In many ways, the six years Ada spent with Stanfield in diplomatic service in tropical Kuala Lumpur were the happiest of her life. As rich and official Americans they lived like royalty, and every whim was seen to by someone else. Although they were physically closer to the gathering world war than anyone in the United States was, in terms of its effect on their lives, they were as far away from trouble and concern as they possibly could be.
Still though, Ada had some reason to regret that she wasn't home. In the spring of 1937, she became a grandmother. She didn't feel like a grandmother, certainly, and those in her community certainly didn't see the raven-haired beauty as a grandmother. But Hugh and his wife, Beth, had produced a son nonetheless, who they named John, after both Beth's and Hugh's fathers. Not being able to be there in person, Ada pursued her life as a grandmother through a series of exotic gifts for the child, exchanged with photographs his parents sent her as little Johnny grew from a baby to a toddler. The photographs were both delightful and disturbing all at the same time. The baby, of course, was sheer delight to behold. And by seeing photographs of Beth, showing her down-to-earth beauty and the way she wore the western clothes so comfortably as if she been raised in them and the way she looked at and responded to both her child and her husband in the still poses, Ada gained confidence that this, indeed, was a fine wife for her son and mother for her grandson and that perhaps the marriage would hold after all. But then she looked at her son, Hugh, in the photos and she became concerned all over again. It wasn't that the photos revealed any lack of love and affection toward his wife and his child. It was that he looked so haunted and confused. Ada could not look at her son in this photo without the visage of the other photo, the photo she'd found on J. Harvey Kincaid's nightstand, rising up out of the ether to float alongside it. And her heart stopped beating, if just for a second, each time she looked at one of the photographs of her son's family.
But then Ada would simply tuck the photograph back into her scarf drawer, give a little sigh, and return to her fantasy world. She had longed to be out in the greater world, to be playing on a much grander scale than Natoma, Kansas, or even of Warsaw, Indiana, or the Wolf Creek valley. Washington, D.C, had suited her dreams just fine in this regard, but now she truly was out in the world. As isolated as they were, it seemed like the whole world passed through Kuala Lumpur and their dining room—but at a pace that Ada could easily cope with and savor.
And Ada's art flourished as well. Whereas her fame in the States had come to rest on her winter scenes of the Colorado mountains, in Malaya she was using bold colors to capture the vivid beauty of the tropical jungles. She was shipping paintings off to the Chicago and New York galleries and had become the darling of a whole new generations of art collectors, many of whom beat their way to her remote paradise to worship at her feet and to share with her the continuing sagas of her literary and artist friends at home. In all she did, Ada's husband indulged his wife and presented her to his world with pride and affection. This was an ideal marriage for him.
Although Ada loved and respected her husband dearly, this wasn't at all the ideal marriage for her. But it wasn't long before Ada had met a man who took all of the tension out of her lack of a bedroom relationship with her impotent husband. She encountered him at one of those interminable cocktail parties at the French embassy. And he was about the last person on earth she would have expected to sweep her off her feet.
Sun Li was a Malay of Chinese extraction, and he was nearly twenty years Ada's junior. To the Americans and Europeans, he was primitive, a tribal warlord from the wilderness of the isolated Genting Highlands, in central Malaya, northeast of the capital city. But to the Malay, he was a truly Renaissance man. He had been educated at the Sorbonne in Paris and was an accomplished violinist. Conversely, he was a warrior, the leader of a fierce, untamed tribe. And to his people he was a god. When Ada first met him in the drawing room of the French embassy, he was wearing a tuxedo—and wearing it quite well—and was the center of an obviously erudite conversation in French with a small, select group of diplomats and Malay government leaders. If it hadn't been for his Chinese features, dark bronze skin, and the pony tail that his black hair was pulled into, Ada would have assumed he was yet another European ambassador. But, no, she had thought. He was much too powerfully built to be anything but the leader of men in battle.
