Born Under an Assumed Name Read online

  Here in Bethesda, at summer’s end 1962, I was chewing my way to being American. My mission—it was as though the president of the United States himself had given me orders—was to prove that I was an American kid. A wad of gum in my mouth, I solemnly swear. Cross my heart and hope to die.

  6

  jap

  I was standing on the playground the first day at Radnor Elementary School in my new white sneakers, holding my new pencil box from People’s Drug Store. Hovering at the edge of these shouting American children playing hopscotch, throwing balls, and dashing madly, America suddenly didn’t feel at all like home. I was the sparrow in the cage again.

  First thing in the classroom, we stood and recited the Pledge of Allegiance, which I knew, but all through the first day I said nothing at all, unless Mrs. Hart, my teacher, asked me a question—and then I squeaked out an answer she couldn’t hear. Mrs. Hart had kind, brown eyes that searched into yours, and a French chignon, like a soft bird’s nest at the back of her hair, and she had a gentle voice, but I felt like I had a beak instead of a mouth and twiggy bird legs that didn’t hold me up. My new sneakers were giving me a blister on my heel, and I didn’t understand these American kids with their funny Southern accents. I wished someone could give me a recipe or a list of rules for how to be: what to do, what to say to people so that they would like me, so that I could just blend in.

  My father joked to me when I was older that when I did ballet as a girl in Bethesda, I looked like a donkey on its hind legs. That’s how I felt all through those first days at Radnor: goofy and awkward—until I finally realized it was safe to put my four hooves on the ground.

  After a week, I knew where to stow my book bag and where to find an extra pencil. I could locate, in the long corridor of doors, the library and the girls’ room. I was tentatively, gingerly, beginning to step down harder as I walked in my sneakers. But then, suddenly, the second week of school, something happened on the playground that whirled me into uncertainty about who I was.

  The word had gotten around among the children that the new girl in third grade had come from Asia, and this day, a boy spotted me, ran across the blacktop, bustled up in front of me and said, swaggering, hands folded in front of his chest, “Are you a Jap?” His voice was sauced up with taunt and dare.

  I knew it was very bad to be a “Jap,” and I was struck dumb, riveted to this boy’s puffy, fiery face—it looked like a terrible Halloween pumpkin.

  Three other boys gathered around the first. “Are you a Jap?” “Are you a Jap?” “You’re a Jap, aren’t you?”

  I was standing there with my two honey-colored ponytails sticking out from the two sides of my head. As the boys pushed me with their words, I could feel my eye pockets filling up like little sinks, with tears. I had to gulp and look high into the sky in order to stop them from overflowing. In Taiwan I had often felt different, but there I had been buffered by being a member of a select and superior elite. Here, in this place that was supposed to be my home, I was not supposed to feel this sinking aloneness.

  The bell rang and saved me. I was so shaken by the boys’ petulance, though, that only halfway through arithmetic did I realize I should have said, “No. I’m American.” The whole experience fretted me. My nationality had never been called into question before. On the Taipei streets, jammed with black-haired people, my Americanness was very clear. Now I was confused: the boy who’d jeered at me was sandy-haired like me. But, I thought, he’s right. I’m not like him. Maybe somehow, in a way I’m not aware of, I am a Jap. I was born in Yokosuka. Maybe that means I have a hidden stamp on me that only other people can see.

  I felt shame, a gush of hot red blood, flushing my face. I’d been uncloaked, shown to be an imposter, an illegal spy trying to pretend she was American. I wanted to run away and never return. Only as an adult, looking back, would I become conscious of my own collusion with my American aggressors and ashamed of my betrayal of Japanese friends.

  Suddenly, here as a seven-year-old, I had a longing so strong that my stomach hurt—for people with black hair, for the smell of fish and soy sauce and water buffalo dung. I wished I had a guard, like President Eisenhower had when he toured Taipei, or at least a driver to chase people away, like Mr. Chang did for us in the chicken village. All through the rest of the day, I could think of nothing except going home to Taipei.

  Simultaneously, I was run amok with questions: Is Taiwan still real? Where is it? I wanted to net my old country, pin it to a sheet of cardboard, like a butterfly.

  Taiwan was now but a glimmer across the sea and sky. At home we rarely referred to Taipei. My family’s creed, like that of most Foreign Service families on arrival at a new post, was to soldier on, adapt quickly, grab the possibilities before us and look to the future. Our motto was: if you can’t have tofu and mu shu pork, eat fries and hamburgers.

  When I came in the door from school, my mother saw my face and made me fried rice for dinner. Peas, eggs, soy sauce, rice, and a spoonful of sugar, cooked together into a colorful pile: she knew what comforted me.

  When I told my father about the incident at dinner, he stroked my hair and roared with laughter at the boy’s thinking I was Japanese. But then his face got serious when he saw I was about to cry. “Of course you’re American!” he said, taking me on his lap and explaining that we had a law in America that decreed that anyone born to American parents, anywhere in the world, was American. “You’re American as apple pie.”

  After dinner, less weepy but stilled inside, I trudged up to my room, and, trying not to make a sound—quiet as an orphaned Chinese kitten taking its first steps—I found a taped-shut carton under my bed and pulled it out onto the rug. As though I was on a secret mission, I noiselessly opened the box and peeked inside.

  I removed objects from the box, grasping them gingerly, and then tiptoed to my dresser and placed them on its top surface. One by one, I arranged my bell from the Temple of a Thousand Steps; the oyster shell given to me by my mother from which I’d extracted a pearl; my collection of seven tiny wooden Chinese dolls; and a handkerchief Mary had ironed. Such arrangement of objects would comfort me throughout my life. With my head on my pillow, I looked across at them all, and as I did, I felt like a sea that was calming after a storm. The tears receded into their keeping pouches.

  Perhaps the most basic instinct of a child—and perhaps one of the most basic afflictions—is the wish to be the same as others. From the time of my birth in Japan, and all through my early years in Taipei, this yearning had been thwarted. Now at eight, I was a scrawny kid with knobby knees and side-parted, sandy hair coming loose from its ponytail. I looked a little like a scarecrow, in fact.

  One day, as a college freshman in a leafy Ohio town, the knowledge would seep into me that my shy classmate from a small town in Minnesota felt utterly confident about her place in the world. Being the same was not an issue for her; she could take belonging to a country for granted. To me, my friend’s possession would seem like a luxury more unattainable and remote than a palace in Tibet—which actually seemed attainable to me, the world-hopper. I didn’t know that some small-town Americans felt as acutely out of place as I did. I would meet them as time went on— all those small-town kids who were too creative or unique for their surroundings. But here in this classroom of kids America-born and -raised, I was stuck on a pole flapping in the wind. My answer to the question, “Is it okay to be different?” was clear as my name: “no.”

  The morning after the Jap incident, I had to count all my possessions three times before I could close up my book bag. I started brushing my hair three times, going to the bathroom three times, and checking that I had my homework three times before I went to school—I was making sure, making sure, making sure.

  Now, routinely, I had stomachaches when I woke up. My mother, worried, took me to the doctor. He gave me x-rays and medicine, and one time I had to drink some horrid cement-like white paste—so that the doctor could look at my insides. But he found nothing physically
wrong.

  Lonely afternoons these early weeks of school, my mother comforted me with the words that would be her refrain the rest of my childhood. “You can do anything for a year. Just do your schoolwork. The friends will come.”

  The raggedy Chinese girl with the drawing pad sitting on the Taipei market street floated into my mind as a promise, so I tried not to be shy, to keep a lookout. At recess, though, as I watched the swirling clamor and chaos and commotion, the loneliness ached. “Beggars can’t be choosers,” the saying went, but my mother said, like it was an asset, “A friend in need is a friend indeed.”

  As I would do in all the new places to come, here in Bethesda—without knowing these were my criteria—I was watching for a girl who seemed strong, who had no doubts, who had no questions, a girl guide who knew how to be, think, and behave in the place I had landed—so that I could try to be her friend and step into her shoes.

  One day I spotted her: Charlotte Hill was there playing hopscotch across the way, strong and sturdy, and waiting like the granite elephant statue at the zoo. She had been at Radnor since kindergarten. Generously, she took me on as her protégé. Almost instantly, we became “best friends.”

  Why some children reach out is a mystery—Charlotte was a gift to me, perhaps from the chubby, smiling Chinese folk god of good fortune. Or maybe she too was “a friend in need.”

  We began to do everything together. We sat on top of my Chinese embroidered bedspread and drew; we pressed Silly Putty onto our favorite Sunday funnies to make wobbly prints; we jump-roped and hopscotched on the path leading up to her tidy, white colonial house on Birch Street.

  I fantasized that people might think Charlotte and I were twins. Charlotte was medium and I was skinny. We both had braids. Charlotte had brown hair and bangs, and mine was nearer to blond, but, even so, maybe we could be non-identical twins. My mother bought me a camel hair coat like Charlotte’s at the Next-to-New. Looking like Charlotte fortified me eight ways like Wonder Bread on the commercial. Harry Stack Sullivan, the great psychologist of childhood loneliness whom I would read in graduate school, put his finger on it: the critical importance to every child of “the chum.”

  Another psychologist whose work I came to know, Heinz Kohut, wrote of the child’s psychological need for a twin—of the basic and simple human requirement for reflection or “mirroring.” In America, this basic instinct for twinning, however, is denigrated. The ideal, “strongest” American, as I’d learn in so many lessons, stands alone.

  Charlotte and I went regularly to the impressionist galleries at the National Gallery of Art. Past the white marble busts of Greek gods, we entered the third gallery on the left and walked into a world of fluffy clouds, girls in full-skirted dresses, and rose and melon and lime gardens—all sun-shot and happy and light. We admired Monet’s lacy pink, yellow, and lightest-blue Rouen Cathedral and Corot’s deep black forests, but our official favorite was Renoir’s A Girl with the Watering Can. I Scotch-taped a 25-cent print of her beside my favorite shan shui on my wall at home.

  At school now, I felt confident and happy like the girl in the portrait, so long as Charlotte was near. I laughed when Charlotte did and scuffed my shoe along the ground at the same moment as she. I tossed my head as if I had bangs like hers. This copying assured me that I belonged in spite of my heretical background. But still, I was a new girl. Any hint of exclusion and the match flared: the feeling of being an outsider would flame up.

  One day, Betsy told me she only wanted Charlotte to play Chinese jump rope with her and two other girls, and I felt, for the rest of the day, like I was a rock to be kicked out of the way.

  Later, at home, my mother gave me a Twinkie and the sad look in her eyes made me think she understood. She said, “Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me. Those girls don’t matter, Sara.” But then she added, “You’re just being too sensitive.”

  My mother’s comment made me feel as if I should wave my feelings away like a fairy godmother. I was supposed to play merrily all the time, no matter how other kids acted. But unable to conjure that kind of magic, all the little slights were like little slices on skin. Decades later, I would understand that my mother simply couldn’t bear for me to suffer. But at the time, her wish to whisk away my feelings made me feel incompetent; I hated her for it.

  One day after Charlotte went off to play jacks with Jennifer at recess, my mother found a note that I had written to my best friend tucked into the pocket of my camel hair coat.

  The note read:

  Dear Charlotte,

  If you don’t like me, tell me how to be, and I’ll change.

  Your friend, Sara

  The note to Charlotte expressed a new girl’s desperation, but since I would be new over and over throughout my life, the self-subjugation developed into a habit. I would hand myself to my friends for molding like a gift of clay. Luckily this girl was not the only one I was—but she was the one who would wrest the leading role in the next stage of my life. I would always have the sense that I had to earn friendship, and keep earning it, rather than it simply being there—or it would vanish across a sea. This one-down position in friendship was a disadvantage, but, on the other hand, maybe the world would be a different and better place if everyone possessed the innocent need and devotion in friendship of that girl I was back then, that readiness for love.

  Upon reading the note, my mother sputtered. “Sara! You’re fine as you are!” But I knew that was not true.

  Tonight—it was mid-October now—my father shook his head, looked at my mother, tossed the newspaper on the floor, and leaned across the table, looking straight into our eyes, as if he had something important to tell us. “I want to explain something that you’re going to hear more and more about,” he said. “Right now, we are in the middle of an altercation with the Russians. What happened is that some of our recon pilots discovered Russian missiles, aimed at us, mounted on the island of Cuba. Since Cuba is right off our shores, that is of concern. But,” he said, shuffling in his chair and glancing toward my mother again, “it is nothing for you to worry about. The president and his men are working like fury right now to get the Russians to dismantle them, and they will succeed.”

  My father knew about these things because he worked at the State Department, so I knew everything would be fine. But still, after this evening, my father whispered to my mother when he got home from work each day. It seemed like there was something about the missile crisis that pertained especially to our family.

  During my father’s kitchen reports to my mother, I caught the starts of her quivery sentences. “When . . . ,” she said. “What if . . . ” “Oh Charlie, what do they say about . . . ?” There were extra phone calls from my father’s friends, my mother did extra shopping. She hauled in grocery bags of tuna fish, oatmeal, and dry cereal, and she filled old juice jugs and plastic cartons with water and put them on a shelf in the basement. My father watched the news like it was his church.

  The standoff with Cuba was my first conscious sip of American-style power: of the U.S. government’s use of posturing, threats, and swaggering; of the government’s willingness to put the world at risk in the name of moral superiority. The Cuban Missile Crisis was perhaps one of the times when the use of threats was defensive and appropriate. The Soviet missiles were truly “a clear and imminent danger.” But I wasn’t afraid of the missiles because I knew from my father that President Kennedy was the wisest of leaders and America always did the right thing.

  Every week at school we had air-raid drills. We practiced going into the hall and lined up like sailors readying to board a ship, or we squatted under our desks like soldiers waiting in ambush. Being hunkered down felt familiarly American to me—like I was back in my Taiwanese house enclosed by the high, impenetrable, glass-topped wall, bunkered against the world.

  One time, after we had all brought in cans of tuna fish, chicken noodle soup, jars of Tang (the drink of the astronauts), and Vienna sausages for the emergency
stockpile, we hastened behind our teacher to the home of Mary, one of the girls in my class. We sat there in Mary’s paneled basement rec room for a while beside the wet bar, the TV, and all the cans—imagining, between giggles, what it actually might be like to be bombed.

  Mostly I just liked the excitement of the crisis—the hoarding of tins, the unusual, broken-up days at school. Life felt heady, important, like a flag was waving.

  One evening, at bedtime—the Cuban Missile Crisis finally over, but the exhilaration of conflict still in the air—my father told us the inspiring story about George Washington and his soldiers who suffered through the Valley Forge winter without food or clean water. He also told us about U.S. Army boot camp, where new soldiers had to slither on their bellies like snakes, while other soldiers shot over their heads with real bullets. As he told us of these men, his voice was hushed with admiration. He esteemed people who could do without, who could survive in “dire straits.”

  A Saturday with a sky shocked blue as the China Sea, my father took us on a six-mile hike in the Shenandoah “to build character.” The woods were a festival of red, orange, and yellow mixed with pine green—and a carnival of crisp air; the smell of soft, crumbling mulch; and the rustle and crunch of dry leaves underfoot. We each carried our lunches in our Japanese rucksacks, our GI canteens slung over our shoulders. Andy and I gloried in the woods, dashing up and down the trail, hearts thumping, pretending to be fighters in the French and Indian War. We tromped up and down a slushy stream, looking for frogs. We ate bologna sandwiches and Fritos and swigged from our canteens while sitting on a log beside the path.

  After lunch, we forged onward, trying to complete the circuit my father had mapped out for us. Soon, though, first Andy and then I started to flag. “Can’t we sit down, Pop?” “I want to go back.” “Can’t we rest? I need a drink from my canteen,” we said every five minutes. My father wouldn’t let us do these things, though. “You may have a small drink,” he said, stopping for us to take a swig of water. “But re member Valley Forge. Conserve your water. Just take tiny sips. On a hike, you only drink a little at a time because you never know how much farther you’ll have to go.