The Shape of Things to Come

As Ma Cau, 12, this boy’s life was always a half step from death; a blur of street corner firefights and mines beneath buses, children blown to pulp and young fathers press-ganged into the Vietnamese army to disappear.

Even Ma’s escape aboard a leaking, undersized fishing boat crammed with 40 refugees--all seasick, all parched and petrified--seemed deadlier than staying.

“Waves smashed into the boat like a big wooden drum and we didn’t think it could last another night,” he remembers. A cruise ship sailed near and there was music and well-dressed watchers at its rail. “But it didn’t stop. For the first time I felt abandoned in a dangerous place.”

But now, as Michael Ma, 31, this man’s life is about as safe as it gets.

He has a prestigious degree, a salary closer to six figures than five, and is part of an elite team drawing and dreaming advanced designs for Mercedes-Benz.

And between his worlds, throughout his 19-year passage from barefoot refugee to respected stylist, there is a simple yet often overlooked creed: Having nothing can be a new start to success or an old excuse for failure.

“In America, opportunity is here for everyone because that’s how the system was developed,” he says. Ma is speaking of constitutional freedoms and all our equal opportunities, from free education to welfare programs that can be a route out, a way up. “What we haven’t got are enough individuals who value the system and know how it can help them.”

That, of course, makes Ma fusty and hopelessly out of season. Lord, he even thinks there should be respect for elders and that adult children should support needy senior parents. He believes that regard for those around us creates similar returns; that stubbornness abets personal advancement; that loyal employers are entitled to honest employees; and that families are everyone’s primary foundation. And similar quaint nonsense.

Yet Ma makes no attempt to preach or patronize. He knows that his own rearing placed uncommon emphasis on self-worth through centuries-old standards of pride, caring and giving. Teachers, employers, friends and mentors say his qualities are instinctive.

If there is a consciousness, they agree, it is all rooted in a self-discipline fueled by an incessant drive to compete. If there are negatives, say a few, it is his impatience that sometimes makes Ma seem a prima donna.

He doesn’t see that temperament. Nor do most friends. Deference, yes. Maybe shyness. Certainly chronic politeness and a consideration for others that produced his gentle counterproposal to a request for an interview.

We could chat any evening. But if the interview would require time away from his workday, asked Ma the established professional, would we please clear it through his boss?

*

Ma Cau’s background and beginnings were bright.

His parents were Chinese living in South Vietnam. Father was a herbal physician schooled by his father. Mother sold nets and sea fishing gear and made a family home at Cam Ranh Bay, a deep and sheltered harbor for U.S. military sea lifts supplying the war.

For Ma Cau--to become Michael Ma when an American teacher exercised an immigrant gesture as old as Ellis Island--there was a brother and six sisters. Born in Vietnam, he studied Chinese at good schools in places that later would ring as combat datelines--Phan Rang, Nha Trang, Dalat and Cholon on the outskirts of Saigon.

“It was a happy childhood,” Ma recalls. “I got to go to bigger cities and study and I liked that.”

It was also an American childhood within a military occupation where he saw no racism, nor disrespect for native populations and cultures.

“I liked to associate with Americans because they were a lot of fun, always caring, very respectful of me and my family and curious about the Vietnamese way of life,” Ma says. “I’d get to ride in jeeps. They’d give me ice cream and toys. My favorite was a long, solid plastic firetruck, all red and white with an extending ladder.”

Soldiers spoke of baseball and New York; cowboys and Hollywood; surfing, hamburgers, Ford Mustangs and one nation, under God, an inexhaustible fountain of Coca-Cola.

“To me, America was a paradise,” Ma says.

Vietnam was also his first taste of Mercedes-Benz.

“A friend’s parents had one and sometimes we’d all get driven to school in it,” he remembers. “A big, black car with a three-pointed star. Very nice. I felt very privileged. That’s how I remember Mercedes.”

But as Ma turned toward his teens, South Vietnam began to crumble. He remembers those mid-’70s as neighbors in panic, great convoys of military vehicles, fewer fathers returning from war and more smashed homes.

The Ma family gathered in Cholon. The official advice was simple: American aircraft carriers are in the South China Sea waiting for those who will get on military helicopters and go.

“My parents got cold feet and didn’t want to leave the country,” Ma says. Then the Americans, their carriers and helicopters went away. In 1975 the Communists came. “My parents were thinking about committing suicide, all of us would commit suicide.”

Instead, they decided to join a 1.5 million-person exodus from Vietnam. They converted piasters into American dollars and those dollars into 1.5-ounce gold wafers the size of business cards. They found a fisherman with a boat. They worked in secret for two years, spending their gold on stockpiling gas rations, rebuilding the boat’s timbers and overhauling its engine.

Ma was a lookout that night in 1977 when their fisherman walked the beach, cast a net and lighted a cigarette. It was the signal for time and tide.

“We started walking to the ocean that moonless night, then walked a quarter mile in shallow sea to where the boat was parked offshore,” he says. “We would head for the Philippines.”

Hellish storms and exhausted food and water supplies ended that plan after a few days. When a freighter chugged by, Ma’s mother used her wedding band to buy water, food and directions. Their boat turned southwest toward a new destination: Malaysia.

“When we landed, after seven days and nights at sea, none of us could walk,” Ma says. “We crawled up the seashore . . . were picked up and spent the next six months in a refugee camp.”

Ma tosses out a sad statistic: “Five hundred people,” he says. “One toilet.”

The stay could have lasted years. But Ma’s father had a stepsister living in Alhambra, who vouched for her extended family and agreed to sponsor them. That’s what families do.

“We were broke when we got here and were on welfare for the next two years,” relates Ma.

That wasn’t the worst.

Ma was accepted at Marguerita School despite a handicap unknown to most eighth-graders.

“I couldn’t read or speak English,” he says.

*

Word by word, class by class, day by day, Ma worked at becoming an American. He graduated from Marguerita to Alhambra High School and then San Gabriel High. He made school tennis teams and won their trophies.

He registered for art classes and sketched incessantly. People he’d seen in the movies. Cartoon characters he saw in his mind. And, of course, those cowboys the soldiers at Cam Ranh Bay had described.

Ma wrestled through cultural differences. In Vietnam, high school students received physical punishment and packed their own lunches. In the United States, there were no beatings and endless cafeteria food.

“I remember looking at the school parking lot, seeing all these cars and thinking how lucky teachers were,” he says. “Then I found out they were students’ cars.”

There were, of course, drugs and gangs. But not for Ma. He had his tennis tournaments and career ambitions. Besides, he’d already survived much heftier dangers.

“Escaping Vietnam gave me a second chance, so I treasured life a lot,” he says. “I had opportunity. I had freedom. I wasn’t about to do anything that would ruin that.”

Ma’s art skills ascended. He won a school contest and his poster was chosen to promote a Fourth of July celebration. Then his tennis coach’s brother arranged a tour of the Art Center College of Design at Pasadena.

“I saw the gallery, the paintings,” Ma remembers. He also caught the passion of the place. “I saw fifth-scale models of cars, their shapes, their colors, their big wheels, and what I was seeing was nothing I was seeing on the streets.

“This was the future environment. This was the place I knew I wanted to be.”

Right. The line seeking admission to Art Center stretches from here to Florence, Italy. Ma had no money, no exemplary grades. Worse, no portfolio. But he had desire that was a fire.

To get grades up, he registered at East Los Angeles Community College and studied English, math, history, all the general requirements for higher education.

He found a job as a copy messenger at the Los Angeles Times, a gofer hoofing proofs and mail and back issues from circulation to editorial departments. And he hung out in the photo section where former staff photographer and automotive specialist Randy Leffingwell well remembers this skinny kid “always drawing, always showing me these really wonderful, fanciful renderings of future cars.”

Ma also decided he could do as well as anyone on the newspaper’s roster of freelance illustrators. And so he drew for the Times’ food, book, business, entertainment and lifestyle sections, learning the tricks of caricature, anatomy and brush shading. The publications fattened his portfolio.

There were night classes at the Art Center, where he was taught “to draw and make a car look good . . . although I didn’t have a clue about the difference between styling and design.”

Finally, on a Ford-Chrysler-GM scholarship worth about $60,000, Ma was accepted for full-time studies at the Art Center.

There was no question that he would study transportation design because he was submerged in Southern California where “you couldn’t help looking at cars, admiring cars until a car becomes who you are.

“Here, you do everything in a car. You work in a car. You play in a car. You shop in a car. When we arrived in Los Angeles and drove from the airport I had never seen so many cars, maybe a zillion of them at one time.”

Ma laughs at a thought. He’s probably the only person ever inspired to a career by rush hour on the San Diego Freeway.

*

Ma found the Art Center an unyielding, tougher education.

“A hard-working world around very talented people and a lot of competition,” he explains. But he had an accidental asset. “I was a 50-50 mixture, Chinese and American.

“So I could approach and translate issues from two points of view. That helped my confidence, gave me a broader picture and more freedom to make better decisions.”

Ma learned to express his thinking on paper, to meld shapes and colors into a personal philosophy of design. Less is more, he discovered. But always within the perennial challenge of balancing simplicity against function.

Drawing. Photography. Sculpting models from clay and Styrofoam. Ma loved the reach of advanced design, being in a dreamworks where ideas are usually visions drawn too weird, too impractical and too expensive.

But they could be a shape of things to come.

One fragment might translate to practical purpose.

They could at least poke people into thinking in new directions.

And it probably was an advanced designer, not a production designer, who dreamed the first cup holder.

“Michael was always able to free himself from the rigors of cliches and get into new adventures,” says Strother McMinn, Art Center professor, Ma mentor and former GM designer. “The predominant feature in his work is his sense of form.

“This has to do with his evolution of shapes and their integration. All shapes go together, of course, but he is able to get new ideas together and not lose the ball. I think his future is unlimited.”

It follows that beneath McMinn’s tutelage, Ma was a first-round draft choice when Mercedes-Benz visited the Art Center to recruit young, fresh, innovative talent.

Gerhard Steinle, president of Irvine-based Mercedes-Benz Advanced Design of North America, was particularly impressed by Ma’s rendering of a Mercedes coupe.

“I thought it really showed feeling for the shape of the car, the corporate identity and definitely our heritage,” Steinle says. “Mike, he really loves Mercedes. In fact, he is our only designer who drives a Mercedes.

“The others drive Miatas.”

*

With Mercedes, Ma has matured as an advanced designer.

He assisted interior styling of the Mercedes-Benz AAV, a sport-utility vehicle to be introduced next year. He headed a team that drew the interior of the Smart, a micro-compact, two-seat commuter Mercedes will build in partnership with the Swiss company that manufactures Swatch watches.

Ma is particularly proud of the Smart’s curved, swirling dashboard and its unique flexibility: It can be flopped and reversed and used on right- or left-hand-drive cars without any structural changes.

Today, while the world is still wide-eyed at 1997 models, Ma is drawing for 2005 and the next generation of Mercedes’ cars.

He has branched out with illustrations appearing in Road & Track magazine and on T-shirts promoting the United States launch of Mercedes’ new E-Class.

He added brushed aluminum pocket flaps, the Mercedes three-pointed insignia, even sleeves of upholstery fabric to a Levi Strauss denim jacket that sold for $1,700 at an AIDS charity auction in Atlanta.

But the future, he says, is still forming.

“I want to be an inventor of products,” he says. Like his designing idols--Michelangelo, Da Vinci and Frank Lloyd Wright. “Things that are useful and it doesn’t matter if it’s a toaster or a space shuttle. But things for a better life, things that are environmentally safe, reduce waste, improve the quality of life and help save the Earth.”

For the Earth, he says, is our home. And home is a foundation to be treasured. Or it will be lost.

Bachelor Ma’s home is a three-bedroom house in Rosemead he shares with his parents. They still cannot speak English and are supported by Ma, his brother the aerospace electrician, and sisters who teach, work in banks, assist physicians and own a dry-cleaning store. To Ma, family is inseparable from home.

“When I got here, in the United States, I realized what my parents had done and sacrificed for me and the family,” he says. “That made me want to do something for them, to work hard and harder to help out. To make them proud of me.”

It’s all part of his circle of life.

“If you don’t respect your parents, you don’t respect life. If you don’t respect life, you don’t respect yourself. And if you don’t respect yourself, there is no life.”

Ma’s life is tennis, his Mercedes C-280, big screen television, Grand Slam breakfasts at Denny’s, any movie by Spielberg, models of legendary cars he admires, and just about everything American. Including his U.S. citizenship.

His past is largely memories because possessions of his former life were lost when the fishing boat broke up on a Malaysian shoreline.

There is, however, one black-and-white snapshot.

It shows an 8-year-old Ma Cau in shorts, standing with his family on the beach at Cam Ranh Bay.

“I hold that photograph and wonder what it looks like today,” he muses. “What are the conditions? Did we pollute the water where I swam? Did we lose those trees?

“I must go back to visit one day.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Michael Ma

Age: 31.

Background: Born in Vietnam, escaped with parents and family by boat in 1977, spent six months in a Malaysian refugee camp before arriving in Los Angeles.

Family: Single, lives with parents and has one brother, six sisters.

Passions: Tennis, classic designers, the Ferrari F40, the 1955 Ford Thunderbird, any car by Mercedes-Benz and family values.

Philosophy of creativity: “If you don’t take a chance, your work is going to be very dull. You have to keep pushing for something new, be constantly upgrading your thinking and keeping up with trends so you can generate new trends.”

Favorite designs: “Zippo lighters, Cadillacs of the ‘50s, Coca-Cola bottles, British, French and Spanish homes on one block of Beverly Hills . . . it’s all so American.”

A remembered Chinese saying: “When you are near the blackness, you stay dark . . . when you are near sunshine, you live in the light.”

His love affair: “Coming from a Third World country, you appreciate the United States more. You treasure the freedom, you go anywhere you want to go, be anyone you want to be. You feel no fear because you feel alive.”