To write and publish this signer, I spent several days at the Hotel Intercontinental in Manhattan, along with sponsoring editor Susan France and researcher Mitchell Hsieh, secretly interviewing Dr. Wong. I wanted to tell the story in full narrative detail. The piece also needed to meet the Digest's strict fact-checking standards. This meant that every word had to be confirmed by eyewitnesses living in Communist China. I can't reveal exactly how we carried this off, but I will say that we were grateful to have a Chinese-speaking researcher in Hsieh and a clever operative based in our Hong Kong editorial bureau.

Between interview sessions, we took Dr. Wong to lunch at the Four Seasons, one of New York's most expensive restaurants. Wong told us she was feeling a little run-down, and related how, when she was a child in China, her parents fed her raw water-buffalo meat as a restorative. When the waiter came, I jokingly asked if we could order water buffalo, raw. "This is the Four Seasons," the man replied. "Of course you can." And that's exactly what Wong got.