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A Life - so far
I was born and raised in New York's Hudson River Valley, a
region rich in natural beauty and tales of the "unusual." Perhaps it was that combination that attracted me to my present
literary interests.
I had a rather uninspired high school career, focusing more on fast cars than academics - couldn't help it, the cars were
more interesting than the teachers at my high school.
In my free time, I worked at the sports car shop owned by my best friend's father, who was a very successful professional
race car driver. His father was a larger than life figure, a hero in every sense of the word. At an international automobile
race in Sebring, Florida, he risked his life to pull a fellow racer from a burning wreck. It was also at this shop that I
built the 1959 Corvette that can be seen on the "fast cars" section on this website.
It was during the Vietnam War that I had my introduction to Asian culture. Curious about the Chinese backing for the North
Vietnamese, I took a summer course on Asian literature in translation at the local community college. I liked what I read,
especially the religious and philosophical readings; they offered me new and profound insights into life.
That was the summer of 1966, and I mark it as the beginning of my study of Chinese civilization. I seem to have followed a
straight line from that class in 1966 to this website. The constant has been my interest in China, primarily, in its religious
and philosophical traditions. After graduating from a local community college, I went onto the State University of New York
at Binghamton to major in history and political science.
In 1968, began my serious study of China at the University of Hawaii where I created my own Masters program. I anchored myself
in the history department and also took classes in the philosophy and religion departments.
From 1971 to 1975, I studied Chinese at the National Taiwan Normal University, Mandarin Training Center in Taipei. I lived
for those four years with a Taiwanese family. Upon returning to Honolulu to finish my masters program, I wrote a Masters thesis
based on mostly medieval Chinese primary texts. The thesis was later published in a collection of studies on traditional Chinese
culture by the University of Hawaii Press.
In 1977, I attended Yale University to focus on the study of Buddhism and Daoism. Two years later, I received a Masters in
East Asian Studies.
In 1978, I married Ms. Jing-hua Gao, an extremely talented Chinese watercolor artist, whom I met when I was living in a Buddhist
monastery in Taipei teaching English to the nuns. My wife-to-be was their art instructor. There is a link to her painting
website in the Links section of this website.
In 1982, our first child, a daughter, was born in Taiwan where we were living so I could pursue the research on my Ph.D. dissertation.
I also spent three months in Tokyo at Komazawa University doing research.
My academic pursuits were capped off in 1985 with a Ph.D. in Chinese history from the University of Hawaii. My dissertation
focused on the local history of Chan (Japanese: Zen) Buddhism during the early Tang dynasty (6th - 7th centuries CE).
It was after I received my doctorate that I started my fiction writing career with a correspondence course in fiction writing
through Writer's Digest Magazine. To learn more about my teacher, Ms. Ardath Mayhar, check out the "Literary" section
of this website.
In 1987, I was invited to Beijing as a “foreign expert” to work in mainland China’s publishing industry.
We stayed for six months.
In 1989, my second child, a boy, was born in my Hudson Valley hometown. A month later, we returned to Taiwan where I held
a string of jobs: broadcast journalist and assignment editor for the local English language radio station; copywriter for
an ad agency; editor-in-chief/founder of one of Taipei’s first city magazines, Taipei Magazine; and finally,
back to my academic roots and my writing career, as an Associate Professor of English at Soochow University (Dong-wu da-xueh)
for five years.
In 1997, we were on the move again. This time back to the US, where I had been offered the position of Editorial Director
at Wisdom Publications, a small, nonprofit publisher of fine books on Buddhism in Boston.
A year later, I was working at another Boston book publisher, Bentley Publishers, as an acquisitions editor for books on high
performance automobiles. I left there three years later and pursued my fiction writing full time.
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