On Registration evening, I saw that a new student was called Justin Smith. I took him to one side, and asked him, “What are your parents’ names?” He was taken aback, “What? I have to give my parents’ names as well just to register on a language course?!”
Back in 1976, a Schlumberger engineer John Smith and his Irish wife Mary arrived in Taipei for his stint on our [Conoco’s] offshore rig. She was eight months pregnant, and they’d flown in on the last possible day for her to fly. The following evening, she went into labour, so they said they’d name the boy Justin Taipei Smith. Hence my asking this young man, who looked about the right age, for his parents’ names. Given that they’d been in Taipei and he was born there, it wouldn’t be surprising that he might be wanting to learn Chinese. No, not them, but how amazing it’d have been to be meeting them again in this way.
(London, 1995)
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