The picture that forms in my mind is of a tall, handsome, athletic and outdoorsy Canadian, already well into middle age, getting into a relationship with a very attractive, sensual, adventurous and fun-loving young Taiwanese woman who is 20 years or more younger than him. They become immersed in a passionate romance, going scuba-diving, camping, traveling, partying, and enjoying so many pleasures together while also sharing an intense mutual physical attraction, seemingly a pair of perfect soulmates.
Their relationship culminates in a highly romantic marriage ceremony in July 2011 (they are a strikingly good-looking couple in the wedding photos on her FB page), and the birth of a beautiful little girl in November 2013. He remains infatuated with his wife, even adopting her name (calling himself David Weng on FB), and dotes upon his daughter.
But something starts to go sour between them. He drinks heavily (in photos so often with beer in hand or big mugs of beer in front of him), is touching 50, has a receding hairline, is putting on weight, losing more and more of the looks and vitality that had so attracted her. Her ardour cools and they start getting into rows.
She feels and expresses growing resentment at his having less money than her, the spoiled daughter of an affluent family, and being unable to provide her with the comforts and luxuries that she has been used to. Her family members stir the pot with pointed remarks about his financial status. The stresses and constraints of motherhood add to her feelings of dissatisfaction.
They have a very big row and she leaves him, taking her daughter with her and going to stay with her family in Taitung. He is still deeply in love with her, cannot bear to lose her, and desperately wants to get her back. His life is so painfully empty without the woman he loves and their child. He rides his scooter all the way from Taipei to Taitung to go to her and try to persuade her to return to him.
She adamantly refuses, backed up by her family, making it absolutely clear to him that their marriage is over and they’ll never get together again. He is shattered, inconsolably miserable. Maybe she feels pity for him, but hardens her heart against it. He leaves on his scooter to ride back to the north in a state of dizzy despair, hardly knowing what he is doing.
In such situations, it’s all too easy for a foreigner, isolated in an alien and unsympathetic environment so far from family, homeland or any kind of emotional support, to completely lose his bearings and sink into an abyss of dejected self-abandonment. Like the case of the young American guy – it must have been 20 years ago or more – who went to pieces when his Taiwanese girlfriend died in a jetski accident in Kenting, wandered aimlessly around Taiwan, sleeping rough, jumping on and off trains, and lost his legs when he was run over by a train.
In Dave’s case, anything might have happened to him after his scooter packed up before he had got even halfway home. Perhaps the people in those two cars saw this despairing foreigner stranded there, offered him a lift, and dropped him off in some remote location when he asked them to do so. Maybe somewhere along the Suhua Highway, where the sea glitters invitingly at the foot of the cliff far below the road. Maybe that’s where he ended it all, or maybe he took off up into the mountains.
Or maybe, as others have surmised, there was foul play by the people in those cars, or by the wife or her family, or with some link between the two. Not so likely, I feel, but still possibilities.
Certainly, the wife’s account of the helicopter search is massively implausible, and she ought to be questioned very closely about what happened in that fateful last meeting and afterwards.
Perhaps she felt guilty about what she had done to him, knew very well that something very bad might have happened to him because of it, and threw out the mention of the helicopter search to try to mask her guilty conscience about, and the blame attachable to her for, causing him to be in the state he was in when she spurned his last plea to her.
I only hope that the mystery of his disappearance can be cleared up, and that his Canadian family can find the answers they need and are so anxiously seeking.
