He Held His Last

Breath For Me

A Memoir

By

Rainfield Yen

New York

Copyright © 2013 by Rainfield Yen

First edition, December 2013

ISBN 978-0-9888586-0-2

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions

Cover design by Mohamed Thiam

Ebook design by M. A. Demers

Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

1 The End

2 The Beginning

3 War

4 Escape

5 Waxing

6 Waning

7 America

8 The Arrest

9 The Aftermath

10 Hope

11 Waxing Again

12 Waning Again

13 Unholy Matrimony

14 The Club

15 Family

16 The Fate of Friends

17 The Interlude

18 His Last Breath

Photo Insert

About the Author

For Seigfo and Sharon and all those who come after

I am going to die, but this story, like a beautiful flower that never wilts, lives on.

—Achilles accepts his fate, The Iliad (9.413)

CHAPTER 1

The End

I live on Taiwan’s northeast coast. My apartment is on the sixteenth floor; its windows look out onto the East China Sea. Every morning I get up as I always have, check my appearance in the mirror, trim my beard—unlike those of many Chinese men, mine grows thick and full—and put on a freshly pressed pair of pants and a collared shirt. Then I spend the day at my window, watching the waves roll onto the beach, listening to my stereo, thinking about life and, as someone in my predicament does, brooding about mortality and death.

Death: from birth onwards, its moment draws ever nearer. The number of days you have to walk this earth counts down, decreasing, as we say in mathematics, monotonically—always dropping, never once to rise. For most of those days, though, death remains an abstraction. As long as you avoid war and other physical dangers, you may confine thoughts of your eventual death to a rear chamber of the mind, outside your daily stream of consciousness. Unless death strikes you without warning, a time will come when you will unfetter those thoughts, face them, and try to make sense of them.

I am afraid of what is to come. I want to be either fully alive or to be gone. I do not welcome any state in between. What I fear most isn’t the moment of death but the process of dying: to lie on that hospital bed, tubes sticking into me, the bare remains of my strength ebbing from me, all my dignity gone, my usefulness to the world long gone, all the pleasures the world once offered me long since gone. That miserable condition I cannot accept. Could I endure it for a few days? I suppose I could. But for weeks or even months? No. I would rather drop away into nothingness, for the world to carry on without me.

I have cancer of the pancreas, one of the disease’s most savage forms. At one year out, the survival rate is twenty-five percent. At the five-year mark, it drops to four percent. Since my diagnosis, four years have passed—I have beaten the odds. But against such odds luck does not hold. I am like a gambler who returns, again and again, to the table with my winnings, but in the end the house takes all.

In my thoughts, I ceaselessly replay the most recent scene at the hospital. In it, I sit in my doctor’s office, waiting for the results of my latest PET scan. In such moments, before your doctor speaks, while he leafs through papers or calls up a report on his computer screen, you study his face, searching for clues to what is coming. His usual air is one of studied remoteness. His profession, oncology, has inured him to the worst sort of news. But today, his expression betrays concern.

“Professor Yen,” he begins. We are both men of science. I sense, between us, an unspoken mutual respect. He won’t need to couch his findings in euphemism or reach for the usual cancer metaphors: the fight, the courageous battle, the valiant but losing struggle. Whatever is coming, he can serve to me straight up, as a cold, undiluted, technical conclusion.

“Your scan this time is not so clean, I’m afraid. It shows two indistinct spots on the tail of your pancreas.” I remain composed. I betray no emotion. He goes on, saying, “As well, the tumor marker in your blood has gone up again. That means the drugs aren’t working. Your tumor cells have developed resistance to the drugs. They’ve lost their potency. I don’t advise more chemotherapy, and further radiation is impossible. All we can do is wait.”

Today, as I stand at my window replaying that scene, my live-in maid, Macy, makes my breakfast. To the west I notice a rare sight, a rainbow. It begins behind a cluster of buildings, arcs over the beach, then fades into the horizon far out at sea. I hurry to find my camera. I want to preserve it for posterity.

I live alone with Macy. She comes from the Philippines. Our interaction is polite and respectful yet perfunctory. She tidies the apartment for me, keeps my clothes clean and pressed, and fixes my meals—I still eat three a day. Though we share the same space, our minds are far apart. She knows, of course, of my condition, but we don’t discuss it. We live separate lives, think separate thoughts.

I select a CD from the cabinet beside my stereo, put it on, and turn up the volume. It is the racing, pulsing soundtrack of the movie The Untouchables, music that earned its composer, Ennio Morricone, an Academy Award nomination. As it plays I return to the window and study the condition of the ocean. Today’s waves are big rollers, breaking over the shore with a fixed rhythm.

Wave motion: how much of our natural world this complex branch of physics explains! The light that arrives at my eyes, the music as it reaches my ears, the wireless communication that is my specialty: all are waves of a kind. So, too, are the wave functions of quantum mechanics—waves of probability, a concept that strains our capacity to grasp the ungraspable. Yet even quantum phenomena, however far from our everyday experience, are knowable. The inquiries of science penetrate the very structure of the universe. What, though, does science say on the one question that matters to me now: what awaits me? On that subject, all is silence.

I envy those who, in their final days, hold steadfast to their belief in God. How comforting that belief must be! My brother and his wife are devout Christians, and my condition makes me ripe for conversion. They have tried mightily, and I have tried along with them, to induce in me that leap of faith. Yes, I do want to believe! I want to believe that the universe has a permanent place for me, that the “I” inside me—the special essence that is me—will outlast my fading corporeal body.

The promise of eternal life—that life will carry on in some form after death—is a common thread that runs through all religions. Yet it is the very thread that eludes my grasp. Each time I bring myself to the brink of belief, skepticism and cold reason pull me back. I balk; I do not leap.

Raw instinct tells me the universe ought to have a god. He ought to exist. Yet when I follow this line of thinking down a ladder of abstraction, I stumble on the concrete tenets of religious belief at its lower rungs. Take for instance transubstantiation, the conversion of bread and wine into the body and blood of Jesus Christ, who washed away our sins. Or metempsychosis, the migration of the soul after death. I know the words, I know their meaning, but when I move myself to accept them as truth, too many questions intrude. If an all-powerful god exists, why do we conjure him in so many forms? Or summon him by so many names? Christians herald Jesus’ death as a cleansing of sin, but what effect did it have? Are not these same sins still evident everywhere? Where is the observable, measurable result?

I have tried to surrender, to give myself over to a belief in God and gain the comfort it would bring me. But the conclusion is always the same. I can find no cosmic reason why my existence ought to continue, why some essence of me—an ethereal, immortal soul—ought to persist or to reappear on Earth in another guise.

Or do I? Once, in a road accident, I nearly died. As my friend and I fought off death, a ghostly apparition appeared before us. Perhaps God or his messenger? Or just a hallucination? I no longer know for certain what to believe and what to dismiss. I haven’t accepted God, but neither do I find peace in the coolness of reason, the perfectibility of science. I am not at peace.

My laptop computer sits on my dining-room table, always on, its Skype connection always open. News of my downturn has spread among friends and family, and they want to reach me. In each conversation I recite the same facts, reporting them in the neutral, academic tone of doctor to patient—or better yet, doctor to fellow doctor.

I sense their awkwardness. What to say to a dying man? Give him hope, of course: they want to give me hope. Perhaps they have a promising scrap to relay, news of an oncological advance or naturopathic countermeasure. Might it work for me? Or perhaps a survivor’s tale: a friend of a friend, say, who beat the odds, escaped death, and lives on.

Are they curious to know how I feel about dying? Yes, I think they must be. I’m not an abstraction, a mere cancer statistic. I’m a victim whom they know, who embodies a version of their own futures—a case study of a possible fate. But such probing questions go unasked. Their words of hope erect a barrier between us. Our conversations peter out.

When the Morricone composition ends, I switch to jazz, then show tunes, then rock ’n roll. All kinds of music sound good on my stereo. Its acoustics are nearly perfect, the crispness of the high notes most remarkable. At a high volume, these piercing highs can damage human hearing. I turn the volume up another notch. If I’m bothering the neighbors, ought I care? Dying has its privileges.

You never hear the bullet that kills, they say. But when that bullet is cancer, it inches toward you, puts you on notice that death is coming. I curse that notice. Every evening the news reports death, most of it arriving without warning: road accidents, violence, natural disasters. I envy those deaths. I don’t want to die by inches. I’d rather be struck by a falling brick or picked off by a sniper.

As the music plays I look out at the seascape and take an inventory of my life. Two marriages, two divorces. One offspring. I went abroad, earned a doctorate, had adventures, came back, taught at a local university. My life, despite its ups and downs, has ended up all right. I’m still independent; I don’t impose on anyone. Would I care, though, to live it again? To ride again the swelling crests of those dizzying highs and plunge once more into the troughs of those desperate lows? No, I’m not sure I would.

I try a simple arithmetic calculation: in my sixty-nine years of time of this earth, how much did I spend in a state of pleasure? How many hours was I having sex, enjoying friends, feeling triumphant, riding high? Not many, I don’t think, compared to the indeterminable number I spent worrying—whether about my schoolwork, the progress of my career, money, my son’s welfare, my strife-prone marriages, my family troubles. One life, I suppose, is sufficient, one turn to walk this earth enough.

If as a young man I had foreseen how my life would turn out, would I have acted differently? Would I have smoked less, drunk less, pursued fewer women, listened to less music, wasted less time, attended more church services? No, I don’t think I would have. I have regrets, but if I am honest with myself, I see that they are inescapable: I brought them upon myself, my character induced them, and little would have gone differently in any event.

As the music plays, the morning wears on. Macy taps me on the shoulder and hands me my mobile phone. There is a call. I leave the music playing in the living room and walk to another room to take it. I finish with the caller and return to the music.

A while later Macy taps my shoulder again. A friend has arrived; he is waiting at the front door. I go to the door to greet him and guide him to the sofa. He has read an early version of this book and has come with his opinion of it. But first, I tell him, let’s listen to some music.

Proudly I show him my stereo. My amplifiers, I note, are worth more than my car. And that’s not counting the subwoofer, accessories, and the surround-sound system. I decide to play him a snippet of a movie, The Scorpion King. Though it was no Oscar candidate, its opening sequence—two ancient armies colliding with a clanging of swords and shields—is wall-shaking.

Its rendering in surround-sound is a product of digital gimmickry, of course, but I don’t begrudge it. To digitize analog sound, to boost it to five or more channels from two: such techniques, unloved as they are by audiophiles, feel as natural to me as their beloved world of turntables and tube amps. I keep up with the times; I don’t look backwards.

Macy brings us coffee and plates of nuts and cut fruit. I remove the movie disc and return the Morricone CD to the player. Two-channel audio, faithful to the original recording, is still what I like best. At last I stop fiddling with the stereo and join my friend on the sofa to hear his thoughts on the book.

It’s a beautiful story, he says—touching and affecting in parts, funny in others. When I began to write, I set out to tell my father’s story. But in telling his story, my friend points out, instead I have told my own. My father’s wild swings of fortune, his ungovernable, self-destructive impulses, his final crushing defeat: these stories stand in opposition to my own vicissitudes. In examining my father’s life, I reveal my own.

As did Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, my father and I both could say, with accuracy, “I have had my world, as in my tyme.” We were, in our time, men of intelligence and reason; these qualities guided us. But the irresistible lure of risk, the sudden inflaming of passions, exerted an even greater pull. As a bird hastens to the snare and a moth is drawn to the flame, on many occasions impulse seized us, overrode reason, suspended our free will, and altered the paths we took.

Were I to relive my life, would those fateful moments repeat themselves, each time with the same inexorable result? Yes, I think they would. Because for those of a certain cast—men like my father and me—impulse and destiny are alike; one is the measure of the other.

CHAPTER 2

The Beginning

The year was 1962, and I was in my freshman year of electrical engineering at National Taiwan University. One evening my father summoned his four children to the living room. It was a rare occasion when he spoke to us together, assembled as a group. We knew it had to be a serious matter.

The four of us stood before him in rapt attention. Reclining comfortably on the long sofa, his hands laced on his stomach, he said, “You kids, from now on, you just concentrate on your studies.”

He stuck out his belly and clasped his hands behind his head. “That’s your only job. And when it’s time for graduate studies, I’ll send you to the best universities in America. All your tuition, all of your living costs, I will pay.”

We stood listening in silence, like soldiers in formation. My father seemed cocky, elated. My mother wasn’t present; perhaps she was in the kitchen, supervising the maid. Or maybe, knowing what we didn’t—that my father was an inveterate gambler, riding a gambler’s high—she was off sulking somewhere.

He went on. “You’ll be going to Harvard, MIT, Stanford. Schools like those.” They were America’s most famous universities, names nearly everyone had heard. “But to get into those places, you’ll need good grades. So you must study hard. You’re doing all right in school, I know that. But you can’t loosen up. Like I said, money is no object—I’ll take care of the money. Do you all understand?”

We nodded.

“Good! You’re dismissed then. Go off and do your work.”

We dispersed to our rooms. As I entered mine, I whispered to one of my brothers, “How much money does father have?”

Taiwan in those days was a poor place where the average family subsisted in poverty. Salaries in Taiwan were then a tiny fraction, perhaps one-fiftieth, of those in America. Parents dreamed of sending their children to study abroad, but overseas tuitions were impossibly high. A handful of top students might earn scholarships, but few working people—even highly placed government officials—earned enough to pay out of pocket.

Yet my father, or so he claimed, could afford the fees at top schools—and not only for one child but for four. Not knowing what lay behind his promises, we welcomed the news. The good times, though, were not to last.

Though I have lived in Taiwan on and off for more than fifty years, it isn’t the place of my birth, nor of my father’s. Cheuh-Nan Yen, the man who, in 1944, would become my father, was born in mainland China on May 16th, 1908. He entered the world in the poorest of circumstances, in the roughest part of a small town, Cheng Chiang, that lies north of Shanghai and south of the Yangtze River.

In China, dialects abound. People dwelling on opposite banks of the Yangtze River speak different sub-varieties of Chinese, and in my father’s day those on the south side—speakers of the southern tongue—snubbed those on the north, labeling them low-class. The northerners as a result went through life burdened by a sense of inferiority. My father’s town lay on the south side of the river, but by some linguistic accident its inhabitants spoke the northern dialect. By geography he was a southerner, but on opening his mouth, his accent pointed to the lowlier group.

My father’s parents were nearly destitute and totally parochial. There was not a flicker of the modern world about them. How my grandfather supported his family, I don’t know. I never met him or my grandmother. They are ciphers to me, inhabitants of a long-lost world I can barely picture.

My father was an oddball kid with a maverick disposition; even though his family lacked money to pay for his schooling, he found his own way to learn. He didn’t mingle with the neighborhood hooligans, the other boys who, like him, weren’t in school. He avoided them, partly because he was shy and partly out of good sense. He didn’t play hopscotch, jump rope, shoot marbles, or take an interest in sports. Instead, every morning he snuck off to a neighborhood bookstore where he hung around shelves reading books without buying them. Then at sundown he returned home. That was how he spent his childhood.

According to my mother’s account—and on certain facts, its accuracy may be less than perfect—in those days you could earn a college degree in China simply by passing a series of exams without attending any classes. That, she told me, was how my father earned a law degree from the Shanghai Law and Business College and later, by taking the bar and CPA exams, licenses to practice law and accounting.

Armed with these credentials, my father found a job at a large department store in Shanghai. He did well, working his way up the ranks to general manager. Then in rapid succession he got married and had two sons. But my mother wasn’t his wife, and neither of the sons was me.

My mother, Hsueh-Yin Liu, was born to a wealthy family. She attended a prestigious private school whose students were mostly children of dignitaries and other notables. The school’s classes went as far as high school, where her education ended; few women of her era attended college.

China, for the first half of the 20th century, was in a state of continual conflict. It suffered incursions by the Japanese, the overthrow of the old dynastic order, and a violent collision of nationalism and warlordism with a potent new movement, communism. Like that of many families torn asunder by the civil war, our fate was intertwined with that of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, the chief warlord whose political party, the Kuomintang or KMT, briefly united the country as the Republic of China.

One of my mother’s classmates and friends, a charming, urbane young woman named Chiang Hua-shiou, was a member of Chiang Kai-shek’s family. My mother’s half-brother, Zu-Han Liu, had an even closer connection to the ruling family: he joined Chiang’s personal guard, later losing his right arm to an assassin’s bullet intended for Chiang.

Uncle Zu-Han and my mother had the same father but were born to different mothers. My maternal grandfather had several wives, then a common practice among the wealthy. My mother had numerous full and half siblings, how many I don’t know. The only one I ever met was Uncle Zu-Han. He, too, was wealthy: he had multiple wives and owned vast estates in the city of Hangzhou, about two hours’ driving distance from Shanghai.

By some chance event that is lost in time, my mother and father one day happened to meet. He was thirty; she, twenty-one. Stunned by her beauty, he fell instantly in love.

His affection, he quickly found, was not reciprocated. His speech was clumsy, his dress unfashionable, and his manners awkward. Though he held a degree in law, not having attended college or even high school he was never shaped by the refining influence of campus life. My mother’s upbringing had left her sniffy about mixing with the lower classes, and on hearing his low-class accent, she snubbed him.

Adding to disadvantages were his modest height of five feet, eight inches—in China to this day, height is of great social importance—and receding hairline, which together gave him a frumpy appearance not unlike Chairman Mao’s. Worse, when unshaven he sprouted thick whiskers that women of my mother’s sort found barbaric. He was surely no ladies’ man.

My mother, on the other hand, was a flowering beauty. She had grown up around people of high station and had all the etiquette and civility of high society. She had plump breasts, long legs, fair skin, and stood five feet seven inches tall, a magnificent height for a Chinese woman of that era. Side by side with my father, she carefully groomed and standing taller than he was in her high heels, they made for a mismatched pair.

I don’t suggest that my father was altogether bad-looking, for he did have a fine cast of features: a full, rounded forehead, thick eyebrows, piercing brown eyes, a straight nose, and well-shaped lips. It was rather the tout ensemble—his carriage, speech, and dress taken together—that set him beneath my mother’s standards. Numerous suitors were courting her, and all seemed better prospects than he was; at his every approach, she tried to put him off.

Yet, as was his nature, he persisted. He bided his time, sending her flowers daily while he worked to soften his vulgar accent and to acquire the Shanghai dialect, the distinguished language of the upper classes. His early years of voracious reading at the bookstore had made him an accomplished rhetorician and an eloquent writer, and what he lacked in elegance of speech he made up for in the love letters he wrote her. At length, he captured her heart.

He proposed marriage, and my mother accepted. She had no idea that he already had a wife, the woman who had borne him two sons. Still, the marriage to my mother went ahead; I suppose bigamy was then legal. When she learned the truth, my mother was furious. Her recourse was limited, however: bigamy might have been acceptable, but divorce was taboo. Her only option was to forbid my father to see his other family ever again. And according to her, he complied.

Did he ever, I wonder, sneak off to see his first wife and two sons, behind my mother’s back? I cannot say for certain. As far as I could tell, they dropped out of his life completely. I know nothing about them. I never met his two sons, even though they were my half-brothers, nor did I even learn their names.

CHAPTER 3

War

The year was 1944. The Second World War was raging, the Japanese were advancing on China, and Chiang Kai-shek’s forces were faltering. In 1937 Chiang had moved the nation’s capital from the northern city of Nanking, which had fallen to the Japanese, to Chungking in the southwest. Shanghai fell that same year, sending my parents fleeing to Chungking, the new capital. Chungking was also the place where, on March 19th, 1944, I was born.

The following year, 1945, my mother gave birth to a second boy, my brother Forceman. I ought at this point to account for his English name along with my own, Rainfield. In the Chinese ideographic system of writing, each character has a meaning, and within each character are pictorial elements that carry additional sub-meanings. My father prided himself on his learning, and the characters he chose for our names reflected his scholarly bent. In his own name, Cheuh-Nan, the character “Nan” means “man.” It depicts a farmer’s field atop a generalized “force.” My mother’s name contains the character “Hsueh,” meaning snow, depicted as rain falling on a mountain. My father conferred on me the top parts of the two characters, calling me Yu-Tien or Rain-Field. To my brother he gave the bottom parts, calling him Li-Shan or Force-Mountain.

Instead of taking an ordinary English name like James, Tony, or Peter, I decided to call myself “Rainfield.” Later, when I moved to America, many people, hearing my name and noting my dark complexion and full mustache, took me for an American Indian. But I liked the name and kept it. My brother followed my example, at first calling himself “Forcemountain.” Later he learned it sounded odd, and he shortened it to Forceman.

My father had moved the department store from Shanghai to Chungking. The business was apparently successful: when we arrived in Chungking, we moved straight into a mansion-like home. A staff of live-in servants rushed to and fro, including a cook, chamberlain, chauffeur, various maids, a wet nurse, a nanny for my brother and another for me. To outward appearances, our little family of four was prospering. Yet all was not well. My father’s gambling habit had taken hold and was worsening.

Most nights, instead of joining his family after work, my father disappeared into gambling dens, returning, if at all, in the small hours of the morning. His alarming behavior left my mother frantic, beside herself with concern. She also hated being left alone with her two small children to manage the large staff without his help. She henpecked him relentlessly to change his ways, but he would not. Nothing, it seemed, would induce him to restrain his habit.

China in those days was rife with superstition. The frequent absence of the head of the household was considered unlucky and left my mother uneasy and fearful. When I was old enough to understand them, she told me stories of ghosts who visited her during that time. Superstition of any kind leaves me skeptical, but coming from her mouth the stories sounded vividly real, and I know they profoundly affected her.

Her late father had lived with us in the period before his death, and one night, she told me, she went upstairs to fetch an article from the room where he had stayed. She opened the door, and as she fumbled for the light switch she saw what appeared to be her late father sitting upright on the bed, buttoning his shirt. He was legless—the apparition had only a torso, arms, and a head.

Screaming wildly for help, she bolted from the room, ran back down the stairs, and collapsed in her bedroom. For more than a week she remained bedridden, fevered and delirious, raving about her vision.

Another night she was asleep in bed, alone as usual—my father hadn’t returned from his late-night prowls. She opened her eyes to a ten-foot phantom. It stood in the corner, then moved along a wall. This time she didn’t scream. Instead she slipped noiselessly out of the room and called for a male servant. They came back together, by which time the shadow was gone—only to reappear, she reported, later that same night.

In retrospect, the true source of her phantoms is pretty clear. My father’s behavior was driving her mad with worry. When added to the superstitious beliefs of her day, it was pushing her to the brink.

A year after Forceman’s birth my sister Julie came into the world. Her Chinese name is Rau-Yin. The first character, “Rau,” means “resemble” and the second one occurs in my mother’s name. By choosing this name, my father meant for her to take after our mother. As for the name Julie, my sister chose it herself later in life; unlike her brothers, she wanted a conventional Western name.

That same year I had my first brush with death. I caught measles and developed severe complications, a pustular, encephalitic infection in my rear brain. My mother colorfully explained that the pus found no egress from the pox on my skin and hence was building up in my head.

My parents took me from doctor to doctor, but none could cure it. Each doctor would open my skull and drain copious amounts of pus from the back of my head. But each time the pus built back up again—to the point, my mother told me, where the draining would fill a sizable vessel. A year of enduring these treatments reduced me to skin and bone. Doctors feared I wouldn’t survive much longer.

At last my mother found a doctor whose procedure was different. This doctor, a woman, removed a piece of bone from my head. The reasoning behind this measure and its precise effect I don’t know, but soon after I began to improve. Though I made a complete recovery, her procedure left a permanent notch in the back of my head. Fortunately, hair grew over it.

Years passed, and my family had nearly forgotten about my cranial disfigurement. When I was ten years old, my mother dropped me off at the barber with instructions to give me a crew cut. I fumbled my explanation to the barber, who promptly shaved my head completely. When she returned to pick me up, she was shocked to see the dent in my head exposed to plain view. By then it was too late of course, and my family members had to put up with this unsettling sight until my hair grew back. It is indeed a weird head; even today I dislike haircuts, because the barber invariably remarks on it.

I was too young to form lasting memories of all of the anguish and pain my illness brought me as a small boy, but others who knew our family often remarked on my miraculous recovery. My father’s colleagues took to calling me “golden boy.” They meant I owed my life to my father’s wealth, the store of gold bullion he drew down to pay so many doctors.

When the Second World War ended in Japan’s unconditional surrender and the ejection of its hated troops from China, we were free to move back to Shanghai. By that time my father—why, I’m not sure—had quit the department-store business. Needing work, he took a government examination to screen candidates for a senior position, the governorship of a small county, Jintan, near Shanghai.

During the tumultuous postwar period, the government was in disarray, corruption was pervasive, and venality and bribery were the chief means of landing important jobs of the sort my father wanted. The examination was typically just a formality to cover an illicit deal. But on this occasion my father, who excelled at exams, was fortunate enough to encounter an honest official, Mou-Kung Wong, who assessed him on merit alone. He got the job. My father and Wong, who later became mayor of Shanghai, would remain lifelong friends.

So the whole family moved to Jintan. The central authorities in Nanking, in the aftermath of the war, had bigger concerns than the administration of a small county like Jintan. So the county governor was left to run its affairs as he saw fit, presiding over his territory as an emperor of a tiny kingdom—and we were the emperor’s family.

I was then old enough to form lasting memories of my surroundings, and I can vividly recall the vast walled compound where we lived. Outside our front gate—a metal-sheathed, sculpted portal that stood ten feet high—two stone lions stood guard. Accompanying the lions were real-life guards stationed round the clock. When a new shift arrived to relieve the other, I would watch from the front window of our main building as they performed an elaborate changing-of-the-guard ceremony.

A visitor to our compound would proceed first through its imposing gate, walking past the guardhouse and the stone lions and then entering an expansive courtyard of tended lawns, fully five acres in area, that looked like a public park. A paved driveway bisected the courtyard, running about three hundred yards from the gate to the main building, a two-storey stone mansion divided into two wings. We lived on the upper floor, my parents in the east wing and in the west wing my brother and sister and I. Near our rooms stayed the wet nurses and nannies, who were always on call.

We saw our parents only at mealtimes; the dining room was on the second floor at the junction of the two wings. On both levels was a warren of libraries, offices, chambers, antechambers, and cubbyholes that I explored whenever I could.

The courtyard outside the main building was my favorite playground. I remember playing hopscotch, marbles, and badminton. I also liked to chalk pictures on the clay pavement. One of the guards admired my artwork, and after his shift ended he would sometimes linger to watch me draw. It was an idyllic period.

Soon my second sister was born, and my family grew to six: our parents, Forceman and me, Julie, and now our infant sister. My father named her “Rau-Nan” meaning “resemble Nan.” The Nan or man he meant her to resemble was, of course, himself.

It was 1948, and my father was not yet forty years old. Though he didn’t know it then, he had already reached the highest point of his life. The happy days in Jintan County were soon to end.

CHAPTER 4

Escape

Even though the war with Japan had ended in victory, the civil war between Chiang Kai-shek’s party, the KMT, and Mao Zedong’s Communists was still raging fiercer than ever. Though Chiang Kai-shek was the favorite of the Americans, his regime was tottering—weakened by corruption, a withering devaluation of the paper currency, and military ineptitude. In 1949, facing defeat and annihilation at the hands of the Communists, he retreated with his forces to the island of Taiwan, a former Japanese colony southeast of the mainland.

Thus began the standoff between the Republic of China, as Chiang called his government, and Mao’s newly created People’s Republic of China, a standoff that continues to the present day. Each side, at least nominally, still claims to be the legitimate government of the other’s territory.

My father had no love for communism, and he was the very sort of wealthy official Mao’s Communists were violently purging. Unless he escaped to Taiwan, he would face execution or, at best, he would be stripped of his assets and marked for derision as a member of a despised class.

As Chiang’s forces withdrew to their island stronghold, the country descended into chaos. People like my father, in their tens of thousands, were scrambling to leave. But Taiwan was a faraway island, and air transportation to it had nearly ceased. To move an entire family, the only practical means was to obtain passage on an ocean-going ship. But passenger space was scarce and demand overwhelming. Bribery was the only means out. Fortunately for us, my father had amassed trunks of gold bullion that he used to out-bribe the other would-be escapers and secure passage for our whole family.

We hastened to leave. The authorities, aiming to stem a massive outflow of capital, had placed strict limits on how much gold a person could carry out. Afraid of having his gold found and seized, my father had it melted down and formed into plates and other kitchen items that he painted with enamel to look like ordinary chinaware.

When the day came for our departure, our preparations were complete. But my baby sister, then only a few months old, had caught a severe illness and was running a high fever. The long, arduous journey at sea might be too much for her.

Our seats were reserved for that day only. To give them up would strand all of us in Communist China. So my mother made the painful decision to leave her infant with one of her sisters, who would bring her to Taiwan on a second ship that would depart a week later.

So we set sail, leaving my sister behind. Our servants we left behind too, except for one man, Sweigan, whom my father brought along, I suppose as a reward for his exceptional loyalty.

After a rough sea voyage of many days, we set foot on Taiwan. There we heard the news: during the time we were at sea, the Communist government had asserted total control, sealed off the ports, and stopped all outbound traffic. My sister’s ship would not sail.

Thus our family, like so many others, was broken apart by the fall of the Bamboo Curtain, the Cold War euphemism for the line demarcating the borders of Communist China. Across that barrier, movement and even contact were strictly forbidden. Of our family members, Uncle Zu-Han was the only other one to escape. He made his way to Taiwan alone, leaving his own family behind.

Some forty years would pass before we would learn my sister’s fate.

In the fifty years leading up to Japan’s defeat in World War II, the island of Taiwan was a Japanese colony. Under Japan, Taiwan was an agrarian society—its produce supplied the Japanese home islands—and almost without industry.

At the war’s end, the Allied victors at the 1945 Yalta Conference handed Taiwan to China, then headed by Chiang Kai-shek. Chiang’s grip proved no less brutal than that of the Japanese: he imposed martial law, and his regime’s single-party authoritarian rule remained unchallenged until the island’s gradual opening up to democracy during the 1980s.

In the years following the defeat of their common Japanese enemy in 1945, the civil war between Chiang Kai-shek’s KMT party and Mao Zedong’s Communists heated up, ending in the KMT’s ejection from the mainland in 1949 and retreat to Taiwan. Total victory over Chiang now in sight, Mao Zedong had his forces prepare for an amphibious assault on Taiwan. But Chiang’s luck held, and no invasion came.

As Chiang’s defeat grew ever more certain, the United States initially made no commitment to aid him in his final stand. The onset of the Korean War in 1950, however, brought about the policy of “containment,” which called for communism to be blocked at its every advance. President Truman declared he would defend Taiwan from attack, and he ordered the United States Navy’s Seventh Fleet to patrol the Taiwan Strait, the stretch of ocean running between the island and the mainland, to prevent the two sides from engaging. Thus began the standoff that continues to this day.

Despite Chiang’s loss of the mainland, the U.S. continued to recognize his “Republic of China” as China’s legitimate government, albeit in exile. Chiang dreamed of combining his forces with those of the U.S. and using Taiwan as a military platform from which to retake the mainland. But his American backers, fearful of military entanglements with Mao’s People’s Republic, warned him against such a project.

After Nixon’s visit to China in 1972, the American stance toward the mainland softened. In 1979 the United States opened official relations with the Mao’s regime and ceased to recognize Chiang’s Republic of China, from then on referring to Chiang’s government as merely “the governing authorities on Taiwan.” The U.S. still offers Taiwan tacit military protection, and the dispute over the two Chinas remains, along with the division of North and South Korea, a twentieth-century conundrum that has spilled over into the twenty-first.

Chiang presided over Taiwan until his death in 1975, whereupon one of his sons, Chiang Ching-kuo, succeeded him as president. Although the second Chiang also ruled Taiwan until his death, never allowing democratic elections, he contributed greatly to Taiwan’s advancement. Many people recall with fondness his years in power. He did much to modernize Taiwan, building freeways, international airports, power plants, reservoirs, tourist attractions, and industrial zones. In the process he turned a sleepy agricultural backwater into a participant in the world economy. By the 1970s and 80s, his economic policies had attracted American, European, and Japanese investments in manufacturing, and the economy began to boom.

The younger Chiang knew full well that his father’s plan to retake the mainland, though still the KMT’s official policy, was a fantasy. In his final years he also foresaw that his family’s absolutist regime was not sustainable. In the mid-1980s he began to liberalize the political system, finally lifting martial law in 1987. By the time he died, in 1988, the reforms he set in motion were unstoppable. He had voluntarily broken his family’s dynastic hold on power and, in the process, paved the way for democracy.

After the younger Chiang’s death, the presidency passed to his vice-president, Lee Teng-hui. Lee, who later became widely reviled, had a strong affinity for Japan. He denied his Chinese heritage, professed hatred for mainlanders, and became an extremist advocating Taiwan’s independence.

The Chiangs’ KMT and Mao’s Communist Party, despite their differences, concurred on one fundamental assertion: that Taiwan was part of China. The Communists tolerated the KMT’s control over the island on condition that Taiwan never declare independence, in which case they vowed to invade. President Lee not only inflamed relations with the mainland, he oversaw the decline of his own party and (many believe) the embezzlement of billions of taxpayer dollars. Although he won Taiwan’s first democratic election, in 1996, earning fifty-four percent of the vote, under Lee the KMT’s popularity faded. The second presidential election, in 2000, ended KMT rule and handed power to the Democratic Progressive Party under Chen Shui-bian.

Many people in Taiwan view our government as democratic in appearance only. The system lacks checks and balances, and the constitution and other laws leave open endless loopholes. The president exercises nearly infinite power, like an emperor.

The story of President Chen Shui-bian is illustrative. After winning in 2000 he was reelected in 2004 under what many considered fraudulent circumstances. By the end of his second term, his popularity had nosedived amid allegations of corruption. The KMT regained power in 2008, and Chen, no longer enjoying presidential immunity, was charged with embezzling public funds. He was sentenced to life in prison, later commuted to nineteen years.

Back in 1949 when my family arrived in Taiwan, the advances that would happen under Chiang Ching-kuo and the political wrangling of the island’s transition to democracy were still far in the future. It was a backward and desperately poor land. Opportunities for work were few.

Using some of the gold he smuggled out of Shanghai, my father bought a house in Taipei, the island’s largest city. That same year my mother gave birth to a fifth child, my youngest brother, whom they named Yo-Min. “Yo” means friendly or kind, and “Min” signifies mankind or people. He later decided he would call himself “Kindman.” But as with Forceman’s English initial naming attempt, Forcemountain, it sounded funny, so he changed it to “Kingsman.”

That year of Kingsman’s birth my father spent searching for opportunities for work. But the impoverished island of Taiwan had nothing to offer him. The economy of Hong Kong, then under British rule, was much more developed than Taiwan’s at the time, and my father decided to try his luck there. So we sold our house in Taipei and moved to Hong Kong. There my father purchased a house on the Kowloon side, at the foot of a hill the locals called Diamond Mountain.

I was six years old and my brother Forceman five. I recall Hong Kong as full of wonders. We lived close to Kai Tak Airport, and my mother sometimes brought Forceman and me to its outskirts, where we peered through the chain-link and barbed-wire fences and watched airplanes taking off and landing. On weekends we might ride the ferry service—the Star Ferry—that plied the crossing between the Kowloon district on the mainland and Hong Kong Island. After disembarking on the island side, we would shop or see a movie. I also recall riding the London-style double-decker buses that had begun to appear in Hong Kong. All these were fresh, vivid experiences for us as children and a lot of fun.

Within walking distance of our home was Yunkong Middle School, which taught the primary and middle grades. My mother sent both of us there. It was a bilingual school that taught both in Mandarin, China’s official language, and Cantonese, the dialect spoken in Hong Kong. I vaguely remember having a brief period of fluency in Cantonese—an ability I later lost completely.

We had brought to Hong Kong the trunks of gold bullion my father smuggled from Shanghai to Taiwan. My mother kept careful watch over this treasure, locking away the trunks in a back room of the house and holding onto the only key. As startup capital for his new endeavors, she allowed my father to take a single bar of gold; he assured her he would invest it in a lucrative new business.

And sure enough, every morning he left the house early, returning home around sundown. Clearly, he was busying himself with something. My mother, for her part, was a typical housewife of the day. Women back then were discouraged from higher education and from minding men’s business. So she contented herself with overseeing the affairs of the household. Sweigan, the servant who had accompanied us from Shanghai to Taiwan, was still with us, and he worked around the house as a general handyman. We also hired a maid to help with cooking and cleaning. Thus, my father went about his business, my mother looked after the house, and she didn’t pry into what he was doing.

Life went on this way for about a year. All seemed well, until one evening my father didn’t come home as usual. As the hour grew late and he still hadn’t returned, my mother became visibly edgy and started to fret.

Then the phone rang. It was my father.

“Where are you?” my mother demanded to know. “It’s so late now. Why haven’t you come home?”

“I’m in a hotel,” came his croaking reply. He sounded utterly dejected.

“A hotel? What hotel?” My mother’s voice rose to a note of near-hysteria.

“You’ve got to come over here,” he said. “I want to talk to you.”

“Go there? No! You come straight home, right now, and explain what all this is about!”

“No, you have to come over here!”

The conversation went back and forth this way for a while. Finally my mother conceded—she would go to the hotel. Not sure how long she would be gone, she packed a bag with a change of clothing. Then she set off to look for my father.

Following the directions he gave her, she came upon the hotel. It was small, rundown, and located on a dark backstreet. My father’s room was on one of the uppermost floors. She ascended, and then, cautiously, not knowing what she would find inside, she knocked on the door.

“It’s open!” came the reply.

She pushed on the door, and it creaked inward. The light was switched off, and the room was in darkness. Unable to see anything, she felt for the light switch.

Then a voice stopped her: “Don’t!”

As her eyes adjusted to the dim light, she made out the figure of my father sitting slouched on the edge of the bed, his head dipped and the palms of his hands covering his face. She rushed over to sit down next to him.

“What happened?” she said, trying to sound gentle and soothing.

“I’m ruined!”

“What?”

“I’ve lost all the gold!” His usually confident, sonorous voice had dropped to a low whine.

“So what? It doesn’t matter—we still have plenty. Just take another bar and try your luck again!”

“No! No!”

“What do you mean?”

“You don’t understand.” My father raised his head and looked at her, revealing teary eyes. “They’re all gone!” he said.

“What do you—”

She stopped mid-sentence, thunderstruck by the sudden realization of what he’d been doing: removing the gold, piece by piece, from the trunks she had locked away. Somehow he had got his hands on her key and duplicated it.

“I tried finding a business to do,” he said, “but I couldn’t find anything. Here in Hong Kong, I don’t speak the language, and they take me for an outsider. They are cold and relentless people. So I started gambling again, and I was losing. Then I took the gold a little at a time, until I lost it all.”

As his voice trailed off he started whimpering abjectly. He hung his head again. “What am I to do? What the devil am I to do?”

A pall fell over my mother. She was thirty years old and had come from a rich family. She had married a husband whom she assumed was permanently rich. She had never worked outside the home, had never tasted poverty. She was dumbfounded and speechless.

Then, while my mother was still gathering her thoughts, my father proposed a resolution. He said, “First we’ll go home, get the kids, and bring them over here. Then we’ll throw them, one by one, from this hotel window. Then we’ll both jump out after them.”

“No!” she cried out. “Absolutely not!”

Never would she let my father’s suicidal proposal proceed. Now she began to collect herself and think hard. It wasn’t the time for anger—that could come later. First she had to restore my father’s faith in himself.

In a calm and propitiatory tone, she began to speak. “The kids are my blood, they are my flesh. I can’t possibly let them die. We are still young. We still have our house at Diamond Mountain. It’s worth a lot of money. We can sell it. I know Hong Kong is an unforgiving jungle, and you’re right, we don’t belong here. We’ll return to Taiwan—the government should be more stable there by now. You’ll start fresh with a clean slate. It’s our only recourse—you must face reality.”

My father was still hanging his head. He said nothing.

“I know you can make it,” she added. “After all, you are such a smart person.”

So off we went on a cargo ship back to Taiwan, minus our trunks of gold and without our servant, Sweigan. My father’s financial debacle meant we couldn’t possibly afford him; he would have to return to mainland China. That day we left Hong Kong was the last time I ever saw him—a man I will never forget, for during those years of my childhood, I regarded him as a bosom friend.

When our ship docked at the port of Keelung, a seaport in the north of Taiwan, we were refused entry. The problem, I believe, was insufficient documents. The authorities made us return to Hong Kong on that same ship. But in our absence, Uncle Zu-Han, the only other family member to escape to Taiwan, helped to sort out the legalities of our entry, and we sailed again. This time Forceman was miserably seasick the whole way. But in spite of the discomforts of the journey, we made it.

So began the toughest period our family would endure. With our money exhausted, day-to-day existence was precarious. Fortunately, a kind-hearted friend offered us free lodgings. He owned a rooming house in the south section of Taipei on a street called Hoping West Road, a busy thoroughfare still bustling today.

It was a low-slung, Japanese-style house where each tenant occupied a single room. Ours was about twenty feet by ten feet in size. We couldn’t afford beds, so all six of us—my parents, Forceman, Kingsman, Julie, and me—slept on the floor. The room was divided into sections, each draped with mosquito netting. The four children slept on one side, our parents on the other.

Living in the room abutting ours was a paying lodger, a tall, handsome young man of decorum and gentility. He had a dimple on each of his cheeks, and to me he resembled a young Gregory Peck. His name was Mr. Yu.

Mr. Yu’s room and ours were separated only by sliding paper doors of the Japanese style. Any sound we made went straight through these flimsy dividers. We seldom heard any noises from Mr. Yu; living alone, he was nearly silent. But the presence of a family of six as his neighbors must have disturbed him terribly.

Over time, Mr. Yu and I got to know each other, and he would allow me into his room to talk. When I reflect back on the childish subjects I must have raised with him, I see what a kind and patient man he was. I liked him very much.

On occasion my mother would invite Mr. Yu to join us for dinner. She was a great culinary artist, cooking Shanghai-style dishes better than anyone I know. I never came across a Shanghainese restaurant, in Shanghai or elsewhere, whose dishes measured up to my mother’s cooking. I regret not learning her recipes while I had the chance.

Once we had settled in to our humble living quarters, my father started to look for a job. By putting his flair for exam-taking once again to good use, he landed a post in Taiwan’s treasury department. Soon we moved out of the free housing and rented a place of our own.

Located on Lien-Yun Street, a poor neighborhood in Taipei’s eastern district, it was a complex of eight single-room units, each one measuring about fifteen feet square and housing an entire family. In the middle of the complex was a rectangular atrium about forty-five feet by thirty feet in area. A row of three apartment units branched off to the right, another row of three units to the left, and two units lay straight ahead. Ours was on the right. To cram a six-member family into such a small space wasn’t unusual: the seven other families numbered between five and eight.

The place swarmed with continuous activity. All day long as children played in the atrium, adults squatted in open doorways and chatted. The apartment interiors were all alike: a disorderly cramming of beds, tables, chairs, and other items of cheap furniture.

Around the corner was a kindergarten where I began attending classes. My mother liked having help around the house, and despite my father’s lean income we could still afford to hire a maid, which then cost very little.

And so, despite our greatly reduced circumstances, life went on. Things improved gradually as my father’s superiors took note of his talents and promoted him. When a new position entitled him to government-owned quarters, we moved to a three-room house on Nang-Chong Street, in the south part of Taipei, and then to a nearby house on Ging-Chiang Street.

From then on life became more comfortable. On top of having a maid, we had a pedicab and driver. In the Taiwan of the 1950s, automobiles were rare; only rich businessmen and officials of the highest rank could afford one. A family that owned a pedicab was considered quite well-to-do.

In that era the government provided free schooling only to the elementary level. Middle-school and high-school students, even in the public system, had to pay tuition. Private schools abounded, yet they were costlier and generally of much lesser quality. Parents, keen for their children to enter a public school, pushed them into competing fiercely on grueling entrance examinations, which had pass rates of less than fifty percent.

My mother wanted Forceman and me to attend a top public school, the Mandarin Experimental Primary School. But when we took the entrance exam, we both flunked it. My mother, devastated by this dismal result, approached the school’s principal several times on our behalf, begging for a second chance. At length her perseverance paid off. The principal, a woman named Chang She-Wen, was moved by her devotion and gave us a second sitting. We both passed, and soon our pedicab driver began bringing us to and from that school each day.

In 1956 I took the nationwide exams at the middle-school level. I did well enough to land a place in one of Taipei’s best schools, the one affiliated with Taiwan National Normal University. The following year, 1957, Forceman took the same exam and also did well, entering the highly regarded Fushing Middle School.

Our family’s recovery from disaster appeared to be complete. We had escaped from Communist China, recovered from financial ruin, and with the sad exception of my little sister still trapped on the mainland, our family had remained intact. My parents were grateful for our good fortune. My father was employed, his career was advancing, and their two sons had gained admission to top schools.

Our problems seemed to be behind us, the road ahead a smooth one. But our lives would not remain smooth, or peaceful, for long.

CHAPTER 5

Waxing

A period of uneasiness and unwelcome change set in. Uncle Zu-Han, my mother’s half-brother, after arriving in Taiwan alone, had used his connections to Chiang Kai-shek to find government work. Now in his seventies and still alone, he had retired and moved into our home on Ging-Chiang Street. My uncle’s presence, though, was benign. It was my father’s black moods that lent this period its restless, unsettled quality.

My father seldom spoke heart-to-heart with his children. To do so was against his nature. He addressed us only to issue commands, to impress on us the need to work harder at school, or to express his displeasure. He was toughest on me, perhaps because I was the oldest. Many a time I received corporal punishment, instances that always upset my mother. She would scream for him to stop, and sometimes—though not often—he would heed her.

My performance at school was the usual cause of his wrath. Whenever I performed badly—which is to say, not as well as he wanted—I received either a harsh berating or a spanking. Good performance, on the other hand, he took for granted; it received no recognition or reward. On one particularly unpleasant occasion he proclaimed that if I didn’t do better, he would cast me out of the house and into the streets.

Yet my father was not all harshness; when he saw I was struggling with a subject, he would come to my aid. He often tutored me in mathematics, history, and English grammar. I don’t think his English was very good in practice—even on his visits to the U.S., I never saw him speaking to a foreigner—but he had a solid enough middle-school grasp of the language.

In spite of my father’s strict discipline, I rebelled. At school I became a problem student. Among my classmates, I hung out with the “baddest” actors. Two are worth mentioning here, for they figure prominently in the story later on.

Kuo Tze-lien led a gang of delinquent juveniles who bullied weaker classmates and stole their belongings. He was also fond of passing salacious or pornographic materials around the classroom. Though he was a flagrant ruffian, he came from a rich family; his father was the general manager of a government-controlled bank, the First Commercial Bank of Taiwan.

The second was Gordon Cheng. Not as much a miscreant as Kuo, he was more impish and prevaricating, a spoiled kid from a family even richer than Kuo’s. His father, then one of Taiwan’s wealthiest men, owned the island’s largest textile maker and also ran a shoe factory that operated an outlet in Taipei’s busiest commercial district. He had taken three wives, each of whom lived in her own dwelling. Gordon was born to the first wife, who lived near our home.

My friends and I spent long hours at Gordon’s palatial home. Kuo was the only boy who didn’t join us—ironically, he and Gordon, the two bad boys among my friends, didn’t get along. It was the late 1950s, and conditions in Taiwan were still austere. Visiting Gordon’s place at the age of fourteen, I saw wondrous things I had never laid eyes on before: Playboy magazines, Kent cigarettes, Johnnie Walker whisky, Courvoisier cognacs, Japanese sakes. I was overtaken with delight, and I loved going there. It was at Gordon’s place that I took up smoking, a habit that became nearly lifelong.

The boys in Gordon’s circle often played hooky from school, venturing off to see movies or shoot pool. Gordon always had loads of pocket-money and would pick up the tab for our illicit adventures (later on, during our college years, he even treated me to a brothel where I lost my virginity).

Gordon’s mother pampered him to an extreme. She snuck him cigarettes, let him drink alcohol, and gave him money to squander. Heedless of his wrongdoings, she seldom scolded him. I often visited their home, and it was there I met a man, Yeh Gun-lin, who would later alter the course of my life. About fifteen years my senior, Yeh was then courting Gordon’s aunt, the younger sister of his mother, who lived there too.

Yeh had earned a degree in civil engineering and worked at his father’s small-time construction business. He was a tirelessly diligent man. Every morning he rose before dawn to ride his tattered bicycle to a construction site, usually tens of kilometers away, returning home after sundown. After he married Gordon’s aunt he started doing business with Gordon’s father, becoming the main contractor on all of his construction projects. He did good work, and his reputation grew. Eventually his wealth would surpass even that of Gordon’s father, but back then he was an ordinary-seeming man. I had no inkling of the role he would later play in my life.

Gordon and Kuo and their gangs of followers raised hell whenever we could. I got into one scrape after another and was forever on the brink of expulsion. At each crisis my mother went to the school and pleaded with the authorities to forgive me. Thanks to her, they were all averted.

My mother and father began to fight ever more often. My mother, in the throes of bitter frustration and rage, hurled truly cutting words at my father, barbs like “I’ve never loved you!” and “You’re a north-bank lowlife. . .I don’t know why I married you!”

In these exchanges my mother was usually the victor. My father, henpecked, almost always gave in. We children, of course, stayed silent while they argued. But in my heart, my mother’s caustic language put me on my father’s side. I couldn’t bear to hear the things she would say to him.

My memories of their squabbling, and of my mother always gaining the upper hand, left a lasting imprint on me and influenced my attitude towards women. I vowed never to let a woman bully me. So firm was this resolve that it turned me into a king of male chauvinists. I allowed two marriages to fail, and in my final days I am alone, bereft of female companionship.

Their arguments escalated in intensity until one day my mother’s words pushed my father beyond the limits of tolerance. He lost control and struck her. And that was it! At that physical insult she went unhinged, pummeling him, screaming at him, and threatening him with divorce.

He gushed his apologies but it was too late; she stormed out of the house. Not knowing what to do, he vented his anger on me.

“What are you standing there for?” he shouted. “Go and get your mother back!”

I rushed out of the house after her, but she was long gone. A whole week passed with no sign of her. My father was devastated. He hid himself away in his room, not shaving, barely eating, not going to work. He called person after person looking for her but found no trace of her whereabouts.

The one person he didn’t contact was Chiang Hua-shiou, my mother’s old high-school friend and relative of Chiang Kai-shek’s. And it was Hua-shiou who, at last, brought my mother home. The week she and my father had spent apart seemed to soften their animus, and they appeared to reconcile.

Soon, though, the bickering was back, uglier than ever. Violence, once it emerges a first time, from then on hovers closer to the surface. When my father hit her for a second time, my mother didn’t walk out on him. Instead she swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills.

She was rushed to the hospital and her life saved. Still, I felt a mounting sense of trepidation, sorrow, and especially panic.

Then as swiftly as the gloom descended, happiness returned. One afternoon while my father was at work, my mother brought home a prominent man, General Chiang Wei-kuo, the second son of Chiang Kai-shek. As young as I was, I still recognized him. My mother showed him around the house, they chatted for a half hour or so, and he left.

I didn’t know what his visit portended, but I knew it had to be something good.

A couple of months after General Chiang’s visit, we moved again. Our new residence was on Chung Shan North Road, in one of Taipei’s affluent districts. In those days America still had an embassy in Taiwan, and the ambassador lived right behind us.

The house was comfortable and commodious. We even had a telephone line installed, a luxury costing about US$500 at a time when the average household earned no more than $25 a month. So I knew my father was doing well.

His prosperity came partly from his own hard work and partly from my mother’s enlisting of General Chiang’s help. In a society where connections played such a vital role, my father never fully mastered the art of exploiting them. Unlike my mother, a highly sociable and gregarious person, he was an introvert, reserved and bashful. Relying on hard work alone, without my mother’s pulling of strings on his behalf, he would not have climbed to such a height.

Our home soon became a place of frequent visitors and lively parties. Ever since the Ming dynasty the game of mahjong has been a popular pastime among Chinese rich and poor, and it became the featured attraction at our house parties. Each time we would set up two or three mahjong tables in the living room, and then at around two in the afternoon visitors would gather for marathon sessions lasting until midnight.

We served snacks and hors d’oeuvres throughout the event and always offered a gourmet dinner. The guests enjoyed themselves mightily, avidly playing mahjong and feasting from afternoon to night. The kids were happy, too: we ate well, and the adults found the game so absorbing we could do as we pleased for as long as the party lasted.

Chiang Hua-shiou, my mother’s old classmate and relative of Chiang Kai-shek, was a frequent guest, as was Mr. Wong, the former Shanghai mayor who granted my father his governorship in China. Wong, like other high officials in the KMT government, fled the Communist takeover and had wound up in Taiwan.

My parents also visited friends’ places for similar parties. I loved those occasions the most; for a day I became master of the house, enjoying complete freedom from adult eyes.

It was during the ninth grade that my attitude of recklessness finally had serious consequences. It was springtime, and our class had undertaken a field trip to Yangming Mountain, a popular resort area outside of Taipei. While we were walking along a mountain path, Kuo and I, determined to explore the areas off the usual path, stealthily parted from the group. Leaving our classmates behind, we made our way deeper and deeper into the sub-tropical jungle. Finally we came upon a narrow creek. We decided to try to cross it by jumping.

I went first. I sprang across with all my might. When I touched down on the opposite bank, my foot landed on a mossy patch and I slipped, falling hard onto rocky, muddy ground. A sharp pain ran up my leg and into my right hip. When I tried to stand up, I crumpled to the ground.

Kuo said, in a panic, “Don’t tell me you’ve broken your leg!”

I didn’t answer him. I tried to lift myself up but again faltered, this time crying out in pain. The stabbing sensation in my leg and hip left me gasping for breath. Rivulets of sweat poured from me.

Fortunately, Kuo was a brawny, strong boy. He managed to lift me onto his back and began to carry me in the direction of the path. An hour or more must have elapsed before we found our group.

They were terribly anxious over our disappearance. On seeing us, our teacher turned livid with rage. But then my condition became apparent, and her anger turned to concern. They laid me on the ground, and the pain, instead of lessening, grew only sharper. I lay on the mountain path, groaning.

Finally, Gordon, my second miscreant friend, arranged for an ambulance to bring me to the Central Clinic, one of the city’s best hospitals. Gordon and Kuo went along, as did the teacher and many of my classmates. When we arrived at the hospital, Gordon summoned Dr. Deng, who he’d heard was the country’s top orthopedist.

An X-ray revealed that my right hip joint was broken. In those days there was no medical insurance. Expenses were paid out of pocket, and I worried that my parents, despite their recent displays of wealth, wouldn’t be able to afford my treatment. I badgered Gordon over how much it might cost. He told me not to think about money—now wasn’t the time.

My mother and father soon arrived, naturally in a state of great distress. With their consent I was admitted to inpatient care. The doctors placed me in traction, hanging my right leg from a sling. The healing process, they said, would require six months, during which time my entire right hip and thigh would remain encased in a plaster cast. I would have to drop out of school for the semester, meaning I would be held back a year. Horrified at that prospect, I asked my mother to intervene if she could.

My mother put her gift of charm to work on the school authorities. In the end they agreed I could take my final exams without attending classes. If I passed them all, I would advance to the tenth grade. If not, I would repeat the ninth.

From my hospital bed I tried to study as best I could. Apart from my schoolbooks, visits from my parents and friends were my only diversions. Gordon came to see me often, as did his mother. It was in my hospital room, on overlapping visits, that his mother met mine for the first time. My mother liked Gordon’s mother at once, praising her as a noble lady. And indeed she was: I have never encountered a mother so kind, so affectionate, so compassionate as Gordon’s. She doted on him so ardently, though, that in the end she spoiled him.

As the days stretched into weeks, my plaster body cast began to irritate my skin. I grew more and more uncomfortable and progressively more vocal in my complaints. A little more than a month following the injury, Dr. Deng, heeding my protests, reluctantly removed the cast. The sling holding up my leg, however, stayed.

After two more months in hospital, the doctor let me return home—on condition I remain bedridden, my right leg still suspended in the sling, for another four months. Then I could start to walk with a cane, an aid I would need, he said, for at least a year. I never learned how much my parents spent on my hospital stay. I would guess about $500—at the time, nearly two years’ salary for the average worker.

Among my parents’ friends was another military general, Chen Jia-shon, who was commander-in-chief of the air force. Through his wife, my mother learned of a doctor at the Air Force General Hospital, Dr. Ho Heng-gee, who had received advanced training in the U.S. According to General Chen’s wife, Dr. Ho was the country’s best orthopedist. His skill, she reckoned, far exceeded that of Dr. Deng. She offered to have Dr. Ho give a second opinion of my treatment; because of her status, the consultation would be free of charge. The idea sounded sensible, so off to Dr. Ho we went.

Dr. Ho, hinting sneeringly that Dr. Deng had failed to keep abreast of advances in the field, arrived at a radically different diagnosis. What I needed, he said, was immediate surgery. In retrospect I think he was trying, sycophantically, to impress the commander’s wife—suggesting a complex operation was a way to show off his knowledge.

Necessary or not, the operation went ahead. Dr. Ho re-broke my hip along the original fracture and inserted a stainless-steel pin. He also twisted my femur to lengthen my leg; otherwise, he said, it would end up too short after it healed. Best of all, I was bedridden no longer. Right after the procedure I was able to get around on crutches.

So thanks to Dr. Ho, life returned to normal faster than I had expected. Though his treatment was meant to be complimentary, to express our appreciation and keep face my mother slipped him twenty thousand Taiwan dollars (at the time about $500).

I sat for my final exams and passed them. I was advancing to the tenth grade. That summer vacation, still on crutches, I missed out on the usual mischief with Gordon and Kuo. When I returned to school in the fall, I learned that Kuo had been expelled and Gordon, because of his chronically poor grades, had been held back a year.

Two months into the new semester, I exchanged my crutches for a cane. Dr. Ho later performed a second operation to remove the steel pin from my leg, and I began walking without a cane.

Without Gordon and Kuo around to distract me, I became a top student. From that year on, I stayed among the top five in my class (though my marks for behavior remained less than exemplary).

For a long time thereafter, I assumed the operations had been successful. But years later, my right hip became sore, and I started limping badly. I endured this discomfort until the age of forty-eight when I could stand it no longer.

By then, Dr. Ho had died. I consulted Dr. Huang Juin-Shiung of the Mackay Memorial Hospital, and I learned that Dr. Ho’s repositioning of my femur had been mistaken. My cartilage had worn down, leaving me with an arthritic hip.

Dr. Huang replaced the end of my femur with an artificial implant. He warned me it might wear out, but over the years I’ve walked many miles and hiked up mountains, and it seems to have held up well enough. Let me knock on wood.

In the summer of 1962, I graduated from high school and sat for the college-entrance exam, a nationwide uniform test that determined which university you could attend. Before taking the exam, the students filled out a form listing their preferences of university and field of study. If you scored well, you attended the program you wanted. Otherwise, you had to accept whichever one the system assigned.

Like most teenagers I hadn’t decided what I really wanted to do with my life. I was quite talented in art, especially painting. But I knew my parents would never let me pursue an artist’s life. Even earning a regular salary, my father warned me, would forever keep me poor. Instead, he said, I ought to open a factory—that was the surest way to get rich. And to open a factory, one had to learn electrical engineering. So my first choice was electrical engineering at National Taiwan University, the nation’s top school.

I did well enough on the exam to enter my program of choice, and my parents were exuberant. As the oldest among my siblings, my academic achievement set an example for the others. My two brothers found my example especially inspiring. They both worked hard, did well on their exams, and entered good universities—Forceman in mechanical engineering, Kingsman in chemistry.

My example, though, was lost on Gordon. Twice more he would repeat a grade. His lazy habits made him unable to live up to our high school’s strict curriculum. His father transferred him to a less demanding school, and he finally graduated and entered a two-year college program studying textile engineering.

Kuo, my other bad-boy friend, never graduated high school. He entered the business world without finding much success, then fell in with a circle of gangsters under whose sway he remained for a long, long time.

After I started my university studies, Gordon and I stayed in close touch and often had fun together. By the second half of my sophomore year, I was overindulging in off-campus action: chasing girls, attending dance parties, touring around the island on a motorcycle, and seldom showing up for class.

Most of the students bicycled to school or rode the bus, and my parents’ gift of a 50cc Honda motorcycle set me apart. Gordon had one too—his a more powerful 305cc model. We rode those Hondas everywhere, driving as fast as we dared. We had the odd crash—incidents we concealed from our parents—but nothing serious.

My grades, however, dipped badly. My average for the semester was a disappointing B minus. The shock of that lowly mark was a wakeup call. I knew I had to start applying myself. Never, I resolved, would I let myself drop from the ranks of the top ten students—never again.

CHAPTER 6

Waning

My father’s fortunes rose and fell. They reached their peak just prior to that fateful family meeting when he promised to send us to America’s best schools.

“You just concentrate on your studies,” he said to the four of us that day. “All your tuition, all your living costs, I will pay.”

The truth was, he was playing the stock market. In the days leading up to his confident promise, his holdings had gained in value by several million Taiwan dollars (close to ten million U.S. dollars today).

Such an amount, though still far less than what he had lost in Hong Kong, would indeed have covered our overseas tuition and expenses. But a month later the stock market tanked, and all of his gains were lost. Worse, he was trading on margin, multiplying his losses as his leverage went into reverse. Almost overnight he found himself deep in debt.

We had no idea of his reversal of fortune; he gave no second speech to retract his earlier promise. So life went on. He and my mother concealed from us their troubles, and the children remained blissfully unaware of them.

During my final year of university we had to move again—owing to financial strain, no doubt. My mother’s friend Chiang Hua-shiou offered us a discounted price on a new, spacious apartment in an elevator-equipped building that her family’s construction firm had recently built. My mother had her eye on it, but even after the discount, my father couldn’t come up with enough cash. Instead we acquired a five-bedroom apartment on Ling Yi Street, in Taipei’s eastern district. The area was decent enough, but our unit was a fourth-floor walk-up—we couldn’t afford a lower floor. And it was only about 1,200 square feet in size, a little too small for a family of seven.

My parents occupied the master bedroom, where they added a second bed for Kingsman. Forceman and I shared the next-largest room. Julie took one of the remaining rooms and Uncle Zu-Han another. Our maid slept in a tiny closet-like chamber.

By then we had let our pedicab driver go. Not only to conserve funds—the service itself had become superfluous. Pedicabs were disappearing from the streets of Taipei, replaced by taxis and frequent bus service. These artifacts of the old China would soon vanish completely.

I was still living in our Ling Yi Street place when I earned my bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from National Taiwan University in 1966. By then the straitened reality of my father’s circumstances had become obvious to all of us. I knew his promise to fund my further education was unfulfillable.

Even without his support I was keen to continue my studies. I took the graduate-school entrance exams my university offered and a nationwide exam that subsidized top-scorers who would study abroad. I also took the TOEFL and GRE tests and applied for scholarships in America.

To my surprise and delight, all three avenues succeeded. Of greatest interest was an offer from Washington State University: admission to a master’s degree program in electrical engineering paired with a teaching assistantship. Best of all, it came with a full-tuition scholarship.

After I arrived in the U.S., I could survive on my scholarship income. All I needed from my father was enough funds to buy a one-way ticket to Seattle and some pocket money to get me started. But his finances had reached an even lower ebb. He was either gambling again or had made another disastrous investment. I suspect the latter. Either way, he didn’t have any money to give me.

Then one day I received a call from Gordon. “Uncle Yeh wants to lend you two hundred thousand,” he said in a tone that, as usual, sounded impish and teasing.

“Uncle Yeh?” I was unsure whom he meant.

“Yes, Yeh Gun-lin. The guy who married my aunt. He heard you got a chance to go to school in the U.S., and he thinks you need the money. So he’ll lend it to you.”

“Why would he want to do that?” I couldn’t believe what I was hearing—it had to be another of Gordon’s jokes.

“Because he likes you. He says you’re a promising young man. He says it would be a shame if you couldn’t study abroad because you don’t have the money.”

“But when would I need to pay him back?”

“Whenever you can. There’s no deadline—no pressure at all.”

The news struck me like a clap of thunder. Yeh did, years later, end up a very rich man—but back then, as far as I knew, he was only just getting by. Why was such a wonderful thing happening to me? Was I not the luckiest man in the world? And Uncle Yeh the most kind-hearted? What had I done to deserve this immense favor from him? Despite the many questions swirling around in my head, I did what most anyone would do: I accepted his offer.

In fact, I didn’t need that much money—even one-tenth of that amount would have been enough. But I was glad to have ample funds to fall back on. I knew my father was desperately short of cash, and when I got Yeh’s money, I handed him fifty thousand Taiwan dollars, one-quarter of the amount. Then I went shopping for some items I figured I would need in America: new shoes, new clothes, even a couple of suits tailored at Gordon’s family store. And of course, I bought my plane ticket.

As my departure date neared, a complication arose. In Taiwan every male citizen who reaches eighteen years of age and is not enrolled in the local school system must complete two years of military service. Having seriously injured my leg, I assumed I was exempt on medical grounds. But it turned out I wasn’t: I still had to complete three months’ training as a noncombat reservist.

This obstacle meant I was barred from leaving the country and couldn’t start the fall semester at Washington State. I wrote the school to request a postponement, which was granted. In truth I was glad for the delay—I was happy to stay with my family and friends a while longer. My move to the U.S. might be a permanent one. Who knew when I’d be back, even to visit?

I completed my military training, and once again my departure date neared. This time, however, a self-inflicted disaster intervened. One day, for fun, I exchanged my Honda 50cc motorbike for a classmate’s 150cc Honda model. With a friend, Wang En-liang, riding on the back, I headed for Danshui, the oceanfront suburb north of Taipei where I live in the present day.

Wang and I had both enjoyed a few drinks before setting out. The hour was near dusk. As we drove farther away from the city center, the traffic grew thinner, traffic lights became fewer, and the road straightened into long open stretches. I twisted the throttle and we picked up speed. I turned the throttle as far as it would go, and saw the speedometer’s needle touching eighty miles an hour—the Honda’s top speed.

I felt Wang tug at my arm, urging me to slow down. But the thrill of driving at such a velocity—faster than I’d ever gone before—seized me, and I ignored him. Raindrops dotted the road ahead, and the wind swept back my hair and drove droplets of rain into my eyes. In my excitement, I felt not a trace of fear. I sped onwards.

Soon the broad, straight road flanked by houses and streetlights had branched off into a narrow, winding, unlit lane. Night had fallen, and I switched on the headlight. I didn’t know the area or where the road led.

The only sight was of scrubby vegetation at the shoulders of the road; the only sound, the motorcycle’s laboring engine. Wang had put his arms around my waist and was clasping me tightly. With each curve in the road I felt his body stiffen. I knew he was scared, but I didn’t slacken our speed.

I was halfway through a curve in the road when I realized, too late, that it wasn’t merely a curve but a switchback. Our speed was too great, and I lost control. The bike slid out from under us, and we smashed into a pile of bricks that lay at the roadside. We both flew into the air, hitting the ground many feet away. We landed on a downward slope and kept on sliding. I skidded headfirst along the rough, gravelly ground, banging my left temple as I went.

Then, nothing—all was quiet. The motorcycle’s engine had quit, and the rain was no longer falling. I lay, stunned, in the darkness of the night, enveloped in a terrifying silence.

By some miracle we were both still conscious. I tottered to my feet, relieved I could move my limbs. Then I looked down at my body and saw I had become a man of blood. The entire front of my shirt was stained blood-red.

Wang was lying about ten yards away. I heard him emit a groaning sound but saw no movement. I staggered over and helped him get up. He too was a blood-man.

Shakily he got to his feet. He seemed dazed. He pointed a finger to the north of where we were standing. In a thin voice, he said, “Look, do you see? There’s a woman in a white gown standing there. Do you see her?”

I looked in the direction he was pointing but saw nothing, not even a shadow. He was hallucinating—perhaps out of panic or from a terrible injury to his brain. The delirious rambling continued. “Let’s ask her for help!” he cried out. “Hey, lady!”

“I see nothing there,” I said.

He looked at me and a stricken expression crossed his face. “Yes, yes!” he said. “She’s there! Hey, please help!” To make doubly certain I wasn’t wrong, I looked again—no one was there.

We hadn’t worn helmets, and I saw he was bleeding badly from his head. Then I raised my hand to touch my own head. I looked at it and saw it shimmering with blood. I took off my bloody shirt, tore it in half, and wrapped one strip around Wang’s head and the other around mine. Hanging onto each other for balance, we made our way back up to the road where the crashed bike lay forlornly on its side.

With great effort I righted the motorcycle and tried to kick-start it. By a second miracle it sputtered to life. Fighting off the pain of his injuries, Wang mounted the bike in the passenger position, and I steered us back onto the road.

The sky was moonless and dark. The road was unlit, and no other cars were in sight. In the dim beam of the headlight, I could barely make out the white line in the middle of the road. Knowing it had to lead us somewhere, I followed it.

Either from shock or simple loss of blood, I grew giddy and lightheaded as I drove. Parts of my body were throbbing but I felt like I was floating above the pain. Not so Wang: with each bump in the road, or even the slightest rocking motion of the bike, he cried out in pain.

The engine sounded abnormal and seemed to cut in and out. Then it quit completely, and we glided to a halt. The time was near midnight, and we were still in the middle of nowhere.

“We’re going to die here!” Wang said. He sounded utterly hopeless. I didn’t reply; I feared he was right.

I tried to kick the engine back to life. It was no use—after several tries, it still showed no sign of life. My makeshift bandages hadn’t stopped the bleeding from our heads, and our strength was ebbing.

Then I saw a man on the road. He was walking toward us. Excited, we began to yell and scream in his direction.

As he grew nearer, we recognized him as a soldier in uniform. “Please help!” I said. “We’ve had an accident. We’re bleeding to death!”

To this day, his unnatural reaction still baffles me: the sight of two injured, bloody  people didn’t move him a bit. Instead he asked, “Did you see a group of soldiers marching by? I lost them a while ago.”

“No!” I said. “But please help us!”

“You sure you didn’t see them?”

“Yes, but can you—”

Before I could finish my sentence he turned his back and walked right past us. I yelled after him, asking once more for help, but to no effect. We were alone again.

We had no choice but to keep walking. I asked Wang to help me push the motorcycle. I figured we’d better not abandon it in case by some third miracle it revived again.

I don’t know how far we walked or for how long—my memory is blurred. We saw no cars, no people on the road. Finally we came upon a solitary farmhouse by the roadside. The house was in darkness. If anyone was inside, they were fast asleep.

We found the front door and knocked on it. A light came on, and a young man opened the door. Unlike the soldier, he wasn’t indifferent to the sight of us. At once he expressed grave concern.

I implored him to take us to the nearest hospital for emergency treatment. He answered that his family had no vehicle, only a bicycle. He told us to lie down on a haystack and rest while he rode for help. By that time the whole family had woken up, and they busied themselves trying to rewrap our wounds.

The young man—I think he was eldest son—set off. He must have cycled at a frantic pace, because within a short time a taxi arrived. The young man and his father helped Wang and me into the back seat. As we drove away, I called out my thanks and asked them to keep the damaged motorcycle until I could have someone come to fetch it.

We arrived at a clinic in the nearest village to find it frightfully primitive. It occupied the first floor of a dingy, three-storey concrete slab of a building on the main street. The doctor, who lived above the clinic and whom we had awoken by banging on the front door, looked cursorily at our wounds and declared he could treat Wang but not me. He could stanch my bleeding for a short while, but for proper treatment I ought to rush to a modern hospital in Taipei.

The taxi driver agreed to take me all the way to Taipei. I asked Wang to go with me, but he declined. He was relieved to be receiving treatment, however crude, and chose to remain with the village doctor.

So I carried on without him to the Mackay Memorial Hospital, one of Taipei’s finest. When I entered the emergency room, the crowd parted as though seeing a specter—caked all over with dried blood, my clothes torn, and my head swathed in rough, stained bandages, I must have looked like a movie monster.

The hospital attendants, without delay, brought me to a doctor. He was a foreigner, a Caucasian from either America or Europe. Several hours had passed since my injury, and during that interval the whole left side of my face had swollen up. The doctor was worried about infection, and his immediate concern was to debride, sterilize, and close the deep gash on my forehead. He needed eighteen stitches to close it.

The hospital called my mother in the early hours of the morning to inform her of my accident. She rushed to my side. I spent two weeks in hospital, during which she kept me company most of the time. It was my third hospitalization and second brush with death—the first being my grave illness as a child.

The friend who had lent me his motorcycle followed my directions to the farmhouse, retrieved the damaged motorcycle, and sent it for repair. The bill went to my parents—on top of another sizable medical expense, they paid it.

My friends speculated on the various mysteries that surrounded the incident. After making inquiries, they learned that the brick pile I hit was no ordinary pile of rubble. It was a tomb, and the empty area where we were stranded was a graveyard. During the colonial time it had held a prison camp where the Japanese had executed many local soldiers.

The white-gowned woman, they suggested, was the occupant of the tomb we struck. The soldier? He too was a ghost, the spirit of a soldier executed on that spot.

I granted that their theory had a certain logic. No flesh-and-blood soldier would have refused to aid wounded civilians. Only Wang had seen the woman, but we had both seen the soldier. Was he a “real” ghost? Or was he a hallucination, one we both had shared—a folie à deux?

The night of the accident, by carrying on to Mackay Memorial, I received the best treatment available—from a foreign doctor no less. Wang was less fortunate. The village doctor failed to clean and sterilize his wound properly, and he came down with a serious, life-threatening infection. He fell into a coma and was sent to the Navy Hospital for intensive care. He did get well, but his recovery was much slower than mine. Worse, his head wound left an area of permanent hair loss. He ended up wearing a toupée for life.

I felt terrible for the misery I had caused him. If only I had driven more carefully, the accident would never have happened. What possessed me to be so reckless? I could offer no sensible explanation. All I could do, in recompense, was to visit him frequently.

By January 1967 I had recovered from my injury and was ready again to depart for America. Going abroad in those days was no trivial event—people didn’t flit back and forth across the ocean as they do today. I went to the airport accompanied by a small crowd: friends, classmates, my brothers and sister, my parents.

As I stood in the departures area, my flight minutes from boarding, my father approached me. I guessed he was about to express something—perhaps some sentimental words, the sort of words he had never spoken to me before. Instead, wordlessly, he embraced me in a hug. That action in itself was unusual: not since I was a child had he hugged me. Tears formed in his eyes, and I sensed he was plucking up the courage to reveal, for the first time, his true feelings.

I hugged him back but then hurriedly stepped away, not wanting to prolong his show of affection and embarrass him. I pretended I hadn’t seen his tears. Then I turned to my mother and hugged her. I sensed her heart melting—for this was the first hug she had received from me since my childhood.

I realize now that my sorrow at parting was, at the time, far less than theirs. Parents love their children more than the children comprehend—especially when they are young, and I was still a very young man.

I often think back on that reticent scene at the airport. Of the many errors in my life, one stands out as a truly deep regret: that I failed to convey to my parent my appreciation for their love, for their caring, and for simply bringing me into this world. I failed in both word and deed: never did I speak of my love, nor did I display it in any conspicuous way. Instead, I acted in ways I knew were bound to hurt them. Now they are long gone, and I have lost even the chance at repentance.

If I could be granted three wishes today, the very first would be to revisit the past and say to them, “I truly love you, mama and papa,” then to see, as these words issued from my mouth, their rapturous faces. My second wish would to have them spring back to life and reside with me forever. And the third wish. . .well, allow me to reserve that one for now.

I learned of my cancer in 2009. I had just turned sixty-five. It was June, and I was wrapping up the spring semester of teaching engineering at Taiwan’s Tamkang University. With the summer vacation only days away, I was feeling elated. For the past twenty summers, without exception, I had gone to California and Seattle to visit friends and relatives along the West Coast. But this summer would be different.

Ever since reaching sixty years of age I had fallen into a sort of depression or melancholia. Looking at my reflection in the mirror, I saw the mark of age on my countenance. I started to feel old and useless, felt my self-confidence ebbing. Life had lost its former color. I tried to look to God for help, but that effort went nowhere. Life became miserable, even downright painful.

I had, however, hit on a restorative tonic, a plan to reconnect me with my youthful vigor. For a whole summer I would backpack, alone, the length and breadth of mainland China, traipsing from town to town like an itinerant monk.

If a place interested me, I would stay there for a few days. If not, I would move on. I would eschew flying in favor of local buses and trains. I love the variety of food China offers, and wherever I went I would sample the local specialties. Alone, I would be free to do as I chose, unburdened with travel companions whose desires might differ from mine.

A week before my adventure was to begin I felt a slight stomachache. It didn’t bother me a great deal—it seemed like a minor, passing complaint—but it came with an unusual degree of flatulence that I found bothersome. Plus the soreness in my abdomen seemed to be spreading to my upper back, and I felt a numbing fatigue. Nothing a good massage wouldn’t cure, I reckoned. Still, I decided to have a quick checkup before leaving.

I had always taken my health more or less for granted. I was a heavy smoker, consuming up to a pack and a half a day. I wasn’t exactly an alcoholic, but I was a hard drinker. I went to parties and stayed out late, often until three or four in the morning. On food I set no constraints. I loved chocolate, ice cream, Coca-Cola, rich pastries. I ate oily foods and lots of meat. Fruits and vegetables I ate too, but as a sideline along with the unhealthy stuff.

Having reached sixty-five I knew I had to start being more careful, but I had remained thin and didn’t consider myself unhealthy. So when I strolled into Taipei’s Mackay Memorial Hospital, it was without much trepidation. It would be a routine checkup, one that might uncover a minor ailment or two.

The doctor first gave me a blood test. I had a hepatitis B history, and he found my liver indices (the GOT and GPT enzymes) a little high—but only a little. He suspected my hepatitis infection, after a long dormancy, had broken out again. I listened to his concerns, then announced I was leaving for an extended trip to China.

“Not a good idea!” he said. “I strongly advise you to admit yourself for inpatient treatment. This is no minor matter.”

“Are you serious?” I couldn’t believe my bad luck. I had devised my trip to China as a self-administered cure for my low-level depression. Was the recurrence of an old problem now derailing my plan? If so, I thought, what unfortunate timing!

“Yes, I’m serious,” the doctor said.

“Can we repeat the test in a couple of days? Maybe the indices will come down on their own.”

“Fine, I’ll schedule another test. And while we’re at it, I’ll schedule an endoscopy, too—I want to check into that stomachache.”

Several days later I returned to the hospital. First the doctor checked the whites of my eyes. Saying they looked a little yellowish, he ordered another test, the jaundice index, to be done that day as well.

Then he began the endoscopy. He threaded the endoscopy tube, with its miniature camera on one end, down my throat and into my stomach. It was a common procedure, strictly routine. As they worked, the doctor and the nurse in attendance both had a relaxed air.

Then I heard the doctor remark to the nurse that he couldn’t feed the scope past a turn near my bile duct. Some obstacle was blocking the way. At that point they had to interrupt the procedure. The doctor, puzzled, ordered an ultrasound check of my abdomen.

The ultrasound scan found a blurry-looking object blocking my bile duct. A more advanced CAT scan was ordered to determine what it was. In addition, my jaundice index was found to be high. I would be hospitalized that evening, a Saturday, for further tests and treatment.

Events were unfolding at a disorienting pace. I had expected to embark on a restorative trip. Instead, my health was gravely in question. I felt as though I was in the midst of a dream, or more accurately, a waking nightmare.

That night as I lay on the hospital bed, I received a call from a good friend, Ta-Ching Liu. Was I free that night, he wondered, to go out and have fun? His cheerful invitation was a sad reminder of the abrupt turn my life had taken.

Learning of my sudden hospitalization, he rushed over to see me. He knew a physician, Dr. Cheng, who specialized in gastroenterology. Ta-Ching called him, and after Dr. Cheng listened to the facts of my case, he recommended I move straightaway to his facility, Cheng Hsin Hospital. In his opinion, it was far better equipped than Mackay Memorial to handle my case.

I now faced a familiar dilemma of the seriously ill: which doctor to trust? Which hospital to choose? These questions have no easy answer, and I found myself torn. Perhaps my friend and his doctor acquaintance knew best and I ought to listen to their advice. On the other hand, was I willing to reject the doctor who was already caring for me and probably embarrass him in the process? How to quantify “better” or “worse” when it comes to medical facilities and caregivers? In my own field, natural phenomenon were reducible to trustworthy mathematics. But this question seemed to have no reliable answer.

In the end, I decided to change hospitals, and Ta-Ching returned the next morning to help me move. It was, after all, a matter of life and death. My doctor’s feelings were of lesser concern. But was I making the right choice? Still to this day, I don’t know for certain.

CHAPTER 7

America

I spent 1967 studying at Washington State University. I obtained my master’s degree without a hitch, and in June 1968 I left the university town of Pullman bound for Seattle, where I had lined up an engineering job at the John Fluke Manufacturing Company, a maker of electrical test equipment.

I didn’t plan to stay in that job for long. I had my eye on getting a Ph.D., and soon I started searching for suitable programs. To my delight, an offer came from Columbia University in New York, including financial support. So at the end of that summer in Seattle, after a short stint of working at Fluke, I quit the job, packed up my things, and headed for New York.

Nothing in my imagination had prepared me for what I found there. New York at the trailing end of the sixties was a teeming human jungle—quite the opposite of tiny, serene Pullman. It was monstrous in size, filthy in parts, rowdy and turbulent everywhere. I worried at first that I wouldn’t be able to cope. But as time went by, I began to like it.

Gradually, I discovered the varieties of life the city offered. Its mixture of nationalities opened a window onto different cultures; its countless restaurants—some fancy, some slapped-together—served cuisine from all over the world. Its majestic skyscrapers represented the world’s finest achievements in architecture; its sumptuous cinemas and Broadway musicals delivered you to a world of dreams; its elaborately styled bars and clubs offered entertainment of all forms, from the stately to the wild. The city’s museums and art galleries rivaled those of Europe. Its boutiques and department stores overflowed with eye-dazzling merchandise. As I walked the city streets, I discovered one by one its fabled sites, places with names like Times Square, Greenwich Village, Chinatown, Germantown, Wall Street, Central Park, Fifth Avenue, and the Statue of Liberty.

In the end, I fell in love with New York City. I made friends there with people from around the world, places like Israel, Germany, Canada, and South Africa. We had a fabulous time together. Every Friday night, as a ritual, we partied until Saturday dawned. Still, despite all the revelry, I kept up with my studies.

My first few weeks of discovery stretched into months, until the first school year passed and the summer of 1969 began. Around then, two old classmates from Taiwan arrived in New York, also for graduate studies. When I first arrived in America, I felt a sense of isolation. But now, thanks to the new friends I had made and the arrival of acquaintances from home, the loneliness was entirely gone. I was having a blast.

Even better, my brother Forceman announced he was coming too. Back in Taiwan he had followed in my footsteps: he graduated from the same high school, then enrolled in mechanical engineering at Cheng Kung University in Tainan, a city in southern Taiwan. After earning his degree, he served for two years in the military as the law required. In engineering school, his grades were adequate but not good enough for a scholarship in America. A university in Missouri admitted him to a master’s program in mathematics, but the offer came without financial support. So my parents scraped together enough to cover his expenses for the first year. After that, he would have to support himself.

Instead of heading straight to Missouri in the fall, Forceman arrived in the U.S. three months ahead of time to spend the summer with me in New York. I lived on the 11th floor of Johnson Hall, a dormitory on campus, in a tiny room about eight feet by ten feet in size. It contained only a bed, a bookshelf, a small desk that faced the window, and a portable refrigerator that doubled as an end table. Between the bed and the desk, there was just enough space on the floor for a person to lie down. That was where Forceman slept.

Forceman hoped to spend the summer earning money. His first instinct, like that of many Chinese students in America, was to find a low-paid job at a Chinese restaurant. I suggested he consider other options. Following my advice, he landed a job as a doorman at a high-rise apartment building in Greenwich Village. He worked four eight-hour shifts a week, from Monday through Thursday. The job turned out to pay well: on top of a weekly salary of about $100, the residents were generous tippers, and on an average day he collected $40 in gratuities. He estimated he would pocket over the course of the summer an extra $3,000 to bring with him to Missouri.

On the mornings he worked, he arose from his spot on the dorm-room floor at six, walked ten minutes to the subway station at West 110th Street and Broadway, and caught a train to Greenwich Village. I carried on sleeping, usually opening my eyes around noon. Then I would spring up, bolt down some leftovers from the night before, and dash off to my laboratory at Columbia’s Seeley W. Mudd building. There I immersed myself in preparations for my Ph.D. qualifying exam—the test I had to pass before I undertook dissertation research.

At around four-thirty in the afternoon, his shift done, Forceman would return to the room and fall onto the bed, exhausted from manning a doorway since seven that morning with only a half-hour break for lunch. I would return from the laboratory an hour or two later to find him in a deep sleep, snoring like a thunderstorm. We’d then share a frugal dinner, usually splitting a submarine sandwich from a nearby takeout. Other times we splurged on a burger joint or deli and sauntered around Broadway. Back in our cramped quarters, Forceman would stretch out on the floor and fall asleep early, leaving me to study late into the night.

Friday night was our time to relax and have fun. I would set my books aside, put my studies out of my mind, and show Forceman around the city I had grown to love. We liked to window-shop in downtown Manhattan, where I took him past Cartier, Steuben Glass, Tiffany, Saks Fifth Avenue, Bloomingdale’s, and the little boutiques in the lanes around Second Avenue. We couldn’t afford to buy anything—simply to admire the stylish goods on display was entertainment enough.

Sometimes we would stroll through the Waldorf Astoria or the Plaza Hotel, pretending we were wealthy hotel guests, then walk along upper Fifth Avenue to gaze at the luxurious co-ops as we went by. Other times we visited the Metropolitan Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Museum of Natural History, places where for little expense we could spend hours absorbed in the wonders on display. Late at night the street scene was entertainment enough, and we would sit on Park Avenue, people-watching.

We loved to sample the endless variety of foods available cheaply in New York, from shish kebabs and frankfurters in Times Square to Chinese food on Canal Street. After eating our fill we hopped from bar to bar. A typical Friday might begin at the Wednesday Club, then shift to another called the Thursday Club. Then we might bounce over to Adam’s Apple, followed by the Rainbow Room atop the RCA building, where we sipped beer and mingled with the beautiful girls.

And so the summer went. Our plans were unfolding just as we hoped they would. I had come to America, earned a master’s degree, and I was now on the cusp of my next achievement: the Ph.D. qualifying exam that was a week away. Once I passed it, I could begin my doctoral dissertation. For his part, my brother was about to leave for Missouri to begin his own solo American adventure.

I advised Forceman to buy an overcoat, an item he needed for the cold winter ahead. For price and selection, I told him, no place beat New York. He agreed; the coming Friday, we decided, was the day we would buy it. My suggestion proved to be a fateful one.

On Thursday he returned from work, tuckered out as usual. It was a torrid summer afternoon, our dorm room lacked air-conditioning, and he opened the window as wide as it would go. He emptied his pockets of his tip money, setting the bills and loose change onto the desk, and stretched out on the bed for some rest.

A noise awoke him, and he opened his eyes to the blurred image of a man. In his bleary state he passed it off as a dream, and he promptly fell back to sleep.

When he woke up a second time, the sun had set and the room was dark. Recalling his dream, he sprang up and found the light switch. The money on the desk was gone! He hadn’t dreamt the image—the man was a thief!

Forceman was aghast. The day’s work had been for nothing; worse, his close brush with a criminal made his stomach turn. When I returned from the laboratory, he told me what had happened. We spent the rest of the evening in low spirits. Despite feeling shaken by the incident, we decided to stick to our plan and buy the overcoat the next day.

The following afternoon, after walking the streets for a while, we came upon the Macy’s store on West 34th Street. Though I’d been in New York almost a year and by then was a veteran window-shopper, the coat would be my first actual purchase at a big department store in America. We were both excited.

We walked into Macy’s, and our eyes darted everywhere. So many items were for sale; we didn’t know what to choose or even how to begin. As a trial run we bought a few cheap, unplanned items. Then we found the coat department. We wanted a sturdy coat at a reasonable cost, but the price tags made our eyes water. How, we wondered, could an ordinary coat cost so much?

Then the flash hit me: what if we didn’t pay? In Taiwan, storekeepers kept shoppers in sight, eying them to prevent theft. But here in America, no one seemed to be on guard. Looking around us, I saw only my brother.

I tugged at Forceman’s sleeve. “Hey,” I said. “Look, there’s no one around.”

He turned his head to look left and right. “Yeah, so what?” he said. He hadn’t caught on to what I was implying.

“I mean, if we steal a coat, nobody’s going to notice.”

“Come on! We can’t do that.” The furrows in his brow conveyed his disapproval.

“What’s stopping us? Look around—there’s no one watching us. Think about that $40 you lost yesterday. Now’s our chance to make it even.” I pointed at our shopping bag. “Look, this bag is big enough. We just need to hurry up and slip a coat into it, before anyone sees us.”

He hesitated. He began casting about for reasons not to proceed. Yet the impulse had gripped me, and I had made up my mind: we were going to do it. Nothing he could say would deter me, and I overcame his objections. I was, after all, his older brother—he had listened to me all his life.

We lingered in the coat section a while longer, sorting through the rack to identify his favorite. Then, after we made certain no one was watching, we placed the coat in our shopping bag and slunk away.

We decided not to leave the store right away. To make doubly certain no one was following us, we would loiter for a half hour or so. We meandered from department to department, trying our best to appear nonchalant, and when enough time had passed I said to Forceman, “Nobody’s noticed us—it must be safe now.”

We headed for the exit.

CHAPTER 8

The Arrest

We were on the department store’s second floor. An escalator led to the ground floor and the exit. As we walked onto the escalator we glanced around us, looking for signs of a pursuer. No one was paying us the slightest attention.

We began to descend. When we were halfway down, I spotted two burly men standing at the base of the escalator. They were olive-skinned and looked like the Puerto Ricans I had seen on the city streets. They were both staring up at us. My heart began to thump.

The escalator was jam-packed. I looked behind us: a solid line of people, standing two abreast, extended all the way to the top. There was no going back. All we could do was stand still and keep riding downward, toward the two men.

Forceman whispered into my ear, “They look like security men. We’re finished!”

I hoped he was wrong. But when we reached the ground level, they closed in. One of them flashed a metallic badge in front of my eyes. He put it away so quickly I didn’t get a clear look at it. But its meaning was clear enough.

“Please step aside,” the man said. As though in a trance, I obeyed him.

The second man said, “Can we see what’s in your bag?” A strong New York accent overlaid traces of a Puerto Rican upbringing.

We said nothing in reply—simply nodded our assent. In one motion the man thrust his hand into our bag and lifted out the overcoat. They had caught us.

I realized at that instant how foolish our plan had been. We had deceived no one—these men had spotted us long before and known our intentions all along! American stores didn’t lack security; they had it in droves. Whereas in Taiwan the clerks observed you blatantly, here they did so surreptitiously and more cleverly. We never had a chance!

One of the men said, “Would you come with us?”

The other shoppers seemed oblivious to our predicament. They jostled by us, calling out to each other in cheerful voices. At that moment I envied them terribly. The cheerful world of normalcy they inhabited we had, by one criminal act, forfeited.

The men led us away. We passed through a set of metal doors, leaving behind us the bright ambiance of the fancy department store and entering a grim new world, one of grubby walls and unpolished corridors, a place for the defective, for the guilty, a world those cheerful, jostling, chatting, innocent shoppers would never see.

We walked and walked. I had the sense we were descending into the basement. Finally we arrived at a small room abutting the security office. The room was bare, unfurnished except for a table at which two unsmiling men were sitting. They looked at us without surprise, as though they were expecting us.

One of them lifted his hand and pointed a finger at me. He must have gathered that I was the main culprit.

“Do you have money on you?”

“Yes!” I replied. “Yes, we sure do!”

Perhaps the whole exercise was only a test of indigence—if we had sufficient funds, we would go free.

“Would you show it to me please?”

We took out all of the money we had and laid the bills on the desk in front of him. I guessed the total was about $180.

“You have money. So why did you steal?” It was the second man, who until then had kept silent.

This was the very question I was least prepared to answer. My sudden criminal impulse baffled even me.

“Well, uh. . .we needed the money for, um, you know, something else.” I knew at once my explanation sounded ludicrous.

“What?” His tone and expression were both incredulous.

I tried to organize my thoughts, to form a coherent line of reasoning. “You see, we’re poor students from China. We don’t have enough money, and we need to pay our tuition soon.”

As I talked, I grew bolder. Might I be able to talk us free? The man’s expression was still skeptical, but I went on.

“Look, we’re Chinese. The Chinese are usually law-abiding citizens, right? The truth is, we’ve never committed any crimes before. This was our first time—truly—and I don’t know why I did it.”

“Yes, that’s all very well, but—”

“Please. . .give us a break!” My tone turned pleading. “Give us a chance! I swear to God, I’ll never do it again.”

“There’s nothing we can do,” said the second man. “We don’t have the authority to let you go.”

“Then let me talk to your manager! Please, call the manager in and let me talk to him.”

He shook his head. “The manager’s not in. Besides, the police are already on their way.”

“The police? No! How?”

“The minute we caught you we called the police. It’s standard procedure. All we can do now is wait here for them to come.”

My heart was sinking. I knew Forceman’s was too. We looked at each other in despair. His face had flushed a deep crimson.

“I’m sorry,” said the first man. I detected an expression of pity cross his face, as though, if he could choose, he would rather spare us what was about to happen. But I also sensed futility—nothing could turn the tide now.

They gave us chairs, and we sat down to wait. With each passing second my mind swirled with possibilities, none of them good. What, exactly, would happen to us? Deportation? I foresaw us returning to Taiwan under a cloud of ignomy. How would we face my parents? Their two sons, of whom they were so proud, shipped back as common criminals—the very idea was unthinkable. Yet it was happening. And I was to blame for causing it.

The waiting seemed to go on forever. I thought of my Ph.D. exam, just days away. Even without the disruption of this incident, I still had much cramming to do. Now failure was certain—all I had worked for, now dashed to pieces.

Finally the police came. Two officers arrived, both in uniform. With scarcely a word they handcuffed us, then led us through the labyrinth of corridors that honeycombed the department store’s inner depths. A door opened; we emerged onto the department store floor, then out the main doors and onto the street. I saw a police vehicle parked at the curb, waiting to convey us away.

This time I didn’t wonder whether the bystanders knew what we had done. It was obvious they did. As we walked past, I felt their eyes stalking us. Never in our lives had we felt such shame.

The rear door of the police car closed, and the vehicle started to move. As we made our way to the station, I felt my whole world collapsing. The sky was coming down, compressing me, as though death itself was beckoning. Crime, arrest, handcuffs, interrogation, imprisonment: these were things I had seen only in movies. But now the actors in the scene were my brother and I, and it was real.

After about twenty minutes’ time we reached the police station. The two officers got out and opened the rear doors to let us alight. They led us, still handcuffed, into the precinct.

It was a clamorous place, buzzing with activity. Officers hurried to and fro, talking in loud voices to each other and to various malefactors—mostly black people—who were scattered here and there, apparently in various stages of processing. We were ushered to a room that looked like an office and ordered to remain there and wait.

Then ensued another long, fretful period of waiting. Forceman and I had exchanged few words since our apprehension, but I knew what he was thinking: that life, as we knew it, had ended. Then a new thought flashed into my mind.

“You don’t have any ID with you, right?”

“No,” he said. “So what?”

“Then you don’t need to give them your real name.”

He looked puzzled. “But what good would that do?”

“It means your real name won’t appear on their record. You’re not a citizen—you’ve got no identity here. They won’t know who you really are. Get it?”

“But what name should I use?”

“How about. . .John Chen. Yes, that’s it. Just tell them you’re Mr. John Chen.”

At that moment the door opened, and a policeman entered. It was a new man, one we hadn’t seen before. As I predicted, he requested our identity documents.

I produced my Columbia University student card and my driver’s license. Forceman, following along with the plan, gave the false name of John Chen. Then it hit me: John was the most common name in America, and Chen was Taiwan’s most common surname. Was the name “John Chen” implausibly common?

By then the officer had sat down at the table and begun filling out a form. He looked over my documents, scrutinized my name, and wrote it on the form. Then, sure enough, he wrote “John Chen” as the second arrestee. My life was probably shattered—nothing, I realized, could halt my fate—but I hoped desperately to shield my brother from the same consequences.

After finishing the paperwork, the officer brought us to another room, this one equipped with a camera. Just as I’d seen in the movies, a technician slung a numbered placard around our necks and photographed us from the front and side. Then they led us to a third room where finally they removed our handcuffs. I recognized it as the fingerprinting station.

After these processing steps were done, the officers moved us to a holding cell. No longer were we alone: the cell housed other suspects they had rounded up that day—mostly black people.

Yet another period of waiting ensued. Whatever would happen, I preferred it end quickly. The interminable waiting, I decided, was this disaster’s greatest torment.

We sat in a corner of the cell, keeping silent and avoiding eye contact with the other prisoners. Minutes stretched into hours. We lost track of time. When, finally, the officers opened the cell door and ordered everyone out, I could only guess what time it was. I was even less certain where we were going. Did they plan to free us, I wondered.

We filed out of the cell. The guards led us through some exit doors and into the night air. Parked on the street was a paddy wagon, its rear doors hanging open to receive us. Far from being freed, we were, I realized, to be transported to another place of captivity—to a jail, I guessed.

Judging by the pitch-dark sky, I guessed it must have been eight or nine o’clock at night. We had been arrested in the early afternoon, and I suddenly realized we’d had no dinner. I hadn’t felt a trace of hunger.

Together with our cellmates we boarded the paddy wagon. The doors shut behind us with a thud, and I heard the metallic thunk of a heavy locking mechanism engage. Then the vehicle began to move.

I peered through the steel mesh cladding the window but could barely make out the city streets. What awaited us at the other end of this journey, I could not guess.

The other prisoners seemed passive and accepting, as though transiting in and out of police vehicles and judicial buildings was a familiar routine to them. They bantered back and forth a bit, but I couldn’t make out what they were saying. I considered striking up a conversation, then thought better of it. What would be the point? I sensed they had already accepted, stoically, what lay ahead for them. Now it was on us to follow their example and do the same.

The ride was shorter than our trip in the police car. After about ten minutes of driving, the vehicle came to a halt behind a courthouse building in the Chinatown district. The rear door opened, and we got out. We entered the building, and once inside all we saw were rows of cells. We were to be imprisoned!

The cells were filthy and stagnant. They were already crammed with inmates; I couldn’t imagine how we would fit. Yet fit we did. The guards ordered us into one of the cells—the one at the far end of the row. Might this innermost chamber, I wondered, be reserved for the most hopeless cases? The most complex, with uncertain, prolonged outcomes yet in which guilt was surest?

The scene inside the cell was gruesome. An overpoweringly foul smell—of excrement, vomit, and human sweat—hung in the air. In the corner stood an open toilet—a grim enough object under any circumstances, it had become clogged and was brimming with excrement. The air was stuffy and close, and a wave of nausea washed over me.

The inmates, without evincing the slightest shame, spat and even vomited all over the floor. Most of them wore tattered, threadbare clothing. Some—alcoholics, plainly—lay on the floor, oblivious to the human effluvia, and slept. One was contentedly snoring.

Among the group were a couple of Caucasians but no Orientals like us, so we spoke to no one. As time passed, I caught snippets of their conversations and gradually pieced together what was happening. This lockup was a temporary detention center. Incoming inmates were placed in the rear cells, as we had been. Then they were shuffled from cell to cell, eventually arriving in the cell at the front of the row, whereupon they were sent to a courtroom and brought before a judge.

It dawned on me that the crime rate in New York City was staggeringly high. In response, a sprawling system of retributive justice operated ceaselessly beneath the city’s visible surface. This courthouse, I gathered, handled detainees accused of relatively minor offenses: petty theft, public drunkenness, simple assault, disorderly conduct. The system each day processed vast numbers of these common criminals. That explained the policemen’s indifference to our case: though tawdry and humiliating to us, in this city it was all too ordinary.

A guard approached the bars of the cell and announced we could make one phone call, to a family member or friend. I racked my brain wondering whom I might call. Of course we had no relations in the city or anywhere in America. Then I remembered my two Taiwan classmates who had recently arrived. Swallowing my pride, I called one of them, Jack Li, who was studying law at New York University. The phone rang and rang. He wasn’t home.

I tried the second friend, Ning-Yuan Chen, who was working toward a Ph.D. in chemistry at the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn. He was a gentle, refined character—certainly not someone accustomed to sorting out criminal entanglements. He answered, and I implored him to come over.

By then I’d figured out that we would not be held indefinitely. Payment of a bond would secure our freedom, at least for now. Ning-Yuan agreed to come over and bail us out.

And so began yet another long wait. Forceman is the kind of person who can sleep anywhere, however uncomfortable the circumstances, and true to form he soon dozed off. As for me, I was too wound-up to sleep. I tried over and over again to shut my eyes, but they wouldn’t stay shut.

At intervals the guards moved us from one cell to the next. By around three o’clock in the morning we had reached the front cell, the one nearest the courtroom. A young man wearing a suit walked up to the cell and beckoned to us through the bars.

He asked, “Are you Rainfield Yen and John Chen?”

“Yes,” we chorused.

“I’m the attorney assigned to your case. I’ll defend you. I know you’re students and you don’t have much money, so don’t worry—you don’t need to pay anything. I work for the city government, in the public defender’s office. They pay me to represent you. Now, would you please tell me what happened? Just tell me the truth.”

I had never heard of a free lawyer. The concept seemed illogical: the government wanted to prosecute me, yet would pay a lawyer to defend me? The system didn’t make much sense. Still, I was relieved to hear we wouldn’t have to pay.

I took the young attorney through an account of what happened. By the time I finished my story, he was smiling wryly. “In this city it’s very rare for Orientals to commit crimes,” he said.

I shrugged my shoulders and returned his wry smile. “Well, I guess there’s always a first time.”

He said, “I guess so,” and walked off.

About ten minutes passed before our cell door opened. A guard guided us into the corridor and through a door that led to the courtroom. Passing through that portal was like entering a different world: clean, brightly lit, orderly. We had ascended from hell to heaven.

Despite the hour—it was nearly four o’clock in the morning—the courtroom was full of people. We were instructed to queue up and await our turn. On a raised platform at the front sat the judge, who looked about sixty. Off to his side a stenographer, a young woman, busily recorded the proceedings.

A uniformed bailiff directed the accused criminals, ordering each defendant in turn to approach the judge. The judge, I noted, dispensed with each case with great briskness and efficiency; he had to, otherwise his work would never finish.

The courtroom had a section for spectators. About half of the seats were occupied. I kept my eye out for my friend, Ning-Yuan, but didn’t see him. So no one would be on hand to bail us out. Defendants unable to make bail were remanded back into custody. I realized we were probably headed straight back to those dank cells.

Eventually the bailiff called my name and that of John Chen. He escorted us to the position directly facing the judge. I braced myself for this next ordeal.

The judge said, “What’s the crime?”

At the last moment, the young attorney had appeared at our side. He answered, “Shoplifting, your honor.”

“The item?”

“A coat.”

“Prior record?”

At that point I felt I had to interject—to defend my good name. “No!” I cried out.

The judge looked at me sternly. “What do you do? What is your occupation?”

I looked over at the attorney, seeking his permission to go on. He nodded.

“I’m a student. A graduate student.”

The judge shook his head as though in disbelief. “Oh, a graduate student? At what school?”

I answered without delay. “Columbia University.”

The judge’s gaze moved to Forceman. “You are John Chen?”

Forceman gulped and nodded.

“And what, sir, do you do?”

“A student.”

“Also at Columbia?”

“No, my school is in Missouri.”

Our history was odd—different from those of the other criminals—and I sensed the judge was curious to learn more. But our time had run out. He had to move on to the next case. There were no more questions.

“I’m releasing you on your own recognizance, without bail,” he said. “But you must return to this court on October 2nd at eight a.m., otherwise I will issue a warrant for your arrest.”

I guessed it was the words “Columbia University” that had done the trick—or perhaps my honest face. Still, we had a major problem: Forceman was due at school soon. On October 2nd, he wouldn’t be anywhere near New York. But no further discussion was possible. The attorney took my arm and gently tugged me away. Forceman followed.

On the way out I pointed at Forceman and said, “He’s going to Missouri next week. He’s starting school.”

The attorney took a business card from his wallet and handed it to me. “Well, here’s my card. Call me, and we’ll talk about it.”

We walked out of the courthouse. A bright dawn was breaking. We were both exhausted. I hadn’t slept a wink, and Forceman had napped only fitfully. Neither of us felt like talking or even thinking about what had happened. We took the subway straight home.

Back in the dorm room, Forceman fell at once into a deep sleep in his usual position on the floor. Try as I might, I couldn’t sleep. I tossed and turned on the bed as my mind replayed the terrible features of the previous night: the swarthy faces of the security guards at the base of the escalator, glaring up at us; my pleading for leniency in that basement office; the arresting officers leading us in handcuffs to the police car in plain view of so many bystanders; the photographing and fingerprinting; our waiting for hours in that filthy cell amid genuine criminals; the young attorney’s intervention; the judge’s words; our release—to face what? I still couldn’t conceive what would happen next. How would I, as a criminal, be permitted to remain in America? At last my eyelids grew heavy. I fell into a light sleep, filled with feverish dreams.

When we awoke it was early evening. We were frazzled at having slept all day and, of course, dejected. Plus we hadn’t eaten a thing for more than twenty-four hours. We walked over to the nearby sandwich shop for something to eat.

I called my friend Ning-Yuan and learned he had in fact gone to the courtroom looking for me. When I phoned him I asked him to come straight over, not knowing our turn before the judge wouldn’t come until four o’clock in the morning. He had waited until about two, then having failed to see me, he left.

As we ate our sandwiches, Forceman and I began, for the first time since the incident, to discuss the details of our plight. As a first step, we agreed we had to find a different lawyer. How could we trust one who was free, who worked for the authorities? As strapped for cash as we were, our futures were at stake. We didn’t want a free service—we preferred to pay.

Given how little money we had, we couldn’t possibly afford a top-flight lawyer. In retrospect, our young, up-and-coming attorney from the public defender’s office might have done just fine. But lacking any knowledge of the justice system—apart from what we’d seen in American movies—we assumed the worst of him.

It was Saturday night, and we would have to sit out the rest of the weekend before we could take any action. Unlike previous weekends, which flew by in a fun-filled blur of activity, in our present state of despondency this one seemed to go on forever.

Monday morning came at last. I rose much earlier than usual and found a copy of the Yellow Pages directory. The entries for lawyers went on for page after page. More or less at random, I picked one and dialed the number. A receptionist answered. After grasping that I needed help on a criminal matter, she transferred me to a lawyer who agreed at once to take our case. His fee would be $300. If that amount was difficult to bear, he would accept installments over the next ten months.

The lawyer’s offer seemed reasonable, and I asked to meet him at his office as soon as he was available. I’ve since forgotten his name, so I’ll call him Mr. L. That afternoon he received us with great cordiality. I recounted to him what had happened, emphasizing two points. First, he should make every effort to prevent the immigration authorities from learning of the case. Second, I was the sole culprit. John Chen, I insisted, was innocent; furthermore, he was due in Missouri to start school and would not be around to deal with this matter.

Before going to Mr. L’s office, I had already made up my mind that Forceman’s true identity we would keep secret from all authorities, even Mr. L. He listened attentively to my story and made no objection to my two central requests. The next step, he said, was to meet him at the courthouse on October 2nd, shortly before the trial was to begin.

A few days later I sat for my Ph.D. qualifying exam. It stretched out over two days, each session lasting from eight in the morning until four in the afternoon. Even lunch I took in the exam room. The questions ranged over my entire body of knowledge, from first-year engineering right up to the complexities of laser communications, my thesis topic.

The arrest and its unsettled, still-looming aftermath left me unable to concentrate on the questions. I rushed through my answers, both days finishing in half the allotted time. It was no use: I hadn’t prepared adequately, and I knew it.

Two days later, as I was walking through the campus, I bumped into my thesis advisor, Professor Teich.

“Hi Rainfield,” he said, “So how was your exam?”

“Lousy,” I replied. “I ran into some trouble beforehand, and I couldn’t concentrate at all.”

“Trouble? What do you mean by trouble?”

I hesitated. Should I tell him the shameful truth? He would learn of it sooner or later. The alternative—to hear it from someone else—would be even more embarrassing. Besides, he was a free-thinking sort, a product of the sixties. I guessed it wouldn’t bother him overly much.

“I was shoplifting, and they caught me red-handed!”

“Oh, no! Why would you do a thing like that?”

I had asked myself the same question—it had no good answer. “It’s hard to say. I guess I just, you know, wasn’t really thinking, and it just sort of. . .”

He helpfully interjected. “So what happened exactly? Did the police get involved?”

“Yeah, I got arrested and taken to court.”

“So what’s next?”

“I have a trial on October 2nd.”

“Well, it doesn’t sound too serious. Shoplifting is a pretty minor offense. Should be no big deal.”

“But I’m a foreign student. I might get deported.”

“I sure hope not. So about the exam, you really think it went badly?”

“I finished it too fast. My mind was in a mess. I just couldn’t concentrate.”

“Well, hang in there. Maybe you’ll do better next year.”

Next year? That was the very year I was dreading. Where would I be? What would I be doing—or rather, not doing? I foresaw a wretched future: barred from my American studies, shipped back to Taiwan, idled by the permanent shame of having ruined my prospects—and even worse, my brother’s—over a meaningless, inexplicable crime.

If my offense had been a different one—if, say, I had injured someone in self-defense or even stolen a large sum of money—then people could at least comprehend my motive. I could retain some dignity, could hold my head up a little. But to have pilfered like a petty criminal? How could my father, or anyone else, ever respect me again?

“Thanks for the encouragement,” I said to Professor Teich as we stood on the campus path. It was all I could think of to say.

CHAPTER 9

The Aftermath

With my friend Ta-Ching’s help, I checked myself out of Mackay Memorial Hospital and into Cheng Hsin Hospital, the one his doctor friend, Dr. Cheng, had recommended. That was a Sunday. The next day, a CAT scan at Cheng Hsin Hospital detected a tumor on the head of my pancreas. It was 2.5cm in diameter.

Up until that point, I’d been assuring myself that this health scare would probably subside—the doctors had been overcautious, and the problem would turn out to be minor. But on hearing the scan results, all sense of optimism drained from me. In its place came a terrible dread. Pancreatic cancer was the king of all cancers—a death sentence. Moreover, Dr. Cheng, after studying the scan image, suspected the tumor had attached itself to an artery. Removal of it by surgery might be impossible.

Dr. Cheng ordered a more advanced scan, an MRI, to uncover more detail. It too was inconclusive. The tumor might be benign or might be malignant. It might be operable or maybe not. My life seemed to be hanging on these two questions, and I pushed the doctor for unequivocal answers. He remained evasive. I couldn’t help wondering, had I chosen the wrong doctor? Ought I have stayed at Mackay Memorial? In the imprecise world of medicine, such questions, I’ve learned, have no easy answers.

As well as administering the two scans, Dr. Cheng gave me intravenous treatment to mitigate my jaundice. Then, in a move to ease my worry about quality of care, he assembled a group of ten leading doctors from various hospitals to review my case. Perhaps it was Ta-Ching’s urgings that led to this VIP treatment—or perhaps my case was just unusually grave.

The ten doctors concurred that surgery in my case was feasible. A highly regarded surgeon, Dr. Chen-Si Su of the Veterans General Hospital, would perform the operation. After the surgery, his colleague Dr. Yi Chao would administer radiation treatment and chemotherapy. Dr. Chao was widely considered the nation’s top oncologist, often representing Taiwan at international conferences.

Dr. Su, the surgeon, was a leading expert in the Whipple procedure, an operation to remove much of my digestive system and rearrange what was left. He would remove one-third of my stomach, the head of my pancreas, my entire gall bladder, and my duodenum, a part of the small intestine. Then he would reattach the remaining part of the pancreas and connect my small intestine to my stomach.

The Whipple procedure’s creator, Dr. Allen Whipple, was a surgical pioneer whose innovation was to combine these many removals and rearrangements into a single operation. Yet even Dr. Whipple had performed it only thirty-seven times. It was surgery of the most radical kind.

My tumor was judged to be growing voraciously, expanding by as much as ten percent a week. Dr. Su, however, had many demands on his time. The sort of procedures he performed were major, lasting from early morning until night. He allowed himself only two a week, each Tuesday and Thursday. His schedule for the coming two weeks was fully booked. I would have to wait. It is the interminable waiting, I find, that makes a looming fear most unbearable. Your thoughts dwell on what lies ahead, and you construct one scenario after another, few of them good.

Another surgeon on staff at the hospital, Dr. Shih, was also trained in the Whipple procedure. But Dr. Cheng urged me to wait for Dr. Su. So I checked out of the hospital and went home to await an opening in his schedule.

By then, I had no living relatives left in Taiwan. Both my marriages had ended, and my parents had long since passed away. My brothers and sisters all lived abroad. My son, Seigfo, and stepdaughter, Sharon, worked in Los Angeles. Their mother, Celina, the second of my ex-wives, was the closest I had in Taiwan to a relative. Though our divorce had not been a friendly one—she stayed hostile long after our breakup—I decided to call her and tell her what had happened.

To my great surprise, on learning of my plight she came to my rescue. She offered to let me stay at her place while I waited for surgery. I don’t know how to account for her sudden benevolence—perhaps our common son, or maybe the passage of time had left her big-hearted. Women, I’ve learned, are hard to predict.

After we divorced Celina had not remarried, though she did have a long-standing boyfriend. Albert Yu was a retired merchant from Hong Kong who had worked in the garment trade. After he wound up his business in Hong Kong, he had moved to Taiwan to be with Celina. She too had a keen eye for business—she operated boutiques and invested in real estate. She owned apartments in Taipei and in Hsinchu, a neighboring city, and together with Albert had bought property in Hong Kong and Shanghai.

Her Taipei residence housed two apartments: a unit on the sixth floor and another on the seventh. She stayed in the sixth-floor unit on weekdays and spent her weekends in Hsinchu, where Albert lived. The seventh-floor unit, which was usually vacant, she offered to me. I gratefully accepted.

I called and emailed friends and relatives to tell them of my sudden and serious illness. I found myself repeating the same dreadful facts over and over again. Many friends wrote to express their concern and sorrow, and some called. Chet Chapracki, an old American friend, called from San Francisco. Halfway through the conversation he broke down, weeping and sobbing into the phone.

Family members rushed to my side. My two brothers in Seattle, Forceman and Kingsman, flew over with their wives. My son, Seigfo, and stepdaughter, Sharon, also came. They took leaves of absence from work, and Seigfo even proposed quitting his job to help care for me.

I did my best to project a sense of calm, but inside I was in turmoil. A mixture of shock and panic had gripped me. Almost every night I woke up in a fright, unsure what was true and what wasn’t. Then the cold truth would hit me, and the panic would resume.

The possibility remained—at least as far as I knew—that my tumor was benign. Lately, though, the doctors had turned quiet on that question. The answer, they said, was unknowable until after the surgery. But from their manner I sensed they already knew it and were holding it back from me. Maybe they feared the truth would sap my strength, strength I would need to survive the coming surgery.

As I waited, I had to assume I would die in the very near future. I began to set my affairs in order. I asked Jack Li, my lawyer friend, to prepare my will. My son, then only twenty-five, wasn’t mature enough to manage my estate. So I left Celina in charge of my assets until he reached thirty, at which point he would inherit them all.

I had bought an apartment in Zhuhai, a city in China near Macau, that I had been renting out. I decided to take Celina and Albert to Zhuhai, where I would sign a power of attorney assigning her control over the property. While the three of us were at the airport waiting for our flight, Albert went to the bookstore to browse the health section. He picked out a title for me to read: a book about naturopathic cures for cancer.

You see such books nowadays on sale everywhere. Their contents are all more or less the same: they preach alternative therapies and aim to discredit Western medicine. Their authors are usually health-care practitioners of a sort, some even medical doctors. They attract a loyal following of cancer victims who credit their treatments and contribute glowing testimonials. I was a skeptic, but Albert and Celina avidly believed in such things.

Even a skeptic wishes, though, for a miracle cure. After I returned from Zhuhai an old high-school classmate, Peter Chao, came to see me. His older sister, he said, made regular trips from Canada to Taipei to visit a certain clinic. Its proprietor claimed to possess both engineering and medical degrees, though whether he was a licensed physician Peter wasn’t sure. At any rate, his specialty was treating cancer. He had invented a machine to test a person’s “cancer index.” If the index was high, the device would reduce the index, curing the cancer—at least that was how Peter explained it.

Each treatment session cost twenty thousand Taiwan dollars (about $700). To cure a severe case of cancer might require several sessions a week for a prolonged period. Peter’s sister had been receiving regular treatments, though not for cancer: rather, they were to boost her emotional well-being. It all sounded preposterous, but, as Peter said, shouldn’t I exhaust all possibilities?

When I told Celina about the clinic, she offered to take me for a consultation at once. Where I am skeptical, she is credulous. She holds all sorts of fantastical beliefs: in ghosts, fortune-telling, and the odder variants of Chinese medicine, such as the linkage between each part of your body and a precise spot on your foot. So off we went—Celina, Peter, another friend, Lo Hsieh, and I—to the clinic.

It was in Taipei’s eastern district, in a nondescript building on Jen Ai Road. We entered the building and proceeded to the floor that housed the clinic. A receptionist greeted me from behind a counter and straightaway collected a registration fee of two thousand Taiwan dollars (about $70). Their business seemed good—the waiting room was packed with patients. We would have to wait our turn.

Peter passed the time as we waited by chatting with the young receptionist. When she heard I might have pancreatic cancer, she recounted the case of an elected official, a senator in the city government. Their treatments, she said, had cured him of that very condition—entirely without the intervention of Western medicine. She even offered us his phone number so we could call and check his story ourselves.

Curious, Peter dialed the number. The man who answered said he would be glad to discuss his case. Yes, he said, the story of the miracle cure was true—though for a busy politician to be so readily reachable by phone struck me as a bit odd.

Finally a nurse escorted the four of us into an adjoining room where the head doctor—the clinic’s proprietor whom Peter’s sister had praised so highly—would see us. In the room were twenty or thirty treatment stations arranged in rows. At each station sat a patient connected by wires to a cheap-looking metal box.

The nurse led me to an examination area where the doctor was sitting. On the table next to him was another metal box. This one displayed a gauge with a sweeping needle that resembled a speedometer or old-style voltmeter.

In his hand the doctor held a metal probe. Once the nurse sat me down, he started to touch the probe to various spots on my body. A wire ran from the probe in his hand to the metal box on the table, and whenever he touched me with the probe, the needle on the gauge rose. Then he touched my right palm. The needle jerked upward and swung all the way to the rightmost end of the scale.

“See?” the man said. “Your cancer index is very high. It’s off the scale.”

Then he launched into a practiced spiel, full of fuzzy metaphors about electromagnetism and radiation, to explain the function of his device. He didn’t know, of course, that of the four of us, three—Peter, Lo, and I—were either engineering or science majors.

I listened for a minute or two, then spoke up, poking holes in his claims. A trace of alarm crossed his face. Just about everything he had said, I was demolishing. Then Lo looked under the table to find the man’s foot resting on a pedal. He’d been controlling the needle with his foot!

The medical mountebank, now exposed as a fraud, was visibly sweating. He seemed at a loss for words. Then he stood up and said, “Your best bet is to seek Western medical treatment at a major hospital. I won’t be able to help you.”

With that, the session was over. The charlatan scurried away, and his nurse escorted us out.

In an ironic twist, three years later Peter’s sister, the faithful devotee of the bogus doctor, really did get cancer. She had the disease treated in Canada, using the latest methods of modern science.

October 2nd, the day of my criminal trial, was nearly upon me. A few weeks had passed since my disastrous showing in the Ph.D. exam, and Forceman had left for Missouri nearly a month earlier. The morning of the trial I arrived at the courthouse a few minutes before eight to find Mr. L standing in the lobby, waiting for me.

We walked into the courtroom together. The judge, I noted, was the same man who had arraigned me the night of my arrest. This time, unlike that agonizingly drawn-out ordeal, there would be no delay—my case was among the first to be heard. The judge recited the basic facts of my case then delivered the verdict: a suspended sentence plus one year’s probation.

I didn’t understand the precise meaning of the legal terms. Still standing in front of the judge, I whispered to Mr. L, “What does he mean?”

“It means you got off,” he whispered back. “No jail time. But if you commit another crime inside a year, you go to jail for sure.”

Leniency—a relief! An even more pressing matter, though, was still open: would I be deported? From the start, this had been my main concern.

I considered whispering another question to Mr. L, but instead I called out directly to the judge. “Please, your honor, don’t report my case to immigration!” By then he had already dismissed my case and moved his attention to the next one. He looked at me and nodded his head in agreement.

So I would not go to jail, be expelled from school, or be deported. Instead, I was free! After weeks of gnawing worry, I was ecstatic.

Then there was the matter of my Ph.D. exam. I was certain I’d flunked, and the following week, I received notice of my results. To my surprise, I passed! The world was mine again!

Soon afterward I received another piece of good news: Forceman was engaged to be married. His fiancée, Darlene Liu, was also from Taiwan. They had met at his university in Missouri, where he was earning his master’s degree in mathematics and she was studying nursing.

As time went by and weeks turned into months, my memories of that terrible night faded. The crisis, it seemed, had retreated—I expected never to hear of it again. But no sooner had I convinced myself that life was back to normal than I received in the mail an ominous-looking letter. It was from the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service.

I hurriedly tore open the envelope and took out the single page it enclosed. The letter was addressed “Attention Mr. Rainfield Yen,” and it read: “You are to come in person to the 8th floor of the INS office at the address listed below at 8:00 a.m. on Monday, January 16th, 1970. Be sure to bring the original copy of this letter with you.”

A bolt out of the blue! The immigration authorities must have got wind of my conviction. It was the very event I had been fearing most. But how had it happened? Mr. L had promised to prevent it, and the judge—or so I’d thought—had agreed to cooperate. Perhaps some other matter, routine and quite unrelated, had triggered the letter. Yet I couldn’t imagine what—by then, I had lived in America for quite a while and had never once received such a summons.

I received the letter on a Friday; the Monday appointment was three days hence. All of my earlier fears flooded back, and those three nights I passed almost without sleep.

When Monday morning came I arrived at the immigration office at ten minutes before eight. The waiting area was already swarming. I immediately felt disoriented and wondered what to do. I noticed a counter marked “Information.” Behind it sat an enormously fat black woman. I walked up and presented her with the letter. She took it from my hand, looked at it for a moment, and said, “Sit down and wait for us to call your name.”

Her tone was frosty, and as she spoke she had scarcely looked at me. I remained at the counter and said, “I beg your pardon, but do you know what this matter is about?”

Ignoring my question, she looked past me and said, “Can I help the next person please?”

I sat down to wait. My mind replayed, in cinematic detail, scenes of the fateful incident: the grim basement office at Macy’s, the police station, the horrid detention cells, the courtroom, the judge, Mr. L, the trial.

I tried to banish these thoughts from my mind. I said to myself, “Don’t worry, Mr. L took care of it. The judge cooperated. Don’t worry. Don’t worry!”

Then I heard my name called. I jumped up from my seat. A man in a suit was beckoning me from behind one of the counters. I walked toward him, and he opened a door and guided me inside. I followed him as he navigated the inner corridors, until finally we arrived at a doorway. It was the entrance to a small room.

Inside was a conference table. Around it I counted six chairs, one at each end and two on each side. The image of that room has forever burned itself into my mind. It was an innocuous, ordinary sight, yet under the circumstances—what transpired in that chamber would decide my future—it was a forbidding sight.

The man said, “Wait here please.”

I stepped inside the room and he closed the door behind me. I heard his footfalls in the corridor as he walked off.

Ten minutes later the door opened, and three men entered. They wore dark suits and looked like FBI agents. I meant to get up from the table to greet them politely, but they seated themselves so abruptly I had no time to do so. Two sat on either side of me, and the third, whom I took to be the leader, faced me across the table.

The leader set a file folder on the table, opened it, and flipped through the pages.

“Mr. Rainfield. . .wait, is that your surname? Ah, I see it here—Mr. Yen, you were arrested last year at the Macy’s department store in New York City. You were caught in the act of stealing a coat, is that correct?”

My heart sank. There was, of course, only one reason for the letter. My hopeful thoughts had been foolish. Still, I had to collect myself.

“Yes,” I said. How could I deny the truth? They knew it already.

“Do you want to call your lawyer? Or will you defend yourself?”

I thought of Mr. L. He had taken my money and not done his job—no way would I call him.

“I’ll defend myself.”

A barrage of questions followed. The lead man asked most of the questions. The other two stayed silent, except to interject occasionally. I felt like a weak lamb beset by three wolfs, all pouncing at once. I knew I stood no chance: I was to be devoured by these wolves, then deported, my career over, my family humiliated.

The leader said, “Your record says you are a student. Is that correct?”

“Yes,” I replied.

“At what school?”

“Columbia.”

“Oh? It doesn’t say that here. In what program?”

“I’m studying for a Ph.D. in electrical engineering.”

“Oh, really?” The leader smiled and shook his head. “And how’s that been going for you?”

“I think fine.”

Turning to one of the lower-ranked men, he said, “Let’s check on that. Call Columbia and ask whether this Mr. Yen is enrolled there. Find out as much as you can.”

“Yes, sir.” The man got up from the table and left the room.

The two men who remained returned to the grilling. Their tone, however, had softened a little.

“If what you’re saying is true,” one of them said, “then why would you do such a stupid thing?”

Damn it, I thought—it was the very question I struggled to answer each time it came up. My actions were a mystery even to me.

“Well,” I began, “I suppose it was just an impulsive thing. It was expensive, and I’m a student. I had the money, but. . .I needed to save it. I wanted the coat, and I guess I simply wanted to save the money. As a student, I need to save.”

I knew my explanation made no sense.

“Unbelievable,” the junior man said. He smiled at his boss, who smiled too. Was it a sign of compassion?

Then the boss said, “All right. Let’s see what we find out—we’ll know soon enough.”

As we waited for the agent to return with news of his call to Columbia University, I wondered how well I was defending myself. As well as anyone could under the circumstances, I supposed. And to my relief, John Chen’s name hadn’t come up. This problem, it appeared, would be mine alone.

The three of us sat in silence. Suddenly curious, I asked, “May I know how you found out about this case? My lawyer said it wouldn’t reach immigration. The judge said that too.”

The leader gave a short laugh and said, “The minute your mug shot and fingerprints are taken, the FBI can see your record, and so can we.”

So that was why Mr. L was helpless to conceal it. Strange—even though he was a lawyer, he didn’t grasp the inner workings of the law-enforcement agencies. Then again neither did the judge, or else he wouldn’t have promised me, either—at least I thought he had promised.

The door opened and the third agent entered. He carried a handwritten note in his hand.

“The kid was telling the truth,” he said. “I talked to the dean of engineering. He’s a student there, all right.”

“Okay, so he’s a student,” the lead agent said. “And what else did you find out?”

“Well, he’s a darned good student. Straight As, in fact.”

“Really?” The leader paused as if to think. “Okay, Mr. Yen,” he said. “We’ll discuss your case with our superior. Come back here again tomorrow morning.”

Was it good news or bad? I wasn’t sure.

“What time?” I asked.

“Same time, eight o’clock.”

I felt I couldn’t leave without asking the most important question, the one that was preying on me.

“What will happen?” I said.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Like I told you, we’ll discuss it with our superior.”

“Will I be deported?”

The man was already gathering up my file. He stood up.

“Just be back here tomorrow, eight o’clock.”

The meeting was over. With a heavy heart, I returned to my dorm room to pass another sleepless night.

I returned to the immigration office the next morning, this time thirty minutes early.

Impatiently I sat awaiting my turn. I heard my name called. A young man—a different one from the previous day—led me again into the maze of corridors.

We came to an office where a stout man, who looked to be in his sixties, sat at a large desk. Behind him was a picture window overlooking the Manhattan skyline. The room, I noticed, was huge. Within it were rows of smaller desks—I counted nearly twenty—at which the man’s subordinates worked. So this was the big boss!

The man’s head was down, and he was busy perusing papers. He hadn’t noticed my arrival.

My escort said, “Sir, we brought Mr. Yen in to see you.”

The man raised his head, and the moment his features came into view I rushed to judge his character. His deeply lined face and graying hair gave him an air of perpetual fatigue, but his firm nose, wide lips and strong chin projected firm authority. He struck me as a benevolent man.

“Thank you,” he said to the young man. “You may go now.”

He indicated a padded chair at the foot of his expansive desk.

“Good morning, Mr. Yen. Please sit down.”

I sat perched on the edge of the chair as he foraged through a stack of papers on his desk. He found my file, opened it, and scanned its contents, pausing at certain pages of interest. Then he set it aside.

“What I see in your file puzzles me. Some parts I find quite impressive. Others, quite disgusting.”

I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing, simply nodded.

“Do you know, Mr. Yen, that last night, I almost sent some agents to detain you and then to deport you?”

The word “almost” gave me instant relief. I sensed the chance of a reprieve.

“And yet, Mr. Yen, after I considered that good part of your record, I decided to give you a second chance. But you must promise, Mr. Yen—I mean absolutely guarantee—to conduct yourself in strict accordance with the laws of this country.”

“Yes, I promise! I do promise!”

“Now, let me warn you again: any more unlawful conduct and we will deport you without hesitation. This, Mr. Yen, is your final chance. There will not be another one.”

“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir. I’ll never do it again. I promise!”

“Good. You may go now. That will be all.”

As I rose from my chair, I repeated, “Thank you, sir!”

“All right. No more trouble, you hear? And study hard.”

“Yes, sir.”

As I walked out of his office I was smiling, and I kept on smiling until, late that night, I fell asleep—the first truly peaceful sleep I’d had since the trouble began.

CHAPTER 10

Hope

I accepted Celina’s kind offer to stay at her seventh-floor apartment while I waited for Dr. Su’s schedule to open up. Finally the call arrived: it was the Veterans Hospital, telling me to report for surgery.

By then Forceman and Darlene had arrived in Taipei, as had my son, Seigfo. The three of them went with me to the hospital to check in. Later that day a number of close friends came to visit, including Jack Li, Tom Chien, and Ta-Ching Liu. Everyone was acting upbeat and hopeful, but deep down I knew what they were thinking: surgery or not, I was a dead man. It was only a matter of time.

The operation was a couple of days out. First they would run some tests. A CAT scan confirmed my tumor was indeed growing quickly: during the two weeks I had spent waiting for surgery, its diameter had grown by twenty percent, from 2.5cm to 3.0cm.

Test results in hand, Dr. Su summoned my relatives to a meeting at the hospital. With me listening, he briefed them on the facts of my case and the operation he was about to perform.

“In our experience treating cases similar to his,” he said, “when we open up the abdomen, there’s only a twenty percent chance the operation can continue. There’s an eighty percent chance his tumor is too tightly attached to the artery or his cancer has already metastasized—meaning it’s spread all over his body, in which case operating is pointless. So to put it simply, there’s a four in five chance we’ll stop what we’re doing and sew him back up again.”

It was the first time I had heard concrete numbers to quantify my prognosis. Pointedly absent, I noted, from Dr. Su’s speech was any mention of the word “benign.”

Forceman took charge of the questions. “You mean, doctor, that the metastasis isn’t always detected by the CAT scan or MRI?”

The doctor nodded. “That’s correct. Those machines aren’t as all-powerful as you might think. Their resolution has limits, and in the end we still need to go in and see what’s there with our own eyes.”

“So if his tumor isn’t operable, then what?”

“Then the best we can do is insert stents to open a passage through his bile duct, which is now blocked by the tumor. That would temporarily fix the jaundice problem and reduce some of his discomfort from that. In that case, however, he would have only about three months to live.”

“And what if it is operable? What are his chances then?”

“Well, I have to warn you, it’s a difficult, complicated, and dangerous operation. No patient has ever died on my operating table—that I can tell you. But the period after the surgery is less certain. We’ll be removing more than half of his pancreas, one-third of his stomach, his entire gall bladder, and his duodenum. We have no choice, because his tumor is growing at the juncture of those organs. A lot of people can’t tolerate having so many pieces removed, and they die within a few weeks of the operation. There’s also a high risk of infection, which can also be fatal. So we can’t guarantee anything. From our past experience, the long-term survival rate after this surgery is less than twenty percent.”

Forceman seemed shaken up by the stark facts the doctor was reciting. He paused, and we looked at him in silence as he framed his next question.

“So in my brother’s case,” he began, “there’s only a twenty percent chance you’ll be able to operate, and then only a twenty percent chance he’ll live through the operation. So his chances of survival are twenty percent of twenty percent, which makes four percent. Is that right?”

The numbers were far grimmer than any estimate I’d yet heard. Had we misunderstood the doctor’s meaning?

I hoped the doctor would refute Forceman’s calculation. Instead he said, “Yes. That’s essentially correct. Even if he survives the operation, chances are he’ll die within the first year and a half.”

“And his chance of living longer than that?”

“Of patients who survive the first year and a half, about fifteen percent are still alive at the five-year mark. If a patient survives that long, we consider the cancer to be cured or at least in long-term remission.”

Finally I opened my mouth to speak. “So what you’re saying is, my chance of being cured is fifteen percent of four percent, which is only 0.6 percent!”

There was a pause as the doctor turned to look straight at me.

“Yes, you could say that,” he said. “So you’ll have to decide whether you still want the operation. It is a very radical procedure, and frankly speaking, I don’t unreservedly recommend it. Not to perform it is always a relief. But if you insist, I will most definitely proceed.”

At last I was hearing the unadorned truth of my prognosis. A surgeon of Dr. Su’s rank, I supposed, has to be blunt. To rip out a man’s insides is no minor matter; he could hardly afford to mince his words.

I said, “So it sounds like there’s really no point in going ahead, am I right?”

Forceman interjected, “Rainfield, no! Even if there’s only a 0.6 percent chance, it’s still worth trying. Who knows? You might fall into that small group of survivors. Why give up?”

I looked at the faces of my relatives. They all nodded their agreement with Forceman’s statement. As I listened to the bleak numbers issuing from the doctor’s mouth, an icy fear of death had gripped me. I, too, wanted to take the chance.

Still, I foresaw what probably lay ahead: one painful treatment after another, in the end amounting to nothing. Did I have the courage to forgo the operation and declare a preference for quick, painless death? I did not. After some more back-and-forth discussion, I gave my consent to proceed.

From that moment on, I began my battle with this demonic disease: cancer of the pancreas, the emperor of all maladies.

One sunny New York afternoon I was sauntering across the Columbia campus when I saw a familiar face approaching.

“Hi, Rainfield!” the man called to me from afar.

As he got closer I recognized him as G.N. Chang, an old acquaintance from university in Taiwan. Back then he’d been a business major. We went to the cafeteria for coffee and a chat. I was glad to reconnect with someone from home, and we ended up talking for hours.

He was at Columbia doing his MBA, he told me. But he didn’t live in the dormitory as I did. He stayed in Queens with his parents, who together with him had moved to New York.

I asked, “How can your parents move here? They aren’t students like you and me.”

“Because we all applied for permanent residency.”

“How did you do that?”

“Easy. Just find a good immigration lawyer. If you want, you can apply too.”

“Really?”

“Sure. You can get a Green Card if you want.”

“Maybe I should. Can you suggest a good lawyer?” The idea had never occurred to me, but it sounded intriguing.

“The lawyer who handled my case was good. I can refer you to him.”

A few days later I met my friend’s lawyer. I’ll call him Mr. M. After gathering my particulars, Mr. M pronounced me qualified to apply. My master’s degree from Washington State, he said, placed me in a category called “sixth preference.”

A jittery, balding man who looked about sixty, Mr. M was an oddball. The skin on his face and neck had erupted in a chronic-looking red rash; his blemished appearance, one sensed, was at the root of his nervous demeanor. He offered to take on my case for a moderate fee. I mentioned Forceman, and he agreed to take on my brother’s case too.

By then I knew I couldn’t conceal the truth, so I admitted to my role in the shoplifting incident. I was careful not to mention Forceman’s involvement or the false name he had given police.

“That’s just petty larceny,” Mr. M said. “I can get around it for you.”

What a relief! My crime would not stand as an obstacle to U.S. citizenship as I’d feared it would. Plus, they had no way to connect Forceman with the mysterious “John Chen,” my co-conspirator in the Macy’s incident.

I wanted to confirm that the process would go smoothly for Forceman and his wife, Darlene. “My brother isn’t here in New York,” I said. “Won’t he and his wife have to apply here in person?”

“Immigration is a federal matter. It has nothing to do with the state where you reside. He and his wife need only come to New York for the interview—that only takes a day. Anyway, for now just have him prepare the documents I need and send them to me. At this stage, that’s all he needs to do.”

“But another thing: he doesn’t yet have a degree from a U.S. school. He’s still working on his master’s degree here. His undergraduate degree is from Taiwan.”

“Don’t worry. That’ll do!”

The next day I informed Forceman of the plan. I told him what documents to send to Mr. M, and over the following days I prepared mine as well. Mr. M soon filed our applications, and then all we could do was to wait for the interview day to come. The interval, Mr. M warned, would be at least six months, possibly even a year.

That summer Forceman completed his master’s degree in mathematics, Darlene her degree in nursing. Both of them found the university courses in Missouri quite easy, and they were able to finish in one quick year.

Forceman’s job search, however, proved not so easy. Unlike my engineering degree, which got me a job offer as soon as I graduated, Forceman’s degree in mathematics was of less interest to employers. So instead of prolonging his search, he enrolled in a second master’s program, this one in computer science, at West Coast University in Los Angeles. Demand was strong for computer programmers, and armed with that degree he felt his job prospects would be better.

To help with Forceman’s school expenses, Darlene took a job as a hospital nurse and began working toward her registered nursing license. Forceman took a part-time job at a gas station, quickly becoming a skilled mechanic (and saving considerably on car repairs later in life). So although they endured a challenging period, the young couple found ways to make ends meet.

That same summer I learned that my old high-school friend Gordon was enrolling at the Philadelphia College of Textiles and Science. After many reversals and delays, he had completed a two-year college program in textiles back in Taiwan, and now his father wanted him to burnish his credentials with a U.S. degree. En route to Philadelphia, he would stop off to visit me in New York. I was overjoyed at the promise of a reunion.

Gorden didn’t follow Forceman’s example and squeeze into my cramped dorm room. Instead he stayed at the posh home of rich family acquaintances. From the moment he arrived, the two of us went straight to living it up. We enjoyed feast after feast at Chinatown’s best restaurants, all his treat. Then, true to form, he went on an orgy of shopping, snapping up dandyish clothes from Saks Fifth Avenue, Bloomingdale’s, and other white-glove boutiques.

After two weeks of swanning around the city like a visiting lord, Gordon left New York, bound for Philadelphia. We’d had a blast and were sorry to part. Over the months to come I would visit Philadelphia several times to reprise our New York City revels.

The year Gordon came to the U.S. was a time of unbridled joy in my life. I made friends of all kinds—among them plenty of willing female companions, both Western and Oriental. I partied a lot, had a great deal of sex, and even smoked grass.

In keeping with the “in” fashion of the day, I grew my hair long like a Jesus figure, let my beard and mustache sprout out, and looked for all the world like a counterculture hippy. I loved every minute of my life back then—no other period ever matched the exhilarating sense of freedom I felt.

The U.S. immigration matter was proceeding smoothly. During my third year at Columbia I had my Green Card interview. It seemed to go without a hitch. Forceman and Darlene soon received instructions to report to New York for their interview.

They flew from Los Angeles to New York a day early. They planned to make the most of the trip: it was to be a second honeymoon, and they were in the mood to celebrate. The following morning Mr. M met them at their modest downtown hotel to take them to the immigration office. I had arranged to meet them that night for dinner at a Chinese restaurant on Canal Street.

I was the first one to arrive at the restaurant. We were all elated at the prospect of becoming permanent residents, and it was to be a joyful occasion. But they walked in looking crestfallen.

“What happened?” I asked. “It didn’t go well?”

“I’m afraid not,” Forceman said.

“What went wrong?”

He shook his head. “The shoplifting.”

I felt the blood drain from my face. How could it be?

“The shoplifting?” I said. “But how come it wasn’t a problem for me then? I was the one who got convicted, not you.”

At that point Darlene interjected. “Let’s order some food first. No matter what, we still have to eat.”

My appetite had vanished. Theirs must have, too—they glanced at the menu without much interest. But we went ahead and ordered some food, and then they explained what had happened.

Forceman and Darlene had been sitting at the interview table with Mr. M at their side. The immigration officer had laid their files open on the desk and was glancing through them. Their Green Cards—already printed—sat on the table next to their files. Some concern, however, seemed to be holding the officer back from handing over the cards. He was scrutinizing Forceman’s file in particular.

“Mr. Yen, your first name is Forceman, and your middle initial is L. Correct?”

“Yes,” Forceman said.

“And do you know anyone by the name of John Chen?”

On hearing that name, Forceman froze. Then he choked out an instinctive “No!”

Darlene looked puzzled, as did Mr. M. The officer repeated the question: “Mr. Yen, let me ask you again, do you know a John Chen?”

“No,” Forceman repeated.

By then Mr. M and Darlene knew something was amiss. Her initial puzzlement had turned into panic, and Mr. M’s customary twitchiness was morphing into visible anger.

The officer said, “I’m going to ask you one final time.” His tone was sterner than before. “Who is John Chen? Do you know him?”

Forceman shook his head and repeated, “No.”

“All right. You wait right here.”

The officer got up from his chair and disappeared into another room, leaving Forceman, Darlene, and Mr. M sitting alone at the table.

Mr. M spoke first. “What is this John Chen shit? What the hell is going on?”

Forceman said, “Remember what my brother told you about the shoplifting? I was with him, and they let me off. But when they took us to the police station, I lied about my name.”

Mr. M arched his brows. “Why didn’t you tell me that before?”

At that moment the officer returned. He was carrying another file folder.

He resumed his seat, opened the file, and read from it aloud: “Records show that Forceman L. Yen has been using the alias John Chen.” Indicating the passage he had just read, he looked at Forceman and said, “According to the FBI, you and John Chen are one and the same person.”

The three of them—my brother, his wife, and his lawyer—were struck dumb. The immigration officer finally broke the silence. “Well then, Mr. Yen, what do you want to do now?”

He had been caught lying to a federal agent: more than an embarrassment, it was a second criminal offense. All he could do was nod his head, conceding the truth.

The officer scooped up their Green Cards and closed up their files. Their Green Cards had vanished before their eyes!

The officer said, “We’ll be looking into your matter.” He got up to leave. “That will be all for today.”

The officer walked off. Mr. M told Forceman and Darlene to wait in the lobby, then he tailed the man into the next room. Apparently he would try to plead their case.

About fifteen minutes later Mr. M joined them in the lobby. He looked even more nervous and twitchy than usual.

“You should have told me about this John Chen business upfront,” he said, wiping sweat from his forehead. “I could have had it covered, before it turned into a mess. Now, tell me the truth: is it correct you were never formally charged?”

“Yes,” Forceman said.

“You’re sure about that? No more lies—I don’t want any more surprises!”

“Yes, I’m sure.”

“All right. So long as you weren’t convicted, it might not be a problem. I’ll see what I can do. But you won’t be getting your Green Cards today.”

“When might we get them?”

“I don’t know. The FBI has a record of your arrest, but they need confirmation you weren’t found guilty. That will take some time to arrange. Probably a month.”

Nervous about making another expensive trip, Forceman asked, “Do you mean we’ll have to come back to New York to get them?”

“Probably not. Either I’ll get them on your behalf, or they’ll be mailed to you.”

Mr. M turned out to be a fine man and a skilled lawyer. He followed our cases through to the end and didn’t even raise his fee for the extra trouble we had caused. A month later Forceman and Darlene received their cards, by mail. And mine arrived, too, with no questions asked.

CHAPTER 11

Waxing Again

Four years had passed since the day my parents waved goodbye to me at the Taipei airport. During that interval, my father’s luck had taken an upward turn. At work he received a generous offer of promotion, one that gave him two choices: to become deputy chief of Taiwan’s National Property Bureau or director of the tax bureau in Taipei’s northern district. He chose the second option.

From what I could gather from his letters—to my surprise, he began to write me regularly!—his spirits were soaring. Every morning he practically leapt out of bed, eager to start the day’s work; though as the organization’s head he enjoyed a certain flexibility, he was always the first to arrive at the office.

His position brought him great benefits. He oversaw all government-owned real estate in Taipei and made decisions on land use and development. Businessmen and their construction firms coveted the city’s land, and collusion between them and government officials was commonplace. Just what sort of dealings he had—whether illicit or not—he never disclosed to me. I don’t suppose he ever broke the law outright, but I imagine he operated artfully on its margins. Or perhaps he profited from personal investments or had resumed playing the stock market. Whatever he was doing, he was thriving again.

My brother Kingsman followed Forceman and me to America. The State University of New York at Buffalo awarded him a scholarship to pursue a master’s degree in chemical engineering. On finishing that degree he switched his field of study, taking the GMAT test and entering the MBA program at New York University in Manhattan.

My sister Julie came to the U.S. too, but not for school. Back then America still provided direct military aid to Taiwan, and she had met a G.I. who was stationed in Taipei. His name was Joe McNamara. He was of Irish descent and came from a small town in Pennsylvania. The two married, and when Joe’s overseas tour of duty ended he brought her home.

The marriage did not last. While living in Pennsylvania Julie clashed often with Joe’s mother, who had racist views, and the couple split up. Julie moved to New York to find work, and for a time the three of us—she, Kingsman, and I—were all in New York together. It was a great coincidence!

I took a part-time job as a doorman at Hampshire House, an elegant co-op building on Central Park South. The movie star Sophia Loren and her producer husband Carlo Ponte, who together had a baby son, had taken a unit there as a second home. Lots of other celebrities brushed past me as I manned the door, including Lee Marvin, Ali McGraw, and John Lindsay, then mayor of New York City. That experience rounded out my time in New York. From my campus friends and tiny dorm room to the tony palaces of the rich and famous, I saw the city’s full spectrum.

In 1972, after four years at Columbia, I completed my Ph.D. But when I started to look for work I ran straight into a hurdle. Everywhere I went for an interview, the application form invariably included a question like, “Have you ever been arrested? If yes, please give details.”

By then, experience had taught me that lying only brought more trouble. So I truthfully reported the incident on the forms, and during the interviews I made sure to bring it up before the interviewer raised it. To my great relief, none of them seemed to view the matter with great concern.

TRW, a large conglomerate in the automotive, aerospace, and defense industries, soon offered me an engineering position. The company, which then employed more than a hundred thousand people (it was later acquired by Northrop Grumman), was headquartered in Redondo Beach, California. My job was at a satellite operation near Washington, D.C. The starting salary was about $18,000 a year—a handsome amount in those days, especially for an inexperienced student fresh out of school.

I had spent five long years away from Taiwan, and I knew once I started work I would have few chances to return home. From my earnings as a doorman I repaid Yeh Gun-lin, the man whose generous loan had made my overseas study possible, and had just enough left over to buy a round-trip plane ticket to Taipei. So I asked TRW to postpone my start date. They agreed.

I returned to Taipei to find my parents in fine form. My father’s spirits were high, and my mother too reported feeling terrific. Uncle Zu-Han, now nearing eighty, was still in great shape.

Our family’s rising prosperity was evident. Our home was furnished more beautifully than ever before, and we had a new addition to the household: a charming young maid. She immediately caught my attention: pretty, bewitchingly sexy, and what a body! I couldn’t help but give her a surreptitious peek whenever she walked by.

My mother was blissfully happy to see me. Her eldest son had come back with a couple of fine feathers in his cap: a Ph.D. from a good American school and a job awaiting him on his return. She exuded pride.

I didn’t dare mention the Macy’s incident. Perhaps I should have admitted to it, for it had done no permanent harm. But I couldn’t bear the shameful blot my conduct had made on the family escutcheon, so I kept it to myself.

The night of my arrest, the first friend I had tried to reach was Jack Li, who was then studying law at New York University. He had since graduated and was now practicing at Taiwan’s largest law firm, Lee and Li, that counted among its clients large multinationals such as IBM, RCA, GE, and Lockheed. The “Li” in the firm’s name referred to Jack’s father, one of its two founding partners.

I sought Jack out in Taipei, and during my visit we had many jovial times together. Like Gordon, Jack remained a lifelong friend. From our school days until the present day—a period of some fifty years—we never lost contact, and whenever I’ve had legal problems, he’s handled them for me for a minimal fee or without accepting a penny.

My visit to Taiwan lasted nearly six months, and I was sorry to leave. I knew my return to the U.S. marked a turning point in my life. My days as carefree student were ending, and a new phase was set to begin: the working man.

On the day of my departure my parents, just as they had the first time, went to the airport to see me off. And just as before, words we intended to speak we left unspoken. Even after five years of exposure to uninhibited Western ways, I still hadn’t learned to express my love for my parents. As I walked toward the gate, waving farewell, they stood watching my receding figure and waving goodbye. During our parting moments they were longing, I think, for me to reveal my feelings for them. But those final moments were as stiff as the first time.

On my way back to the U.S. I stopped off in Japan to tour Tokyo, Kyoto, and Osaka and then spent a few days in Honolulu basking in the sun. I knew it was my last taste of true freedom before I joined the workingman’s world, and I wanted to savor it.

Soon after I bid him farewell at the airport, my father again started wheeling down a dangerous path. He was a man drawn to risk: the more he flourished, the stronger grew his urge to gamble with his fortune.

Unfortunately for him, Taipei had no shortage of cardsharps and hustlers looking for easy targets. These men and women will concoct the most elaborate schemes to relieve a rich man of his wealth. In a perverse form of market research, their scouts populate the social milieu, looking for those who share my father’s urge. These are no ordinary predators. They deploy the cleverest of psychological tactics. First they let the mark win money a few times, seemingly easily. Then, after the taste of victory has baited the hook, they reel the sucker in for the kill.

In my father they sensed, accurately, the qualities of a perfect target. He fell in with such a group and quickly wound up ahead by a hundred thousand Taiwan dollars (then about $2,500). Then he notched up another win, this time for double that amount. His gambler’s urge drove him back for a third time. He lost a hundred and fifty thousand but on balance was still ahead. So he went back for a fourth round.

That time he lost four hundred thousand, a net loss of two hundred and fifty thousand. Yet they had hooked him: he had won twice and lost twice. No way would he allow those losses to stand. He gambled again and lost a million Taiwan dollars, equal to $25,000. As a measure of its magnitude, in the 1970s that amount could buy you five top-flight apartments in Taipei’s best district.

Yet that wasn’t the end of it. Still unwilling to accept his losses, he carried on with the deadly game all the way to its fatal conclusion: his total financial annihilation. The ruin he’d brought down on himself in Hong Kong had repeated itself, and just as before, my mother had no inkling of the tragedy until the crushing end.

His wild gambling soon became the talk of the office, and he lost his job. In the aftermath of the Hong Kong episode, he had had the youthful vigor to bounce back from ruin. This time he was a bankrupt old man of sixty.

My father’s dissipation didn’t end with the bankruptcy. Behind my mother’s back he made love to the pretty young maid, the one whom I too had admired. What lead to their liaison I don’t know—perhaps she was simple-minded and easily seduced, or maybe she truly admired him. This betrayal of course compounded my mother’s misery. I can scarcely comprehend the scale of her suffering amid such bitter vicissitudes.

My mother, though, was a strong-willed woman of unbreakable pride. She refused to seek help from her children or even disclose to us what had happened. Instead she swung into action. She dismissed the maid and forgave my father. Then she started rummaging through old things, hoping to turn up something—anything—that might help to mitigate the financial disaster.

Among the documents she came across were my father’s old licenses to practice accounting and law. Though issued by the authorities in Shanghai, these qualifications predated the Communist revolution and hence were still valid in Taiwan. My father, at least on paper, was a man of professional standing. My mother scanned the classified ads every day, hoping for a miracle.

In those days CPAs were rare in Taiwan. Many accounting firms practiced unlawfully, without keeping a licensed CPA on staff. An advertisement caught my mother’s eye: an accounting firm sought a CPA to serve as its titular head.

She phoned, and they asked to see my father straightaway. The meeting went well. My father agreed to audit and proofread the financial reports they prepared for clients and affix his signature and seal. In exchange he would share in the firm’s profits.

In a stroke of good fortune, after he struck this deal the accounting firm’s business began to boom. Soon he was earning a substantial income. Little by little, prosperity returned.

Only years later did my mother disclose to me these events. Rather than burden their children, my parents preferred to suffer alone. During that time of terrible hardship, while their adult children were off enjoying America, not once did they come to us with their problems.

What wonderful parents they were! Even today, when I think back to the ever-widening contrast between the ease of my life and the difficulty of theirs, I feel a pain in my heart, and tears well up in my eyes.

CHAPTER 12

Waning Again

My surgery was scheduled for July 29, 2009. At seven that morning, the orderlies arrived in my hospital room to wheel my trolley bed to the surgical ward. Friends—among them Jack Li, Tom Chien, and Ta-Ching Liu—and family members stood at the entrance to the operating theater to wish me luck as I went past.

I looked up at the assembled group with a terrified expression, that of a condemned man on his way to the gallows. My son Seigfo’s eyes were red-rimmed; I knew he was wondering whether it was his last glimpse of me alive. The orderlies positioned my bed alongside what looked like a large window in the wall. Then the window opened, and they pushed me through it and onto a steel bed that was waiting on the other wide. Hands grasped the steel bed, the window shut behind me, and I was wheeled to the operating table.

I lay on the operating table and waited for the anesthetist to sedate me. To be put to sleep and never to wake up: wouldn’t that be a nice way to die? Then, with that thought in mind, I fell into unconsciousness.

The surgery began. My friends left the hospital to begin their business for the day, leaving Celina, Forceman, Darlene, Seigfo, and Sharon to settle in for a long, anxious wait.

Dr. Su had warned that my tumor was most likely inoperable, in which case I would be out by noon. Otherwise the operation would continue until evening. As noon approached my relatives held their breath, praying that the operation would not be aborted.

I, of course, had no sense of time passing. I remember stirring briefly to a bright white light shining through my eyelids. But I found I couldn’t open my eyes, and I fell back into blackness.

Then I awoke to the image of Dr. Su standing over me. He said, “We have removed your tumor.”

Then a nurse said, “We’ll keep you here until the anesthesia has worn off, then you can return to your room.”

I couldn’t speak or move. I returned to a deep slumber.

My family members later described to me the scene just after my procedure ended. The operating room doors opened, and Dr. Su walked out carrying a cloth bag. He called my family members into a room, where he opened the bag and showed them its contents. To their shock, it contained the organ parts he had removed from my body.

He explained he had done his best to cut away the entire tumor, but part of it was too closely attached to the artery. That part he didn’t dare touch. In his estimation, this residual tumor would one day spread—in medical parlance, metastasize—via my vascular system to other parts of my body.

The operation, then, had not entirely succeeded. My family members debated whether I ought to learn the truth. They decided to withhold it from me, at least for the time being.

The operation had begun around eight o’clock that morning, and it was ten p.m. by the time they returned me from the post-operative ward to my room. Invasive tubes ran all over my body, one feeding into my nose, another down my throat, one into my urethra, and four sticking into my abdomen. An intravenous drip fed me morphine, sedatives, dextrose, and protein.

Next to the risk of dying on the operating table, the hours immediately following the surgery were the most dangerous of all. Special nurses kept up a round-the-clock vigil, and Seigfo volunteered to stay with me overnight. Family members were a constant presence at my bedside, including Kingsman and Betty, who arrived on the second day.

The intravenous morphine continued for four days—the doctor estimated that severe post-operative pain would last about that long—then they switched me to a milder pain reliever. But the pain persisted. My stomach felt uncomfortably tight, as though it was about to burst from pressurized gases within. The physical pain was the worst I have ever felt.

Yet pain wasn’t the main worry. When your interior plumbing undergoes such drastic rearrangement, the question is whether your digestive system will still work properly. For three days after the operation I hadn’t had a single bowel movement. Then on the fourth day I farted out some gas and expelled some feces. That, apparently, was the sign my doctor was looking for: it showed my body had tolerated the surgery and digestive function was returning.

I ate nothing for a week. Then they gave me liquid food for two days, followed by regular hospital food. My new digestive system appeared to be functioning.

At the end of the second week the invasive tubes were finally taken out and I was cleared for release. That day Dr. Su visited my bedside. With him was Dr. Chao, the oncologist who would oversee my follow-up treatment.

Until then I had restrained myself from asking the most vital question. When your life is in danger, those around you keep up a hopeful front; facts blur and troubling prognoses are elided. The truth becomes hard to discern. But I knew Dr. Su was a straight-shooter. He wouldn’t butter me up with false hope.

I said to him, straight out, “What are my chances of survival?”

“Ten percent,” he said.

Then Dr. Chao spoke. “You know some residual cancer, near an artery, was left behind, don’t you?”

I was aghast. No, I didn’t know! I was hearing this news for the first time.

“No, no one told me about that.”

Dr. Chao brushed aside my surprise and went on. “A recently published paper in Germany reports early intervention with chemotherapy can increase the survival rate in cases like yours. First you need to rest awhile. In about six weeks’ time, once you’ve recovered from your surgery, you can report to me to start chemo. My office will call you to arrange an appointment.”

I was still unclear what chemotherapy involved and how exactly it worked, and I wanted to know more. But as I was forming the first question, the two doctors turned their backs and rushed off to see another patient.

Later that day I moved from the hospital back to my ex-wife Celina’s seventh-floor apartment. Forceman, Darlene, and Seigfo moved there too and planned to stay with me for a few weeks. Kingsman and Betty were staying for three weeks courtesy of their daughter-in-law, Heather—wife of their son, Galex—whose family had offered an apartment where they could stay.

I hired a live-in maid, a Filipina named Gloria, to help with my care. Her main duties were cooking and cleaning, and she would also accompany me on my visits to the hospital for post-operative checkups and treatment.

On weekdays Celina stayed downstairs in her sixth-floor unit, and on weekends she traveled to Hsinchu to stay with her boyfriend, Albert. The memories of our bitter divorce seemed irrelevant now, and I was glad to have her nearby. Feeling too weak to handle my own affairs, I turned over my financial accounts to her oversight.

My weight dropped steadily. Before getting sick I weighed 75kg. A month after the operation I was down to 60kg—a loss of 15kg, equivalent to more than 30 lbs. I blamed my weight loss (unfairly, I now realize) on the diet Celina arranged for me. She limited my meals to vegetables and fish, allowing me very little meat and little variation from day to day.

Celina had never been the domestic type. Always ambitious and career-minded, she knew little about the culinary arts, and, unlike me, she wasn’t a lover of gourmet food. Her appetite was for material wants: house decor, furniture, and, most of all, stylish clothing. Even in her late fifties she was still a workaholic: she threw herself into managing her retail boutiques, immersing herself in her business affairs with fervid energy.

Her two children, Seigfo and Sharon, probably didn’t get enough of her time growing up. She was a busy single mother, and the kids grew up mostly in the care of maids. But the children never complained, and Celina never conceded any shortcoming—whenever we discussed the subject, she unfailingly declared herself to have performed her motherly duties well. And, I suppose, if parental attention was indeed lacking, then I too was to blame.

Dr. Chao had prescribed a waiting period of nearly two months before chemotherapy could begin. During this period my body started to behave strangely. I had many bowel movements a day, at least six or seven and sometimes more than ten. My stomach still felt tight, as though expanding from pressure on the inside. Later I learned that gas was in fact building up in my stomach, a consequence of the unnatural new digestive system that the Whipple procedure had fashioned.

My friends came over on occasion to play short rounds of mahjong with me, among them Jack Li, Ta-Ching Liu, Gordon Cheng, James Wu, and a lady friend, Pauline. Although James, Gordon, and Ta-Ching weren’t avid mahjong players, they knew the game distracted me from constant thoughts of my condition and helped me pass the time.

Celina, a die-hard believer in Chinese medicine and folk remedies, was for her part pushing me to consult a Chinese medicine practitioner. The clinic she suggested wasn’t registered with the national health plan, so insurance would not defray any part of the cost. On her orders I went once a week, each time paying two thousand Taiwan dollars (about $70) for a week’s supply of herbal medicine.

A Chinese drug called ganoderma, an extract of a genus of wild mushroom, was then making waves in Taipei for its supposed anticancer properties. Naturally Celina got wind of it. A sudden spike in demand, however, had pushed prices way up, and a month’s supply was fetching a couple of thousand U.S. dollars. Ta-Ching’s cousin, a professor at Zhongshan University in Guangdong, China, happened to be researching ganoderma and offered to obtain it for me. Through him, Celina got hold of the pills and urged me to take them.

I grant that Chinese medicine might be effective for mild ailments like colds, fevers, and flu and furthermore that acupuncture does work in some cases. But when it comes to combating serious illnesses like cancer and heart disease, I have seen no scientific proof that these treatments work. Indeed, I suspect that the appeal of alternative therapies lies in their unscientific basis—imposing the burden of proof would disrupt the intuitive satisfaction of matching cause and effect.

Celina’s two brothers, as a matter of fact, had been victims of cancer. The younger one, when he was in his early fifties, suffered a brain tumor and underwent surgery to remove it. Her older brother—who was the same age as me and a heavy smoker and betel-nut chewer—got throat cancer. At her insistence, they both took herbal cures. They died anyway.

To avoid confrontation, I suppressed my personal opinion, yielded to Celina’s wishes, and began taking the ganoderma. She is, after all, such a headstrong woman. What other choice did I have?

In September 1972 I started my engineering job at TRW. I was stationed in McLean, a suburb of Washington, D.C.

Halfway between McLean and downtown Washington was the small city of Falls Church, where I rented a one-bedroom condominium. To get around I bought a used VW beetle, a convertible model painted a deep blue.

The company assigned me to a project designing sonar communication systems for U.S. Navy submarines. The job carried a security classification that required a background check. This lengthy process, which would probe my history all the way back to my origins in China, would take about a year. In the meantime, I was given unclassified tasks.

For the first time in my life I was earning a substantial income, and I started sending money home to my parents. They hadn’t asked me for money, but I wanted to express my filial affection; among first-generation Chinese immigrants, such dutiful acts are common.

Compared to New York City, I found Washington a much sleepier place. Yet it, too, had its merits, offering just about all you might need: plays and concerts, parks and sports facilities, restaurants and pubs. Grand government buildings like the White House and Capitol Hill draw tourists from everywhere. The various Smithsonian museums have built up collections rivaling those anywhere in the world. The Washington Monument, Jefferson Memorial, Lincoln Memorial, and the Kennedy Center all display renowned, majestic architecture. The famous Potomac River runs through East and West Potomac Park, areas of verdant nature within a modern metropolis. Most pleasurable for me, being young and single, was the entertainment district of Georgetown and its nightlife that allured students and other young people.

As I had in New York, I socialized frequently and made lots of friends, on weekends escaping the small-town boredom of Falls Church by partying downtown. I made some female acquaintances, but mostly for sex and casual fun—I had no intention of settling down. Life was good.

Whenever I could, I visited New York. I longed for the place that had given me so many irreplaceable memories. My sister Julie, after divorcing the American G.I., lived there for several years, and during that time I visited her often. One summer she and I joined a tour of Europe, and on that trip I fell in love with a second place, this time not just a city but an entire continent. Together we visited three countries: England, France, and the Netherlands. Smitten with the continent, I vowed to return and later in life toured Germany, Belgium, Ireland, Switzerland, Sweden, Finland, Austria, Italy, and Spain.

Some of my European trips were for business, such as attending academic conferences, others purely for pleasure. Each time I went, I left all the more intrigued. Every feature of the place I found enchanting: the people, the food, the culture and history, the artistic traditions and architecture, the shops, castles, street scenes, and countryside vistas. I loved Italy the most, France a close second. To those two countries I returned time and time again.

Of any group, the Italians, I’ve decided, have the most artistic nature. Whether you find yourself in a metropolitan city or a small village, everywhere you go in Italy reminds you of art, every place—from the lost city of Pompeii to Rome, Florence, Milan, and Venice—entrancing. The town of Como in the Alps near the Swiss border is, to me, paradise on earth. After seeing it once, I went back three more times. One has to see it to believe it.

The most splendid journey of my life was a trip I took by train along the Mediterranean coastline from Pisa to Barcelona. It was April, during springtime. From the train window a cloudless blue sky stretched into an endless distance, joining at the far horizon the deeper blue of the sea. Along the way, brightly colored seaside villas gave way to villages of lovely, petit houses sprinkled among the hills. And when we reached the region of the French Riviera, I knew at once why so many artists and millionaires from around the world choose to make it their second home. That journey’s every scene is like a postcard picture, a snapshot I will forever retain in my mind’s eye.

While I was working at TRW, Kuo, that mischievous character from my high-school days, showed up in Washington and tracked me down. In the interval since we’d last met, he had married. His bride, En-Fong Wang, was an English major at Taiwan National University where I did my undergraduate degree. By sheer coincidence, she was the younger sister of En-Liang Wang, the boy I had injured years before in that motorcycle crash. What a small world!

Kuo’s relationship with his wife puzzled me. That such a beautiful, refined girl as she was would entrust her life to a man like Kuo, who lacked even a high-school diploma and who traveled in gangster circles, seemed incongruous. Both her parents had died young, and her family had not been well off, so perhaps it was his money that attracted her. The circumstances of his marriage were, of course, not my business, but still I couldn’t help but wonder.

The three of us met for lunch one Sunday afternoon. I brought them to a Chinese restaurant in downtown Washington. As the three of us sat eating and chatting, I noticed two Chinese ladies sitting three tables away from us. One was young and ravishingly beautiful, and the other, who was middle-aged, I took to be her mother. I could hardly take my eyes off the young woman. Hers was the enchanting face of a goddess.

She had big luminous eyes, a small straight nose, and a sensuous pair of lips. Her skin was snow white, her long hair light brown in color. She had a slender body and a mid-sized bust that matched her slim figure perfectly. I was enthralled; my mouth was watering.

I was staring at her so fixedly that she couldn’t help but notice. As she ate and conversed with her older companion, she glanced a few times in my direction. I was bent on making her acquaintance, but with her mother on the scene, I didn’t know how to begin the approach.

Kuo also noticed the attention I was paying her. “I know what you’re thinking,” he said to me. “But just forget it—it’s impossible.”

Undeterred, I racked my brain for a plausible means of introduction. As our meal came to an end, still no idea had come to mind. Then, as I motioned to the waiter for the bill, inspiration struck. When the waiter arrived at the table I asked him for a pen and a slip of paper. On it I scribbled my name and phone number and handed it back to him. I instructed him to wait until we had left and then to give it to the young lady on my behalf.

As we walked out, I cast a final backward glance at her. She looked back at me with a neutral expression, one that betrayed no clue as to how she would react to my ploy. All I could do was pray.

Days passed. The following Saturday morning, as I lay in bed, the phone rang. It was she! Her name, I soon learned, was Genevieve. Like me, she was from Taiwan. She was twenty-five years old, four years younger than me, and was living in Bethesda, Maryland, where she worked as a teller at a local bank.

We began dating. Bethesda was on the other end of town from my place, an hour’s drive along the Capital Beltway from Virginia to Maryland. Nonetheless, every Friday after work, rain or shine, I leapt into my VW Beetle and drove straight over to see her. We would then revel nonstop until Monday morning dawned.

In the evenings we dined out, saw plays, danced in discotheques, got drunk in pubs, and sought out every other mode of fun the city nights had to offer. Sunday afternoons we liked to enjoy the outdoors, biking in Potomac Park or horseback riding at a nearby mountain ranch. Once we even skipped work for a week-long road trip to Canada, ending up in Toronto after stopping at Niagara Falls en route.

We kept up this crazed pace for about two months. Every night we were together we slept in the same bed, yet—believe it or not—she wouldn’t give me a single lay. She simply refused to have sex with me. That was the first oddity; then came the revelation that she had another boyfriend on the go. He was an American who worked at the Department of Justice. His name was Bob.

My sudden appearance on the scene plainly did not bode well for Bob. He had been courting Genevieve for a long time and had even proposed to her on many occasions. Each time, unwilling to make up her mind, she put him off. From what I could piece together of their relationship, he was extremely nice to her—that part she appreciated—but his deep love went unrequited. I got the impression of a well-meaning but hapless fellow.

By and by, Genevieve revealed to me the story of her brief life. Her family came from Harbin, a northern province of China. Her mother, after fleeing the Communist takeover, arrived in Taiwan with little Genevieve in tow but absent her husband and son. The son, Genevieve’s brother, later made it to Hong Kong, where on the strength of his good looks he became a minor movie star.

Her mother then immigrated to the U.S. She went alone, leaving Genevieve in boarding school in Taipei. Somewhere along the way she must have picked up some scientific training, because she was employed as a biological researcher.

Growing up beyond the reach of her parents’ influence, Genevieve developed a wayward, feisty, independent nature. She was the sort of Chinese girl who had an eye for Caucasian boys, and soon after she finished school in Taiwan she married an American and moved to the U.S. Before long she realized she didn’t love the man, and one day, without warning, she abruptly left him. She simply vanished, leaving the poor man vainly seeking her whereabouts. When two months later she called him, from her mother’s place in Maryland, to request a divorce, he agreed.

This colorful history made her irksome refusal of sex all the more maddening. One fateful night, at my place, we had both consumed a few drinks and were lying on the bed together, kissing, and, in the chaste way she permitted, caressing each other. My carnal desires overcame my forbearance—I went beyond her limits and tried to impose myself on her. At once her ardor cooled, and she pushed me away.

This same scenario had played out many times before. That night, though, I was unusually lascivious and lecherous. I wasn’t going to accept her refusal as pliantly I had before.

“Why not?” I demanded to know.

“Just no!” she replied.

“What do you mean, ‘just no’?”

“It just means no. No!”

“But come on. . .we’ve been together for a while now. It’s only natural that—”

“Rainfield,” she interrupted, “I like you. I enjoy being with you. And yes, you do turn me on. But it’s just that—”

“Just that what?” I was getting tired of her vague excuses.

“It’s just that unless—”

“Unless what?” This time I wasn’t going to be put off so easily. “Be specific!”

“Unless you marry me!” she blurted out.

So that had been her reason for blocking me! But what could I do? I was still young, unready to be trapped by marriage. I still had years ahead of me before having to settle down.

“You must be kidding,” I said.

“No, I’m not kidding.” Her tone was firm. “If you don’t marry me, then you can’t make love to me.”

“Damn it!” I felt helpless. How could she hold us to such a quaint principle? “Come on—don’t be such a prude!”

“I’m telling you again, don’t even think about it.”

“You’re no fun at all!” I was trying for some jollity, but right away I could tell she didn’t like that remark.

“Fine. Then just let go of me.”

Suddenly the fear of losing her gripped me, and the impulse struck. I said, “Okay, I’ll marry you!”

“Okay, good. But when?” Her tone was skeptical. My promise had come too easily, and she suspected insincerity.

“You mean when to marry?” I said. “I don’t know exactly. I guess we’ll have to do some planning.”

“How about tomorrow?”

“What? Tomorrow?” I wasn’t sure if she was serious or just testing me.

“I said, let’s do it tomorrow.”

“Are you serious?”

“Dead serious.”

“Okay, it’s a deal!”

The combination of the alcohol and her physical charms had got me: for one lousy lay, I gave away my life.

So we married, and I entered yet another new phase. I was, of course, totally unprepared for matrimony. I knew nothing about married life, how two people from different backgrounds could live together and get along. What was more, we were both stubborn-minded. We both staked out unyielding positions and refused any compromise. My mother’s domineering treatment of my father was still fresh in my mind, and when we argued I always held firm, resolving never to allow her the upper hand. The marriage was a disaster from day one.

Our communication was laughably non-existent. Even on the biggest decisions we failed to consult each other. In one of many instances, only after the fact did I learn that Genevieve had quit her job and enrolled in a computer-science program at a community college. To cover her tuition she surreptitiously withdrew two thousand dollars from our joint account. At the time it was a big sum, and when I discovered it was missing, I was enraged. That incident began a long and bitter feud between us.

It was a dark period in my life and no doubt in hers as well. We fought constantly. I lost track of how many times we threatened each other with divorce. Yet some magnetic force kept us together. I even bought us a home in Maryland, hoping a nice house would help save our marriage. Yet still the misery went on, year after year.

I found that chronic unhappiness at home spills over to other parts of life. My work suffered. To avoid blowups with Genevieve, I spent more and more time out with friends. My frequent absences agitated her all the more and generated even more friction between us. It was a snowballing effect: any action by either one of us led to a reaction that compounded our mutual problems.

After she finished her computer-science training, Genevieve found work as a software analyst at the Federal Reserve Bank. From then on, her career blossomed. Mine, on the other hand, sputtered.

As the two of us bickered, Bob, her spurned suitor, waited patiently in the wings. She ran to him for consolation when we fought. If she lacked for something, Bob would get it for her. When she expressed a fondness for houseplants, Bob appeared at the house bearing all sorts of them. When she wanted a custom cabinet for the stereo system, Bob made her one by hand. I saw these items appearing in our home, but I didn’t question their provenance—we were on such bad terms, we rarely spoke.

Then one day Genevieve told me she was pregnant. She wanted to know my stance on having the baby. I coldly replied I didn’t want the baby. She arranged an abortion.

My reaction to the pregnancy hurt her deeply. From that day forward, her mind was set on divorce.

CHAPTER 13

Unholy Matrimony

While I was living with Genevieve and working at TRW I met a fascinating character who would greatly alter the course of my life. His name was Johnny Kao. Originally from Taiwan, at young age he obtained a passage to the U.S. by sea, jumped ship on arrival, and landed illegally.

He found his way to New York City where he worked in Chinese restaurants, first as a busboy and then as a waiter. By working hard he managed to save up a sizable sum and eventually found an avenue to obtain legal U.S. residency. He and some friends decided to start a restaurant together, but instead of locating it in New York they chose Washington, D.C., where they judged the competition to be weaker.

Johnny was an original thinker. Rather than follow the example of so many other Chinese immigrants and open a Chinese restaurant, Johnny wanted to appeal to a wider clientele. Back then average restaurant-goers in Washington, a rustic place of sprawling suburbs, lacked the sophisticated palate of their New York City counterparts. Authentic Chinese food, with its complex flavors, had a narrow appeal in Washington and furthermore was tricky to prepare. His solution to both problems: Polynesian cuisine, a style that blended East and West. He named the restaurant Diamond Head, after the volcanic ridge that is a prominent feature of the Hawaiian island of Oahu.

The restaurant did well, and he opened a second, then a third. All three he named Diamond Head, thus creating the beginnings of a chain. His decision to serve Polynesian food proved fortuitous. The food was an instant hit, as was the ambiance: he appointed his restaurants with decor reminiscent of the South Pacific, giving them a cozy, inviting feel.

Johnny had a natural flair for the hospitality business. He knew customers prized attentive service just as highly as good food, and he trained his wait staff to render service with military precision—a customer taking out a cigarette would find a waiter rushing over to light it, quicker than the guest could himself. Johnny himself walked the dining-room floor every dinner service, greeting guests and dispensing his magnetic charm. The customers loved him and nearly always returned for more.

Johnny’s business flourished, and he soon established a name for himself in the D.C. area as a burgeoning tycoon. He built ties with bankers, who gave him easy credit. His friends, the silent partners who had backed his business, did well. To engender loyalty among his experienced chefs and floor managers, he gave them shares in his business and they, too, prospered. Everyone who knew him considered him a smart, successful, and powerful businessman.

Chatting with Johnny after hours became a favorite pastime of mine. We were, as far as our career choices went, two different men. Yet we liked each other. I admired his moneymaking skills, and he respected my academic achievements.

They say a man covets most what he lacks in himself: on gaining wealth, he wants fame; once famous, he wants knowledge; on gaining wisdom, he wants immortality—for his name to go down in history. Covetous men, I’ve found, aspire to great heights but fall to even greater depths. Those who are truly successful—who achieve lasting wealth, fame, or wisdom—do not outright demand it; they doggedly strive to advance in the life they have, and let providence take care of the outcome.

Such, though, are the lessons of age—lessons, back then, I had yet to learn. The more I got to know Johnny, the more I wanted to be like him and the more I detested my mundane life as an engineer. Compared to his, my life was monotonous and banal; furthermore, it seemed to be going nowhere.

The economy had taken a dip, and the defense industry was hit hard. Layoffs, even at stalwarts like RCA, GE, and General Dynamics, were widespread. At work, the fear of retrenchment hung in the air, and our office was abuzz with panic and rumor-mongering. The prevailing sense of insecurity, the dullness of my job, and my unhappy marriage all combined to make me yearn for a new life.

At times during our conversations, Johnny would flaunt his wealth and the glamor it lent him. His business was growing, he said, and he needed able partners to help expand his empire. Thus far, his partners had all been uneducated people, some even illiterate. Any new partners, he said, would have to be people of refinement and sophistication. He never directly asked me to join him—he dropped hints here and there, and he knew he had piqued my interest, but the discussions went no further.

Then one day as I was looking through the classified ads section of the Washington Post, I came across a listing for an engineering job at a higher salary than mine. Here was a chance to change my life, at least by some measure: I would remain an engineer—my specialized training seemed to preclude any other choice—but I would make more money. It wasn’t a drastic move, but it might, I thought, be a first step toward a bigger change.

I contacted the company, Columbia Research Corporation. It was a much smaller outfit than TRW, but they offered me an engineering manager job at an annual salary about $2,000 more than TRW paid. Moreover, the location, Crystal City, was much closer to downtown. I accepted.

I soon found, however, that the extra amount I made each month, after taxes, amounted to only about $100 more than the TRW job—hardly enough to improve my lifestyle much. Second, the working environment was less appealing, and third—most alarming of all—the job was only a temporary position. It was tied to a two-year contract the firm had secured with the U.S. Navy. When the contract was finished, they would let me go. Only after I started work did I learn this all-important fact.

The job change, then, made my life no better. In fact, it got worse. My job duties were more monotonous and banal than ever, my misery deepened, and my anger and dissatisfaction boiled over into conflict with Genevieve. Our marriage took an even deeper dive.

My life was falling apart, my affairs were in disarray, and I felt on the verge of a total breakdown. To numb myself and avoid confrontation with Genevieve, most evenings I stayed out late. My neglectful attitude incited yet more displeasure and bitterness, but by then I didn’t give a damn—I’d nearly abandoned any effort to prop up our marriage. Mentally, I was deteriorating fast.

During my frequent evenings out, I would go bar-hopping or visit friends’ places. Often I hung out with people I barely liked, just to keep myself away from home. Even worse, I fell into having one-night stands with girls I met at parties and taverns.

One night I stayed out past two o’clock in the morning, and when I arrived home, Genevieve was still up—she was sitting on the edge of the bed, awaiting my return. She had, I could tell, prepared herself for a showdown. The icy firmness of her expression and her bloodshot eyes told me a fiery rage was imminent.

“Where the hell have you been? Do you have any idea how late it is?” The sight of me was like touching a match to dry tinder.

“I went out with a couple of colleagues for some drinks.”

“Bullshit!” The sharpness of that word stung like a blow to the cheek.

“What do you mean by that? Where else do you think would I go?”

“You have a mistress, don’t you?”

She voiced this accusation in a low hiss. It wasn’t all—I sensed she had more to say, and was about to unleash a second barrage.

“Hell, no!” I said. “What are you talking about?” I was trying to sound confidently dismissive, but she had rattled me. What did she have on me?

“Oh? Then how do you explain this?”

She held up her hand. Between her thumb and forefinger she clasped a single long strand of blond hair. I was taken aback. Where had she got it from? I was certain I had never brought any of the girls back to the house. Was she trying to set me up? Yet Genevieve wasn’t the type to fabricate evidence—she was disagreeable, yes, but not devious.

“Now wait just a minute,” I said. “I have no idea where that came from.”

“Liar!” The fire was raging—she wasn’t backing down.

“Look, I swear to God I know nothing of this!”

“Then how in the world did it get into our house?” As she spoke, her face contorted with rage.

“I don’t know. I really don’t know. Look, it’s late. Can’t we talk about it tomorrow night?”

“Tomorrow night? No way! You’ve got to explain it to my satisfaction right now, tonight!”

“Come on, be reasonable. Please.”

“Reasonable? You be reasonable!” Her voice had risen to a shriek.

“What do you want me to say? I told you, I don’t know where it came from.”

“I want you to explain.”

“There’s nothing to explain.”

“So you think you can get away with anything now, is that it?”

“I’m not getting away with anything!” Now it was my turn to get angry. “I’ve done nothing!” Trying to ignore her, I started to take off my clothes and ready myself for bed.

She said, “You’re not going to bed.”

“Yes, I am.”

I got into bed, but as I pulled up the covers she ripped them off me. When I pulled them up again, she pulled them back down. This cycle repeated several times. Then I got up from the bed and started to put my clothes back on.

“Where are you going?”

“Since you won’t let me sleep, I’m going to check into a hotel.”

“No, you’re not—you’re not going anywhere.”

She grabbed hold of me and tore at my clothes, popping several buttons off my shirt. I strode over to the closet to fetch another shirt, but as I was fastening it, again she tore it off. This time I pushed her away. She ran off to another room, out of my line of sight.

As I put on a third shirt, she returned to the bedroom wielding a pair of scissors. Ignoring me, she went straight for the closet where, like a lunatic, she began stabbing and slicing my hanging clothes. As she threshed away, her eyes were teary and bloodshot, her jaw locked, and her face frozen in a wild, fixated expression. It was like a scene from a horror movie.

I was terrified—I had never seen a person acting so crazy. I was also furious to witness my best suits and shirts being slashed to ribbons. In a fit of anger and fear, I dashed over and landed a punch on her face. That was it for her—she went completely deranged.

She ran into the kitchen and returned to the bedroom holding a broom. I knew I was in for a walloping. Savagely she beat me with the broom, stopping only when I managed to grab hold of the handle. We were stuck at an impasse: all four of our hands grasped the broomstick, and neither of us was willing to let go.

After five minutes of grappling, I figured she’d had enough time to cool down, and I let go of the broom. At once I realized my error—she was far more dogged than I’d thought. No sooner had I released her weapon than she was pounding me with it again. This time, I shielded my face and sensitive areas and just allowed the pummeling to go on, hoping she would eventually tire.

When she paused for a split second I saw my chance and dashed from the bedroom to the front door. Before I had a chance to unfasten its three locks, she was upon me. She leaned against the door, bracing it with her body and preventing me from getting at the locks.

She is a tall, athletic woman—she and I are of equal height—and that night her madness had lent her more than her usual strength. To pry her off that door I knew would be no easy matter, yet I was determined not to stay in that house with her for one minute longer. Summoning all my strength, I pushed her aside with one hand while I worked the locks with the other.

I managed to get the door open. Clad only in a pair of half-torn underpants—she had sliced off the rest of my clothes—I dashed outside, ran to a nearby phone booth, and dialed 911. My underpants were barely clinging together, and I feared the police would arrest me for streaking, but I wasn’t going to deal with her without help.

Soon two policemen arrived. One of them, seeing my state of undress, ordered me to find some clothes or a blanket and to cover myself up immediately. Those items were all inside the house—all I could do was hold my torn underpants together.

They escorted me to the front doorway, where Genevieve was standing, and began to question us both.

“My husband is going to abandon me,” she told them. Tears were trickling down her cheeks. “I can’t let him go.”

“That’s a family problem,” one of the policemen said. “It’s not our business to sort out right from wrong. But you can’t restrain him from leaving the house, if that’s what he wants to do.”

“Why can’t I? I’m his wife, and he’s running away from me!”

“Because he’s free to come and go as he pleases. If you don’t let him leave, that’s attempted kidnapping. Do you understand me?”

“But he’s never coming back!”

Her voice had progressively climbed in pitch and she sounded hysterical. The policemen—no doubt inured to this sort of behavior—showed no sign of sympathy for her.

“Ma’am, that’s between you and him. You can’t keep him here against his will. If you’re having a marital dispute, you can take it to court if you want. But it’s outside of our jurisdiction.”

Finally she conceded, and as the police stood guard outside the house, I went inside to retrieve a few items of clothing that she hadn’t destroyed. When I emerged, a bright morning was dawning. I got in my car and drove off.

I vanished for days, during which Genevieve searched for me in vain. Every day she phoned my office, but I refused her calls. Finally she figured out I was staying at the home of a colleague, and she caught up with him and beseeched him to help. He agreed to intermediate, and between the two of them they persuaded me to patch things up and return home.

The damage, though, had already gone too deep. She and I knew in our hearts the marriage was finished. A few months later we acknowledged the truth and began divorce proceedings.

We sold the house, and I moved into a rented apartment in Falls Church. She rented a unit in a high-rise building near her downtown office. Our five-year marriage ended, and never again did we reunite. The origin of that strand of blond hair—the spark that set our marriage ablaze—has forever remained a mystery.

Poor loyal Bob, the tireless suitor Genevieve spurned in favor of me, learned of our split. It was the event he’d been praying would happen. But it did not produce the benefit he hoped. Not only did Genevieve not marry him, she didn’t even give him a chance. She swiftly took up with a colleague at the Federal Reserve Bank, a tall, handsome hunk named Mike. A year later she dumped Mike for another coworker, dropping Mike just as summarily as she had her first husband—by one day vanishing without warning.

Her new boyfriend was named Steve. They arranged a transfer of their jobs to San Francisco, where they were married. Poor Bob, when he got news of her latest marriage—her third and the second while he’d been on the sidelines—finally conceded all hope was gone. How he’d allowed her to string him along all those years, I don’t know. This time, though, he was irretrievably hurt, utterly downhearted, and consumed by despair.

He quit his government post and took a whole year off, traveling solo around the world while trying to forget about Genevieve. Still, he couldn’t shake his feelings for her and straighten himself out. He squandered his savings, and after a year’s time he returned home broke. He developed hypochondria and depression. Unable to work, he fell into a squalid life of poverty. He lost touch with everyone in our circle and sank out of sight.

Genevieve stayed with Steve for three or four years. Then she broke up with him too. She went from the Federal Reserve to a management position at IBM, eventually leading a team of twenty that included several Ph.D.s. Along the way she met John, a Jewish man who owned a small software company. His kindness and generosity won her heart, and they married. Their marriage succeeded for many years, though I learned in 2013 that they had gone their separate ways—as far as I know, without divorcing.

Throughout her dating history, Genevieve avoided Chinese men—I was the only exception. In this preference she was like my sister Julie. Indeed, I have encountered quite a few Chinese girls who share a particular fondness for Caucasian men. Others, though, find their hirsuteness off-putting. To each her own, I suppose. I may have cracked various mysteries of applied mathematics, but female desires I have yet to decode.

My divorce from Genevieve coincided with the end of my contract at Columbia Research Corporation. I was wifeless and about to be jobless—right back to where I had started. My spirits hit an all-time low.

It was the end of August 2009, and the new academic year was about to begin. Since my surgery, a month’s time had passed, and I had to inform the university of my illness.

The head of the electrical engineering department came over to Celina’s place to see me. Though he was willing, he said, to make arrangements for my retirement, he suggested we wait and see: perhaps I might end up cured after all. In the meantime he would have other professors take over my classes. All he asked was that I show up once a week for an hour-long session with my students and pay the substitute lecturer an hourly fee.

News of my illness spread among the faculty, and a number of colleagues came over to offer encouragement. One professor told me a story—one he swore was true—about a cancer patient who had beaten his illness by means of a daily arm-swinging exercise. Every morning the man would stand, his feet parted to shoulder width, raise his arms above his head and swing them down and up five hundred times. His cancer receded. Whether true or not, I’ve been swinging my arms ever since.

Dr. Chao, the oncologist, decided to combine chemotherapy with radiation treatment. I started receiving radiotherapy daily from Monday to Friday. In the procedure, beams of ionizing radiation were aimed at my tumor area from various angles. It took about fifteen minutes and was painless. The only uncomfortable part was traveling to the hospital and, once I arrived, having to endure the long queue for treatment—the radiation ward did a brisk trade.

I had a session of chemotherapy once a week. Each session lasted for about an hour, during which I received an intravenous dose of a drug called gemcitabine (marketed as Gemzar).

Words can scarcely convey the ghastly discomfort chemotherapy brings on. There is no physical pain in the ordinary sense, but the combination of unending nausea and crippling weakness is nearly unbearable.

The two days that followed each session I found most intolerable. My appetite vanished—to swallow even a morsel of food was a struggle. Then on the third day, my appetite would creep back.

After twenty-eight sessions of radiotherapy, Dr. Chao increased the Gemzar dose to 1,700mg each time. It was a heavy dose, so he reduced the frequency of the chemotherapy treatment to three times a month: one session a week for three weeks, then a week of rest.

I did perceive one side benefit of chemotherapy: believers in Chinese herbal cures consider Western drugs to be at odds with such cures, and I used that excuse to decline the ganoderma and other herbal preparations Celina had been pushing on me.

That winter was one of the coldest on record. In Taipei the cold temperatures usually don’t arrive until after Christmas and even then seldom dip below ten degrees Celsius. But that year, the cold weather started in October. Cold fronts rolled in, one after another. After getting sick I found I’d developed an extreme sensitivity to cold, and this weather was bad for me.

What was worse, the H1N1 swine flu was breaking out. Chemotherapy had left my immune system perilously fragile, and I had to be wary of H1N1 and other viruses. Several times I got sick, developing fevers that would reach thirty-nine degrees Celsius. After I swallowed a few antipyretic pills, the fevers would usually subside. But when one fever kept on raging, resistant to over-the-counter medication, I visited the emergency room at Veterans Hospital. They admitted me for intravenous treatment until the fever broke.

Dr. Chao had been monitoring the effects of the radiation and chemotherapy by measuring a tumor marker. A tumor marker is a substance in the blood that becomes elevated in the presence of a tumor. It is produced either by the tumorous cells themselves or by normal cells in response to the tumor. The tumor marker for pancreatic cancer is called CA19-9.

Before the surgery, my CA19-9 reading was around 1,100. By April of 2010, after radiation and nearly six months of chemotherapy, it had dropped to around 15. At that point Dr. Chao seemed satisfied, and he decided to stop the chemotherapy.

His decision came as a great relief. Might I be among the minuscule group of pancreatic cancer’s long-term survivors? I began to hold out such a hope.

CHAPTER 14

The Club

Cancer brings desperation, desperation craves hope, and hope calls for miracles. Friends, wanting to give you hope, keep a lookout for miraculous countermeasures no matter how unorthodox.

Barry Lam, a Taiwanese tycoon of laptop-computer manufacturing, contracted lung cancer in 2006. He endured a battery of Western medical treatments to no avail. Then when he consulted a Chinese medical practitioner in Shanghai, Dr. Shi, his condition stabilized. He credited Dr. Shi’s intervention; this celebrity endorsement drew attention to Shi and boosted his reputation immensely.

Many cancer patients began making the trip from Taiwan to Shanghai seeking treatment. Shi practiced Chinese medicine at a middling hospital, where he saw local patients for a modest fee. Rich out-of-town patients he received only at his residence and then only through referrals. The fees he charged those patients rose as his fame grew, ending up stratospheric. A mere consultation cost $400, plus $110 for a mandatory prescription. According to the lore, Shi’s celebrity patient Barry Lam handed him $2,000 a visit—paying extra, they said, out of sheer gratitude.

Many of my friends urged me to consult Dr. Shi. One of them, J.T. Chang, lived in Shanghai, knew the doctor personally, and offered to pull strings to get me an appointment.

In such matters I am an avowed skeptic. If Dr. Shi’s treatment were so revolutionary, why weren’t researchers from leading institutes like John Hopkins, Stanford, and the Mayo Clinic beating a path to his door? If such a miracle treatment existed, wouldn’t the world take note of it? Say for instance by awarding him a Nobel Prize in medicine?

Still, concerned friends are very insistent. I had already refused further doses of ganoderma, the mushroom-derived compound also reputed to be miraculous in its effects. Were I to resist another hopeful treatment, I risked giving the impression I had stopped caring. Did I not owe it to myself, so the argument went—not to mention to my friends and loved ones—to try and save my life by any means?

I agreed to see Dr. Shi. I would fly solo to Shanghai, where J.T. Chang would meet me at Hongqiao Airport. In Shanghai I would stay in the building where Chang lived, in a vacant apartment owned by a wealthy friend, Y.S. Shen. Chang would oversee my medical arrangements and offer me three meals a day.

I flew from Taipei’s Taoyuan International Airport to Macau, crossed the Chinese border into Zhuhai, and flew from Zhuhai to Shanghai. Direct flights from Taipei to Shanghai had not yet started, necessitating this full-day trip. To my relief I made it without much difficulty, though along the way I had to find a toilet at least five times for bowel movements.

It was April, and the weather in Shanghai was still chilly. The evening I arrived, Chang drove me in his Mercedes to my first consultation with Dr. Shi. We pulled up outside what looked like an ordinary apartment block. Shi’s residential office was in one of the upstairs units.

We went up to find several patients lined up ahead of us. I waited in the reception area for my turn to come. Half an hour later I was brought before the doctor. Dr. Shi was an old man—late seventies, I guessed. His back was slightly hunched over, and he moved stiffly. I had brought with me a file folder containing my case history and digital copies of my CAT scans. After greeting him, I handed him the file. Looking around his office, though, I saw no computer or other equipment that could read the discs.

He set the discs aside and riffled through the pages of my file for a minute or two. Then, as all Chinese-medicine practitioners do, he took my pulse by holding his fingers on my wrist.

“You are seriously ill and extremely weak,” he announced.

My friend Chang had cautioned me to stay quiet during the examination—that was Dr. Shi’s preference—so I said nothing. As the investigation proceeded, I projected a wordless air of reverence. I said nothing unless asked. As a matter of fact I couldn’t think of anything I wanted to say or ask, until finally I blurted out, “So what are my chances?”

He nodded gravely, pausing as if for effect. “If you want any chance of staying alive, then you must come to see me regularly for an indefinite period. The treatment must be continuous, without interruption.”

He produced a prescription pad and began scribbling on it. He went on writing for nearly ten minutes, occasionally pausing as if deep in abstract thought. Then he tore off the prescription form and handed it to me.

“Since you live far away in Taiwan, I’ll give you a full month’s worth of medicine each time. That way, you’ll only have to come once a month.”

The medicine, he said, I was to purchase from a certain pharmacy—the one he specified.

I took out from my pocket a red envelope enclosing his fee: four crisp $100 bills. As I set it on his desk, I felt like asking him, “Do you really believe you can cure me? Or are you taking this money knowing full well your treatment is a fraud? If the first case, fine. But if the second, then you are truly an immoral, unscrupulous man.”

As I contemplated the twin, coincident losses—the collapse of my marriage to Genevieve and the termination of my job—I fell into despondency and confusion. My mood blackened.

Lacking all vitality, I slouched listlessly around my rented apartment. Gone was the promise of happiness. Life—once filled with rich sensations—had emptied of meaning. Nothing that remained aroused even a flicker of interest in me anymore.

Late one evening I went to see Johnny, the rich owner of the thriving chain of Polynesian restaurants. I confided to him my feelings of utter melancholy. He wasn’t surprised. He knew I was unhappy with my engineering career, and on other nights he had alluded—in the form of hints dropped here and there—to another direction my life might take: to join up with him. Now, on hearing I was nearing the end of my rope, he saw his chance.

“You don’t like your job, Rainfield, and you don’t like your life. So why not make some big changes?”

“But how? I’m at a dead end.”

“Easy! Listen, I’ve been feeling the same way myself—I want to make big changes, too. We can do it together.”

“But what exactly do you mean?”

“Just like your job has hit a dead end, my restaurant business has too. I’m stuck. I don’t see any way to make it bigger than it is. And frankly, I’m tired of hanging around in a restaurant, day in, day out. I’m boxed in. I want a new business that’s a lot bigger. And not something Chinese, either. Something purely American.”

“Oh? What idea do you have in mind?”

“My interior decorator gave me a fantastic idea. He’s an American guy. His name is Watkins. Ray Watkins.”

“What’s his idea?”

“He said I should get into show business.”

“Show business? Are you serious?”

“Yes—show business! I’m totally serious. Show business.” As he repeated those two words, his face lit up in a tantalizing grin.

“But isn’t that outside your field?”

“Yeah, sure it is. But I’ll make it my field. We’ll open a supper club. A restaurant with a thousand seats, and a big stage up at the front. We’ll book big stars like Tom Jones, Paul Anka, and Diana Ross to do shows. It’ll be just like in Las Vegas, except right here in Washington. And no gambling, of course. Anyway, Ray says he’s got the showbiz connections, I know the restaurant side, so we’ll be partners. And not just Ray, you can be a partner too. If the idea works out well here, then it’s on to Hollywood. We’ll be rich and famous! So what do you think? Are you in?”

“Wow,” was the only word I could find to utter. After that, I was speechless.

Tom Jones, Paul Anka, and Diana Ross! I had never dreamt of meeting such people face to face, let alone pursuing a path that intersected with theirs. Was Johnny for real, I wondered? He sounded serious, though—and I was overwhelmed with excitement.

Johnny went on. “If you do join up, I’ll make you my partner. You’ll be the general manager of the new company, and I’ll be the chairman of the board. All the men I have now are cooks, or maître d’s, or small-time accountants. They might be okay for a restaurant, but for a big business like this one, I can’t rely on them. That’s why I need you, an educated man, a person of real sophistication.”

“But what about Watkins? If I’m the general manager, what’s his role?”

“Don’t worry about him. I’ll give him something to do to keep him happy. Just between you and me, I can’t trust an American. They’re a different sort from us. You though, you’re Chinese—you’re one of my own. I know I can trust you.”

It was a beguiling offer. I was flattered and moved. Yet apart from my time, I had nothing to contribute. I said, “It sounds like it might need a lot of capital to get started. How much would I need to bring in? I don’t have much money.”

“You won’t need to put in much. Twenty thousand dollars will do. Even me, I’m only putting in forty thousand, and I’m the biggest shareholder. Put in twenty thousand, and you’ll be the second biggest.”

“But how’s that possible? Setting up a club with a thousand seats will take a lot more money than that.”

Again came the beguiling smile. “Simple,” he said. “You’ve been a scholar all your life, and now it’s time to think like a businessman. You never put in all you’ve got—that would be way too risky. You use other people’s money to make money. We’ll bring in silent partners to invest. Between you, me, and Watkins, I figure we can find twenty investors just in D.C. alone. And I also know lots of bankers who’ll lend us money too. I’ve had my accountant do up some rough estimates, and I figure a million dollars should be enough to start. If we find twenty investors plus get a bank loan, we’ll come up with a million easy. Don’t underestimate me—I may not have a Ph.D. like you do, but I know how to put numbers together. So what do you say? Are you in?”

Again I was speechless. Nearly a minute passed before Johnny broke the silence.

“Rainfield, look. I know it’s not an easy decision. But go home and give it some thought. Then give me your answer tomorrow or another day. But please, don’t keep me waiting too long.”

When I left Johnny’s restaurant to go home that night, I already knew in my heart the answer would be yes. The alternative—to continue my boring career as an engineer—sickened me. Johnny too was tired of his line. We both wanted to change our lives, to find a new door, one that would open onto a bright, glamorous new world.

A Chinese saying goes, “When down and out, make a change. It will lead to success.” Another goes, “Don’t be afraid to take a big step. You can’t cross a chasm in two small jumps.” These dicta made sense, and I decided to follow them.

My contract at Columbia Research Corporation was in its final days. I had at most two months of work left. I went back to Johnny and asked if he could wait while I finished up my contract. He agreed.

“Done deal!” he said, shaking my hand.

So two months later I started to work for Johnny. The three of us—me, Johnny, and Ray—began canvassing investors. Johnny’s reputation for success, my credentials from a well-known university, and Ray Watkins’ enthusiasm for the idea proved an attractive combination. As Johnny predicted, we signed up one investor after another, mostly within the Chinese community. Then the Bank of Virginia approved a loan. Soon we had the million dollars we needed.

One day as I was driving around my neighborhood in Falls Church, I noticed a billboard announcing a local supermarket was vacating a site. It looked like the perfect location for the club. Johnny concurred, and we signed a lease with the landlord.

Our preparations for the grand opening went into high gear. We hired carpenters, electricians, and signed contracts for elaborate lighting and sound systems. The decor, in keeping with Johnny’s other restaurants, would be done up in a South Pacific theme. We decided to call it the Royal Hawaiian Supper Club.

I threw myself into the work. As the renovations gathered pace, I started recruiting staff, booking shows, and spreading publicity. I was frantically busy yet uttered not a word of complaint. I found the work mesmerizing—and what a contrast to the dull routine of engineering work!

Every facet of the new business I handled. Johnny delegated day-to-day authority to me, and Ray served as my helper. The task I found most enthralling of all was lining up the entertainment: hobnobbing with show-business people and traveling to Las Vegas and New York to meet agents. I ended up dealing mainly with the William Morris Agency in New York; as the largest agency in the business, they had the biggest stable of stars and fearsome power in price negotiations.

The favored meeting spot among agents was New York’s prestigious 21 Club on 52nd Street, where I caught frequent glimpses of minor celebrities such as news anchormen and actors I’d seen on television. The mayor of the city, John Lindsay, once sat at the table next to ours. To return to the city I loved, in such a glamorous capacity—I relished every moment!

Soon, though, I discovered our first miscalculation: the big stars—names like Tom Jones and Paul Anka—were well beyond our reach. The prices they commanded for a single show were eye-watering, and only the biggest venues could book them. Our entertainment budget, which had to cover two performances a night, was a mere twenty thousand dollars a week—far short of the numbers the agents were quoting. We would have to accept performers who were not so hot or bigger names whose popularity had faded.

The renovations took six months to complete, followed by a publicity blitz that lasted another two months. Newspaper columnists wrote pieces about the new club, and in the days leading up to opening night we ran ads in print and on television. The grand opening of the Royal Hawaiian Supper Club was to be the hottest ticket in town.

Our inaugural act was the singer Patti Page. She had been a big star in the 1940s and 50s whose last major hit was in 1965. Still, the newspaper and television reporters took an interest in her upcoming show. Even the Washington Post promised us a half-page story.

With all the effort we expended on publicity, and considering our club’s status as the first of its kind in the area, we expected opening night to sell out. Instead, when Patti Page took the stage, almost a third of the seats stood empty. Our market research, such as it was, had badly overestimated demand. Our second miscalculation!

Though our show-business strategy had revealed some kinks, Johnny was confident in his command of the restaurant side of the business. We offered a set menu at $15.99 a person, drinks extra. It seemed like a reasonable policy: not overly cheap but not too expensive either.

Though the price was right, the inflow of customers, instead of an inpouring, amounted to a trickle. In retrospect, I think our program of shows was the main detractor. Our acts—which included Mel Tormé, Jack Jones, Eddie Fisher, Sarah Vaughan, the Platters, the Stylistics, Frank Gorshin, the Smothers Brothers, and the Golddiggers—were mostly artifacts of a bygone era. They had nostalgic appeal but not enough to attract crowds of any size. And even as poor draws they weren’t cheap: in addition to their own fees, some demanded eight- to twelve-piece backing bands.

I count Eddie Fisher’s run as the worst disaster. Fisher, a vocalist whose career had peaked twenty years before, drew at most three tables of guests every night. Amid the disappointments, though, there were a few modest successes, among them Frank Gorshin, Jack Jones, and the Smothers Brothers. Those nights we filled seventy or eighty percent of our seats. We never had a full house.

We lost money from day one. The first six months we spent hoping business would pick up. By the seventh and eighth months, that hope was fading. We knew in our gut that the club did not have long to live. Our dream of the Royal Hawaiian Supper Club delivering us to a life of wealth and fame was fading fast.

Still, I latched onto whatever moments of glory I could, however fleeting. I went on regaling the reporters and lavishly hosting the entertainers. When we brought new stars to town, a local television program, Channel 7 News, would interview them. Glowing with pride, I was always the one to escort the star to and from the TV station.

When the Golddiggers, a singing and dancing troupe of five beautiful women, played a weeklong gig, I partied with the performers every night. After their show, I squired them around town, taking them out for late dinners, hitting the discotheques, and partying in their rooms at the Sheraton Hotel—the best in town. That contract with the Sheraton was one of my finest strokes: when I’d approached the hotel manager dropping famous names, she was so thrilled she practically gave away the rooms for free.

During the tenth and eleventh months, when the end was plainly in sight, I fell into total dissolution, trying as best I could to dull the foreknowledge of imminent doom. I dated waitresses I’d hired and partied with the staff every night. Johnny and I began to quarrel and for a while even stopped talking to each other.

The club did not see its first anniversary. During its twelfth month of operations, the company filed for bankruptcy. All the investor money was lost, as was my own twenty thousand; in a year’s time, we had burned through a million dollars.

The end of the Royal Hawaiian spelled the end of me too. It snuffed out my dreams, exhausted my savings, and left me without means of support. The venture that I’d intended would change my life had changed it all right: by leaving it worse off than ever.

The club’s failure also destroyed Ray Watkins. He was close to fifty at the time. The Royal Hawaiian, his idea from the beginning, had been his last shot at success; instead it failed spectacularly. For him, the most unfortunate casualty was his relationship with Johnny. Outfitting Johnny’s restaurants in the South Pacific style, Ray’s specialty, had been his main source of income. The rupture with Johnny left him almost destitute. He never recovered: we lost touch, and I later learned he had died not many years later.

Johnny, too, was hurt by the failure. His credit rating took a hit, and his plans for expansion went on hold. His setback, however, was short-lived. Two years later he launched a comeback, selling the Diamond Head restaurants and, in a return to his roots, opening a first-class Chinese restaurant in the heart of downtown.

Called Mr. K’s Restaurant, Johnny’s new eatery was an instant success. Over the years he counted many famous people among his patrons, including Henry Kissinger, Ronald Reagan, and George Bush Senior. Always the clever promoter, Johnny kept the chopsticks his famous customers used and displayed them at the front entrance. If you visit Washington today, you will find Mr. K’s still going strong, its chopstick mementos still on display out front.

Johnny later opened a second Mr. K’s in New York, a few blocks away from the Waldorf Astoria Hotel. He and I stayed in touch over the years, and as far as I know, he is still doing fine.

As for me, I learned from my mistake and admitted my limitations. The field I know best—to be accurate, the only one I really know at all—is engineering. Never again did I covet another man’s talents and a life that wasn’t my own.

CHAPTER 15

Family

After consulting Dr. Shi in Shanghai, I returned to Taipei with a month’s supply of his herbal medicine, the supposed miracle cure. After dutifully taking it every day for a month, I went for another tumor marker test. Instead of dropping or stabilizing, my CA19-9 reading had risen, from 16 to 46. Dr. Shi, I decided then, was a quack.

From there, the number kept on rising. Over the next five months it rose to 95, then 96, then 140. As the number climbed, my spirits, naturally, sank.

An old friend, Linda, suggested I visit a fortune-teller, a man she knew well. His powers, she told me, equipped him to predict my fate and thus assuage my gnawing uncertainty. In a moment of desperation, I accepted. The next evening we went together to see him.

When we arrived, Linda wasted no time in announcing the purpose of our visit. “My friend has serious cancer. His tumor indicator has risen very high. He wants to know if he has a chance of surviving.”

The fortune teller had us sit down at a round table, then he presented me with a bunch of small rocks. I was to throw them randomly onto the table in front of him. From the lay of the rocks, he would discern a telling pattern.

I did as he said and scattered the rocks onto the table. After studying them for a few moments, he wrote a cryptic sentence onto a piece of paper. He wrote in an archaic style of Chinese I couldn’t easily read, but I recognized the characters well enough to ascertain their general meaning: “beyond remedy, hopeless.”

A bilious fear struck the pit of my stomach. It wasn’t so much the fortune-teller’s words in themselves that alarmed me—those I could chalk up to superstition—but the match between his scribbled prediction and the scientific test. One or the other I could dismiss, but their confluence was chilling.

The man noted my fearful reaction. He said, “Indeed you have drawn the worst lot. But one can always make up for bad luck by doing good deeds. Any good deed will do, such as giving alms to the poor.”

His suggestion—a redemptive course—had a curiously Christian ring to it. Then he pointed to his wife, who was sitting next to him, listening in silence as he dealt with my case.

“You see her?” he said. “She’s also a cancer patient. She had lung cancer. But now, she’s perfectly fine.”

“Perfectly fine?” I said. “How do you mean she’s perfectly fine?”

He got up and retrieved a book from his shelf. He held it up for me to see. It was called “Cancer Is Not a Disease.” Its author was an Indian physician; his copy was a Chinese translation.

He said, “This is the golden bible. It advises against surgery, chemotherapy, or radiotherapy. All of those treatments will end up stimulating the cancer growth and doing more harm than good.”

“Really?”

“Yes. The author is a famous doctor who once specialized in Western medicine. Now he cures patients using a food regimen. Eat only vegetables, no meat. And only certain vegetables: nothing alkaline, like seaweed or carrots, and nothing acidic either. No salt, sugar, or fat. Every day, go to a wooded, mountainous area and breathe fresh air, practice yoga, and take half an hour of sunshine. My wife has followed these rules for a few months. She’s stopped her chemotherapy, and she’s fine. The doctor still prescribes her oral chemotherapy, but each time she brings home the pills, she throws them away. She doesn’t take them.”

“Are you serious?” I could scarcely believe what I was hearing: a cancer patient secretly dodging her chemo?

“Yes, and look at her. She feels so good now.”

She didn’t look very good to me. To my eye, her complexion was turning a metallic black. Then the wife spoke up, suggesting I take the book home to read it. I tried to decline, but she insisted. Finally, out of politeness, I agreed to take it with me.

That night at home I read a few passages here and there. It was the usual junk, no different from the rest of the miracle cures people had pushed on me. Via Linda, I returned it to the fortune-teller.

Not long afterwards I learned the fate of the fortune-teller’s wife. One day she was overcome by a sudden discomfort and rushed to the hospital. Her cancer had spread all over her body. In a matter of days, she expired.

My sister Julie, after living in New York for a few years, found herself unhappy with her prospects and moved to San Francisco to try her luck in a new place. There she met a fine young man named Kurtis Opp. She by then was thirty, and he was nearly ten years younger.

Soon she was pregnant. Despite their mismatch in ages—and over a clamor of dissenting voices from friends and family alike—Julie decided she wanted Kurtis and she wanted the baby. She had yearned for a child in her life, and she worried that the odds of meeting an unattached man were, at her age, lengthening.

Kurtis came from a decent, traditional family of German descent; the name Opp is a truncated form of Oppenheimer. He had two siblings, both brothers. His father was a wealthy businessman who had made a fortune selling home appliances. His mother was one of the kindest women I’ve ever encountered.

In their family, to have a baby out of wedlock was quite unacceptable. Yet when Julie’s baby, Leanna, was born, Mrs. Opp adored her. Hoping the couple would wed, she offered them as a betrothal gift a down-payment on a house. Kurtis and Julie graciously accepted, and they married.

At the time, Kurtis seemed to have no serious prospects. He was drifting around, frittering away his time. Marriage and fatherhood, though, settled him down. He applied to a medical program and qualified as a physician assistant. He has practiced medicine ever since.

Mrs. Opp kept her promise and helped them buy a home near Millbrae, a posh area just west of San Francisco Bay. Later they had a second daughter, Deena, and a son, Alexander. Now they have a grandchild—Deena recently gave birth to a baby girl.

My brother Forceman, after completing his master’s degree in computer science, found a job as a computer engineer at Boeing in Seattle. Despite his imposing name, Forceman is a gentle, affable, steady-minded man who gets on well with everyone. Whereas I’ve bounced between jobs and had marriages come and go, he’s had precisely one of each.

Over the years of Forceman’s tenure at Boeing, the firm went through plenty of ups and downs. Layoff and retrenchment crises were not uncommon occurrences. Each time, though, Forceman came out okay. He stayed at Boeing for twenty-seven years, retiring at age fifty-five.

Forceman and his wife Darlene invested astutely in equities and real estate, buying several houses in the Seattle area, including their own lovely home in Bellevue, about fifteen minutes’ drive from downtown. Their two daughters, Angela and Michelle, both graduated from the University of Washington. Both are married. Michelle has a son, Angie two sons.

Forceman and Darlene are devout Christians, and on my every visit to Seattle they took me to church. To find religious faith—a faith they find so uplifting and sustaining—seemed to me a worthy goal, and at their urging I was christened at the age of fifty-three. To my sadness, true belief has eluded me.

Like Forceman, my brother Kingsman is a family man. After earning an MBA from New York University, he joined Peat Marwick Mitchell & Co, a big accounting firm. He married an American-born Chinese girl named Betty Kong, who soon gave birth to a son, Galex.

Peat Marwick was active in Taiwan, and Kingsman arranged to transfer his job to Taipei. It was a good deal for him: he could return home, yet his salary would stay at an American level. His expatriate package came with other benefits as well, including a housing allowance and tuition at the costly Taipei American School.

The Taiwan posting, however, was limited to a fixed three-year term. When he returned to New York, he would lose the fringe benefits. Preferring to stay in Taiwan as an expat, before the three years were up he quit Peat Marwick and moved to the Taiwan branch of another American company, General Instrument, taking the post of internal auditor.

General Instrument ran a large factory in Taiwan making cable TV converters and semiconductors. Kingsman remained there for fifteen years. After the company broke apart in a series of divestitures and acquisitions, he moved to Philips Taiwan where he remained until retirement. His twenty years of high paychecks and stock options at General Instrument allowed him to retire an affluent man.

Kingsman and Betty’s son, Galex, graduated from the University of Wisconsin and found a job at Abbott Laboratories in Chicago. Later he joined Microsoft in Seattle. Their daughter, Bricina, was born in Taiwan and is five years Galex’s junior. Their two children have produced three grandchildren: a son to Galex and two sons to Bricina.

After finishing his career in Taiwan, Kingsman bought a house in Seattle, near Forceman’s place, and moved back to the U.S. Since then, these two branches of the Yen family have lived in close proximity.

As for me, the black sheep of the family, the ordeal of the Royal Hawaiian ended my American dream. I returned to Taiwan in the fall of 1977 to become a university professor. Eleven years after I had left home, I moved back in with my parents. Their other children all having taken flight—from Taiwan to the U.S.—they were overjoyed to have at least one of them return.

I was surprised to find one member of our household missing: Uncle Zu-Han no longer lived with us. He had moved out to a home for retired veterans. Later I learned he and my mother, his half-sister, had stopped getting along.

Then I met a woman. Her name was Celina Chiang, a divorcée with a baby daughter, Sharon. Celina came from a family of modest means. Her father, a soldier, had joined Chiang Kai-shek’s retreat to Taiwan. The army stationed him at the city of Hsinchu, where he had remained ever since. He had four children: two sons and two daughters. Celina was the third child.

On his meager army salary, her father couldn’t afford to send his kids to college. So Celina went to Taipei straight from high school to find work. She found a job at a cosmetics counter at a department store. Half of her small income she dutifully sent home to her parents. She lived austerely: she stayed in the company dormitory and even scrimped on meals, sustaining herself mainly on beef-noodle soup minus most of the beef.

In Taipei Celina met a young man, David Wu, a louche libertine who hailed from Hong Kong. They married, and the young couple started a business selling women’s fashion. They set up a boutique in a small rented space at the front entrance to a hair salon.

Soon Celina was pregnant. When the day came to deliver her baby, David vanished—never to reappear. Suddenly she was alone, caring for a newborn and struggling to keep her small business afloat. Without her husband’s help to man her tiny store, at times she had to send her baby to Hsinchu for her parents to look after.

Yet she persevered. The hair salon, her main source of customers, was frequented by affluent debutantes, rich socialites, and high-class prostitutes who all had money to spend. Celina is a born salesperson: she wheedled, inveigled, and cajoled her growing roster of clients into buying her wares, and the business flourished.

At first she made trips to Tokyo to cart back the latest Japanese trends. Later she upgraded her store to carry European lines and began visiting cities like Milan to procure brands such as Fendi, Celine, and Louis Vuitton. Her sales climbed yet higher.

Peter Chao—the same friend on whose advice, years later, I consulted the legerdemain with his phony cancer detector—introduced me to the smart, pretty twenty-six-year-old with the adorable one-year-old daughter. I fell hard.

So far I have accounted for all of my siblings save one. In 1949, just before we fled China to escape the Communists, my mother gave birth to a baby girl. On the day our ship sailed, the infant was sick with fever. Knowing she might not survive the journey, my mother made the heart-wrenching decision to leave her behind to take the next passage out—a passage that never came.

For the ensuing forty years, Chiang Kai-shek’s secret police permitted no contact between Taiwan and the mainland. His government enforced a strict policy he called the “three noes”: no contact, no negotiation, no compromise. Many families, like ours, were split apart by the war.

My mother suffered terrible guilt over abandoning her daughter and feared constantly for her safety. During the early years of Mao’s revolution, anyone whose relatives had fled to Taiwan—the enemy side—came in for barbarous mistreatment. My mother longed to know the fate of her baby girl, and if indeed she had survived the cruel postwar years, to reunite with her.

When overt hostilities between the two sides finally lessened, some limited contact between Taiwan and the mainland became possible via third countries. Taiwanese citizens could travel to places like Hong Kong or the Philippines and mail letters that would reach their relatives on the mainland. My mother’s niece, Uncle Zu-Han’s daughter, lived in Hong Kong, and with her help my mother at last located her long-lost daughter. Her name, my mother learned, was Shirley. She was married and had a son, Thomas. They lived in Shanghai.

While my mother made arrangements to reunite with Shirley in Hong Kong, Forceman, Kingman, Julie, and I discussed how we might help her. We all felt guilty over the stark contrast between our lives and hers. At that time it was impossible for a mainland Chinese citizen to emigrate to Taiwan. We could, however, pool our resources and send her some money every month. China in those days was still desperately poor, and even a few hundred dollars a month was enough for a woman to live like a queen.

Shirley declined our offer. She didn’t want to stay in China, she told us by telephone. She wanted to leave. And, she declared, it was our responsibility, having left her behind, to get her out.

By then we had all become U.S. citizens, and although she couldn’t come to Taiwan, we could sponsor her for residency in America. But could she could adapt to such a drastic change, we wondered. To move, in one jump, straight from a communist country to the epicenter of capitalism: was it too big a step? Still, at her insistence, we went ahead.

The application process took a year to complete. During that interval she divorced her husband, deciding to make a new life without him. She arrived in San Francisco bringing only her son, Thomas.

Our fear that she wouldn’t adjust to the cut and thrust of capitalism turned out to be misplaced: they were just her cup of tea. The poverty of her upbringing had given her an insatiable desire for money and to get ahead. She started off renting a cheap apartment in a down-at-heel area of Oakland, then worked her way up through various jobs, invested in real estate, and after fifteen years had attained a comfortable middle-class lifestyle. Her personal life, though, was less settled: over this same period, she went through three marriages.

Her son Thomas, after arriving in the U.S. with his mother, worked hard at part-time jobs to put himself through school. He enrolled first in a community college, then transferred to the University of California at Berkeley, where he studied computer science. After graduating he found a job in Silicon Valley, bought a house and a BMW automobile, and one day plans to return to Shanghai to start a business of his own. I wish him the best of luck.

Despite her achievements, Shirley found happiness elusive. She is a restless, outgoing woman who tends toward vanity and craves face. When she left China years before, she was nearly destitute. Then, having attained a certain stature in America, she wanted to return to her native land as a rich woman and flaunt her success. So move back she did.

She arrived in Shanghai and immediately rented a luxury apartment. Then, though it belonged to the landlord, not to her, she spent a staggering sum on renovations and new decor. She drove a pricey car, frequented the finest restaurants and shops, and made sure to show off her money wherever she went.

In the years of her absence, however, the simple China she knew had turned into dangerous landscape, one abounding with hustlers all too willing to flatter the vain and manipulate the gullible. Aged sixty, she fell in with a man of forty, a beautician. He proposed she invest in a luxury health spa—she would provide the capital, and together they would manage it. Under the sway of this younger man, she invested every penny she had, and, with dogged persistence, borrowed the rest from any source she could persuade.

The business promptly flopped. Her entire investment evaporated, replaced by a staggering debt. Creditors soon began hounding her, even sending gangsters to threaten her life. Terrified, she called us for help, begging for money to put off the debt-collectors.

After listening to her story, we realized she was facing an abyss. Any amount we sent would only result in more demands. We denied her request for money. Fearing for her safety, she made a dash to the airport and bought a one-way ticket to San Francisco. She returned to America as poor as the day she had first arrived.

By that point she was too old to restart her career. Her real estate investments were long gone. She and her husband had operated a brokerage business, but the market had dropped and showed no signs of coming back. She rented a room from a Chinese family in the East Bay area, and began subsisting on social security.

The Chinese characters my father chose for Shirley’s name meant “resemble man”—the man being, of course, him. He couldn’t have known how prophetic his choice would be. In unequal measures, his offspring have inherited his reckless streak. Some of it he conferred on me, no doubt. But of all of his children, Shirley, it would seem, got the biggest dose.

CHAPTER 16

The Fate of Friends

After I completed my first round of chemotherapy, I decided to deal with another health problem, one that had bothered me for some time. My prostate was in such poor condition that I had to urinate many times during the night. On one occasion my incontinence grew so bad I rushed to the hospital to have a urinary catheter inserted, then carried around a collection bag for several days afterward. Needless to say, I was anxious to rid myself of this irksome problem.

My doctor proposed prostate surgery. In my weakened condition, however, the risk of complications worried him. So he opted for a laser procedure that required only partial anesthesia. The procedure at the Taipei Veterans Hospital went smoothly, and I was told to remain in hospital for two more days of observation.

While I was recovering from my operation, I heard that an old friend, Lao Ding, was also staying at the Veterans Hospital. Sadly, I learned he was in the hospice section, receiving palliative care. Lao Ding was a sort of hoodlum. He looked husky and imposing and had the habits of a typical Taiwanese gangster: he chain-smoked, drank, and chewed betel nut.

A few years before, he had been involved in a scam to bring mainland Chinese women to Taiwan under false marriages. This affair had landed him in some hot water, and he fled to Shanghai where he remained in hiding for a year or so. When things cooled down, he returned to manage a small, cheap tavern in Taoyuan, a city about twenty kilometers south of Taipei.

Before starting the Taoyuan bar, Lao Ding had worked in similar establishments in Tianmu, a district of Taipei popular among American and European residents. Although his English was never strong, he had an affable way about him, and he attracted friends of all sorts. Within the social circle in Tianmu we had a couple of American friends in common, and through them he and I got to know each other.

One evening we gathered with friends in Tianmu when Lao Ding mentioned he had a growth on his neck, just under his left ear. At first he’d taken it for a harmless wart. But since then it had grown at an alarming rate, getting bigger by the day.

He wore his hair long, so none of us had noticed it. That evening he lifted up his hair to show it to us. It was a horrible sight: a bulging protuberance the size of a ping-pong ball.

To my surprise, he said he hadn’t seen a doctor about it—he still hoped it would clear up on its own. Of course we urged him to have an immediate checkup. He must have known it was likely serious, maybe cancer, but was afraid to face the truth. A few days later he came down with unbearable pain and finally reported to the hospital.

It turned out to be cancer of the tonsil, and it was already metastasizing. Had it been caught earlier, it might have been readily treatable. With the disease at such an advanced stage, the necessary surgical intervention would require removing all of his teeth and opening up a big hole in his jaw, leaving him hideously disfigured.

He refused the operation and sought folk treatment instead. His friends, though, sensed he was simply giving up. For quite a while his life had not gone well. His bar business was losing money, and he lacked even a proper place to live—after closing down the bar each night, he would sleep there. He had never married and had no children. The will to carry on seemed to have left him.

When I entered his room in the hospital, I was greeted by a sad, miserable, horrible sight. He was half-lying, half-sitting on the bed. The left side of his face bulged grotesquely, preventing him from lying flat. He could barely eat, talk, or even get fluids down. The sight reminded me of Charles Laughton as Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame. His sole comfort was his sweet, loyal girlfriend, who remained at his bedside day and night.

Soon after I checked out of the hospital, my oncologist, Dr. Chao, found that my tumor marker, the CA19-9 index, was still rising. I began a second round of chemotherapy. Yet even after the treatment got underway, the number kept going up. The drug, Gemzar, had lost its potency, Dr. Chao told me. My tumor had developed resistance to it.

Stronger treatment was needed. He offered me two choices: Cisplatin, which was covered by the national health-insurance plan, and Oxaliplatin, a platinum-based agent that would cost me fifteen thousand Taiwan dollars (about $500) a session. The new dose would be high, and the sessions would now last longer than before—about four hours—and be administered twice a month. Dr. Chao recommended the more expensive drug, Oxaliplatin, and I agreed to cover the cost.

It was indeed a strong drug, and it wore me down greatly. The sessions left me so weak and uncomfortable I needed seven to ten days to recover each time. But even this powerful drug didn’t bring any improvement: my CA19-9 number continued to climb steadily.

In May 2011, after six months of continuous treatment, the CA19-9 reading reached 518—up from 15 right after my surgery. A CAT scan, however, turned up no sign of tumor regrowth, and Dr. Chao decided to end my second round of chemo, declaring the results inconclusive.

It was around then that Lao Ding bade farewell to this world.

In a bitter twist of fate, pancreatic cancer began felling others in my circle. The first to go was Alan Yeh. A vigorous, athletic man, Alan belonged to the tennis team at the Taipei American Club, where he and another good friend, Tom Chien, often played.

Alan received his diagnosis a month after mine. Unlike my case, his tumor was inoperable. Doctors at the National Taiwan University Hospital gave him radiation and chemotherapy, hoping to shrink his tumor to a size that would allow them to operate. It didn’t shrink appreciably, and a year and a half later, he died. Right up to his final day, he was taking the herbal treatment ganoderma—the same dubious cure that friends had pressed upon me.

The second to go was Michael Cheng, a church friend of Forceman’s in Seattle. In early 2009 he underwent surgery and chemotherapy for cancer of the colon. Then in April of that same year, while he was in Taiwan visiting relatives, he felt some discomfort and checked himself into hospital. Doctors found he had a heart problem and, even worse, a second cancer—this time, of the pancreas.

Michael’s daughter, a physician in the U.S., made inquiries in medical circles to find the best surgeon in Taiwan to perform the Whipple operation, the same procedure I underwent. She came back with three names: Dr. Tien at National Taiwan University Hospital, the place that had treated Alan Yeh, and two surgeons at Veterans Hospital: Dr. Su, my surgeon, and the backup man, Dr. Shih. Michael, however, picked Dr. Tien.

Before his operation could proceed, doctors first had to stabilize his heart condition. That ended up taking almost a month’s time. His heart was still weak, and Dr. Tien worried it would give out during surgery. His tumor was growing so rapidly, however, that Michael decided to take the risk. So Dr. Tien went ahead with the operation. Michael survived, and when he recovered he returned to Seattle.

Back in Seattle Michael consulted a second doctor. This one advised immediate chemotherapy. After considering cost and other factors, Michael returned to Taiwan for the treatment. There he bought a house in Hualien, a city on the east coast renowned for its fresh air and beautiful scenery. Forceman, Darlene, and I visited him and found him in good spirits, although the chemotherapy had given his skin a blackish sheen.

He and I decided to stay in touch to exchange notes on our progress and give each other encouragement. We weren’t in touch for long. He left this world in late 2010, about a year and a half after his surgery.

The third case was a distant relative: the father-in-law of Angie, Forceman’s daughter. He developed pancreatic cancer in 2009, the same year that Alan, Michael, and I did. His case was inoperable, and no treatment was practical. The old man died three months later.

The fourth was Mrs. Cheng, the wife of Yun Cheng, a high-school classmate of mine. At the time I received my diagnosis, she had been living with pancreatic cancer for three years. Of the pancreatic cancer patients I knew, she had survived the longest. Her case was thus an inspiration to me: if her cancer proved to be curable, then perhaps mine would be, too.

She had undergone a single round of chemo at the outset of her illness, and since then her CA19-9 reading had held steady at around 80. Then in her fifth year of living with the disease, it suddenly rose to 200 and kept climbing. When it reached 400, her doctor panicked and ordered a second round of chemotherapy. She was unable to tolerate the strong drugs the doctor prescribed, and during the second session she collapsed. She died not long after.

Mrs. Cheng’s death wiped out my hope for a cure—a hope that would never return.

One of my dearest lifelong friends, and certainly the most flamboyant, was Gordon Cheng. Gordon’s whole family was unusual. His father had three wives and seven children. His mother, the first of the three wives, had two sons, Gordon and Raymond. The other five children—a boy and four girls—were half-siblings.

Raymond, unlike Gordon who grew up in Taiwan, was educated in the U.S. from elementary school to college. He graduated from MIT with a business degree and found a job on Wall Street with American Express. He married into a rich family of Chinese immigrants, but he and his wife divorced, and American Express transferred him to Singapore. There he met a woman from Shanghai and remarried. His new wife, an appallingly vain and snobbish woman, persuaded him to abandon his career at American Express and start his own garment business in Hong Kong.

The business floundered. The couple squandered all of their savings and went bankrupt. They later divorced, and Raymond has struggled ever since. His half-brother, Daniel, did much better: after one divorce, he went on to marry a famous Taiwanese actress. They are still together.

Gordon’s lusty appetite for life had always kept him in rude health. Not suspecting he had any problems, in early 2011 he went for a routine checkup at the Sun Yat-Sen Cancer Center in Taipei. A colonoscopy detected stomach cancer.

Fortunately, the disease was still at an early stage, requiring only a minor, endoscopic operation to remove the cancerous tissues. The procedure went ahead and was pronounced a complete success. No follow-up radiation or chemotherapy was deemed necessary.

A sonogram, however, turned up a suspicious image in the area of Gordon’s pancreas. Doctors ordered a CAT scan for a clearer look. The CAT scan procedure requires injecting a contrast agent, an iodine-containing dye that enhances the quality of the image. Gordon, though, had a kidney problem—the contrast agent would damage his weakened kidneys. So the test had wait until his kidneys healed.

After a five-month delay, Gordon finally got his CAT scan. It detected a tumor on the tail of his pancreas. His case, they said, didn’t require the radical Whipple operation. Instead doctors used a less invasive procedure, a robotic system called da Vinci. The surgeon made four small incisions on his abdomen spaced about 10cm apart, forming the corners of a square, and a fifth incision at the center. Then, through this quincunx of incisions, the surgeon passed miniaturized instruments and a high-definition camera. The operation lasted only half a day—about half the duration of mine.

The day following his surgery, Gordon roared back to life like a tiger. Chemotherapy began two weeks later. On the evening of his first session of chemo, I called him. He sounded upbeat and reported feeling fine. Then on the following Sunday, I received a call from Jack Li, our mutual friend.

“Gordon’s gone,” he said.

“Gone where?” I asked. I didn’t grasp what he was saying.

There was a pause. Jack, his voice cracking, said, “Heaven.”

“What?” was all I could say. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

“Yes, I just heard from Raymond what happened. This afternoon, he ate a bowl of noodles and threw up. He started to feel dizzy, and then he went into a seizure. They called an ambulance, but before he got to the hospital, he was gone.”

I was speechless. We had lost our long-time friend.

In life, I’ve learned, precious few people stand out as truly unique. Gordon was one.

CHAPTER 17

The Interlude

It was July 2011. Since my cancer diagnosis, nearly two years had passed. Though my tumor index was still high enough to be worrisome, no treatments were ongoing: my latest CAT scan showed no tumors, hence no chemotherapy was practical. My doctors decided to repeat the scan after three months’ time. In the meantime, they could do nothing.

On July 4th, I flew to Seattle to stay with Forceman and Darlene to relax. They were overjoyed to see me. Kingsman and Betty were also in Seattle then, as were lots of young nieces and nephews. We toured some of the local attractions, sampled restaurants, and on Sundays went to church. Forceman takes great comfort from quoting Scripture—relating its symbolism and metaphors to our journey through life—and he read aloud to me from the Bible. His devotion moved me—but it wasn’t enough, I’m afraid, to induce in me that final leap of faith.

While in Seattle I decided to seek a second opinion on my prognosis, which was still inconclusive. I made an appointment with a noted oncologist, Dr. Back of the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance. Seeing all of my relatives had sent my spirits soaring, and I hoped a U.S. doctor’s report would deliver yet more good cheer.

The result was a bitter disappointment. Dr. Back more or less issued me a death warrant, declaring I had no more than a year to live.

Forceman’s wife Darlene, though, had cause for optimism. Her sister Helen worked at a nursing home in downtown Seattle. A colleague of Helen’s, a woman named Lou Lorton, had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2010. Judging her tumor to be inoperable, her doctors administered only chemotherapy and radiation. After a few months of poor results, Lou circulated her case file to some top cancer clinics, asking them to reassess it. A surgeon in Milwaukee, after looking at her scan results, felt surgery was possible and offered to operate. She accepted. Four months had passed since her surgery, and she felt remarkably better.

She and I started to email back and forth, exchanging notes on our treatment and progress. From understanding her case, I learned that disagreements among doctors are not uncommon. A gloomy prediction from one doctor need not spell certain doom. Dr. Back’s pronouncement was not indubitable. In fact, apart from some numbness and weakness in my limbs—a common aftereffect of intensive chemotherapy—I was feeling all right.

So I carried on with my holiday, flying to San Francisco to visit Chet Chapracki and some other California friends. While in San Francisco I also met my sister Julie and her two lovely daughters, Leanna and Deena. My ex-wife Genevieve even appeared, treating my friends and me to a big dinner at an upscale Cantonese restaurant.

My friends Jack Li and James Wu also made special trips to the Bay Area to see me. Jack owns a holiday property in Lake Tahoe, and James drove a vanload of us—including his wife, his sister, and his brother-in-law—up to Jack’s place. We stayed there for a few days, taking in the scenery during the day and enjoying spirited games of mahjong in the evenings.

I flew back to Seattle and stayed with Kingsman for another two weeks. When I returned to Taiwan in early September, I was feeling pretty good. The numbness and weakness in my limbs, though, had worsened, and I found I needed a cane for walking.

Immediately upon my return to Taipei, Dr. Chao called me in for another tumor marker test and CAT scan. My CA19-9 reading, he found, had shot up to nearly 1,500. Although such a high number was devastating to me, the scan showed nothing unusual. Dr. Chao opted not to take any action. Instead he ordered me to rest for another three months, then come back for another round of tests.

When Dr. Chao repeated the tests three months later, my CA19-9 number had doubled, reaching nearly 3,000. But the CAT scan remained clean. So he allowed me yet another three-month deferment of chemo—in total, he had granted me nine months of chemo-free vacation.

Dr. Chao’s tight-lipped indecision gnawed at me. Doctors, I’d learned, commonly shielded their sickest patients from the truth. My friend Ta-Ching, who introduced me to Dr. Cheng, the doctor who first diagnosed my condition, had confessed to me such a cover-up. At the very outset of my illness, Dr. Cheng had told him that tumors like mine were malignant in ninety-nine percent of cases. The chance it was benign was practically nil. They hadn’t wanted me to know.

The dread CA19-9 number and the bleak statistics surrounding my disease remained ever present in my mind. Around then the death of Steve Jobs was on everyone’s lips. Despite all efforts to save him, his cancer—the same type as mine—was unstoppable. The disease was invincible.

Still, in January 2012, inspired by the resolve of the terminally ill characters in the movie The Bucket List, I made a second post-cancer trip to the U.S. I had another incentive to travel: the condition of Celina’s seventh-floor apartment. The ceiling was starting to leak badly, and with me absent she could have the necessary repairs done.

This time I flew straight to San Francisco to meet up with Chet. We planned carry on to Florida. He was considering moving there when he retired at sixty, and he wanted to explore the place. For a week we prowled around St. Petersburg and Fort Myers in our rented Chevy Impala, looking at real estate.

I found the sunny winter weather in Florida a welcome relief from damp, chilly Taipei, and Chet and I had a great time. One of the highlights of the trip was the evening we spent with Chet’s brother Bob and his friends in St. Petersburg, where we had a delectable steak dinner at a plush restaurant. After dinner we chatted and drank beer in our hotel room until late into the night.

Midway through our explorations, Chet decided Florida wasn’t his dream retirement destination after all. Life in the “sunshine state” he found far too monochrome, lacking the variety he’d come to appreciate in San Francisco. Chet had worked for a while in Taiwan, where his employer, a multinational construction tools manufacturer called Hilti, had sent him to develop new business and manage customer service. That experience gave him an appreciation for the flavors and vibrancy he found in San Francisco’s Chinatown—whereas in Florida, the sole Asian we encountered was a waitress at a faux Japanese sushi house.

Near the end of our trip we both came down with a nasty flu and were coughing and hacking. I was alarmed—in my condition, a flu can lead to life-threatening pneumonia. To my relief, we both recovered.

After leaving Chet behind in San Francisco, I flew to Seattle. I planned stay there for a month altogether, first with Forceman and then Kingsman. I was happy to keep my U.S. trip going: my thoughts dwelt constantly on that ominous CA19-9 number, and I feared the next round of tests awaiting me in Taipei.

Before leaving Seattle I arranged to see Lou Lorton, the woman who had made a remarkable recovery despite a bleak initial prognosis. I looked forward to meeting her in person and seeing first-hand how well she was doing. We arranged to meet at a Starbucks location near her downtown home.

When she walked into the coffee shop and sat down to talk, I saw at once her condition was not good. Her cancer, she told me, had spread to her lungs and her bones. Her time was nearly up. Tears welled up in her eyes as she spoke. It was a sad meeting.

I tried as best I could to enjoy the rest of my trip. My sister Julie’s youngest daughter, Deena, was getting married to a man named Arnoldo, who was of Portuguese descent. The wedding was to be held in San Francisco, and I returned there for the final two weeks of my trip. All the Seattle relatives attended—it was a big and joyous family reunion.

When I got back to Taipei, Dr. Chao was ready to test me again. To my dismay, my latest CA19-9 number was higher than ever: 7,700. The CAT scan, however, still showed nothing unusual. Dr. Chao was tight-lipped as always, but he seemed to give more weight to the scan results than to the test number. So I still had some cause for hope.

At Celina’s seventh-floor apartment, the renovation work had run into complications: the contractor had been unable to find the source of the water leak, and the project had become unending. Plus, Celina was too busy to deal with it properly. So I had to move back to my own place in Danshui on the coast. The weather there is cooler than in Taipei, and I was sensitive to the cold and damp, but fortunately the winter was nearing an end.

My Filipino maid moved to Danshui with me. By then a new woman had started in the job, the one who lives with me today. Her name is Menzy, but when I took to calling her “Macy,” that name stuck.

I was still officially on the staff of my university, and I decided to attend a research conference in Guilin, a city in China’s Guangxi province. A grad student offered to go along; glad for his company, I offered to pay all his expenses.

On the way to Guilin we stopped for a night in Kinmen, an island held by Taiwan that lies just two kilometers from the mainland. During the Cold War, Kinmen, then known as Quemoy, experienced heavy bombardment. After Chiang Kai-shek’s forces retreated to Taiwan, Communist gunners continued pounding Kinmen, eventually landing more than a million artillery shells on its small area. It is a fascinating place: many of its former military installations—including underground excavations dug for protection from the shelling—are now tourist attractions.

From Kinmen we took a short ferry ride to Xiamen, an island city controlled by the Chinese mainland. We stayed there for four days. From the sixteenth century onward, Xiamen was a port frequented by European traders, and it still retains a European touch. One of the highlights of our visit was a tour of nearby Gulangyu, a car-free island renowned for its winding lanes, beaches, and historic architecture—even more fun, I found, than touring Alcatraz Island off San Francisco.

Then we flew to Guilin to attend the conference. The countryside around Guilin is renowned for its breathtaking scenery: karst hills, often depicted in classical Chinese art, that jut spectacularly into the air. While in Guilin I started to feel a constant thirst—I drank one Coke after another, yet it remained unquenchable.

When I got back to Taipei, I weighed myself and was startled at the result. Around that time, my normal weight was about 60kg. That morning I weighed only 54kg, a huge weight loss in a short time. Then a chronic exhaustion set in—I had trouble staying awake and would sleep almost the whole day.

I went back to see Dr. Chao. This time he ordered a PET scan. This procedure, more expensive than either a CAT scan or MRI, produces a three-dimensional picture of the metabolic processes in the body. In preparation for the test, a short-lived radioactive contrast dye is injected into your body. Because the radiocontrast agent is molecularly similar to glucose and cancerous tissue has a high glucose uptake, a tumor that is present will show up on the scanner.

When they inject the contrast dye, your blood sugar level must not be too high or else the dye might damage your kidneys and other organs. Patients must therefore avoid eating for several hours before the blood-sugar measurement is taken. When they checked my blood sugar they found it was too high: nearly 500 mg/dL, implying I was in a diabetic state. They gave me a shot of insulin to bring it down to about 200, then injected the dye.

After the test was performed, the director of the PET-scanning unit took me aside. They had found an anomaly in the scan. He seemed concerned and told me I should see my oncologist as soon as the formal report was ready. He also advised a general checkup of my metabolic condition—I was later prescribed insulin shots and pills to bring my blood sugar under control.

A few days later, when the report was ready, I went to see Dr. Chao. He confirmed what I had already suspected: the tumor was back.

This new tumor was growing on the tail of my pancreas and was hindering normal functioning of the organ, thus making me diabetic. Dr. Chao prescribed a daily insulin shot to control the diabetes. The major crisis, of course, was the new tumor. He ordered immediate resumption of radiation therapy together with a third course of chemotherapy.

Radiation treatment is not without dangers; there is a ceiling on the lifetime dose of radiation a person can safely receive. Furthermore, the same area of the body cannot be irradiated twice. My original tumor had been on the head of my pancreas, and Dr. Su had removed about seventy percent of the entire organ. This second tumor was in a different position, making a second course of radiotherapy theoretically possible. The problem was, not much of my pancreas was left. Unless angled with extreme precision, the radiation beams might stray onto healthy tissue and irreversibly damage what little was left of my pancreas.

To proceed might be fatal; to do nothing would certainly be. I began having five sessions of radiation therapy and one session of light chemo a week—about 400mg of Gemzar. After twenty-eight sessions of radiation, my CA19-9 number had dropped from 7,700 to 1,450. The radiation was working, but by then the radiation dosage had reached the lifetime maximum. Now, chemotherapy was my sole remaining option.

Dr. Chao opted to throw at me an arsenal of drugs: cisplatin, fluorouracil, and leucovorin in a combination known as PFL. Now each session would take twenty-four hours to complete, and I would be hospitalized each time for three days.

While this third phase of chemo was going on, Forceman and Darlene came to Taiwan for a visit. Celina’s seventh-floor unit was still under construction, so they stayed with me in Danshui. During their month-long visit I was in good spirits—judging by my lower CA19-9 number, my treatment seemed to be working. I had enjoyed my earlier trip to Xiamen, and I decided to take them there for a week’s holiday, acting as a tour guide.

As the chemotherapy continued, my CA19-9 number kept on dropping. From 1,450 it went down to 800, then 400, and finally down to 100. Then, just as steadily, it started to climb. It reached 300 before jumping all the way to 1,500. The gains I had made had gone into reverse, and my doctor seemed helpless to intercede. The PFL treatment had ceased to work. All I could do now was wait. Despite my high CA19-9 number, I went ahead with the Xiamen trip; Forceman and Darlene indeed found it intriguing.

Soon afterwards I learned what happened to Lou Lorton, the woman whose case had given me such hope. She had died. Though I’d known she wasn’t well, still it was a devastating blow—this merciless disease spared no one.

CHAPTER 18

His Last Breath

Soon after Forceman and Darlene returned to Seattle, my CA19-9 number skyrocketed to 18,500—far higher than it had ever been. A CAT scan revealed a new tumor 2.2cm in size, this time in my liver. Dr. Chao decided to burn it off using a technique called radio-frequency ablation (RFA). This procedure works only on tumors of the liver or kidney; as mine happened to be in the liver, RFA stood a chance of working.

In the RFA procedure, a needle slightly thicker than a hypodermic syringe is inserted into the tumorous region. The other end of the needle is connected to a device that produces a high-frequency electric current, heating the needle’s tip to 100 degrees Celsius and burning off the tumor. The success rate is typically ninety percent with a ten percent risk of infection.

My luck went bad on both counts: after the procedure was done, a scan revealed a 1.2mm portion of the tumor had remained intact. Furthermore, my immune system’s weakened state leaves me susceptible to the slightest invasion of bacteria—organisms harmless to a normal person pose great danger to me. I came down with an E. coli infection: bacteria had entered my bloodstream through the puncture wound. I remained in hospital, bedridden for two months while the infection slowly yielded to potent antibiotics.

After three weeks’ rest at home, I returned to the hospital for another RFA attempt. This time the doctor managed to burn off the entire tumor, but I suffered yet another infection. This one took three weeks of hospitalization to clear.

The tumor gone and infection cleared, I was now cancer-free; they would check my condition again after three months. It so happened that Macy’s three-year contract had just expired. According to Taiwan law governing foreign domestic helpers, she had to return to the Philippines for about a month to renew her work permit. Not knowing how long my respite would last, and lacking her help around the house, I made a daring decision: to make another trip to the U.S. I would go first to San Francisco, then to Seattle. Forceman, delighted at the news of my decision, booked us an Alaska cruise that would depart from Seattle.

The trip turned into a disaster. Two days after landing in San Francisco, I came down with persistent vertigo. Before leaving I had also suffered crippling fatigue: in the days leading up to my flight, I slept practically all day. Genevieve took me to Sutter Health Service, a general hospital near Millbrae. After conducting several tests, they suspected an inner-ear balance problem. They prescribed some pills to combat dizziness and advised me to see an ear, nose, and throat (ENT) specialist.

In spite of my fatigue and dizziness, I went ahead with the Alaskan cruise together with Forceman, Darlene, and a couple of other friends. My condition continued to decline. While on board, I spent ninety percent of the time hidden away in my cabin, sleeping. I felt constant pain in my stomach and crippling exhaustion. Though I still had a reasonable appetite, eating only worsened my stomach discomfort and I couldn’t get much down.

When we returned from the cruise, I stayed first with Forceman, then Kingsman. During this period my medical problems continued to intrude. I checked into hospital several times seeking treatment for my vertigo and stomach problems. An ENT doctor found some fluid accumulation in my left ear, accounting for my sense of imbalance, and he drained some fluid from my eardrum. A general practitioner found my blood sugar was high and prescribed insulin shots to continue until I returned home.

On my return trip to Taipei I had planned to stop off in San Francisco to see my dear friend Chet, my sisters Julie and Shirley, and some other friends. But while staying with Kingsman, I felt so terrible I decided I had better go straight home for a thorough health check. So I forfeited the air ticket I’d bought and booked a one-way business-class flight to Taipei.

Forceman and Darlene, knowing that Macy had not yet returned to Taipei and concerned I might find the solo flight unendurable, offered to accompany me to Taipei and care of me for three weeks. How lucky I am to have a brother like Forceman! What more can I ask for in this world than the love and care of family?

So we went to Taipei together. Before the three weeks were up, Kingsman arrived to care for me until Macy returned. The day Forceman left, he burst into tears. He knew it was the last time he would see his older brother again. I too could not restrain my tears. He came forward to hug me, and for a long while we lost control of our emotions. Kingsman sat with us, his own eyes reddening as he observed the sad scene.

Then, two weeks later, the day of Kingsman’ own departure arrived. Again we couldn’t help but fall into a deep sadness: weeping, sobbing, and hugging each other. At last we three brothers had dropped the barriers between us—had expressed the true love we felt for each other. Of all the items in my “bucket list,” this was the one that truly mattered.

On my return to Taipei I was immediately hospitalized. A CAT scan showed several tumors around my liver and stomach areas. Dr. Chao asked me if I wanted to try another phase of chemotherapy using a new drug called Folfirinox. It was the same drug Lou Lorton had taken—similar to PFL but stronger and not covered by the national health insurance program. He warned that the drug’s fearsome potency could damage my kidneys, and in my weakened condition, I might collapse immediately. At best it might prolong my life for a couple of months.

After considerable deliberation, I made the most difficult decision of my life: I opted against further treatment. Most of my friends and relatives, who had witnessed my prolonged suffering, agreed with my decision. My problems had become too many: each time I endured treatment to assuage one problem, another would appear. So I told the doctors my decision, and they sent me home, laden with various prescriptions including pain-killer pills, morphine patches, laxatives, diuretics, and diabetes pills. Now, I await my final day to come.

As I write this final chapter, I suffer the symptoms of a dying man. My limbs are deadly numb. My body retains water; my legs are so heavy with fluid I can hardly lift them.

The other day, I awoke to find I had lost all sensation and movement in my right hand. I went straight to the ER. They scanned my brain, looking for a tumor that might be bearing down on a nerve and account for the sudden crippling of my hand. The doctor concluded that the cause was my sleeping position. To avoid stomach discomfort, I slept curled up on my side, always in the same position. I had probably damaged the nerves in my right shoulder. No treatment was possible; I could only hope the paralysis would lessen over time.

Having lost the use of my right hand, I cannot write, sign my name, use a fork, knife, or chopsticks, put on clothes, trim my nails, or do nearly anything.

Worse, I cannot eat. I have great difficulty swallowing, whether solid or liquid foods. A single cup of Ensure, a liquid supplement, takes me hours to finish. If drink too fast, I throw up. Constipation is another painful problem. Any accumulation of matter in my digestive system, whether food in my stomach or a stool farther down, causes me great discomfort.

I cannot go outdoors on my own—a wheelchair is my only means of locomotion, and to get in and out of a car causes great pain. I feel like a zombie or ghoul. I am sixty-nine, but I look ninety. I had always assumed that pain, discomfort, and misery had boundaries; now I realize they are unbounded.

I hate to face each day. I look ahead and see nothing—no goals to fulfill, no pleasures to anticipate. Yet, in a bizarre paradox, even though my waking hours are empty of meaning, still I hate to sleep, to deduct from my conscious time remaining.

I want to end this useless life. I ask myself constantly, “Why did I come into this world? What was the purpose of living?” Perhaps a year ago, I still had the urge to live—or more accurately, the urge not to die; I feared death. But now, as it draws ever nearer, I seem to fear it no more. Perhaps I have fully accepted its inevitability, the finality of the world’s continuation without my presence.

I do not want a funeral of any sort. I ask only that my body be cremated and my ashes sprinkled into the ocean. At friends’ request, I have agreed to a simple memorial service. I contacted the church I attended for a while—back when I was still seeking faith in God—and they will help my son Seigfo to organize a simple ceremony. When the time comes, my friends Tom Chien and Peter Chao will lend him a hand as well. I have made a list of attendees whom I wish to invite.

Speaking of good friends, Peter Chao, Jack Li, Tom Chien, and Ta-Ching Liu have been so good to me throughout this difficult time, giving boundless support and encouragement. They would even leave work during office hours to take care of me, to accompany me to the hospital, or to play short mahjong games to relax me and help me kill time. They are my high-school classmates; our friendships date back fifty years. I do not know what I have done to deserve such dear friendships. I sincerely thank them from the bottom of my heart.

Many other dear friends, here in Taiwan and overseas, have extended great help, concern, and support since the day, four years ago, I learned I had contracted this demonic, merciless disease. My friends sensed my mounting fear as my fate loomed; now, that fear has faded. I them to know I depart this world in peace. I am fearful no more.

A deathly fatigue grips me; I know my final collapse may occur at any moment, that any moment may be my last. I write these final words on December 11th, 2013 from the hospice ward of Taipei Veteran’s Hospital, where on November 30th I was admitted for palliative care. I pray I can finish my story before it is too late.

The year was 1981. My father had spent several good years as head of the thriving CPA practice, and he was well on his way to amassing another fortune. The harsh lessons of the past had kept him away from the gambling tables: he resisted his old temptation, avoiding even the merest flutter with the cards.

His gambling urge, however, had not truly left him—it merely found another outlet. He learned of an electronics firm whose owner sought a loan of ten million Taiwan dollars, then about $250,000. At the time it was a princely sum: enough to buy a house or two in San Francisco or New York. The deal would mean risking all the cash he had saved, but the borrower offered him a temptingly high rate of interest, and he accepted.

Three months into the deal, the borrower disappeared along with any hope of repayment. Disaster had struck again. This time he made no attempt to conceal the debacle from his children, who by then were fully grown. I wanted to help, and an idea crossed my mind: to involve Kuo, my gangsterish high-school classmate.

My family agreed that we ought to seek Kuo’s help to track down the debtor and pressure him into paying. Meanwhile, we also filed a lawsuit in the Taiwan courts.

The lawsuit quickly floundered. Under Taiwan’s inquisitorial system, the judge investigates the facts of the case and decides the outcome, decides on matters of fact as well as matters of law, answering to no jury. What I witnessed of this system disgusted me.

When I showed up at the court hearing on my father’s behalf, I found more than ten other complainants already there, suing the same defendant. It was clearly a serious case of criminal fraud—the man must have swindled hundreds of millions of Taiwan dollars. But the judge, when he questioned me and the other plaintiffs, was rude and peremptory, interrupting us frequently and giving us no time to explain the salient facts. The defendant, I concluded, had bribed the judge. A million Taiwan dollars would probably have been enough, a tiny fraction of what the fraudster had stolen.

After holding three hearings that stretched out over a year, the judge returned a verdict of not guilty. Not once did he compel the swindler to show up in court. Furthermore, he permitted the man to cover his debts using postdated checks. These instruments, of course, ended up being worthless; by the time the checks came due, the man had fled the country.

As well as seeking legal remedies, I had, in parallel, employed Kuo’s services as a debt collector. According to our agreement he would keep as his fee twenty-five percent of any amount he collected, as long as it exceeded one million. If he recovered less than that amount, we wouldn’t owe him anything.

Kuo, though, wasn’t much help either. Before the man vanished, Kuo’s goons managed to squeeze from him only two hundred thousand of the ten million he owed my father. Kuo, too, was unhappy: he had to pay his men, but under our deal would get nothing. Being an old friend he hesitated to negotiate with me in person. But one day his goons showed up to negotiate for him—or rather, to shake me down. I ended up handing over fifty thousand, leaving us with a hundred and fifty thousand—a mere two percent of the debt.

Once again my father was down and out. But unlike the previous occasions, when he still had youth on his side and could claw his way back to prosperity, he was now an old man of seventy. It was a final, fatal blow. The hard cruelty of injustice—and even more, his own unhealthy appetite for risk—had toppled him once and for all. His life had got off to a humble start, and it would now have a humble end.

His health declined swiftly. He started coughing up blood, and doctors found a tumor in his lung. It was cancerous. Given his history of diabetes and hypertension, they doubted he would survive surgery. They gave him chemotherapy and radiation. Then one day he was stabilized. The tumor had shrunk, and he was sent home for rest.

The day he returned home from the hospital, my mother held a mahjong party for him, inviting his closest friends. The guests were in a celebratory mood, and he too was in good spirits. But the good days he had left, sadly, would be all too few.

The doctor advised a resumption of chemo, this time at a higher dose. Unable to tolerate the drug’s assault on his system, after two sessions he collapsed and was hospitalized again.

His condition worsened; he drifted in and out of consciousness and became delirious. My mother, Kingsman, and I took turns keeping vigil over him.

One evening it was my turn to keep watch. I fell asleep by his bedside, and when I awoke it was early morning. To my surprise, my father was sitting bolt upright in bed. His eyes stared fixedly ahead into blank space, his expression was rigidly set, and blood trickled from his mouth down his chin and onto his chest. I immediately called for the nurse.

She came in to clean him and change the bed sheets but did nothing else. When the doctor arrived on his early-morning rounds, I expected him to explain the episode I witnessed. Instead he offered no opinion. By then my father was sleeping serenely, and none of the hospital staff seemed especially concerned.

My mother arrived to relieve me, and I left. That evening around seven o’clock Kingsman and I both received frantic a telephone call from our mother. She told us to rush to the hospital. My father wouldn’t last beyond midnight, the doctor had told her.

By the time Kingsman, Betty, and I got to the hospital we were too late. My mother was weeping and sobbing, stooped over my father’s lifeless body.

I tried hard to hold back my tears. Why I felt the need to bottle up my feelings, I don’t know—but I did. Then Kingsman and Betty burst into tears.

The four of us stood together in that lonely, somber room, mourning my father’s death until two men arrived, half an hour later, to transport his body to the morgue.

That, then, was the last of my father. He was seventy-four years old and had worked his whole life. He was a scholar at heart, but unlike his children he never enjoyed the pleasures of a university campus. Everything he learned, he taught himself.

Throughout his life, trouble pursued him. He never knew a moment of comfortable retirement. Yet despite his faults and preposterous misconduct, I respected him fiercely. As long as I am alive, he will live in me. He will forever be my hero.

Within a year of my father’s death I married Celina. A year after that, in 1984, our son, Seigfo, was born in Seattle. His name is an amalgam of “Seattle” and “eighty-four”—the place and year of his birth.

My mother moved to the U.S. to stay with Forceman and Darlene for a while. Her stay was not harmonious. As so often happens in Chinese families, jealous feelings simmered between her and her daughter-in-law. When Darlene discovered my mother had snooped through her things, reading her personal letters, their cold war became a hot one.

In the midst of the blowup that ensued, Forceman defended his mother. “Get out!” he yelled to his wife, and sure enough, Darlene stormed out.

She walked around their neighborhood all night long, and when she returned home, it was clear to all three of them that the arrangement could not last.

My mother flew back to Taiwan, and I went to the airport to pick her up. I will never forget our conversation on that drive into the city. I had heard from Forceman of her unreasonable behavior at his place, and I blamed her for the trouble. Callously, I refused to allow her to stay with me, insisting she live alone with a maid. I worried her presence in my home would bring discord to my marriage.

I recognize now it was the worst sin I ever committed. Forceman had opened his home to her; even though it didn’t work out, at least he had tried. I refused even to try. Many a night I have lain awake in bed, crying in the dark for this sin. How could I have been so cruel, so ruthless, so ignorant, so distorted in my thinking, so selfish, so witless and so malignant as to reject my own mother? Now I, too, am alone in the final years of my life. Might my own lack of companionship be retribution for this great sin?

My decision to exclude my mother from Celina’s and my household did not save our marriage. It lasted less than five years. After my second marriage failed, I knew in my heart I would live out the rest of my days alone. At times I look on my brothers’ lives—both are family men whose wives will forever be at their sides—with a certain envy. I know, though, that my temperament sets me apart from them. I am far too rigid and unaccommodating, and the women I have attracted are dangerously similar to me in those traits.

After our divorce, Seigfo at first lived with me. But within a year Celina demanded custody. To avoid subjecting the boy to a prolonged confrontation between us, I deferred to her wishes. I agreed to pay his tuition costs, and when he went abroad to study, his living costs too.

Having been born in the U.S., Seigfo was an American citizen, and the Taipei American School admitted him as an expat student. He wasn’t especially studious, and he gravitated toward art—just as I had as a child. Within sensible limits, I allowed him to go his own way. I hesitated to impose on him the same harsh strictures that my father, who insisted I enter the hard sciences, had imposed on me.

After Seigfo graduated from the Taipei American School, he enrolled at San Jose University in business studies. At my suggestion, he chose to major in accounting: if not science, at least it was quantitative. While at university he spent his summers in Taiwan, and as far as I could tell—like most young men, he revealed little to his parents—he was happy.

Then one summer he raised the idea of dropping out of university and staying in Taiwan. He had grown up tall and quite handsome, and some agents had approached him about doing some modeling. It was an impulse I knew I had to quash, but instead of invoking my authority and simply ordering him back to school, I decided to look deeper into his motivations. I asked him to introduce me to these agents so I could hear for myself their proposal.

Seigfo dutifully set up the meeting. The agents, I found, were two young ladies.

“With his good looks,” one of them said, “we think he’ll have a lot of opportunities in the modeling field. And not only that, but show business as well.”

“Show business?” I thought at once of the Royal Hawaiian Supper Club. “Listen,” I said, “do you know he’s not even a Taiwanese citizen? He can’t work here without a residency card and a work permit. And to get a work permit for a foreigner, you have to be a sizable company, not just a handful of people. How big is your agency? Have you talked to a lawyer about his employment status? Have you considered any of these facts at all?”

From their dumbfounded reaction, it was clear they had considered none of these practicalities. Soon afterwards Seigfo told me he had dropped the idea and would return to San Jose to finish his degree. I was greatly relieved.

After graduating in 2006, Seigfo found a job with Bank of America in Los Angeles. He found a lovely girlfriend, Stephanie, who had earned a business degree from Berkeley and worked at PricewaterhouseCoopers in L.A.

In 2008 the subprime mortgage crisis hit, and the banking business began to suffer badly. Rumor had it that fifty thousand jobs in Bank of America worldwide were to go. Seigfo took the downturn as a signal to quit. So he decided to change jobs, signing on with a start-up company in the solar energy field.

When in 2009 I contracted pancreatic cancer, Seigfo took a month-long leave of absence to stay with me in Taipei. Finally, in 2010, he decided to quit the solar energy company altogether and return to Taipei to be near me—for God only knew how much time I had left.

In Taipei he enrolled in the Global MBA (GMBA) program at the nation’s top school, National Taiwan University (NTU). He aimed to enter the marketing field. Following his example, Stephanie left Pricewaterhouse and entered an MBA program at the University of Southern California (USC), also majoring in marketing.

Seigfo graduated from NTU in 2012 and right away landed a job with a local motion picture production firm—finding his way into the entertainment business, his goal all along. He satisfied both of our wishes: he earned himself a respected degree, and entered the field he desired. By then, Stephanie had completed her MBA at USC. She returned to Taiwan to reunite with Seigfo. Her impressive educational and professional credentials landed her a marketing post at a foreign firm, with a starting salary much higher than the average in Taiwan. A year later she switched to another employer: a government-subsidized organization affiliated with the British Council.

I wish my son to find in his career and family life the satisfaction that eluded me and for whomever he chooses as his lifelong partner to remain at his side, to end of his days, in a state of mutual happiness, love, and felicity.

My mother met her end in 1987, five years after my father’s death. Hers was a painless exit. She suffered a heart attack while playing mahjong with her friends. Within twelve hours she had departed this world. She died as gracefully as she lived.

Over the decades she had enjoyed her days of glory but also suffered hardships and despair. At the bitterest depths of my father’s self-induced disasters, I would hear her shout to him that she regretted their marriage, that she had never loved him. Yet even as she uttered those angry words, apart from her brief disappearance in their early years she never left his side.

Words of kindness so often went unsaid. When my mother told me of my father’s final moments, the unspoken sentiment between them finally became clear. That night she had stepped out for dinner, and when she returned to his hospital room he was looking at her, beckoning her with his eyes. She rushed to him. The very moment she arrived at his bedside, his eyes still fixed on hers, he let out his last breath—one great, final suspiration—then closed his eyes forever.

“He was holding his last breath,” she told me. “He was holding his last breath for me.”

When I heard those words I knew she had, in her life, found true love. My father was her true love all along, no mistake about it.

It was a love that started as a fragile seed, one that germinated under a soft rain and over the years flowered and blossomed into an abiding love within her heart. The bonds of that love proved too powerful ever to break. And their love story is the greatest love story I have ever heard.

About the Author

Rainfield Yen was born in 1944 in China, where his father was the governor of Jintan, a county near Shanghai. Fleeing the Communist takeover, his family escaped to Taiwan. They moved briefly to Hong Kong before settling permanently in Taipei.

Rainfield moved to the United States in 1967, earning first a master’s degree from Washington State University and then a Ph.D. from Columbia, both in electrical engineering. He returned to Taiwan in 1977, becoming an engineering professor at Tamkang University.

He was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2009. He is still living with the disease.