焦點人物: Tony Hsu 徐善曾

(The following text is an excerpt from the book Chinese Americans in Irvine 1971-2021.)

Tony Sui-Tsan Hsu (徐善曾) is the grandson of Xu Zhimo, China’s preeminent poet of the twentieth century. He was born in Shanghai shortly after the end of World War II. As a toddler, Tony and his three sisters were raised by his grandmother, Zhang Youyi, while his parents pursued their studies in America. In the late 1940s, Youyi and her young charges left China amidst national political turmoil and settled in Hong Kong. At age six, Tony and his sisters emigrated to New York to join their parents and to begin a new life in America. There, he and his sisters grew up in a modest immigrant household in Queens.

Tony went on to earn a BS in electrical engineering from the University of Michigan and a MPhil and PhD in applied physics at Yale University. Although his educational background is in physics, he takes great pride in his endeavors as an entrepreneur, which have allowed him to follow in the footsteps of his great-grandfather Xu Shenru. Since the early 1990s, Tony has worked with early-stage technology companies to develop them into successful ventures; in the late 1990s he cofounded Tech Coast Angels, an organization committed to developing technology ventures.

Tony is married to Lily Pao Hsu, a fashion and fabric designer. Together they have lived in the Irvine/Newport Beach area for more than four decades. Their daughter, Alexandra Hsu, is a filmmaker and has taken a deep interest in exploring the life of her great-grandparents Zhang Youyi and Xu Zhimo. She is in the early stages of crafting a script for a biopic.

Lily was an active member of the Chinese American community in the 1980s and 90s. She has volunteered for the Chinese American Executive Council of the Bowers Museum and The Historical & Cultural Foundation of Orange County. These groups organized fundraising events, such as “Iron Spikes” and “Golden Fields,” to promote Chinese American culture and arts in Orange County.

In 1992, Tony helped organize, along with others, an event at the Irvine Barclay Theater featuring NASA astronaut Dr. Eugene Trinh, who is a Yale classmate and close friend of Tony’s. Dr. Trinh was a payload specialist for the United States’ 48th Space Shuttle Mission aboard the Space Shuttle Columbia in 1992.

After he retired, Tony renewed his interest in exploring the life and legacy of his poet grandfather Xu Zhimo, who died fifteen years before he was born. However, the journey to discover who his grandfather truly was began when he was just a boy. Every day the young Tony walked past an old framed black and white photograph of this mysterious relative who was dressed in a white silk Chinese gown and spectacles.

Xu Zhimo had a somewhat unconventional place in the Hsu family—he had famously separated from his wife, Tony’s beloved grandmother Zhang Youyi, during a time when divorce was unheard of in China. Tony’s father, Xu Jikai, rarely spoke of him.

Now, for more than a decade, Tony has traveled through China, England, Italy, Russia, Japan, India, and many parts of the United States in search of Xu Zhimo. In 2013, he and his family made the 8,000-mile voyage to Kolkata in Southern India to visit Santiniketan, the rural college town where Xu Zhimo had traveled in 1928 to spend time with his dear friend Tagore. On the grounds of the Visva-Bharati University which Tagore had founded, Tony, Lily, and Alle enjoyed a cup of tea at Susima, a rustic, octagonally-shaped tea house named after Xu Zhimo.

A year later in 2014, the family journeyed to Japan to meet with husband and wife professors Ako and Hiro Kato at the Shibusawa Memorial Museum. It was there that the museum curator showed them rare film footage of Xu Zhimo and Tagore on their visit to Japan nearly a century earlier.

Ultimately, this personal investigation has brought Tony revelations about a man who has always been portrayed as an iconoclastic poet, and a man who seemed almost defined by his quests for romantic love. But he learned that Xu Zhimo was so much more faceted than that. He was also a brilliant thinker with lofty ideals who lived in a period of modern history marked by massive upheaval, technological advances, and military conflict— the harbinger of a new era.

In 2016, Tony published the fruits of his research, along with essays by Xu Zhimo scholars and professors Alan Macfarlane and Michelle Yeh, in the book Chasing the Modern: The Twentieth-Century Life of Poet Xu Zhimo. The book is the first English-language biography to be written about his grandfather. In 2018, it was translated into Chinese and published in China where it became a bestseller. (Courtesy of Tony Hsu)

 

(以下文字摘錄自《爾灣華裔紀實1971-2021》一書)

徐善曾是二十世紀傑出詩人徐志摩的嫡孫。二戰結束後不久，出生於上海。在蹣跚學步的時候，善曾的父母赴美留學深造，於是他和三位姊姊由祖母張幼儀撫養長大。1940 年代後期，張幼儀和她悉心照料的幼兒們在全國政局動盪中離開中國，定居香港。六歲時，善曾和他的姊姊們移民到紐約與父母團聚，開始在美國的新生活。在那裡，他和姊姊們在皇后區中產移民家庭中長大。

徐善曾接下來在密西根大學獲得電機工程學士學位，後在耶魯大學獲得應用物理學碩士和博士學位。 雖然他的教育背景是物理，但他引以為傲的是、能夠追隨曾祖父徐申如的腳步，靠自己努力成為一名企業家。自 1990 年代初以來，徐善曾一直和新創科技公司合作，將它們發展成為成功的企業； 1990 年代後期， 他與人聯合創辦了技術海岸風險投資公司（Tech Coast ngels），旨在培養新創科技公司。

徐善曾與服裝設計師妻子包舜如（Lily Pao Hsu） 在爾灣/新港灘地區生活了 40 多年。女兒徐文慈是一 名電影製片人，對探索曾祖父母徐志摩和張幼儀的生平有著濃厚的興趣，她正在為這部傳記片編寫劇本。

包舜如是 1980 年代和 90 年代美籍華人社區的活躍人物。她曾為寶爾博物館的美籍華裔委員會和橙縣歷史文化基金會擔任志工。這些團體安排籌款活動， 例如「鐵釘」和「金田」，以在橙縣推廣美籍華裔的文化和藝術。

1992 年，善曾與其他人一起在爾灣巴克萊劇院籌劃了一場活動，由善曾耶魯大學的同學及密友，美國國家航空暨太空總署太空人鄭有州（Eugene Trinh）博士為特邀嘉賓。鄭博士是 1992 年搭乘哥倫比亞號太空梭，完成美國第 48 次航天飛機任務的有效載荷專家。

退休後，善曾對探索在他出生前 15 年便撒手人寰的詩人祖父徐志摩的生平與成就的興趣、再次油然而生。然而，探尋祖父究竟是誰的旅程其實早在善曾還是孩童時就已開始。每天，年輕的善曾都會經過一幅老舊的相框，其中的黑白照片顯示著神秘親戚身穿白色絲綢中式禮服、戴著眼鏡。

徐志摩在徐家有著不尋常的處境，他與妻子，善曾心愛的祖母張幼儀分居，而離婚在當時的中國聞所未聞，因此善曾的父親徐積鍇很少提起他父親。

十多年來，徐善曾走遍中國、英國、義大利、俄羅斯、日本、印度和美國許多地方，搜尋關於徐志摩的資料。2013 年，他和家人跋山涉水航行 8000 英里前往印度南部的加爾各答，訪問了徐志摩在 1928 年與摯友泰戈爾共度時光的鄉村大學城 Santiniketan。在參觀泰戈爾創辦的 Visva-Bharati 大學校園中，善曾、 Lily 和 Alle 也特地在一間以徐志摩命名（印度名字 Susima）的純樸八角形茶館中歇息茗茶。

一年後的 2014 年， 善曾全家前往日本， 在 Shibusawa 澀澤紀念博物館與教授夫婦 Ako 和 Hiro Kato 會面。在那裡，博物館館長向他們展示了徐志摩和泰戈爾在近一個世紀前訪問日本的罕見電影片段。

善曾個人的研究尋訪最終讓他對徐志摩，這位向來被描繪成是一名反傳統的詩人，以及似乎被定位成是一個追求浪漫愛情的人物，有更進一步的認識。但善曾了解，徐志摩的多面性遠超過這些。他還是生活在一個以大規模動盪、科技優勢及充滿軍事衝突為標誌的近代歷史中、一位有遠大理想的傑出思想家── 一位引領新世代的先驅。

2016 年，善曾在《志在摩登：詩人徐志摩的二十 世紀生平》一書中發表了他的研究成果，並加入徐志摩學者和教授 Alan Macfarlane 和 Michelle Yeh 的論文。這本書是第一本關於他祖父徐志摩的英文傳記。 2018 年，它被翻譯成中文，而且在中國出版、並成為暢銷書。（中文翻譯：鄧含章）