Xing taught Wu how to fight for survival in the camps. He showed Wu how to dig for underground rat burrows in order to find clean caches of grain and beans which could then later be boiled for food to avoid starvation. He also taught Wu how to be aggressive to discourage bullies. Wu came from an urban, educated background and was naive. Xing often repeated to Wu, "Nobody here will take care of you. You have to take care of yourself." Wu later wrote: Wu was released from his life sentence in 1979 at the age of 42, as a result of political changes following the death of Mao Zedong. He obtained a teaching position at the Geoscience University in Beijing, but found that the label of having been a political prisoner continued to follow him. Wu also found that those who had played a part in labeling him "an enemy of the people", leading to his imprisonment twenty years earlier, tended to react to his survival and return the same way: "All that has happened is in the past ... the Party has suffered too." Wu left China for the United States in 1985, after having received a chance invitation from the University of California at Berkeley to be a visiting scholar. (A faculty member at Berkeley had read an article that Wu had written in an academic journal on geology). Early years in the U.S. Wu arrived in the U.S. with only 40 dollars, a few clothes and an ink tiger print that he had inherited from his father. Since he did not have funding from the university for his first year he had to improvise. At first he was sleeping in the park, and on the Bay Area Rapid Transit when it rained. He got a night shift job making donuts at a donut shop for a few months; then a job at a liquor store, and was finally able to rent a cheap apartment. Wu continued with various odd jobs during this period and in 1988 began working for an electronic chip manufacturer, where he became an assistant manager, and was able to buy a used car. Looking back on this period of his life, Wu felt that there was opportunity and if he just worked hard he could make it. During his first years in America, Wu did not want to think about or