Flora Ho was raised 7,700 miles away from Northwest Indiana. Yet when she first arrived here, the smokestack skyline looked – and smelled – surprisingly familiar.
Ho is from Kaohsiung in southwest Taiwan, a massive port city with an invisible connection to our Region. The city of nearly 3 million people boasts a thriving steel industry that emerged around the time that our Region’s steel industry began to rust, Ho said.
Flora Ho is from Kaohsiung, Taiwan, a massive port city with an invisible connection to our Region. Ho is a first-year medical student at Indiana University School of Medicine in Gary.
Jerry Davich, The Times
She pointed out this insightful observation during a presentation I gave at the campus of Indiana University Northwest in Gary. I was asked to speak to students of the Indiana University School of Medicine about my book, “Lost Gary, Indiana” and my upbringing in the Steel City.
“We would like our medical students to understand the historical, socio-economic, and demographic characteristics of Gary – past, present and future,” Baraka Muvuka, assistant professor of clinical family medicine, told me weeks ago. “Part of their medical education explores how social, economic, and political factors influence community health.”
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Kaohsiung, in southwest Taiwan, is a massive port city with an invisible connection to our Region. The city of nearly 3 million people boasts a thriving steel industry that emerged around the time that our Region’s steel industry began to rust.
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Despite such lofty criteria for an academic presentation, she invited me to share my uneducated experiences with her students. This past week, I visited the school and rambled for almost an hour, touching on a variety of subjects related to Gary and Northwest Indiana.
I barely addressed a printed list of relative talking points I prepared beforehand. Once I start speaking publicly, the conversation usually takes unexpected twists and turns. I welcomed a dialogue with the medical students and they didn’t disappoint.
At one point I recalled growing up in Miller, just east of U.S. Steel, and smelling millions of dollars being made along the polluted Lake Michigan shoreline. It all depended on which way the wind was blowing. Most days I could see the pollution. Some days I could also smell it.
Our Region has had a love-hate relationship with steel mills since 1906 when U.S. Steel Gary Works began operations. Since then, we’ve been grappling with our “cap and trade” conundrum: We cap our valid health and environment concerns for the trade-off of steady money and putting food on the table, Jerry Davich writes.
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“I thought every kid could tell which direction the wind blew from its harsh smell,” I joked.
That’s when Ho, a first-year medical student, raised her hand and told me something I never considered.
“I had a similar experience where I was raised,” she said.
What? Where? How?
“I experienced a similar landscape growing up in the biggest steel-producing city of my home country,” she said. “From my perspective, it looks like the time Gary’s economy started to dwindle was the time steel making became an industry in Kaohsiung. The main company that produces steel in Taiwan – China Steel – started around the 1970s in my hometown.”
Flora Ho was raised 7,700 miles away from Northwest Indiana, in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, a massive port city with nearly 3 million residents.
Jerry Davich, The Times
Today, that company is the largest integrated steelmaker in Taiwan with nearly 10,000 workers. It opened its first of four blast furnaces in 1977 and is well known for its production in Ho’s hometown.
“Kaohsiung, Taiwan, isn’t even the biggest steel-making city in East Asia,” she said. “The ones in China are much bigger and started only slightly later than the ones in Taiwan.”
