Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories

Tombrello–243
town, staying in a very old, what probably had been an extremely elegant hotel, the Jin Jiang.
It’s got very high ceilings and huge, heavy long drapes. Stephanie and I were sleeping in, and
late in the morning I get up, push the curtains aside, and look out. I say, “Stephanie, I’m having
a hallucination.” She said, “What’s going on?” I said, “We’re in the heart of the Red Chinese
Empire. And I’m looking out at the flagpole, and it’s got a Union Jack at the top of it.” And
Kerstin, who’s twelve years old going on thirty-five, says, “Well, if you’d been up and about,
you would have met her, too.” I said, “Tiny twit, what are you talking about? Met whom?”
And she said, “Maggie, of course. I’ve been downstairs, and I met her.” I don’t know what she
did when she met Maggie Thatcher [U.K. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher], but since she was
born in Cambridge, England, she probably curtsied and told her she was a countryman. I don’t
know. Kerstin had just come off of being the only child at a big banquet at the Great Hall of the
People. God, were there pictures taken of her, because she was unique! You know, you drive up
and you’re in a limousine and you get out and the press are taking your pictures; and out of this
car jumps a twelve-year-old. Jumps out? Oh, no! She comes out, ultimate sophistication. You
know, if you’d had a twelve-year-old boy, you would have had to lock him in his room. But a
twelve-year-old girl! This was just perfect. So when I hear about Margaret Thatcher, suddenly I
do a calculation. It’s 1982. The lease for Hong Kong is up in 1997. Years later, I check this out
with some friends of mine at the British consulate, one of whom was with Maggie on that trip.
There’s nothing in the newspaper, but clearly everyone in China knows what’s going on.
They’ve started the negotiations for Hong Kong. In 1997, I was at a conference in Japan, and
suddenly we get this invitation, “Come over to China; we’d love to have you guys for a week.
We’ll pay for all of it.” We said, “What is this about?” And when we get there, we’re there just
in time to watch the handing over of Hong Kong on television. They wanted us there to gloat.
Hey, bragging rights—no problem. They got it back. But we’d been there for what was sort of
the first step, totally inadvertently.
ASPATURIAN: You’ve been to China quite a bit. What do you think? Is China going to absorb
Hong Kong or is Hong Kong going to absorb China?
TOMBRELLO: I think the Chinese have a very good game plan. You could see the beginnings of
it in 1979, in the kind of trade goods they were expecting to sell and in the way the people were
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