Review: The Shape of a Life

 The Shape of a Life is the autobiography of Shing-Tung Yau, ghost-written by Steven Nadis, since Yau is not a native English speaker and probably speaks Math better than he speaks English. You come to expect a certain trope when immigrants talk about their stories, like the incredible poverty they grew up with, and the struggle to get an education good enough to qualify for a transplantation to the West.

Yau lives up to this expectation. He's perhaps a little too modest about his achievements, since he portrayed his admissions into the UC Berkeley PhD Math program as being luckily selected by a visiting Math professor at his high school who advocated on his behalf. He astonishingly gets his PhD in a record 2 years, having written a publishable formal proof during the break in between semesters during his first year in graduate school!

Yau, of course, is famous for being part of the Calabi-Yau manifold description, and definitely someone who's made major contributions to the advancement of mathematics. The guy definitely worked hard and he and his wife frequently lived on opposite coasts during their marriage before finally getting to live together at Harvard University.

Yau will disabuse you of the notion that academic mathematics has no politics. The amount of politics he had to deal with as an accomplished and famous mathematician is quite astounding, and the factionalism he encountered in particular as being part of the Chinese mathematical community is even more astonishing, since in that culture, you're supposed to support your mentor and they expect you to be grateful. I couldn't help but think that his problems there was self-inflicted. A lot of his collaborators weren't Chinese, and he didn't have to go out of his way to get involved in Chinese politics.

Another cliche in Chinese American literature is the feeling that you don't belong in either the West or in Asia. Yau does his best to live up to this cliche, including declaring in several places in the book that his heart was in China and he would do his best to bring Chinese academics up to the standards of the West, even though many of the problems of the Chinese mathematical communities are self-inflicted:

the academic system in China is more complicated because major universities are under the control of the government through the Ministry of Education. Leadership changes at universities, which happen periodically, can result in significant upheaval. When new people come in, they don’t want to do what their predecessors agreed to because in that case the successors won’t get much credit. They want to have something new to show their superiors, which means doing something different, even if that means curtailing a successful program and replacing it with an ineffectual one. This introduces an element of uncertainty to operations in Chinese universities that does not exist in their U.S. counterparts. Every university in the United States, to be sure, has its own internal politics—the inevitable squabbles within departments, between departments, and between the faculty and administration. But when the country as a whole elects a new president, that doesn’t usually affect anything at the campus level—unless, of course, major funding cuts or policy shifts are instituted as a result of a change at the top. (page 263)

(Yes, I am very well aware of the irony that the USA is trying to emulate this aspect of the Chinese academic community!) 

I will say that as an Asian immigrant who's extremely grateful that the USA invested in him at a time when no private banker would have, I'm astounded at the lack of gratefulness Yau displays in this autobiography. At one point Yau was stateless (no passport since the British consulate took back his right to a British passport after he got a green card), yet the USA continually worked with him to grant him opportunities to travel and return. And obviously in 2024 Yau gave up his job at Harvard to move back to China to join Tsinghua university, which clearly tells you where his loyalties lie. Being politically oblivious, he probably doesn't see this as potentially making things much worse for the Chinese American communities who may not wish to move, but I'm flabbergasted that someone whose material well-being and ability to achieve his potential was only enabled by Western largesse being so entitled about it!

I enjoyed the book, and probably learned a lot less math than I thought I would have (it's written at a layman's level), but I certainly learned a lot more about the old school Chinese immigrant and their attitudes than I expected.