A Shaky Beginning to Career

Yale-educated Wei-Tai Kwock surrendered his hard-won company and career to fight for our climate, working with Vice President Al Gore for the non-profit Climate Reality Project.  This wasn’t an obvious path. His grandfathers and father were into business and science. They had all fled China when the Communists took over in 1949, his parents coming to the U.S., his paternal grandparents going to the Philliipines . HIs grandparents never set foot in China again. (See Part 1 .)Wei-Tai's father did return, though, as soon as the country started ties with the U.S. (1979), and he took Wei-Tai with him. China was not as Wei-Tai's father remembered. Still, he was proud of the country's accomplishments, and eager to introduce other Americans to it. (See Part 2.) Wei-Tai also became enchanted with the idea of leading tour groups. (See Part 3.)

Wei-Tai picked up so much of the language during the summers of his undergraduate studies, when he graduated, he decided to keep up his language progress. So, rather than applying to work on Wall Street, which was a popular choice in the 80'S,, he moved to Shanghai and enrolled in Fudan, one of China’s top five universities.

Shanghai's Fudan University ID, 1985

 He remembered the cost of education was so, so inexpensive: about $600/semester for school, about $4/day for room and board. More than that, he found himself in the midst of a UN of sorts. His fellow classmates came from all over the world: including North Korea, Russia, Czechoslovakia, Eastern Germany.  “These were countries that Americans usually never interacted with. Fortunately, China was the place where all these people could congregate. China had relations with all these countries.  As students, we sat in the same class, ate together, played baseball, volleyball and ping-pong together. And you wondered, ‘Why are these countries enemies?’ And, you realize it’s sort of contrived to be enemies. When you get to know them, they’re just the same as normal people.”

After he graduated from Fudan, he got a job as a translator and legal assistant at Paul Weiss, an American law firm with an office in Shanghai.  It was then he happened to meet his wife, Violet. Born in Hong Kong, and educated in the U.S. (Duke, Thunderbird), she had a job at IBM in Beijing.  After Shanghai, Wei-Tai was transferred to Paul Weiss in New York for two years, where he eventually concluded that he had little interest in a legal career, even less in living in New York. He had visited California several times, and had always enjoyed the place. So, hanging on only to the hope that he’d find a job in high tech, he jumped to the land of sunny blue skies. Within a week his dream had materialized, and he found himself working for a nuclear-energy consulting firm.  Monday, October 19^th, 1989 was his first day on the job. At five o’clock, he put his pencils away….and the Loma Prieta Earthquake began.

(To be continued. Next: From Nuclear to Advertising Power.)