services Lee had procured. They were both a bit sweet on the middle-aged woman.
Parkinson’s was slowly shutting the old man down. His knuckles were curling, his shoulders hunching, and his feet increasingly deaf to the brain’s insistent commands. Yet the smile of the aging engineer grew ever gentler and child-like as the disease took hold. The irony tore at Lee, deepening his dread of the impending loss. As dementia set in and death approached, the old man’s rough edges were fading. The bullying commands were forgotten, the authoritarian voice having melted. What remained, underneath the layers of a life of trial, was an unexpected tenderness. It made Lee even sadder for the void looming beyond his father’s imminent passage into darkness.
Lee had taken to scrawling awkward verses in his journal. His attempts at poetry and short stories left him even emptier, though. He had fallen into idealizing his American days, especially those first weeks of freedom in Palo Alto. He allowed his mind to float, to think heretically once again. He would fantasize, and the revolutionary within would emerge briefly on paper. But then he would set his pen down and come back to earth, to the unsavory choices before him. One night, he burned the journal, feeding sheet by sheet into the blue flames of the coal burner.
In the end, he would be orphaned. He saw it now. At forty-eight, he gazed at an empty future—no parents, no children. It was too late for him; he would be left alone with his stubborn ideals and his rancorous countrymen.
In his father’s face the previous Sunday, he had seen a vision of his own demise. There would be no gentle hand to ease his passing. There would be no witness for him—no one to come to his rescue. He recognized now that his run had peaked, that his patriotism was misplaced, that he was sliding down from some precipice of experience, into his own inevitable decline.
He stood in the shadows, finishing his Camel, the cigarette tip the only light on the porch. It sparkled whenever he inhaled, pulsing like a firefly, illuminating his jet-black hair and severe eyes. Lee toyed with the smoke, attempting a picket line of rings by contorting his mouth in a brief moment of play. The nicotine and the air combined for a stimulating kick before he crushed the butt on the railing. Flicking it into the bushes, he hitched up his slacks before turning back to the policy wars.
A solitary figure remained in the conference room. It was Chen, making notes intently on a red file folder. The defense ministry’s global strategist, Chen was Lee’s foil in these interagency sessions. They clashed predictably, like an old couple familiar with each other’s pronouncements. They would measure themselves against one another, testing the limits of candor and dissent, sharpening their minds, playing devil’s advocate. Lee wondered if their set-piece encounters amused their colleagues, like the rancorous talk shows on CNN International with those jowly journalists trying to shout over each other.
Theirs was a clash grounded in mutual respect. Chen was the most reasonable of the brains at Defense, a modern man with a graduate degree from M.I.T., a man for whom the excesses of the Cultural Revolution were a horror never to be repeated. Chen had slowed down the faction that saw modernization merely as a way to restore a neo-Maoist purity to state control. Chen could see through the older military men, soldiers trapped in their web of rhetoric and fabricated deadlines for progress on Taiwan’s “reunification” with the Mainland. Yet, Chen also could still outmaneuver the clever young comrades who were so eager to manipulate their doctrinaire elders.
Then, again, Chen’s bureaucratic colleagues would instantly betray Lee if evidence of his past transgressions were ever uncovered—those dark times after Tiananmen when his struggle to honor the martyrs had led him to cross his own government. They would send Lee to a quick
Parkinson’s was slowly shutting the old man down. His knuckles were curling, his shoulders hunching, and his feet increasingly deaf to the brain’s insistent commands. Yet the smile of the aging engineer grew ever gentler and child-like as the disease took hold. The irony tore at Lee, deepening his dread of the impending loss. As dementia set in and death approached, the old man’s rough edges were fading. The bullying commands were forgotten, the authoritarian voice having melted. What remained, underneath the layers of a life of trial, was an unexpected tenderness. It made Lee even sadder for the void looming beyond his father’s imminent passage into darkness.
Lee had taken to scrawling awkward verses in his journal. His attempts at poetry and short stories left him even emptier, though. He had fallen into idealizing his American days, especially those first weeks of freedom in Palo Alto. He allowed his mind to float, to think heretically once again. He would fantasize, and the revolutionary within would emerge briefly on paper. But then he would set his pen down and come back to earth, to the unsavory choices before him. One night, he burned the journal, feeding sheet by sheet into the blue flames of the coal burner.
In the end, he would be orphaned. He saw it now. At forty-eight, he gazed at an empty future—no parents, no children. It was too late for him; he would be left alone with his stubborn ideals and his rancorous countrymen.
In his father’s face the previous Sunday, he had seen a vision of his own demise. There would be no gentle hand to ease his passing. There would be no witness for him—no one to come to his rescue. He recognized now that his run had peaked, that his patriotism was misplaced, that he was sliding down from some precipice of experience, into his own inevitable decline.
He stood in the shadows, finishing his Camel, the cigarette tip the only light on the porch. It sparkled whenever he inhaled, pulsing like a firefly, illuminating his jet-black hair and severe eyes. Lee toyed with the smoke, attempting a picket line of rings by contorting his mouth in a brief moment of play. The nicotine and the air combined for a stimulating kick before he crushed the butt on the railing. Flicking it into the bushes, he hitched up his slacks before turning back to the policy wars.
A solitary figure remained in the conference room. It was Chen, making notes intently on a red file folder. The defense ministry’s global strategist, Chen was Lee’s foil in these interagency sessions. They clashed predictably, like an old couple familiar with each other’s pronouncements. They would measure themselves against one another, testing the limits of candor and dissent, sharpening their minds, playing devil’s advocate. Lee wondered if their set-piece encounters amused their colleagues, like the rancorous talk shows on CNN International with those jowly journalists trying to shout over each other.
Theirs was a clash grounded in mutual respect. Chen was the most reasonable of the brains at Defense, a modern man with a graduate degree from M.I.T., a man for whom the excesses of the Cultural Revolution were a horror never to be repeated. Chen had slowed down the faction that saw modernization merely as a way to restore a neo-Maoist purity to state control. Chen could see through the older military men, soldiers trapped in their web of rhetoric and fabricated deadlines for progress on Taiwan’s “reunification” with the Mainland. Yet, Chen also could still outmaneuver the clever young comrades who were so eager to manipulate their doctrinaire elders.
Then, again, Chen’s bureaucratic colleagues would instantly betray Lee if evidence of his past transgressions were ever uncovered—those dark times after Tiananmen when his struggle to honor the martyrs had led him to cross his own government. They would send Lee to a quick
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