Uncle Hanzi in his studio

There are many legendary stories in Silicon Valley in US. Uncle Hanzi’s story is one of them. The documentary film Chinese in Silicon Valley we made also has Uncle Hanzi in it. Although he has blue eyes, he actually knows Chinese characters and their history better than most Chinese people.

Castro Street in Mountain View was very prosperous in Silicon Valley in 2002. Lots of engineers and entrepreneurs went there eating, drinking or having business meetings in the café day and night. It was in a restaurant called Yuanbao House on the street, I first met Uncle Hanzi, aka Richard Sears. Coming from Oregon, he worked in a high-tech company as an engineer. But he had a great passion for Chinese language.

 He almost spent all his spare time and money researching Chinese characters and attempting to computerize them. I guess that’s the reason for his divorce since her wife couldn’t understand his aspirations and he couldn’t fulfill her desire to live a normal life.

Once my family went to the Golden Gate Park Botanical Garden in San Francisco with Uncle Hanzi. He introduced those strange flowers and plants in Chinese to us. We were so impressed with him, especially of his propound knowledge of Chinese characters.

Then Uncle Hanzi disappeared from our lives for years till we saw an article about him in World Daily. He has been roving in the East of US these years, working, researching on the evolution of Chinese characters and running a website called “Chinese Etymology” with all his efforts. To trace the etymology of Chinese characters is definitely a state level project. You cannot imagine that an American is willingly to spend all his money and time doing this throughout his lifetime, which, to be honest, should be done by the Chinese people.

In 2017, I met Uncle Hanzi again in Shanghai and learnt about his experience during those years. In 2002, he lost his job in Silicon Valley due to economic crisis and lived a very tight life. Despite all his personal difficulties, he didn’t stop his research on Chinese characters nor did he accept any commercial advertising on his website. He attempted to find contributions, but failed. That’s why he finally decided to came to China for support later.

Back in 1972, Sears was determined to learn Chinese and bought a one-way air ticket to Taiwan. He couldn’t even say a word of Chinese at that time and what’s even worse was he got only 80 US dollars left. He found a job there while learning Chinese and returned to US later. In 1994, he got a severe heart attack, which made him decided that if he had only one year left, what he most wanted to do was to computerize all the ancient Chinese characters from Shuowen Jiezi (literally “discussing writing and explaining characters”), a dictionary dated to the Eastern Han dynasty (25-220). Then in the following 25 years, he collected over 96,000 ancient Chinese characters and built up the data base.

Chinese Etymology, the website that Uncle Hanzi founded

In 2011, Sears became famous overnight on Chinese social media after a Chinese blogger wrote a post about his Chinese etymology website. Amazed with his two decades of effort researching Chinese characters, Chinese netizens gave him an affectionate nickname Uncle Hanzi (Hanzi Iiterally means “Chinese characters”). He was invited to continue the research and taught physics in Beijing Normal University. Since then, Uncle Hanzi has developed a growing influence across China and got more and more attention from public media. Till now Chinese etymology is still the most popular website for foreigners to learn Chinese characters.

In September 2021, I got an invitation from Uncle Hanzi to attend the opening ceremony of his studio in Nanjing. I asked my friends home to send three flower baskets up to 1.8 meters and asked my calligrapher friends in Zhejiang to write a plaque of “Xinghan Cuican” (literally “a sea of bright stars) for Uncle Hanzi to celebrate the milestone.

Now “Chinese Etymology” has become the biggest free data base of Chinese characters, with over one million monthly visits and users hail from 170 different countries and regions across the globe. After staying for a decade in China, Uncle Hanzi finally obtained the green card in 2020. And he said he did not want to move any more this time: his studio has become his new home and China has become a new home.   

Editor:Huang Yan