For persons in China whose elementary and secondary education coincided with the Cultural Revolution, 1966-1976, schooling was two years less than normal. Of my ten years, the first five were at the July 1 Elementary School formerly attached to Sun Yat-sen University and located on its picturesque campus, the sixth was the first year of junior middle school spent in an extended program at the elementary school, and the last four – two more years of junior and two years of senior middle school – were at Guangzhou No. 6 Middle School a short distance east of the university campus.
At the elementary school we had coed seating and for six years I shared a desk and bench with a poised, articulate and studious girl, our class section leader whose name differed from that of Chairman Mao’s famous wife of the 1920s by only the middle of three Chinese characters, Yang Junhui (杨俊慧) versus Yang Kaihui (杨开慧), which I also mentioned in my most recent Chinese blog post, “忆往昔，学历史智慧（三）——文革“破旧立新”开始的记忆”(“Reminiscing the past, learning history’s wisdom (Part 3) – memories of the start of “destroy the old and erect the new” in Cultural Revolution”).
Arriving at the middle school in 1972 was a sobering experience: it was like a men’s world now, the boys in the senior classes were muscular and intimidating, and within a few months several of my classmates were robbed – some while in the men’s room and once as I witnessed when bigger boys entered our classroom during noon break demanding money from some of us.
For a short time in the 1960s this middle school was affiliated with Sun Yat-sen University, but it had originally been founded as an affiliated school of the Huangpu (Whampoa) Military Academy in 1937 , when the Academy founded in 1924-25 had already relocated to the national capital Nanjing and this school was established at its former site to bear the name of founder Chiang Kai-shek.
In fact, today Guangzhou No. 6 Middle School is once again using the Whampoa Military Academy’s official motto and official song as the school motto and school song – probably the only school of any kind doing so in mainland China given that the motto “亲爱精诚”(“Dear and Sincere”) approved by Sun Yat-sen and also in the lyrics of the song was originally proposed and calligraphed by the Academy’s founding President (Commandant) Chiang Kai-shek, who after Dr. Sun’s 1925 death in 1927 purged the Communists from a Nationalist-Communist alliance (“校歌二首”, January 19, 1927, 黄埔日刊, 黄埔军校旧址纪念馆; “亲爱精诚”, by 罗林虎, June 17, 2009, 南方网罗林虎博客; “广州六中 重温中正校训 亲爱精诚”, by 梁艳燕 and 马强, March 31, 2010, 南方都市报; and, “Chiang Kai-shek”, Wikipedia).
A middle school like this wasn’t expected to be easy, even if in my days during Cultural Revolution the school practically made no reference to Chiang.
One of the “Chen” (陈) family older boys in a neighboring house up the hill on university campus, who had either graduated from the middle school or in the last year and whose father was the most senior university official from my maternal family’s Chaozhou-Shantou region, told my mother that if I had any problem at school we should let them know right away so I could be protected.
We were freshmen but no longer children, so from now on I would be seated with a boy. For the two junior years I seated with the stubborn “Fang Xiaoqiang” (方小强), whose father was a former junior army officer and a cadre at the university’s People’s Arms office supervising People’s Militia, and who often brought in a toy-size, battery-operated fan to play with below the desk.
Being tall and skinny as always my seat was in the last row. My old buddy “Ling” – his given name 凌 is the family name of Taiwanese American journalists Lisa and Laura Ling (凌志慧 and 凌志美), the latter of North Korea detention fame – who had sit in front of and liked to tease me in the elementary school years was now two rows ahead separated by a girl.
Though most students of our class section were the same as at the elementary school there were a few new classmates. Most noticeable and troublesome to me was “Ling”’s new seatmate “Chen” (his family name 陈), whose dad worked in one of the factories across from the south side of the university campus and whose family lived in the Old Phoenix Village behind the factories – my father had stayed at the Village during university Red Guard militant conflicts in 1967-68 as mentioned in Part 2 of this blog article.
“Chen” liked to playfully challenge me in a physical manner during class breaks and now it was more than “Ling”’s verbal teasing. Eventually one day in our last junior year during his aggressive physical hassling when I tried to push him away my left little finger ran into his lunging chest; after months of Chinese herbal treatment on the purple and swollen finger the pain faded but the finger’s normal growth was stunted – it remains shorter and less agile today.
But that kind of youths’ ‘playfulness’ wasn’t a real problem, was it? It might be considered a subtle form of physical mischief or harassment, but not in the world I was in then with its ‘manly’ atmosphere – I told my parents the injury was from basketball.
Having spent time in Vancouver, British Columbia, and begun my more serous political activism there I sometimes like to comment on things from that perspective; so in my November-December 2009 blog article ““Nairobi to Shenzhen”, and on to Guangzhou” I mentioned how political psychiatry used to silence me in 1992-94 could carry health consequences resembling local favorite Michael J. Fox’s:
“In fact, taking psychiatric medication such as Haldol (Haloperidol) for an extended period – I was forced to take on and off during a period of more than a year – could turn one into sufferer of degenerative and irreversible tardive syndromes – with uncontrollable behavior much like Michael J. Fox’s discussed in the preceding part of this blog article, if not actual Parkinson’s disease.”
In fact, Fox wasn’t only a famous TV/movie star from the Vancouver region but his Parkinson’s disease symptom began with “twitches” in his left little finger – in 1990-91 and unfortunately for someone with what I called “a fabulous stereotype of a young Republican” his entire left hand and shoulder soon began to shake as well (“'It's the gift that keeps on taking'”, by Emma Brockes, April 11, 2009, The Guardian; and, “Parkinson’s saved my life: Michael J Fox was plunged into drink and depression but now he says the disease has made him a better man”, by Lina Das, November 5, 2010, Daily Mail).
During this last junior year a more open and nasty act of violence – by the school authority – fell on my seatmate “Fang” and a small political drama ensued involving the four of us.
“Fang” and I sat next to a back window, outside the window were a small strip of green lawn and some bushes in a slightly off-the-road area of the school ground, and “Fang” liked to sneak out of the window when the teacher was facing the chalkboard away from the class, play outside and then sneak back in.
Then one day while he was playing like this outside the back of the classroom two senior student members of the school security team saw “Fang”, had an argument with him and took him into custody. An hour or two later “Fang” was released back to the classroom through the door in front of the entire class, with bruises all over his face – while in custody he was beaten up by a group of “security” senior students who apparently wanted to teach him a lesson.
During the next class break we the four boys talked about it, and all felt it was unreasonable for “Fang” to have been beaten like that. “Ling” was the most vocal and suggested that we register a complaint about it, I agreed with him, “Fang” said okay and “Chen” agreed to participate also – but it was really up to “Ling” and I for a civil act like this when the norm was contemplating physical retaliation by one’s outside buddies like some other boys did.
We decided to post a “Big-character Poster” (大字报) in school. “Ling” and I worked out the draft, stating that it was wrong and why it was wrong for school security to beat up a student, and demanding an apology from them to “Fang”; I then wrote up the poster with a calligraphy brush.
“Ling” suggested that I sign first so I put down my name at the end, but to my surprise “Ling” then signed behind my name in considerably smaller characters and the other two followed his suit.
Oh-oh, now my handwriting and name really stood out in this “Big-character Poster”, which was rare after the abusive and violent Red Guard activities of early Cultural Revolution was put down in 1968 by the military with the workers’ militia – in the case of Sun Yat-sen University as discussed in Part 2 of this blog article – and nearly unheard of in middle schools in this later period.
Fortunately I had given some thoughts on what we wrote and genuinely felt we were reasonable.
We put the poster up in the administration center area of school campus. The next day the school security team posted their countering “Big-character Poster”, stating to the effect that they would resolutely suppress bad student behavior such as in this case.
I should have been more careful and anticipated “Ling”’s trickiness. Back in Grade 3 or 4 – 1968-70 – at elementary school, “Ling” once asked me if some quotations from Vice Chairman Lin Biao that we studied weren’t inconsistent with Chairman Mao’s quotations; I normally was careful not to say anything politically incorrect but that time it was only us two and “Ling” really wanted to hear my opinion so I said yeah some particular things weren’t the same. To my horror “Ling” then went to our head teacher, “Teacher Luo” (罗), and informed that I had said things against Vice Chairman Lin; an articulate and righteous woman teaching math (arithmetic), “Teacher Luo” called me in for a serious conversation and it took a lot of explanation and my normally very good behavior to convince her that I didn’t pose a political problem.
Now in the 1973-74 academic year at the middle school, ironically our head teacher was again a “Teacher Luo” (罗) – this time a young man teaching physics who also had school security and administration ambitions.
Even more ironically, it was now a time of national political campaign denouncing Lin Biao – together with Confucius (批林批孔) as ordered by Chairman Mao – who had died in 1971 at 63 with his family in a plane crash in Mongolia after a failed coup against Mao (Frederick C. Teiwes and Warren Sun, The End of the Maoist Era: Chinese Politics During the Twilight of the Cultural Revolution, 1972-1976, 2009, M.E. Sharpe; and, “Lin Biao”, Wikipedia).
One of the most active scholars in this campaign, linking Lin Biao to Confucius, criticizing Confucius for defending ancient slavery, and receiving Chairman Mao’s praise was Professor Yang Rongguo (杨荣国), chairman of the university’s Philosophy department where “Ling”’s father and my father were lecturers – in my most recent Chinese blog post I also noted that one of his daughters was our classmate.
It so happened that of the over 100 middle schools in the city of Guangzhou there were a few, no more than 3 or 4, that were “focus schools” of this political campaign, each with an “Investigation Unit” (调查组) onsite from the city’s education bureau, and the No. 6 Middle School was one. The unit leader was Wang Pingshan (王屏山), a well-known, elusive and somewhat mysterious figure – with some interesting historical links.
In 1951 when my parents entered Sun Yat-sen University as freshmen, Mr. Wang finished his graduate study in physics at the Christian, private Lingnan University. The next year the former absorbed the latter and moved to the latter’s campus, but the Engineering, Agricultural, Medical, and Teacher’s Colleges weren’t part of the move in a government-run comprehensive reorganization of higher education and instead became independent Institutes and Colleges: Sun Yat-sen Medical College (University) mentioned in Part 2 of this blog article, South China Institute of Technology and South China Agricultural College with between them most of the former Sun Yat-sen University campus (“早期的中山大学”, March 17, 2009, 广州市天河区地方志编纂委员会办公室), and South China Teacher’s College which took over Sun Yat-sen University’s affiliated middle school with Mr. Wang as its vice principal.
In 1955 my parents graduated in Chinese Literature, my father entered graduate study and my mother – also a Wang – was assigned to Mr. Wang’s school for her very first teaching job, and a few years later Wang Pingshan became the principal – of one of the best middle schools in Guangdong province.
So in 1973-74 at No. 6 Middle School the high-level “Investigation Unit” leader happened to be my mother’s former boss, but I didn’t know him personally because by the time I was born in 1959 my mother was reassigned to No. 33 Middle School (mentioned in Part 2 of this blog article) – a few times I happened to walk by as he was on his way to official business and my gesture of respect was greeted with a smile from the corners of Mr. Wang’s mouth.
I was prepared to be denounced by school security although I doubted they would also beat me as I was never a physical problem. But neither our head teacher – the physic teacher “Luo” – or the security team called me in for reproaching; instead a member of the “Investigation Unit” interviewed me for details, so I described what I had seen and repeated the rationale for the “Big-character Poster”.
A few days later there was a terse school announcement posted where the two opposing posters were, acknowledging that the security team had beaten a student and that it should not have happened.
At semester’s end I received a pretty enthusiastic evaluation from “Teacher Luo”, who was now given part of the responsibility for school security; soon our class went to the countryside campus (every middle school in Guangzhou had such a campus during the second half of Cultural Revolution, where students spent about 1/4 of their middle school years doing half-time labor work) and “Ling” and I were included in the security team there – it was only a gesture to me as I was simply not physically strong for real but it was a great start for “Ling”.
Into senior years “Ling” was transferred to another class section to become its leader, and also became a leader of the revamped school security team. After graduation he even got a job working in the middle school.
In senior years our class section had a different head teacher, math teacher “Xie” (谢), a lady short in statue but strong on school principles. Somehow my performance on volunteer work wasn’t good enough for her and on updating her about student behavior wasn’t useful, so I almost didn’t get accepted into the Communist Youth League prior to graduation. “Teacher Xie” told my mother the reason, and it reminded me of my kindergarten teacher admonishing me for singing at a wrong time – a story told in my second-most recent Chinese post 忆往昔，学历史智慧（二）——童年的启蒙 (“Reminiscing the past, learning history’s wisdom (Part 2) – childhood enlightenment”) and its English Synopsis.
Good students were not only members but also cadres in the Youth League organization so it would have meant political and possibly career banishment: in 1977 when I was admitted into Sun Yat-sen University to study Computational Mathematics only 2 or 3 out of over 40 in our freshmen class were not members.
A morale of this whole story from the teenage years is that violence should be opposed and stopped but oftentimes its motive is unclear – especially when some of the interpersonal and political factors are not in the open – and its outcome uncertain to the innocent.
But there is a lot more relevant politics to mention here, on what happened since with some of the characters in this past event.
In the senior years “Ling” was one of the boys who became personal friends with “Teacher Luo” in charge of security; “Luo”’s father was an official in one of the city’s industry bureaus and their family lived in the compound of the Guangzhou Electric Motors Factory across from the south side of Sun Yat-sen University campus – the two entities had had Red Guard militant conflicts as discussed in Part 2 of this blog article.
“Teacher Luo” is today a math teacher with a degree from South China Normal University (formerly Teacher’s College) and a master’s degree from Macau, the Principal of Guangzhou No. 2 Middle School, a Model Principal of Guangdong province and an official Educational Inspector (督学) of the provincial government (“罗峻峰”, Baidu; and, “罗峻峰校长率队慰问汶川支教老师”, by 曹亮敏, May 17, 2010, Guangzhou No. 2 High School).
Those who have read my second-most recent Chinese blog post or its English Synopsis know that my childhood education had begun with my maternal grandfather teaching me Chairman Mao’s famous 1961 poem, "The Immortals' Cave Inscription on a Photo Taken by Comrade Li Jin”, which described “billowy clouds” and “lofty and perilous peak”, and that as a child I had found the poem dear to me because my father’s name had “cloud” and my name was a “peak” – now “Teacher Luo”’s name Luo Junfeng (罗峻峰) had not only a "peak” but a “steep peak”!
In my most recent Chinese blog post and in its English Synopsis I mentioned that in 1956 my father was persuaded to end his Chinese Literature graduate study early to prepare for studying Aesthetics as part of Philosophy in the Soviet Union but then Chinese-Soviet relations soured and he was instead assigned to teach Marxist philosophy, I also mentioned that the founding president of South China Teacher’s College, “Du Guoyang” (杜国痒), was at the time a nationally known Marxist philosopher leading the Guangzhou branch of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and could influence my father in the new field but Du soon died of cancer in 1961 in his 72th year.
Well, Wang Pingshan, my mother’s former boss at the affiliated middle school of South China Teacher’s College and leader of the high-level “Investigation Unit” in 1973-74 at my middle school, not only became a leader of the Teacher’s College but also became the Vice Governor of Guangdong province overseeing education, in the 1980s.
Mr. Wang suffered from cancer since 1991 but was able to survive to his 80th year of 2006 (“王屏山：一生为教育奔波的副省长”, by 郝婧羽, 贺佳 and 李宇红, March 1, 2006, 羊城晚报; and, “追忆敬爱的父亲王屏山同志”, by 王磊, originally in 羊城晚报, February 28, 2007, Xinhua) – my father died of long-term coronary diseases in 2005 at only 72.
Part 2 of this blog article has mentioned that at 6-years old prior to Cultural Revolution I applied to an experimental school but was not admitted. The latest news out of China announces that in the Fall of 2011 Guangdong Experimental High School will open the first American branch of any Chinese high school, in Riverside, California, with former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger as an official adviser (“广东首所中学出国赴美办分校 计划9月开学”, March 25, 2011, Xinhua).
This high school used to be part of the South China Teacher’s College’s affiliated middle school (“Guangdong Experimental High School”, Wikipedia) where my mother once taught under Principal Wang Pingshan.
What would Gov. Schwarzenegger advise best for a new high school from “out of country”, state politics or his gung-ho macho ways? I have told a juicier story – in my second-most recent Chinese blog post and its English Synopsis – that Kung Fu superstar Jackie Chan had a daughter nicknamed “Little Dragon Girl” out of wedlock with Hong Kong actress Elaine Ng, 1990 Miss Asia crowned while a Vancouver high school student, who happened to be a distant maternal cousin of mine from the days in China.
Past middle school my former seatmate “Fang” soon got into worse trouble: he and a group of guys went to the woods with one girl and they all had sex with her, who afterwards complained to the authority.
One of the guys was the youngest son of “Auntie Zeng’, a university official living upstairs in the same house as our family – as in my two most recent Chinese blog posts and the English Synopsis “Auntie Zeng” had come from Singapore to join the Chinese Communist revolution but then tragically her army-colonel husband in charge of cultural affairs at Guangzhou Military District died of suicide in early Cultural Revolution, and her youngest son was especially fond of a girl also of Singapore family history who visited our family.
Well, “Auntie Zeng”’s youngest son was a Communist party member and a cadre of the Youth League organization in the factory where he worked, and for the scandal he was expelled from the Communist party and lost his Youth League post.
“Fang”’s father quickly used his connection to enlist his son in the army so the son could get better discipline. Soon it was the 1979 war between China and Vietnam, “Fang” was a squad leader with the Chinese troops going into Vietnam, and he won official merit for killing an enemy soldier – the rumor mill had it that he and his squad were escorting an unarmed group (supply or medical type) and heard noise in the bushes with likely an enemy there so he opened fire, but the enemy soldier may have been unarmed and just hiding.
By early 1980s when I was still a Sun Yat-sen University student “Fang” had left the military and become a firefighter at the university’s fire station, and later became its fire captain.
In Part 1 of this blog article I have discussed attending a Canada-U.S. women’s national hockey game in San Jose, California, in October 2001, that during the game the Canadian consul Bernard Etzinger introduced me to Beth Lawlor, a new post-doctoral researcher at the University of California’s medical school in San Francisco, whose Ph.D. was from the University of British Columbia where she studied under a cancer-research scientist related to me; I’ve also mentioned that while teaching at UBC in 1992 I had a civil dispute with my then boss that turned nasty, that my experience grew nastier when I also circulated press releases critical of then Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, and that I suffered from prosecution and political psychiatry at the hand of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police among others.
So in October 2001 it was nice to meet someone with an interesting name and a link to an extended family member, but I wasn’t surprised that Beth was at UC San Francisco medical school because I had been ‘shadowed’ years ago by my old buddy “Ling” there: in the 1980s when I was in Math graduate study at the University of California, Berkeley, “Ling” was a Biology graduate student at the University of Texas, Austin; then about a year before my graduation “Ling” began to do research at UC San Francisco medical school, and after my move to Vancouver he became a postdoc researcher at UC San Francisco.
In 1999 I went to Silicon Valley to look for a job in the computer industry and one of the old friends accommodating me there was “Ling”, who was now working in the biotech field in companies like Monsanto, and Maxygen.
Didn’t I talk about it already in my November-December 2009 blog article quoted earlier about Michael J. Fox’s Parkinson’s disease, that the software engineer job I got in Silicon Valley was with a startup company where both the founding president who hired me and the vice president of engineering who gave me the layoff notice on October 11, 2001 – exactly one month after 9/11 – had graduate degrees from the University of Texas, Austin? After layoff I had plenty of time to go to a hockey game and meet other Canadians.
In 2002 I said goodbye to the Silicon Valley-San Francisco Bay Area, to old friends like “Ling” and new friends like Myra Marsh, research librarian at the mystical Rosicrucian Order headquartered across the street from Herbert Hoover Middle School in San Jose(“The History of Alchemy in America” by Mark Stavish, 1996, Hermetic.com; and, “San Jose surprise - hippo goddess, pharoah & trees - Pt. 1”, Myriad’s Blog, February 25, 2011, Open Salon), and back to Canada I moved to Toronto, Ontario.
In the summer of 2009 “Ling” appeared again, who was now a professor in Kentucky and was in Toronto for a meeting as a member of a biotech advisory panel for a Ontario government ministry.
It was good to see my old buddy again and we had lunch in Toronto’s Chinatown together with another boyhood classmate, “You-Zhi Tang” (汤友志), a well-known environmental scientist in Canada as well as in China (“Media Advisory: City to honour recipients of Green Toronto Awards”, April 26, 2007, City of Toronto; and, “Company Overview”, DaoPower Canada).
I had begun my political blogging in January 2009 and “Ling” was informed soon after, so after lunch the two of us had a chat, and two things “Ling” told me I took as significant.
First, “Ling” said he hadn’t had the time to read the details of my blog posts but his ex-girlfriend “Angela Liu” read it and had some familiarity with it.
That was very interesting, but not because “Angela” was a biotech expert like “Ling” – or because “Angela”’s work was into green apples whereas “Ling”’s research involved tobacco.
It was because like “Ling” and I being kids of Sun Yat-sen University faculty members “Angela” was from the circle of kids at South China Institute of Technology – over at Sun Yat-sen University’s former campus adjacent South China Teacher’s College.
In 1982 when I was going to graduate school at Berkeley, “Ling” was still in his undergraduate study at Jinan University in Guangzhou and asked me to bring a package of something to his classmate-girlfriend “Angela”; I did and met “Angela”, then a hardworking UC Berkeley undergraduate student waitressing part-time for a Taiwanese restaurant on Berkeley’s boisterous Telegraph Avenue.
Later moving to work in Vancouver I found that Angela’s sister and mother had already immigrated there.
It surely has been a small world, but in the summer of 2009 I felt more confident than before because in the several months of political blogging I had covered some important issues of the past, such as some of my activities in and views on Canadian politics including about former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, and some of my opinions on U.S. politics and international politics (my blog articles, “Greeting the New Millennium – nearly a decade late”, and, “The myth of political vendetta in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s Airbus Affair investigation, the politics of Brian Mulroney and Jean Chretien, and some social undercurrents in Canada”).
In other words, I was now more prepared even if “Ling” would inform whoever what I said, or try to get me to front for something too much – the open internet has made it possible for everyone to see what a person writes.
The second thing of significance “Ling” then told me was that his father, the very well-known Professor Yuan Weishi (袁伟时), my late father’s colleague mentioned in Part 2 of this blog article, was about to publish a new book tentatively entitled “The Diaries of Chiang Kai-shek that I have read” and that “Uncle Yuan” would gladly send me a copy as a present – a few months later there indeed was a publisher’s announcement of the plan (“岳麓书社推出“袁伟时书系””, September 7, 2009, 东北网).
Aha, my old buddy “Ling” must have gotten something from the founding president of Whampoa Military Academy and founder of our middle school, where his motto is once again official today and where “Ling” did so much better than I after the “Big-character Poster” incident.
“Ling” explained that his father had spent months at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution studying Chiang’s diaries there, staying at the old house “Ling” and his wife owned where I had also briefly stayed near the university across the San Francisco Bay from Berkeley.
I understand. But to this day I haven’t found any internet report on this new book of “Uncle Yuan”’s although there are reports on his speeches about Chiang’s diaries (“袁伟时：中国档案存放在美国是不幸，更是幸事”, March 31, 2010, 华网在线), so it confirmed what “Ling” later told me that due to the current political climate in China the book’s publication was put on hold.
That I can also see, from facts in Part 2 of this blog article and in my February 2010 Chinese blog post, “忆往昔，学历史智慧（一）——从幼年的故事说起”(“Reminiscing the past, learning history’s wisdom (part 1) – starting from childhood stories”) and its English Synopsis.
I’ll explain here.
My father was a Sun Yat-sen University faculty member but unlike “Ling” and other elementary school classmates I wasn’t born on the university campus, didn’t begin to live there until early Cultural Revolution in 1966-67, and therefore would not have automatically warranted a berth at the No. 6 Middle School now upholding Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek’s official motto.
Even if not all Sun Yat-sen University campus children were guaranteed such a berth, the chance for a faculty member’s child was better than 50%: our elementary school class had two sections of around 50 each, where more of our section were children of faculty members and all later went to No. 6 Middle School, and more of the other section were children of workers, administrators and officials and all later went to No. 52 Middle School across the street from the campus’s main Southgate.
Instead, I was born in the former American Presbyterian Mission hospital in Guangzhou founded as the clinic of the first-ever women’s medical school in China, and my delivery doctor, whose medical-school boyfriend was a maternal cousin of my mother’s and had died tragically early, was the daughter of former Whampoa Military Academy Provost and left-wing Nationalist military and government leader Deng Yanda (邓演达) executed in 1931 by Chiang for organizing opposition. This hospital had nurtured or helped famous persons including future scientist Peng Jiamu (彭加木), in 1925 its first-ever “incubator baby”, who later got lost and died during a desert scientific expedition, and Deng Yingchao (邓颖超) in 1927 whose unborn baby had just died in her only pregnancy while her husband Zhou Enlai, former director of Whampoa Military Academy’s political department and later Premier of China, was being hunted by Chiang’s soldiers.
Then after my involvement in Canadian politics in 1992 I did not work until 1996, and the businesswoman originally from Taiwan who gave me the new job told me that her late father had spent years in a Taiwanese jail due to his role as political secretary of General Sun Li-jen (孙立人) – legendary World War II hero and Virginia Military Institute graduate who himself suffered nearly lifetime house detention in Taiwan due to political opposition to Chiang Kai-shek.
Life isn’t easy, and so it takes time to go from a middle school to something more, or from Taiwan to someplace bigger.
Years after the middle school “Big-character Poster” incident when a high-level “Investigation Unit” led by Wang Pingshan happened to be around, a thread of life continued with connections to the South China Teacher’s College and its affiliated middle school.
When I entered university in the spring of 1978 I found myself among 7 in a dorm room with 4 bunker beds, where three others surrounding me were physically imposing while I was the skinniest of the class: above me was “Lin”, an intimidating though sociable young man from the mountainous Shaoguan region of northern Guangdong where Sun Yat-sen university had sent faculty members for labor work in the second half of Cultural Revolution, who liked domineering roles on the basketball team from center to guard, bouncing the ball off the board real hard and yelling scarily loud; across the center-isle desk from me was “Wang”, at 16 the youngest in our Computational Math class who passed the university entrance exam easily and ‘leaped’ forward from the affiliated middle school of South China Teacher’s College where his father was a college physical education teacher and he himself a martial-arts expert already; and above “Wang” was “Lu”, a tall and strong boy from a region just outside Beijing who despite the Cantonese perception of northerners was quite genial and played basketball center with skills.
None of them was a real physical threat but some sort of psychological contrast was likely intended in this dorm-room arrangement, and “Wang” sometimes liked to see if he could test his martial-arts acumen on me but I opted to only play badminton with him.
Further background stories below will explain why the psychological contrast of their physical strengths versus my lack of was intended, namely that university life could be as physically nasty as middle school – albeit fortunately it didn’t turn out that way – and more political.
After middle school I got an apprenticeship in the city’s corded telephone factory located near the No. 6 Middle School, close to home. It wasn’t a job of privilege of any sort but convenience: I was among ones allowed to get factory work in the city instead of farm work in the countryside, so my mother called her old university roommate “Auntie Shunming” in Beijing and her electrical engineer husband “Uncle Lin” happened to have a former colleague “Engineer Wang” at this Guangzhou factory – as discussed in my second-most recent Chinese blog post the couple had come from Singapore to attend universities in China and were parents of the girl whom “Auntie Zeng”’s youngest son was particularly fond of.
I began work in the fall of 1976 – Chairman Mao had died and Cultural Revolution had ended. Soon in 1977 the government changed its policies and rather than via political selections university admission would again be based on standardized annual entrance exam open to all who had received reasonable prior education, and I was thrilled that I would be able to try.
Though I had various intellectual interests in social sciences and humanities as well as in natural sciences and math, I was pretty awkward at hands-on things while my parents were worried that my social-science side of attention could potentially cause me misery in life, so I was encouraged to study applicable math.
“Auntie Zeng”, the university official living in the same house upstairs from us, was also very encouraging of this direction for me, and introduced me to “Teacher Hou” (侯), a Mathematics and soon-to-be Computer Science lecturer and an old friend of “Auntie Zeng”’s eldest son working in Beijing – from the days when they both studied in the Soviet Union. So “Teacher Hou” gave me two sessions of assessment/tutoring on basic math totaling about 3 hours.
“Auntie Zeng” also told us two favorite stories about her son and “Hou”.
The first was about how young “Hou” was: in early 1960s when “Auntie Zeng”’s son and his peers were at the Beijing airport about to board a plane for the Soviet Union, there came a boy of about 14 or 15 who claimed to be one of them, and the group leader wondered if the government had made a mistake and allowed a little kid to join them to go to university in the Soviet Union, which was a pretty important thing (as mentioned before my father was once selected to go to the Soviet Union to study but didn’t make it due to worsening diplomatic and political relations). Well there was no mistake, the kid “Hou” was a boy genius especially selected.
The second was about how physically dangerous the Soviet Union could be when mixed with politics: in 1965 while participating in foreign student protests against the United States’ Vietnam War, none other than “Hou” and “Auntie Zeng”’s son were among the Chinese student protestors beaten by the Soviet police, with injuries requiring hospital treatment. This can be verified by the news of an official complaint lodged by the Chinese Ambassador to the Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, reported on March 8, 1965, by People’s Liberation Army Daily; in this story the Chinese Ambassador also complained that during his visit with them these two hospitalized Chinese students were evicted (“我驻苏使馆向苏联政府提出抗议”, March 8, 1965, PLA Daily).
Poor “Auntie Zeng”, by late 1970s she had suffered not only the fate of her army-colonel husband’s death in early Cultural Revolution and her youngest son’s indignant expulsion from the Communist Party due to a sex scandal, but also her eldest son’s prior beating by the Soviet police.
In my two most recent Chinese blog posts and the English Synopsis I have recalled how much it meant to me that my maternal grandfather, a noted amateur Chinese calligrapher, used a famous 1961 poem of Chairman Mao’s to begin my learning to read and write at 4-years old, where part of my father’s name and my name were words in the poem, and how much it has been a disappointment and shock to discover that the poem likely had been adapted by Mao from classical Chinese erotica.
Around the time of preparing for the university entrance exam a tragic incident occurred to my factory apprentice partner “Chen” – “Chen” again! – and severely injured a finger of his: during the graveyard shift while looking away and chatting “Chen” put his hand – I can’t recall which – toward the automatic-turning lathe we attended churning out small copper gearwheels, and had half of a finger top peeled off to the bone; only a few of us were in the workshop and we bandaged his wound and rushed him to the hospital as quickly as we could waiting for and taking a bus; then at the emergency room he was asked to wait in the hallway despite our pleas that he had turned pale and shaking cold since on the bus – a total of over 2 hours lapsed by the time he was treated.
So there was the unmistakable sense when I entered my class at Sun Yat-sen University in early 1978, that my new roommate “Wang” from South China Teacher’s College’s affiliated middle school where my mother “Wang” once taught under Principal “Wang” Pingshan, was an analog of the boy genius “Hou” in the old times of “Auntie Zeng”’s son, and that my roommate’s martial-arts skills were there for a reason.
Any doubt on the part of others can be dispelled by the fact that later my roommate “Wang” indeed chose “Teacher Hou”’s field and also studied under “Teacher Hou” for a master’s degree, as well as the facts that subsequently he went to Boston University for his Ph.D. study, then specialized in computer-network security, has been a professor in Greensboro, North Carolina and Lowell, Massachusetts (“Jie Wang, PhD, Professor and Chair, Department of Computer Science, Director, Center for Network and Information Security”, University of Massachusetts Lowell), and as I recall has testified in front of U.S. politicians, such as at the North Carolina state legislature, on computer network security after 9/11.
So in the end it wasn’t unlike the Red Guard days of Cultural Revolution – as discussed in Part 2 of this blog article – but in a relative sense for me, namely that university life was more civil than middle school life – no physical hassling by “Chen” or beating of “Fang” and even the martial-arts roommate’s future specialization of “security” wasn’t bodily security.
Still, I am intrigued to see that “Jie Wang” has changed his name from “王洁” when we were classmates to “王杰” now, making him a namesake of a famous Chinese army engineer soldier, a squad leader who sacrificed himself in 1965 protecting People’s Militia members under his training from an accidentally ignited explosion. The very few elite Communist soldier martyr-national heroes of “Wang Jie”’s statue include Ouyang Hai (欧阳海) – also a squad leader – who sacrificed himself in November 1963 to avert a passenger train’s collision with a horse – a story made famous by the first grownup book I read as a child which happened to have been written by a military writer in the cultural affairs department led by “Auntie Zeng”’s army-colonel husband as discussed in my second-most recent Chinese blog post and its English Synopsis.
Nonetheless there were deadly events in my times, albeit in other related contexts.
My special interests differed from “Jie Wang”s and when he was doing his undergraduate thesis under “Teacher Hou” I was doing mine under “Professor Li”, then chairman of Sun Yat-sen University’s new Computer Science Department. Professor Li had done graduate study in the Soviet Union before, explored a move from Northeast China back to his home province of Hunan neighboring Guangdong, and come to Sun Yat-sen University instead after “Teacher Hou” and others recommended him to the university leadership including “Auntie Zeng” – coincidentally the Ouyang Hai story happened in Hunan and the second grownup book I read as child, again a real-life based political novel, was about the Communist military in the Northeast before they marched south in late 1940s.
When I applied for graduate study in the United States Professor Li seriously recommended the U. S. Army Mathematics Research Center at the University of Wisconsin, Madison – Dr. Carl de Boor there and his General Motors connection were Professor Li’s favorite and it also had Dr. Grace Wahba – but I preferred the Math program at the University of California, Berkeley, although Computer Science at Stanford was my first choice.
Little did I know that the Army Math Research Center had been a target of deadly violence, by anti-Vietnam War students in the 1970 “Sterling Hall bombing”: led by the mathematician J. Barkley Rosser the Center survived the most powerful domestic bombing prior to the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing but much of the Physic department’s laboratories were destroyed and a talented postdoc researcher, Robert Fassnacht, was killed; one of the perpetrators, university rowing athlete Leo Frederick Burt, escaped to Canada and remains one of America’s Most Wanted to this day (“Leo Frederick Burt – Domestic Terrorist Wanted”, America’s Most Wanted; and, J. Chandra and Stephen M. Robinson, An uneasy alliance: the Mathematics Research Center at the University of Wisconsin, 1956-1987, 2006, SIAM).
Profiles of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police viewed rowing as one of Leo Burt’s most important connections (“Ask Doctor Rowing: Rowing’s Most Wanted”, by Andy Anderson, Volume 6, Number 1, Independent Rowing News):
“Burt apparently reached Canada successfully despite being accorded FBI Ten Most Wanted status. There was a brief moment at the worlds in St. Catharines that summer (70) when Tim Mickelson, Burt’s old roommate who was rowing in the U.S.A. eight, received a couple of phone calls from an unidentified caller. Was Burt trying to get in touch with his old boatmate?
“I came back to the dorm from the race course,” said Mickelson when I called him. “The caller wouldn’t leave a message, and except for my family, no one would have called me. I found out later that the Canadian Mounties were watching me carefully at the regatta, in case Burt called. …”
“When I flew back from St. Catharines, the FBI was waiting at the airport for me,” Tim Mickelson said. “They told me about his part in the bombing. They thought that rowing had been his greatest connection at the University and he might try to seek help from one of his old rowing buddies. Every two or three months for the next few years they would call me up to check whether I’d heard anything.””
Nothing did I or most people know that a former UC Berkeley Math professor with a University of Michigan Ph.D. – the same academic pedigrees as my later Ph.D. adviser at Berkeley who had been an anti-Vietnam War activist leader – by the name of Theodore Kaczynski, had secretly begun a serial bombing career just as I entered university study in 1978 – as what later the FBI codenamed the “Unabomber”. In May 1978 his first mail bomb listed Professor Buckley Crist of Northwestern University as the sender, and when returned to sender slightly injured the left hand of security guard Terry Marker opening it on Crist’s behalf; then not long before my arrival at Berkeley in 1982, on July 2 his first mail bomb targeting UC Berkeley-related persons wounded the right hand and face of Electrical Engineering professor Diogenes Angelakos (“Suspect’s path jibes with Unabomber’s”, by Richard Perez-Pena, April 7, 1996, Los Angeles Daily News (courtesy of The Free Library); “Diogenes Angelakos, 77, Scholar Who Was Target of Unabomber”, June 11, 1997, The New York Times; and, “Ted Kaczynski”, Wikipedia).
I arrived in San Francisco and Berkeley on August 28, 1982.
Among others taking the journey after English training together was “Yu”, a former peasant, soldier and then worker at the Guangdong Tractor Factory (as in Part 2 of this blog article Red Guards in this factory and in the Guangzhou Electric Motors Factory – where middle school “Teacher Luo” lived – across the south side of Sun Yat-sen University campus were the major local nemeses of the university Red Flag Red Guards in early Cultural Revolution); after a Statistics focus as a Math major he was going to UCLA (“My College Dream – From a peasant, a soldier and a worker to a professor”, by Qiqing Yu, May 6, 2006, Department of Mathematical Sciences, SUNY, Binghamton).
There was also “Ron Chen”, one step more senior than me with already a master’s degree in Computer Science specializing in Computational Math; he was going to Texas A&M University at College Station (“Prof. Ron Chen”, ISSNIP, The University of Melbourne).
At Berkeley I became the latest roommate of a senior Math graduate student, “Li”, one of the most active Chinese graduate students on campus, who would give me a considerable amount of help getting my studies on track.
How could I have such luck? Another “Fang” (方), a computer systems technician at Sun Yat-sen university who was also a friend and South China Teacher’s College’s affiliated middle school alumnus of my roommate “Jie Wang”, was from the circle of kids at South China Institute of Technology and knew a professor there whose son was a fellow Berkeley Math graduate student and former roommate of “Li”’s, and so before my journey a new connection was already made.
In my February 2010 Chinese blog post and its English Synopsis I mentioned an episode in 1984 when a Taiwanese visiting professor of Philosophy was about to go to teach at Beijing University, had “Li” deliver his new book to a Taiwanese author living across the San Francisco Bay not far from Stanford, and then not long after that the other author, Henry Liu (pen name Jiang Nan, 江南) who had recently written an unauthorized biography of Chiang Ching-kuo, president of the government in Taiwan and son of Chiang Kai-shek, was murdered at his home.
Such reinforced the sense that it’s dangerous for Chinese and Taiwanese intellectuals to make an enemy of the Chiang father-and-son dynasty.
But there were silver linings in this event’s unraveling: a highly political murder was quickly solved to the degree that not only the responsible Taiwanese gang members and leader in the United States were pinpointed but their links to the top of the Taiwanese military intelligence were uncovered; moreover, a crucial break in solving this unusual crime came by modern technology, from recording of telephone calls between the gang and Taiwanese military intelligence made by the U.S. National Security Agency specializing in electronic surveillance of international communications (“Taiwan Communiqué: The murder of Henry Liu”, April 1985, International Committee for Human Rights in Taiwan; and, “Democratic Reforms in Taiwan: Issues for Congress”, by Shirley A. Kan, May 26, 2010, U. S. Congressional Research Service).
However according to author David E. Kaplan in his 1992 book, Fires of the Dragon: politics, murder, and the Kuomintang, the NSA had obtained the information before the assassination and sent it to the CIA, but the FBI with which Liu had a relationship was not informed:
“The implications are troubling. The NSA had picked up someone in Los Angeles talking to KMT military intelligence about having to “finish the job” on a well-known Chinese writer and FBI asset—and yet the FBI was never told.
Henry Liu would not have understood. Henry always saw his life in America—his U.S. citizenship, his relationship with the FBI—as the last and best line of defense against the KMT. Yet in the end his adopted homeland would offer no protection at all.”
Another murder shocked UC Berkeley while I was there, revealing the state of race relations among the young and ambitious student body, an educated and integrating sector of the American society: An Asian American female student of petite physique, whose family name was “Lee” if I recall correctly, was found murdered in the woods up the Berkeley Hills behind university campus, and the killer turned out to be her white and athletic fraternity student boyfriend, who during a jog together attacked her with a rock, bludgeoning her and leaving her for dead; her parents sobbed with sadness and sorrow when they came to her memorial service from her hometown Boston.
Others got a sense how far the weaker minority could go when it came to interracial relations, i.e., not far at all.
By the spring of 1984 I had moved to an apartment in Richmond near Albany and my new roommate David (Ngi) Chin was a Computer Science Ph.D. student specializing in a subfield of Artificial Intelligence – focusing on the role of intelligent agents in natural language systems. An MIT grad from Boston, born in Hong Kong, David played some chess and softball but I only played tennis and volleyball regularly with him. His previous roommate and fellow Computer Science student Vincent Lau had left school early for the computer industry.
By late spring I also passed the Ph.D. qualifying exam, marking the start of research-oriented Ph.D. study under my thesis adviser.
In May 1985 the Electrical Engineering Division of the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department was mail-bombed again, this time permanently severing four right-hand fingers and part of the right arm of graduate student John Hauser, an Air Force pilot and graduate of the U.S. Air Force Academy at Colorado Springs; luckily, Professor Diogenes Angelakos was nearby and helped Hauser handle his severed arteries using a necktie. Despite the ensuing psychological shock and the ruining of his astronaut dream, Hauser completed his Ph.D. in 1989 and is a professor in Boulder, CO. (“On the Unabomber’s Track: the Victims; At the Places Where Bombs Killed, a Day for Memories and Nervous Optimism”, By Neil MacFarquhar, April 4, 1996, The New York Times; “To Unabomb Victims, a Deeper Mystery”, by George Lardner and Lorraine Adams, April 14, 1996, Washington Post; and, “John Hauser, Vita”, ECEE Department, University of Colorado at Boulder.)
The EE Division of EECS Dept. was located at Cory Hall while the Computer Science Division was housed in Mathematics Department’s Evans Hall along with Statistics Department and part of Economics Department, and so these mail-bombings weren’t that close to me. Despite the injuries and fears they also looked mild at the time compared to the outright murders mentioned above, and did not garner as much media coverage either.
As for the possibility of a serial attacker, soon in June news headlines in the San Francisco Bay Area were dominated by the discovery of gruesome adventures of two former U.S. Marines in the area, Leonard Lake and Charles Ng, who had murdered at least 11 and possibly as many as 25 people in a year’s time, usually taking them to their property in Wilseyville in the Sierra foothills; Ng’s shoplifting brought them to police attention, and upon arrest on possessing missing persons’ items Lake committed suicide; originally from Hong Kong, Ng had joined the Marines lying about his citizenship and been posted to Hawaii, now took a flight to Chicago taking along a .22 caliber pistol, and fled to Canada where his sisters lived in Toronto and Calgary (“Charles Ng: Cheating Death”, by Patrick Bellamy, truTV Crime Library; and, “Charles Ng”, Wikipedia).
By the time I was getting my Math Ph.D. in 1988 my decision was to do Computer Science teaching and research at the University of British Columbia in Canada. The acting Department Head there who made the decision to hire me had told me that he heard about my visit to the University of Toronto in October 1987 and another to the University of Colorado at Boulder in February 1988, and that he himself was once a scientist at the Army Math Research Center in Madison, Wisconsin – a connection was extended.
I arrived in Vancouver on August 24, 1988 – unaware that coincidentally it was an anniversary date of the 1970 Sterling Hall Bombing in Madison.
At the new faculty orientation and get-to-know functions of the UBC Computer Science Department two couples really stood out: the new Department Head and her husband, both mathematical computer scientists hired from IBM Research in California for the same academic year, and our computer systems manager Frederick (Rick) Sample, a tall, athletic and handsome young man, who other staff whispered in my ear was a martial-arts expert, and his wife Linda, a recent Electrical Engineering graduate and former member of the UBC women’s rowing team according to these others – one of these others was “Theresa”, whose sister “Christine” was to be a friend of Elaine Ng’s mother “Auntie Liming” taking her daughter from Hong Kong to Vancouver to high school and sponsor Elaine for the 1990 Miss Asia Pageant, as discussed in my second-most recent Chinese blog post and its English Synopsis.
The Fall semester soon got into rhythm, a senior colleague “David” (or “DGK” alternatively) who had taken part in hiring me liked jogging in the late afternoon and our new boss “Maria” (or “MMK”), whom he had known since late 1970s when she visited UBC as a new Ph.D., became his jogging partner. On one of the days I was invited to join them.
Boy, how embarrassed was I, so out of shape jogging along a trail in the woods of the University Endowment Lands that “David” and “Maria” had to slow down so I could keep up with them, and then shorten the route – I never accepted to jog with them again so as not to erode the quality of their daily exercise.
But on that only jogging trip together, about halfway we were surpassed by Rick and his jogging partner “Moyra”, a computer systems staff member tall and athletic just like Rick, a former member of the Canadian women’s national volleyball team and assistant coach of the junior women’s national team – my favorite women’s sport as in Part 1 of this blog article. They greeted and breezed by us – it’s night and day but I remember the good-natured and understanding smile I always got from Rick.
Soon it was the spring of 1989, and mass protests on Tiananmen Square in Beijing were one of the daily headline news topics. I did not even own a television set and normally rarely watched, and now showed up often in the department’s coffee room to catch the latest CNN and other reports on TV and chat with others. One of the persons who showed much interest in hearing my introduction on the political system in China and my opinions on where things might be heading was John Demco, the assistant computer systems manager under Rick.
Those who follow the development of Canadian internet may know John Demco, sometimes touted as “the godfather of .ca” (“Former UBC staff honoured for foresight of creating Canadian online identity”, September 9, 2008, UBC Public Affairs; “UBC names learning centre after .ca 'godfather'”, September 10, 2008, The Vancouver Sun; and, “John Demco’s lesson in volunteerism”, by Jeff Rybak, September 11, 2008, Maclean’s), but few in the public know Rick Sample, John’s talented, all-around superior over twenty years ago, because Rick was soon dead – in a murder case that would go all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada and yet end with no one held responsible for the crime.
The basic framework of that murder was simple and narrow as summarized in the Supreme Court of Canada decision upholding the original jury acquittal of the accused, Barry James Evans, of first-degree murder after the Crown prosecution had won a new trial decision from the B.C. Court of Appeal (“R. v. Evans, File No.: 22929”, Judgment rendered orally March 22, 1993, Reasons for judgment rendered June 17, 1993, Supreme Court of Canada):
“The victim was killed by a gun owned by appellant. Appellant contended that he had flown from Calgary to Vancouver the day the victim was murdered to show the victim's wife, Linda Sample, how to shoot. When she refused to take the afternoon off, he left the gun in her glove compartment and took a cab to visit the victim and from there he walked to the airport for the return flight to Calgary.
Appellant and Linda Sample had had some form of relationship which had created tensions in the long friendship between the victim and appellant but these tensions seemed to have been resolved before the murder. Linda Sample testified that she had not seen appellant the day of the murder, that she had been at work and that she had been swimming during her lunch hour.”
For this murder that took place on December 28, 1989, a few weeks after the December 6 Montreal Massacre (discussed in Part 1 of this blog article) in which 14 women were selectively murdered, the final top court decision coincidentally saw a lone female and lone French Canadian Justice dissent from her four colleagues on the panel, which included new Justice John C. Major of Alberta whom I have profiled in my 2009 blog posts on Canadian politics in the context of his connections to former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney who appointed him on November 13, 1992, and to German Canadian businessman Kerlheinz Schreiber – two persons at the center of the Airbus Affair (“The myth of political vendetta in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s Airbus Affair investigation, the politics of Brian Mulroney and Jean Chretien, and some social undercurrents in Canada”).
Reading from the SCC summary quoted above one would think that either Evans obviously killed Rick Sample – his former roommate and mutual karate friend since the UBC computer science student days – or Rick’s wife Linda – a former UBC rower – had to do with Rick’s death. The acquittal though on technical basis to do with semantics of witness statements from Linda certainly left an air of doubt as to the woman’s innocence in this three-way relationship.
The SCC Reasons for Judgment described the trial proceeding outcome quite clearly. The jury was instructed by the trial judge to consider the charge as a whole when reviewing the evidence, which included prosecution contention and evidence that Evans had wanted to play the role of an assassin, supported by some of Linda Sample’s testimony. In the end the jury felt unsure about it or about Linda Sample’s testimony, and wanted to know if during the RCMP investigation Linda had actually given out Barry Evans's name as matching police profile of the suspect; the jury thought it was important not only for pinpointing Barry Evans but for ruling Linda out as a suspect: if Linda had taken the gun from Evans as alleged by Evans’s defense – a second-hand .22 caliber pistol bought on November 29 for gun club use and sneaked onto his Vancouver flight on December 28 concealed in a metal cookie tin inside a computer parts box (“Computer scientist's friend turned assassin, court told”, by Kayce White, February 21, and “Accused says he left his gun with victim's wife”, by Kayce White, March 5, 1991, The Vancouver Sun) – she would not have easily given out his name.
The prosecution offered to put Linda Sample on the witness stand again to find out from her what she had told police, but that was refused by the trial judge and the jury then delivered a verdict of acquittal.
In the subsequent prosecution appeal a panel of the B.C. Court of Appeal – B.C. Chief Justice Allan McEachern and Justices Josieh Wood and David Hinds – ruled that the trial judge had erred in not allowing the prosecution to recall Linda Sample to the stand, and ordered a new trial, describing the prosecution case as “very strong … almost an unanswerable one”.
While the Supreme Court of Canada agreed with the B.C. Court of Appeal that the trial judge had made an error, the majority of the SCC panel concluded that letting Linda Sample onto the witness stand again on that particular issue “could not have affected the outcome”, for the reason that RCMP investigator Cpl. Robert Doige already answered affirmatively in his testimony that at some point Linda Sample did give him the name of Barry Evans – the jury should have just used this evidence:
“Q. Now, ultimately in the course of your discussion with her it's correct to say that the name Barry Evans came up; is that correct?
A. Yes it did. [Emphasis added.]”
This was a rather intriguing case in how the trial verdict, and the appeals, turned out. I can understand the majority SCC Justices’ legal view but the discrepancy of the jury minds could be more subtle.
One could be concerned about the Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s bias because Barry Evans was the son of a former RCMP officer (“Albertan acquitted of murder charge”, by Kayce White, March 11, 1991, The Vancouver Sun). Given the affirmative answer in the RCMP investigator’s testimony when asked if Linda Sample had given Barry Evans’s name, wouldn’t lack of candidness in Linda’s testimony indicate worry rather than something wrong on her part?
One could be concerned that the prosecution favored Linda Sample in pushing for an “assassin” explanation that was unconvincing, which the defense lawyer Noel O’Brien kept hitting on (“Evans murder trial closes”, by Kayce White, March 8, 1991, The Vancouver Sun):
“Both Evans and Linda Sample testified they were strongly attracted to each other and exchanged love letters. Linda Sample told the court she believed Evans was "obsessed with assassination."
"The whole concept (of Evans) being obsessed with assassination is ridiculous. It was part of a plot to generate movie scripts by computer," O'Brien said.”
One could also be concerned that the trial judge – B.C. Supreme Court Justice John Anderson – capitulated to the high caliber of Barry Evans’s legal defense. The Calgary computer programmer of “whiz” reputation was represented by Noel O’Brien of the Calgary law firm O’Brien Devlin Markey MacLeod, whose partner Donald MacLeod had been representing the notorious Charles Ng in his legal fight to avoid extradition to face the death penalty in the United States.
Back in July 1985 after a month on the lam Charles Ng was seen shoplifting in a Calgary department store; approached by two security guards Ng pulled out his .22 caliber handgun and in the struggle security guard John Doyle was shot in the left hand, but Ng was subdued and arrested by police (“California Mass Murder Suspect Arrested In Canada”, July 7, 1985, Chicago Tribune).
As Canada did not have the death penalty and Canadians were generally opposed to extraditing someone to face that, Ng’s extradition was not easy, and he even planned to kill the prosecutors – among others in a 77-person ‘hit list’ – or failing that kill a prison guard so he could serve a murder sentence in Canada (“Edmonton Journal; With Death at Issue, Can Canada Wash Its Hands?”, by John F. Burns, November 1, 1988, The New York Times; and, “Prosecutors seeking extradition top Ng's ‘hit list’”, September 28, 1991, The Gazette).
Paradoxically, such deadly plans coexisted with a ‘changed man’ in some sense: in the California murder spree he had enjoyed enslaving and torturing women, but in Canadian jail Charles Ng was now taking correspondence courses in Psychology since Fall 1989, and another on counseling girls and women beginning February 1990 (“Accused sex killer's university studies prompts protest by Edmonton taxpayer”, October 30, 1989, The Gazette; and, Don Lasseter, Die for Me: The Terrifying True Story of the Charles Ng & Leonard Lake Torture Murders, 2000, Pinnacle Books).
Imprisoned at the Prince Albert penitentiary in Saskatchewan, Ng was taking Psychopathology courses at Alberta’s Athabasca University paid for by the government, but he bought his own computer and paid for the course on counseling women – at Simon Fraser University (“Ng held in special prison unit”, by Rick Mofina, February 21, 1991, Calgary Herald). That was the same university in the Vancouver area where according to Barry James Evans he met Linda Sample, showed her how to shoot and left it in her car on the day of the Rick Sample murder near the end of 1989.
On February 20, 1991, the Barry James Evans trial at the B.C. Supreme Court began with prosecution argument, and on February 21 it heard testimony from Evans’s boyhood friend Jim Hutchison while on that same day the Charles Ng appeal began at the Supreme Court of Canada with Don MacLeod making his opening argument (“'Thrilled' with pal's wife: Evans cited special bond, murder trial told”, by Mark Edge, February 22, 1991, The Province; “Ng extradition would violate charter, Supreme Court told”, February 22, 1991, The Gazette; and, “Evans murder trial closes”, by Kayce White, March 8, 1991, The Vancouver Sun).
But any concern that the B.C. trial judge had given leeway to the aggressive Evans-Ng lawyers was dispelled two years later by Supreme Court of Canada’s conclusion that the trial judge’s refusal to allow another testimony from Linda Sample should not have affected the jury verdict – even if by this later time new Justice John Major from Calgary was on the top court he was only one of four forming that majority opinion.
Nonetheless, with all due respect for Justice Major I note that in February 1991 he was still a Calgary lawyer in a Canadian law firm headed by then Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s tax lawyer and financial trustee Bruce Verchere, and he shared the February 20 birthday with my father (my 2009 blog posts, “The myth of political vendetta in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s Airbus Affair investigation, the politics of Brian Mulroney and Jean Chretien, and some social undercurrents in Canada”).
It was the trial jury’s decision, the SCC Reasons for Judgment explained, and the jury decision should be respected:
“Among appellate courts there has always been a great deal of healthy respect for and deference to a jury verdict of acquittal. This deferential approach is appropriate and correct. The special significance of a verdict of acquittal by a jury has also been recognized by this Court in R. v. Kirkness, [1990] 3 S.C.R. 74. There on behalf of the majority it was said at p. 83:
The verdict of the jury constitutes, in a very real way, the verdict of the
community. Trial by jury in criminal cases is a process that functions
exceedingly well and constitutes a fundamentally important aspect of our
democratic society. It is not members of the judiciary, but rather the
members of the jury, sitting as members of the community, who make
decision as to guilt or innocence which is so vitally important both to the
individual accused and the community.
. . .
It follows that only if there was a significant error made by the trial judge
in the course of the charge should the verdict of acquittal be set aside.
[Emphasis added.]”
In other words, the jury represented the community and they already heard the RCMP testimony that Linda Sample had given out Barry Evans’s name, so now if they were still unsure of her innocence and Evans’s guilt it’s just being “a fundamentally important aspect of our democratic society”.
The top court also pointed out that Canada was already better than the United States in allowing prosecution appeal – presumably that the earlier prosecution appeal to the B.C. Court of Appeal after the jury verdict could not have been possible in the U.S.:
“In setting the standard for reversal, it is worth observing that, among the
major English-speaking common-law jurisdictions, Canada appears to possess the most liberal provisions for Crown appeals. In some jurisdictions, particularly in the United States, the prosecution is limited to interlocutory appeals from unfavourable rulings made before a verdict is reached.”
The jury verdict was a victory not only for the accused Barry James Evans whose link to the murder was so obvious with the evidence he admitted to, but also for lawyer Noel O’Brien; the Calgary Herald proclaimed it in a story headline, “Acquittal tops city lawyer's career” (by Tom Keiser, March 12, 1991, Calgary Herald), with praise from Don MacLeod in particular:
“O'Brien's partner Don MacLeod - who took the Charles Ng extradition case to the country's highest court - agrees: "His preparation is faultless."”
From 1991 to 1993, every March there was a court decision on the Barry Evans case.
By the time of the second one in 1992 when the B.C. Court of Appeal ruled in favor of a new trial, I was in a political dispute with my boss “Maria” at UBC Computer Science Department.
By the time of the Supreme Court of Canada judgment in 1993 I had become engulfed in troubles due also to my attempts to air criticisms of then Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s leadership and conduct. On February 24 Mulroney announced his decision to retire.
When Mr. Mulroney stepped down on June 25 he had made a number of last-minute patronage appointments the day before, including that of his personal tax lawyer and financial trustee Bruce Verchere as Chairman of Atomic Energy of Canada Limited.
On August 11, a UBC computer science programmer, a good boy who had been president of his computer science student class, was clubbed to death with a baseball bat over his head while riding his bike in the woods of the University Endowment Lands.
On August 28, Bruce Verchere died of a .22 caliber shotgun wound to his head in his Montreal home in what was ruled a suicide. Someone there from outside his family was Greg Williams, live-in boyfriend of Bruce’s son David and a McGill University rowing athlete, who showed the police investigators where the guns were stored in the house.
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