Make a Fist: A Life of Starting Over

On the night of July 23, 1981, a nineteen-year-old man was ejected through the windshield of a 1926 Model T Ford roadster on a mountain road in South Lake Tahoe. The doctors were not certain he would walk again. They were less certain he would think clearly again.He made a fist.What followed was over forty years of starting over — a mathematics career built from a tire shop three doors down from a community college, a statistics program founded from scratch, a speed skiing personal record set at nearly 102 miles per hour in the French Alps, sixteen years teaching across eight international schools in China and Vietnam, a marriage that waited for a family that never arrived, and a flight out of Shenzhen in February 2026 with a passport, a phone, and whatever he could carry.This is how he did it — and what it cost. Read more