With just $21 he sailed to a new life in America with a tiny wooden boat

(CNN) — Sitting in Eddie Fong’s living room in Palo Alto is a 55-year-old model of a traditional Chinese junk boat.

Its presence symbolizes a series of unlikely events that brought Fong, now 81, away from his birthplace Hong Kong to the United States in the 1960s, thanks to a chance encounter with a retired Oakland detective that developed into an ambitious plan to sail across the Pacific Ocean to California on a life-sized junk boat.

Before speaking to CNN Travel, Fong texted us a spoiler alert: “I need to tell you ahead of the time. We didn’t make the entire trip to California.”

But…