The extraordinary destiny of a digital genius

Digital engineering, Harry Yuan is caught up in justice. Eighteen years later, reclusive under a false identity, he confides in an old knowledge. Thriller fascinating and meditation on time, in his first novel, “The last days of Harry Yuan” Arbon explores the truth, the illusions and the weight of the secrets. What if all this was true?

“The greatest danger that awaits those who succeed is to believe that success will be indefinitely there. We gray ourselves, we consider ourselves invincible: we sin by presumption, excess of confidence, disdain. The ancient Greeks called it the Hubris“.

In the midst of the Internet bubble in the early 2000s, Harry Yuan was the magician of the digital transition to television in the United States. He is certainly the one who had best understood and anticipated the way digital was going to upset people’s lives.

He has raised a lot of money. But against the background of betrayal, economic manipulations and media fall, this tech magnate will be prosecuted for financial crimes. He is sentenced to a fine of $ 100 million and prison.

Released for good behavior, he hides in Mexico then in Greece, in an island, under a false name. It was there that 18 years after having disappeared from radars, he sent a strange message signed “Hy” to Jean-Pierre, narrator, whose digital publishing company he had bought at the time, asking him to join him on his isolated island, in a sumptuous home. At the James Bond, outside of the justice and the revenge of men.

“I changed my life, I disappeared”

Harry Yuan is now called Mr. Ren and he will unroll his past by scraps, between confessions, silences and obscure memories. Like an autobiography. “”I changed my life, I disappeared“. Sick, suffering from cancer, Mr. Ren knows about the twilight of his life.”I hope you don’t have me the idea of ​​a good guy“.

“Harry was my hero, he was no longer. The more I learned about him, the more disturbed he seemed to me,“Thought Jean-Pierre. The reader will go from surprise to surprise, up to an astounding revelation … Mr. Ren is far from needed.

In his first novel at the crossroads, “The last days of Harry Yuan“(Edition at the Devil Vauvert), Arbon immerses us behind the scenes of the digital revolution. He offers us an economic thriller where to unravel the true from the false, where the border between fiction and reality only holds a thread. What if everything was true?

But it is also a meditation on the passage of time, full of melancholy where silence takes its entire part.

Born in Paris in 1953, Arbon is a singer-songwriter. He published several albums, wrote a musical and also organized a music festival. He was also a publisher. The last days of Harry Yuan is his first novel.

Tell us who was Harry Yuan?

He was born in China, just when Mao takes power. He saw his childhood and adolescence there and then emigrated to the United States at nineteen or twenty years. He is an extremely brilliant type, he studied mathematics and he became a professor at the University of California. And then, a little by chance, one day, he creates a business and it leads him to take an interest in digital.

It is very brilliant and designs television in the digital age above all. For example, it is he who ultimately invents everything we can do with a remote control today, access the program by chain, by date, by theme, etc. And not only does he invent it, but he also invents the CRM, that is to say the management of customer relations. He says to himself: “Once the viewer has clicked on his remote control a dozen times, I would know what happens at what time, what are his tastes and I could send him targeted advertisements”.

It is very brilliant and designs television in the digital age above all.

All this seems fairly easy today, but in fact, he designs it first more than thirty years ago. He takes patents on this. And when all the big television operators say that you have to go to digital, they come across his patents and that’s how he makes a fortune. This is the man it was.

I met him because he was not interested in television, he was also interested in the publishing. And at the time, I had created a company that was publishing online with the e-book. And as he had bought the two Californian startups that had launched the first e-books, that’s how I met him for two years.

When you say to yourself: “But maybe it deserves that I write a book?” You have been in the publishing world, CEO of Flammarion for ten years. What made you say: “I’m going to write this story”.

It is a kind of epic. It’s beautiful to have managed to make a fortune like that from nothing. When I met Harry Yuan, he was a multimillionaire in dollars, it was not as frequent as today. And then there was forfeiture and the prison. Finally, in 2006, he disappeared and no one knows what has become of it. So there was material to imagine.

There is a desire to anchor this story in reality, the one you have known, but leaves for the reader, not to be able to make a moment to make the share of the true and the false.

It’s a bit of a fact on purpose. Besides, remember, there is a citation of Stendhal in the epitaph, who says: “All the facts reported in this volume are true, or at least the author believes them such. He admits in his book only absolutely essential lies”. I find that it stuck very well with my project since it was indeed to weave together reality and fiction.

All the facts reported in this volume are true, or at least the author believes them such. He admits in his book only the absolutely essential lies

This book is a bit of a meditation on the passage of time, on what society will keep from you?

This is it, it is this kind of ambiguity between what we imagine, in any case, what I had imagined who was Harry Yuan, and I actually discover, by digging and imagining this story, that he still has his share of wrong, his share of responsibility, the errors he could make and that he has sometimes committed knowingly. We get out of the idealized vision that I could have at the start and as the novel advances, it becomes a man like any other again.

Does he regret something of his life?

I’m not sure. But what interested me, since I located the action in Greece was precisely this parallel with the Odyssey. The book poses the question of knowing: “What is a man when he stopped being a hero?” This is the case of Ulysses, because it is heroic during the Trojan War, during the Iliad. Then he tries to go home, he does not succeed, he is tossed by the events. He is sinking, cannot bring his boat where he wants and takes ten years to go home.

It’s a bit of Harry’s story. He had an extraordinary success and then he was caught in a kind of turmoil from which he has trouble getting out, but which he bounces quite well, we can say.

No one knows what Harry Yuan has become.

Do you know what Harry Yuan has become become?

For real, no. And no one knows what Harry Yuan has become. I think there is a good reason for that: American justice is still looking for it. So it is unlikely to manifest. It’s been eighteen years, nineteen years now that he has disappeared from radars.