Learning a Different Kind of Strength

People who meet me for the first time sometimes think I look stern. I suppose that is understandable. I was the eldest son in a family with four younger sisters, and for much of my life I was accustomed to being responsible, making decisions, and taking care of other people. Later, in business, I became even more used to being the person who gave instructions rather than the person who followed them.

My wife, Du Meijing, is almost the opposite at first glance. She was a professional dancer when she was young and has always had a gentler presence. But appearances can be misleading. After more than thirty-five years of marriage, I can tell you that beneath that softness is a remarkably strong woman.

When we first met through mutual friends, neither of us could have known what our life together would eventually contain. There would be children and careers, success and retirement, volunteer work, illness, fear, and many moments when one of us had to become strong because the other could not. Looking back, I think marriage has been less about two people remaining exactly as they were when they first met and more about learning how to change without losing each other.

Meijing made one of the first major changes. She stepped away from her professional life as a dancer and devoted much of herself to our family. In those years, I concentrated heavily on work. I was involved in pharmaceutical distribution during a period when Western medicines were developing rapidly in Taiwan, and business was good. I worked hard, built a team, and gradually became successful.

I cared deeply about the people who worked with me. Employees were never simply names on a payroll. I knew their families and tried to treat them as part of a larger community around the company. Business inevitably brings disagreements and temptations, particularly when money is involved, but I believed that once integrity was damaged, financial success could not repair it. I wanted to make money, of course, but I also wanted to be able to look people in the eye afterward.

For many years, that life suited me. I was busy, useful, and accustomed to having a purpose every morning.

Then I retired.

I discovered that retirement is not automatically relaxing simply because you no longer have to go to work. When a person has spent decades measuring his days through responsibilities, decisions, employees, and problems to solve, suddenly having an empty calendar can be surprisingly uncomfortable. I played golf and spent more time with my family, but something was missing.

Meijing adapted much more naturally. She had always been better at building a life around people, activities, and community. Through her, another world slowly entered our lives—the Tzu Chi Foundation.

At first, I was skeptical.

Religious organizations had never interested me very much. I had spent my career in business, where I trusted things I could observe and measure. I did not want to join something simply because other people told me it was good.

Then September 11 happened.

In the aftermath of the attacks, I had an opportunity to see Tzu Chi volunteers working near the disaster site. What affected me was not preaching. It was what people were actually doing. I saw order, compassion, discipline, and individuals quietly taking care of strangers without asking for recognition.

That stayed with me.

I began participating more seriously, and without realizing it at first, I entered another kind of education.

For most of my professional life, I had occupied positions of responsibility. I was accustomed to managing people and being respected. Volunteer work placed me in situations where none of that mattered. If the street needed sweeping, someone had to sweep it. If chairs needed moving, someone moved them. If a community needed cleaning, you cleaned.

At first, these small roles tested my pride more than I expected. Eventually, they became some of the most meaningful parts of the experience.

There is something very healthy about discovering that you are not too important to hold a broom.

I began to understand humility not as making yourself smaller, but as no longer needing every task to confirm your importance.

The more I participated, the more my life after retirement filled up again. I worked alongside volunteers who knew how to build, repair, organize, cook, transport, and solve practical problems. I helped with community activities, student safety, disaster relief, and team leadership. The businessman in me did not disappear; many of the skills I had developed over a lifetime were still useful. But the purpose behind them changed.

Meijing noticed the difference too. The man who had once been skeptical of religious organizations was now willing to spend his time sweeping streets and doing whatever job needed to be done.

The teachings I encountered through Tzu Chi also began affecting the way I thought about ordinary life. Ideas such as patience, tolerance, gratitude, and letting go can sound simple when spoken aloud. Living them is another matter. It is easy to talk about letting go when nothing important is being taken from you.

I would eventually have to learn that lesson in a much more difficult way.

For months, I had been experiencing pain. At first, I assumed it was muscular or simply part of getting older. You reach a certain age and aches no longer seem unusual, so it is easy to explain them away.

But the pain persisted.

The examinations became more serious: X-rays, scans, more tests. Eventually, the doctors discovered lung cancer that had already metastasized to my bones.

Suddenly, the future I had assumed was waiting for me became uncertain.

People sometimes imagine that when you receive news like this, you immediately collapse emotionally. My response was somewhat different. Perhaps my years of spiritual practice had prepared me more than I realized. Perhaps it was simply my personality. I began thinking practically.

My family needed to know. Affairs needed to be arranged. Decisions about treatment had to be made. I chose to return to Taiwan, where I could receive treatment while being closer to relatives and the network of people who had been part of our lives.

For years, she had been beside me as my wife and partner, but now she had to confront the possibility of watching me suffer and perhaps losing me. Her fear was not abstract. She would be the one beside me through appointments, treatments, sleepless nights, pain, and uncertainty.

Treatment was demanding. There was chemotherapy and radiation, including advanced Tomotherapy. There were periods of severe pain and side effects that affected almost every part of ordinary life. My skin developed rashes. I had diarrhea. At times, swallowing became difficult. Simple activities that I had never thought about before suddenly required planning and endurance.

I tried to deal with each problem as it came. If one method did not work, I looked for another. I had spent my business life solving practical problems, and in a strange way that habit helped me during treatment. I could not control the cancer, but I could still respond to the circumstances it created.

What I had not expected was how many people would respond with us.

The community we had entered through volunteer work now surrounded our family. Messages came. People visited. Volunteers in different places offered help and encouragement. During some of the lowest periods of treatment, I was reminded again and again that relationships built quietly over many years do not disappear when circumstances become difficult.

For much of my life, I had been proud of being able to help others. Illness forced me to learn the other half of that relationship: how to be helped.

That was not necessarily easier.

There is dignity in giving, but there is also humility in receiving. When you are accustomed to being strong, allowing someone else to care for you can feel like surrender. Eventually I understood that it was not. The affection being offered to me was something other people needed to give just as sincerely as I had once needed to give it.

Meijing and I were learning different versions of the same lesson. I had to accept that my body was no longer completely under my command. She had to learn that love could not guarantee an outcome. We could make decisions, pursue the best treatment available, support one another, and remain hopeful, but neither of us could negotiate with life for certainty.

That was where the idea of letting go stopped being a teaching and became an experience.

Letting go did not mean giving up treatment. I believed strongly in medicine and in taking advantage of advances in cancer care. Nor did it mean becoming indifferent about whether I lived or died. I wanted to live.

It meant accepting that fear would not give us greater control.

Once I understood that, gratitude became easier to find even in the middle of illness. I was grateful for doctors and technology. I was grateful for my family. I was grateful for Meijing, who remained beside me when caring for me was exhausting. I was grateful for friends and volunteers whose concern made our world feel larger than the hospital room.

Most of all, I became aware of how much of a life is built from relationships.

When I was younger, success had a different shape. I thought about building a business, leading employees, supporting a family, and doing my work well. Those things still matter to me. I do not dismiss the life I lived before retirement.

Then volunteer work taught me that strength could also mean putting down your status and doing an unnoticed job because it needed to be done.

After more than thirty-five years together, Meijing and I have discovered that marriage contains many different kinds of companionship. There are years when you build a home together. There are years when you are busy raising a family or pursuing a career. There are quieter years when retirement changes the rhythm of the household. And there may come a time when one person sits beside the other through illness and both begin to understand how precious all those ordinary years actually were.

I do not know that a good life can be measured by its length. I am increasingly convinced that it is measured by what we do with the time we are given and by the relationships we leave inside other people.

When I think about the businessman I once was, I still recognize him. He worked hard, valued integrity, cared for his employees, and believed responsibility was important. I have not abandoned that person.

It gave him a community and taught him that independence is not the same as standing alone.

And through all of it, it gave him a woman who stayed beside him.

Perhaps that is what I understand now as a bright life. It is not a life in which darkness never arrives. Every family will eventually encounter some form of loss, illness, disappointment, or uncertainty.

Brightness comes from what remains visible when it does.

For me, what remained was love, friendship, gratitude, and the knowledge that even when I could no longer control what happened next, I did not have to face it alone.