China My Other Country
by
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At the Paris Airport
"Mademoiselle, would you care to share a drink with me?"
"Pourquoi pas (why not)?" I tried to sound as casual as I could, as if being invited for a drink with a stranger was a daily occurrence with me, when in fact, I had never encountered this before. Who is this young man anyway? How can he be so presumptuous as to assume that any girl he picks would necessarily love to share a drink with him? Anyway, no harm seeing what he is like, so the two of us headed for the bar. Once by the bar, he extended his hand and introduced himself, he was Roberto Olivetti. He had a mop of dark wavy hair, a Romanesque face with a fine aquiline nose and a slightly olive complexion, making him, all in all, a very genuine Roman. I responded, briefly explaining that I was working for the Commisariat d'Energie Atomique laboratory just outside Paris, having just got my PhD in England. He told me that he was an electronic engineer, that he was in fact the heir apparent to the Olivetti empire and that his father, Adriano, was in charge of the Olivetti company in Rome while he worked in an Olivetti factory in Torino until he succeeds him. . .
Roberto, from the multi-billion dollar family, was unassuming, intelligent and altogether gentle mannered. It was difficult to divine the power and wealth he wielded, or rather what he will wield in his hands, when he seemed to be just a nice young man that I could take home to.
The spectacular part of the Alps having gone by, hand in hand, we regained our seats. Roberto looked pensive, then he totally disarmed me by looking at me intently, as if asking himself:
"Shall I? Shall I not? Would she mind? Oh, you beautiful creature!'
I am congenitally incapable of looking at anyone in the eye, therefore for self-defense I avoided his gaze. But it was no use, he leaned over and kissed me delicately as though he was smelling a flower, lest he should perturb the magic which had enwrapped us. We were both still trying to rein in our emotions, with me saying to myself under my breath: 'This is ridiculous!'
After a while, he composed himself:
"Gioietta, we must make a plan."
"What plan? I am young and free, I don't need a plan."
With tongue in cheek, I pretended that I was not in the least bit of trouble, my instinct was always to wriggle out of a noose set by a man. In this instance, I was also rather amused that I had, by chance, coined a phrase which aptly described the predicament I had fallen into. How bizarre and indescribable my day has been!
"Yes, I know you are young and free. "
Said Roberto, with a wink in his eye. He continued:
"But you can't wander all over Europe like this. My plan is this:
I will negotiate an Italian transit visa for you when we arrive at Milano airport. I have a car parked at the airport, so I can take you into Milano (about 50 km away). To-morrow morning I can take you with my fast Ferrari to Trieste on the Yugoslav-Italian border in 3 hours."
Huh! My ears popped up. This was getting serious. Despite the dictates of my heart, my main concern became how not to end up in his bed that night. I could not divine what was in Roberto's mind, may be he was happy with the prospect of a new conquest from an exotic land, or maybe he had decided that he was genuinely fascinated by me. As for me, I was terribly confused and I have been oscillating back and forth in my mind. One part of me says that Roberto was just a playboy out for a bit of fun and I should run away from him as quickly as possible, another part that he was a decent man worthy of my friendship and love. In the end, none of this mattered, for my instincts overrode all the logic -
He had mesmerized me with this thing called love, in its many splendered form, undefinable, mysterious and defying all logic.
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About the Book
www.gioiettakuo.com
Idyllic childhood in the Himalayan foothills of Chengdu, Sichuan, with pet panda. Exciting hike across a bamboo suspension bridge to camp by a Buddhist monastery in Kham. Tibet. Harrowing tales of her feudal relatives – her cousin who had her arm chopped off by her drunken father and her aunt being made to die drinking opium for having an illegitimate baby who was thrown into a river.
At just 14, abruptly dumped into an English boarding school with little English, Gioietta grew up to be beautiful and academically brilliant. Here is an unique and thrilling tale of her metamorphosis from one great civilization to another – her struggles of adaptation, conflicts of identity and her accomplishments – Cambridge, PhD in nuclear physics at age 24, Fellow at St Hilda's college, Oxford and later at Princeton, USA.
Inevitably she was pursued by many young men of different nationalities. Among them was an Italian billionaire who fell in love with her on a Paris-Milano flight. May be it is her father, her profession or her personality, her early life revolved around the shady side of politics – spying. Dancing with a Russian physicist from communist Soviet Union in the streets of Paris at the height of cold war led to a sinister skirmish with Soviet intelligence, KGB, and British foreign counter Intelligence MI6.
Her father was a diplomat for Taiwan in Paris. larger than life, patron of the arts, a fabulous cook, kind, generous and recklessly extravagant especially with women. He doted on Gioietta and was devastated when she left Paris to marry a Croatian and live in Tito's communist Yugoslavia. Most sensational, her father vanished – escaping to Beijing pursued by Taiwan agents who wanted his head for high treason. A real life spy story. All cloak and dagger stuff.
About the Author
Gioietta Kuo spent her childhood in the Himalayan foothills in Chengdu, Sichuan, China. At the end of the Second World War, her father took up a job with UNESCO in Paris and she was abruptly dumped into a girls boarding school in Bristol, England, when just 14 years of age with little command of English. After 4 years, she went to Cambridge and Birmingham universities obtaining a PhD in nuclear physics at age 24. In the following year she lived in Paris, working for the French Commisariat d'Energie Atomique. In 1959 she married a fellow graduate student from Yugoslavia and went to live in Zagreb, Croatia where she worked in nuclear physics at Institut Ruder Boskovic. In 1961, she and her husband, Goran, returned to England, working in computational plasma physics for the UK Atomic Energy Authority's plasma physics laboratory at Culham, near Oxford. She was the Atlas Computer Fellow at St Hilda's college of Oxford university before coming to the USA to work at Princeton University in 1977. She is an expert on CT image reconstruction with 2 patents to her name. Since 2006, she has written over 50 articles on the global environment. Among them many in the Chinese press: People's Daily organ of the Chinese government and World Environment Journal of the Chinese Ministry of Environmental Protection, She also writes for several Washington think tanks: World Future Society, wfs.org, Worldwatch.org and Futuretakes.org. She is a senior Fellow of her resident think tank American Center for International Policy Studies, amcips.org.
She has 2 sons. She and Goran live among the vineyards of California.