Geomancer had a previous reincarnation as a play about a scientist named Kuo with a mentor named Von Neumann. The only remaining scene from this version is the Farewell between Tsien and Von Karman. My gratitude to Roger Tang who put me in touch with director Cyndie Mastel-Rokicki.
Kuo was a physicist and I imagined that he was one of the scientists who returned and developed the atomic bomb for China. In researching this play, I contacted the Nobel prize winner Chen Ning Yang and tried very hard to understand particle physics, symmetry, and twenty-three dimensions. At one point, I think I hallucinated how it would feel to be in twenty-three dimensions. I also spoke to Xue Litai, the coauthor of China Builds the Bomb but as in the case of Chen Ning Yang, had no idea what questions to ask them. Interestingly, Those were the old days where people picked up calls from complete strangers. Interestingly Dr. Yang is now at Tsing Hua University in China, one of the scientists who returned to China.
I was caught up in the white-gaze, cautionary-tale they were making with the story of Tsien and Chao Chung-yao, another Caltech alumnus, who returned to China as described in The China Cloud America’s Tragic Blunder and China’s Rise to Nuclear Power by authors William Ryan and Sam Summerlin. This book was written in 1968. You can grasp from the title the narrative they were peddling.
The fun part of creating this piece was interacting with my technical consultants. I consulted with the late Dr. Paul Bock, a chemical engineering professor at the University of Connecticut, to get a sense of who these people were. Paul was an ardent supporter of my creative endeavors and rode his bicycle from Wallingford to come to the reading.
C.C. Tien was another technical consultant. C.C. spent time with Eric (who played Kuo) so Eric could master the accent and mannerisms. C.C., a PhD mechanical engineer, was known as Mr. Flutter at Boeing. He is the brother of Chang-Lin Tien, Chancellor of the University of California system until his untimely death at age 63. Chancellor Tien was considered for the Clinton cabinet as either Secretary of Energy or Transportation, but apparently the appointment may have been thwarted because he was one of the many Chinese American scientists under surveillance despite his prominence. He had an extensive FBI file.
C.C.Tien is president of the China Forum and part of a group that wanted to surface the wartime atrocities. He met Iris Chang when she was promoting the Rape of Nanking and told me that he had an exhibit of large photographs of the Nanking atrocities like the one that prompted Iris Chang to take on the topic. He told me that he understood why Iris Chang was tormented by the atrocities because he was tormented himself when he looked at the exhibit. He had to keep it covered because it was so horrifying to him.