The Greatest Lie Part 17

My family was an incendiary mix, and I was the spark. Could I avoid repeating the same cycle of alienation and mutual destruction as a parent of my accidental love child, Alyssa? Or was I destined to play the roles of both Antigone and Creon, rebellious daughter and destructive father, in one tragedy?

Ambitious endeavors have unintended consequences. I needed to top my parents' academic achievements with my own. As a freshman, I researched and published a scientific paper on the sex practices of transsexuals at the University of Minnesota. I parlayed that success into a grant to continue my research among the katoey, or ladyboy sex workers of Thailand.

Did I forget to mention that I needed a trip to Phuket for me and my girlfriend Tran to complete our sex-reassignment surgeries? We were a little short on cash, but we made up the difference shooting pornos in Los Angeles. I guess I just can't get enough fame.

But my Thai transgender sex worker project collapsed on the diseased and violent streets of Chiang Mai. Our research had uncovered a dirty secret: my research subjects were dying from the malfeasance of a monstrous, greedy corporation, Spartan LLC. Spartan was a Thai-American multinational that promoted nonoxynol 9 (N9) for AIDS prevention for Third World sex workers. Its own research, which I rediscovered, proved that N9 promoted the spread of AIDS, especially when used by transsexuals and gays for anal sex.

The Thai sponsors of Spartan condemned me as a drug trafficker, and it used its connection to the corrupt Thai Army to turn the violence of the Thai drug war against the surviving victims of its first study, my collaborators, Tran and our Thai friend Nancee, and me. We found ourselves on the dreaded drug blacklist: fair game for "ying ting," officially sanctioned murder.

Nancee and I escaped across the wild border of Thailand and Burma and became hostages to outlaws, first to a band of brutal Wa Army drug smugglers, and then to a group of violent Karen rebels. Tran was stranded in the northern mountains of Thailand.