THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC VIDEO INTRODUCES ALBERT
YU-MIN LIN WITH A LONG LIST OF DESCRIPTORS :
explorer , engineer , scientist , artist , surfer . It flashes clips of him on horseback , at the top of mountain peaks , hiking thick jungle trails as the words continue : humanist , traveler , philosopher , father . I can add my own — nomad , a largerthan-life figure , always on the move . It ’ s a challenge to capture Lin , whether in a few words or just for a quick phone call . He seems to
C have an endless supply of momentum — an energy , curiosity and optimism as big as the world he is continually exploring .
When I do reach Lin , he ’ s wrapped a day of shooting a new series for the National Geographic channel . A few days before , he ’ d been traveling down Norwegian
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fjords and soon he ’ d be hanging out of a Black Hawk
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helicopter in
LIN’ 04 , MS ’ 05 , PHD ’ 08
BY KATIE E . ISMAEL
Jordan . But I ’ m able to catch him just after a dive in the English Channel ; it ’ s late and he ’ s freezing , drawing a bath in his hotel room to warm up .
“ It ’ s been wild ,” he says . “ We ’ ve been shooting through the night because it never gets dark in Norway . At like two in the morning you realize you ’ re supposed to be sleeping ,” he adds with a laugh . But that seems to befit Lin ’ s mission for the show : “ We ’ re finding places where there are secrets hidden within extreme conditions — things that might tell you more about the human story .” ( The series , Lost Cities with Albert Lin , just finished its first season .)
Lin ’ s own story , filled with extremes and adventure and unexpected twists , can also shed light on our human condition . Born to a mother who was a former Hong Kong movie star and an astrophysicist father who took the young Lin on sabbaticals throughout Europe and Russia , he seemed destined to be on this worldly journey . In fact , his middle name , Yu-Min , translates to “ Citizen of the Universe .” But his own age of discovery began at UC San Diego in classes with professor Marc A . Meyers , a materials scientist in the Jacobs School of Engineering . “ He was a renaissance person ,” Lin recalls . “ I always thought you had to be an expert in one thing . But he wrote poetry and novels ; he went down the Amazon . He did all these other things , but he was also a materials scientist . He was a human being .”
For Lin , Meyers sparked a classic romantic notion of the explorerscientist , so much so that every summer Lin would take shoestring trips to cultivate his own sense of adventure .
One such trip found Lin on a train in the Gobi Desert , in the middle of the night on the Chinese- Mongolian border . A chance encounter led him to intervene on behalf of a Mongolian woman and her friend who were having trouble making the crossing . “ The situation was intense ,” he recalls . “ It was a very scary place to show up in the middle of the night .”
Fluent in both Mandarin and English , Lin helped translate for the couple and got them safely through the border — a seemingly small yet important act that would end up changing the course of his trip , and his future . In a gesture of gratitude , the woman took Lin in , introducing him to her family as well as their nomadic culture , one that goes back thousands of years into ancient history and involves the emperor Genghis Khan . Lin became an adopted son of sorts : “ They gave me a horse and taught me about a history I didn ’ t even know was there — one in which Khan was a hero ,” he says . “ Of course , he was a warrior at the time , but he changed the entire course of the planet within a single lifetime , defeating armies that were more advanced by every account .”
LIN RETURNED HOME and finished his master ’ s and PhD in materials science and engineering , but the fascination with Khan stuck with him . Upon graduation he poured himself into the subject , selling everything he owned and sleeping in his car and on couches , devoting all his time and resources to building an exploratory project of his own . He wanted to investigate the history of Khan and go deeper than anyone into the mystery of his final resting place . He gave himself one year .
“ I ate so much ramen and eggs I almost get sick thinking about it today ,” he says . “ But it was one of the happiest times in my life in some ways .” Such a minimalistic life allowed for intense focus on exploring the lost history of Khan from a scientific and engineering standpoint , an approach that would be shaped by a lecture he attended in graduate school by
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