Recently, a Chinese blogger spotted a scruffy homeless man who appeared to be Chinese on a US street and went over to strike up a conversation with him. After chatting, he found out that he is a graduate of Fudan University in China who later came to the United States to study postdoctoral and has been living on the streets of New York for 16 years.
author:Nout Gons
The homeless man, identified as Sun Weidong, was born in 1969 in Jiangyin, a small city in Jiangsu Province, China. Sun was an undergraduate majoring in physics at a prestigious Chinese university. After graduation, he chose to come to the United States to pursue his master’s and doctoral degrees, and successfully obtained both degrees in physics in the United States. He studied computer science while working as a researcher and managed to find a high-paying job as a software engineer on Wall Street in New York. He then received his green card and chose to become a naturalized U.S. citizen.
Author：Taufiq Klinkenborg
Sun mentioned in the conversation that when he first came to the United States, he met a Chinese woman in New York. The woman was nice to him, they slowly developed feelings, and then married. Only unexpectedly for Sun, the woman divorced him after getting a green card through marriage. As a result, he suffered a great blow to his mental health, and since then his work and life can not be carried out normally, and he has problems in interpersonal relationships.
“I started hearing voices, hallucinations, and couldn’t tell reality from fiction,” Sun shared in the video with the blogger. He gradually strayed from his normal life and began to wander. Since 2007, he has been on the road for 16 years, surviving almost every day by begging and picking up discarded food.
Shortly after the divorce, Sun shared that he had plans to return home to China with $30,000, but the $30,000 was soon stolen.
In the summer, he slept on a park bench at night. In winter, because New York is very cold in winter, he often spent the night on the New York subway or on the subway benches.
Author：Karolina Grabowska
When asked if he could accept his current life, Sun said that everything is difficult at the beginning, and if it goes well, maybe he can go back to his old situation. He also wants to work on Wall Street again, “even for tens of thousands of dollars,” he said.
In response, ERHS student Philip Taylor shared that after hearing the doctor’s experience, he feel sorry for him.
“He was so smart, so good,” Taylor said. “It’s a shame he ended up here.”
Another ERHS student, William Wang, had a slightly different view.
“In my opinion, there must be other reasons for a smart PhD to end up here, so I think we can’t just look at the surface,” Wang said.
There must be many unknown reasons behind why a good man has fallen to this state. I hope Sun can get help and return home as soon as possible.
