The Homeland Beckons for Many Taiwanese : Nationwide Recession, Career Opportunities Abroad Prompt Many Professionals to Leave the Southland

From the South Bay to the San Gabriel Valley, Chinese professionals are packing up and heading home to Taiwan, trading recession for the promise of an unprecedented high-technology boom on the island.

The trend has left the Chinese community in Los Angeles County in a state of flux, as friends and relatives pack up and go. For some, protracted unemployment left no choice but to buy a one-way ticket back. Others see Taiwan’s top science jobs as a chance to jump-start stalled careers.

“Some are early retirement age, who come back to get a second career. Others, maybe they didn’t see a good future for themselves in the United States. I just wanted a change. I was recruited,” said a systems engineer who moved from Rancho Palos Verdes to Taiwan.

Many of those leaving are engineers, some with more than 20 years’ experience in the aerospace industry. But the trend has also touched professionals from lawyers to architects, as well as businessmen and recent graduates on student visas.

“Instead of always staying in the United States, like a brain drain out of Taiwan, a lot are going back and bringing with them the knowledge and know-how that they gained,” Monterey Park City Councilman Samuel Kiang said.

The former South Bay engineer, who asked not to be identified, left seven months ago, after 25 years in the U.S. aerospace industry. He took a job with Taiwan’s national science program, which oversees the government’s fledgling satellite program. Speaking from Taiwan, he said: “It’s very prosperous here. I thought, ‘Why don’t I just take a chance?’ ”

Of the 100 or so employees in his office, about one-third recently arrived from the United States, he said, an upheaval that has led to culture shock, and, for the many men who temporarily left wives and young children behind, the sadness of separations.

Even for the older generation, nostalgia is a factor that tempts them to return.

“In the recent year, I have thought about going back,” said Jin Yu, 53, of Rancho Palos Verdes, a structural engineer for McDonnell Douglas. “To simply put it, I’m homesick. It may sound funny because I have been here 30 years. But never did I really feel that this is my home--that I’m part of this society. And that feeling got a little stronger lately.”

Although Yu has not decided if or when he would return, Taiwan’s increased political openness and economic opportunity beckon.

In 1992, 5,200 Taiwanese with master’s and doctoral degrees returned home from abroad, more than 80% of them from the United States, according to Yaw-Nan Chen, science division director of Taiwan’s diplomatic mission in Los Angeles. In the first four months of this year, 1,700 went back, again with the vast majority coming from the United States, he said. Those numbers are up markedly from the 2,800 who returned to Taiwan in all of 1990.

Back in Los Angeles County, signs of the exodus abound.

Behind the closed doors of Yaw-Nan Chen’s South Pasadena office, strategically located within recruiters’ reach of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and close to the heart of the San Gabriel Valley’s Chinese community, a steady stream of high-tech officials from Taiwan interview local Chinese scientists.

Chen’s office, the only one of its kind in Southern California, promotes exchange programs and joint research between the United States and Taiwan and facilitates technology transfers. As Taiwan revs up its high-tech efforts, however, the office is playing a greater role in recruiting.

In a recent speech organized by Chen at an Alhambra golf club, Nan-Hon Kuo, new chairman of Taiwan’s National Science Council, urged about 120 of the region’s top engineers to return to Taiwan, touting the island’s development plans and fast-moving high-tech policy.

A rapidly expanding science-industry park outside Taipei that now contains more than 140 companies offers a sure promise of employment, especially to those in computer-related fields, Kuo told the crowd.

The slump in California’s economy coincides with frenzied development in Taiwan: A government plan launched in 1991 is pumping $300 billion into improvements in communications, transportation and pollution control.

The island also has thrown its resources into developing its own aerospace industry; the fledgling government program calls for the launching of three satellites over the next 15 years, the first in 1997.

For many, a return to Taiwan represents an opportunity for upward mobility, greater recognition and increased responsibility.

“Being Asian here in the United States, there is only so far you can go on the corporate ladder,” said a 28-year-old electrical engineer from Taiwan who works at an Irvine firm. “After 10 or 20 years, you still have to worry about job security, and even if job security is there, you can’t get past a certain level. I’m not claiming discrimination; it’s just a fact of life.”

In Taiwan, a ballooning high-tech sector still offers top jobs. Take Denny Ko, a former Los Angeles area resident who returned to Taiwan in late 1991 as president of Taiwan Aerospace Corp., a public-private venture that made headlines with a proposed $2-billion deal for a 40% stake in McDonnell Douglas Corp. that later fell through.

Ko worked for Northrop Corp. and McDonnell Douglas before founding his own company in Los Angeles, said Phillip Chen, who worked for Ko for five years and who now runs his own computer business in Cerritos.

“His company here had 75 people,” Chen said. “Now he’s heading Taiwan Aerospace. He has 600 people reporting to him.

“Taiwan now can pay higher salaries, almost commensurate with what (engineers) are getting here. Just from my own friends, 20 to 50 people I know of have gone back in the past couple of years,” he said.

Taiwan Aerospace, which is 29% government-owned, continues to draw heavily on local talent in its recruiting efforts, said Yaw-Nan Chen, of the diplomatic mission.

“Some are from TRW, some from JPL, some from Litton, some from Hughes, one from Lockheed, some from Aerospace Corp.,” he said.

About 50 Chinese scientists from the United States, most from the Los Angeles area, have been hired for the satellite program, he said. The program is supervised by the Taiwan government’s National Science Council, which is headed by Peter Tai, a former TRW engineer.

Though Chen’s office recruits only for high-level science and engineering positions that often require 10 years’ experience, scores of younger Taiwanese who got advanced degrees in the United States, with the intention of staying here, are heading back to apply for work in Taiwan’s expanding high-tech industries.

“If I can’t find a job in the summer, I’ll think about going back,” said Mike Tsao, 32, who was laid off in April after eight months as a computer engineer for a downtown Los Angeles law firm. “Some of our friends, they have a job, but they feel the same way--very insecure. When I got laid off, I didn’t think it would be me. Even now, if I got a job, I don’t have the confidence of security.”

Tsao, a former San Gabriel Valley resident who now lives in Yorba Linda, recently completed his course work for a master’s in computer engineering at Cal Poly Pomona. But he and his friends are hard-pressed to find jobs above the level of computer technician, low-paying work for which they are overqualified, they said. And those who have found jobs are worried about losing them.

One of Tsao’s closest friends has already given up and gone home.

“He had a job here, but he didn’t feel secure. His brother works for Boeing, in Seattle, and he wants to leave too,” Tsao said. “At this kind of age, we cannot waste our time and just hang in there. We can go back to Taiwan and come back here in 10 years. But we just don’t have a chance right now.”

For years, lower salaries and an oppressive political climate kept many of Taiwan’s top minds far from home.

“A couple of years ago, if there was a position in Taiwan or China, most Chinese-Americans in the United States would not consider it. The simple reason: the salary,” said T. J. Wang, president of the Chinese Engineering and Scientists Assn. of Southern California. “Today is a bit different.”

Greater political tolerance on the part of the Taiwan government and an easing of the hard line toward mainland China also have encouraged some to return.

Twenty years ago, Tsao’s uncle slipped into Shanghai via Hong Kong on a clandestine business trip. At that time, Tsao recalled, anyone discovered on the communist mainland was blacklisted by the Taiwan government and refused re-entry. Today, however, billions of dollars in Taiwanese capital are flowing into mainland China, where labor is cheap and environmental regulations few.

“People who came and got a job here and American citizenship, now they feel like they can live with the political system in Taiwan,” said Ching Shieh, an engineer with Aerospace Corp. in El Segundo.”

“I ask myself, ‘What am I going to be doing after I retire?’ ” Yu said. “I don’t want to move to Arizona--or any place outside of Southern California, where I can see a lot of my own ethnic group.”

When Yu arrived in the 1960s, “You didn’t want to go home,” he said. “It’s not like today, simply because today this place is not too much more attractive than back home, everything considered.”

Despite the exodus, however, many say the population shift is only temporary.

About 95% of those who have left the Los Angeles area are keeping their homes and families here, Yaw-Nan Chen said. Those with school-age children, particularly those with children who speak little or no Chinese, prefer to become international commuters rather than put their families through cultural upheaval.

Those with one foot in each country are so prevalent that they are jokingly referred to as “astronauts” in Taiwan.

Then there are Taiwan’s drawbacks: chronic pollution far worse than Los Angeles’ smog, precipitous real estate prices and overcrowded living conditions. Two parking spaces in Taiwan can buy you a house in the Los Angeles suburbs, one man joked.

“I think that in the long run, they will all be back. I haven’t heard of anyone giving up their U.S. citizenship and repatriating,” said Phillip Chen, the aerospace engineer who started a computer business. “People like us are already Americanized. Our home is here.”

“Here, the air is a lot cleaner, even though Los Angeles is one of the worst cities in America. Compared to Taipei, it’s wonderful. Even the congestion on the freeway is 10 times (better) than Taiwan.”

For some, the jarring shift back to Taiwan was too much to take.

Ju-Lan Jau, 41, a mechanical engineer who lived in the United States for 10 years, left her Cerritos home and a job at McDonnell Douglas to work in Taiwan two years ago. After six months, she came back to Southern California.

“There is a lot of sexual discrimination (in Taiwan). People don’t respect a woman engineer,” Jau said in a telephone interview from Taipei, where she is vacationing.

While she and her teen-age daughter both bristled at elements of Taiwan’s culture, including a school system Jau describes as so competitive it’s “stupid,” she said she still considers making a permanent move back to Taiwan, not as an engineer but as a businesswoman and feminist.

“I hate the way women are treated here,” Jau said. “If I could do something to change that, I would.”