FINDING MISS FONG

In this memoir, a young man’s hasty decision to join the Peace Corps sets the course of the rest of his life.

In 1961, Chicago-born Wolter writes, he joined the Peace Corps, in part, to avoid marrying his girlfriend: “We were being steamrolled into it by our mothers.” After training, his team was sent to Malaya—soon part of Malaysia—where he hoped to spend his two-year stint teaching biology. The Peace Corps administration instead sent him hither and yon and asked him to teach subjects that he knew nothing about. He also found that the locals sometimes resented and mistrusted him and his fellow volunteers. Then he met someone he thought was “the most beautiful woman in the world”: Fong Moke Chee, an accomplished Chinese Malayan woman who’d traveled in Europe and studied art in England. They fell in love (“time seemed to evaporate in thin air,” he writes of a lunch they shared), but soon ran into obstacles. Fong’s family liked the author, but her father refused to give the marriage his blessing. (She was her parents’ only child, and they expected her to care for them.) The couple eloped and soon had two kids; the author planned to make a life for the youngsters in Fong’s home country—but then more pitfalls cropped up. Overall, this is a very enjoyable, if meandering, account, and one that’s full of surprises and memorable characters. Readers will find both the author and Fong likable and hope for their success. One gets an everyday glimpse into Malayan culture from an outsider’s point of view, and the author adapts to it remarkably well. He also admirably bore many difficulties with aplomb. Ultimately, he found that his love for Fong turned out to be his superpower, and that their hasty decision to marry was a wise course of action, after all.

A somewhat lengthy but touching international love story.