Kwan Hsu

Kwan Hsu was born in Guilin, Guangxi Province, China on March 11, 1913 into a family of educators: her mother was a teacher and her father was a high school principal in Java. Her mother died when she was three and her father remarried seven years later into the Huang Yen Pei family, a well-known family of educators in Shanghai where Kwan attended French convent schools for junior and senior high school and then the University of Shanghai, an American Baptist college, where she graduated in physics in 1936.

Kwan’s plans to study abroad were thwarted by the Japanese Occupation of China from 1937 to 1945. During that time she taught in several Christian mission schools and then became a lab instructor at her alma mater where she taught General Physics, Electricity and Magnetism, Optics, Heat, Modern Physics, and D.C. and A.C. Machinery.

In 1947 Kwan was awarded an American Association of University Women international study fellowship for one year at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. She stayed on in graduate school for thirteen years, receiving a master’s degree in physics from Minnesota and a PhD in biophysics from U.C. Berkeley in 1960 and became a naturalized citizen of the U.S. the same year.

Her first job was as biophysicist at the V.A. Hospital in Indianapolis, Indiana before joining the Department of Physics at PSU in 1964. There she developed a biophysics program for upper division and graduate students, sat on the Radiation Safety Board, and was Officer of Radiation Safety for three years. She and several other PSU professors received a HEW grant, “Effects of Pesticides on Transport Across Bilayer Lipid Membranes” which she worked on for ten years. She was a member of the New York Academy of Sciences, the Society of Nuclear Medicine, the International Biophysics Congress, the Radiation Research Society, and the Chinese Scientists and Engineers Association of Portland.

Kwan’s retirement from PSU in 1978 coincided with the opening of China to the west. After being cut off from family and friends for twenty-five years after the communist take-over in 1949, she was now able to reconnect with her brother in Beijing and her classmates and colleagues at the former University in Shanghai. She was asked to direct three PSU alumni trips to China, acted as translator for visiting Chinese delegations, gave Chinese language lessons, and became an active member of U.S. Chinese People’s Friendship Association and NW China Council in Portland. In 1984 she was invited by Consul General Tan of San Francisco to attend the thirty-fifth anniversary celebration of the People’s Republic of China as the only overseas Chinese member from Oregon.

In 1985, in a more open atmosphere, alumni of the University of Shanghai began to meet and form alumni chapters in major cities in China and the U.S. Kwan made contacts with her classmates who celebrated their fiftieth reunion together. She visited many alumni groups and wrote articles for the alumni newsletter. 

Kwan’s nephew, Zhao Wen (Micah), his wife, Tian Suiyin, and two children, Ziling and Tammie, immigrated to Portland in 1989 and Kwan got her own Chinese family. They bought a duplex together and cared for Kwan until her death of a brain aneurism in 1995. She was eighty-two years old. Tuck and Jayne Chin of Newark, California and their six children befriended Kwan in 1960 when she suffered a nervous breakdown and became her first American-Chinese family. Both families honor Kwan today for her perseverance and quest for excellence over a life-time of service and loyalty to her native country.