Roll Call Tribute

Published in Stamford (CT) Advocate on March 25, 2011

Chen Tsai
CHEN FAI ("STEVE") TSAI Steve Tsai, loving husband and father and innovative chemical engineer, passed away on March 14 at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City surrounded by his family. He was 65. Steve came to the U.S. from Taiwan as a young man with a brilliant mind and a few dollars in his pocket and spent the rest of his life building a family, researching the newest developments in chemical engineering and sacrificing his own comforts to provide for the best-possible education of his children.

Born Chen Fai Tsai on February 7, 1946 in Changhua, Taiwan, Steve was one of eight children and a member of the twenty-fifth generation of his family. He excelled at math and science from a young age, and at 15 was accepted into the Taiwan Institute of Technology, now known as the National Taiwan University of Science and Technology.

After graduating with a bachelor's degree in engineering and completing his Taiwan national military service and two years of work at a plastics company, Steve came to the U.S. in 1969 with $20 cash and a bottle of duty-free Johnny Walker Black Label whiskey he thought he could sell for a profit. No one would by the bottle, he recalled, and he didn't drink.

During those first lean years in America, Steve completed an engineering masters program at the University of New Hampshire. He did odd jobs between semesters like putting up posters in Manhattan, selling hot dogs in Times Square, running errands for a Garment District storeroom, and, as he was fond of reminding his children, often would stretch a bowl of oatmeal to serve for breakfast and lunch.

After finishing his master's degree, Steve was accepted into the Ph.D. program in chemical engineering at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas. It was while studying in Texas that Steve met the love of his life, a botany student also from Taiwan named Aimee H.Y. Liu, at a spring picnic. They married on August 26, 1972, and, in 1975 Aimee and Steve had their first daughter, Emily.

After he graduated with his Ph.D. in 1976, Steve's older sister--who was also living in the U.S.--mailed him an advertisement for an engineering job in Manhattan that she clipped from the New York Times. The U.S. Industrial Chemicals, Inc. hired Steve and he moved his family to Queens, New York and then Pompton Plains, New Jersey, where their second daughter, Anne, was born in 1979.

Steve and Aimee's careers soon took them to Stamford, Connecticut where Steve threw his energies into helping to organize events and outings for the local Chinese community, eventually serving as president of the Chinese Association of Fairfield County (now a chapter of the Organization of Chinese Americans). He enjoyed playing bridge and tennis with his friends in town.

As a chemical engineer, Steve pushed the boundaries of his field. In the final years of his career, he helped develop new surgical tools at the health care manufacturer Covidien. Steve was part of a cutting-edge research team known within the company as "the mad scientists." It was a job he loved, and he relished the exchange of ideas with his colleagues and his role as mentor to many young scientists and engineers at the company.

After Steve was diagnosed with cancer in 2007, his work in the Covidien labs took on a new, personal urgency that his team admired. Among Steve's many contributions to the industry were working on new ways to perform surgery, new techniques for coating surgical tools to reduce infection rates, and new ways to locally treat cancer that limit the toxic effects of chemotherapy.

An enthusiastic correspondent, Steve always sent reports about his family and his life to his classmates from Taiwan, now dispersed all over the world. Steve was an avid photographer and often emailed photographs to friends of the cherry blossoms on his prized cherry tree or the stargazer lilies he planted in the front yard. He was proud to see both of his daughters graduate from Harvard University, having always scrimped on new clothes and luxuries for himself to put his daughters' educations first.

After his daughters graduated from college, Steve organized trips abroad for himself and Aimee. The two of them visited the far-flung places he had always dreamed of seeing like Alaska, Kyoto, Bangkok, Istanbul, Prague, Vienna, Copenhagen, Paris, and Rome.

Steve's office desk was always a shrine to his family, and he loved sharing with his colleagues photos of meaningful occasions like attending his children's weddings, his daughter Emily's graduation from Harvard medical school with honors, and his daughter Anne's development work in Afghanistan. He leaves behind a collection of memories his loved ones will cherish, and a legacy of hard work, dedication to family, and love of life.

Steve is survived by his wife Aimee H. Y. Liu, his daughter Dr. Emily Tsai and her husband Dr. Matthew Baldwin, and his daughter Anne Tsai Bennett and her husband Brian Bennett. The family asks that in lieu of flowers donations be made to Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in the name of Chen Fai Tsai.