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DECEMBER 30, 1996/JANUARY 6, 1997 VOL. 148 NO. 29
When his father sent for the family, a seriousness came over Da-i. The 12-year-old packed his own bags and stayed awake throughout the flight to watch over his mother and his younger brother. They were traveling to a land they did not know and whose language they did not speak. It would be a place where they would receive new names and new identities. Their father, a devout Christian who now called himself Paul, had picked the boys' American names from the Bible. Thus it came to pass that Ho Da-i became David Ho and his younger brother became Phillip. For a few more years, Phillip would refer to David by the Chinese honorific for "older brother"; becoming American would take time. The family initially settled in a black neighborhood of central Los Angeles, not far from the University of Southern California, where Paul Ho pursued a master's degree in engineering. A translator for U.S. troops in China during World War II, he instructed his wife that their sons were to stick to Taiwanese and Mandarin Chinese and not learn English until they got to America for a better chance of speaking it without an accent. As Sonia Ho recalls in careful but imperfect English, "When we first come to U.S., we don't know any words. David would come home from school and say, 'I don't know what they talking about.' I'd say, 'Oh, what are we going to do?'" Says David: "We hadn't even learned the ABC's. I remember being laughed at by classmates who thought I was dumb." A diffident David did two things: he became an introvert and stuck close to the family, and he focused on school and achievement. Says Phillip, now a dentist: "He knew what it was he had to do." Sonia recalls, "If he got even one question wrong, he'd be very upset with himself." It was A's in everything, math, science--and English. Six months after starting school, David settled into the language, thanks to an English-as-a-second-language program and the miracle of TV. "We watched The Three Stooges," Phillip says. "We picked up a few phrases here and there and some mannerisms." When their parents' third son was born, Phillip and David got to choose the name. They skipped the Bible and picked Sidney, after a character in a Jerry Lewis comedy. Medicine was David's second choice as a career. After high school, he attended M.I.T. and Caltech as a physics major. He never let up on himself, at work or play. Though short, he was an intense basketball player. At Caltech, he took up chess. Characteristically, the first time he entered a tournament, he won. Ho soon realized that the most glittering prizes in science weren't in physics. Molecular biology was the cutting edge, gene splicing the hot technology. Medical research, says Ho, was much more "tangible." And so he made his way to Harvard Medical School. Soon enough, medicine provided the turning point of his career. His mother recalls, "He told me he saw a lot of young people die. He say that must be some disease, so he want to keep researching to find out why." Ho had met up with HIV. As he pursued medicine and then the virus, Ho's introversion faded. "It took many years to reverse itself," Ho says. At the same time, his brothers say, he grew less temperamental and developed his legendary tranquillity. When colleagues threw a tantrum, Ho gently offered advice from Chinese philosophers. One of his favorites is the Taoist sage Lao-tzu, who said, "The softest things in the world overcome the hardest things in the world."
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