6 The RAPS Sheet Summer 2020 In memoriam: Nan-Teh Hsu, 1925-2016 NAN-TEH HSU, who served Portland State for 30 years as a professor of mechanical engineering, died May 3, 2016, in Portland. He was 91 years old. Professor Hsu was one of the pioneering members of the present-day Maseeh College of Engineering and Computer Science. He joined the Department of Applied Science in 1958 and played an integral part in the department’s accreditation and growth into a college. He retired in March 1988 as professor emeritus. Professor Hsu was born February 6, 1925, in Rangoon, Burma (Yangon, Myanmar), one of nine children. He traveled with two of his brothers to Guangzhou, China, in 1936 to study at LingNam University, which ran a special language program for children of overseas Chinese; it was equivalent to an elementary school curriculum. In 1938, as the war with Japan raged, the boys returned to Burma, where Professor Hsu attended high school until 1941. The next year he returned to China to attend Southwest Associated College in Kunming, China. After his first year, however, he—and most of his classmates—left to join a group of interpreters who worked with Chinese and U.S. military personnel. Fluent in Cantonese, Mandarin, Burmese, and English, Professor Hsu served as an interpreter from 1943 to 1945. He returned to Burma to work with two American engineers on a connection from the Burma Road, which had been cut off by Japanese forces, to the Ledo Road from India, which the Allies used to supply the Chinese. In 1945, with the war winding down, he was one of 100 interpreters chosen to join the Foreign Affairs Bureau and work with the U.S. Army. He arrived in Washington, D.C., in June 1945. In 1946 Professor Hsu resumed his education. One of the American engineers on the Burma Road project had promised Professor Hsu that he would help him get into an American university. He was true to his word, arranging a meeting for Professor Hsu with the dean of engineering at the University of Wisconsin. Three years later he received a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering. While at Wisconsin, he also met his first wife, Fung-Haan Fung, who was completing her Ph.D. in nutrition. They married June 27, 1953, and had two children: a daughter, Loh-Ying, born in 1957, and a son, Loh-Kun, born in 1958. After working for the Tennessee Valley Authority, in Alabama, and Seagram’s Whiskey Company, in Kentucky, Professor Hsu enrolled at the California Institute of Technology, from which he received a Ph.D. in chemical engineering in 1956. He worked at Smith-Emery, a materials testing company in Los Angeles, then accepted an offer from Portland State in 1958. But as the family drove to Portland that September, another driver lost control of his vehicle and collided with the Hsu car near Harrisburg. Mrs. Hsu died at the scene. With his two young children living with relatives in California, Professor Hsu began his Portland State career and became good friends with Pastor Charles Lum and his wife, Lorene, of the Chinese Baptist Church. Professor Hsu became a Christian in 1958. When he was reunited with his children a year later, the Lums spent much time caring for the Hsu children. Ten years later, in 1968, Charles Lum died suddenly, and in 1970, Lorene and Professor Hsu were married. After nearly 45 years of marriage, Mrs. Hsu died in 2015. Professor Hsu died 11 months later. Reminder: RAPS picnic nixed THE SUMMER PICNIC, the annual August event that signals the beginning of the programming year for RAPS, was cancelled by the RAPS Board. The decision was prompted by the coronavirus pandemic.
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