March 13
Los Angeles International Airport
2:10 a.m.
In three days I passed through four
cities.
Dubai’s nearly empty airport.
Hong Kong’s crowded terminals.
Taipei’s Taoyuan Airport.
Now I had finally landed in Los Angeles.
But this was not the end of my journey.
I still had to cross the continent back
to the East Coast
—to New York and New Jersey, where I
have lived for decades.
There were two and a half hours before
boarding.
Around me a few travelers slept in
scattered chairs. Listening to the quiet
rhythm of their breathing, my thoughts
drifted back
to the Middle East.
To one place in particular.
Doha.
I kept thinking about it.
During forty-five days traveling from
New York to the Middle East, many things
happened—events large enough to shake
one’s understanding of life.
Yet what stayed with me most was a
single afternoon.
I was sitting on a beach in Doha.
Behind me stood the striking
architecture of the Raffles and Fairmont
hotels, rising beneath the moon-shaped
structure that has become one of the
city’s landmarks.
In front of me stretched an endless blue
sea.
Under my feet was warm golden sand.
Above me I heard the soft calls of
doves.
There were almost no people around.
Sunlight fell quietly across the water,
and for a moment it felt as if time
itself had paused.
I thought about the many years behind
me.
For decades I traveled with Chinese
entrepreneurs across the world—visiting
islands, discussing acquisitions,
sometimes translating, sometimes
strategizing.
I had seen beautiful oceans before.
The Pacific’s remote Yap Island. Saipan.
The Caribbean coast of Puerto Rico.
The seas were always breathtaking. But
if you turned around, there were often
only jungles and palm trees. Development
had not yet arrived.
Doha was different.
Beyond the natural beauty of sea and
sand stood manicured lawns and the
brilliance of the Raffles Hotel.
It reminded me of Beijing—the China
World Hotel, the old Beijing Hotel, and
the moment when it too became a Raffles.
Some places hold not only natural beauty
but the sense of civilization
completed—an order shaped by time,
culture, and wealth.
Sitting by the sea, I began to look back
at my own life.
For most of it, it seemed, I had been
working for others.
Studying desperately in China in the
late 1970s. Going abroad to America.
Building a career.
For our generation, education was the
only path forward. We carried a quiet
sense of responsibility.
In university we often heard a phrase:
“Fifty-six farmers support one college
student.”
It meant that once you were given the
chance to study, you could not live only
for yourself.
But to give something to the world, you
must first have something to give.
So for many years I have asked myself
three questions:
Me and the world.
Me and society.
Me and the community.
A person’s value exists in those
relationships.
Perhaps that is why I once invested in
the environmental documentary Currents
of Hope – Save the Ocean.
A friend joked with me:
“Do you really expect to live until the
oceans dry up? Why throw money into the
water?”
Because it was Ramadan, Doha was
unusually quiet during the day.
People slept after their pre-dawn meal
and returned to life after sunset. Day
and night had almost reversed.
The daytime that normally belongs to the
noisy world suddenly felt empty.
It belonged to me.
There, far from the place where I had
spent most of my life, I sat watching
the sea, listening to birds, feeling the
sun.
And I asked myself a simple question:
If I left the world tomorrow, what would
I take with me?
Two people were traveling with me.
One was Gellini, founder of the Family
Film Awards.
His life resembles a film itself.
More than forty years ago he left Iran
during the turmoil of the White
Revolution and moved to America. The
departure carried deep wounds—family,
country, memory.
Those fragments never left him.
So he did something unusual.
He placed the life he could not live in
reality into film.
For him, cinema is not entertainment but
a refuge—a place where memory and
imagination meet.
Sometimes when he speaks, truth and
fiction blur together.
It reminds me of someone sitting in a
theater watching a hero on the screen
and wondering, when the lights come on:
Perhaps that hero is me.
Because in real life, we rarely feel
like heroes.
Reality requires compromise.
The second companion was Mr. Ye,
an extraordinary collector of Chinese
antiquities.
People often say we all have two jobs:
A day job and a dream job.
The day job sustains life.
The dream job sustains the soul.
Mr. Ye’s professional life may involve
government infrastructure projects and
contracting work. It is stable and
practical.
But his true world is art.
He has collected countless
artifacts—from ancient jade of the
Hongshan culture to ceramics spanning
two thousand years.
Each object carries traces of its
time—technology, aesthetics, and human
imagination preserved in material form.
That afternoon we each did our own
thing.
Gellini sat facing the sea, quietly
praying.
Through the glass walls of the
restaurant I saw Mr. Ye seated alone,
studying images of antiques on his
phone. Whenever he has a spare moment,
he returns to those objects from distant
centuries.
At that moment I remembered the first
time he showed me a Yongzheng imperial
coral-red enamel bowl in a restaurant
near Times Square.
When he opened the box and revealed the
bowl, I was stunned into silence.
Its beauty was overwhelming—not loud or
extravagant, but gentle.
A soft glow seemed to travel across
three hundred years until it reached my
hands.
When I held it, it felt less like
porcelain than a flower born from fire
and time.
Petals light as breath.
Pink and violet like shy glances.
Gold at the center glowing quietly.
That was when I understood something.
A great object does not simply belong to
history.
It carries the love of the people who
preserved it.
Standing on the shore in Doha, watching
my two companions, I suddenly realized
something simple.
Life could be lived like this.
A little less responsibility.
A little more love.
Love what you love.
And perhaps, in doing so, discover the
most beautiful version of yourself.
Between War and Beauty
• Under the Shadow of War, Love in Doha!
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