Taiwan 33

We circled around the island until finally reaching my father-in-law's place near Chiai, halfway up a mountainside where my wife grew up. This is really the proverbial tropical paradise, the jungles of Formosa.

My father-in-law, at 80+ years of age, is the picture of health, and you are looking at the reason. He was the village doctor (trained in both western and eastern medicine) and did house calls, traipsing up and down steep paths and roadways all of his adult life to get to his patients. We were on one of these trails when I spied this temple tucked in a nook off the beaten path.

He still wakes up and does 100 push ups before doing anything else. And there's the story told in family lore when, in 2001, he decided to forgo the bus to walk to my brother-in-law's house in Taipei from downtown. Five miles later he was spry and bouncy as ever, leaving us younger folks huffing and puffing two blocks behind...

The man will forever be my hero. Youngest of 12, the only boy in the bunch, he was routinely belittled by his sisters and other relations. But life does balance out: after growing up during the occupation he learned Japanese on his own and apprenticed under a western-trained doctor. Finding his niche in small-town Taiwan, he scraped a living in service to the poor and down-trodden in forgotten pockets of humanity away from civilization...hiking miles to make his calls. When patients came his way, he welcomed them into his living/waiting room, going upstairs to the compound pharmacy next to the family kitchen to blend medicines as needed (if a western remedy was not available). On occasion the man even did surgery on the premises, banishing his children to a neighbor's house during the procedure. Of course, all of his six children were delivered at home and now are doing well, with three here in Texas and three still on the island.

The greatest part of this story is a conversation that I had with my mother when I was seven years old. She was giving me a lesson about how there is someone for everyone...even me. Upon reflection I asked, "Is there really someone out there, right now, that I am going to marry?" She responded, "Yes, she could be anywhere...even on the other side of the world!" At the time Chenjean was four years old, on the brink of death from a lung disease. I would like to think that an angel carried our conversation to God, who decided to do something about it...