Personal Story - Wenxia Song
My journey to become a professor has been long and winding, with many unexpected turns and backtracks. I grew up in Beijing, the capital city of China, which has the best educational environment in China nowadays. However, my K-12 education fell into a unique period in Chinese history, the Cultural Revolution. During that period, most educated people were labeled with capitalism and anti-revolution and forced out of their jobs into punishing labor work. Books were removed from people's homes and burned. Schools and many families fell into chaos. The 12-year-old myself was sent to a labor camp with my father to cook and wash for him, keeping him alive. Even under such difficult situations, my parents pushed me to study by reading whatever I could find, imagining, observing, and doing simple things with whatever I had. I found refuge from the chaos in my "learning world." Only in my middle school years did schools gradually restore regular teaching, but still with frequent interruptions by political movements. I absorbed every drop of knowledge teachers could give me and read whatever books I could get, including my mother's old medical textbook.
After high school graduation, even with an excellent academic record, I had no opportunity to attend college, as only children from politically elite families were selected to go to college. We were sent to poor cooperative farming villages to work as peasants and prepared to stay there for the rest of our lives. My village, Southern Jade River, was extremely poor and isolated. Village people barely had enough to eat and had little of anything else, but they were very kind and took me as their own. They taught me to farm using cows, spades, and reap hooks, growing wheat, rice, corn, and vegetables and changing me from a city girl into a peasant as strong as an ox! To return their kindness, I tried to cultivate better seeds to increase production and treat simple health problems using acupuncture, which I learned from my mother. I was frustrated by my limited knowledge and capability. I did not understand "hybridization" for seed cultivation as I had never heard about genetics then. I watched a village man die on the way we carried him on foot to a hospital. The desire for colleges was fired up again in my heart, but the doors of colleges appeared permeably shut to me.
In my third year working in the village, the cultural revolution finally ended, and the good news came. Universities opened to the public, and I was finally allowed to take the entry exam and apply for universities. While worrying about my incomplete education and more than two years out of school, I knew I had to give my best to try, as this was my only chance to go to college! I studied under a flashlight every night after working in the field for 10~15 hours for five months. After three agonizing months of doubting myself for not doing well with the college entry exam, I was surprised to learn that I was accepted into Jilin University, a top-tiered university in northern China, as a biochemistry major. Why did I choose biochemistry? To tell you the truth, I did not even know what biochemistry was about then. Since I did not have information about universities and majors available in the isolated village, I wrote a letter to my sister in the city asking her to fill out the application forms for me. I told her about my interest in medicine and chemistry and that she could choose universities and majors she saw fit. I am always thankful to my sister because she was the one who put my career track in the right direction.
I treasured the opportunity to go to college that I had fought so hard for and spent every minute I could find studying. I was lucky to have enthusiastic professors and lecturers who were also just allowed to return to their teaching jobs interrupted by the cultural revolution. They bravely took on US and UK textbooks, translating chapter by chapter for us with their lectures, enabling us to learn the most updated knowledge. Even though I had to move to a strange city by myself and had a lot to catch up on initially, I felt right at home. I particularly loved lab work. I established a new protocol to isolate the iron-molybdenum cofactor of nitrogenase from nitrogen fixation bacteria as my research thesis and published my first paper, which motivated me to pursue a research career. It was in the college I met my husband of 40 years, who shared a similar hard-fought path to the college.
After graduation, I got into the Master's program of the Biophysical Research Institute at the Chinese Academy of Science, studying the respiration function of mitochondria. At the same time, my husband went to the University of Cambridge, UK, for his Ph.D. two weeks after our wedding. We supported each other with weekly letters. The graduate school exposed me to the real world of research. I was hooked and decided to pursue a Ph.D. abroad after getting a Master's degree. To find information on Ph.D. programs in the US, I had to travel by bus for several hours to the city library, where I jotted down information from the only copy of Peterson's data book. While three graduate programs in the US accepted me, the biochemistry graduate program at the University of Maryland, College Park, was the only one that provided me with the graduate assistant fellowship. Fortunately, there were no Zoom interviews for graduate admission in those days. Otherwise, I would not get into any graduate programs here with my broken English. In the middle of August 1986, with $50 in my pocket and one suitcase in my hand, I arrived at Dulles International Airport, starting my life in a new country. While I had to transfer to a different university after one semester at UMD, I never forgot that UMD opened its arms to me.
I transferred from UMD to Kansas State University to be with my husband, who started his post-doctoral training there in 1987, after we lived thousands of miles apart for three and a half years. I joined Dr. David Rintoul's lab to study how glycolipids regulate signal transduction by forming membrane microdomains and interacting with membrane receptors. I enjoyed the freedom to drive my project independently and the opportunities to attend national and international conferences. I graduated within five years with three first-author publications and a one-year-old son. In both UMD and KState, I met people who originally came from all over the world and learned about their culture, customs, religions, and even sports, which continuously enriched my life.
As a post-doctor, I joined Dr. Keith Mostov's lab at the University of California, San Francisco, studying how epithelial cells transport antibodies from the submucosal to the mucosal surface. From this project, I transitioned my research interest from biochemistry to cell biology. I enjoyed the fast-paced research and weekly stimulating seminars at UCSF and the diverse cultural environment in the area. Two and a half years later, we moved again to Chicago for my husband's job. I worked as a research associate in Dr. Susan Pierce's lab at Northwestern University to study antigen processing and presenting in B cells, which exposed me to immunology research. The complexity of our immune system was and is still fascinating to me. Dr. Pierce encouraged me to apply my biochemistry and cell biology background to understand immune cells and processes, which shaped my independent research career.
When I applied for jobs at the end of my post-doctoral training, UMD again was the first to offer me an assistant professor position. In August of 1996, exactly ten years after I landed in the US for the first time, I returned to the University of Maryland as an assistant professor. After living and working in Maryland for nearly 28 years, Maryland has become my home. I would miss our campus if I got out of town for a week. It has become a habit of mine to stroll around campus every afternoon to clear my mind and to watch students getting younger and younger, more and more new buildings going up, and different flowers blooming as seasons change. I am very fortunate to have the opportunity to work in such a supportive and collaborative environment and train many undergraduate and graduate students from various cultural backgrounds, contributing to our diverse community.
From the September 2024 CBMG Newsletter