Chasing Halley: Sleeping Through the Light

In 1986, eight-year-old Eddie Lau's father pulled him from a bed that smelled of mothballs and Tiger Balm to see Halley's Comet over Malaysia. He looked up for three seconds. He went back to sleep. From the kitchen, he heard his father say to his mother: mei you hao qi xin. The boy lacks the heart for wondering.

He carried those words across an ocean and through forty years. Now he is forty-seven, settled in Louisiana, with a wife who has waited out every kind of weather and a non-speaking s...