By Crystal Zhu
When my father boarded a plane from China to California in 1991, he carried a suitcase, a scholarship, and a stubborn kind of hope. At 25, armed with a master’s in mathematics but nearly penniless and barely fluent in English, he dreamed of building a life in a country where he knew no one.
Three decades later, he’s an engineer at Apple, working on the frontier of battery technology. The road between those two points wasn’t smooth or predictable. It zigzagged through hunger, illness, rejection, and reinvention — powered by little more than grit and curiosity.
Yunfeng grew up in a small village in China, in a home where meals were often just plain rice and dried vegetables. “If I had one yuan to spend,” he recalled with a chuckle, “I felt rich.” His parents were poor in money but rich in conviction — they believed education was the only ticket out. When he earned a coveted spot at the top high school in the nearby city, they celebrated as though he’d already made it, even though it meant he’d live away from home, often on the edge of starvation.
During his first months at school, he could barely afford meals. His weight dropped, and he fell ill. “I had to drop out for a few months,” he remembered. “My family thought college was no longer possible.” But he sold belongings and borrowed money to pay for treatment, then returned to school with quiet resolve. Against all odds, he not only caught up but rose back to the top of his class by semester’s end.
“I still don’t know how,” he mused, shaking his head. “But somehow, I did.”
That comeback would become the blueprint of his life.
In 1980s China, the college entrance exams were merciless — fewer than one in a thousand students made it to university. Yunfeng faced an additional barrier: colorblindness. In a system that coupled academic placement with physical qualifications, colorblindness disqualified him from nearly all engineering and applied science majors.
“The only fields I could study were math and theoretical physics, and even so, I did not qualify for some physics labs,” he said. “So I chose math.”
Yunfeng excelled, earning his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in mathematics. But pursuing a Ph.D. in the United States posed a new challenge: finances.
“Even the application fees were too much,” he explained. “I had to write to schools asking them to waive them.” When Caltech accepted him into its Ph.D. program, he still couldn’t afford the English language exam fee required for his visa. Advisors and friends helped cover it.
In 1991, he arrived in Pasadena with less than a hundred dollars and a heart full of purpose. He survived on his teaching assistant stipend, spending no more than twenty dollars a week on groceries. “But I was so grateful,” he said, eyes brightening. “I could buy meat and vegetables every week. Back in China, that was maybe once a year.”
Despite the hardships, he flourished. But graduation brought another storm. “I sent out three hundred, maybe four hundred applications to different teaching positions across the US,” he recounted. “Community colleges, universities, anywhere.” But the combination of his limited English skills and strict visa rules made the path to a professorship nearly impossible.
At this point, he faced a crossroads: continue down an uncertain academic path or reinvent himself entirely.
With an F-1 visa allowing a year of practical training, he joined a small software team in Los Angeles. “It was very low income, like being a student again,” he said. “But I learned everything on the job — computers, programming, how to build things.”
That self-taught persistence paid off. By 1996, he joined a San Francisco video game startup experimenting with a 3D virtual reality world built in Java. “We were way ahead of our time,” he said. “The technology was too new. Networks were too slow to support the technology.” Within months, the company went bankrupt.
But he didn’t view it as a failure. Innovation doesn’t always pay off immediately, but the ability to adapt — to keep learning — is itself a form of success.
Because small startups couldn’t sponsor H-1 visas, he sought larger companies to continue working legally in the U.S. In 1997, he landed at Hyundai’s U.S. branch as an embedded software engineer, developing CDMA technology — the foundation of early mobile phones. When the Asian financial crisis struck later that year, Hyundai shut down its U.S. electronics division, and he had to begin anew.
He pivoted to Toshiba, where he worked on DSL internet systems and later on high-definition television — each at the edge of what was possible at the time. “I guess I’ve always been working on the newest things, chasing innovation,” he admitted.
Even as industries rose and fell, Yunfeng’s stability was remarkable. In over two decades in tech, he was never once laid off, even when teammates were. Each transition was by choice, a quiet act of self-determination as he searched for better opportunities. In 2019, he joined Apple, where he now works on advancing battery systems.
Yunfeng’s path is not just a story of technical progression, but also one of human resilience. Every chapter of his life was a lesson in adaptation: from illness to immigration, from teaching to engineering, from one industry to the next. When asked what kept him going through all the uncertainty, he paused. “Well,” he said slowly, “I had no other choice. I had to do all that just to survive. But also, I wanted to see what I could do. When you come from nothing, you are not afraid to try.”
His story offers a quiet but powerful message to anyone navigating their own uncertainties in tech — or in life in general. You don’t need a straight path. You don’t even need perfect conditions. You just need to keep learning, keep moving forward, even when the next step seems impossibly far.