My son’s middle name is Luther.  Many think it’s after the religious reformer Martin Luther or the civil rights leader MLK.  It is actually in honor of a fictional Scotland Yard homicide detective John Luther.  His original middle name was to be Jude after the Beatles song Hey Jude.  I changed my mind after I learned that Jude is also the name of the patron saint of lost causes.  This hits a bit too close to home.

A lot of my life involved weaker or minority positions.  At RM, I played in the yearly basketball tournament and my teams were usually the underdogs.  We lost all but one game but always put up a good fight.  I’ve already told you about being either the only Asian or one of the only ones in the locations I was placed in.  Even as a prosecutor, while an arguably powerful position, I was in a city overwhelmed with crime.  Only a small portion of crimes actually get prosecuted and our of those, not all result in convictions.  The homicide rate in the city was off the charts – it was double Chicago’s and triple NYC’s.  Not sure if this was true but I was taught my first week as a baby DA that we were the handgun murder capital of the world.  I won’t mention the other crimes, there were so many.  Often, I felt like the kid plugging the hole in the dyke with his finger.

My PhD work was in fighting corruption.  It is a near impossible task.  I spent roughly 7 years studying its aspects, indicating how to fight it and to this day for the life of me can’t tell you how to do it efficiently and effectively.  Most of the time, the major perpetrators get away with thier misdeeds.  Sometimes, the ones tasked to fight corruption are themselves corrupt.  I know.  Malaysia is like that and my first job in NYC was for its anti-corruption agency that was misused for political purposes.

And the NYPD.  Once thought to be an immovable force, it changed rapidly in the years I was there.  American  law enforcement has been turned on its head due to unprecedented historical changes.  One of my Chiefs told me that the NYPD was being destroyed from inside.  I tried to fight it.  Didn’t look that successful.

But it’s all about making the stand.

Because even losing battles have good endings.  I was one of 300 Philadelphia Assistant DAs.  That number is significant because it is also the number of the Spartans who fought 10000 Persians at the Battle of Thermopylae.  They are valiant and hold off the invading force but they eventually succumb.  What their sacrifice does, however, is to buy time for the rest of Greece to be inspired to mobilize and resist the Persians successfully.

Even those high school basketball games, we got slaughtered in several of them.  But showing up to compete made the other team respect us.  I was very young when I started as a baby DA.  I rarely went to court but when I did, it was in front of the second highest state court.  I was nervous as hell and would stammer and stutter.  But somehow I would make it through.  As one of the very few Asian attorneys in the city, it made a difference when I would say- “Good morning, my name is Assistant District Attorney V-Tsien Fan and I represent the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.”  Just to do that spoke volumes.

I’ll make the stand with you.   And I don’t think this is like the other occasions.