Lo Mei Fok

Her name was Lo Mei Fok. Looking back, I realize how little I actually knew about her. She liked to punctuate her sentences, both written and spoken, by saying "Oh my!" I don't think she knew how to laugh. She was a widow from China who had moved here to live with her daughter, a doctor of some kind, in 1985 after her husband died. I never knew what she looked like, but I loved her, and by telling her that I loved her I made her run away--something she had refused to do even as I was revealing the darkest and most personal parts of myself to her in my letters. I never knew what she looked like, but I knew she was beautiful.

She spoke very little English, and when she first moved here she was very lonely. Her daughter, who must be brilliant, told her to write letters to prisoners. "They won't judge you because of your English," she told Lo Mei, "and they've got lots of time to write back." "Oh my!" I'm sure Lo Mei said in response, but she took her daughter's advice and wrote letters to prisoners, and she wrote one to Curt Jimenez and changed his life.

Thirty-six letters she wrote to me in all, each of which I still have, laminated and arranged chronologically in a yellow binder I keep in the top drawer of my bedside table. The year I received the first letter, 1987, Lo Mei was 48 and I was 27. There have been a lot of hard years for me in my life, but in 1987 I had been in jail for five years, and I think the tough exterior I had been building since I was a teenager was starting to crumble under the enormous weight of indefinite incarceration. I was drowning. I wasn't raised to be able to handle prison, and in 1987 I think I was finally starting to understand that. I was desperate for something to come into my life and change me. Many prisoners mock the idea of rehabilitation, but I was there, I was burdened, and I was ready to become someone different then the naive boy I had always been.

I remember getting the letter vividly, as notes and cards from Mom were about the only thing to look forward to in those days, and to get something from somebody else was quite out of the ordinary.

Dear Inmate Jimenez,

Hi, how are you doing? My Daughter says my alone feelings will be better if I find people to talk. I am China and just come to America to live with my daughter who is doctor. My husband is dead in China and I know no one. If you would like to send letters I would like that. Sorry my English is kind of not so good. Maybe you can help me make better! Oh my! Thank you very much!
Sincerely,
Lo Mei Fok

Lo Mei wrote me a letter for the last time in June of 1992. I had been eager to talk to her on the phone or in person for a long time. She didn't want to do it. Maybe she was scared of who I really was. Maybe the emotional distance of the written word--in a language not her own--kept me remote enough to make it okay to converse with a convicted murderer. Maybe though, she loved me back and was afraid of where it could go. Would it anger the soul of her departed husband? Was it improper for a woman her age to be with someone twenty years younger? Maybe she was just embarrassed to reveal the real voice behind the letters. I called her though, and we talked, for maybe a half-hour or more. Her voice was high pitched and a little raspy, and because of what must have been nervousness, she tried to speak faster than her mind was able to deliver the English words. I had known that I was in love with her for some time, and hearing her speak only strengthened the convictions of my heart. I told her what I felt, and I never heard from her again.

On a whim, after some strange remembrance, I Googled her name this morning. What I found was that Lo Mei Fok had a brain tumor and died back in May of 2009. Lo Mei Fok was the first person to forgive me--and to teach me how to forgive myself--by saying that Curt Jimenez in 1982 was not the same man as Curt Jimenez in 1989. "You never step in same river twice!" she wrote. She told me that I was a writer, that if it felt good to put things down on paper, it didn't matter if you were good at it. "You writer!" she wrote. She told me that I would get out of prison some day, and that when I did I would live a good and full life that I might never have valued properly if things had gone differently in my youth. She was right. Lo Mei Fok, I love you and I miss you.