In my first year of college I was arrested by Chinese intelligence, because I was an anti-communist. They told me they were going to kill me. I was nineteen, maybe twenty.
At nineteen you do not get the benefit. You cannot see what an event is for. You see the pain in front of you, because that is the whole of what a human being is issued. Can you see the future? Can you see what is going to happen in 2027, 2030? Nobody can. But when you look back, you can connect the dot. The wisdom behind everything that happened to you is sitting there in plain view.
That arrest is the most important thing that ever happened to me. It was the moment I understood that if I stayed, one day they would kill me. So I quit school. I bribed the people who had to be bribed, I got my passport, and I left.
I call that arrest the best thing that ever happened to me. What makes that more than a lucky man telling himself a comfortable story?
The control group. The classmates who were not arrested, who had no reason to run, who stayed because staying was the reasonable choice. Many of them are dead. The rest are in the concentration camps, or were arrested later, or have no freedom at all. Can you imagine that? I am sorry to bring a traumatic thing into a book about job applications, but without those classmates this is only a lucky man being grateful for his luck. If I had been comfortable, if nobody had arrested me that time, I would still be there.
When I look back now I am genuinely thankful, and I know how that sounds. I am thankful for my parents for getting divorced, and that is why I am independent. I'm thankful for the Chinese intelligence arrested me. That is why I am here today and alive. I am thankful to my stepmother, because she is where I learned to be kind to others, and that is why people like working with me.