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Dr. Wang shares tales of his journey to USA
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He scraped together money from relatives for one-way airfare and borrowed $50 from a college professor to make his journey from China to America in 1982.Now Dr. Ming Wang is one of the most renowned eye surgeons in the state and the inspiration for one of the central characters in the 2014 film “God Is Not Dead.”Dr. Wang was in McMinnville on Thursday as guest speaker for the Noon Rotary Club. His speech, titled “Atheism to Faith,” addressed his childhood struggles growing up in communist China.Wang said the Chinese dictator was bent on destroying a generation of children and closed the country’s institutes of higher learning in 1966. Those schools were not reopened, Wang said, until the dictator died in 1976.“He destroyed 20 million lives,” said Wang of the lost educational opportunities in China.With his one-way airfare and borrowed $50, Wang said one of the first things he purchased was a Chinese-American dictionary.