While vacationing in Thailand, an Asian-American professor fell desperately in love with a young woman from Chiang Mai, thus beginning a seven year transoceanic pursuit through the successive states of longing, infatuation, dejection, hope, joy and bliss, in testimonies perhaps never so meticulously documented as in these letters written by the lover and his enthusiastic young friend Carlo. The candid confessions and sympathetic responses were interspersed with digressions into contemporary life, culture and customs, religion and myth, literature, arts and sciences, as well as the nature and essence of being in love, the loneliness and alienation felt by an Asian intellectual uprooted into a Western world and his life long quest for an earthly paradise. The letters in this volume span a one year period from the first meeting of the lovers. This real life dramatic account of the sorrow and ecstasy of romantic love reveals the depth and intensity of passion and suffering attainable in a tortuous but ultimately triumphant union between a man and a woman.

Besides sixty papers in prestigious journals on fluid and solid mechanics, composite materials and structures, his real interest lies in humanistic studies and contemporary issues. He wrote Chinese articles in the seventies in Taiwanese magazines and newspapers, and continued to write English articles in USA. He enjoys his retirement life with his beloved companion Air, reading and listening to music, traveling around the world, collecting folk art objects, and pondering the past and future of mankind.