Today, February 28, is a good day for me to continue the reflections in this blog article’s Part 1, which was first posted on January 29, my birthday and the 4th anniversary of the start of my blogging with the article, “Greeting the New Millennium – nearly a decade late”, in 2009.
My sister Ning’s husband Yuzhuo Li would have turned 55 today.
For over 24 years after receiving his Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1988, Yuzhuo excelled as an academic and scientist, primarily mentoring students and researchers at Clarkson University in Potsdam, New York, and for the last nearly 5 years also leading research and development in Electronic Materials at the world’s largest chemical company, BASF in Germany (“Professor YuZhuo Li joins BASF • Leading expert in R&D for the semiconductor industry”, February 18, 2008, BASF; and, “学术报告(20100517), Challenges and Opportunities for Future Electronic Materials Research – From Nano- to Quantum”, May 11, 2010, State Key Laboratory of Optoelectronic Materials and Technologies, Sun Yat-sen University).
Yuzhuo’s diligent and productive life was recently cut short, unexpectedly and sadly, by a sudden illness on November 14, 2012 (“Yuzhuo Li”, November 27, 2012, Daily Courier-Observer) – a coma he couldn’t get out of, I was told.
Today is also a remarkable day to further the exploration and exposition of some of the interesting and intriguing issues begun in Part 1.
Pope Benedict XVI of the Roman Catholic Church steps down today after a surprising announcement on February 11, a resignation decision planned months ago according to his brother George Ratzinger (“Pope Benedict XVI resigns owing to age and declining health”, Lizzy Davies, John Hooper and Kate Connolly, February 11, 2013, The Guardian).
For nearly 24 years from 1981 to 2005, Joseph Aloisius Ratzinger presided over the church’s Doctrine of the Faith, and for the last nearly 8 years he has been the Supreme Pontiff (“Pope Benedict XVI Fast Facts”, February 16, 2013, CNN World).
Benedict XVI is the first German Pope in nearly 1,000 years since Stephen IX, the last of a succession of four German Popes within less than 10 years early last Millennium, and is also the first Pope to abdicate in nearly 600 years after Gregory XII (“German Ratzinger New Catholic Pope”, April 20, 2005, Today’s Zaman; and, “List of popes”, Wikipedia).
I know, my comparisons sound pretentious – The New York Times views this date as coinciding with the feast day of the 5th-century Pope Saint Hilarious (“Last Pope to Resign Faced Division Within the Church”, Rick Gladstone, February 11, 2013, The New York Times). Nonetheless, I wish my brother-in-law had gained wider fame than only in his field of specialty – but not ubiquitous like the Catholic Pope.
Resuming from Part 1, in the summer of 2002 when I was leaving Silicon Valley to look at the job market in New York City’s financial industry, I did so at the invitation of “Peter”, an old friend since our classmate days at the affiliated elementary school of Sun Yat-sen University in China.
I would also be visiting Ning, Yuzhuo and their son Eugene in Potsdam, NY.
Near the Canadian border, Potsdam is a small town named after the famous German city, one of 10 towns historically named after big foreign cities to form the St. Lawrence County – ostensibly to attract foreign settlers who could alert the United States about any British invasion (“The origin of Potsdam”, Sarah Hagen, August 8, 2009, Your News Now):
“After the Revolutionary War, the Board of Land Commissioners parceled the North Country and ten towns were named in Northern New York. Most of these towns were named after big cities abroad. Today, they are recognized collectively as St. Lawrence County.
St. Lawrence County Historical Association Executive Director Trent Trulock said, “The state was eager to settle people in Northern New York both to raise money and to create some early warning system for when the British invade, if they come from Canada, we’ll know about it because the settlers up in Northern New York State would let everybody know.”
And Trulock says the names made it easier to sell the property to both local and foreign settlers.”
2 of the 10 towns have since changed their names, leaving 8 with the original foreign names:
“Since the development of the Ten Towns in St. Lawrence County, two towns have changed their name. The Town of Potsdam, however, remains to be one of the original titles.”
There could be a huge difference between 10 and 8, as one of the many cultural superstitions about crows’ warnings, this one from England, says (“Pagan Blog Project: The crow, psychopomps and Morrigan”, Frater Docet Umbra, February 6, 2012, Blog about Thelema, Magick and the Occult on the Sovereign Island of Ireland):
“One Crow for sorrow,
Two Crows for mirth;
Three Crows for a wedding,
Four Crows for a birth;
Five Crows for silver,
Six Crows for gold;
Seven Crows for a secret, not to be told;
Eight Crows for heaven,
Nine Crows for hell;
And ten Crows for the devils own self.”
10 or 8 could be the difference between Britain and Canada to the Americans in an early era.
My sister has been teaching at St. Lawrence University located at the County seat, Canton, and in my first blog post 4 years ago I mused about Canton being the namesake of our hometown in China (“Greeting the New Millennium – nearly a decade late”):
“To me it is very interesting that my sister Ning ended up doing her career work in an American town that bears the same name as the Chinese city we had grown up in, because it adds a personal dimension to these stories.”
But the town where Ning works had in fact been one of the 10 originals, and named after the Chinese city (“Welcome to Canton, NY”, Bob LaRue, Canton, New York; and, Gates Curtis ed., Our County and Its People, A Memorial Record of St. Lawrence County, New York, 1894, The Boston History Company).
Rather than “ended up” there, Ning may have been a genuine recruit to Canton from the original Chinese city; and having been settled in Potsdam to work, Yuzhuo was then recruited to the real Germany.
I would even fancy that Yuzhuo’s death somehow foretold Benedict XVI’s abdication – an event of sorrow chosen by the German Pope that happens to be on Yuzhuo’s birthday!
In the early summer of 2002 I could have had a driving partner for the trip from the San Francisco Bay Area to New York City, but decided to go solo.
Recall as in Part 1, while living in Castro Valley in year 2000 I switched family doctor from Steven Una to newly arrived female doctor Ling Xu after Dr. Xu told me about her background, which had geographical links to my father’s background in China, and to the Texas backgrounds of two bosses at the Silicon Valley company where I worked and of Ling Yuan, my childhood friend then in the Bay Area biotech industry; but after the doctor change I soon fell mysteriously ill and doctors couldn’t find anything wrong.
Also as in Part 1, after moving to Pleasant Hill in the fall of 2001 New York Life Insurance Company – not my doctors – diagnosed that I had Type 2 diabetes, and turned down my application, and on October 11 I was also laid off from the San Jose start-up company; then in the spring of 2002 while my house was for sale I allowed Corinne Fong, a young Chinese American woman without a job, to rent a room out of sympathy that she had no place to go, despite her inability to pay rent; but Corinne soon refused to let her room be shown to potential home buyers and even made false allegations about me to police, and my house sale was nearly sabotaged at a time when I had no income to make mortgage payments – before I eventually helped her move to a nice house of her choice in Novato in Marin County.
During that Springtime, a Chinese woman also phoned me looking for a room. I no longer took new renters and the experience with Corinne was hurting, but this young woman was a former student from China like I had once been, So I cordially invited her over and told her about my home selling situation. She decided not to move here from her apartment in Lafayette – the same town where my first Pleasant Hill renter Cindy Wang’s boyfriend had gotten a job as in Part 1 – but told me about herself: Yunfeng Deng was a graduate of People’s University of China in Beijing where my father had once studied, and was of the same family name as the late former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping, with her given name sounding like a combination of something from my father’s and mine.
An accountant married to a web developer for Morgan Stanley in New York City, Yunfeng would like to socialize so we went to a Napa Valley winery tour she had looked forward to.
My home was then sold and I was getting ready to drive to New York. Yunfeng said she also planned to move and drive to New York to be with her husband and would like to have a partner for the long trip, but I decided not to follow up on her lead.
My past political activism had led me to a keen habit of making political, social and cultural observances while visiting places; as there was no romantic obligation I wouldn’t let my sociological studies across a large part of the United States be foiled by Yunfeng’s different interests.
I also chose to go across the southern U.S. instead of taking the northern route, for several reasons.
In early 2002 when my U.S. work visa was expiring, I had driven to Vancouver, Canada, and then returned as a visitor by way of northern California, Oregon and Washington. A little south of it, I had taken the western part of Interstate 80 in 1983, with my then roommate “Li”, a fellow Mathematics graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, who was more senior and had taught me how to drive; we took several Chinese visiting scholars across Nevada and Utah en route to Yellowstone National Park.
I knew how harsh the Utah climate was when in 1983 our rental car broke down at the Salt Lake shore and we had to wait in the salty, humid hot air for an hour for the replacement.
Now in 2002 I had diabetes also.
“Li” was my first roommate at UC Berkeley until I moved out of his apartment, to share David Chin’s in 1984 as in Part 1. In a March 29, 2011 blog post I have recalled an episode after moving out, about Li delivering a book on behalf of a visiting Taiwanese professor to Taiwanese American author Henry Liu not long before Liu’s murder (“Team Canada female athletes disqualified from Commonwealth silver medal, jailed Chinese democracy activist awarded with Nobel peace prize, and others in between (Part 3) – when violence and motive are subtle and pervasive”):
“In my February 2010 Chinese blog post and its English Synopsis I mentioned an episode in 1984 when a Taiwanese visiting professor of Philosophy was about to go to teach at Beijing University, had “Li” deliver his new book to a Taiwanese author living across the San Francisco Bay not far from Stanford, and then not long after that the other author, Henry Liu (pen name Jiang Nan, 江南) who had recently written an unauthorized biography of Chiang Ching-kuo, president of the government in Taiwan and son of Chiang Kai-shek, was murdered at his home.
Such reinforced the sense that it’s dangerous for Chinese and Taiwanese intellectuals to make an enemy of the Chiang father-and-son dynasty.”
In 1984 I wasn’t involved in politics, only following it keenly, including attending lectures by Chinese political dissidents and occasionally socializing with some who were at UC Berkeley. But even after I became political active in Vancouver in the early 1990s, I focused on political issues and political leaders’ rights and wrongs in them, rather than on their personal scores and motives. In my view, personal tragedies in politics like Henry Liu’s death were more underlain by treacheries in the latter category.
In the southern U.S., I had driven to as far as the Grand Canyon as part of the 1983 return trip, during which we saw our replacement rental car blow a tire in Death Valley; we weren’t good at replacing it and were feeling the desert heat, but just so luckily two American outdoors-type guys came by in a truck and the Good Samaritans did it for us in no time.
The southern summer was milder as long as Death Valley, which I had already visited, was bypassed.
Los Angeles was the first logical stop.
I went there to say goodbye to Tobin Zhou, an old friend and my sister Ning’s childhood classmate, who after I had moved into my first home in Castro Valley was in San Francisco with his family and brought a housewarming gift basket.
As in Part 1, while in Castro Valley some of the relatives and friends of my Silicon Valley engineer friends Zhicheng Lin and Ruth Lin had come to the Bay Area to look for work and stayed briefly at my place. At the time, I forwarded some of them to Tobin’s attention for his computer software business, and Tobin conscientiously accepted Lusia Lu, a competent software designer and programmer with experience designing software for Chinese shopping malls.
Lusia’s friend and Ruth’s cousin Tammy Tan was more complicated.
When I first met Tammy at Ruth’s home in Mountain View, she was on a personal visit from China where she had worked in Beijing, and then in my hometown Guangzhou, i.e., Canton, as an office manager. I showed affection to Tammy, an innocent-appearing young woman who was not only from Sichuan province like Ruth, but from Deng Xiaoping’s home county Guang’an – that was over a year before Yunfeng Deng befriending me in Pleasant Hill.
A few months after our first meeting Tammy was in the U.S. on business, employed by Compuware, a large software company headquartered in Detroit, Michigan. She stayed with me briefly, in the room left by my former renter Melisande Elliott, a University of Virginia graduate majoring in mental health as in Part 1.
Tammy may have tried to flirt with me, but I kept it non-romantic due not only to her marital status but to my observation that only a few months apart she now acted the part of a brash businesswoman. I was quite amazed by her sense of confidence, that though her husband was in China her U.S. immigration application passed the initial stages as her lawyer told her.
Then one morning Tammy suddenly said, “What if I weren’t married?”
I dodged her rhetorical question, sensing that Tammy’s unpredictability could be more than I experienced. When she soon moved back to Ruth’s home across the Bay I had no problem with her decision.
That was the only time in Castro Valley that things might turn unpleasant for me, which later happened in Pleasant Hill with the Chinese American Corinne Fong as mentioned earlier.
Tammy then went down to the more exciting Los Angeles, where Tobin’s business was apparently too small for her but opportunities abound.
After my October 11, 2001 layoff I went to visit Glenn Vandenbroeck, the technical recruiter who had recruited me for my start-up software design and engineering job. While there, a warm and sunny young woman walked by and Glenn introduced that she was his colleague “Elissa”.
In late October/early November I told Glenn I also wanted to look at the LA job market, and Glenn said Elissa had just moved back to her home region of southern California, and made initial contact with her for me.
But when I visited her Long Beach recruiting firm office in November 2001, I couldn’t believe it was the same Elissa. She looked very different, not only noticeably slimmer but grim and calculating. The second time around I had at least recognized Tammy with a different personality, but I seriously doubted if Elissa was the same person or I was walking into a Hollywood-style suspense thriller plot – not the least for her eerie name, Elissa Naideth.
I told Elissa I was going farther south to meet two other recruiters, and she said she lived south in Huntington Beach and would be home.
The town’s name was familiar. When I taught at the University of Hawaii in 1997-99 a women’s volleyball star player whom I ran into a few times, Jennifer Roberts, was from Huntington Beach (“Hawaii Player Profile: 12 Jennifer Roberts”, University of Hawaii). Women’s volleyball was a favorite sport for me as I have said in an earlier blog post (“Team Canada female athletes disqualified from Commonwealth silver medal, jailed Chinese democracy activist awarded with Nobel peace prize, and others in between (Part 1) — when democracy can be trumped by issue-based politics”).
As I drove close to Huntington Beach, with some trepidation I called Elissa on her cellphone to see if she was available for a meal or a drink, but she politely said she wouldn’t have time.
Driving through the town, I noted to myself that a tall-girl athlete had come from this town that didn’t look tall or big. Coincidentally in 2001-02, Roberts followed her new boyfriend Ryan McGuyre’s favorite number, 13, to engage on June 13, 2001, marry on July 13, 2002, and become an assistant coach for her husband’s volleyball coaching at California Baptist University in Riverside, until 2012 when Ryan McGuyre became a University of Maryland assistant coach – as announced on a day of his favorite number, February 13 (“College Volleyball”, Cindy Luis, March 24, 2004, Honolulu Star Bulletin; and, “McGuyre Hired as Assistant Coach”, February 13, 2012, University of Maryland Official Athletic Site).
Past Huntington Beach, and I was greatly impressed by Newport Beach’s thoughtfully designed landscapes and splendid buildings.
I had heard of this small city at the Pacific Ocean many times in my Berkeley days, from fellow graduate student and friend Marc da Costa Nunes and his friend Judy, a Chinese American undergraduate student I had taught as a Calculus teaching assistant, both of them from Newport Beach.
Besides its good urban planning, which in year 2000 also added voter referendum on certain things, Newport Beach has been nationally recognized for its continuous efforts to maintain a green environment (“National Planning Awards 2008”, American Planning Association; “Tree City USA—Sterling Communities”, Arbor Day Foundation; and, “In the News: Tree City USA”, 2013, Daily Pilot).
Meeting the next two recruiters was like a comedy. The sisters, Kathy and Kristy, worked in Irvine but interviewed me at their home office in San Juan Capistrano, and I then took them to dinner in the restaurant of their choice, all the while wondering how they could recruit for technology companies as it was obvious they had learning disabilities themselves, which hadn’t shown up in our email communications.
In the November 2001 LA trip I also met Theresa Fong again after many years, a former colleague and friend at the University of British Columbia from 1988 after my UC Berkeley Ph.D. graduation. Theresa and her companion, retired Hong Kong police superintendent Frank Kong, had moved to LA in 1991 – before I got into a political dispute with our boss, UBC Computer Science Head Maria Klawe as mentioned in Part 1.
As in an earlier blog post, Theresa’s sister Christine had been involved in a major human-smuggling case that police cracked when I was with UBC (“Team Canada female athletes disqualified from Commonwealth silver medal, jailed Chinese democracy activist awarded with Nobel peace prize, and others in between (Part 5) — when law enforcement considerations reflect entrenched interests”):
“The Fong sisters’ parents had been wealthy business people from Hong Kong, the sisters had brother Paul locally and other siblings internationally, and when I first arrived Theresa was still involved in a downtown Vancouver karaoke-bar business as well as in the ownership of a local racehorse. What was really interesting is that they had connections running on ‘both sides of the track’, as the following passages from a 1990 newspaper article showed ‘the other side’, quite in sharp contrast to Theresa’s police-superintendent companionship:
…
The Fong sisters’ Kerrisdale neighborhood home was where I reconnected with Elaine Ng (also known as Elaine Wu) and her mother, whom I had not seen since late 1970s. I also met the sisters’ friend, fashion buyer “Irene”, whom I presume was the individual in the human-smuggling case as reported in the above newspaper quote, but I knew nothing of the smuggling and had no idea gang members went there also.
In any case, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police had everything under surveillance over a year before my 1988 arrival to be acquainted with colleague Theresa but they chose to crackdown only in 1989, after 60 persons had been smuggled and with the gang leader safely in Taiwan – you know what I mean.”
So in November 2001 when we went to a dinner together in LA, there were not only Tobin and his wife Nancy but also Theresa and Frank, as well as Lusia, Tammy, and “April” – a new acquaintance the two girls had introduced to me.
Lusia was Tobin’s employee. Tammy told me she now worked for China Eastern Airlines, and she lived in a nice house: the home of a successful Chinese American businesswoman, in San Marino where the world-famous Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens were located, with photos of her meeting then Chinese President Jiang Zemin prominently displayed in the house.
Both Huntington Beach, and Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens, were named after businessman Henry E. Huntington, symbolizing his great influence in the past development of southern California (“Henry E. Huntington”, Wikipedia).
April was even more ambitious than Tammy. Outspoken and articulate, with some journalism background, the young woman had once worked as a secretary for one of China’s top military leaders, and was now married to a former senior executive of a Guangzhou-based Chinese oil company with South China Sea oil fields, settling in the United States.
To me April appeared like an intellectual version of my distant cousin, former Miss Asia Elaine Ng mentioned in the quote above, and more here from the same blog post:
“In Part 3 I have mentioned Christine’s sponsorship of a Vancouver high school student Elaine Ng, my distant maternal cousin originally from China, for the 1990 Miss Asia Pageant in Hong Kong, which Elaine won. Elaine subsequently became an actress, and is known as the unwed mother of Kung Fu megastar Jackie Chan’s daughter, “Little Dragon Girl”.”
A parallel was even here, between whatever links April had with a former Chinese military leader and Elaine’s complicated relationship with Kung Fu megastar Jackie Chan.
In November 2001 Lusia, Tammy and April took me to Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens to let me know more about it, but we didn’t have time for a tour. Instead, they took the time taking me to San Diego Zoo Safari Park, and I enjoyed it as well as the young women’s wild and adventurous spirits – noticeably Tammy’s and April’s.
Now in May 2002 on my start to drive to New York, Lusia who incidentally had worked and lived in Long Island, NY, spent some time with me, Tammy barely showed up, and April was too preoccupied with her new pregnancy.
Readers of this blog article could grow skeptical, that having the kind of social connections with young women like Tammy and April I could really be politically active in a dissenting or challenging direction. If so, I would even second such scepticism, in the old fashion of this blog article’s title elaborated on in Part 1, and say: not to mention that I wasn’t Sir Lancelot, one of the Twelve Knights, in the court of anyone or another.
In a Southwest U.S. tour, Las Vegas was a must stop for its scenes even when not into gambling. I remember my last time there, in the 1980s when I drove my UC Berkeley friend “Dar” mentioned in Part 1 to visit Tobin in Los Angeles and we went to Las Vegas together: we did sightseeing during the day, and they went casino gambling at night while I slept in the motel.
But where else in the world could one see an Egyptian pyramid, a Moroccan palace, the Venice canals, the Eiffel Tower of Paris and New York City’s Statue of Liberty, all replicated in grandeur and erected along one long boulevard, and thousands of smiling tourists walk about and admire at them (“Around the World in One City: Las Vegas”, Dave Emery, April 1, 2010, HotelClub Travel Blog)? The barren, desert-like land was in good use at least in this respect.
At Flagstaff, Arizona, I had an unscheduled overnight stay due to closure for repair of one of the highways. When I got to the Grand Canyon, the early summer was still cool and very comfortable.
My familiarity with the southern U.S. route ended after Phoenix, a city I had visited in January 1989 for an annual meeting of the American Mathematical Society. From there on it was all virgin territories for me.
Until Washington, D.C., that was, or really Maryland because in 1987 when I visited the University of Maryland at College Park – a trip mentioned in my first blog post 4 years ago – I didn’t get to tour the U.S. capital city at all.
Surprisingly, the hot weather along the way in the southern U.S. didn’t present a serious problem to me suffering from diabetes.
The worst of the heat was actually experienced before Las Vegas, in Palm Springs, CA. Just taking a leisure-paced, window-shopping stroll along South Palm Canyon Drive in downtown, and the heat was unbearable without frequent stops inside the stores.
I wondered at the time whether the scorching climate was more tolerant to the rich and famous, as the city was an internationally haven for them, with generously sized estates all around.
The small city’s most famous celebrities had been the musical duo Sonny & Cher. In the perception of someone like me a little behind their time, Cher was this sexy entertainer who went out of her way to cheer American soldiers while Sonny was this pint-sized Italian American small businessman – originally from Detroit – who made it to be among the politicians as Mayor of Palm Springs and then Republican Congressman, only to be found killed in a tree collision while skiing ahead of his last wife and their two children in Lake Tahoe, Nevada, on January 5, 1998, days after Michael Kennedy, son of the late U.S. Democrat Senator Robert F. Kennedy, had been killed on December 31, 1997 while playing football on a ski slope in Aspen, Colorado. (“Sonny Bono Is Killed in Ski Crash”, William Claiborne, January 7, 1998, The Washington Post; and, “Cher: ‘I don’t have to be for this war to support the troops’”, Steve Mraz, July 16, 2006, Stars and Stripes)
Sonny Bono’s political legacy was carried forward by his wife Mary Whitaker as Congresswoman Mary Bono, and more recently as Congresswoman Mary Bono Mack courtesy of her marriage to Florida Republican Congressman Connie Mack, until her defeat in the November 2012 election, which also saw her husband lose in a Senate race against Democrat Bill Nelson (“Mary Bono Mack booted from Congress”, Michael McGuire, November 7, 2012, Examiner.com; and, “Connie Mack’s Double-Header Loss”, Jonathan Salant, November 7, 2012, Bloomberg).
This is where I can resume some of the discussions in Part 1 on the Guinevere-and-Lancelot metaphor that is in the title of, and a major theme of, this article – for the reason that both power and love are necessary ingredients.
“Whitaker” is reputed to be one of the most ancient Anglo-Saxon names, traceable in the written records to the 11th-12th centuries or earlier, with “white acre” and “wheat acre” being its origin (“Last name: Whitaker”, The Internet Surname Database; and, “Whitaker”, Celtic Radio), i.e., no later than the historical era when the Lancelot character first appeared in the legends of King Arthur and the Twelve Knights of the Round Table as discussed in Part 1 – a favorite warrior knight among the twelve, whose affair with Queen Guinevere contributed to the decline and the demise of the King.
Among the Whitakers, “Mary Whitaker” is reported to be the most common name as in the mid-19th-century British censuses (“The Whitaker Family History”, Your-family-history.com).
Back in my UC Berkeley days there was a fellow graduate student one year ahead of me by the name of Nathaniel Whitaker, except that he was African American so I don’t know how his name had been inherited. “Nate” was very athletic, a regular tennis buddy of a well-known professor, Andrew Majda, who and whose Swiss wife, Gerta Keller, have been mentioned in an earlier blog post (“Team Canada female athletes disqualified from Commonwealth silver medal, jailed Chinese democracy activist awarded with Nobel peace prize, and others in between (Part 1) — when democracy can be trumped by issue-based politics”).
Nate and my classmate friend Paul Wright – mentioned in Part 5 of the blog article referenced above – were among a very small number of African American Mathematics Ph.D. students in the United States (Nathaniel Dean ed., African Americans in Mathematics, June 26-28, 1996, DIMACS Workshop, American Mathematical Society).
For women, one obvious way to acquire new surnames is through marriages. Along with political powers succeeded or associated with, Mary Bono Mack has had Italian and Irish names added to her Anglo-Saxon stock: Connie Mack, or Cornelius Harvey McGillicuddy IV, is son of a former U.S. Senator and grandson of a legendary Irish American baseball figure (“Famous Irish American Connie Mack”, Tara Clapper, January 15, 2009, Examiner.com; and, “Connie Mack IV”, Wikipedia).
But the story of Sonny, Mary & Connie was not one in the frame of King Arthur, Queen Guinevere and Sir Lancelot, given that Sonny Bono had died beforehand, in contrast to the nasty financial power struggle and divorce battle in his earlier marriage to Cher (“Cher”, Cintra Wilson, February 22, 2000, Salon).
But in 1999 over a year after Sonny’s death, George Magazine published an article that revealed: the marriage of Sonny and Mary had been on the rock before Sonny’s death; Mary thought of Sonny as having been responsible for his own death by abusing painkillers, “What he did showed absolute lack of judgment. That’s what these pills do”; but Susie Coelho, Sonny’s ex-wife in-between Cher and Mary, disputed Mary’s account by saying Sonny had been “very anti-drug”, and Sonny’s mother recalled Sonny accusing Mary of “fooling around”. (“Proud Mary Bono”, Ann Bardach, August 1999, George Magazine, rickross.com)
The above info from a George Magazine article’s copy posted by the Rick A. Ross Institute has however not been authenticated by me since the magazine founded by John F. Kennedy, Jr., who died in a plane crash in July 1999 one month before the article’s appearance, is no longer in existence (“George (magazine)”, Wikipedia).
There have been allegations by private investigators, including a former FBI agent, that Sonny Bono had been murdered (“Hitmen ‘clubbed’ Sonny Bono to death, ex-FBI agent claims”, April 4, 2008, Herald Sun).
The next hot spot in my Summer 2002 southern U.S. tour as I recall was a walking tour to view cactus plants in a desert area where the trail ended in a small building looking out toward the Mexican border a few miles south – probably in the area of the Organ Pipe Cactus Family Picnic Ground in Arizona. Several miles of early afternoon walk, in the dry heat under a bright sun for over 2 hours, proved much more adaptable than in Palm Springs.
A problem for a diabetes patient on insulin-type medications is that the medications could lead to a low blood-sugar level, and that the patient could be unsure about, or confused with, the blood level when discomfort occurred, i.e., whether it was too high or too low – each with its health risks (“When Your Blood Glucose Is Too High or Too Low”, National Diabetes Information Clearinghouse, National Institute of Health).
Having some candy-like glucose tablets, which I had with me, was handy remedy for low blood glucose but they might not be enough when one was indeed hungry.
That may have been what happened the evening I arrived at Las Cruces in southern New Mexico, after 8 o’clock and hadn’t had supper. My plan had been to get to a tourist area as I had seen on the map, but after getting off Interstate 25 and driving along Main Street for a while I felt tired and weak, that I had to eat immediately.
Very few restaurants along the street that were easily spotted were still open, and when I saw a Denny’s I parked and went in, because it was a restaurant with dependable food for me since my Vancouver days.
The first Denny’s episode I remember well was in 1996 when I was helping Taiwanese Canadian businesswoman Liza Chiang start a small business designing and marketing Canadian souvenirs to be made with Canadian maple leaves. I was out of the academia at the time after a dispute with my UBC boss Maria Klawe in 1991-92, but Liza’s late father had experienced much worse politics in Taiwan as I have recalled in a November 22, 2009 blog post (“Nairobi to Shenzhen”, and on to Guangzhou):
“I began working again in Vancouver in 1996 only when I was introduced to a businesswoman who had moved from Taiwan, who also told me her late father had been the political secretary of General Sun Liren (Sun Li-jen) in Taiwan when (in August 1955) the Virginia Military Institute graduate and World War II hero was put under house arrest by strongman President Jiang Jieshi (Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek), which then lasted for almost the rest of Sun’s life until March 20, 1988, shortly after the death of Jiang’s son/President of Taiwan.”
My mother had stayed with me in Vancouver from June 1993 to late 1995/early 1996 before returning to China, and when I looked for a new rental place in south Vancouver afterwards, I met Lori, a young student majoring in Sculpture at Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design, someone more technically focused than Jennifer or Gennifer I later met in year 2000 in Castro Valley who studied it at California State University at Hayward as in Part 1.
Lori kept a large dog as companion, and when I arrived to view a room in her house she had advertised, a working-type guy was already there and had done the same. She didn’t rent the room to me, and in the end I moved to Richmond south of Vancouver and met Liza through links originating from my Taiwanese landlady, but I formed a good impression of Lori.
So when Liza wanted designers for Canadian maple leaf souvenirs that would be made via plastic lamination or resin casting, I thought of Lori and phoned her, and she indicated she would bring along her young fashion buyer friend Kristen from Montreal, but would like to meet over business lunch. Normally Liza had business meals with senior personalities only but I persuaded her to agree.
So as agreed to by Lori and Liza, the four of us met at the Denny’s restaurant on Southwest Marine Drive not far from Lori’s house in Marpole area of Vancouver, and later Liza gave the two girls some design contract work. But during the meeting I also noticed interesting contrasts between Lori, pint-sized, thoughtful and quiet, and Kristen, plus-sized, ambitious and outgoing.
Later in 2003 when I communicated with former Canadian Prime Minister Joe Clark on politics as mentioned in Part 1, it was through his constituency director named Lori (“Team Canada female athletes disqualified from Commonwealth silver medal, jailed Chinese democracy activist awarded with Nobel peace prize, and others in between (Part 1) — when democracy can be trumped by issue-based politics”).
The second memorable episode related to Denny’s was the onset of my diabetes in October 2000, also described in Part 1: driving back from my work in San Jose to my Castro Valley home at around 8’clock in the evening, near the border between Union City and Hayward I suddenly felt so weak that I would lose control of my car; I hurriedly got off Interstate 880 at Industrial Way near Home Depot Union City, went into a restaurant and ordered sweet food as in the past I had experienced lower blood-sugar symptoms; after the meal the near panic subsided but I continued to feel very sick this time.
Everyday I drove by, the first restaurant along Industrial Way prominently seen from the highway was, and still is, the Denny’s. A diabetes sufferer could become very tired and confused, and my memory of that day soon became so blurred that not long afterwards I forgot exactly which restaurant it was. But reviewing the restaurants along Industrial Way as they are now on Google Map and comparing them to my fragmented memory, I do not see another match.
In any case, looking from Interstate 880 the Denny’s was the most prominently visible restaurant around Industrial Way, and probably along the entire route between San Jose and Castro Valley, while large-portioned sweets on its menu had been among my favorites in my Vancouver Days.
Now in May 2002 in Las Cruces, again tired and weak due to diabetes – and also medications this time – but not as bad as in October 2000, I went into a Denny’s on Main Street.
I remember the Vancouver Southwest Marine Drive Denny’s as moderately busy that time in 1996, and the Hayward-Union City Industrial Way restaurant as very busy in October 2000.
But this Las Cruces Main Street Denny’s was nearly empty.
The waitress was a university student-type young woman, relatively tall, slim and long haired, a type I especially liked as Theresa Fong had once commented in Vancouver – close to myself I guess. But her personality could only be described as “NeutraSweet”, and after I began eating my meal she left work with a white styrofoam cup in hand, on the sidewalk heading north in the direction I had come from.
After the meal I felt more energetic, and decided to get a drink as it was only around 9’clock. I drove along Main Street until according to the brochure and map I had – most likely American Automobile Association’s – it was a tourist center of the town.
In the dark I could see an old Roman Church-like structure, and nearby I found a local-type restaurant that my brochure indicated had a bar. The restaurant was still serving food but I went to the bar, settled down with a beer in hand, and enjoyed watching a group of people playing billiards at the pool table. The mixture of working-type men and student-age girls were very friendly, frequently casting attentions toward others including me as their games went along.
But there was no old Roman Church-like building in Las Cruces. The old town section of the city is Old Mesilla, a tourist destination with shops, restaurants and bars. In Old Mesilla there stands a modern, Roman-like structure, the Basilica of San Albino, home to the Roman Catholic Diocese of Las Cruces, center of the “strongly religious community of Mesilla” where wild lifestyles, including in politics, have also been a trademark (“The Shops of Old Mesilla, N.M.”, Mesilla.com) – a very interesting mix.
I arrived in Austin, the Texas state capital, on a Friday, and placed a call to a University of Texas at Austin professor I had known since 1987. But he wasn’t in his office.
This was the Austin and the university I have mentioned prominently in Part 1, that several persons around me in Silicon Valley from late 1999 to 2002, who were in patron positions to help me, had earned University of Texas at Austin graduate degrees: president “Ian” and the vice president of engineering of the company where I worked, and my elementary-school classmate friend Ling Yuan in the Bay Area biotech industry.
They were all younger, in the case of Ling by a few months, but more successful than me.
Part 1 has raised the specter about such a high concentration of UT Austin alumni around me. Now the fact that the professor I wanted to see in May 2002 was at UT Austin is an even more tell-tale sign of certain ambitions behind this phenomenon.
Professor Ivo Babuska was a mathematical and computational scientist whom I had read about in my undergraduate days, and whose work I had developed a high degree of respect for while doing graduate study at UC Berkeley when he was a professor at the University of Maryland at College Park.
Politically, the personalities in the fields of pure mathematics and those in the fields of applied mathematics were quite different. A large number of academicians in pure math were known to be political left-wings, active to various degrees as political dissidents, international human-rights activists, or in the case of Americans, anti-war activists.
Near the opening of my first blog post dated January 29, 2009 – its 4th anniversary is marked by the date of Part 1 – I referred to a personal connection, namely my Ph.D. adviser at UC Berkeley having been a leading anti-war activist (“Greeting the New Millennium – nearly a decade late”):
“Having grown up a peaceful child and done Ph.D. study under someone who happened to have a past background of vigorous opposition to the Vietnam War, I tended to look into things via more idealistic, less bombastic lenses, and my presumption could sometimes be quite naïve.”
But despite my Ph.D. adviser’s pure math pedigrees, my professional interests and studies were more in applied and computational mathematics, in fields where politics was usually not openly discussed as much, not the least because research was substantially funded by industry and by military-related sources.
Ivo Babuska is one such fine example, an applied mathematician originally from Prague, capital of the Czech Republic, someone so accomplished that his birthday has been hailed as among (“Babuska’s Birth Hailed as Major Event”, May 20, 2001, Cockrell School of Engineering, University of Texas at Austin):
“Prague’s “top 11 historical events” between 1197 and 1966 a.d. compiled by Mlada Fronta Dnes, the Czech Republic’s largest newspaper”.
Babuska’s background had a link to a major political event, but that link has usually been minimized by most biographical sources, stating only that he came to the United States from Czechoslovakia in 1968. But here is one biography that offered more details about his 1968 move (“Ivo Milan Babuska”, J J O’Connor and E F Robertson, July 2011, School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of St Andrews, Scotland):
“The political situation in Czechoslovakia has not been mentioned up to now in Babuska’s biography since it has played a relatively small part. The Communists had seized control of the country in 1948 and it was under strong Soviet influence over the following years. Mathematics was allowed to develop without interference, however, and the applied and computational methods developed by Babuska found favour. Beginning in 1964 reformers had won many concessions which became more clear-cut in early 1968 when the country began to implement “socialism with a human face”. The reforms came to a sudden end, however, in August 1968 when Soviet tanks rolled into Prague. Babuska had just been appointed as a professor at the Charles University of Prague but, given the political situation, he travelled with his family to the United States where he spent a year as a visiting professor at the Institute for Fluid Dynamics and Applied Mathematics at the University of Maryland at College Park. He was given a permanent appointment as a professor at the University of Maryland in the following year and he held this position until 1995. He was then appointed Professor of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics, Professor of Mathematics, and appointed to the Robert Trull Chair in Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. Although now over 85 years of age, he continues to hold these positions.
After coming to the United States, Babuska became the world-leading expert in finite element analysis.”
The above quote says that during the early period of the Communist era in Czechoslovakia Babuska’s pioneering work actually “found favour” – in my view because of usefulness for industrial applications – but when the Soviet Union invaded Prague in 1968 to put down the political reforms – known as the Prague Spring – Babuska and his family were given a passage to the U.S. where he became “the world-leading expert in finite element analysis”.
Wouldn’t that be a subject to feature for the politically minded as a lesson about Soviet interference, given that Maryland was a place with close ties to the U.S. government sectors and American politics?
Not really, because as I have pointed out priorities were different in the applied math fields.
In his acceptance speech for the 1995 von Neumann Medal awarded by the United States Association for Computational Mechanics, Babuska touched on the subject of the links experts in his fields more likely would had, in the example of John von Neumann, world-renowned mathematician and “father of modern digital computers”, who was also from Eastern Europe (“Ivo Babuska Acceptance Remarks”, June 13, 1995, USACM):
“What kind of personality was von Neumann, a man who contributed so much to mathematics, who was the father of modern digital computers, who influenced profoundly U.S. policy in the Truman and Eisenhower Administrations? Who was the man who, near his death, had a meeting at Walter Reed Hospital, where gathered around his bedside and attentive to his last words of advice and wisdom were the Secretary of the Army, Navy and Air Force, and all the military Chiefs of Staff?
When Nobel Laureate Eugen Wigner visited his native Budapest a decade after von Neumann’s death, he was asked whether it was true that in the early and middle 1950s the scientific and nuclear policies of the United States were largely decided by von Neumann. Wigner replied in his precise manner, “That is not quite so. But after von Neumann had analyzed a problem, it was clear what had to be done.””
John von Neumann’s job was giving advice to the American military leaders, even when on his deathbed!
After his intimate participations in advanced military researches during World War II and afterwards, including in the development of the nuclear bomb, John von Neumann died of cancer in 1957 at only 53, and there has been a question whether his premature death had been work-related (Norman MacRae, John Von Neumann: The Scientific Genius Who Pioneered the Modern Computer, Game Theory, Nuclear Deterrence, and Much More, 1992, American Mathematical Society):
“It is plausible that in 1955 the then-fifty-one-year-old Johnny’s cancer sprang from his attendance at the 1946 Bikini nuclear tests. The safety precautions at Bikini were based on calculations that were meant to keep any observer’s exposure to radiation well below what had given Japanese at Hiroshima even a 1 percent extra risk of cancer. But Johnny, like some other great scientists, underestimated risks at that time. He was startled when radiation probably caused the cancer and death in 1954 at age fifty-three of his great friend Fermi, whose 1930s experiments with nuclear bombardment in Italy were not accompanied by proper precautions. Soon after a Soviet nuclear test in 1953 Sakharov and Vyacheslav Malyshev walked near the site to assess its results. Sakharov ascribed Malyshev’s death from leukemia in 1954, and possibly his own terminal illness thirty-five years later, to that walk.”
So von Neumann and some other great scientists in the nuclear bomb development may have “underestimated” the health risks, and he and Enrico Fermi who had discovered nuclear reaction (“Enrico Fermi Biography”, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory), both died at the age of 53.
Hmm, I doubt that a mathematician of von Neumann’s caliber would have incorrectly calculated the cancer risks from radiation.
In a 2011 Chinese blog post I have recalled my experiences, as a child and then a youngster, witnessing the career activities of my father, a Philosophy faculty member at Sun Yet-sen University in China, and have noted an unusually high incidence of cancer deaths for related faculty members involved in politics; here is a passage from an English Synopsis (“忆往昔，学历史智慧 (Reminiscing the past, learning history’s wisdom) – Part 4”):
“After Cultural Revolution ended, Yang Rongguo soon died of cancer in 1978 at the age of 71. The former leader of Father’s writing group, Zhang Hai, also died of cancer in late 1970s, not yet reaching his 70 as far as Feng remembers.
Father’s former colleague and roommate mentioned in Parts 2 & 3, “Uncle Xiong Maosheng”, had been an activist in studying Chairman Mao’s teachings, and published in early Cultural Revolution in a journal issue in which his article on studying the works of Chairman Mao appeared just ahead of an article praising the novel, “The Song of Ouyang Hai”. Uncle Xiong died of cancer during Cultural Revolution.
Part 3 has discussed about three Chinese calligraphers from maternal Grandpa’s Shantou region whose calligraphies have been included in a historical collection along with Grandpa’s and to whom Father had cultural links in one way or another, that they all died of cancer – including Father’s professor, Zhan Antai.”
These Chinese intellectuals worked in Social Sciences and Humanities fields totally unrelated to nuclear radiation.
In any case, it was a pity for the University of California that John von Neumann died at his prime age, as before his death he had decided to resign from the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and move to one of the UC campuses, as also revealed in the book quoted about him:
“When Johnny was in hospital in 1956, with what proved to be his terminal cancer, he wrote to Oppenheimer and explained, although not yet for publication, that he was not in fact going to come back to the IAS. He had privately accepted an offer to be professor at large at the University of California: he would live near one of its campuses (it had not been quite decided which) and proceed with research on the computer and its possible future uses, with considerable commercial sponsorship. We cannot know how much he would then have enriched our lives, with cellular automata, with totally new lines for the computer, with new sorts of mathematics.”
I bet it was my alma mater UC Berkeley John von Neumann was about to move to, given its close collaborations with several National Labs that had nuclear science and weapons researches, and its proximity to what would become Silicon Valley around Stanford University across the Bay as discussed in Part 1.
The scientific and technological history of the Bay Area would have looked very different, so much more – had “Johnny” come to his senses earlier, I sigh.
The physicist Robert Oppenheimer, the director of IAS at Princeton with whom von Neumann discussed his pending move in 1956, had hailed from UC Berkeley to become “father of the atomic bomb”, leading the development of nuclear bombs at Los Alamos National Lab founded by him in northern New Mexico; Oppenheimer later also died of cancer, at the age of 63 (“Oppenheimer: A Life, April 22, 1904 – February 18, 1967”, Center for Science, Technology, Medicine & Society, University of California, Berkeley).
In the anecdotes of mathematics, von Neumann was known not only for his brilliance but also for his uptight personality. In my first blog article dated January 29, 2009, I have referred to the life story of the mathematician and Nobel laureate John F. Nash, whose name was made famous by the 2001 Oscar-winning movie “A Beautiful Mind”. The book of the same title, from which the movie was adapted, had recorded the following impression of John von Neumann by John Nash as a young graduate student (Sylvia Nasar, A Beautiful Mind, 1998, Simon & Schuster):
“Nash went to see von Neumann a few days after he passed his generals. He wanted, he had told the secretary cockily, to discuss an idea that might be of interest to Professor von Neumann. It was a rather audacious thing for a graduate student to do. Von Neumann was a public figure, had very little contact with Princeton graduate students outside of occasional lectures, and generally discouraged them from seeking him out with their research problems. But it was typical of Nash, who had gone to see Einstein the year before with the germ of an idea.
Von Neumann was sitting at an enormous desk, looking more like a prosperous bank president than an academic in his expensive three-piece suit, silk tie, and jaunty pocket handkerchief. He had the preoccupied air of a busy executive. At the time, he was holding a dozen consultancies, “arguing the ear off Robert Oppenheimer” over the development of the H-bomb, and overseeing the construction and programming of two prototype computers. …
… Nash started to describe the proof he had in mind for an equilibrium in games of more than two players. But before he had gotten out more than a few disjointed sentences, von Neumann interrupted, jumped ahead to the yet unstated conclusion of Nash’s argument, and said abruptly, “That’s trivial, you know. That’s just a fixed point theorem.””
Like some say, a great mind is a terrible thing to waste.
Ivo Babuska has been much more fortunate. The award ceremony for his 1995 USACM von Neumann Medal also announced his retirement from the University of Maryland as well as his new jobs at UT Austin starting in September 1995, as the Trull Chair in Engineering, Professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics, and in the Department of Mathematics, and Senior Research Scientist at Texas Institute for Computational and Applied Mathematics.
Now at nearly 87 years of age, Bubuska is still active in teaching and research at UT Austin.
As mentioned earlier, my first time to the Washington, D.C. area had been a 1987 visit to UM College Park. There I was interviewed as a joint faculty candidate at the Institute for Physical Science and Technology and the Computer Science Department, and had the privilege to meet Prof. Bubuska at the Institute, who also attended one of my two seminar talks.
And while chatting with Babuska in the hallway, to my surprise an old Computer Science classmate from Sun Yat-sen University came out of the elevator. Yi Rong’s personal life had been fuller than mine, if not her professional career: she had gotten married after our graduation, then divorced, and was now studying for her Master’s degree in computer software at UM College Park.
Ivo Babuska then became instrumental in a visiting faculty position being offered to me in 1987 at the University of Maryland – the only U.S. job offer I received before going to teach at UBC in Canada in 1988 – by introducing me to Mathematics Professor Thomas Seidman at UM Baltimore County.
In the end when I decided, on the advice of others, to stay in UC Berkeley’s Math Ph.D. program for another year and extensively audit Computer Science courses, it was also Babuska who advised me to apply to Canadian universities the next year – given my U.S. visa status which he had personal empathy for.
And Babuska was also instrumental in the first publication of my research, recommending a scientific journal based in Vienna, Austria, which I didn’t realize was about my age (“Numerische Mathematik”, Wikipedia).
After my 1992 dispute at UBC with my boss Maria Klawe I didn’t have another academic job for years, and lost contact with many of my professional connections, including mentors like Ivo Babuska.
Then in year 2000 shortly after I had begun working in Silicon Valley, Bubuska visited the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute at Berkeley, a premier national and international venue for exchanges of mathematical ideas, in his only major stint there since MSRI’s founding in 1983 by the U.S. National Science Foundation; Babuska organized a March-April workshop on “Numerical and Applied Mathematics” (“Scientific Past”, Mathematical Sciences Research Institute; and, “NSF Opts for Three Institutes: UCLA’s IPAM To Join IMA, MSRI”, Barry A. Cipra, July 23, 1999, SIAM News).
But at the time I didn’t know that Babuska was around in the Bay Area, given the start-up company’s extremely busy, overtime schedules I worked as mentioned in Part 1.
Much more than the several UT Austin graduate-degree holders in patron positions around me when I was in Silicon Valley, Ivo Bubuska’s profile illustrated UT Austin’s role as a magnet for those with career ambitions making a transition – even after retirement – from government-related work to broader industry-related work. The several younger persons around me at Silicon Valley had all graduated from universities in China, a Communist country, before attending UT Austin.
But professional Texas links for me dated back to an earlier period. When I went to Berkeley to attend graduate school in August 1982, among the SYSU alumni coming to U.S. graduate schools was Ron Chen, a friend more senior than me, whose Master’s thesis and my Bachelor’s thesis had been supervised by the same “Professor Li”, then SYSU’s Computer Science Department chairman I have referred to in a 2011 blog post (“Team Canada female athletes disqualified from Commonwealth silver medal, jailed Chinese democracy activist awarded with Nobel peace prize, and others in between (Part 3) – when violence and motive are subtle and pervasive”):
“Professor Li had done graduate study in the Soviet Union before, explored a move from Northeast China back to his home province of Hunan neighboring Guangdong, and come to Sun Yat-sen University instead …
When I applied for graduate study in the United States Professor Li seriously recommended the U. S. Army Mathematics Research Center at the University of Wisconsin, Madison – Dr. Carl de Boor there and his General Motors connection were Professor Li’s favorite and it also had Dr. Grace Wahba – but I preferred the Math program at the University of California, Berkeley, although Computer Science at Stanford was my first choice.”
Ron’s specially was in control theory, including Kalman filtering, with engineering applications. He later received his Ph.D. degree from Texas A&M University located in College Station, TX, became a visiting faculty member at Rice University and eventually a tenured professor at University of Houston. In the New Millennium, Ron has been a professor in Hong Kong permanently, with honorary professorships and research affiliations at dozens of universities internationally, including in China, Argentina and Australia. (“Professor Ron Chen (陈关荣)”, futurict-china.org)
Around 1989-91 while I was at UBC, Ron sent me personal documents to let me know that, from his perspective, his career route in the U.S. was better than mine in Canada, that it was made possible by the help of immigration lawyers, and that I should consider it.
But I felt fine in Canada. Later in 1992 when I was engulfed in a political dispute at UBC with Maria Klawe, Ron and a SYSU mutual friend who was teaching at North Dakota State University at Fargo, visited me and gave seminar talks at UBC.
In contrast to Ron’s, my experiences with lawyers have been dismal, consisting primarily of a lawsuit and the need for legal defence, as well as related legal consultations, all stemming from my UBC dispute and my subsequent attempts to challenge the political leadership conduct of then Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney. A big part of these has been discussed in blog posts starting in February 2009, and is accessible through, “Team Canada female athletes disqualified from Commonwealth silver medal, jailed Chinese democracy activist awarded with Nobel peace prize, and others in between”.
But was such Texas-style ambition only about industry and career, or did it also encourage political activism?
I know that my old friend, UT Austin Ph.D. Ling Yuan has been very interested in bringing my attention to Chinese political issues. But I am also mindful of an elementary school episode – discussed in Part 3 of my blog article listed above – in around 1970 when Ling quickly reported to our teacher what I said despite having been the one seeking out my view on certain politics. So I would say that the Texas links encouraged political activism, but likely very management and control oriented.
In fact, around 1989 at UBC Computer Science Department, my boss Maria Klawe liked to say to the employees that she and her husband, computer scientist Nick Pippenger, had held important positions at IBM and been interviewed for jobs at UT Austin and UC San Diego but come to UBC, so everyone should appreciate what she was doing.
But in May 2002 at Austin there was more hidden that I didn’t know. Former UBC graduate student Andrew K. Martin was there working for Motorola, who during my 1992 dispute had been a key figure maneuvering against me, writing to persons in positions of authority to falsely accuse me of being mentally ill and violent – I have recalled this episode in Part 4 of the above listed blog article:
“Only one part of Martin’s allegations was true: on possibly three occasions I did show temper tantrum toward him.
…
For Martin not to consider my past apology and what I had said on that occasion and instead accused me as mentally ill and violent was absolutely unconscionable. Even if he had a wife back in Ontario, privacy should not be a devious excuse for oppression – unless like Vince Manis said the Nazis were in power.
A 1989 graduate of Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Andrew Martin had arrived before Rick Sample’s death, studied for a master’s degree under David Kirkpatrick and become a Ph.D. student under Carl Seger. After Ph.D. he went to the computer industry – at Motorola and IBM – in Austin, Texas, where several crucial persons crossing paths with me have been schooled (as in Part 3 of this blog articles): my old buddy “Ling”, and the founding president and engineering vice president of the Silicon Valley startup company I worked in ending with a “10/11 layoff”.
When I got into the first verbal incident with Martin, Kirkpatrick was very worried and said Andrew might not be as mature as he seemed…”
More about the persons mentioned in the above quote can be found in that blog article, including the 1989 murder of UBC Computer Science colleague Rick Sample, which is still unresolved because an acquittal of the chief suspect, Barry James Evans, was upheld by the Supreme Court of Canada despite the accused’s admission of being at the location around the estimated time of murder and the forensic evidence tying his gun to the death.
So Austin, TX, may have also acquired the political means to frame me or to justify getting rid of me.
Having done some sightseeing at Austin, I decided to drive along Interstate 77 toward Dallas, rather than waiting for a response after the weekend from Prof. Babuska. My entire schedule for the tour across southern U.S. was only a little over 2 weeks in length.
Related to the Austin storyline, in Dallas there were a few old friends I would meet, all engineers in computer-related fields: “Sean” and his wife, former University of Hawaii graduate students when I taught there in 1997-99; my university classmate friends Hongyang Chao, and her husband who turned out to be out of town on business; and a son of SYSU’s Professor Li who had not only supervised my Bachelor’s thesis and Ron’s Master’s, but Hongyang’s Ph.D.’s!
In Texas the sun was red hot, but it didn’t feel scorching like in Palm Springs.
After the weekend, on my way leaving Texas and heading toward Little Rock, Arkansas, I received Professor Ivo Bubuska’s phone call, and thanked him for returning the call of someone (guilty of) not having been in contact for so long.
The evening I spent at Austin had been one of the most pleasant ones in the entire southern U.S. tour. In a bar in downtown Austin I saw that people were friendly, and young women come up ordering drinks like in a merry-go-round.
A young girl by the name of Jennifer or Gennifer – I have recalled a distinct one in Hawaii and one in Castro Valley – was very flirtatious with me. Later when I was leaving in my car she and her male companion were outside, Jennifer got off the sidewalk heading towards my car, and I noticed that her friend looked like another Texan mentioned in Part 1 – my former Berkeley roommate David Chin’s sister Patti’s husband “David”, living in Texas working for Halliburton.
Having seen so many political controversies in the news about former U.S. President Bill Clinton’s juicy sex life, I fully anticipated Little Rock, AR, to be a place with fun nightlife like Austin, TX. But boy, was I disappointed.
Arriving in the evening I couldn’t find an economic place to stay near downtown so checked into a motel several miles south, and had supper in its restaurant. During most of the meal time, in the entire restaurant there were only a young African American waiter standing behind the bar counter, an older white gentleman customer sitting across at the bar, with his high-end antique convertible car parked outside, and myself sitting at a table.
Afterwards I went into downtown, but couldn’t find a fun place to spend more time probably because it wasn’t the weekend, and came back to bed early.
Before reaching Little Rock I had visited Bill Clinton’s hometown Hope, which felt like any other American Midwest town. The next day I had lunch at downtown Little Rock, and began to appreciate how much of a precious urban oasis it was like.
But before lunchtime at Little Rock my mood had turned sad, brought down to low by what I had seen and reflected on during my visit to the Arkansas State Capitol building.
In the morning tour of the Arkansas State Capitol I took the time to carefully admire at the portraits of, and read the introductions to, the governors in the history of this relatively small but uniquely ambitious state, a state that has the Latin phrase “Regnat Populus”, meaning “The People Rule”, as its official motto (“Regnat populus”, Merriam-Webster Online).
For some reason that my presentation of what I saw will explain, I began to feel depressed, despite appreciating that a Rockefeller had descended here and served as governor, and a boy born poor had ascended not only to become one of the longest serving governors but the president of the United States.
The Rockefeller family was the most prominent American industrialist family of the first half of the 20th century, founded by accounting clerk John D. Rockefeller, who grew a modest business into a large stake in the Standard Oil Company monopoly – predecessor of Exxon, Mobil, Chevron and others – and became America’s first billionaire. The Rockefellers were also known for philanthropic largesse, having founded museums, universities, philanthropic foundations, and national parks. (“Rockefeller Family Tries to Keep A Vast Fortune From Dissipating”, Richard Hylton, February 16, 1992, The New York Times).
By the 3rd generation, Rockefeller family members were active in politics, with two brothers Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller and Winthrop Rockefeller, and also John Davidson “Jay” Rockefeller from the 4th generation, playing prominently active roles in elected politics and government. All three have served as state governors: Nelson Aldrich in New York, the geographical base of the family, Winthrop in Arkansas, and John Davidson in West Virginia. (“Former Governors’ Bios, Last Name Rockefeller”, National Governors Association)
That was quite a distinction for the state of Arkansas among the 50 U.S. states, not large and powerful like New York, or close to the political center of Washington, D.C. like West Virginia.
Born in New York City on May 1, 1912, in the 1930s Winthrop Rockefeller worked as a roughneck in the Texas oil fields, and during World War II in the 1940s served and was wounded as a U.S. Army officer in battles in the south Pacific. His Army friendship then brought him to Little Rock in 1953, and he soon moved to the state to build a large, showcase farm, along with ambitions for the economic development of Arkansas (“Winthrop Rockefeller (1912–1973)”, The Encyclopedia of Arkansas Industry and Culture):
“Rockefeller fled to the very antithesis of New York chic society in early 1953, visiting an old army friend from Little Rock (Pulaski County), businessman Frank Newell. In less than a year, Rockefeller bought a large amount of land atop Petit Jean Mountain near Morrilton (Conway County), which he named Winrock Farms and developed into a showplace home.
Arkansans welcomed Rockefeller, and he quickly developed deep roots. He and his second wife, Jeannette Edris Rockefeller, were especially supportive of the Arkansas Arts Center. The Rockwin Fund provided support for worthy causes across the state.
It did not take long for Rockefeller to attract the attention of Governor Orval Faubus. Desperate to build Arkansas’s stagnant economy, Faubus named Rockefeller to the Arkansas Industrial Development Commission (now the Arkansas Department of Economic Development) in 1955. Rockefeller took this work seriously, and by the time he left the commission after nine years, Arkansas had undergone a remarkable economic transformation. He claimed credit for bringing more than 600 new industrial plants to Arkansas, providing 90,000 new jobs. Industrial employment grew by 47.5 percent, and manufacturing wages grew by eighty-eight percent, compared to a national rise of thirty-six percent.”
He then excelled in state politics, according to Winthrop Rockefeller’s official biography at the National Governors Association (“Arkansas Governor Winthrop Rockefeller”, National Governors Association):
“In 1964 he was a delegate to the Republican National Convention. He was elected governor of Arkansas in 1966 and reelected in 1968. As governor, Rockefeller was an advocate for human rights, government reform, cultural development, and education.”
But sadly, despite his achievement developing Arkansas, Winthrop’s life was short due to cancer. He died in 1973 of lung cancer according his biography at the National Governors Association and the official Rockefeller family biography (“Winthrop Rockefeller, 1912-1973”, Rockefeller Archive Center), or pancreatic cancer according to an Arkansas biography that also points out his playboy lifestyle when young and his drinking problem even as Governor, despite his popularity among African American voters (“Winthrop Rockefeller (1912–1973)”, The Encyclopedia of Arkansas Industry and Culture):
“A heavy drinker known for his playboy lifestyle, Rockefeller often frequented chic cafes late at night with a movie star on his arm. …
…
The election of 1966 was a watershed in Arkansas political history, for it not only saw the election of the state’s first Republican governor since 1872, as well as a Republican U.S. congressman in northwest Arkansas, but it was an election in which black voters cast the deciding vote. The segregationist wing of the state Democratic Party mustered a final victory by nominating former Supreme Court justice James D. (Jim) Johnson, a protégé of segregationist presidential candidate and Alabama governor, George C. Wallace. While Rockefeller welcomed black votes, Johnson refused to shake hands with black citizens. In the end, Rockefeller won with fifty-four percent of the vote.
…
Along with growing unhappiness with Rockefeller’s political agenda was a rise in public realization that Rockefeller had a drinking problem. …
…
Rockefeller died of pancreatic cancer on February 22, 1973, in Palm Springs, California, where he had gone to escape the cold weather at Winrock.”
Only 60 years of life when Winthrop died in Palms Springs, the southern California city of scorching summer heat – I had passed through it days earlier before arriving at Little Rock – but he had been there for the winter.
Later in the same year 1973, Winthrop’s older brother Nelson resigned from the New York governor position he had held since 1959 (“New York Governor Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller”, National Governors Association).
A famous old song, “On the Sunny Side of the Street” by Jimmy McHugh and Dorothy Fields, once expressed the sunny American attitude, an outlook upon anyone with ambition and ability as being able to achieve success like John D. Rockefeller, even if from a poor beginning (“On the Sunny Side of the Street, Jimmy McHugh, Dorothy Fields”, Lyrics):
Walked with no one and talked with no one
And I had nothing but shadows
Then one morning you passed
And I brightened at last
…
Grab your coat and get your hat
Leave your worry on the doorstep
Just direct your feet
To the sunny side of the street
…
Life can be so sweet
On the sunny side of the street
I used to walk in the shade
With those blues on parade
But I’m not afraid
This Rover crossed over
If I never have a cent
I’d be rich as Rockefeller
Gold dust at my feet
On the sunny side of the street
Grab your street
But a Rockefeller was a Rockefeller – a son of the Rockefeller family was never penniless, no matter how hardy he had chosen for his life experiences and pushed his life adventures to be.
Winthrop’s older brother Nelson Aldrich, who then served as the Republican Vice President for President Gerald Ford in 1974-1977, later died at 70 years old of a heart attack in the evening of January 26, 1979, alone with a young woman when an ambulance was called too late. He was buried on January 29. (“Nelson Rockefeller”, Wikipedia).
Now at 75, Jay Rockefeller is serving his last term as a Democrat Senator representing West Virginia (“Jay Rockefeller Retirement Brings the Old Money, Big Fame Era to an End”, Matthew Cooper, January 11, 2013, Nation Journal).
Lifestyle mattered, and life expectancy improved with time, one can say.
But on that day in May 2002 at the Arkansas State Capitol, I had no biographical data about the other Rockefellers in front of me, only data for Winthrop Rockefeller and the other Arkansas state governors.
Below is a list of the Arkansas governors of the 20th century, with comparisons of their ages at death to census data on the average ages of death:
| Name | Governor period | Year of death | Age at death | U.S. average age at death | Age over average |
| Jefferson Davis | 1901-1907 | 1913 | 50 | ~ 51 | ~ -1 |
| John Sebastian Little | 1907 | 1916 | 65 | ~ 52 | ~ +13 |
| John Isaac Moore | 1907 | 1937 | 81 | ~ 61 | ~ +20 |
| Xenophon Overton Pindall | 1907-1909 | 1935 | 61 | ~ 61 | ~ 0 |
| Jesse M. Martin | 1909 | 1915 | 37 | ~ 52 | ~ -15 |
| George Washington Donaghey | 1909-1913 | 1937 | 81 | ~ 61 | ~ +20 |
| Joseph Taylor Robinson | 1913 | 1937 | 64 | ~ 61 | ~ +3 |
| William Kavanaugh Oldham | 1913 | 1938 | 72 | ~ 61 | ~ +11 |
| Junius Marion Futrell | 1913 | 1955 | 84 | ~ 68 | ~ +16 |
| George Washington Hays | 1913-1917 | 1927 | 63 | ~ 57 | ~ +6 |
| Charles Hillman Brough | 1917-1921 | 1935 | 59 | ~ 61 | ~ -2 |
| Thomas Chipman McRae | 1921-1925 | 1929 | 77 | ~ 58 | ~ +19 |
| Thomas Jefferson Terral | 1925-1927 | 1946 | 63 | ~ 65 | ~ -2 |
| John Ellis Martineau | 1927-1928 | 1937 | 63 | ~ 61 | ~ +2 |
| Harvey Parnell | 1928-1933 | 1936 | 55 | ~ 61 | ~ -6 |
| Junius Marion Futrell | 1933-1937 | 1955 | 84 | ~ 68 | ~ +16 |
| Carl Edward Bailey | 1937-1941 | 1948 | 54 | ~ 66 | ~ -12 |
| Homer Martin Adkins | 1941-1945 | 1964 | 73 | ~ 70 | ~ +3 |
| Benjamin Travis Laney, Jr. | 1945-1949 | 1977 | 80 | ~ 72 | ~ +8 |
| Sidney Sanders McMath | 1949-1953 | 2003 | 91 | > 77 | > +14 |
| Francis Adams Cherry, Sr. | 1953-1955 | 1965 | 56 | ~ 69 | ~ -13 |
| Orval Eugene Faubus | 1955-1967 | 1994 | 84 | ~ 75 | ~ +9 |
| Winthrop Rockefeller | 1967-1971 | 1973 | 60 | ~ 71 | ~ -11 |
| Dale Leon Bumpers | 1971-1975 | living | 87 | ||
| Bob Cowley Riley | 1975 | 1994 | 69 | ~ 75 | ~ -6 |
| David Hampton Pryor | 1975-1979 | living | 78 | ||
| Joe Edward Purcell | 1979 | 1987 | 63 | ~ 74 | ~ -9 |
| William Jefferson Clinton | 1979-1981 | living | 66 | ||
| Frank Durward White | 1981-1983 | 2003 | 69 | > 77 | < -8 |
| William Jefferson Clinton | 1983-1992 | living | 66 | ||
| James Guy Tucker, Jr. | 1992-1996 | living | 69 | ||
| Michael Dale Huckabee | 1996-2007 | living | 57 |
| Sources of Data: |
| 1) Governors’ biographical data via “List of Governors of Arkansas”, Wikipedia |
| 2) “Life Expectancy Graphs: Average Age of Death in Years, 1850-2000”, Mapping History Project, University of Oregon |
At the Arkansas State Capitol, I reviewed and calculated some of the biographical data, including a governor’s name, periods of governorship, and the year and age of death. Though at the time I didn’t have the American average age of death for comparison as in the above table.
Seeing their names, I immediately had a sense that Arkansas was a state of national ambitions: its first governor elected in the 20th century was Jefferson Davis, namesake of the president of the Confederate States of America during the 1861-65 Civil War in which the slave state of Arkansas joined the southern Confederacy (“Confederate States of America”, Wikipedia).
Names of 3 more governors within the 20th century’s first 30 years confirmed the greater ambitions, referring to the most prominent of the founding fathers of the United States: George Washington Donaghey, George Washington Hays, and Thomas Jefferson Terral.
Reviewing the governors’ ages at death, I saw that in the early part of the century they were doing okay, knowing that life expectancy wasn’t that high. The exceptions were Jefferson Davis at 50, Jesse Martin at 37 – I am not sure at the time I saw the bio of this 4-day acting governor (“Jesse M. Martin”, Wikipedia) – and Charles Hillman Brough, the only other below 60 at 59.
After several others, there were two noticeable early deaths: Harvey Parnell at 55, and Carl Edward Bailey at 56.
Whether I noticed Jesse Martin, the real governors of early deaths to this point in time were Jefferson Davis, Harvey Parnell and Carl Edward Bailey.
I began to wonder if there was a political theme in this.
Obviously Jefferson Davis had the challenging name of the leader of slavery in the Civil War history.
Harvey Parnell served as governor in 1928-1933, the period when the Great Depression hit and then sank the U.S. economy. After him, Junius Marion Futrell was elected for 1933-1937, who had been acting governor for a few months in 1913 so the voters may have gone back to an experienced hand; Futrell lived to 84.
In fact, Harvey Parnell died in 1936 while his successor Futrell was in charge, presumably improving a difficult economy.
Carl Edward Bailey followed in 1937-1941, during which time the U.S. economy improved somewhat, but not greatly until the nation joined World War II (“How Did World War II End the Great Depression?: Echoes”, Lois Hyman, December 16, 2011, Bloomberg) – a feat facilitated by Japanese attacks on Pearl Harbor and other U.S. interests in the Pacific in late 1941.
Carl Edward Bailey later died in 1948, a few years after U.S. had won the war.
With such thoughts, I began to think that being too challenging or not handling a bad situation well could cost a governor his lifespan.
After several governors of longer life, the Parnell-Futrell-Bailey pattern repeated with Francis Adams Cherry, Sr. at 56, Orval Eugene Faubus at 84 and Winthrop Rockefeller at 60 – the longer lifespan in the middle of the 3 even happened to be the same 84.
One could see that Cherry was the governor when Winthrop Rockefeller from the famous Rockefeller family arrived at Arkansas, and after Faubus’s long terms – and long life as it would turn out – Winthrop himself would be the governor with a short life.
Given the significant improvement in life expectancy during the century, Winthrop Rockefeller’s 60 in 1973 was probably the “new 50” of Jefferson Davis in 1913.
But any such thought by me underestimated the severity, as the part of the table data above which I didn’t have on that day indicates Davis had died near American average death of 51, which was over 70 by Winthrop Rockefeller’s time – a milestone only years later in 1979 was reached by his older brother Nelson.
Then I saw 2 more deaths in their 60s, including an immediate predecessor of Bill Clinton, who served as governor twice: Bob Cowley Riley in 1994 at 69, and Clinton’s first predecessor Joe Edward Purcell in 1987 at 63, who had served as acting governor for only 6 days (“Joe Purcell”, Wikipedia) but I believe I saw his data.
What I didn’t know in May 2002 was that it would happen again: Clinton’s second immediate predecessor, Frank Durward White, would die in 2003 at 69 – another type of repeated pattern!
But I was quite aware that life expectancies in the Western developed countries were approaching 80.
Visiting every U.S. state capital I pretty much always toured the capitol building, but this was the first time I noticed something so persistently and recurrently volatile in the governors’ lifespans. I felt bad that these could be a consequence of “The People Rule”.
Even Bill Clinton has not been immune to the risks: in 2004 at the age of 58 he had a quadruple-bypass heart operation after feeling chest pain and taking a angiogram, which he credited for saving his life in a phone-in to CNN’s Larry King Live (“Clinton: Angiogram ‘probably saved my life’”, September 3, 2004, CNN):
“So I think if people have a family history there, and high cholesterol and high blood pressure, they ought to consider the angiogram, even if they don’t have the symptoms I had. There is some chance of damage there, but it’s like 1 in 1,000. And I really think it probably saved my life.”
The quadruple-bypass surgery led to some complications and Clinton had to endure a second operation 6 months later. Then in 2010 at the age of 63, one of the bypasses failed and Clinton endured another surgery to have 2 stents inserted into his coronary artery, at the Columbia University campus of New York Presbyterian Hospital as in 2004. (“Bill Clinton Undergoes a New Heart Procedure”, Peter Baker, February 11, 2010, The New York Times)
How many former Arkansas governors had died at 63? Four: George Washington Hays, two successive governors Thomas Jefferson Terral and John Ellis Martineau, and Clinton’s first predecessor Joe Edward Purcell – lucky that William Jefferson Clinton didn’t become part of another new repeat pattern!
For a heart-disease sufferer, diet is very important. Clinton has recognized it since 2011, switching to a vegetarian diet and crediting it with saving his life. (“Former president Bill Clinton turns 66: ‘A vegan diet saved my life’”, Samantha Chang, August 19, 2012, Examiner.com).
Lifestyle mattered, one can say.
But it would be naive to think that politics in the U.S. democratic system hasn’t taken psychological and physical tolls on Clinton. Despite his popularity, Bill Clinton was also the most prosecuted 20th-century President next to Richard Nixon – the only ones impeached by U.S. House of Representatives (“Impeachment and resignation”, Artemio V. Panganiban, February 12, 2012, Philippine Daily Inquirer).
Arkansas has been among a rare group of states. Only 3 out of the 50 U.S. states’ carry the word “people” in their official mottos (“List of U.S. state and territory mottos”, Wikipedia). They are:
South Dakota: “Under God the people rule” – the “Mount Rushmore State”, with the mountain sculpture of 4 former Presidents, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln.
Arkansas: “Regnat populus” (“The people rule”) – home state of former President Bill Clinton.
Missouri: “Salus populi suprema lex esto” (“Let the welfare of the people be the supreme law”) – home state of former President Harry Truman, and the state whose name the navy warship USS Missouri carried, onboard which Japan’s official surrendering marked World War II’s end.
Back on June 22, 1998 in Honolulu, Hawaii, I watched the USS Missouri in its final move across the Pacific Ocean arriving at Pearl Habor. Later I also attended the ship’s early-bird open house, bringing a panda toy bought from the souvenir store where my Japanese-girl housemate “Shori” worked, as a present for the USS Missouri Memorial Association. Onboard the impressive ship, I heard a Navy sailor say it would officially opened as a museum on January 29, 1999 – not for my birthday though, but for the 55th anniversary of its launch on January 29, 1944. (“FAQ: Where is the U.S.S. Missouri now? Can you visit it and go aboard?”, Harry S. Truman Library & Museum)
My maternal cousin Ying and her mother mentioned in Part 1, lived in Bowie, Maryland; in my first blog post on January 29, 2009, I recalled Ying dropping her mother and me off for our tour of the U.S. Naval Academy after my arrival from this drive across the southern U.S. (“Greeting the New Millennium – nearly a decade late”):
“A gracious host she was, but during my only visit to her in Maryland back in late May 2002, as an environmental modeling scientist for the U.S. government she didn’t accompany me and her mother (my aunt) for a tour of the Naval Academy at Annapolis, choosing to drop us off near the gate and then pick us up afterwards; she obviously would not have had the time for me had I told her I also wanted a ‘nature’s walk’ in the Rock Creek Park in downtown D.C., which I did myself on a later day after saying goodbye.”
It was the weekend. The Naval Academy and the city of Annapolis were welcoming, but politely – it could have been why Ying lacked enthusiasm – and I instinctively felt a connection to skin color:
“The Naval Academy and the city of Annapolis may appear more white than some other American institutions and towns, but the Academy was also known for former National Basketball Association star player David Robinson; the African-American Naval Academy 1987 graduate in mathematics and NBA No.1 draft pick gave up two years of early NBA career to fulfill his commitment serving in the U.S. navy”.
As for the United States capital, the National Mall visit was very pleasant. Up close at the Lincoln Memorial I paid tribute to the solemn and stern but fatherly Abraham Lincoln, and at the Jefferson Memorial I gazed at Thomas Jefferson in perpetual strides like his contemporary French revolutionaries.
But the White House was heavily barricaded after 9/11 the year before, and the Capitol building, i.e., the United States Congress, was closed to visitors due to renovations underway.
I recognized the Canadian Embassy building nearby and went for a closer look. Majestic in simplicity, it had been designed by famed Vancouver architect Arthur Erickson in 1983 (“Canadian Embassy”, arthurerickson.com; and, “Arthur Erickson Archive”, Canadian Centre for Architecture). Erickson’s vast portfolio had included Simon Fraser University in the Vancouver suburb of Burnaby, which had offered me a faculty position in 1988 before I opted for UBC, and also included the UBC Museum of Anthropology, where part of the April 1993 Clinton-Yeltsin summit was held – things discussed in my other blog posts starting with the first one. (“Team Canada female athletes disqualified from Commonwealth silver medal, jailed Chinese democracy activist awarded with Nobel peace prize, and others in between”, Part 7 and Part 8)
Unable to visit the U.S. Capitol, I felt like running into the unexpected highway closure at Flagstaff, AZ, earlier in the trip when I had to take an unplanned overnight stay before getting to the Grand Canyon.
I had planned for a short stay with Ying and her Mom, and now there was even less incentive to linger here given the Capitol closure and tense atmospheres, my Auntie’s guiding interest I couldn’t wander away from to explore more, and the fact that I needed to be in New York City to view the financial-industry job market before my 6-month Canadian visitor status’s end in August.
What I dubbed “a ‘nature’s walk’ in the Rock Creek Park” in an earlier quote was the only extra thing I did in Washington, D.C.: on the day after saying goodbye to Ying and Auntie, I spent the morning exploring Rock Creek Park and nearby neighborhoods, had lunch near Dupont Circle, and then found my way to Interstate 95 heading toward Baltimore.
The next evening when I arrived at the home of my old friend “Peter” in River Edge, New Jersey, he and his wife had done the preparation for my stay, and I quickly got acquainted with their only son, “Austin” in his early teens.
Another Austin!
Well, quite a few persons who had been in patron positions helping me were associated with UT Austin, but as in a person’s name I have only introduced Laura Austin Wiley in Part 1, a 1989 graduate of Columbia University who is the proud owner of the first home I had bought in Castro Valley from the late Marcia Jacqunelia Bates Foreman, a former fashion model, U.S. Army 1st Sergeant during World War II, and someone who had worked with Mother Teresa in the 1980s.
So in this storyline, chronologically Peter’s son Austin was the first named Austin, in fact after the Texas capital city where he had been born, and where his father had attended school and his grandfather, a biology professor at Jinan University in Guangzhou, China, a nationally honored university teacher in China, had visited as a scholar – at the University of Texas.
At that point I had met Austin’s older cousin “Bill”, son of Peter’s older brother, who was attending Foothill College in Palo Alto, near Stanford University. But I didn’t recognize the significance of the fact that all the grownups associated with Austin, TX, had been in patron positions in relation to me, that it might be a part of some hidden rule. Ivo Babuska was several decades my senior, while Peter’s and my old classmate friend Ling, and the president and engineering vice president of the start-up company where I had worked until 10/11, 2001, were of the same generation but a little younger as noted earlier.
This raises an ominous implication for someone like me who strive to make progress happen: for Peter’s son Austin to be in a patron position to help me would take a decade or two down the road, maybe by my retirement age if whatever that help is still needed.
Austin is now a proud university graduate though not yet in a patron position, and perhaps not coincidentally I have not seen any progress in the political issues of my focus – since I met Austin in 2002 or since the start of my blogging in 2009.
Such hidden correlation may very well have been real and not my whim of imagination or over-worrying. The town of River Edge in Bergen County, NJ, is in fact located at the edge of Hackensack River and the larger city of Hackensack, named after a Native American tribe that was part of the Unami, or Turtle Clan, whose territories once included today’s states of Delaware and New Jersey, and Manhattan in New York City (“Lenape rituals come alive by the river’s edge”, Douglass Crouse, March 10, 2008, The Record (Bergen County, New Jersey); and, “Hackensack tribe”, Wikipedia).
So I may have been treated like a turtle arriving at the river’s edge – life had been slow and sickening, but now could be worse out of the water!
Use of mathematics and computer science was growing rapidly in the financial industry, which was becoming an important alternative source of employment for persons with advanced degrees in these fields. For example, shared on my Facebook page in late 2012 have been articles from The New York Times and The Washington Post describing the work of Ina Drew and Tom DeMark, two major Wall Street personalities in this area (Facebook post on October 15, 2012 at 4:34pm, and, Facebook post on December 11, 2012 at 12:46am).
Before leaving California, Tammy Tan had introduced her friend “Georgia”, a young woman working at the New Jersey headquarters of the international chemical company Formosa Plastics. I communicated with Georgia, and now in New Jersey we went to a Saturday lunch at a Chinese restaurant near her company’s offices in Livingston, NJ.
From China and frequently back there on business, Georgia told me – Tammy had said it also – that she worked in the office of Wang Yung-Ching, Formosa Plastics’ billionaire founder and chairman, a legendary self-made business figure. (“Wang Yung-Ching, Founder Of Formosa Plastics, Dies”, October 21, 2008, Chemical & Engineering News)
Though I wasn’t sure where it could fit I gave Georgia a copy of my resume, as in the Bay Area I had also given a copy to a Sun Yat-sen University Chemistry graduate friend in the semiconductor company Applied Materials, where Diana Ma, a SYSU alumnus and childhood mutual acquaintance with Tobin Zhou, was a successful female vice president (“Diana Ma, Applied Materials”, May 2, 2008, Women Worth Watching). Diana was so busy in Silicon Valley I had managed to reach her once – on her cellphone around Christmas 1999 when she told me she was on a Lake Tahoe ski slope with her Taiwanese American husband and their two children.
I asked Georgia if I could stay with her for a short while, since I didn’t want to be a burden for any one friend for too long and I had stayed occasionally with April and with Lusia while in Los Angeles. But Georgia said I wouldn’t feel comfortable because she had two large dog companions.
After lunch Georgia, who didn’t drive, had me drop her off at her company’s headquarters, located adjacent to a Jewish academy she pointed out, but said I couldn’t accompany her in.
I stayed with Peter’s family for a few short weeks, during which Peter showed me the way to get to Manhattan, and I quickly found my way around as I had been there visiting Columbia University’s Computer Science Department for various durations in 1986, 1987 and 1989.
By mid-June I moved to the home of Uncle Marco Wong in Westchester County north of NYC, where Bill and Hillary Clinton lived in the town of Chappaqua, and where I had visited IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights to give a seminar talk in 1987.
In other blog posts I have mentioned “Sally”, my mother’s first cousin who happened to be an interpreter at Vancouver Provincial Court where I faced legal troubles in 1992-94 due to political activism and had help from her (“Team Canada female athletes disqualified from Commonwealth silver medal, jailed Chinese democracy activist awarded with Nobel peace prize, and others in between (Part 8) — when political power games rule”).
Marco is Sally’s older brother, and a retired Manhattan businessman; his wife Judy was retiring from the Bank of New York. Marco’s preference for Chinese food in Vancouver over that in Manhattan had earned him a mention in The New York Times (“Vancouver: Where the Far East Now Begins”, Marian Burros, August 5, 1998, The New York Times):
“So, for example, when Marco Wong, who heads a shipping company in Manhattan, wants the very best Chinese food in North America, he knows to look for it in Vancouver, where his brother, Stephen Wong, is a food consultant and cookbook author.
“It’s like the difference between going to a very good bistro and going to Alain Ducasse,” said Marco Wong, referring to France’s only six-star chef. “Nowhere else comes close.” If some of the Chinese food I ate during my five-day stay were French, it would be called haute cuisine.”
Chinese food in Vancouver was certainly better than the canteen food I ate in November 1992 at Vancouver Pre-trial Services Centre waiting to see if I could get bail – Sally then bailed me out as discussed in my blog post cited above.
Marco’s daughter Velma studied hospitality administration at Boston University, where my SYSU classmate and roommate Jie Wang had studied for his Ph.D. (“Team Canada female athletes disqualified from Commonwealth silver medal, jailed Chinese democracy activist awarded with Nobel peace prize, and others in between (Part 3) – when violence and motive are subtle and pervasive”). When Marco visited Vancouver in the mid-1990s he said Velma was working as an intern assistant manager at a Hong Kong Marriott hotel. But when I arrived in June 2002, she was already a manager with one of the Helmsley Hotels in New York City.
We went to dinner one evening in Manhattan, and then Velma asked to be dropped off at Bryant Park to see Broadway Under the Stars show, which according to local news archive was on June 10 that year, sponsored by America Online Time Warner (“Finneran, Eder, Butz, Krakowski, Glover Added to ‘Broadway Under the Stars,’ June 10”, Ernio Hernandez, June 5, 2002, playbill.com).
I thought it was interesting for a managerial employee in the Leona Helmsley empire to do that on her own, but I didn’t offer to join Velma as my mind was preoccupied by other things.
The next Sunday as I recall, Velma came to her parents’ home looking for a book, and I was surprised to see her in a completely different, university young woman look, Chinese Jewish style I thought, and couldn’t recognize her at first. She came with a date, a Caucasian young man, possibly Italian, so must have had for the Broadway Under the Stars show also.
After I had returned to Canada and moved from Vancouver to Toronto, in 2003 Velma was talking about providing internet access in the Helmsley hotel she was a manager of (“Helmsley Middletowne Hotel Installs Telkonet High-Speed Internet Solution; Telkonet Debuts in Manhattan”, December 11, 2003, Business Wire):
“The Helmsley Middletowne takes pride in providing top-tier accommodations that UN diplomats, business executives and vacationers alike expect in a world-class hotel. High standards and quality service are hallmarks of the Middletowne …”.
Quite book-sophis and tech-savvy.
The colorful and controversial Leona Helmsley was famous for saying, “Only the little people pay taxes”. Little people like myself I guess, But to me the maiden name of the Polish Jewish hatmaker’s daughter, Leona Mindy Rosenthal, had intellectual flavor, until her attending Abraham Lincoln High School in Brooklyn in NYC and changing it to Leona Roberts, then marrying real-estate tycoon Harry Helmsley who owned the Empire State Building in NYC among others, going to jail for 18 months in 1992 for tax evasion, and ending with the last decade of her life barred from running her hotels – with only her dog Trouble as companion (“Leona Helmsley, Hotel Queen, Dies at 87”, Enid Nemy, August 20, 2007, The New York Times; and, “Leona Helmsley leaves dog $12 million”, Tom Leonard, August 29, 2007, The telegraph).
In 2011 when the Helmsley estate auctioned off its largest New York Helmsley Hotel, it was bought by Host Hotels & Resorts based in Bethesda, Maryland, that had been part of Marriott International until 1993 (“Another Helmsley Property Sold Off”, Kris Hudson, January 25, 2011, The Wall Street Journal).
Perhaps the Helmsleys could have parted with some of their troubles earlier.
Sometimes the personalities I met on social occasions could be interesting. After my 10/11 layoff in Silicon Valley I had more time and attended the activities of the Digital Moose Lounge, a social organization for Canadians in the San Francisco Bay area, and now I continued in New York City with the organization NYCanadians.
About 2 days after the dinner evening with Velma and her parents and the Broadway Under the Stars show Velma went to, I attended NYCanadians’ social-networking event for the first time, at the rooftop bar of a Manhattan Midtown restaurant and bar.
Among others I met Jen Strang – another Jennifer – and had a good amount of conversations with her, who reminded me of my former UBC co-worker and friend Theresa Fong. As I recall Jen said she was a maternal granddaughter of Simon Fraser University founding Chancellor Gordon Shrum, known for the annual Shrum Bowl football game between SFU and UBC (“No Shrum Bowl for a second straight year”, Brock Hunter, September 9, 2012, News 1130).
For no apparent reason, or perhaps to do with my attention to young women, Jen tried to remind me that basketball star Magic Johnson liked to play with Children.
Johnson had indeed held popular basketball clinics for kids, including in a popular 1989 video written by Sonny Mathis and directed by Edd Griles (“Put Magic in Your Game (Video 1989)”, IMDb; and, “NBA: Magic Johnson – Put Magic in Your Game”, MTV).
But I got the sense Jen tried to warn about HIV/AIDS. Johnson had found out about his HIV from a life insurance policy test and announced it on November 7, 1991 (“Magic Johnson’s HIV Announcement Resonates 21 Years Later”, Katie Moisse, November 5, 2012, ABC News) – 10 years before the fall of 2001 when my Type 2 diabetes was discovered by New York Life Insurance Company as in Part 1.
At the rooftop bar, a group of young women exchanged attentions with some of us. One of them reminded me of my distant cousin Elaine Ng mentioned earlier, and I chatted with her friend Traci, who told me she had lived in San Jose, CA, her brothers still lived there and she likely would move back. Traci said I could send her my resume for her company to take a look, I later did, and probably a day after Velma had come to her parents’ house to look for a book, I received Traci’s reply email saying Deutsch Inc. did advertising only:
“… I don’t know if there are any positions here at Deutsch for someone with your caliber.We are strictly an advertising agency and I don’t think we’d have any positions for computer software design. I’m truly sorry if I gave you the wrong impression. I thought I could have helped out. Hopefully things work out well for you in NYC.”
Someone could look very different from the usual look, or say very differently from what it really was, whatever “wrong impression” intended for. I doubt that Traci Bergan, today Traci Bergan-deBakker, then a media specialist handling Japanese advertising accounts which she told me, had been from San Jose, but rather had attended Gettysburg College in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania (“Fuseideas Hires New VP of Client Services”, June 8, 2010, Fuseideas), the town where President Abraham Lincoln had delivered the famous Gettysburg Address in 1863 during the Civil War, and President Dwight D. Eisenhower had retired to after his presidency (“Gettysburg College” and “Gettysburg Address”, Wikipedia).
Coincidentally, Peter strongly suggested that I look at financial companies in Philadelphia, PA. I then visited the famous city in American history I shouldn’t miss, but had no job lead there other than sending my resume to a friend of his. But I suppose the encounter with Traci was Pennsylvanian in some sense.
The only job interview I had in NYC was a “non-interview” at a company with names as grandiose as the advertising personality Donny Deutsch’s Deutsch Inc.: billionaire Israel Englander’s Millennium Management hedge fund (“An SEC survivor: Hedge fund thrives after civil charges, as SAC faces heat”, Michelle Celarier, December 11, 2012, New York Post; and, “Israel Englander”, March 2013, Forbes)
I had received a call about a week earlier by a group manager at Millennium Management, whose name I can’t recall exactly but here refer to as “Richard”, who set up an interview for a certain date to be confirmed 2 days prior. But by the confirmation day I had received no further contact and messages I left were not returned, and so I decided to just go in at the time as set up.
Telling the staff I was there for an interview, and I was invited to wait at the office cubicle of a young associate, who told me the manager had his own small operation elsewhere and came in only 2-3 times a week. About an hour later the manager showed up, I introduced myself and he looked very embarrassed, “But I didn’t confirm you for today”. He asked the associate to quickly describe to me their work, then said there was no need to ask me questions as there was no interview, and accompanied me to near the entrance of their office floor.
There, the Millennium Management manager gave his stern parting words, “Remember, never come into a company in New York City unless you have been invited to”. He then went off to greet a young man sitting in the entrance waiting room, who was much more sharply groomed and dressed than me. I thought to myself, “Uh-oh, I jumped a queue no one had told me there was.”
By mid-August I had found no job, in the NYC financial industry or in any industry in the New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania region.
I would have to leave the U.S. as my Canadian visitor status was ending. So I drove to Potsdam, NY, previously intending to meet my sister Ning and her husband Yuzhuo but they were out of town in that time of the summer. I parked my Land Rover at their house as a ride had been arranged by Yuzhuo so I could get to Cornwall, Ontario, about 1/2-hour drive north and begin a cross-Canada train tour – most of it in the reverse direction as my cross-southern U.S. drive.
Yuzhuo’s Ph.D. student “Craig” gave me the ride, telling me that he was a local from Watertown – the town I later wrote about in my first blog post dated January 29, 2009, “Greeting the New Millennium – nearly a decade late”, that it was the town of former U.S. Secretary of State John F. Dulles’s Presbyterian pastor father:
“Erroneously, the Dwight D. Eisenhower presidential library’s archive of John Foster Dulles Papers, lists Dulles’s grandfather, John Welch Dulles, as a former Presbyterian missionary in China, rather than in India as he had been. The difference mistaken, to me is like mistaking Watertown, N.Y., where John F. Dulles’s father Allen Macy Dulles once served as pastor of the First Presbyterian Church, for the town of Canton, N.Y. 60 miles away where my sister now teaches environmental chemistry at the oldest co-ed university in the state of New York, St. Lawrence University founded by the Universalist Church, or maybe even for (a further 12 miles away) the city of Potsdam, N.Y. that is named after the German city, near where my sister’s family live and where her husband teaches at Clarkson University.”
When I started blogging in 2009 with the post cited above, the 2002 Millennium Management interview experience influenced my choice of the article title – about being late for the New Millennium.
Curiously, the next time I went down to the U.S. for my only official interview in NYC, it was by a small company with a name no smaller than Deutsch Inc. or Millennium Management: Media Japan.
In early March 2003 I dug my Land Rover out of what looked like a hill of snow in the front yard of the new home of Ning and Yuzhuo in Norwood near Potsdam, and drove to NYC. There to my disappointment, the Japanese woman who had communicated with me, “Kotoki”, interviewed me in a coffee shop in the lobby of her office building and that was the end of it. But it was at least an interview, unlike the last time at Millennium Management.
The hassles were more than just a 700-mile round-trip drive and a one-night stay with Marco and Judy in Westchester County, for nothing.
Firstly, before the trip I had to get a new auto insurance policy as my California one had expired.
I had first obtained auto insurance in the 1980s at Berkeley through sharing the car of my roommate Li, mentioned earlier, and his Farmers Insurance policy; later when I had my own car I was able to switch to State Farm, which provided economically better coverage. But when I returned to the Bay Area in 2000 I had to start over, first with Infinity Insurance, and then at Castro Valley consolidated auto and home insurances together, again under State Farm.
But in 2003 in Potsdam I could only find MacFadden Dier Insurance willing to do it, given that my California insurance policy had expired and my Ontario driver’s license couldn’t get me a more conventional policy. It was expensive so I obtained basic insurance only.
Secondly, I found that under deep snow a small dent in the car’s front windshield caused by the impact of a small piece of rock during my drive across the U.S. was now a long crack.
Auto-glass repair in Potsdam or Canton was quite expensive and my friend Peter’s supervisor at Bank Julius Baer in New York also would like to take a look at my Land Rover for sale. So in late summer or fall of 2003 I took another driving trip to River Edge, NJ, and had the windshield replaced by a shop there.
These were extra costs incurred without benefit as my car was not in use yet not sold, and by 2004 was repossessed by the lien holder, Fireside Thrift Co., and auctioned off at a big loss – what I have dubbed a “fire side-sale” in Part 1.
My financial problems unexpectedly continued in Canada because some old issues in my political activism in Vancouver in 1992-94 resurfaced in Toronto, hurting my job searching prospect as well as dragging my attention back to sorting them out – this was a new period of problems in life and in politics I have yet to elaborate on in my blogging.
During my second attendance to an NYCanadians event in the summer of 2002 I had met Stephen Plunkett, a Canadian TV media design specialist working for Bloomberg Television, and had given him a copy of my resume. After the Media Japan interview, sometime in the early summer of 2003 I received a phone call from a technical recruiter on behalf of Bloomberg Financial, but at that point had to say no to any interview due to the new circumstances and priorities.
As discussed in Part 1, in May 2002 my last home in the Bay Area – in Pleasant Hill – was sold in a short sale that couldn’t cover the main mortgage I owed. About 3 years later I recall receiving a letter from the mortgage holder informing that that my mortgage debt was written off after a review – the only good news regarding personal financial problems originating from my 10/11 layoff in Silicon Valley and its consequences.
In the summer of 2006 my mother came to visit Ning and Yuzhuo and really enjoyed their spacious home. I was there for a family reunion, the first time since her 2001 stay with me in the Bay Area as in Part 1 – unfortunately my father had passed away in August 2005 due to a long history of heart ailments, as mentioned in some earlier blog posts (“忆往昔，学历史智慧 (Reminiscing the past, learning history’s wisdom) – Part 4”).
My parents had been 1950s’ university classmates in Chinese Literature, and my mother had learned and then continued to practice the piano over the years, and was an accompanist for retired seniors’ choirs back home. At Ning’s home, Mom played over and over again a music CD recording of songs accompanied by her, sung by four retired Physics and Chemistry professors at Sun Yat-sen University, the alma mater of my parents, Ning and me, from where my father had retired as a Philosophy professor.
The singing quartet was quite good, reminding me of the Canadian Tenors becoming popular at the time, founded by Jill Ann Siemens (“The Canadian Tenors Celebrates Christmas”, November 23, 2007, Marketwire).
The home of Ning and Yuzhuo in Norwood village was a newer, Victorian-style house, with a swimming pool in the back that was of a perfect size for Eugene, their son born in year 2000. It demanded a lot of work for the upkeep of the several acres of land, a very large area of lawns, and the backyard garden with the pool. Yuzhuo did most of the regular lawn mowing, and during my small number of visits I helped a little.
But most of the landscape and garden refinements were planned and carried out by “Brian”, someone with a family link to St. Lawrence University where Ning was a professor. I became friendly with Brian also as he was quite easy to talk to.
Living in Norwood could not have been accidental in the case of Ning – especially if, as pointed out near the start of this Part, Ning had been a sort of foreign recruit to Canton, named after our hometown in China.
Norwood is the namesake of Sophia A. Norwood, a 19th-century Western missionary in Swatow (Shantou), our maternal ancestral region in China, who has been given historical credit for helping with the invention of Swatow drawn work by Lin Saiyu, a woman from our grandmother’s ancestral village, at a time when our great-great grandfather was a medical-doctor colleague of Norwood’s husband. Swatow drawn work later became an important staple of China’s textile work export during the 20th century. I discussed this in my very first Chinese blog post and its English Synopsis, written in 2010, and noted that Sophia Norwood had been sent to China to assist famed American missionary and feminist Adele Marion Fielde (“忆往昔，学历史智慧 (Reminiscing the past, learning history’s wisdom)”):
“Born in a Christian family, Grandma never had her feet bound, and could read and write the local Swatow dialect in Romanized phonetics, all thanks to Miss Fielde’s pioneering work in the region.
…
What a surprise! Dr. Lyall was the Principal of the Swatow Mission Hospital founded by the English Presbyterian Mission, and Grandma’s grandfather Lin Zhangzao had studied medicine there in the 1860s soon after its founding and become one of the first Chinese doctors of Western medicine in the region; Great-great Grandfather was a doctor in the hospital when (in the 1880s and 90s) Lin Saiyu was a helper for the Principal doctor and his wife Sophia Norwood; Miss Norwood had been sent to Swatow in 1877 by the American Woman’s Baptist Foreign Missionary Society of the West to work as an assistant for Adele Marion Fielde.
Feng finds it sentimental and intriguing that his sister Ning, who and her husband work and live in New York state, into the New Millennium moved to live in the village of Norwood, N.Y.”
Previously in my first blog post dated January 29, 2009, I had commented on the Swatow drawn work’s style connection to the French “Chantilly lace”, and that the John F. Dulles International Airport in Washington, D.C. was built in 1959 at Chantilly, VA, and named after the late U.S. Secretary of State who had a family connection to Watertown not far from Canton and Potsdam (“Greeting the New Millennium – nearly a decade late”):
I however note that the technical-innovation credit for the Chinese-style drawn broidery (which was not unlike the ‘Chantilly lace’ from the town in France the John F. Dulles International Airport’s location in Virginia had been named after, see:Wikipedia, and, Encyclopedia Britannica) was due a female worker in my maternal grandmother’s ancestral village …”
The town Dulles where the internet company America Online was based when I was in Silicon Valley as in Part 1, is in the Chantilly area and named after J. F. Dulles.
After posting the two blog posts quoted above, I realized that there was more to this historical Christian missionary angle. Adele Marion Fielde was originally from the village of East Rodman next to Watertown, as I wrote in a 2011 blog post (“Some family photos of note”):
“I have since learned through studying missionary literature that Adele Marion Fielde was born in East Rodman just outside of Watertown, NY, and that she was once offered the presidency of Vassar College, a highly respected women’s college in New York state, only to turn it down to return to the missionary field in Swatow, China.
History is full of little surprises.”
As a matter of fact, when John F. Dulles’s father Allen Macy Dulles was posted to Watertown as a Presbyterian pastor in 1887, and the town was then identified with his family, Adele Marion Fielde had already become famous in the United States, and been offered the presidency of Vassar College – in Westchester County, NY – but returned to her American Baptist mission in Swatow. (Leonard Warren, Adele Marion Fielde: Feminist, Social Activist, Scientist, 2004, Routledge; and, Patrick W. Carey, Avery Cardinal Dulles, SJ: A Model Theologian, 1918-2008, 2010, Paulist Press)
But my first Chinese blog post mentioned not only Sophia A. Norwood and Norwood, NY, but that Ning’s home in Norwood had a swimming pool, something I didn’t translate into the English Synopsis (“忆往昔，学历史智慧（一）——从幼年的故事说起”):
“转眼间“阿宁”今天已是美国纽约州一所大学的教授，而她们家在进入新世纪不久便已搬进一栋带小游泳池的房子，座落于一个名叫 Norwood 的小村庄——与纳胡德女传教士一样的名字。”
In April 2011 I went to help Ning move to their latest new home, back to Potsdam for the reason that since 2008 Yuzhuo had been working in Germany and Ning looked after Eugene on her own, who was now attending school in Potsdam.
So imagine my shock when I saw no swimming pool in the Norwood home they were moving out of – it had been filled with solids and flattened.
On the market for months, the house had not been sold but on one of the moving days it was sold.
The buyer, Jennifer – what other name could it have been(!) – came in, introduced herself to us the movers, including the husband of a colleague of Ning’s, Brian, Brian’s son Jack, a friend of Jack, and me.
Jennifer told me her stepfather was a lawyer, and gave me his business card: Robert J. Sassone.
A former athlete and 2002 graduate of University of Sydney in Australia, Jennifer L. Thomas-Sassone has been on the sports coaching staff of Clarkson University where Yuzhuo was a professor (“Property Transfers”, July 2, 2011, Watertown Daily Times; and, “2013 Clarkson Alpine Skiing Capsule Outlook”, The Official Website of Clarkson Golden Knights).
Persons of different national origins may have the surname Sassone, but it is also a word in Italian (“sassone”, Babylon):
“Saxon, member of an ancient Germanic people who invaded and settled parts of Britain”.
No kidding. The legend that the 10 original towns in St. Lawrence County had been named after foreign cities in order to recruit foreigners to defend the U.S. against Britain, appears quite real.
During our lunch break, with others present but not Ning, I said to Brian, apologetically, “Ning shouldn’t have filled the swimming pool. Buyers could have been interested in it”.
Brian replied, “Nobody wants that swimming pool these days”.
I insisted, “Look at the new buyer, Jennifer, her family has several children. They would be interested”.
Brian responded firmly, “Nobody needs it. I told Yuzhuo to get rid of it, and I suggest that you not discuss it with Yuzhuo. He is busy.”
I was dumbfounded and speechless.
Yuzhuo wasn’t home yet, only on his way back from work at the chemical company BASF in Germany and not after a conference in San Francisco, arriving in the late afternoon of our last moving day.
I had no idea that it would be the last time I saw him.
But Yuzhuo wasn’t alone in a meaningful life claimed tragically early by an illness, in his case at the age of 54 on November 14, 2012.
On January 28, 2013, one day before Part 1 of this article was first posted to mark the 4th anniversary of my blogging, Jennifer L. Thomas-Sassone’s 69-year-old biological father passed away of brain cancer – Dr. John H. Beamer was a psychiatrist and M.D. with a Ph.D. degree in Chemical Engineering (“Dr. John H. Beamer, 69, of Norwood”, January 30, 2013, WWNY TV 7).
Jennifer’s mother Sue Thomas happened to be a namesake of a famous deaf investigator portrayed in the popular TV series, “Sue Thomas: F.B.Eye”.
(Continuing to Part 3)
Feng Gao's Posts - Rites of Spring 