Richard Li

At 8AM CST on May 12, 2020, my father's heart beat for the very last time. He was 90 years old. It stopped once before, 5 years ago now, so with a pacemaker we were lucky enough to steal just a few more moments, a few more laughs, a few more salutes before it was time to say goodbye and for that, I will forever be in debt to Dr. V.

It's hard if not impossible to encapsulate in words the heart of a man, to summarize the life of someone without whom you would not exist. I know I am not the first nor will I be the last to lose a father, but somehow as I begin to pen this tribute to my dad, I can't help but feel like no one has ever felt this kind of pain before, no one will ever feel this despair, no one will ever know this loss.

Dr. Richard Tse Min Li was born into poverty in a small mountain village somewhere in the Hunan Province of Southern China in 1929. Raised in bucolic farm life he, like millions of his countrymen, dreamed of a better life - a life where hunger and disease were not a daily threat. But my father's path to fortune would not begin as a heroic one. He was not a hero to anyone least of whom to my grandmother, who upon learning of my mother's daring escape from an affluent life in the Philippines to an uncertain one in Taiwan to marry him, briefly disowned her. And yet, from this perfectly common experience emerged a story that epic tomes are made of, a humble farm boy drafted to a war he did not believe in whose journey from his homeland for the love of a lifetime would eventually canonize him the hero of generations to come.

But who was this man, at first a scholar and an educator, then a salesman and a writer? Who was this late-life ballroom dancer? As his adoring daughter, I can only give a sliver of the picture, a fragment of a life spent in hardship, discrimination, achievement and unadulterated joy - all to a degree I will never fully understand no matter how many books of his I read, no matter how many documents I review, no matter how many pictures I see.
So I will not try to understand the will it takes to build a life out of nothing, with no safety net, no support system, not even a command of the language. Instead, I will simply say:

Thank you, father, for filling my childhood home with laughter, love and forgiveness. Thank you for always believing in me. Thank you for a patience the likes of which I will never know again. Thank you for the time you moved the fence to avoid another teenage argument. Thank you for your optimism - for emphasizing professional titles when professional pay did not accompany them. Thank you for that double wide trailer that everyone warned you against, for that career in nonprofit that you did not anticipate when you saved for college. Thank you for your struggle. Thank you for never giving up. Thank you, daddy, for being the hero of our story.

And now that you're gone, 晚安 (wǎn'ān), my dear sweet daddy. Sleep well, kind gentle soul. Your work here is done. You were loved as much as any man can be and will be missed more than words can express. I am so proud to have had the honor of being your little girl, your sweet 妹妹 (mei mei).