He was a special agent who worked in a huge movie industry in Hong Kong as an undercover for the government in his 30s; a writer too hip for his time that I refuse to recognize him when I was in my rebel teens; he can cite The Twenty-Four Histories by heart and consider Nietzsche is his enlightenment; he smokes cigarette for 30 years and quit it in one second without looking back; he loves European football and is a fan for the Lakers; he play basketball with my teenage son when he is nearly 80; he taught me how to swim and let me draw on every page of his book collections; he gave me the love for sports when hardly anyone in the Island thought girls should play sports; he told me an era governed by an old power was over and so his political career; he warned the family to pack suitcases if the political revolution hit home; he teaches me to embrace the world and it is ok to be exiled from your homeland; he gave me a tombstone to celebrate the end of my artist life when I told him I am getting married; he enjoys the ideal of Spartan way for all kids and did with his grandson; he is my father, a true spirit, a son of a gun.

August 10th is Taiwan’s Independent Day. Sometime between 10/10-11, our purple flowers start blooming. And October 20 is the Nobel Prize week.  My father did not win the Nobel Prize for the Literature, of course, we know the Nobel Prize in Literature 2012 was awarded to Mo Yan “who with hallucinatory realism merges folk tales, history and the contemporary”.  My father has written two books a year on China policy, literature, and philosophy since the 90’s. These heavy weight publications have not brought him any wealth or fame.  My father published his book entirely on his own, no promotion or publicity from any power publishing houses; atop father is not a novelist to accumulate enough readers.  My father’s knowledge of Russian literature, Nietzsche and Nobel Prize writers is real and he wrote so many books on these topics.  My father’s writing is sharp and like a knife, will cut you to pieces, if you cannot keep up with the lines. I remember clearly the day father stopped his college teaching and announced he had enough with the empty souls of young people.  Truck loads of books hauled out from his book shelves to the paper refinery. I own more than 25 of my father’s publications. I have received two publications a year for the past 15 years. Lately, only a book a year makes me wonder about his health and will.  For whom I consider a brilliant Chinese scholar in modern time, my father lives a very modest life.

While China celebrates one of its own for a Nobel Prize in Literature, I, too, celebrate my father’s life as a writer. I salute him, for his last stance as a traditional Chinese scholar who refuses to let his own existence fade away and keep writing.

His name is Li-Chao Hou.