Where the Orchid Blooms

It was the end of a long, hot summer in 1958 when Ta-Sun Wang left his native island of Taiwan. Profound emotions gripped him as the jet taxied down the runway and lifted high into the air in a roar above the city. He was excited about his trip to the United States, but a little apprehensive about being on a plane (he had never flown before) and, ultimately, sad about leaving his home and everyone he loved.

Seated by the window, he saw an intricate mosaic of buildings, rivers and fields that slid quickly beneath him and soon opened to an expansive green carpet of forested mountains as the plane veered toward the Pacific. Then the landscape vanished under the cover of filmy mist, reminding him of the foggy mornings in his hillside birthplace. 

The plane was now cruising above the clouds. He saw before him a boundless sea of intangible and lovely water vapors floating through the vast emptiness of space—that lonely place between heaven and earth where the moon and stars were hidden from mortals, and where lovers met in their dreams. He fell into this realm of spirituality, and his heart opened to his pain.

In a fleeting reflection in the window, he saw the image of Shian-Lan, his childhood sweetheart. They hadn’t seen each other in two years, since shortly before she had married and moved away. They had been best friends and soul mates, and he knew that she was the only girl he would ever love in that particular, innocently complete way. Because she was his paternal first cousin, she had been snatched away from him, weeping, leaving him in barren desolation that was more final than death. She had said to him of their doomed affair: “I’ve been living in my own happy little world like the creatures in the forest rain puddle. And now, the reality is that there is a larger existence outside of my own, and a very large foot will step on me and send my old life splattering out of the puddle. And some of the droplets will evaporate and disappear into the atmosphere, nowhere to be found.”

As youngsters, Ta-Sun and Shian-Lan had read that wild geese often paired for life and pined to death at the loss of their mate. He was flying away, across the ocean and above the concealing mist, like a lone wild goose fleeing the ghosts from his past or searching for his dreams in the distant land. The force that held his spirit within his body had been the persistent feeling that he and Shian-Lan would return to their beloved valley one day and would never have to say goodbye to each other again. Until that time, he wasn''t sure how he would continue to endure the forlornness of not being with her, for she had been his whole existence.