A Question of Duty
To ghostwrite this chilling memoir, I holed up for days at the Hotel Intercontinental in Manhattan, along with sponsoring editor Susan France and researcher Mitchell Hsieh, interviewing Dr. Wong. Her story demanded narrative detail. To meet the magazine’s strict fact-checking standards, however, every word had to be confirmed by eyewitnesses in China. I can’t reveal exactly how we carried this off, but we were grateful for the help of Mandarin-fluent Hsieh and a few clever operatives in our Asian bureaus.
Between interview sessions, we took Dr. Wong to lunch at the Four Seasons, one of New York’s most expensive restaurants. One day Wong told us she was feeling a little run-down, and related how, when she was a child in China, her parents fed her raw water-buffalo meat as a restorative. When the waiter came, I jokingly asked if we could order water buffalo, raw. “This is the Four Seasons,” the man replied. “Of course you can.” And that’s exactly what Wong got.
Reader’s Digest, September 1995, pp. 65–70. Reprinted with permission.