The Shot that Missed by an Inch
I had a momentary sense of my life careening out of control as I leaned into a hairpin turn on a Thai highway. While the physical sensation quickly blipped through me, a halo effect remained as my mother gently broke the news to me: I had been living with an assassin.
Having recently celebrated my twenty-fifth birthday, I was travelling through Southeast Asia with a friend. Ostensibly off to explore the world and find adventure, I was equally looking for my future identity as the adult I was slowly morphing into. Having spent the better part of five months playing tourist, I was no clearer on who I was or who I wanted to become.
Tired of dirty cities, incessant crowds, and overwhelming pollution, my friend and I were both suffering from a mild case of traveler’s malaise and more severe cases of travelers’ indigestion. It was in this state that we went to meet my mother, who was on her way to meet her lover in Taiwan, at Bangkok’s airport.
After collecting luggage and piling into a taxi, we immediately convinced my mother that it would be far better to make the additional journey down the coast to one of the many white sands beach resorts that Thailand was so famous for than spend one minute more than necessary in Bangkok’s congestion. My mother, who was not suffering from world weariness and a blasé attitude that only two twenty somethings who are aimlessly wandering the world can affect with perfect élan, readily agreed that this sounded like a great way to spend her weeklong layover with us.
The next morning, having slung our backpacks over our shoulders and warned my mother to carefully guard her valuables against pickpockets on the lookout for vulnerable tourists, we located our departure point in a semi-coherent caffeine deprived haze and loaded our luggage onto a deluxe coach bus. Making our way to the back of the vehicle, my mother and I relaxed into the plush seats, settling in astride one another.
As we began our four-hour long bus ride down to Hua Hin, my mother gazed at and commented in amazement at the lush scenery that I had started taking for granted. Despite her oohing and aahing, I was somewhere far away in my head, distracted by the indigestion I had been suffering from since teaching English in Seoul. Noticing my far away state, my mother asked what was going on. With my answer in hand, she rooted around in her purse, handed me a small Ziplock bag of brown pills and told me to take five pills three times a day until I felt better. When I asked her what the pills were, she said vaguely “Well, you know… Chinese medicine. They should help you out. I got them awhile ago from Bill.”
As I unquestioningly popped the pills into my mouth, I was suddenly startled out of my self absorption and realized I didn’t really know why Bill was in Taiwan or why my mother was headed there. Bill did live in Montreal after all and I had never known him to leave, save for the weekly summertime visits to his lakeside cottage where he loved to spend endless hours fishing. With that thought having barely flitted through my brain, I asked “Why is Bill in Taiwan? When’s he coming back?”
“Well, I’m not sure,” my mother answered cagily, looking steadfastly out the window.
I sat upright. “What do you mean, you’re not sure? You’re not sure why he’s there or you’re not sure when he’s coming back?”
My mother, a woman who always held her cards close to her chest, suddenly became serious. She turned, fixed her gaze on me, inhaled sharply, and said, “I have to tell you something. But you must promise that you won’t say anything to anyone. It could be a matter of life and death, or other dire penalties, for a lot of people. Bill especially. I’m going to trust you, but you need to promise me that what I tell you today stays between you and me. OK?”
Whaaat? I silently thought to myself as I simultaneously heard myself say “OK,” curious as to what my mother might say that would warrant such a dramatic lead up.
Taking another deep breath, she calmly said, “Bill’s real name isn’t Bill and he’s not an economist. He’s been living in Montreal for the last twenty-five yeas as an illegal alien. Being an economist was part of the cover story.”
As I took in what she had said, I let out a barrage of questions that followed my brain’s incredulous train of thought. “But, if he wasn’t an economist, how did he live? How could he afford his apartment? And the cottage in Arundel? And, if he isn’t an economist what does he do all day besides fish and make the steamed fish balls that I love so much? And why does he need a cover story?”
With that, the story unfurled. Bill’s real name was Peter. Twenty-five years earlier, Peter had attended a doctoral program at Columbia University in New York City. While there, he became a pro democracy activist and an active member of the World United Formosans for Independence, an organization dedicated to promoting Taiwanese independence.
In 1970, he and his brother-in-law, who was also involved in the movement, learned that Chiang Kai-shek’s son, then Vice Premier of Taiwan, would be visiting New York. Realizing that the Vice Premier’s visit to New York could be their only chance to strike a major blow to the current regime and send a loud message to the world about the human rights abuses many Taiwanese suffered from, a few of the members, Peter included, hatched an assassination plan. Since none of them had any experience using firearms, they decided to draw straws. Peter came up short.
Once roles were determined, they procured a revolver via illicit underground means and devised a plan whereby Peter would shoot Chiang Kai-shek’s son in the Plaza’s lobby. On the appointed day, Peter, at the tender age of thirty-three, approached his designated spot and raised his arm, preparing to take aim.
What he hadn’t considered, however, was the case of nerves he’d experience when faced with taking an actual life. And so, his undoing was not just a trembling hand but a crisis of conscience: he couldn’t reconcile his belief in the sanctity of human life with the idea of taking one. The brief interlude between raising his pistol and pulling the trigger was just enough time for a security service agent to notice what was going on, push him out of the way, and cause the intended bullet to miss its target by an inch. While the Plaza’s revolving doorway was indelibly marked, Peter was wrestled to the ground, cuffed, taken away, and ultimately charged with attempted murder and possession of an illegal firearm. He later pled guilty to both charges at trial.
Flabbergasted and enthralled with the saga that I was hearing while attempting to figure out if my mother was putting one over me, I asked “How did he wind up in Montreal then?” I couldn’t even fathom how he could have escaped much less made it over the border without papers.
Escape was relatively easy as it turns out. Let out on bail before sentencing, Peter dressed up like a poor Chinese immigrant and hopped on a Greyhound bus to Montreal. When the Canadian Border Crossing Officer asked him what business he had in Canada, Peter pretended not to speak English. While trying to discretely still his knocking knees, he bashfully looked down. Seconds later, he shyly looked up at the Officer from under his cap’s brim, looked back down at the picture he held in his palm, flipped his cupped hand up and revealed, with a smile, a black and white picture of an Oriental woman while simultaneously uttering, in broken English, ‘Sweetheart’.
The Officer looked at the picture with critical eyes and then, with a big grin, waved Peter right in saying, “Welcome to Canada. Good luck — she’s a beautiful girl”. He’d been living in Montreal, aided and abetted by supporters of the Taiwanese democratic cause, until a couple months before when Taiwan’s statute of limitations for prosecution of the assassination attempt ran out.
As I quietly took in the tale, processing this unanticipated development with gulps that were either indigestion or a very tangible swallowing of these surreal facts, I nestled into my deluxe red velvet seat and looked at my mother with newly evaluative eyes.
After a relaxing week together, my mother, the quiet fugitive harborer, went on to visit Peter in Taiwan and, after two weeks, made the long journey home alone. With another four months of adventures under my belt, the tale of Bill/Peter soon fell away from my mind and, eventually, he also fell from our family’s lexicon, neatly categorized into the box labelled ‘one of my mother’s ex-boyfriends’.
Although I rarely thought of Bill over the years, fond memories of him would come to me unbidden at unexpected moments, especially when using the giant stainless steel steamer he bought me or his personal fish deboning knife he’d handed off to me shortly before he left and which I had accepted, unawares that he was already planning his escape back to his true calling, as if the quarter century that had passed was just an inconvenient interlude in a more important story. Heeding my mother’s warning, Bill’s larger story, conveyed to me on a smoothly rollicking bus in a verdant land filled with palm trees, blue skies, and foreign scents, stayed locked away in a corner of my psyche hidden underneath layers of more personal memories from that trip.
It’s only in the last couple of years, as I approach my own fiftieth birthday, almost the same age as my mother on that long ago journey, that the entire story came back to me. With it, came an insatiable curiosity to find out the tale’s true veracity. And so, finally, one night, alone, with nothing to do but daydream, I typed the name that I pulled out of the musty recesses of my mind into Google’s search engine.
Surprisingly enough, one of the first things to pop up under Peter Huang was a wiki entry, accompanied by a picture of Bill. Greyer, more wrinkled, with a broader face, his recognizable features are framed by a grey cap, a bright red jacket, familiar glasses, and encapsulated in smile larger than any I’ve ever seen him sport. There’s a radiance and lightness to him, even though he appears to be intently serious. And right below his name, I saw his occupation listed as pro-democracy activist. With my appetite whetted, I read on and discovered that his assassination attempt was widely credited as the impetus for political reform that promoted Taiwanese people’s role in the political arena.
I remember Bill as a quiet, unassuming man. One who liked to spend endless hours sitting in his rowboat on a small country lake, quietly fishing, happy with his daily catch no matter the size; someone who happily cooked mounds of Gai Lan and homemade steamed fish balls for us, taking pleasure in our enjoyment as the tastes melded in our mouths; and someone who loved to sit around in his worn-out housecoat slowly reading the Economist as he sipped his ever cooling morning green tea.
The image of this peaceable, untroubled man lies in direct contrast to what I now know about him and yet not. Reflecting on this, I realize he’s both an oxymoron — a near assassin and a pro-democracy activist who led Amnesty International Taiwan for four years and acted as the National Policy Advisor to the President on Human Rights — and not: a human willing to go to his own extremes to fulfill his core beliefs and live a life on purpose.
Slowly, as I digest this as truth, I realize we are all an oxymoron and that we all adapt. We adapt to life’s circumstances, to unanticipated events and challenges we’re faced with, and to unpredictable opportunities life affords us. Like chameleons, we can appear to be other than who we are at our core, sometimes for so long that it appears as if our disguise is our own true self. No matter how far we stray in appearance from our essence, however, it’s always there: something immutably beautiful that’s impervious to whatever ornaments we adorn ourselves with in any given moment to preserve our sense of integrity and something we can return to at any time.
Now, as I enter my fifth decade, looking to craft what I think of as my second act, I find myself reminiscing about who I was at a younger age, before the weight of expectations and immediate demands shaped the mask signifying who I appeared to be. Through this process, I find myself ruminating on what my essence is while reminding myself that, like Peter, it has deep roots I can tap into. Like all of us, I can excavate the surface image, peel back layers, and find the truth about myself. As I begin this practice, whittling away the physical and emotional detritus of my life, an element of surprise takes ahold as I too find myself on an authentic path towards joy and fulfillment.
