Monday, May 5, 2008

Standby for Su Beng on Skype

Just got back yesterday from Taipei. I had another fruitful meeting with Su Beng last week. Before I even had a chance to ask him if we could schedule regular Skype meetings when I'm back in New York, he told me that anytime I need to talk to him, if I "saw him online" I could just feel free to Skype him. This basically means Skyping his assistant, Bin Hong, and so if he were available at the time, he said he'd come and talk to me online!

I've been trying my best to get all the details necessary to fill in the telling of this man's incredible life. I've asked him several times over, for clarification about certain key events in his life, and I am always impressed by his memory and consistency. In my quest for accuracy, I have found some incompleteness regarding the sequence of certain events in Su Beng's life. So what I need to do is understand how to connect everything together, and to add in the missing details. Su Beng definitely keeps me on my toes and corrects me if I've misunderstood the particulars of a certain situation. And sometimes, when I go back over our previous interviews, I realize that I had actually misunderstood or mistranslated what he said.

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