Reciprocity Can Save Your Life

It is so gratifying to help others when you expect nothing in return. Not only is it pleasing to see them benefit from your help, but you can also infer that your heart is in the right place. It nourishes your altruistic side, fending off the selfish scoundrel perhaps lurking within you.

It can also save your life.

Novelist Fredrick Forsyth writes in his autobiography about an incident that happened to his father when he was a young man in Malaya in the early 1930s. It was an extraordinary incident, but his father swore it was true.

His father had hoped to be a naval architect, but he entered the workforce in England during a time between world wars when naval ships were not being built and, generally, such jobs were available for one in 10 people seeking them.

There were opportunities in the East, though, and he took a position managing a rubber farm in Malaya (now Malaysia). At the time of the incident, he had been at his job for close to five years and was hoping either to return to England to marry his fiancée or to have her join him in Malaya.

One night he was roused from his sleep by an unexpected visitor. It was a Japanese man who did carpentry work in the area. The man, along with his wife and son, were private people who didn’t mingle with others, but this night they were in need. The son was suffering acute stomach pain, and the anxious man was requesting medical help.

Forsyth’s father went with the man to examine his son. The poor boy indeed looked in bad shape, and Forsyth’s father could tell, even based on his scant medical knowledge, that the boy had severe appendicitis and needed immediate surgery.

Unfortunately, the nearest hospital was 80 miles away, and the first part of the road was a long, furrowed track through a jungle teeming with predators of the night. But Forsyth’s father gassed up his small motor bike, strapped the boy to his back, and set off right away into the blackness of the jungle path. It was a “hellish journey” of several hours.

Dawn approached when they reached the hospital entrance. Luckily, a doctor was just finishing his night shift and managed a quick examination of the boy. Surgery was performed immediately, and, indeed, just in time. The appendix was close to bursting.

Forsyth’s father returned to the rubber farm that day to inform the boy’s traumatized parents that their son had survived. After a couple of weeks, the boy also returned “with a shy smile and a scar.”

That seemed to be the end of it, but a few days later the carpenter again showed up at his father’s door. With his eyes directed downward, the carpenter said, “Tuan, my son will live. In my culture when a man owes what I owe you, he must offer the most valuable thing that he has. But I am a poor man and have nothing to offer save one thing. Advice.”

He lifted his eyes and with an intense look added, “Leave Malaya, tuan. If you value your life, leave Malaya.”

Forsyth’s father returned to England the next year. He couldn’t say for sure that it was the carpenter’s advice that prompted the return. Maybe it simply confirmed an incipient determination, beginning to form.

Regardless, leaving Malaya when he did likely saved his life. None of the other British men who stayed in Malaya survived the treatment they received from the Japanese after the country was invaded in 1941. None.

The carpenter had probably been one of many sleeper agents who had infiltrated the country in anticipation of a carefully planned Japanese invasion. The British and Australian troops defending the country were outmaneuvered at every turn by the invading Japanese troops, who were guided by these agents. The invasion was over in a matter of days, in no small part because of the advantage gained from these secret activities.

Forsyth concluded, "perhaps only a few whispered words from a grateful carpenter caused me to appear on this earth at all."