To Wendy and Eric

Of course I’ve been thinking of your dad and you all throughout the day today. I am so so sorry he’s gone, and for the suffering he must have endured over the past two years. I know there’s nothing anyone can say to take away the pain and the void you must be feeling.

Hearing the news brought back a flood of memories for me, all of them warm and humorous and so pleasingly eccentric in a way that only your dad could be. I spent so much time with your parents in the 1998–2002 era that I feel like I can randomly generate memories like these, which makes me very happy and grateful for the time I shared with him and you all back then. Here’s a list of some of my favorites:

The books about aliens: Almost every time I visited your house, at some quiet moment in between meals or whatever activities we were up to, your dad would pull me aside and very gently bequeath to me a paperback book about distant galaxies, extra-terrestrial life, and related mysteries of the unknown. He never really explained why, but it felt to me like a welcoming gesture, as if he were letting me in on an important secret. I ended up with a small stack of these books over those years, though I didn’t exactly make it through them all : )

The time he pulled up in a tiny one-person vehicle: In the summer of 1998 Wendy and I took a long road trip around the entire American West. We left from San Diego and returned there after three weeks and over 6000 miles on the then-new green Acura Integra. We never announced the day or time we would return (because we didn’t know that ourselves), but somehow your dad had divined the precise moment. We pulled into the driveway, stumbled out of the car, and turned around to see your dad pulling up in some proto-Smart Car, perhaps the tiniest car I’ve ever seen, as if by magic at exactly that second. It was almost supernatural — how did he know, and where did he get that bizarre car? I remember Wendy laughing as he rolled in very slowly over the stones in the driveway. He got out and welcomed us back as if nothing unusual had happened.

The hummingbird nest: One afternoon we went to visit your dad at his office in Solana Beach. It was a tiny dark office in an unremarkable building, but I remember your dad being overjoyed that hummingbirds had made a nest in a tree in the courtyard. I can’t recall if we actually saw into the nest or if it was just a photo your dad shared later, but I remember seeing the miniature blue-green eggs, and realizing how much he loved tiny beautiful things like this. I remember him pulling up a folding chair to watch the night blooming cereus as one would to see fireworks on the Fourth of July.

The time he was pulled over for driving too slowly on the freeway: I don’t know if the police officer actually said this or if I embellished it over the fifteen years I’ve spent retelling this story, but I still like to believe that when your dad rolled down his window, the officer asked, “Sir, do you have any idea how slow you were going?”

There are so many other funny and endearing memories — visiting the “German place” to get sausages, the secret Snickers drawer in the kitchen, and on and on. Your dad was such a truly unique, kind, and complex person: a Taiwanese American nuclear physicist poet who loved hummingbirds and German sausage. I feel lucky to have known him and I know how much he will be missed by so many.

Thinking of you all and sending love to your family,

Justin