米寓

Good afternoon, my fellow toastmasters and honored guests:

As many of you have known or guessed, I am a native Chinese.  Like every humble Chinese, I believed that a gentleperson should be quick in action and slow in words. I also believed in keeping quiet unless I had something meaningful or original to say. Of course, life-altering inspirations did not come very often, so I had always been a quiet ant, living my life in order.

Tom Rasby changed me, but I have never met Tom and will never meet him in my life.

Tom Rasby was a teenage boy, the only son of Kenneth Rasby, a senior manager in the Boston office of a consulting firm I used to work.  How to describe Ken: “typical”. He is reticent, religious, seeing things in black and white, workaholic, coming to work at 8:00 a.m. sharp every morning. Ken did not like gay people, they made him feel awkward. He was also an unfitted mid-aged man, lacking physical exercises: tall, chubby, and with a big belly. Ken’s physique reminded me of a Santa Clause, but with a straight face.

One day two years ago, Ken started to disappear from the office for long periods of time. That was a strange thing. Later, Carrier, our practice leader, told us that Ken was taking time off because his son, Tom, was diagnosed with blood cancer... two months later, Ken had used up his personal time and came back to work.  He did not talk to anyone, locked himself in his office, either working or weeping… a few times when he spoke, he questioned the existence of God. He was an angry man.  The rest of the office just picked up his work and share it quietly.

One day, he started to take long walks during the lunch breaks…. we thought it might help to ease his pains… then he started to run during these breaks… started to open up a little more. In June, he told us that he was going to run the Boston Marathon in the following April. We were shocked… shocked…. it is not short of a miracle for Ken, who was so unfit, to run a marathon, and the Boston Marathon, one of the most demanding one in the nation?  Not talking about how to finish it, just how to get qualified to run it?

I think Ken was making a bet with God, if he could create a miracle himself by finishing the Boston Marathon, God might create a miracle for him. Ken started to run, night and day, and he started to talk and smile when he was raising funds for the American Cancer Society. He raised a record breaking amount that year, and in February, he was qualified to run for the Society. 

Wednesday, April 12, 2006, the office closed and we all went out to see Ken run. We split into teams and cheered him at Framingham, Wesley, Newton and all the way to the Boylston Street. Ken finished the course in 5 hrs, 26 minutes and 3 seconds. He smiled then cried; something he hadn’t done for six months.

Tom died one month later. We were all invited to his memorial service, which was set in a hockey rink. We were told that when Tom was alive, he liked watch and play hockey games, but, like his father, he was not so fit, so he only watched his school team play outside the rink. It was not a sad service… we were learning how to play the hockey on the ice…. Ernie, the forever serious office lawyer, slipped twice… and everybody laughed.

Virginal Woolf once said: “Someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more. It's contrast.” I did not receive the organ donation from Tom, but in pieces, everyone in the office seemed to be the donee of Tom Rasby’s life, though Ken’s miracle creating efforts and his reborn life attitude. In tears and laughter, every one of us started to revalue ours and other people’s lives in different perspectives.  And here I am, learning to overcome the fears of speaking in public, learning to say something meaningful or maybe total BS.

I met Ken again last week. He came to San Francisco for a conference. He was all beaming: in the past ten months after I left Boston, he reconnected with his high school sweetheart, found new love, training for the triathlon, and picking up the SOA exams, the track he left 10 years ago. When we were taking the ferry to Alcatraz, he cracked a joke about his newly built abs and how he was flattered by being hit on in Castro.

Through Ken’s smiling face was this clear blue sky.

 “Thank you, God, thank you, Tom.”