Imagine a game show where all the people from your past have been invited to share this moment in the media spotlight and the prize is meeting your family for the first time.
A caller asks if you have a faded scar on your forehead, shaped like Taiwan, but hidden by a parting since a young age. You are initially put out because no one knows about this mark but your mother. Then you realize that it must be her.
PHOTO COURTESY OF MARK WILLIAMS
This scene actually did happen to Mark Williams, an Englishman who was born in 1960 in Taiwan to a millionaire, but ended up abandoned in England, aged six, after being smuggled into the country disguised in girls' clothes.
These are the bones of the tale. The detective part of it is how Williams tracked down the story of his birth, emigration to the US and the involvement of a shadowy Shanghai femme fatale -- rumored to have had an affair with former US president Lyndon Johnson -- who either abandoned the youngster or tried to extort cash from the grieving mother, and how it all led to ? But that would give away the story, which Williams is hoping to sell to a publisher.
The Accidental Englishman is Williams' unfinished autobiography. He knows most of the broad outlines of his life so far, but cannot find the motives of the key players, or ascertain key facts and resolve the puzzle that has been his birthright.
In many ways the story has gone full circle. Williams currently has two children of his own, who stay in Hong Kong with his ex-wife. He now lives in Taiwan, still grappling with the whys of the strange position he found himself in, as a six-year-old Taiwanese boy left in an English educational institution by his father and his mistress, the Siren from Shanghai, the presidential translator and one-time detective storywriter.
Williams' story is fascinating partly because it involves the history of Taiwan in the 1960s, when, apparently, babies were occasionally sold and kidnapped or lost, and when it was still relatively normal for men to take more than one wife if they had the money. It's also about emigration to the West and return to the East, specifically Taipei.
When Williams' story first became known in 1994 he became a minor local celebrity for a while. Twelve families were eager to claim Williams as their own, until his mother proved herself by knowing about the mark. She then had a blood test, to be sure.
"It was strange and disappointing when I found my mother," Williams said and added their relationship now was distant and occasionally hostile. "I was looking for my father, really, because he was the only person I remembered."
His father, the mysterious millionaire with a prosthetic arm had died of unknown causes, aged 38, on his return to Taiwan, soon after dropping off his son in England. Williams said the reason he was made to dress up as a girl was because Chiang Kai-shek was nervous at the time about first-born males leaving the country.
Though Williams said at one point "if there is a problem, I tend to give it up," the opposite seems true. Since 1994 he has known about his family, who were Taiwanese from Fujian. But he has either been unable to give up the search for reasons, or is willing to do whatever it takes to find out the details of the story -- and not just the facts -- of his transcontinental transplantation.
Cruelly, it is like an experiment. What would a Taiwanese boy turn out like if he was raised exclusively in England, in an English family, with no connections to his past, or roots?
He was uncomfortable with England and has written that he was "abused" and denigrated at school, presumably, in part, because he looked Chinese. As a result he moved to Hong Kong, where he felt more accepted. "They [the orphanage] never succeeded in subduing the fire within me. The fire that eventually led me back to where I belonged."
Like ABCs he gets the, "He's Chinese but doesn't speak the language" incredulity from locals here and has found it difficult to settle in, or find work, despite having been a mid-level banker in Hong Kong and Singapore. "It's really hard to get a job as an English teacher if you look like this," he says, and points to his Asian face, "And there's not much demand for international bankers like me."
To find out why he was abandoned to his fate in England, Williams has come back to where it all started and is getting to know about the people who he lived with for the first five years of his life, and with whom he evidently feels he belongs.
So, when he does finish the book and gets it published, it will be interesting to hear his observations about the Taiwanese, as well as the English.
See Web site on http://geocities.com/accidentalenglishman
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