Born Under an Assumed Name Read online

  I was in the ammonia-smelling bathroom at school on November 22, the day President Kennedy died. A teacher rushed in to notify all students to return immediately to their classrooms. Back in class, bold, strong Mrs. Levy was crying. All the other teachers who had come into the room were crying too. So many people were crying that you felt like crying no matter who you were. The girls in my class cried. I cried. The boys tried to be too tough to cry, but a lot of them did. No one acted like a brave marine.

  That night, my father said, “President Kennedy was one of the best presidents we’ll ever have.” As he said it, his eyes looked bruised.

  It was a moment when the whole world was sobbing with America—when the whole world was one. Sometimes it seems to me that it is only through sorrow that people can come together. Though good fortune can make people generous, it often seems as if wealth and satisfaction too easily turn people greedy, smug, and self-protective. Can joy unite the way sorrow does? Is there such a thing as universal joy—or does one country’s happiness necessarily cancel another’s? Will envy always reign? As one of my father’s favorites, Aeschylus, wrote, “It is in the character of very few men to honor without envy a friend who has prospered.”

  Soon after President Kennedy’s death, President Johnson asked Americans to help him build “The Great Society” in his inaugural address. He proposed a program of public welfare and medical, educational, and anti-poverty measures: “In a land of great wealth, families must not live in hopeless poverty. In a land rich in harvest, children must not go hungry. In a land of healing miracles, neighbors must not suffer and die unattended. In a great land of learning and scholars, young people must be taught to read and write.”

  While these lofty utterances lifted American spirits, the truth was that the war on poverty that Johnson proposed would be underfunded—unlike the military war that was being waged in Vietnam. By this time, sixteen thousand American military advisors were posted in the country. Johnson was determined not to lose Vietnam to the Communists, but the United States had little experience with this kind of war, in which the enemy suddenly popped out of and vanished into the jungle, and where the enemy was indistinguishable from the common villager.

  Despite momentous events in the world, my own life was happily ordinary. By the middle of fourth grade, I was a sloshing bucket of confidence. I knew my way around the world. Walking down the Bethesda streets, I popped a piece of gum in my mouth. I could blow the biggest bubble in the United States!

  It was after Christmas now, and there was one boy in my fourth-grade class whom I liked. It was an uncomfortable kind of liking that made me both fluttery and shy at one time. It was also a feeling like a sort of warm sap rising up in me as inside a tree. Liking Tristan was something different from liking a friend who was a girl. I liked how he looked; he had huge eyes the color of butterscotch and chocolate syrup blended together, dark eyebrows, and blond- and brown-streaked hair that made him handsome. When we were playing hide-and-seek in my yard and he found me next to the brick wall of the house, I imagined he might kiss me. These feelings embarrassed me—even though he invited me over and we ate Hostess cupcakes and looked at the boat in his neat, echoey garage, I never invited him over again. I did write about him sometimes, though, in a pink leather diary my father gave me, with its own lock and key.

  These feelings about Tristan were a strange brush with teenagerdom that I quickly pushed away. Most of the time, the sap receded down my trunk, and stayed in my roots hidden under the soil, but it was as though, now that it had discovered the track up toward my branches, it was always there, ready to start pulsing at another embarrassing moment.

  On the early evening of February 9, I turned on the television to watch a show everyone had been talking about at school. It was the Ed Sullivan Show. Soon after I turned it on, Ed Sullivan, who was a stringy sort of man, introduced to a dum-da-dum drum roll four members of a band. The teenagers in the band had long hair like I had never seen before. Their dark bangs flopped down in their eyes, and the hair on the sides of their heads draped over their ears. When they started playing their guitars and singing a whiny song called “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” all the girls in the audience started shrieking, jumping up and down, and looking like they were going to faint.

  As the show went on and the girls got more and more shrieky, a strange, bubbly ginger ale-like fizz tingled through my body—and soon I felt myself wanting to shriek too. Again, like with Tristan, I felt like I was standing on a brink.

  The day I turned in something like my twenty-ninth book report, my father delivered some news while we were eating beef and green peppers over rice. It was one of those days that change everything—those days that became indentations in my life.

  “I have some very exciting news,” he said. “We are moving to Holland.” He explained that even though he was a China specialist, he was being sent to Europe because the government liked people with expertise in one region to have familiarity with other places in the world so as not to get identified with any one country. This could endanger their loyalty and objectivity.

  He got out the atlas and pointed to Holland on the map. It was a small, narrow strip, like a margin on the drawing of Europe. My father went on, “You’re going to love it because Europe is a wonderful, wonderful place.” My father’s voice had joyful birds swooping around in it—like this assignment was a great accomplishment, maybe like being assigned to Normandy on D-Day.

  He turned to my mother and said with that breathy lilt in his voice, “It’s not London, but it’s close. Ted says it’s a great post.”

  Holland! I’d never thought of living in Holland. Immediately, a part of me was curious—I knew that in Holland they had windmills and beautiful red tulips—but in another part of me a rock was sinking.

  This would from now on be the pattern of my childhood: upon moving to a new place, I would spend a month of sheer grit-your-teeth survival; then I would spend several months establishing new footing in the new country; finally, through determination, I would win a place to stand and be; I would enjoy a year, two, or three of relative steadiness; and then—the minute I was beginning to feel as though I had conquered a whole world and it was now in my possession—the government would rip me away.

  My mother and father told us not to tell anyone that we were moving yet. My mother, especially, wanted us to keep it secret. We must hide good things, like hopes and plans, from other people. It was as if, if people knew, they might get the idea of having the good thing for themselves, and snatch it away from us. I didn’t know, at this point, that my mother’s caution was wise. Foreign assignments were tentative things—and could be snatched away, by people with more political clout or who suddenly sniffed an advantageous post, until the orders were signed.

  For a week, Holland was our family’s secret. At the end of the week, my father got official orders for The Hague, and we went to the State Department for physicals, and to another hulking building in Virginia for passports. My father knew his way around both buildings. At the giant white skyscraper in Virginia, there were even more security checks than at the State Department downtown. My father had to show his badge and my mother had to dig for her passport in her purse. Also, here, even more people came up and congratulated us and shook our hands. This made me feel important.

  We ate lunch in the cafeteria where my father said he often ate lunch. Sitting in the huge room among what seemed like thousands of men in dark suits, my mother and my father seemed happy, like this was a big chance. As I ate my cafeteria Jell-O cubes with whipped cream, something we never got at home, I tried to picture Holland. In my mind, it was a place like in my book, Tulips for Trina, where there were thatched farmhouses, and where people skated down long, blue, frozen canals and wore wooden shoes. The picture in my mind was bright-colored. Later, though, secretly, in my bed, all I could think of was leaving Mrs. Levy, my tough-nice teacher, and Charlotte, and my Brownie troop, and Twinkies and American gum. I liked being Juicy Fruit, bl
end-in American.

  The next morning, I didn’t lock the sadness in a secret box. I set my eyes to look straight out into the air like the guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Being a marine was almost automatic for me now.

  At school I was now allowed to tell people that I was moving. Telling people made me feel mighty because everyone else seemed so impressed, or scared. Charlotte told me she’d miss me and my throat started to thicken up, despite my telling myself not to be tender. I had wanted Charlotte to be my best friend for my whole life. Most of the girls, though, oohed and ahhed and flounced around me in a circle and said, “Too—lips! Too—lips!”; two girls said, “Oh I’d hate that!”; one girl who was often snotty said, “Too bad for you,” and flounced off.

  Even though some girls tried to exclude me from the jump-rope line, I was staying in Bethesda, in America, breathing the peppermint-sweet American air, until the very last minute. I stocked up on Wrigley’s and Bazooka for the ship and the early days in Holland. I insisted on attending a Brownie meeting the morning of the day we left. The girls in my class gave me a lucky rabbit foot, and they signed a little autograph book, but I felt like I would be there again the next week.

  Soon, while my father flew ahead, my mother, brother, and I would board the SS America and head across the stormy, grey Atlantic. Standing on the topmost deck, looking back toward America, the building sea would mist my face with a fine, salty, obscuring spray.

  In 1956, phone lines were laid across the Atlantic, making it theoretically possible that my stateside friends and I could keep in touch, but the price was so prohibitive all through my childhood that communication by telephone across seas was reserved for family emergencies only. The laying of the phone lines meant the world was getting smaller, and globalization—for all its good and bad—was underway, but we couldn’t see it yet. For all intents and purposes, once I left the United States, save for letters, my friends and my Bethesda life would be gone. It was a degree of rupture and separation unimaginable now—not so different, in terms of communication, from heading west in a covered wagon.

  The ripping-away of Bethesda, this loss of hard-won Charlotte, would make me into a person who treasured every note from a friend, every birthday card, like a starving orphan girl treasures a little lump of rice.

  This was the last week of my life that I would be an ordinary American. If I’d stayed in Bethesda now, I would have stood a chance. I might have eaten some tofu now and then, but I could have been the real McCoy. Forever afterward, my heart would swell with longing at the smell of fresh-cut grass, at the sight of young girls chatting in tight clutches, but the portal to an ordinary American childhood was closed to me now. My crystal coach had swept by.

  Now, on a blustery March day in 1964, I left the United States as a simple and ordinary American girl—for the last time.

  Book 3

  RAINLIGHT

  The Hague, The Netherlands,

  1964–1968

  9

  klompen

  Sometimes happiness slams into you like a freight train of love and you’re knocked off your feet. Other times happiness is work—a painstaking trudge toward an appreciative state of mind. And sometimes it is a gradual accrual of which you’re not even aware: with each passing day you feel more lighted up inside, as if your organs are being painted in pastels. As though each day is a second of the dawn, you absorb more and more light, like sunlight spreading over a damp, grey 5 a.m. landscape.

  While my father was playing a murky game in a dim terrain, I was light-struck in one of the darker places on earth.

  My father met us at the dock in Le Havre with his beige Balmacaan raincoat over his arm. His dark eyes were reflecting the bouncing lights of the dim day; he grabbed us all into tight hugs and said, “You’re going to love Holland!” I was so glad to see my father that I hung on to his arm, even though he was carrying heavy suitcases, all the way to the station.

  We traveled by train to The Hague. Rain like white quill streaks on a flat, grey background gauzed the views of geometrically placed brick houses and green cow pastures the whole journey.

  A taxi took us from the train station to the house that would be our home for the next six months: a yellow-brick row house in a sprawling new suburban development of identical houses at the raw edge of The Hague where the city petered out into farm fields. As I peered out the car windows at the gridded world of damp yellow brick so different from anywhere else I had ever been, my heart quickened. What sort of life did people live in these houses?

  The cab pulled up to a house at the end of a row on Anemoneweg—“Anemone Way.” Tired and mussed, we shuffled out of the car. Out in the open, I looked up into a sky the bleached color of beach shells. Chilly, wet air hit my cheeks and eyes. Then, almost like it was a deliberate act, the sky flushed steel grey, and the lion’s mouth of the sky widened to let rush a heavy fountain-stream of water. By the time we unloaded our eight suitcases from the taxi and made our way up through the doorway of our new home, my fingers felt as though they had been cased in ice and I was wet through to the skin. I had set my suitcase down in a land of rain.

  Our first week in the yellow-brick house was a blur of hand shaking. My mother had to make her calls, first to the ambassador’s wife, and then to the homes of other officers, leaving her calling card if the lady wasn’t in, according to protocol. My father took us to meet other embassy families and Dutch dignitaries. He was polite and formal in his dark suit, and introduced me as though I were an important adult. “Meneer Peereboom, this is my daughter, Sara,” he said as I clasped the Dutchman’s hand. I was living in a movie of the perfect, brave embassy girl; my mother, Andy, and I were Jackie, John-John, and Caroline, ornaments for my father doing his important job for the United States of America.

  Most of the first days I was so absorbed with eating gorgeous Dutch cream puffs and crispy, mayonnaise-topped Dutch french fries called patates frites, and with arranging my room, that I didn’t think about swinging in the park with Charlotte, or of the oatmeal cookies we had at Brownie meetings, or of the ferny smell of our Wilson Lane house. But one evening, at an embassy party, I was standing beside my mother with my braids plaited tight, when a lady asked her if she missed Bethesda, and my throat constricted. My mother had cried when she left Bethesda, but now, as the stalwart diplomat’s wife, she said, “Oh, wherever I am is best.” On the way home from the party, she sat up straight as a soldier and commented, about the weepy mother of another family who had just left her pregnant sister to come to Holland, “She should stop that nonsense. She knew what she was signing up for when her husband joined the Foreign Service.” My mother’s motto was, “We are Tabers. We can do anything.”

  A couple of days later we heard a car drive up and we rushed outside. It was my father with our new, cream-colored Volkswagen Bug. The car was spit-spot; it even smelled new. But there was something else even more remarkable about it. My father pointed to the beginning two letters on the license plates: GN. “The GN stands for geen Nederlander“ my father said. “That means ‘not a Netherlander.’” Only representatives of foreign governments were issued these, he told us. I could feel an American flag waving inside me.

  Toward the end of our first week, we visited my father at work. My mother drove us—nervous at the wheel of a new car in a new country—from the recent-cut suburban sprawl into the city neighborhoods of cobbled streets lined with old brick row houses. The embassy was a white, blocky, modern building, an incongruity set on an old, gracious city square, with long horizontal windows across each of the four stories. We mounted the steps up to the wide glass doors, entered, and approached the platform from which the marine guard had an on-high view of everything outside. When I looked at him in his perfectly crisp navy-and-white uniform, my mind flashed back to the silent, stiff guardians at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, and a shiver trickled down my back.

  The guard had met my mother, but still, he picked up the phone and said, “Mr. Taber, I have your f
amily down here. Is it all right for them to go up?”

  We climbed the broad, open stairway. My father’s office was a big room on the second floor, with a large window looking out on the plein with the trees and benches down below. His office was bright with fluorescent light. My father was stacking papers as we arrived, as if there was a rule that he must conceal all his work from everyone, even my mother.

  There were folders piled on his desk, and books everywhere. The books had titles like From Lenin to Malenkov, Who’s Who in Modern China, Brain-washing in Red China, Sun Yat Sen, The Finest Hours, and Mathews’ Chinese-English Dictionary.

  My father had us sit down on chairs by the window, so he could tell us about his new portfolio. “As a political attache here at the embassy, I do work to foster good relationships between countries,” he said. I didn’t know this, but this was his official line. Now he described something closer to the actual work he did. “Here in Holland, just like I was in Taiwan and in Bethesda, I’m a China watcher. My specific job is to work along with the Dutch, to keep an eye on China. Both countries are very concerned about what China is up to.” I wondered, how did my father watch China from here in Holland? Through a peephole? Binoculars? Was he digging a secret tunnel to some Chinese place?

  As I would know later, a large part of my father’s job in The Hague was to act as liaison to the Dutch intelligence service. Both countries were tracking the activities of Mainland Chinese and Maoist groups in Holland and other parts of Europe, and recruiting spies. And they were, in fact, using gadgets like binoculars and other surveillance techniques to spy on the Communist Chinese. The Hague had one of the few Chinese missions in Europe—the Netherlands was one of the countries in Europe with which the Communist Chinese had formal relations—and the United States was there to glean information, by any means it could. Here in The Hague, like in Taipei, my father was serving as an intelligence officer under official cover. Once again, his basic work was masked, and he shrugged on and off different identities as he sought intelligence in the course of his daily activities.