Lei Pan(1927-2017)

Future scriptwriter/director Peter Pan Lei's formative years before his show business persona was as turbulent as it was quixotic. An ethnic Chinese national born in Vietnam, the young Pan Lei left his birthplace during WWII to return to mainland Yunnan province only to enlist in the armed forces and bounced back south to fight at the Sino-Burmese front against the Japanese in India. Retired from the military with lieutenant's honors after the allied victory, Pan tried to resettle in Vietnam only to be uprooted during the outbreak of the French-Indochine War sending him packing again. The undaunted Pan fled his homeland with a foreign visa in hand to Shanghai where he enrolled into medical school to seek his calling. Instead of completing his training, Pan was sidetracked while finding solace in creative writing penning novellas and poetry while working under a Kuomintang enterprise to earn his keep towards the end of the 1940s however his true calling was interrupted by new civil and political unrest in Mainland China uprooting Pan again in 49. Now setting his sights to Formosa, Pan would resettle once more while being hired as a column writer for a Taipei literary magazine, advancing as a college professor teaching scriptwriting to film students and finally into the offices of Taiwan's Central Motion Pictures Corporation studios in Taipei towards the end of the 1950s...