Zhu eventually moved to Los Angeles. He always stayed in touch with my father, and once when my mother and I passed through Los Angeles he picked us up at the airport, put us up in his apartment, and took us sightseeing. He did this out of a strong sense of duty to my father, for Zhu was of a traditional Chinese upbringing, and for him a student had to show his teacher the same respect and obligations as he would give an elder of his own family. 

I recall that he was small and slightly built, with a head that seemed too large for the rest of him. He was beginning to grow bald. Behind his glasses, his eyes were intense and surprisingly beautiful. When we met him that year in Los Angeles, he had been a devout Buddhist for a long time and lived very simply. He had applied himself fully to the study of Buddhism and worked at some rather pedestrian job completely unrelated to his doctorate. He never married. 

In the 1980s, he wrote to my father to say he had moved to New York City. There he lived an even more ascetic life, which seems improbable amidst the noise and bustle of that most immoderate of cities. Spiritual studies were his primary focus and my father said that from the content of Zhu’s letters, his mind did not seem engaged with earthly matters. My father wasn’t sure how Zhu supported himself in New York, but suspected Zhu was living frugally and exclusively off his savings. 

Then came the year my father announced: “Something has happened to Zhu”. 

Although Zhu wrote very rarely, every year without fail he sent a New Year’s card to my parents and included a few lines about his own situation. When the anticipated card failed to turn up, my father began writing to mutual friends and former students, asking for news of Zhu. 

This is what my father was able to ascertain: Zhu was last seen on New Year’s Eve walking in the direction of the Brooklyn Bridge. The acquaintance who saw him reported that he greeted Zhu and received merely a nod in return. But since it was a cold and rainy night, he assumed that Zhu, like everyone else, was hurrying to get out of the rain. 

Zhu’s landlady reported that he had given notice the previous month and all his rent was paid up. His furnished apartment was left very clean, with only a few personal items left behind, none of which gave any clue as to his whereabouts or intentions. All his bills had been paid, his telephone and newspaper cancelled. No one had filed a missing persons report because he had no close friends; when people realized they hadn’t seen him in a while, they assumed that someone else had already reported him lost and so they did nothing. Thus months went by before the mystery of his disappearance became widely known amongst his circle, and by then whatever trail there might have been was stone cold. 

In all of New York City, with so many people and so many unsolved disappearances, who can say what really happened to Zhu? Sometimes my father would be of the opinion that Zhu had been the victim of foul play, the simplest explanation. But sometimes he would enumerate reasons why he thought Zhu had engineered his own disappearance: the tidy state in which he left his affairs, his complete lack of interest in the material world, his fervent scholarship in matters spiritual. He thought that Zhu had simply stepped out of the mainstream of society and chosen to live without name, home, or obligations. 

But sometimes he would say, rather confidingly, that perhaps Zhu had not only stepped out of the mainstream, he had stepped out of this world altogether. I think this is the explanation my father preferred, for he had great respect for Zhu’s learning. After all, did we ourselves not have an ancestor of great learning who had stepped out of this world and into another?