Believe in the American DreamWe might not be here today if it weren’t for an immigrant from China

Thousands of pivotal moments determine our destiny, John Tu says, and it’s not all just luck. A string of those moments put us in a position to return Storm Lake’s oldest continuous business, the Pilot, to local ownership.  One April morning five years ago, cinematographer Jerry Risius in Brooklyn, N.Y., spotted the news in The New York Times: a tiny paper in The Tall Corn State won the Pulitzer Prize. Risius, reared on a hog farm near Buffalo Center, called to say he was coming home to visit the folks and wanted to swing by to shoot for an afternoon. That afternoon blossomed into a feature-length documentary that aired on PBS last November, “Storm Lake.” Which caught the attention of John Tu. The co-owner of Kingston Technology in Fountain Valley, Calif., Tu heard about the movie on NPR’s “Fresh Air.” He liked what he heard about The Times. He worried that the pandemic might drive us out of business — we were terribly anxious about it, too. Tu emailed to say that he wanted to make sure we stayed open. He made a generous donation to the Western Iowa Journalism Foundation, which in turn appropriated the money to help keep us rolling. Were it not for Jerry Risius calling, were it not for the movie, were it not for John Tu, we might not be here today. Even before the pandemic, the newspaper industry was in a funk. That’s why Doug Burns of the Carroll Times Herald, Lorena Lopez of LaPrensa of Iowa and I dreamed up the foundation, a nonprofit that would support family-owned, independent rural newspapers. As social media sucked up our advertising base we realized that philanthropy would be vital to our survival. We had watched as the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Seattle Times formed foundations to guarantee that local journalism would survive. Former Des Moines Register Iowa columnist Kyle Munson agreed to chair the board, and Dr. Andrea Frantz of Buena Vista University is a trustee. The director is Becky Vonnahme of Breda. The documentary helped raise funds locally and across the country that, along with the Payroll Protection Program, saved all three publications during the pandemic. It also has helped energize efforts nationally to help local journalism build a new sustainable business model. John Tu showed up for a screening of the documentary in Los Angeles attended by a host of Iowans working in Tinsel Town’s film industry — Rob Elk and Nick Kurtz of Storm Lake being chiefs among them. Tu reiterated that he wanted to help us. Just a few months before, we weren’t sure we would make it, and we weren’t betting the farm that the Republic would stand against insurgency. Tu changed our outlook. John Tu is the nicest guy you’ll meet. That’s what his co-workers say. He has an almost incredible story. He is now 80. His family fled mainland China for Taiwan when John was five. He bristled in the strictures of Taiwan culture and education growing up. He realized he had to get out. John wanted to get to the United States but he could not snag a student visa. So he set a course for Germany at age 17, where an uncle lived. He knew some broken English and no German. John searched for help to learn the language. A young man directed him to a priest who, wouldn’t you know, lived for 30 years in China.  “That was a miracle,” Tu recalled. The priest took John under his wing and to a language school. Germany required two years of apprenticeship before education. John spent three years working as a laborer in a shipyard where he was the only Asian. He felt the sting of racism. He chalks it up to ignorance, looking back — his fellow workers had never met anyone from China. He had nothing. Tu persevered and earned an electrical engineering degree. He got a job at Motorola, but like Taiwan, the tight structure of Germany bristled against his ambitions. “People size you up and ask you questions. It makes you feel like you don’t belong,” he said. His sister, living near Boston, got him a visa to visit the USA one summer. “I came in on a boat to New York City, and after a few hours I realized that nobody wondered, ‘Where did this guy come from?’ This is a place where you are accepted. “Immediately, I fell in love with America.” Tu ventured West and eventually settled in the Los Angeles area. One day in 1981 his mother asked him if he could run out to get some groceries for her. At the store, he bumped into an old acquaintance who suggested that he should meet David Sun, a Taiwan-born electrical engineer, at a pick-up basketball game. Sun had an idea to repackage a memory card so computers could scale up processing horsepower. They set up in Tu’s garage with a phone line. Sun built memory devices while Tu sold them on the phone. After a few years they sold the company for a “small fortune” which they lost on bum advice in the 1987 stock market.  He and Sun got up off the matt and launched Kingston Technology. Within a couple years they were doing $40 million in annual revenue. “There is always a dark side and a bright side,” Tu said during a recent phone conversation. “You hold your hand up to the sun and you can only see the darkness, but it is bright on the other side. You just can’t see it. You believe it. “Why did this happen? If I didn’t lose everything, I would not have what I have today. I lost a small fortune, but now we have a big fortune.” He believes in surrounding yourself with good and honest people.  “I strongly believe that without David, I would not have been here. He says the same thing,” Tu said of their meeting. “There has to be a reason.” Today, the company is the world leader in computer memory. He wants to give back for all his success. Why The Storm Lake Times? “What you are doing is so fundamentally important. You are not The New York Times, but you have a different influence in a different area. You were desperate and your hope was diminishing, and at that very moment I heard about you. “I tell people to dream big. We immigrants, we talk a lot about the American Dream.” This is a dream for us. A pretty mystical one, I must say. John Cullen started The Storm Lake Times in 1990 to be Buena Vista County’s Hometown Newspaper. In our first editorial John wrote about the struggle for freedom and democracy. Honest journalism strengthens each. But both The Times and the Pilot-Tribune were heading the wrong direction. Consolidation was unavoidable to save one strong news source for Storm Lake and Buena Vista County. We ended up as the next caretakers for comprehensive local journalism. Our goal is the same: To build the community through honest journalism that reflects Storm Lake. John Tu gets it. He has seen the worst. He has been down but never gives up. Never quit believing, he advises. Guard the dream that America promises — that a young man from China via Germany could land here with a simple desire to thrive and be free, and that he could become a citizen and stakeholder in this great democratic experiment. He keeps the faith. He is not an investor in The Times Pilot, he is a benefactor. Like other donors to the Western Iowa Journalism Foundation, there is nothing in it for him other than to help save a little piece of democracy’s foundation: a free and independent press. His words always will be on our mind. “If you believe in what you are doing, it will come,” Tu said. It’s Tu’s life story, a thread of which is woven into ours. One of a thousand pivotal moments. How does that happen? Art Cullen is the publisher and editor of The Storm Lake Times. He won the the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Writing in 2017 and is the author of the book “Storm Lake: A Chronicle of Change, Resilience, and Hope from a Heartland Newspaper.” Cullen can be reached at times@stormlake.com.