Born Under an Assumed Name Read online

  “Water discipline,” he said as though we were army men on patrol. “Water discipline is the key to survival.” My father only rarely gave us absolutes to follow, so after that, we took only the tiniest of sips, even though we wanted to glug our tepid water all the way to the bottom of our metal canteens.

  And then my father taught us another method for slaking our thirst. When the path led us to a brook, which we forded by jumping from rock to rock, he dipped from the trickling stream two smooth, glistening stones. (You could still drink from American streams back then.) “If you’re ever in the wilderness and you don’t know how far you’ll have to go before you can next refill your canteen, pluck a stone out of a creek and suck on the stone.”

  I never questioned the logic of this instruction; its message simply registered in my bones. I would spend a lot of my life sucking on stones, in a sort of reverence for self-denial, even when there was water nearby.

  7

  the tomb

  Who knows what causes an inner shift to occur. One day I was walking down the hall at school and the corset of tentativeness I had felt for months slid off me like a silky slip. I felt light-headed. I could walk down the hall and not worry about where to put my arms and didn’t think about whether to look at the person I passed or to look down. I just walked down the hall.

  By the last day of third grade, I had grown to love my school. I loved the hook on which I put my jacket. I loved the flap-top desks lined up in rows; I’d organized mine neat as a box of K-rations. I loved the walls of my classroom with our pictures of Paul Revere hung precisely, just so, in lines. I loved penciling my name onto the checkout card at the librarian’s desk. I even loved school food, the astronaut-like trays with everything arranged in order: a neat peanut butter sandwich, a carton of milk, a small stack of carrot sticks. I loved best of all the half an ice cream sandwich I could buy when I brought in five extra cents. The Chinese word binqiling always popped into my head when I saw one.

  In the school library, there was a deliciousness of books. The card catalog was like a menu of all desserts: Nurse Barton, the Bobbsey Twins, Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys, and on and on. I opened one and sailed out over the world on a magic carpet. I cradled them in my arms like orphan kittens when I took them home. My father read aloud to me Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden. This story of a little girl leaving her beloved India and drawing up to a mansion in the desolate English moors—and her accompanying sense of bewilderment and fear and curiosity—caught in my throat.

  On the playground at school by now, I was mistress. I could lose myself sometimes—luxuriously, languorously—to eight-year-old pleasures. I dashed in relay races, jumped rope, and kicked a ball with my full might. In the game of Red Rover, I clasped my neighbors’ hands with absolute determination not to let the runner through. Playing this game I became all grip and ferocity—as though I was a soldier in the Revolutionary army and if I let someone break the line the Redcoats would win.

  Even though Mrs. Hart was American, she seemed from a faraway place and an earlier time. A Mary Poppins without the stiffening. She wore soft, sweatery suits in shades like fawn and buff. She was very tidy, and she always had a fresh handkerchief tucked up her sleeve. Everything about her was reassuringly just-so. I would never be a just-so sort of person—I’d be a messy grown-up with one shoelace always broken—but I found organized people soothing.

  One Saturday Mrs. Hart took Charlotte and me on a special outing to the zoo in our matching camel’s hair coats and then to her home for tea in pretty China cups. I could tell by the sparkle in her eyes that she loved me.

  I knew I loved her. She was like a good fairy and she was wise. I seized all of Mrs. Hart’s stories and maxims and locked them in my heart.

  “Always finish any book you start,” she said, tapping The Wizard of Oz one day in class. “This is the only way to be true to the book and its author.” How long would it take me to get over that one, to put a book down before reading the last page? Thirty years or so.

  “Be a loyal friend,” Mrs. Hart said another day. This aphorism was made for me, the girl who wrote to her Taiwan friend, Laura, every week, and considered friendship, once achieved, as something to be kept in a Chinese box decorated with alabaster inlay and guarded by jeweled dragon locks.

  “And honesty is the most important thing of all,” Mrs. Hart said. “Never tell a lie.” Pulling our chairs into a circle around her, we listened to her read the story of Honest Abe. On another day we heard about George Washington and the cherry tree.

  In class we studied American colonial history. We learned about the Indians, and how they could sneak through the woods in their moccasins without making a sound. We learned about Lewis and Clark and the pioneers. I loved to imagine the pioneers jouncing across the plains, with their whole lives in their wagons: wooden trunks of wedding china and embroidered linens, polished guns, and beautiful taffeta dresses sewn with perfect, tiny stitches. The stories of the wagons drawing into a circle around a fire at nightfall filled me with dreaminess and calm. I loved, too, the stories of the log cabins the homesteaders built. My mother had grown up in a log house in Henryville, Indiana, and had the do-it-yourself independence of a pioneer. She patched Andy’s trousers with clippings of fabric from the trousers’ inner hem. She taped her own broken nose together with Scotch tape.

  These visions—of hardy people, well-provisioned wagons, and hand-hewn homes—would reverberate and feed my mind for years. When I was twenty-three and heading west for grad school, I’d get a more than ordinary satisfaction from neatly packing my blue Karmann Ghia with the full complement of my boyfriend’s and my possessions and keep heading out on the highway, and I’d treasure a dream for years of building a cabin out of birch logs with my own hands.

  In a study of frontiersmen, we read the Landmark biography of Daniel Boone. “Elbow room,” said Daniel Boone. I tucked away, too, the heart-thumping tale of this roving man, who always had to see over the next mountain. In the future lying in store for me, the flags of curiosity and adventure would keep me loping, my head held high as I did what my wandering life required. What I gleaned from all the stories was that Americans were, above all, courageous. In pursuit of higher goals, they could improvise or live without.

  My mother and father took us downtown on the weekends to see the museums and monuments to brave Americans. As we drove down Constitution Avenue and passed the Washington Monument with its circle of flying flags, my mother put her hand on her heart, and tears shone in her eyes. And then, on cue, infected by our mother’s patriotic trembling, Andy and I cheered her up with a rendition of “The Pledge of Allegiance.”

  . . . Purple mountains’ majesty and amber waves of grain . . . Wrapped in scraps of songs and stories, America seemed to me like a green and fertile land where anyone could track down happiness, where any immigrant could breathe his lungs freshly full, open his hands to dropping apples, and fashion his dreams into mansions. We Americans, I reckoned—to use a Davy Crockett word—could conquer anything.

  Like he had done in Taiwan, my father talked to us about the news as we ate my mother’s juicy hamburgers, our Kentucky fried chicken, or our Dinty Moore beef stew. From time to time, he read to us from the newspaper, the print smudging his fingers as he pointed to the articles and photographs—bringing the Cold War into the living room. “We discovered two Soviet spy planes flying over Alaska,” he told us one night, “so President Kennedy has lodged a protest with the Russian president. . . .”

  “Today,” he said during dinner, “President Kennedy announced that he and the president of Russia have set up a ‘hotline’ between the Kremlin and the White House. This is a direct telephone cable between the two countries to prevent accidental nuclear war. If someone in one country mistakenly pushes the button to release the atom bomb, the president of that country can instantly notify the other so he can shoot down the bomb, and also prevent the other from shooting back. This is an excellent way to keep the world safe,�
�� my father said, his voice so confident I didn’t even flicker. I envisioned handsome President Kennedy with his finger poised over a red button—through day and night—at any instant, able to save us all.

  “Some American army officers were killed a while ago in Vietnam,” my father was saying now—pointing to another of the world’s bubbling stewpots. “President Kennedy gave orders that our troops stationed there were to shoot back if fired upon. Now, the newspaper says, we are sending more aid to the South Vietnamese so they aren’t taken over by the North Vietnamese Communists, who are being aided by the Red Chinese. . . . The Chinese are still a big concern to our government.”

  In spite of the glowing hot spots in the world, and despite Mr. Smith, whom he talked to my mother about in the kitchen, my father’s laugh has been mostly easy and free these days. One night, the Stanfords and the Constables came over— friends from our Japan days. The fathers reminisced about the hikes they had taken on weekends while their wives got together with all the new babies and toddlers, keeping each other company in a foreign land.

  “Remember that crew of Japanese hikers on the top of Fuji?” Mr. Constable

  said.

  “They looked like they’d waltzed up while we looked like wet mops,” my father

  said.

  “Those Japanese.” Mr. Constable shook his head.

  My mother said to Mrs. Constable, “Remember, Barbara, when I had a breast infection while the men were off hiking and you had to nurse Sara?”

  “You did me a favor! I had enough milk for ten babies!”

  My father’s eyes grew misty as the men recalled the hikes through fir trees— and the hot spring baths at the end of the trail.

  Then Mr. Stanford took a swig of beer, and the air in the room shifted. “Yeah. . . . Those were intense times. Hard play and hard work. . . . We were so young. . . . Did any of us know what we were doing?”

  Mr. Stanford laughed, but it wasn’t a hearty laugh, and my father’s eyes, which had had dreams in them, clouded like they did when he thought of Lee, the Chinese man from back in those days in Japan.

  In the spring of 1963, the end of my third-grade year, my father was given a three-month TDY assignment to Mexico City. There was something worrisome about it, a fact I picked up from my mother’s fretful neatening up. The length of the trip accounted for a portion of her worry, but there was something more. I was used to my parents having secrets, but this was something different. I understood from fragments of their conversations that my father was trying out some new kind of work.

  Before his trip, when I was passing the kitchen, I heard my mother say to him, “Of course you should go to Mexico City. Try it. You’ve got to get out from under that son of a gun. . . . It’ll be good to be around some fresh blood.” The son of a gun was my father’s boss, Mr. Smith.

  Forty years later, I would find out my father went to Mexico City on a special assignment, arranged by a friend at the Latin American desk, to explore whether it would be worth the United States setting up an operation there to monitor the local Chinese community. The idea was that he might shift to Latin American affairs if he found the job to his taste. It was an opportunity to escape the China Desk. But it was strange to me. Why was my father going to Mexico? Pop speaks Chinese!

  The day my father left, he squatted down and looked into my eyes from his soft, brown ones. He said, “While I am gone, be brave, and do what Mom tells you, okay?” and then he gave me a hug that felt like the whole world was wrapping itself around me, keeping me safe.

  The house seemed like it had too much space and too much lonely air when my father went away on his mission. My mother was like a soldier with a flagpole. She was organized and efficient, always looking after us, always doing her work, always doing her duty. One day I started to cry when I looked at my father’s empty reading chair. My mother came over and said she knew I missed Pop, and hugged me against her bosom, making little circles with her fingers against my back. When the hug was over, though, she pulled her body up straight, and said with a hardened-up voice, “But we must keep our feelings private, Sara. People take advantage of any kind of weakness. In the government, if a man’s wife and his children aren’t perfect, the man can lose his job.” I didn’t know that, for most of my father’s career, wives were graded on their husbands’ efficiency reports, and the behavior of a woman’s children reflected on her, and him, in black print.

  “Do you remember Mr. Palmer from Taipei?” my mother said. “His son started acting obstreperous at school when he was on TDY, and the office sent him home for good.” It was like something had clicked inside my mother, switching her from soft to fierce. “We all have to be brave,” she said. “We miss Pop, but we have to just be brave and not show it, and put our best foot forward.”

  My mother’s ideal was Jackie Kennedy, and mine was Caroline. We liked how tailored and beautiful they looked—like spruced naval officers in their white cord-trimmed navy dresses—and we liked what my mother referred to as their “carriage.” As my mother said, they really knew how to put their best black pumps forward.

  “Hurry up, hurry up. You heard Pop, you have to do exactly as I say.” I scurried as fast as I could. My mother had put on her best Hong Kong suit. It was as neat and trim as Mrs. Kennedy’s.

  We were going to Mrs. Smith’s for tea. My mother said we had to show my father’s boss’s wife that we were a strong family. That we could carry on.

  My mother was snippy when we headed for the car. “Come on, Sara and Andy, we’re going to be late.”

  We sat stiffly, three in a row, on Mrs. Smith’s couch. Mrs. Smith was cheery as she served us tea, Cokes, and Oreos, and my mother was polite. Mrs. Smith asked how we were doing while my father was away, and my mother said, “Oh, we’re all doing just fine,” with a big smile on her face. Then she asked about all of Mrs. Smith’s children, and exclaimed about how proud Mrs. Smith must be of them, but I could feel her hips like hard rocks beside me, and I saw her jaw twitch against her clenched teeth.

  I thought Mrs. Smith seemed nice, but when we got in the car, at last, my mother threw her purse on the backseat, heaved a big sigh, and said, “Well, I’ve done my duty for you, Charlie.”

  Then she said, half to herself, “Thank God that’s over with.”

  Even though we were in America now, it seemed like my mother had in her mind the government rule, “It takes two, a man and a wife, to make a Foreign Service officer.” It made for terrible pressure on her. If my father wasn’t going to play the game perfectly, she would make up for it by being perfect herself.

  My mother’s tough childhood taught her you have to do everything yourself. She got scholarships and worked her way through college. Grit your teeth and do what it takes to get ahead: this was her practical view of life. While my father taught me receptivity, my mother taught me toughness. This would stand me in good stead many times later in life, when fortitude was a requirement. Fighting for my children. . . . brutal illnesses, rejection, resisting currents that weren’t going my direction. She readied her children for the hard pull.

  One day while my father was gone, my mother, Andy, and I visited the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Arlington Cemetery. I watched the guard—in his spiffy navy high-collared dress tunic, his pants with the gold stripes down the legs, and his shoes shiny like black mirrors—march up and down the cement path beside the tomb. He walked up and back, up and back. First he stood still as a statue by the little guardhouse for a count of ten seconds. Then he marched ten paces to the end of the walkway. He clicked his heels, then spun on one heel, clicked again, then marched back down the path. March, march, march-click-spin-click, march, march, march-click-spin-click. As he marched, his back was so straight it seemed like he had an iron brace strapped to his spine, holding his back rigid as his rifle.

  What riveted me to the marine were his eyes. As he marched, his eyes looked only straight ahead, as though no other people existed. His eyes didn’t even flicker. It was sort of like wh
at my Chinese ballet teacher taught me to do when I tried to pirouette: “Fix your eyes on a point on the wall,” he’d said. To me, this was almost impossible to accomplish. But the marine was different. He walked with his eyes nailed, not on anything human, but on an invisible station in the air.

  I wondered, standing there watching in my old cotton shorts and shirt and Keds: would the marine stop, bend down, and help if a lady got sick or a child fell down? I tried to spy into him, to see inside his brain, or inside his heart, but like a robot, he looked as if nothing could ever touch him or harm him. As if nothing ever, ever, would make him feel choked and lumpy with sadness.

  This is what courage must be, I thought, standing with my knobby knees in my scuffed Keds. This must be what you are like if you are a truly brave American.

  My heart tripped when I thought of being brave. It was bracing, like working for something high, for American glory.

  William James wrote in his essay “The Moral Equivalent of War” that human beings thrive on hardiness, devotion, self-sacrifice, and “the strong life”: heady emotions and a sense of high purpose most readily aroused in the face of war. He proposed that if human beings were ever to have peace—something he doubted would ever take place for any stretch of time—a sense of army discipline had to be preserved, since people were not rallied by the thought of a life of ease. “Martial virtues must be the enduring cement: intrepidity, contempt for softness, surrender of private interest, obedience to command, must still remain the rock upon which states are built. . . .” Even for me, a shy nine-year-old, thoughts of war and bravery made my heart sing.