Excerpts

Introduction

In the early evening of October 23, 2009, I was admitted to the Emergency Room of the Ottawa General Hospital suffering with chest congestion, nausea, fever and mental confusion. It was five days after my return from a ten-day trip to Beijing. The medical team determined that I was in septic shock and transferred me to the Intensive Care Unit.

Within minutes, my wife and daughter were at my bedside and word had been sent summoning our son and his family from Toronto. Unbeknownst to me, a priest was standing by, waiting for the arrival of my whole family including my four grandchildren. The expectation was that I might not make it through the night.

But I did. And after five days in the ICU and a further nine days in hospital, I was well enough to be discharged and was soon restored to good health. Those weeks of unexpected ‘down time’ made me reflect on my life and it struck me forcefully that what had just happened was the third life-threatening situation I had survived in the span of seven decades lived on three continents.

One of those incidents stands out with particular clarity. It was 1944. Allied bombing raids on Japanese-occupied Hong Kong had become an almost daily occurrence and we lived our lives as normally as we could in spite of them. The warning sirens began their spine-tingling wail one day as my mother and I were walking to church and we quickly ran beneath a tree, the only thing near us that offered any hope of shelter. My six-year-old pounding heart desperately sought reassurance: "Mother, can you pray standing?" My mother grasped my hand and unhesitatingly nodded her head. The calm certainty of that unvoiced response was to become the guiding focus of my life: with trust, all is indeed well, no matter what.

My hospital stint persuaded me it was time to share my experiences of war and peace, danger and opportunity, tears and laughter with my family. I decided to retrace the journey that brought me from beneath that tree to where I am today, seven decades later – and perhaps in doing so to discover where I might take my thrice-spared life from here. And so, let my journey begin.

Pray standing.

Frank Ling

Ottawa, Canada

April 2013

End Game

I consider myself a “Made in Hong Kong” product but with added value – value gained from diverse cultural life experiences: Chinese family commitment and consensus, British self-discipline and sense of duty, European adaptability, American vigour and optimism, and Canadian give-and-take, equanimity and perseverance. My worlds of East and West, seemingly so far apart at the beginning, have fused into a seamless whole, each beautifully informing and enriching the other. In these pages, I have traced the rich journey that has brought me from Chinese beginnings under British colonial authority and Japanese suppression, through English educational experiences with a dash of European cultural influence, onwards through Southeast Asian lessons in political and personal stability, to settle finally in Canada, the “cold place far away” that the fortune teller had long ago foreseen would be good for me. He was right. It is in Canada – my home now for more than half of my seven-plus decades – that I have been free to create a life that has been everything l could ever have wished for.