Because his grandparents lived in Taiwan and his father had also recently lived there, during the Cultural Revolution his family was persecuted as being a part of China's upper middle class and having ties with the Taiwan Nationalist government.[2] As a result, his family was forced to move in 1970 to a small country village near Panjin.[2] Hsieh's formal education was therefore stopped for several years.[2] He was home-schooled by his parents, and learned the trade of electrical engineering from his formally trained father as they built a crude power system for the unelectrified village and did a variety of repair work.[2]
Hsieh's uncle, P.Y. Hsieh, had left China and earned a Master of Science in electrical engineering from the University of Southern California in 1952, and then worked for TRW.[2] This uncle helped him transfer to USC's engineering program in January 1981.[2] Hsieh earned his Bachelor of Science in electrical engineering from USC in 1983 and his Master of Science in electrical engineering (MSEE) in 1984.[3] His parents wanted him to continue and earn a Ph.D., but Hsieh decided to begin his career instead.[4]
He co-founded his first company, AMAX Information Technologies, a high performance computing and storage vendor, which specialized in servers, storage systems and related hardware,[5] with several fellow USC graduates in 1987.[6][4]
In 2011, Hsieh founded Fulgent Therapeutics,[2] a genetic testing company, which is now Fulgent Genetics.[7] He took the company public via IPO in 2016.[1] Hsieh is chairman and CEO of the company.[8]
In October 2006, Hsieh donated $35 million to USC's Viterbi School of Engineering's Department of Electrical Engineering, 100 years after the department and school's founding. In honor of his donation, the department was renamed the USC Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical Engineering. In October 2010, Hsieh donated $50 million to USC for cancer research. He is on the USC Board of Trustees.[9]
In November 2007, Hsieh donated $5.5 million, cash and in-kind, to West Virginia University's Eberly College of Arts and Sciences Department of Forensic Investigative Sciences, one of only ten in the nation. WVU houses the largest Crime Scene Training Complex in the country.[10] In honor of his donation, WVU named a building on their downtown campus, Ming Hsieh Hall.[11]
Hsieh is a naturalized U.S. citizen.[13] He is married to Eva Hsieh;[2] they reside in Pasadena[14] and have two children.[15] Hsieh also has two adult children from a previous marriage.[16]