Dear Pan
I’m listening to the collection of Pensive Music that you once chose and recorded for me. Poignant, heart-rasping strings are playing against a calm clarichord in Handel’s Violin Sonata 1/12, together inducing a sense of melancholy that is at the same time measured, sure and comforting.
I’m not sure what words I can use to describe how I feel since I heard last week from your family that you had moved on to new adventures, but it must be something like the feeling induced by this music. I am on the one hand desperately sad and bereft that a great friend, a truly great friend under every definition of great, has parted from this world. Like all departures it marks the end of an era, bringing regret and irreparable loss.
On the other hand, your presence, in memory, in thought, in sheer pleasure of recollection, is as strong as ever, and I suspect will grow and strengthen over time. All those who knew you will remember with sheer joy all the different aspects of your Protean personality. I have been reading with laughter and sometimes a tear the tributes from all over the world that have been sent to your family and copied (in your own inimitable fashion) to everybody who knew you (nobody in this life SHARED more than you. Being your friend was like being a member of a select society) .
First there was your ‘satiable curtiosity’ (like that of the Elephant Child in Kipling’s ‘Just So Stories’) And there was indeed something child-like in your curiosity, for you saw the world with the same fathomless wonder which envelops every wide-eyed little boy or girl encountering a new experience, only in your case it lasted all your life. You were interested in everything, and you brought us along with you to share it. How many of us on a Sunday have been rousted out of somnolence and idleness because you had discovered the temple where the Eunuchs of the Imperial Court were buried, and we just had to have a picnic there? Or been whisked on a train two hundred miles on a long weekend because how could a further day go by without visiting the Buddhist Caves, hanging temples and 11th century wooden pagoda in Datong? Or been pulled away from dinner to make a call on the last Aisin Goro Princess to whom you were delivering a box of chocolates? And that was just in Beijing where I had the privilege of being your companion on such jaunts. Everywhere else in the world you did the same. I have never been to the Ukraine, or Southern India or the northeastern forests and swamps of Poland – but I feel I know them, because you sent long emails, with photographs and detailed descriptions of everywhere you had been. Every message from you was a history lesson. In my mind I stood with you on a windswept shore in the Crimea by a prehistoric mound and then, simply by rolling down the cursor on the screen, found myself in the abandoned caves that had once housed the submarines of the Soviet Black Sea Fleet, but we did not linger there in those damp, dripping shadows; next minute I was standing with you in cold clear sunlight by the walls of mediaeval Kiev and from there we went on to Chernobyl. All in one email! And when you were not emailing, you were sending CDs of local music you had compiled. You were working on all senses, Pan! And cylinders!
You were never what I would call a tourist, though. What you were doing was closer to the research of an 18th Century Encyclopaedist or explorer – a Diderot, a Linnaeus, a Banks – cataloguing knowledge for that vast Encyclopaedia that was your own prodigious memory, compiling facts to be compared and analysed, then brought into discussion so that your insights could benefit your work and the society in which you found yourself.
I have never met anybody who traversed so many cultures and so successfully made them your own. Your knowledge of European history was no less than that of China or Japan. You combined the philosophy of China with the scientific rationalism of the Enlightenment and the spiritualism of India. I’ll never forget the wonderful China dinner in which you pitted yourself in argument against your good friend, the senior economist of the World Bank in Beijing – alas I forget his name. For the listeners, it was extraordinary. With great erudition and sincerity on both sides, he, an Indian, argued the advantages of Chinese materialism over the spiritual democracy of India and you, a Chinese, argued with panache the reverse.
The Canadian Government was lucky to have you in its foreign service. You talked to me often about your aid work, though it was not on the professional side that I knew you. What I did see, from the outside, was a natural born diplomat, someone who could cross any cultural barrier with ease and charm, and through friendship give substance and meaning to international cooperation, cultural as well as economic. You did it with kindness and humour – mischievous, wicked humour, which made all of us love your company – but friendliness alone does not earn respect. That was earned by the steel inside you – you were not a man to suffer fools or villains gladly, and you had the virtues of stubbornness, anger and a lashing tongue at your command if it was merited. But even more potent than steel was your integrity.
You were undeniably an idealist. You saw the world as it should be and were determined to do your bit to move it in the direction of liberty and democracy, though you were never a preacher and were always rational and experienced enough to be aware that the Mountain doesn’t often come to Mahomet, especially in Communist China. Yet everybody who met you knew where you stood and that you were fearless in stating what you believed. When you kindly sent me your memoirs and I read about your courage as a young man standing up first to the Japanese, then the Kuomintang in Taiwan, it began to make sense, and I understood why, even though you clearly and vocally represented a system that was certainly in antipathy to China’s, many of its leading intellectuals and even ministers and vice ministers came to respect you, even visited your flat for dinner, because they valued your opinions and appreciated what you had to say. You had a remarkable gift, Pan. You could make people debate – and of course that is the first step towards liberty.
I think it was appropriate in your later years that you wrote a version of China’s Journey to the West. There always were elements in you of Sun Wukong, the Monkey King!
The music has stopped but I am finding that I am writing to you quite naturally, as if you can hear me. Well, if anybody can penetrate the veils of the after world to satisfy his curiosity about what’s going on on earth, it will be you. I like to think of you twinkling mischievously, Sun Wukong-like behind some cloud, looking down at what’s going on, checking on your old friends, though I know you’re also itching to explore whatever new dimension you’re finding out there.
But even if there’s nothing, I know you will have been content before the last light faded.
For besides the pleasure you gave us in your life, there is something else you have given us in your death. You have been an example to us. You have shown us what is unselfish courage, and you have done more than that, you have defied Fate and taken it into your hands.
I thought I knew you well, but I really got to know you during your last trials, after you had discovered the hideous fact that you had ALS. It might have broken a lesser man, or driven him to self pity or misanthropic introspection. You, however, saw it as a challenge. Quite simply, you made the decision to beat it. You set out to find a cure.
I consider myself fortunate that I was in Beijing where stem cell research was going on despite a world wide ban. We were able to find the one man on the planet who could help you, a modest physician who worked in a Military hospital called Dr An. It was painful, and very experimental, even dangerous treatment, but in astonishment I watched your relationship develop, not that of a doctor and patient, more that of a collaborator or fellow researcher. You meticulously noted every stage of your progress, feeding the information back to Dr An, as well as doctors in the West, so that they could learn and improve. It was one in a million odds that you would be cured. Dr An actually never told you you would be. But that didn’t deter you. You held the rate of the disease back for some years, and as the inevitable deterioration continued, you never lost your confidence, your hope or your good humour. It was always the old Pan I saw in the hospital when I visited, never the invalid, and like the old Pan, you, with Heng Ching by your side, played host, as well as you could, with whatever the hospital could provide. I could have been back in your home. We talked. We exchanged books. We debated. I realized your curiosity about life had not abated an iota – it was, well, insatiable.
Such courage, Pan. You would have thought lightly of it. You were being your stoic self. But everybody who had the honour of being with you was amazed as much as moved.
It was also wonderful to see you with Heng Ching. Her strength and indomitability matched yours. It is rare when you can see a couple where you can truly say, you are worthy of each other. And mature love and unselfishness is awesome.
The end of course came slowly. Nina and Nadia sent bulletins and we exchanged letters, although it was more and more difficult for you. The sadness I felt was buoyed by the love I knew was surrounding you. You did not have the monopoly of courage in your family, Pan.
A few weeks ago Nina wrote me saying you had a book for me and asked what address it was best to send it to. I didn’t reply immediately. I decided to send you a long letter full of ideas and politics which I thought might entertain you. I had it all there in my head, all the clever phrases and witticisms – but I never sat down to write it. Then I heard the news and realized it was too late. My sorrow was mixed with regret that I had lost a chance to say goodbye.
From Shanghai airport I phoned Heng Ching and Nina. They were both so calm that I almost broke down there in the airport lounge.
Then Heng Ching and Nadia told me how you had planned your end. You had waited selflessly through all your pain until the very last moment, and then with dignity, you had decided to make your farewells and go. You kept the initiative until the very end. You did it. You did defeat ALS. You controlled Fate.
I told Heng Ching you were the bravest man I had ever met. “I know,” she said.
So I decided to write to you after all. For somebody like you, there’s always time to say goodbye. You’ll hear me somehow.
Goodbye, Pan. I loved knowing you.
Adam
Heraclitus
They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead
They brought me bitter news to hear, and bitter tears to shed
I wept as I remembered, how often you and I
Had tired the sun with talking, and watched him down the sky.
And now that thou art lying, my dear old Carian guest
A handful of grey ashes, long long ago at rest
Still are thy pleasant voices, thy nightingales awake,
For Death he taketh all away, but those he cannot take.
William Johnson Cory
From The Morte d’Arthur
The sequel of to-day unsolders all
The goodliest fellowship of famous knights
Whereof this world holds record. Such a sleep
They sleep — the men I loved. I think that we
Shall never more, at any future time,
Delight our souls with talk of knightly deeds,
Walking about the gardens and the halls
Of Camelot, as in the days that were…
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
From The Book of the Courtier
There are dead in like maner manie other that are named in this boke, unto whom a man wold have thought that nature had promised a verie longe lief. But the thinge that should not be rehersed wythout teares is that the Dutchesse she is also dead. And if my minde be troubled with the losse of so manye frindes and good Lordes of myne, that have left me in this lief, as it were in a wildernes full of sorow, reason would it should with much more grief beare the heavinesse of the Dutchesse death, then of al the rest, bicause she was more worth then all the rest, and I was much more bound unto her then unto all the rest.
Baldassare Castiglione, lamenting the passing of the Duke and Duchess of Urbino and their court, and the great philosophical debates about chivalry and courtly love that used to be held in their beautiful palace. (Sir Thomas Hoby’s translation)
On the other hand, your presence, in memory, in thought, in sheer pleasure of recollection, is as strong as ever, and I suspect will grow and strengthen over time. All those who knew you will remember with sheer joy all the different aspects of your Protean personality. I have been reading with laughter and sometimes a tear the tributes from all over the world that have been sent to your family and copied (in your own inimitable fashion) to everybody who knew you (nobody in this life SHARED more than you. Being your friend was like being a member of a select society) .