Happy Father's Day,
Dad

He was born on March 18, 1956, in Anshan, the steel city of China's northeast, and given the name 华钢 — "steel" — in its honor. He has kept that birth name on every document of his American life, a quiet tribute to his parents. His own father had left cosmopolitan Shanghai to help build the new nation's heavy industry; sacrifice ran in the family.

When the Cultural Revolution shut the schoolhouse doors, the teenager who should have been in high school went to an auto‑repair school instead — stripping ten‑ton "Liberation" trucks down to the last bolt and rebuilding them. That was his first laboratory. When the national college exam was restored in 1977, he taught himself from a stack of study books and earned a place, graduating with a degree in pharmacy from the Guiyang College of Traditional Chinese Medicine.

"I took apart an entire truck until not a single part was connected to another — then I rebuilt it. After that, I understood every system with complete clarity."

In May 1987, with a single suitcase and a stipend of $400 a month, he boarded the first airplane he had ever set foot on and crossed the Pacific to Texas. At the University of Texas at Austin, under Dr. Roland Bodmeier, he turned grit into a master's degree in pharmacy and roughly ten published papers, studying the microscopic science of how a medicine finds its way into the body.

He had come as a visiting scholar. He chose to stay. Texas — warm, flat, and full of light — would become home.

"At every crossroads, the decisive voice was hers." — on Weiming, the catalyst behind every turn

At Access Pharmaceuticals in Dallas, he joined the core team building a new kind of medicine — anti‑cancer drugs wrapped in microscopic spheres, delivered exactly where the body needed them. The work was pioneering, and soon painfully personal: in 1993, his wife Weiming was diagnosed with leukemia. The science of healing was no longer abstract.

When a prestigious offer came from Pfizer — the contract already signed — he turned it down. The houses back east were dark and cramped; Texas was where his family could thrive. He chose them. He always chose them.

"For matters at home, ask your wife; for matters outside, ask Google."

For twenty‑four years he was a scientist at Alcon in Fort Worth — the world's largest eye‑care company — rising to Assistant Director of Research & Development. He formulated the eye drops and contact‑lens solutions that sit in medicine cabinets around the world, among them OPTI‑FREE Puremoist and Systane Ultra, and holds three United States patents for the chemistry behind them.

It is a quiet kind of greatness. Most people will never know his name — yet countless of them have seen the world a little more clearly, a little more comfortably, because of his work.

"Don't lie flat. As long as you're still in the game, the price can always come back."

He retired in 2021, but he did not slow down. He rides his bike most days; flies DJI drones and captures the world in 360°; volunteers as an "armchair botanist" at the Fort Worth Botanic Garden and at the Arlington senior center; hunts fossils and petrified wood; cooks; dotes on cats; and — ever the scientist — keeps tinkering with the newest AI. Beside him, Weiming tends her garden and her jigsaw puzzles.

Five places, each beginning with an A. One remarkable life.