Gia Fu Feng was certainly important at Esalen, his practice was a wonderful counterpoint to the often rowdy and loud encounter and gestalt therapies that were so vibrant in the early days.

Gia Fu was probably the embodiment of the " inscrutable oriental " ( no PC comments please, today it would be the Asian with cultural differences), and that would be almost certainly because he found himself the single Asian at Esalen at the time ( as far as I remember) and also foreign born and not at home with the language. I admire him for his struggle to keep his own presence and being in that time. I liked him, I was a kid and he was kind and seldom angry. I remember seeing him angry once, arguing with Dick Price over money, said arguments happened a bit back then, when money was a scarce commodity. I started out at $200 monthly, room and some board.

Anyway, the winter of 66 or 67, Gia Fu was talking to Dick and was as sad as I had ever seen him. His parents were still in China, and this was in the time of the Great Proletariat Cultural Revolution, in the very early days. There were huge changes and problems in China, and allocation of resources was one of the ways of dealing with them. That meant that his parent's firewood allocation for the winter had been reduced to the point that they would die of hypothermia well before the winter ended.

I never heard how this ended, though I have no reason to believe it ended well.