To become known was never a special desire with me. And I do not feel that I would be hard for a good observer to make out. When asked, I say that I live in Chicago and am semiretired, but I never care to specify my trade. Not that there is much to hide. But something about me hints that there is. I have a Chinese look. After the Korean War, I was sent to study Chinese in a special school. Maybe my esoteric skills, by a process of secret suggestion, brought an East Asian expression into my face. The kids at school never called me ‘Chink’ – and they might have done it because I was in an ambiguous category, an outsider, an orphan. But that, too, was misleading. Both my parents were alive. I was put in an orphanage because my mother had a disease of the joints that sent her from sanitarium to sanitarium, mainly abroad. My father was a simple carpenter. The bills were paid by my mother’s family, her brothers being successful sausage manufacturers and able to afford the cures she took at Bad Nauheim or Hot Springs, Arkansas.

I was assumed at school to be one of the children from the orphanage. I had no occasion to explain my special circumstances, and all the peculiarities of those circumstances sank into the structure of my face – a round head, hair worn as long as the orphanage allowed, a pair of fat black eyes, a wide mouth with a sizable lip. Wonderful materials for the insidious Fu Manchu look.

A man’s road back to himself is a return from his spiritual exile, for that is what a personal history amounts to – exile. I didn’t allow myself to make too much of the Chinese lip. I seem to have decided that to be busy about one’s self-image, to adjust, revise, to tamper with it, was a waste of time.

In the days when I was reviewing my options, I believed that I might – just might – effect a transfer to another civilization. The Chinese would never notice me in China, while in my own country, looking vaguely Chinese would not be enough to prevent discovery … I probably mean exposure.

But I lasted only five years in the Far East; the last two of these I spent in Burma, where I made important business connections, discovering while immersed in another civilization that I had something of a gift for putting together business deals. Provided with a lifetime income through the Burmese operation, which had a Guatemalan branch, I returned to Chicago, where my emotional roots were.

I gave up being a Chinaman. Some Westerners of course preferred to be Oriental. There was the famous British hermit of Peking described so beautifully by Trevor-Roper; there was also Two-Gun Cohen, the Montreal gangster hired by Sun Yat-sen to be his bodyguard, and who never wished to return to Canada, it seems.

You will see soon enough that I had substantial reasons for resettling in Chicago. I might have gone elsewhere – to Baltimore or Boston – but the difference between cities is more of the same, superficially disguised. In Chicago I had unfinished emotional business. In Boston or in Baltimore I would still have thought, daily and regularly, of the same woman – of what I might have said to her, of what she might have answered. ‘Love objects,’ as psychiatry has named them, are not frequently come by or easily put aside. ‘Distance’ is really a formality. The mind takes no real notice of it.