Twelve Years Across Borders

Hangzhou, 2017. A coffee shop two blocks from J Group, where an Americano cost forty-two yuan — about triple what the same cup cost in a Fukuoka convenience store. The location was the point. I came in that morning to meet two people who would, withi... more

November 2016. A high wall in the Minato district of Tokyo. Behind it: a Chinese embassy compound, Chinese sovereign territory, where a Taiwanese citizen with no recognized passport could apply for a thin dark-blue travel booklet that the mainland is... more

A business does not fail all at once — it fails the way a tap closes, a quarter turn at a time. By autumn 2015 a competitor had opened up near Kurume and the patients were going to him. For four months my revenue was close to zero. Then a private cli... more

August 2015, Fukuoka Legal Affairs Bureau, ticket number 47. Inside a manila folder on my lap was a name in three characters of black ink — Shingihou — a name my grandfather's rice shop in Yilan had carried through the 1920s and which had waited fift... more

After the first patient died, the phone did not stop. By spring 2015 my number was circulating inside a quiet word-of-mouth network of Taiwanese families whose physicians had told them there is nothing more we can do here. I drove a twenty-year-old H... more

July 2014. A Wednesday afternoon in a Waseda materials lab on the industrial northern edge of Kyushu. The phone rang with a Taiwan country code. The man on the line said his father had been told there was nothing more to do, that someone had found a ... more

In 2014, one phone call pulled me from an engineering lab into cross-border medicine. I thought I was helping with one translation; I did not know it would become twelve years.

In this episode: medical translation, Japan, Taiwan, and the beginning o... more