In going through my husband's files, books, and papers after his death, I've been forcibly struck by two things. First, contrary to what many of his obituaries said, his writings and thoughts were remarkably consistent throughout his life. In other words, he was not a right-winger who became more liberal and outspoken as he got older. More than most people suspected, he was a radical all along, whose intellectual impulses were tempered only by his birth in the Depression year of 1931 and his determination to make a decent living without "joining the establishment." Second—and it was an unavoidable recollection—he worked with manic energy and maniacally hard all his life.
When we met in the fall of 1956, I was a 19-year-old junior at the University of California, Berkeley, "shacked up" with a boyfriend. Chal, by contrast, was six years older, and just returned from two years with the Navy in Korea, where the ship on which he was the communications officer, LST 883, had been tasked with ferrying Chinese prisoners of war from South Korea back to North Korean ports. He was living at home with his parents in Alameda to save money, and had only recently finished his master's thesis on "thought reform" in Communist China in the period just before and after Mao Zedong took over in 1949.
Alexis Bledel Kim Kardashian China Chow Alecia Elliott Kat Von D
