Trying to expand my horizons from my Hoosier farm-boy background, on two occasions during my time at Purdue I had a Chinese roommate.
The first was very bright. He lived in Hong Kong and knew more American movies than I did. As an incoming freshman engineering student, he tested out of my junior year of mathematics as a mathematics major! On a trip home over the holidays, my mother was embarrassed when she asked him how his mother did the laundry, only to find out that he was the seventh child of the second wife, and it was the upstairs maid that did the laundry for the children. The downstairs maid did the laundry for the adults. Malcom Cho was certainly a privileged and intelligent man.
My senior year saw five of us who leased a house near campus. After graduation, I was working at a walnut cabinet manufacturing factory helping to manufacture walnut cabinets and not doing much else. Weekends were leisurely with no responsibility of work, family, or community calling upon us.
One weekend, an irritation that arose was a neighborhood lady. She was a member of Jehovah’s Witnesses and would arrive early at the house, ring the doorbell, and want to talk about her religion. As you might imagine, none of us were interested in an early morning with her. After several weekend interruptions, my Chinese roommate, Wilson Wong, said that he would handle the problem. He had officially changed his first name to Wilson because the English pronunciation of his first and middle name didn’t exactly convey the message he wanted to convey.
Sure enough, as the next weekend rolled around the doorbell rang, and the lady and her children were ready to proselytize. Wilson answered the door and said in his Chinese-English accent: “You talk-a your religion, I talk-a my religion.” Of course, she readily agreed. He then began unbuttoning his shirt with a comment “I be a nudist, let’s take all our clothes off.” For some reason, the lady was no longer interested in our house.
I finished out that summer in relative peace until I answered Uncle Sam’s draft call to become a tank mechanic. As a tank mechanic, I worked primarily on the M88, which is basically a wrecker to retrieve damaged or bogged down tanks. Wikipedia reports a total of only 629 have been produced for the United States Army. These incredible machines were powered by two locomotive engines and were a thrill to operate.