Born Under an Assumed Name Read online

  “Now, our government objects to the idea of governments controlling industry and people the way communism does. In China, the government dictates where people live, what work they do, what food they get to eat, and how much money they make. In America, we believe that people should be able to own their own living quarters and own their own businesses, and have the freedom to choose their own jobs, and make as much money as they wish to through their own hard work.”

  The Chinese waiter in an American waiter’s uniform arrived at our table and asked if my father wanted coffee. He said, as always, “Yes. Black, please.” As my father said this I experienced a little shot of pride; his bitter choice was, to me, a signal of his courage: in matters small—and large.

  My father took a quick sip of the reflecting black liquid and then returned to China’s story.

  “So, when the civil war fired up in China, we Americans supported the Nationalist leader, Chiang Kai-shek, because, while he, like the Communists, wanted to change the feudal system in China, he wanted to install a democratic-capitalist system like ours.”

  My father explained then that at the outset, in 1946, when China’s civil war had started burning hard, the Nationalists had 3 million men to the Communists’ mere 1 million, and Chiang’s forces seemed destined to win. The American government poured 6 billion dollars of money and weapons into the Nationalists’ hands, but, to America’s surprise, the Communists triumphed, and the People’s Republic of China was proclaimed in October 1949. “This Communist victory was a shock for our government,” my father said. Now the United States was terrified of communism’s spread, and prepared to take extreme measures to contain it.

  “But even though the Communists took over the entire Mainland and the Nationalists had to flee here to Taiwan, we refused to give up,” my father said.

  “This brings us to why we Americans are in Taiwan. . . . We are committed to helping the Nationalists retake China and make it a democratic country. But the truth is, this is a very difficult undertaking. As of now, the Mainland and we, with Chiang, are in a deadlock. Neither of us accepts the division of China. The simple answer to your question is: we are here to help the Gimo’s forces retake China.” Everyone called Chiang Kai-shek, the leader of Free China, “the gimo,” which was short for “generalissimo.” To me the word “gimo” had a powerful and harsh sound; it gave me goose bumps.

  Hearing again this tale of the troubles between Mao and the Gimo made my heart thrill with a mix of excitement and fear, but tucked here at the NACC Club, I felt completely cradled and safe. At the commissary, where we bought stateside groceries like Carnation instant milk, Nabisco’s Nilla Wafers (my favorite cookies), and Sara Lee cheesecake—Yuki bought our cucumbers, snow peas, tangerines, and shrimp at the local market—I felt at home. At the PX, the Post Exchange at the Military Aid Mission on Chung Shan Bei Lu, where we bought my father’s shaving cream and my snow-bright American underwear in neat little packets, I knew I belonged, and among the army men in all these places, and on the Taipei streets where they strode tall with their weapons, I felt protected.

  After lunch, we went to the Grand Hotel for a swim. Since we lived in Taiwan’s steamy tropics, we swam every day. The Grand Hotel looked like a magnificent, broad pagoda, at the foot of Yangmingshan. Families of American officials swam there, in the pool, alongside the families of rich Chinese people. We splashed around for a couple of hours in the cool, pearly water, and then we drove home, through streets of pedicabs, bullock carts, stinky smoke-spewing buses, and the many rag-clad Chinese on foot, to our house behind the wall.

  When we stepped in the door, I went to my room and put on my white cotton Chinese pajamas—beautifully ironed by Aduan and embroidered with little Chinese children watering plants in gardens. When I emerged for dinner, bowls of fried rice, prepared by Yuki, were steaming on the table.

  My mother had taught Yuki to boil all our water for twenty minutes, following the rules sent out by the embassy medical unit. The boiling, followed by filtering, was performed to eliminate parasites, hepatitis, giardia, dysentery, and other dreadful diseases.

  My mother had a habit of diagnosing by sight the ragged, ill-looking children on the streets. Rickets, malnutrition, polio, cholera: these were some of the serious diseases my mother, as a medically trained person, could spot, and of which all American mothers lived in fear. We were constantly inoculated against these dire illnesses but infections, lice, worms, and boils were part of our daily lives. At school, we pressed our cuts with our fingers and showed each other the white-with-a-touch-of-yellow pus oozing out. We scratched our scabs and our boils and our mosquito bites and made them bleed. The Chinese children on the street had lots of sties and boils and sores like we did, but also more serious sicknesses. My mother said it was because in China there was a lack of sanitation. She often pointed out people taking baths at the open sewers that lined the Taipei streets, and children dipping water to drink out of those same sewers. “That is why, Sara and Andy, you must wash your hands when you come in from outside.”

  To prevent all these problems of sties and filth and throwing up, in addition to hand washing, my mother had us drink milk: powdered skim milk from the commissary. Milk was like a holy drink. We drank it with everything. We loved milk. There was something American about milk, something protective, and we drank and drank it.

  When we were sick, we went to the NACC dispensary on Yangmingshan, or to the American military hospital in town. I had my tonsils out at the five-bed dispensary on Yangmingshan, afterward eating lime sherbet on Dr. Dawson’s lap, while he talked to me in his Texas accent. Americans never went to Chinese doctors.

  I was being raised in a world that made Americans seem inviolate. But one day, I’d overheard my mother talking to her friend Mrs. Munger in the living room. “I worry that one of those crazy groups will snatch them off the street,” she said in a low voice, making sure Andy and I couldn’t hear. But I was listening from my bedroom; children always know a mother’s worries even when she tries to hide them. Cobbling fragments of sentences, I figured out that my mother’s fear had to do with my father’s work for President Kennedy: a fear that Communists or other shady groups would kidnap the children of Americans, and hold them for ransom. It was a fear, as I’d know later, that my mother, and even my father, would secretly harbor all through our growing up.

  Another afternoon when we were out taking a walk, the market crowd was so thick that I lost sight of Andy and my parents, and an icy fear streaked through my body. If I were to be swept up by the crowd and kidnapped, I wouldn’t be able to speak enough Chinese, no one could help me and I would never get home. I was paralyzed and sobbing by the time my father found me and took me in his arms.

  Once home, my father scoffed about the possibility of our being kidnapped. He looked at Mom, as well as us kids as he said, “I don’t want any of you to worry about that. It is about as likely as the Pacific Ocean drying up.” And then our father taught us to say, in Chinese—as he later would in other languages, “Please take me to the American Embassy.” Our country would always keep us safe.

  This was my life in Taiwan: My father and mother went to work; I went to school at TAS and Andy went to his Chinese nursery school, where they wore blue smocks with hankies pinned to them and red characters embroidered on the breast. We bought donuts and Kellogg’s cornflakes at the commissary; and we took outings around Formosa to, as my father said, “sample the riches of China.” And while we did all these things, every minute, the American government was like an invisible dome over us, protecting us from all dangers. The government provided this for us because of my father’s important work. He knew important information, he passed on important messages, he met with important Chinese people, rich and poor—in the day and in the night. All of this, I knew, was to help the Free Chinese take Red China back from the Communists. To my seven-year-old mind, this seemed logical, and, tucked in our house behind its high, concrete wall—topped with broken glass to stop unnamed
bad men—I felt utterly safe, as safe from vultures and eagles as a sparrow in an aviary.

  Fried rice and milk downed, seven o’clock, window locks checked by my mother to keep out the thieves who frequently stole into American households, and goodnight-hugged by my parents, I lay on my bed, watched the green and grey geckos skitter up the wall for a few minutes, and then snuggled down to read. I was reading a book about Raggedy Ann and Andy and their adventures in a land with lollipop bushes and root beer pools. The stories in the Raggedy Ann books were set somewhere in England, but the books were printed on Taiwanese paper. I loved the Taiwanese books, even though the words were sometimes spelled wrong. They had slick, greyish paper and a strong, good, leafy smell. My father said they were pirated, that “the Chinese are masters of piracy.” The Encyclopaedia Britan-nica was sold, my father said, “for a pittance, just a few New Taiwan dollars,” for instance, and an American bestseller, the day after its release, was on the Chinese market, ready for our American sailors, in a cheap pocket edition. America has the best writers; that’s why they copy us, I thought as I sank into sleep.

  2

  the chicken village

  For most of my childhood, I lived an American fairy tale. I was a princess in a crystal coach, floating through the airs of various cultures, gliding down foreign streets. As the child of an official American in poorer countries, I was automatically “more important” than the local people. Here in Taiwan, because I was wealthier, well fed, had nice clothing, went to the NACC Club, swam at the Grand Hotel, and rode in a sleek embassy car, I was like a girl in a movie. This sense of elevation and difference inscribed in me a consciousness both of shining privilege and of fragility, unreality, and apartness, a habitual sense of odd specialness that was hard to shake even after the crystal coach shattered, and I landed—thud—at age eighteen, on hard American turf.

  As an American girl being raised in Taiwan, I took note that American servicemen protected Taiwan from invasion; American men towered over Chinese men; and crowds of Chinese people moved back from American cars in a wave, as though we were royalty passing through. My conclusion was that Americans were a superior people.

  Because Americans had the obvious advantages as I saw it, we were inevitably happier than the Chinese, smarter and more talented. And most of all, Americans were more powerful than the Chinese—and so, omnipotent and safe from any peril. Like most seven-year-olds, I was a natural social Darwinist. And there is nothing to match the purity of a young child’s ardent patriotism. But in the course of my daily life, from time to time, pebbles tossed by the outer world pinged the windows of my crystal coach, and one day, in a village of skittering chickens, rocks pelted.

  I climbed into the low-slung black embassy car. The driver, Mr. Wong, backed it down the dirt lane—our house was recently built, the road fresh-cut for the tic-tac-toe lanes of new houses—and then whisked me off for the half-hour ride to TAS, where I’d begun second grade a month before.

  As always, as we drove, I felt like a protected witness. Whatever my father might be doing in the messy Taipei back streets, sitting in my clean dress with my book bag beside me, I was an orchid in a small, private, traveling greenhouse— protected, but also alone.

  As Mr. Wong maneuvered the long, wide car through the narrow, tumbledown streets of Taipei, I watched the pedicabs and bullock carts nearly colliding as they hauled their loads of people and burlap sacks of goods, and I followed, with my eyes, the black-haired people in thread-bare, baggy clothes moving this way and that.

  As we left the city proper, I gazed out at the scenery that changed from city outskirts to little farms to rice padis, set against the wooded, massive, black-green slope of Yangmingshan.

  The school came into view: a low, sprawling white-block building, set among the vast fields of rice. It was newly sprung out of the padi, like our house. American buildings were always fresh and modern—and better than Chinese ones.

  I loved TAS but sometimes at school I felt not like an orchid, but like a little sparrow inside a cage. I felt my face grow hot and red if the teacher called on me, and I answered arithmetic problems in such a quiet voice that Mrs. Johnson asked me to repeat myself, which made everyone turn around and look at me.

  I was a girl who liked to be at the edges. When in a twosome I was fine, but I didn’t like big groups of people. I didn’t like being looked at or watched; when my broken arm was in a cast, I didn’t want anyone to notice it. But I hated being called shy, as adults were wont to do. It seemed like being called bad or weak. I wanted to tear up the word like a piece of paper.

  Sometimes, if I couldn’t find my friend Laura, I sat on the grass at the edge of the blacktop and looked off across the padi until the bell rang. But today I was excited to get to school. It was Friday, the day of the weekly spelling bee.

  The car pulled up in front of the school. Children—most of whose fathers worked for the army, the embassy, or some other American office—were milling around. We all gathered around the flagpole, put our hands over our hearts, and watched as two sixth graders raised the American flag up the pole. We sang “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and the Nationalist Chinese anthem, “San Min Chu Yi . . . ,” screechy high notes climbing into the air. My father told me the anthem was about the “three people’s principles,” advocated by Sun Yat-sen, the famous Chinese leader. He believed adherence to the principles of nationalism, democracy, and social welfare would make China a free and powerful country.

  I could feel the bow of my sash bouncing behind me as I hurried to my classroom of twenty or so American and three Chinese children. I slipped into my chair and got out my list of words, to practice them one last time before the bee, which would be held first thing.

  I was one of the quietest of the students, but I was proud because I was one of the best readers and spellers. In my special shoe box at home, I had several prizes for winning spelling bees: a book of postcards of the monuments in Washington, D.C.; a Donald Duck pencil; and a box of Crayola crayons Mrs. Johnson had gotten from the PX. My only rival was Mei-Lin, a Chinese girl who, like me, wore two ponytails bouncing out above her ears—but, instead of being wheat-colored and fluffy, hers were black and as shiny as two slim, lacquered vases.

  Mei-Lin and the two other Chinese girls in my class never played with the American children, even though they spoke English. I sometimes wanted to ask them to play with me and Laura—my parents said to always include people—but I never did. The Chinese girls seemed contained, complete, tight-stitched in their small, tidy bodies and shiny, flopping ponytails and top-knots. In the hall, they stuck together in a bundle of three and chortled with one another, sounding lively and carefree in a way they never did in class, where they were quiet as padi birds. On the playground, too, they kept apart, making dolls and animals out of bits of paper with their skillful hands. Clustered tightly near the building, it was like they were huddled in a little hut that you could see into but not enter. Sometimes in class Mei-Lin gave a shy smile or said a quiet “thank you.” She seemed nice but I didn’t go over to her or the other Chinese girls. I didn’t have the need. I was in the sway of a security that came from being one of the blond children, one of the majority.

  I scolded myself sometimes for not making friends with the Chinese girls. I thought it showed weak willpower. My mother’s favorite saying was, “You can do anything with willpower.” I didn’t realize that I was in the hands of something larger: human nature—people usually stick with those they know; and geopolitics— Mei Lin and I were stuck behind the fortifications of our groups on either side of a deep ravine. It was not as deep a ravine as that between America and Red China, but we didn’t know how to get across the gorge. These were forces a seven-year-old couldn’t easily defy.

  My father had told Andy and me about the world’s great ravine, the Cold War: a war without shooting, but full of threats, which the U.S. government was fighting to prevent the Russian and the Chinese Communists from gaining control over the world, or using the a
tom bomb. “This is the biggest danger in the world,” my father said. He’d explained that the conflict between America and China was being played out in different locales, with each side trying to dominate Asia. In the early 1950s we had fought the Chinese during the Korean War, a war that had ended with a country split in half.

  In addition to the thrust into Korea, Peking had taken over Tibet, which was until then an independent state, and we were giving massive military aid to Taiwan and South Korea, trying to contain Communism. Every time one country fell to Communism, we feared it opened the door to another falling into the enemy camp.

  “And now we have turned our attention to another Asian country, the country of Vietnam,” my father said. “Vietnam is a place where some Communists, similar to the Red Chinese, are trying to take over.” The year I was born, he said, Vietnam— a little place shaped like a sea horse in the South China Sea—was divided in half. Its head was sliced, just at the belly, from its curvy tail—he sketched the belted sea horse on one of the flash cards of Chinese characters he kept in his pocket—and it became two countries: the Communist North and the Democratic South. The Americans and the Communist Chinese, had, ever since, been positioned at either end of the country—the Americans like a white whale at the tail, and the Chinese like a red whale at the head, each ready to gobble up the whole country the minute the other one tried to take a bite.

  “President Kennedy has just sent a force of specially trained troops to Vietnam,” my father said. “These fighters, the Green Berets, will help in our mission of fighting the spread of Communism in Asia. . . . But the basic fact is, Vietnam is a plaything for the big powers in the Cold War.”

  The conflict between China and America could be worrying, he said, but we had wise leaders and the finest government in the world, and so we Americans were secure despite the divide.