Meet Me In Tangier

From the R.M. Dolin novel, “AN UNSUSTAINABLE LIFE – The Book of Darwin“

Chapter 14: Meet Me in Tangier

The last thing Darwin ever expected to see pulling up the dusty dirt road to his hacienda is Tien, not after the way things ended at Berkeley. It isn’t only that things ended poorly, it’s the suddenness of everything you worked for, everything you believed in, collapsing without closure. Tien was the first to break the news, the first to realize the horrific implications of what he’d done, which has a somewhat circular irony given what happened with her grandfather and yet, that’s the cruel way fate likes to fit into people’s lives. Tien’s the one who prepped Darwin, walked him through the “ins” and “outs” of likely negotiations, he wanted her to attend, to be by his side, but she felt strongly it’d be better he presents as the confident leader rather than someone who manages by consent.

Before leaving for Berkeley that fate-filled morning in early August when cool north bay air provides relief from intense Silicon Valley heat, life was good. That’s what Darwin felt on the drive in, what started three years ago as an idea based on a random conversation he had with a medical doctor from Loma Linda Hospital is now a tool capable of giving hope where none previously existed, of granting life to people on the verge of surrender, and how can you not feel good about that. Darwin’s so damn proud of what he and his team accomplished he allows himself a few altruistic moments to declare the probable payoff doesn’t matter as much as making sure his technology transfers to a company intent of commercializing its capability. He casts himself as someone too profound to be motivated by money; his driver is a responsibility to apply his talents to help humanity. Of course, once the presentation’s over and negotiations begin, he quickly transitions into an uncompromising capitalist on equal footing with every other Silicon Valley technologist on their way to earning their first billion, because everyone in the valley knows, after the first billion the other’s roll in with the regularity of software upgrades.

The thing Darwin can’t know as he waves good-bye to Tien and the rest of his team that fateful morning is it will be the last time they’ll ever be together, after what happens at Berkeley, all they can muster between them is a handful of terse emails and phone calls short on duration but packed with emotion. The fact Darwin loves Tien like a daughter, trusts her like a spouse, and intellectually connects on collaborative levels he’s never experienced, makes her the most valued person in his professional life. When they get to problem solving it’s like watching maestros compose, they’ll go days without leaving the office, sometimes not even eating as they consider one solution after another: Darwin dismissing ideas on logical pragmatic terms and Tien mathematically disproving whatever scenario they’re currently considering.

Tien met Darwin at a conference in Vancouver where Darwin’s presenting his paper on the application of Lagrangian methods to solve the Random Walk optimization paradox; namely, if a person starts out on a random walk between points A and B, how can they know the shortest, or quickest, or most efficient path is optimal. He talks about how his motivation for solving the paradox is an idea he’s kicking around to develop a capability that can overcome the problem people with advanced Parkinson’s disease have with walking. Acknowledging that his application has a limited audience, which translates into limited potential revenue, he justifies his interest, almost as a glib aside, that once developed, someone somewhere will find an application having more universal utility.

To assuage audience members who might otherwise dismiss his approach by asserting one can program a random walk algorithm to optimize around multiple objectives, Darwin argues that you can’t discount the value of the journey, which he concludes remains an unknown until underway and becomes a recursively guided optimization adventure within the optimization problem, something he compares to getting lost in a house of mirrors. Darwin argues that strategic utilization of Lagrangian multipliers can induce optimization along the way if one’s willing to continually update their knowledge base and enhance trade-off objectives. He concludes his talk with a discussion of the mathematical challenges still needing to be overcome, which piques the interest of a young graduate mathematician from Berkeley and when Darwin shows his last slide outlining the complex formula he’s developing, for a lack of better phraseology, it speaks to her.

During the question-and-answer session that follows, Tien’s probing with such aggressive intensity, no one else gets a chance to ask a question. While Darwin is at times less than precise in his answers, he doesn’t care because it’s clear this young lady gets what he’s trying to describe, and her questions are so profoundly probing he starts seeing his problem in ways he never before considered. As their conversation flows from a room full of peers to two people in the hallway having to repeated be told to lower their voices, it’s clear to both Darwin and Tien they’re meant to collaborate on the Parkinson’s problem. First though, Tien needs to finish the last semester of her master’s program then she’ll be ready to join Darwin’s startup.

Tien can’t wait to tell her family back in Oakland, especially Grandpa Quan who’s constantly mentoring her about the importance of finding a post graduate position that’s fulfilling and meaningful. He lectures her to not be lured by big salaries or fancy titles, that it’s more important to use her talents for good and if she does, good things will follow; and by that he tells her, he means a good life with peace and satisfaction.

Both of Tien’s grandpas were engineers living successful lives in different regions of China when the Mao communists came to power. They both somehow manage to escape when it becomes clear that Chairman Mao’s cultural revolution resulting in the systematic genocidal extermination of between fifty- and one-hundred million people is coming for them. The Red Army’s purge of intellectuals is absolute and without mercy so when agents claiming to represent a charitable Christian church in America offer each of her grandparents a clandestine way out that would involve considerable risk, it isn’t much of a decision given the alternative means certain death for them, their spouses, and their young children. The escape from communist China is not easy, it takes them into Afghanistan by horse, then through Pakistan on foot because they need to quietly keep away from both Pakistani and Indian troops who are engaged in a brutal civil war. From there they catch a Polish freighter around the Cape of Good Hope and up the African coast to Lisbon. From Portugal they hop another freighter to England where they stay several weeks in the dark dank basement of a cold stone church before catching another Polish freighter to New York.

Upon arrival in America the Christian aid workers arrange for immigration visas from the State Department and once obtained, both families are relocated to Oakland. With the help of the aid organization Tien’s grandfathers are each given jobs in the same small technology development company specializing in designing transistors for portable AM/FM radios. Prior to fleeing China, Tien’s grandpa on her mother’s side, Quan, had never met Tien’s grandpa on her father’s side Jin, but after enduring the long and treacherous journey from China to Oakland and now working as the two new hires in the electrical engineering division of a transistor design company who speak very poor English, it’s natural they’d form a close bond. Over time their friendship grows even closer and before long the families are spending most of their free time together, which is why it’s no surprise to either family that Tien’s parents, who were each ten when they escape China, became high school sweethearts, college classmates, and eventually husband and wife who never leave the bay area.

Around the time Tien’s parents are finishing high school and preparing for college, Quan makes an error in judgment having catastrophic consequence; he allows himself what he thinks at the time is harmless mischief but turns out to be a prologue to prolonged agony. His portable radio that the families rely on when they go to the beach or on a picnic, becomes a source of competitive banter between he and Jin as each use their radio circuit board prowess to prove who can produce a better sounding radio that picks up the most stations. Since the technology company where they work makes radio transistors, Quan doesn’t see the harm in bringing a couple of them home to try out his latest design. Of course, the company has an oddly prohibitive policy about taking components home, but Quan assumes it’s to prevent Japanese industrial espionage since they’re constantly being told Japanese spies are everywhere trying to steal American technology so they can dominate the rapidly growing world-wide electronics market. Since Quan has no intention of sharing company technology, he figures it’ll be okay to take a couple transistors home, especially since last time he tried a new design using transistors from Radio Shack, they turned out to be cheap Japanese crap that didn’t perform. This time, Quan figures he’ll do his design up right and then he’ll own bragging rights over Jin.

It’s early evening on a nominal Friday night in a quiet part of Oakland when Quan sits down at his garage workbench to implement his design. He opens the garage door hoping to catch a late summer breeze blowing off the bay and because he always appreciates the quiet way his bay area neighborhood fills him with tranquility. He unwraps a handful of the latest prototype transistors the company just got back from manufacturing that he smuggled out in his lunch box thermos. If these transistors perform as expected, they’ll draw less current while picking up more signal with greater clarity, only once installed and ready for testing, instead of tuning into high fidelity FM music from his favorite San Francisco Jazz station, he picks up a telephone conversation from the teen-age daughter of the Korean family across street. Quan quickly tries other channels but all he picks up is phone conversations from other families in the neighborhood.

As a talented electrical engineer who developed the current-mitigating aspects of his transistors, Quan immediately realizes the transistors he snuck home to improve his radio aren’t for the commercial radio market as they’ve been told. All at once, all the seemingly odd things about his job that never made logical sense suddenly do; he and Jin have talked many times about how the way the company’s organized around technology development lacks practical efficiency, which of course drives effectiveness. They usually conclude these conversations by agreeing they just don’t understand western-world ways.

Quan immediately shuts down his radio and calls Jin telling him he must come over with his newer, more powerful radio because they need to run some tests. At first Jin’s reluctant to let Quan install the new transistors in his expensive radio; especially after Quan shows him what his portable radio is capable of. Jin is even more uncomfortable to learn about Quan stealing company property and is worried he’ll get them both fired. After some convincing though, Jin acknowledges that Quan probably has stumbled on to something that does in fact explain all the weird things that go on at work and so, he reluctantly agrees to help Quan test his assertion that the transistors they’ve spent years developing compartmentalized aspects of are for something far more nefarious than culturally compromising music.

It doesn’t take long for these skilled engineers to turn Jin’s AM/FM transistor radio into a device capable of listening to anyone’s phone call by simply pointing the antenna at a phone line running from the street into a house or building. To test their listening device’s capabilities, they drive around Oakland ease-dropping on personal phone calls, police calls, hospital calls, even calls from technology rivals. When you add in that Jin’s radio has a cassette player/recorder built in, Quan and Jin have just built the world’s first consumer-ready remote access telephone ease-dropping device, and that’s as big of a “oh shit,” moment as either has experienced since escaping Chinese oppression. As if a spotlight were suddenly turned on, everything about the past ten years of their lives makes sense; why members of a so-called Christian charity cared about smuggling them out of Maoist China, why they were set up with jobs, housing, and a comfortable life and allowed to continue their electrical engineering careers when most Asian immigrants in the Oakland area are denied access to the American dream.

Security at their work facility always seemed unnecessarily tight and the secrecy around their designs and prototypes was over the top for stinky little commercial transistors. They always assumed the threat of industrial espionage drove all the peculiarities to keep the Japanese from dominating the transistor market. It was equally weird the way everything at work was compartmentalized, each engineer working on a small element of a new transistor design but no one person having a complete understanding of the overall product, its specs, or intended application. It was also unusual that manufacturing and component testing was done off-sight and managers never seem to have a clear answer about what commercial products their transistors can be found in.

Two things become immediately clear to Quan and Jin as they drive around Oakland that late summer night with no relief blowing in off the bay, they had to return the transistors immediately before someone notices, and they can never say anything to anyone about what they’ve uncovered. Their plan mostly works until one fall afternoon when two well-dressed Chinese men show up at Quan’s door claiming to be attachés from the Chinese embassy in San Francisco. The two men waste no time getting to the point of their visit but for Quan, it doesn’t matter, he already knows. The very fact the Chinese government would approach him after all these years, after being assured from State Department officials that as a naturalized US citizen he’s beyond the reach of Chinese agents, Quan always knew he could never really escape the draconian oppression of Mao and his minions.

The two attachés know things about Quan’s company that Quan’s just started to realize but doesn’t want to admit and while they’re not aware of the exact technology Quan works on, they assure him it’s part of a next generation guidance and telemetry system being developed for use in US military weapons. They know with absolute certainty that Quan’s company is a front for military technology development beyond the reach of government regulation, concealed from the careful constraints of the Geneva Convention, and already being deployed in Vietnam. The attachés insist in no uncertain terms that Quan has an obligation and duty to his birth country and his fellow Chinese brothers who are dying in Vietnam to provide information that can be used to help them defeat the evil Americans. They are even more adamant they have the authority and the means at their disposal to compel his compliance in the harshly brutal ways Quan is already all too familiar with.

The attachés understand Quan needs time to come to terms with his new reality and leave stipulating they’ll be in touch. For multiple sleepless nights Quan wrestles with what to do, he is fiercely loyal to his adopted country and wants nothing to do with helping the murderous Maoist regime, but he must consider the safety and well-being of his family. The one thing he’s certain of is that he can’t trust anyone because anyone he talks to about his predicament could betray him, including his best friend, Jin. As days turn into weeks, he doesn’t know where to turn and the moral conundrum eats away at him. Their initial request for information seems harmless; they just want to know the names and educational backgrounds of the other engineers in his division. Not seeing the harm in such a benign request and needing to keep his family safe, Quan complies but the non-relenting angst weighs heavy on his conscience.

A month, maybe a little more goes by, enough time for Quan to almost convince himself that the Chinese has forgotten about him and he can breathe again. But then they show up without warning, demanding information that again seems innocuous; they want to know what vendors are supplying what materials in what quantities. While Quan knows what he’s doing is wrong, weighing the information they seek against the safety of his family convinces him that it’s not really a betrayal, even while conceding down deep in his core, to the part of his soul that can be counted on to know right from wrong and consistently constrain tendencies toward temptation, that the Chinese wouldn’t be pressuring him for worthless information. He gives them what they want to keep his family safe but not without extracting a toll on his mental and emotional health. Men like Quan don’t ever really reconcile doing something they know is wrong regardless of the mitigating circumstances.

The only comfort he draws from his shameful acts is that the attaché’s seem satisfied, months go by with no new demands and Quan once again begins to allow himself to believe the nightmare has ended. And just when it seems he can finally wake up and resume his life, the attaché’s return insisting Quan acquire prototype transistors. He tells them no, that’s it’s the line he cannot cross, the bridge too far, and that he’s willing to bear the consequences of his decision. But when the attachés remind Quan, the consequences are not his to bear alone and that it would be a shame if his family in America, and his family still in China, were no more, so, he relents. Now though, almost as a form of punishment for his insolence, the attaché’s order him to smuggle the transistors out of the country to demonstrate his loyalty. They make up some story about how they can’t be caught with the transistors on US soil because it would violate international treaties and escalate the already delicate situation in Vietnam.

The attaché’s order Quan to deliver the transistors to Tangier, Morocco in a month. To ensure delivery they instruct him to arrange a family vacation in Madrid with a three-day excursion to Seville. They tell him to leave his family in Seville for a day and take the ferry from Tarifa to Tangier and a taxi from the port to the Dar Sultan Hotel where the exchange will take place in the lobby bar. They assure Quan not to worry about his family in Seville while he’s gone because they’ll be keeping a watchful eye on them. Once the transaction is complete, Quan’s to return to Seville and resume his vacation.

Quan’s crisis has finally reached its crescendo, he always knew sooner or later he’d have to decide about how things end and now, is that moment. He decides to turn himself in and beg the US government to protect his family and that is exactly what he intends to do only when he stops by his office to gather the materials he thinks he’ll need to show the agents at the San Francisco FBI, he finds Tom, the Christian aid worker who smuggled he and his family out of Maoist China, waiting for him. Quan immediately understands who Tom is and that his Christian aid story was just a cover. He confesses everything to Tom and begs him to protect his family while he accepts the consequences for his misdeeds. To his surprise, Tom jokingly tells Quan to stop the drama, they always knew it was only a matter of time before this happened and they have a plan already in place that allows Quan to prove his loyalty to his adopted country. Tom then proceeds to tell Quan to resume his normal routine, and everything will be taken care of.

The next month is a complex and confusing cluster of instructions and counter-guidance that when mixed with increasing anxiety is hard to keep track of. The Chinese come to his house multiple times, always someone different, always masquerading as a neighbor stopping by. Every morning when he arrives at work, there’s a CIA agent waiting in Quan’s office to assess his latest instructions and brief him on how he’s to respond.

Per the communist plot, Quan books a family vacation in Spain with three days in Seville. He reserves one-day round trip passage on the Tarifa-to-Tangier ferry and makes up an excuse for his wife about why he’ll be gone all day. Through all this covert planning, both sides repeatedly reassure Quan that completing this mission will end his espionage days and that soon he will be able to re-embrace his routine life. Tom gives Quan a box of transistors to hand over to the Chinese. He instructs Quan to tell the Chinese that the transistors represent a revolutionary way for missiles to know their location and make course corrections in-flight, which will give the US battlefield superiority in Vietnam. Quan agrees to do as instructed and when he asks what’s to become of him, he’s told nothing bad so long as he’s able to convince the Chinese the bogus transistors are legitimate.

As months turn into years, the cost of being a double agent takes its mental and emotional toll. The constant worry of his family being in danger and his freedom being lost makes every interaction with any stranger seem like a test. Everyone is testing him, the Chinese test to see if he’s truthful, the CIA tests for loyalty, his family and friends test for emotional stability. The only place where Quan finds peace is in the solitude of complete withdrawal from work, from social activity, even to a large degree from family. There are moments when Quan truly believes the only way out is to end things and it’s possible he might, if his world hadn’t been blessed with a wonderful granddaughter. The moment Quan sees Tien for the first time he immediately knows everything he did, every sacrifice he made was so his precious granddaughter has a chance for a wonderful life and any cost and any consequence he must consume is worth it.

Tien’s the only person able to penetrate Quan’s self-induced isolation; he spends countless hours with her in his garden or at the park. He never misses a school function or sporting event; he teaches Tien to play chess and enjoys giving her math riddles to solve. He can see from a very early age that like him, Tien has a special talent for math so he encourages her to study hard so she can attend a good technical school. The proudest day in Quan’s life is when Tien gets accepted to Stanford because he understands fate’s laying the groundwork to one day find his path to redemption through her, that she will do something so good all his bad can be overcome and erased from the ledger of life.

As Tien’s technical education progresses, Quan takes it upon himself to educate her on the moral and ethical imperatives she’ll one day confront. From Quan’s vantage point at the edge of the technology frontier he’s always able to see how today’s innovations shape tomorrow’s world, that’s why what he did at his transistor company weighs so heavy on his conscience, he can see the logical leap from transistors to microchips because he had a front row seat to their evolution and just as clearly, he sees the impact of microchips on computers and the way they’ll fundamentally change countries, cultures, weapons, and war, and all of that burdens his soul.

By the time Tien graduates from Stanford with honors and announces she’ll pursue a master’s degree at Berkeley, Quan’s progressing toward poor health. He knows his time is limited but is at peace in the knowledge his ledger of life is going to be brought into balance. The last time Tien talks with her grandfather she’s excited to tell him about the job she’s just accepted at a technology start-up developing a capability to allow people with Parkinson’s disease to retain their ability to walk. Her excitement and sense of purpose fills Quan with pride, but it also causes him to caution her, as he always does, about the need to ensure the benevolent things she thinks she is doing are not nefariously misused.

For the first time since his espionage betrayal, Quan confides in someone his full duplicity in betraying his adopted country, his family, and himself. He begs Tien not to judge him too harshly but rather to remember his mistakes and how he lost his way. He wants her to appreciate how easily one can set out to do good but have things spiral out of control until all you’re left with doing is trying to minimize the bad.

As Tien rolls into Darwin’s hacienda, she once more tries to explain to herself why she’s there but still can’t do it any better than she can justify the cosmic string of events that caused her to do what she’s done, something she came all this way in a cloak of secrecy to share with her former mentor. She misses the closeness they once shared, a closeness she’d long ago reconciled can never be resurrected; that is, until now, until fate interceded to present an opportunity to balance both their ledges of life.