[On September 7th, 1776, the Revolutionary forces employed the Turtle, the first submersible to be used in warfare. So this week I’ve AmericanStudied that event and other submarine stories in our history and culture, leading up to this special weekend tribute to one of my favorite people who has a special sub connection!]
On two of the many ways Mike Tsao reflects the best of late 20th and early 21st century America.
First things first: I wrote a good bit about my former father-in-law (and my sons’ maternal grandfather) Mike Tsao as part of this Saturday Evening Post Considering History column, which paid particular tribute to Mike’s late wife Anna (Ting) Tsao but likewise featured lots of details of Mike’s story as part of their shared one. Check that column out if you would, and then come on back for a couple more layers to Mike’s life and legacies.
Welcome back! I’m featuring this tribute post to Mike now because he spent a good bit of his professional career (more than two decades of it, at least) working for General Dynamics Electric Boat, a Groton, Connecticut company that since 1899 has been one of America’s and the world’s preeminent submarine manufacturers. For much of that time (and continuing to this day) Mike has also taught Engineering Sciences at the University of Connecticut’s nearby Avery Point campus, bringing that professional experience and expertise to students in the area. Those paired professional roles are the endpoints of a career that began at National Cheng Kung University in Taiwan, continued through multiple graduate programs and degrees in the U.S., and included work in Pittsburgh for Westinghouse, one of the world’s oldest and most influential energy companies. Too often, across our history and certainly in our present moment, higher education and industry are framed as contrasting worlds and pitted against each other—but throughout his career, and even more so in his two concurrent roles in Connecticut, Mike reflects how much those worlds intersect and intertwine. I’ve seen our older son Aidan start to have the same kinds of experiences through his studies and first jobs as a civil engineer, and that’s part of Mike’s legacy for sure.
It’s far from the only part, though. Although Mike and Anna were unable (for reasons both personal and geopolitical) to return to either their birth nation of China or their youthful adopted homeland of Taiwan for many years, they always found ways to maintain connections to those places and their communities. Over the last decade and a bit they’ve finally found opportunities to make such return trips, and Mike in particular has been able to do so multiple times, visiting for example his birth region and village in China; Aidan, his brother Kyle, and their Mom were able to accompany Mike and Anna on one memorable such trip in the summer of 2015. Of course those multinational and -cultural connections and journeys, in both directions, themselves illustrate the profoundly American as well as global experiences and identities that Mike embodies and has passed on to his children and grandchildren. But in recent years, my sons have been able to have even more in-depth conversations with Mike about his childhood and life, and thus to make the layers and stages of Mike’s experiences and identities more fully part of their own evolving perspectives and selves. Through their past and heritage as well as their futures, the boys both represent the best of America and give me hope that it might continue and grow despite all the current challenges—and in those ways too, they’re living and extending Mike Tsao’s legacies.
Next series starts Monday,
Ben
PS. What do you think? Sub stories you’d share?
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