MEET ME IN TANGIER

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

Chapter 13: Meet Me in Tangier

The last person Darwin ever expected to see pulling up his dusty dirt road is Tien, not after the way things ended. They didn’t just end poorly, it was 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. It had 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. It was Tien who prepped Darwin for Berkeley; 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 best if he presented himself as a confident leader rather than someone who manages by consent.

Before leaving that fate-filled early August morning as cool north bay air provided relief from intense Silicon Valley heat, life was good. What started three years earlier as an idea based on random conversations he had with a medical doctor from Loma Linda Hospital is now a tool capable of giving hope to patients where none previously existed. Of granting life to people on the verge of surrender. 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 on commercializing its capability. He casts himself as someone too profound to be motivated by money. His driver is his 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. Everyone in the valley knows, after the first billion the other’s roll in with the regularity of software upgrades.

Darwin’s overriding concern that morning, the one blinding him to all other nefarious outcomes, was the potential big pharma would acquire his technology then intentionally shelve it. His project manager, Noah, was obsessed with developing a cost model that tracked the difference between treating medical patients versus curing them. In virtually every instance, treatments far outpaced cures in terms of profitability. Darwin’s technology in no way cures Parkinson’s but it does eliminate some treatment protocols cutting into profits. Stories abound within his entrepreneurial community about game changing innovations that get shelved to prevent profit loss; innovations that improve fuel efficiencies in cars, increase reliability in aircraft, improve longevity in appliances, and of course, benefit humanity in patient care.

The thing Darwin can’t know as he waves goodbye to Tien, and the rest of his team, is it’s their last time together. After Berkeley, all they can muster are a handful of terse emails and phone calls short on duration but packed with emotion. Darwin loves Tien like a daughter, trusts her like a spouse, and intellectually connects on collaborative levels he’s never experienced. That 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 for days without leaving the office, often not even eating. Darwin brainstorming ideas without constraints while Tien mathematically proves or disproves whatever scenario they’re currently considering.

Tien met Darwin at a conference in Vancouver where Darwin’s presenting a paper on the application of Lagrangian methods to solve the Random Walk paradox, which states that 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 playing with the paradox is 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 multiple objectives, Darwin argues it’s the that journey matters. He cautions against optimizing around end states because so much is learned, experienced, and is revealed while the walk is underway. He details how his problem gets layered in recursively guided optimization adventures within the optimization problem. Something he compares to getting lost in a house of mirrors. He argues that strategic utilization of Lagrangian multipliers induces refined optimization if one’s willing to continually update their knowledge base and enhance trade-off objectives. For that he leans on Bayesian methods, a seldom used area of probability analysis and concludes his talk with a discussion of the mathematical challenges still needing to be overcome.

This part of his presentation piques the interest of a graduate mathematician student from Berkeley and when Darwin presents 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 Tien probes with such aggressive intensity, no one else gets to ask questions. While Darwin’s answers are at times less than precise, he doesn’t care because it’s clear this talented mathematician gets what he’s trying to describe. Her questions are so profoundly probing he’s 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 repeatedly being 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 and finalize her thesis on the mathematics of kinesiology, 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. “If you do,” he tells her. “Good things will follow. And by that,” he adds, “I mean a good life with peace and satisfaction.”

Both of Tien’s grandpas were engineers living successful lives in different regions of China when the communists came to power. They both somehow manage to escape when it becomes clear that Chairman Mao’s cultural revolution resulting in the systematic genocide 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 organization in America offer each of her grandparents a clandestine way out, it isn’t much of a decision. Especially given the alternative means certain death for them, their spouses, and their young children. The escape from communist China is not easy and involves considerable risks. Their journey 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 in the Indian Ocean that takes them 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 freighter to New York.

Upon arrival in America the Christian aid workers arrange for State Department visas and once obtained, both families relocate to Oakland. With the help of Tom, the aid worker who’s been with them since China, Tien’s grandfathers find jobs in the electrical engineering division of the same small company specializing in 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. After the long and treacherous journey from China and now working as two new hires at a transistor company who speak very poor English, it’s natural they’d form a close bond. Their friendship grows so strong that before long the families spend most of their free time together. This 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 preparing for college, Quan makes an error in judgment having catastrophic consequences. He allows himself what he thinks 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. Each uses their circuit board prowess to prove who can produce a better sounding radio that picks up the most stations. Since the company where they work makes radio transistors, Quan doesn’t see the harm in bringing a couple of them home to use in his latest attempt to outpace Jin. The company has an oddly prohibitive policy about taking transistor prototypes home, but Quan assumes it’s to prevent Japanese industrial espionage. They’re constantly being told Japanese spies are trying to steal American technology so they can dominate the rapidly growing world-wide electronics market. Since Quan has no ambition to share company technology, particularly with the Japanese, he figures it’ll be okay to take a couple transistors home. He built his last circuit board using components from Radio Shack, that were worthless pieces of cheap Japanese crap. This time, Quan figures on doing his design up right and then he’ll own bragging rights over Jin.

It’s early evening on a nominal Friday in the Asian part of Oakland when Quan sits down at his workbench. He opens the garage door hoping to catch a late summer breeze blowing off the bay and appreciates the quiet way his bay area neighborhood fills him with tranquility. Carefully, Quan unwraps the 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. He works several hours on his circuit board getting the disallowed transistors installed. When tested though, 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 responsible for the current-mitigating aspects of this transistor design, Quan immediately realizes the prototypes he snuck home aren’t for the commercial radio market as they’ve been told. All at once, the seemingly odd things about his job that never made sense suddenly do. He and Jin have talked many times about the way the company’s organized around technology development and how it lacks practical efficiency, which of course drives effectiveness. They usually conclude these conversations by agreeing they just don’t understand western-world ways.

Quan powers down his radio and immediately calls Jin to come over with his newer, more powerful, radio to run some tests. At first Jin refuses Quan’s suggestion that they install the misappropriated transistors in his expensive radio. It doesn’t help that Quan demonstrates what his radio is capable of. Jin’s extremely uncomfortable with Quan stealing company property and is worried he’ll get them both fired. After some convincing though, Jin concedes that Quan probably has stumbled on to something that does in fact explain all the weird things that go on at work. Reluctantly Jin 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. To further test their 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 more powerful 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 an “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 now makes sense. It’s obvious 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. Why they were allowed to continue their electrical engineering careers when most Asian immigrants in the Oakland area were denied access to the American dream.

Security around 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 works on a segmented element of a new transistor design but no one person having a complete understanding of the overall product, its specs, or intended application. It also seemed unusual that manufacturing and component testing was done off-sight and managers never seemed to have a clear answer about what commercial products their transistors could be found in.

Two things are immediately clear to Quan and Jin as they drive around Oakland that late summer night with little relief blowing in off the bay, they must return the transistors before someone notices and they must never say anything to anyone about what they’ve uncovered. Their plan mostly works until one afternoon later that fall when two well-dressed men show up at Quan’s door claiming to be attachés from the Chinese embassy in San Francisco. The two men waste little time getting to the point of their visit but for Quan, it doesn’t matter, he already knows. The very fact Chinese agents would approach him after all these years is telling enough. He was assured by State Department officials that as a naturalized US citizen, he’s beyond the reach of the Chinese government, but apparently that was far from true. Quan always knew that while he could leave China, he could never escape 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. While the attachés are 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. They tell Quan the reason for his company’s obfuscation is to conceal their work from the careful constraints of the Geneva Convention. “Already,” the Chinese agents say. “The technology you work on is being used to kill loyal Chinese 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 to provide information that can be used to help them defeat the evil Americans. They’re even more adamant that they have the authority and the means at their disposal to compel Quan’s compliance in 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 many 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. At the same time, 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, Quan doesn’t know where to turn and the moral conundrum eats away at him. The Chinese agents return with an initial request for information that seems harmless. They just want to know the names and educational backgrounds of the other engineers in Quan’s division. Not seeing the harm in such a benign request and needing to keep his family safe, Quan complies. The non-relenting angst though, weighs heavy on his conscience.

A month goes by and Quan almost convinces himself that the Chinese have forgotten about him and he can breathe again. But then they show up without warning, demanding information that again seems innocuous. This time they want to know what vendors, supply what materials, in what quantities. Quan knows what he’s doing is wrong but weighing the gravity of the information they seek against the safety of his family convinces him it’s not really a betrayal. Deep down to the part of his soul that can be counted on to know right from wrong and consistently constrain tendencies toward temptation, Quan knows that the Chinese wouldn’t pressure him for worthless information. In the end, he gives them what they want to keep his family safe, but it comes at the cost of his mental and emotional wellbeing. The problem for men like Quan is that they don’t really ever 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 again allows 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, this time insisting Quan acquire prototype transistors. He tells them no, that’s it’s the line he cannot cross. It’s the bridge too far, and he’s willing to bear the consequences of his decision. The attachés remind Quan that the consequences are not his alone to bear and that it would be a shame if his family in America, and his family still in China, were no more. With tremendous angsts, 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 a 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 he doesn’t need 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. After several days of agonized turmoil, Quan decides to turn himself in and beg the US government to protect his family. 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 like he bravely did back in China. He accepts full responsibility for what he’s done and for the consequences sure to follow.

“Stop your drama,” Tom dismissively tells Quan. “It was always only a matter of time before this happened. We have a plan in place that allows you to prove your loyalty to your adopted country.”

Tom instructs Quan to resume his normal routine, and everything will be taken care of. The next month is a complex and confusing cluster of guidance and counter-guidance that when combined 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. Each morning when he arrives at work, there’s a CIA agent waiting in Quan’s office to assess his latest interactions with the Chinese and instruct 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’ll be able to re-embrace his routine life. Tom gives Quan a box of faux 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. Tom emphasizes that Quan tell his handlers that this technology assures 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 toll taken from his episode in Tangier affects Quan’s mental and emotional wellbeing. He constantly worries about his family’s safety and his freedom being taken. Any interaction with a stranger seems like a test. Everyone is testing him. The Chinese test to see if he’s truthful. The CIA tests to determine his 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 or consequence he must consume is worth it.

Tien’s the only person able to penetrate Quan’s self-induced isolation. He spends endless 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. From a very early age he can see that Tien’s like him, she 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. He understands fate’s laying the groundwork for him to one day find his path to redemption through her. He’s confident that she will one day do something so good, all his bad is erased from the ledger of life.

As Tien’s technical education progresses throughout her four years at Stanford, Quan takes it upon himself to educate her on the moral and ethical imperatives she’ll one day confront as a technologist. Quan shares that like him, she has a latent talent that will one day allow her to see how today’s innovations shape tomorrow’s world. To make a point about why this is a burden rather than a blessing, he talks about his work at the transistor company and why it weighs so heavy on his conscience. Once he understood the work they were involved in, he could see the logical leap from transistors to microchips just as clearly as he saw the impact of microchips on computers and how they would fundamentally change countries, cultures, weapons, and war; all of which 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 short but is at peace in the knowledge that through Tien, 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 abused.

For the first time since his transistor removal episode began, Quan confides in someone his full duplicity in betraying his adopted country, his family, and himself. He begs Tien not to judge him, 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, is trying to minimize the bad.

As Tien rolls into Darwin’s hacienda, she once more tries to explain to herself why she’s here but doesn’t have any better luck at that than she does trying to 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 she failed so miserably to heed her grandfather’s warning that fate was forced to intercede by presenting an opportunity for both her and Darwin to balance their ledges of life.