before, while soon-to-be tech giants like Apple and Oracle were just in their infancy. As one historian put it, the area was encountering its “Big Bang” moment, the fateful turn of events that gave rise to the personal computer and video gaming industries. Venture capital started percolating from the gold mines that those industries became, and that started to lay the very foundations that would cause the explosion of Big Tech.
The types of people who were finding success in Silicon Valley were by definition optimistic and thought outside the box. As it turned out, the boy riding around the streets just north of the Valley was unwittingly learning on his paper route that he already had the DNA for the type of success the headlines wrote about. After adding up his pay, he realized that he was making about $2 an hour. As Tony pedaled around the neighborhood, he realized that he could make the job more favorable. Then he had an epiphany. What if, he thought, he started his own newspaper? That way, he would be the sole beneficiary of the venture, as opposed to what he reasoned was child labor exploitation by the local paper.
He quit the paper route, and the first major phase of his entrepreneurial streak began. He created The Gobbler, twenty pages of stories, word puzzles, and jokes that Tony drew and wrote out himself. Priced at $5 each, Tony had expected that his friends would become his first subscribers. “P.S.: Subscribe to the GOBBLER!” Tony wrote in a middle school classmate’s yearbook, viewing a sentimental tradition as an opportunity to conduct business. His parents seemed mildly amused by their son’s claim that the newsletter would sell a hundred copies. They were probably even more surprised when, after his first issue, he secured his first advertisement sale from his barber, who agreed to pay $20 for a full-page ad in the second issue.
But he managed to only sell two copies of the second issue, bringing The Gobbler’s total circulation to six copies. After failing to recoup costs and find more ad buyers, Tony ended the business. Even so, with one failure behind him, he realized that he had made his own money through an idea that he had formed, so his curiosity sent him back to the drawing board.
With his younger brother Andy, who was a little less shy but equally small-framed, Tony would spend much of his time poring over Boys’ Life, a monthly magazine (an offshoot of the Boy Scouts of America) focused on the great outdoors. Though the boys in the pages didn’t look like him, it provided a perfect escape. In one issue from 1984, a headline on the cover read, “How Computers Opened a Window on a New World for One Eagle Scout.” His favorite part of the magazine was always the classified ads section, which he saw as a catalog of all the “fantastic things that I never even knew existed but knew I had to have one day,” he later wrote.
One day, he saw an item that struck the money-obsessed chord in him: a button-making kit for $50. Seeing the promise of profits flash before his eyes, he convinced his parents to “loan” him money to buy the machine, which could convert any photo or piece of paper into a pin-on button. Then he took out an ad himself in another book called Free Stuff for Kids. In his advertisement, he offered to make buttons for customers for $1 plus a self-addressed stamped envelope. After doing the math, he calculated he would earn 75 cents on every button sold.
To his parents’ surprise, he paid them back within a month and was soon working four to five hours during the weekend to keep up with the orders. Eventually he bought a more automated button-making machine for $300. Through middle school, he made $200 a month—a hefty sum for a teenager in the eighties. The success spawned a tradition of Tony inviting his two younger brothers to be part of his businesses. When Tony graduated, he passed the button-making business to Andy, who then passed it on to their younger brother, Dave. It also seeded another element of his future. “I learned,” he wrote later, “that it was possible to run a successful business by mail order, without any face-to-face interaction.”
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Thinking up ways to make money often had more to do with Tony trying to think his way out of the limitations of childhood than it did with becoming an entrepreneur. His parents fostered his efforts, sometimes unintentionally. For his ninth birthday, Tony asked for a crate of earthworms, with the ambition of becoming the world’s largest worm seller. The idea—born out of a book that Tony had read about how, when cut in two, both halves of a worm will regenerate, thereby doubling the number of worms at hand—was light on economic modeling, like whether demand would meet supply. Still, Richard and Judy were encouraging, and drove him to Sonoma to what claimed to be America’s biggest worm farm. There they bought a box of mud that was guaranteed to have at least a hundred earthworms squirming within. If he cut them all in half, his product inventory would double. But operating under the ill-conceived notion that feeding the worms raw egg would make them stronger, Tony drowned the dirt in yolk, provided to him by his mother. That attracted birds to the box—a worm’s worst nightmare. The next day, when he went to check on the box, not a single worm remained.
Richard and Judy were also there to indulge Tony’s garage sales, which only ended when their cache of house junk was exhausted, prompting their boy to convince other friends to hold garage sales at their homes. His parents also listened to his plan to go door-to-door selling Christmas cards to his neighbors after seeing an advertisement in Boys’ Life during summer vacation. Given that it was August, his next-door neighbor—and first potential customer—told him to come back later in the year.
Richard Hsieh, tall, lanky, and soft-spoken, was a chemical engineer at Chevron who had secured a reputation in his predominantly white neighborhood in Marin County as friendly and welcoming. Kathy Barrass, one of the Hsiehs’ neighbors who lived across the street, recalled a conversation with Richard outside her home on Coast Oak Way in which she shared with him that she and her husband had always wanted to visit China. “Richard told me to stay right where I was, and he ran back inside their house,” she said. Richard came back out with a travel brochure for China and instructed Kathy to call the number on the flyer. Three weeks later, Kathy and her husband were off on a seven-city tour across China, traveling by boat and plane from Shanghai to Beijing.
Judy Hsieh, a child psychologist, was the kind of mother who would make breakfast and pack lunch bags for Tony and his two younger brothers every morning. The lunches were “insanely healthy,” one childhood friend recalled, adding that Tony apparently didn’t like them much either—he would often try to trade his lunches for one of his friends’ chocolate-frosted Ho Hos. She could also be strict at times, like many mothers, and Tony’s childhood friends often found themselves intimidated by Judy’s presence, despite her petite stature. “I got the feeling that she always thought I was never quite good enough for Tony,” the friend said.
Of the two, Richard was the more gregarious and social parent, and many of Tony’s friends later on in life found themselves on the receiving end of his FaceTime calls. But while they may have differed in communication styles, Richard and Judy, both immigrants from Taiwan, had one core goal in common: they had high expectations for their sons. They were “your typical Asian American parents,” Tony later said, a title that came with a demanding curriculum and strict confines, both in school and at home. They expected their sons to strive for immense intellect and to have a disciplined work ethic, the kind of progeny who would either become a doctor or get a PhD. The latter was an endeavor they both understood well: Richard earned his PhD in chemical engineering from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and Judy waited until after the birth of their third and last son, David, to get her PhD in psychology from the California School of Professional Psychology.
Their demands on their children stemmed from a much larger phenomenon affecting a new generation of Asian American children. Richard and Judy had been two among millions of people who arrived in America as part of a massive brain drain from China, prompted by the events that followed World War II. Shortly after Japan surrendered to the Allied powers, General Tsai Lee and Peggy Lee gave birth to Judy, born Shiao-Ling Lee, on December 10, 1945, on the southern coast of China in what is today known as Guangdong Province. Two years later, on December 7, 1947, Chuan-Kang Hsieh, or Richard, was born. Richard and Judy entered a world emerging from the horrors of global warfare, only to grow up in a country where national trepidation would continue. Two opposing factions within China—the Chinese Communist Party and the nationalist Kuomintang—had resumed the final phase of their own decades-long civil war, and the Communists took over mainland China in 1949 to establish the People’s Republic of China. The Kuomintang leadership and its loyalists, meanwhile, retreated to the island of Taiwan and built their own government.
In their teens, Richard and Judy independently found their way to Taiwan, where they would both end up at National Taiwan University (NTU), a prestigious institution in Taipei from which they had an arm’s-length view of the tragedies occurring on the mainland. While China endured famine, censorship, violence, and death under Chairman Mao Zedong, the citizens of Taiwan escaped the consequences of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. America, meanwhile, recognized Taiwan as a legitimate government, as that meshed with the U.S. agenda to hinder the communists’ growing power.
As the tension between the two Chinese factions continued, Taiwanese intellectuals who wanted to explore and advance their livelihoods felt there was only one place to turn to: Mei Guo, the Mandarin name for America, which translates literally to “beautiful country.” Such an opportunity was typically afforded to the best and brightest students from National Taiwan University who were accepted to graduate degree programs in the United States. That journey from NTU figured in the life stories of prominent Taiwanese like Ang Lee, the famed film director, and Min Kao, the co-founder of Garmin. Many graduates went to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, which had a robust program for international Chinese students dating back to the early 1900s. When Richard and Judy arrived in the Urbana-Champaign region at the end of the 1960s, there were three Chinese restaurants, one Asian supermarket, and not much else to welcome the Chinese students. But what the town lacked in accommodations for its Chinese arrivals, it made up for in its role as a gateway toward the American dream of purported success and freedom—an image as ubiquitous here as at other elite schools like Harvard or Yale.
Richard immigrated in 1969, a year after graduating from NTU with a degree in chemical engineering, to pursue his master’s and PhD in the same field. Judy, meanwhile, had graduated from NTU a year earlier but would also end up at UIUC, enrolling in the master’s program for social work. It was a lonely endeavor for each of them, crossing an ocean and leaving family, friends, and everything else behind. But once at UIUC, the reality of their experience was a country and society reeling from the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War. Race relations were still tense. More often than not, Asian students found themselves striving to fade into the background, to draw less attention to themselves.
Like attracts like, and at UIUC Richard and Judy crossed paths and then fell in love. They both received their master’s degrees in 1971 in their respective fields, but Richard continued to pursue his PhD at the university. He became a member of Phi Lambda Upsilon, a chemistry honor society, as well as the American Chemical Society and the American Institute of Chemical Engineers. In 1973, after Richard and Judy married, Richard published his dissertation with the esteemed Charles Eckert as his thesis advisor. Titled “Molecular Thermodynamics and High Pressure Kinetics of Polar Reactions in Solutions,” his research received funding from the National Science Foundation and from the U.S. Army Research Office in Durham, North Carolina.
“No man works alone,” Richard wrote in the acknowledgments section of his dissertation. “The deepest thanks are due to Dr. C. A. Eckert, not only for his encouragement, advice and assistance, but also for the corrections of poor English, bad grammar, false reasoning and obscurity in the manuscript.” He continued, “I must recognize my debt and gratitude to my parents who encouraged and supported their dearest son to pursue his higher education across the Pacific Ocean, and my wife Judy, whose patience and endurance made this work possible.”
A few months later, on December 12, 1973, the young couple welcomed Anthony Chia-Hua Hsieh to the world in Urbana, Illinois. With the seeds of their family sown, they were determined to make something of themselves in the foreign but free, generous though sometimes unforgiving, land of America. And just as Richard’s parents pushed him to leave his home and his family behind in order to make what was then a fifty-hour flight halfway around the world to pursue his education, he and Judy would push their children to be the best they could be. Their new home was a place of opportunity and prosperity, and as long as you worked hard, seemingly anything could be accomplished.
Two years later, Tony’s brother Andrew Chia-Pei Hsieh was born. Their younger brother, David, would arrive seven years later. One of Tony’s only memories of Illinois was catching fireflies in jars. “In my mind, I had invented it and no one else had done it before,” he later said. When Tony turned five, Richard got a job as an engineer at Chevron on the other side of the country, in Marin County, California. Richard and Judy packed up once more and moved the family out West.
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Given everything they had endured, Richard and Judy shared a prescription for their children’s lives: nothing short of excellence. In practice, this meant an unusual amount of pressure and work, both in school and outside of it. Tony consistently wrestled with these constraints, and made frequent attempts to control his childhood on his own terms.
Among the expectations outlined for him was a requirement for musical excellence, in the name of being well-rounded. Each weekday, if school was in session, he was expected to practice playing his instruments for two hours—thirty minutes each for the piano, violin, trumpet, and French horn. On weekends and during the summer months, Tony was required to practice each instrument for an hour. With four hours supposed to be dedicated to musical progress, this drastically cut into his summer vacation. So Tony came up with a risky scheme that would disappoint his parents and bring punishment if they ever found out. But on the slim chance that the plan succeeded, Tony would have more precious time to enjoy the kind of summer vacation he wanted. He decided to take the chance.
One summer day during middle school, Tony sat in his room and recorded himself playing his instruments. He played hour-long sessions for each instrument, hitting “stop” on the tape recorder once he was done. Then the next morning, as the sun was rising, Tony climbed out of bed and tiptoed down the staircase, mindful not to wake his parents.
Entering the sitting room clutching the tape recorder, he walked over to the piano, placed the recorder above the keys, and hit “play.” The sound of his own keystrokes lilted throughout the house. Perhaps the recording would stir his parents awake ever so slightly, only for them to fall back asleep with the warm satisfaction that their son was downstairs, practicing like they had instructed, like he’d said he would. Once the hour-long piano recording finished, Tony trudged back upstairs to his room and, behind a locked door, proceeded to play the recording of his own violin playing. Instead of spending those hours improving a skill that he knew would never become his life’s work, Tony instead spent the time reading issues of Boys’ Life. The ruse was a gamble, and it paid off.
Kathy Barrass remembered hearing the bright notes of the violin and piano floating out into the street from the Hsiehs’ home during her daily strolls around the neighborhood. In retrospect, perhaps she had been an early, and unwitting, observer of Tony’s ingenuity. It was yet another discovery: that besides having money, thinking outside the box—which meant defying his parents’ instructions, in this instance—could also allow him to define himself.
CHAPTER 2WIDE AWAKE
Dixie Elementary School was a public school sandwiched between the fields of Lucas Valley Preserve and Sleepy Hollow. Renamed Miller Creek Elementary School District decades later due to the former name’s ties to the old South and Confederate states, the school was just a five-minute drive from the Hsiehs’ home on Coast Oak Way. Every morning at the school started with a Pledge of Allegiance to the American flag. From Tony’s first day, it was clear he was unlike the others in his classroom.
“There was all this buzz about the new kid, the wunderkind,” said Spencer Garfinkel, a former classmate of Tony’s. On the first day of school that Monday, he was a first grader. By Tuesday, Tony had jumped to the second grade, putting him in the same year as Spencer. “Literally, it wasn’t a week. It took a day,” Spencer said. Years later, Tony would say how skipping this grade made him feel different and singled out, even more so than he may have already felt, being one of very few Asians in the neighborhood. Tony’s last name was foreign enough that his elementary school soccer coach had trouble spelling out his name in writing when going over plays on a chalkboard. After a few failed tries, he quickly became “Tony H.”
Richard and Judy very quickly identified the other few Chinese families in the neighborhood. “Somehow my parents managed to find all ten of them,” Tony later wrote. The families built a community within a community, coming together often in comfort and familiarity. Speaking with one another in fast and expressive Mandarin, the families would make a point of celebrating traditional holidays like Chinese New Year together, taking turns hosting potluck lunches and dinners at their homes. The kids would play and watch television in one room, while the parents, in another room, gossiped and bragged about their children’s accomplishments.
Tables and counters would groan under the weight of platters and bowls filled with fried and sticky rice, long noodles, and glistening braised pork. Kumquats and oranges would dot the house, the bright orange colors a symbol for gold and prosperity. The kids, Tony included, would have to bow to the parents in order to receive red envelopes, filled with $1 bills, $5 bills, even $20 bills at times. For dessert, sometimes there would be xing ren tofu, a traditional Chinese soft almond tofu. “But it was the Betty Crocker version, which was just Jell-O, flavored with almond extract, I think,” recalled one childhood friend of Tony’s. “It had canned fruit with it.” The gatherings were never anything fancy, but they were significant in other ways, particularly for the children. “It was cool to get together because it was one of the few times where we would see so many Asian people together in the same place.”
Richard and Judy made sure that Tony, and later on his two younger brothers, Andy and Dave, attended Chinese school in the late afternoons on weekdays and on weekends so they could keep in touch with their native language and roots. The brothers were only allowed to watch television one hour a week and had to get straight As—anything less would be a badge of shame. One friend of Tony’s recalled watching him cry in elementary school because he received less than an A on a paper in French class. “He was inconsolable,” he said. “I don’t think it was necessarily even obvious to me how seriously he took academics because sometimes he could come off as somewhat cavalier about it.”
Around the time that Tony entered Miller Creek Middle School, Judy would drive Tony and another one of his friends, Eric Liu, to the local library in the summertime for reading clubs. Aside from Boys’ Life, Tony also devoured a book series called The Three Investigators, which followed three teenage boys as they solved crimes and mysteries. In the series, the headquarters for the three boys was a damaged thirty-foot trailer in a junkyard. The idea that a trailer could have everything that the boys needed to solve their investigations—a small laboratory, an office and a desk, a typewriter, books—became a concept that Tony replicated later on in his life.
Copyright © 2023 by Angel Au-Yeung and David Jeans
