VANDERGRIFT,
PENNSYLVANIA
'I arrived here when I was 7. My
father was a Chinese minister, though
not for China, but for the Presbyterian
church. We settled here because that's
where he served. Before that, my own
great-grandfather had been the first
President of The Republic of China.
I never knew him; he was tortured and
died after trying to crown himself as
Emperor too. I always joked : had he
gone into dishware sales instead, he
perhaps could have been President of
'The Republic of Fine China.' That
would have been good enough for
me. Lee Kuo Yuan, yes, my father,
was Mao's personal physician, but
later - after founding a university
in Jakarta, Indonesia - he was
detained and tortured in Macau,
and thrown into a leper colony to
die. As it was, after 19 months, he
hadn't died and they threw him out.
So we ended up here. I've had, sort
of, two lives, two childhoods: one
that didn't last because it was disrupted
by trauma, and one that never ends
because it was redeemed by language.'
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