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1. Introduction.
2. Formative Years.
3. Bewilderment and Rediscovery.
4. Retrenchment and Recovery.
5. Derailment and Survival.
6. Potential Contribution.
7. Relocation and Finding a Proper Match
8. Drinking Bubble Tea and Sleeping With Pigeons

There are those who make their lives difficult, because they simply do not know any better. Unfortunately, there are far many more who seek to keep things simple, so as to avoid coming to terms with the reality of which they are a part. Then there are people like me who try to understand everything in a way that leaves very little out. No, I am not a know it all, because over the years I have learned how much I truly do not know. This is an important step along the path to wisdom -- something few people seem to care very much about.

Then too, there are many people who appear to know far less than I do about things over which they wield far more power and influence. This is unfortunate for everyone -- not just me. I am also suspicious towards those, who use standard measures to judge me, because my life has been anything but normal. On the other hand, I can wield the standards with which others judge me well, because I have tested them across a large variety of cultures and social settings.This is my overriding strength.

In order to make this meaningful excursion into my personal history a quick read I have divided my life into several major periods. The first periods cover far more time and territory than the latter, but as the latter are a cumulative aggregate of the former, an aesthetic balance has likely been achieved.

I am the second son in a family of three. My father immigrated from Germany to the United States at the age of seven, fought in the Pacific War, and worked his way up the corporate ladder of one of the world's largest automobile manufacturers. After chairing the Indiana chapter of the American Society of Automobile Engineers in 1967 he was struck with a heart attack, which shattered his career. Within a two year period my mother suffered a stroke from which she barely recovered, and my German born grandmother, who was the lynch pin of my family's extended relations, passed away -- she had lost two husbands due to death and had married two additional times as a means to keep her family together. As if all these family tradgedies were not enough, the USAmerican socio-political landscape was in complete upheaval on account of US military involvment in Southeast Asia. Having worked as a page in the Indiana House of Representatives just prior to my graduation from high school I became politically active in the anti-war effort. I can still recall the crashing of broken glass and the acrid scent of tear gas, which pervaded Washington, D.C. in the winter of 1969. I was a college sophomore, and Richard M. Nixon was President. One thing led to another and suddenly I found myself in a state of disarray and a broken family to which I hardly wanted to return.

My mother, who is still living, is a first and second generation born USAmerican citizen of Dutch and German descent, who married my father and remained loyal to him until his death in 1995. It was my mother who taught me how to spell, and my father who taught me how to think. I learned how to behave pretty much on my own, and then only many years after I left home for the last time. Certain members of my family think I was spoiled.

At the age of twelve I moved with my family from Detroit, Michigan, where I was born, to Indiana where I graduated from Lawrence Central High School, Indianapolis, Indiana with honors. I also received an honorary scholarhip from the State of Indiana and numerous other awards for musical performance and debate. I began my academic career in Civil Engineering at Purdue University in 1967 and made it on the Dean's List for academic excellence.

After my fall from grace during my sophomore year in college, it took me 14 long years to recover.

While still at Purdue I switched from engineering to anthropology, whereupon I transferred to the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan at the end of my junior year. There I studied under the world renown anthropologist, Marshall Sahlins and graduated with an A.B. degree in 1972. Upon graduation I began a career in medicine at Michigan State University, East Lansing , Michigan only to discover that I was unsuited for medical work as a physician. While still in East Lansing I started graduate work in German language and literature, because it was the sole thread in my now tumultuous career that I had not cut and offered a whisper of professional hope. I left the United States at a time when the slogan "America, love it or leave it!" was just beginning to appear on many bumber stickers.

While in Germany I taught English as a second language in Kaiserslautern, Rheinland-Pfalz. Unexcited about returning to the United States I applied for a one year extension of my contract and moved to Germersheim am Rhein, where I taught English at still another Gymnasium, while attending the School of Applied Languages, Johannes Gutenberg -- University of Mainz, Germersheim. I majored in French, German and English translation and interpretation. During this same period I also made two trips to West Berlin, where I attended seminars on German reunification sponsored by the Paul Loebe Institute. In addition I crossed the Iron Curtain into East Germany on several occasions and visited my father's birthplace on one of them. There I met members of my father's family and previously unknown relatives.

In the summer of 1975 I also studied French at the International Institute of French Studies, University of Tours, Tours, France. After completion of my second year as an English language teaching assistant in Germersheim in 1976 I moved to Strasbourg, France where I continued my studies in French literature and society at the University of Strasbourg. While in attendance at the university I received a study grant from the René Cassin Foundation and spent the summer of 1977 at a seminar sponsored by the International Institute of Human Rights. I returned to the United States in the fall of the same year to complete my Master of Arts Degree at Michigan State University.

Upon my return I discovered that the course work which I had finished before my departure was no longer valid towards the completion of a Master's degree. Although the study of German and French languages and literatures had served very important therapeutic needs by providing me with an intellectual and emotional framework with which to sort out my personal history, writing literary criticsm was hardly what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. Nevertheless, having come so close to obtaining my first graduate degree, I was not about to throw in the towel. Because I was able to transfer a sizeable portion of my graduate credits to Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan I reenrolled in graduate school at WSU in 1979. In order to support myself I worked as a part-time instructor for the Berlitz International School of Languages, where I interpreted in French and English for the Exxon Corporation and did translation work in German and English for the City of Windsor, Canada. In addition I worked as a bartender at the Detroit Plaza Hotel, which was soon to become the convention site for the 1980 Republican National Convention. This was an important event in my life, because it reawakened my domestic political awareness and caused me to abandon my graduate studies in German language and literature. I transferred into WSU's Department of Economics.

Not only did the study of economics provide me with focus for reentry into the business world, but it combined both the technical and social science aspects of my wayward undergraduate years. After a successful initial year I applied for the Thomas C. Rumble fellowship and became an alternate candidate. Unfortunately, nothing ever materialized of my candidacy, and I was compelled to abandon ship. By this time my father had retired and I was invited to live with my parents in their new home along the western shore of Lake Huron. Living with one's parents at the age of 32 in a rustic resort town was not exactly the best environment for reentry into the business world, but it did give me the opportunity to reassess my family ties and generally put my life back together. In 1983 I reapplied to graduate school in economics and received a teaching assistantship at the University of Oklahoma in Norman.

It is not easy to discover what you want to do in life until you are 32 years of age, but once decided there is no turning back. I entered graduate school at the University of Oklahoma expecting to specialize in either agricultural or energy economics. Unfortunately, bad timing and departmental reorganization required that I seek a different field of orientation. Unprepared for this sudden turn of events I began preparing for my departure and dabbled around in finance and international economics. More important, however, was my first real exposure to mathematical statisitics, econometrics, and linear modelling under Adelle Hughes and others-- I even learned how to program in SAS! While still in attendance at OU I also taught a course in securities markets and portfolio analysis at Oklahoma City University .

In 1987 I applied for entry into the Ph.D. program at the University of Washington in Seattle. Although my technical preparation at OU had prepared me somewhat for the mathematical rigour which awaited me in Seattle, I was ill-prepared for the near cut-throat competition in the UW Department of Economics' pressure cooker. What's more, when I entered the department, I thought I was entering into a Ph.D. program, when in fact I had merely entered into graduate school. This meant that I had to repeat much of the same coursework I had already completed at both Wayne State and OU. Needless to say the redundancy was self-defeating. Moreover, I was competing with students whose GRE scores were nearly all above my own and just about everyone was ten or more years younger.Truly I was anything but happy, but gave it all I had and managed to pass the macroeconomic pre-lim. If you have ever read a journal article written by Stephen Turnovsky, then you have a good idea of what I was able to accomplish mathematically. It was the microeconomic pre-lim that became my stumbling block, however. This was not because I disliked microeconomic modelling, nor because I was particularly bad at it. Rather, I was simply unprepared to memorize for the third time two years worth of microeconomic mini-models and then regurgitate them within the space of a two hour examination. My way of thinking had changed since I was last in high school, and rote memorization was not a top priority on my list of intellectual pursuits. A quick examination of my completed coursework in microeconomics provides clear evidence of both my interest and ability.

Well, sometimes we have to do what we feel to be both dumb and ludicrous, so I tried a second time. After failing the microeconimc pre-lim for a third time, I was compelled to leave the department with a second Master's degree in economics -- this time applied economics. My formal petition to the graduate school for still another opportunity to take the examination had been declined. It was during this same year, that the University of Washington's economics department underwent its ten year review and came under stiff criticism from the Pacific coast academic community for its less than ethical admission practices. Well, the university was not about to surrender to someone whom they pretty much considered an idiot,

Aware that the name of the game was publishing I did not leave the University of Washington without first getting my name in print and wrote a paper which I presented at the Pacific Northwest Regional Economic Conference in Bellingham, Washington in April 1990. My success at the conference led to a temporary full-time post at Western Washington University, where I remained employed until my acceptance into the Ph.D. program in economics at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee. Also, during this same period I was able to land two free-lance contracts with two reputable economic research firms in Seattle.

I entered the graduate program at Vanderbilt midyear, and when across-the-board cuts were announced by the university's president during that same year I was of course among the first to be sacrificed. Being a private university with an excellent reputation it was simply impossible for me to remain without financial support. Already in substantial debt I applied to the University of Maryland for an overseas assignment in Asia and was sent to Japan to teach economic principles to US military officers and base personnel. After four brief months as a G-12 on the US government payroll I was asked to transfer to the Philippines. Unwilling to become a vagabond professor in the Western Pacific and having been promised a one year stint in Japan with possible extension I requested that my contract be terminated and received three months severance pay, whereupon I sought work as an industry analyst at various multinational financial houses in Tokyo. I was told either to return to the United States or learn Japanese. My derailment began.

Along time ago I learned that bitterness and retribution are a dead end and that survival is a matter of attitude and hope.

Living in a society which goes out of its way to let you know that you can never really belong is a singular challenge that few USAmericans, or even Europeans can readily comprehend. Before coming to Japan in the summer of 1991, I thought I knew what internationalism was all about; moreover, I believed that I had already discovered that one universal system of thought that had the power to overcome the vast social, cultural and linguistic differences that make up our modern world -- the neo-classical school of economics. I no longer suffer from this illusion and have come to realize that the privileged position that the marginal school of economics enjoys among the social sciences in the United States is a unique attribute of USAmerican market culture. This is not to say that the fundamental laws of supply and demand, scarcity and want are not universal; rather, that the marginalist school of thought that I had striven so hard to make my own is by no means a sufficient body of analysis for describing culture-specific market phenomena -- well, at least not in Japan. If there is one thing I had to offer the world, then it was this important insight.

Just before my departure from Tokyo in 2000 I secured a three-year work visa with multiple reentry. No one drove me out of Japan, simply there was little there to prevent me from leaving. My need for a break was long overdue. Nine years is a long time to live alone in a society that generally prefers you remain alien.

When I arrived in Hong Kong, it was mid-August. The first year of the new millennium was not yet over, and there were still a few months left to secure firm roots in what seemed to be fertile community soil. Unfortunately, appearances are often deceiving. Within the first month of my new employement I found myself in the midst of a major departmental battle with angry graduate students and a faculty majority that appeared to be more concerned about graduate student sentiment than undergraduate education and new faculty adjustment. Things did not let up until well into 2001, but by then it was much too late, for the soil around me had been poisoned and my fate sealed.

I can hardly claim innocence in any of what transpired, and in the end the employee must bend more than the employer. Nevertheless, there are physical and mental limits to just how much one can and should allow oneself to be bent, before one begins bending back.

Large universities are bureaucratic beasts with enormous kinetic strength and vast untapped community resources concealed behind veil upon veil of social propriety, carefully wrought bureaucratic cloaks of often undeserved prestige, and well-rehearsed pantomime and verbal clichés employed to shield personal quests for wealth, social status, and a comfortable work environment. These concealments are especially effective when the most important source of funding is more bureaucracy -- namely the Hong Kong government.

As I suggested to the Director of Personnel after successful completion of my contract and subsequent departure from the university, the important changes that few seem able to accomplish from within the university might very well be achieved from without. From this experience and what followed the HKLNA-Project was born.