Born Under an Assumed Name Read online

  I felt flutters in my belly as Mrs. Johnson held up the prize for the winner of the bee. All the girls let out an “Ooooh!” when they saw the plastic pencil case that Mrs. Johnson held in her hand. We lined up in two rows.

  Before long, Mei-Lin and I were the only two students left standing at the front of the room. We spelled our way through hippopotamus, gigantic, alphabet, and tyrannosaurus, and then it was my turn again. Mrs. Johnson said the word: peculiar. For the first time, I did not immediately respond. Into my head came a picture of myself: skinny, shy, with two short messy ponytails: peculiar, that’s what I am, I thought. For a moment, I was lost in a spinning whirlpool of thinking and worrying. Then I hurriedly spelled out the word—wrong.

  At the end of the school day, the last bell rang. As we gathered again at the flagpole I tried to hide my shame. As the other blond, ginger-haired, brunette children and I bunched up, I was aware of Mei-Lin, Nancy, and Da in a little clutch off to the edge. A first-grade boy and girl solemnly lowered the American flag and then folded it into a tricorne. As they slowly folded the Stars and Stripes, my heart pattered with pride, but I also thought to myself, I am American. How could Mei-Lin have beaten me?

  At the NACC Club, we ordered hamburgers and the Chinese waiter had just brought Andy and me our ginger ale when I asserted what I assumed was a simple fact, “We’re better than the Chinese, aren’t we, Pop?”

  Sitting and sipping my sparkling ginger ale with its Maraschino cherry, I was utterly sure of myself. I knew Mei-Lin was smart, but even so, my conviction was fast and I wanted to revel in it: our president bossed Chiang, and we had more modern things and were richer, so we must be better.

  My father, however, was from a family whose fortunes had plunged into deep valleys and mounted to the summits of steep mountains—like the landscapes in Chinese scrolls—according to the successes and failures of his father’s sales jobs and inventions. During the Depression his family of eleven had sometimes lived as squatters, and had ended up, on one of my grandfather’s successful ascents, in a big, yellow house at the edge of the Washington University campus in St. Louis. My father had taken advantage of the GI Bill to go to college. My mother, the ninth child in an Indiana forester’s family, had tutored wealthy sorority girls in math and science to get herself through both college and physical therapy school. My parents knew firsthand the roles of luck and class in socioeconomic standing. In Taipei, unbeknownst to me, we lived month-to-month on my father’s government salary, and my mother did all her physical therapy work with Chinese orphans and polio patients in Taipei for free. But among the impoverished Taiwanese, to me, we seemed as rich as Rockefellers.

  I assumed my father saw things as I did—I knew his heart hummed like mine did when he saw the Stars and Stripes fluttering on a pole—and I expected him to agree that Americans were superior to the Chinese. But he said, looking at me with his intent brown eyes, “No, Sara, we’re not better. We and the Chinese are just human beings, and all human beings are the same.”

  As the waiter set down our hamburgers, my father launched another of his history lessons. “We’re not better than the Chinese. We’re just more fortunate. The Chinese people are good, smart people who have been through terrible times and are now struggling for freedom. On the Mainland, as you know, the citizens can’t criticize the government or they will be jailed or killed.”

  I was confused. It still sounded like Americans were better.

  “We Americans are here in Free China to help the Chinese develop a government and a way of life,” my father went on, “where they will be freer and also better off so they can afford to live with more comfort—like we have. The Chinese are struggling and poor, but they are basically just like us. We Americans are very wealthy compared to the Chinese, and as wealthier, luckier people, it is our responsibility to give to poorer people, but this does not mean that we are better. I believe, as Teddy Roosevelt said, ‘To whom much has been given, from him much is rightfully expected.’”

  I began to absorb my father’s meaning now.

  “Above all,” my father said, “we must respect the Chinese culture. The Chinese are very hard workers, and we have much to learn from the Chinese ways: their music, their religions, their bravery. You’ve seen how hard they work in the padis, Sara, how fast a Chinese storekeeper can spin the abacus beads. You’ve seen their magnificent pagodas. The Chinese have a strong, fine, ancient culture.”

  Even though my father told me this, I didn’t quite believe it. I believed my eyes, which absorbed most readily shiny things.

  We crossed the dusty yard of Yi Kuang, the orphanage established by a Chinese legislator’s wife, where my mother worked, in addition to the polio clinic she had set up in Taipei. Many of the children at Yi Kuang, my mother had told me, had crippled legs and inflamed brains, and the parents of the children, a large number of whom were from the Mainland, had died, or were too poor to feed them. Some of them had been abandoned, like kittens, on Yi Kuang’s doorstep, wrapped in old rags, in the secrecy of the night.

  We visited a room full of babies lying in wicker cribs lined up, one smack against the next. In the next room, the children were bigger—maybe two or three years old—and paired in their cribs. Each of them had polio or cerebral palsy or spina bifida, or some other condition that made it hard for them to learn to walk. My mother put down her bag and began to examine the children closely. She leaned into each bed and moved each child’s arms or legs. The children were strangely silent as she coaxed them, gently massaging their too-curvy or too-bony legs with her long-fingered hands. Here and there she commented to the nurse that a child needed more eye ointment, a pneumonia check, or some medicine that she took from a box in her purse.

  In the Yi Kuang dining room, while my mother talked to the cooks about nutrition, I stood near the wall, watching the children eating their rice, fruit, and tea. At the low table nearest me, one of the little orphan girls—about four years old, her hair cut into a sharp upside-down bowl at her ears, her bright, quizzical eyes forming little teepees in her small face—looked over to me and held out her bowl of rice and bananas. She grinned and motioned with her chopsticks that she would be happy to share with me. I shook my head—I knew I shouldn’t take food from a hungry orphan and the food looked horrid—but the girl’s happy smile and extended bowl traveled into me and established a station there. This is my first memory of the astonishing generosity of the poor—an experience I’d have regularly over my childhood. I was startled and ashamed. It was I who should have shared the candy I had tucked in my pocket.

  After this visit, I developed an eye for stray kittens. I spotted them everywhere, and, when my parents relented, took them home and fed them milk with an eye-dropper until they could survive on their own.

  We were riding in the embassy car. The car wound down a narrow street between rows of shabby shops. High screeching Chinese music, from the street sellers’ radios, assaulted the car, even though the windows were rolled tight. As we glided along the trash-filled street, dirty animals—doves, dogs, chickens, cats, and pigs— and hordes of people roiled and blocked our way. The driver honked continuously.

  As we crawled along, I watched a slender boy, naked to the waist, racing up and down the street. Suddenly he separated from the throng. He came up to our car, displayed his polio-damaged, limp left arm three inches in front of my eyes, and pounded on the pane with his useful hand. I forced myself to look into his face. The boy’s eyes met mine and our eyes latched for an instant. I was amazed: His mud-brown eyes and his crooked mouth were laughing. His face and his whole body seemed to shout out with merriment.

  Before leaving the side of the car the boy took a little wooden flute out of his pocket with his one hand and played a tune. He went off flipping the coin my mother gave him high into the air.

  As the boy sauntered off, I watched, deeply intrigued at how a Chinese boy, all alone, with dirty legs and no shoes and a useless arm, could laugh to the sky.

  Such moments of
admiration for the Chinese were tinkling sounds against my crystal coach that didn’t chip its glass—until, carried by my father’s eagerness to get out “to see the real people,” we took a journey to a small village at the foot of some mountains where the villagers made vases and urns.

  In the black, motor pool Chevy with the driver, we glided through the poor, jumbled streets of the villages along the way. Feeling like I was riding a float in a parade, I wanted to wave an American flag and shout “Here I am! Look at me. I’m an American.”

  Andy talked the whole journey long, narrating everything he saw. “Look, Pop, a jeep!” and “Look, Mom, a man on a donkey!”

  As we rode along the twisty dirt roads, we got to talking about John Glenn and his first-time orbit of the earth. To me, this showed definitively that we were the smartest country. I didn’t know about Sputnik or the arms race. Then my father started telling us about other world events. Communist Cuba had stopped our country from taking it over, he said: something called “The Bay of Pigs.” Another thing that happened—a more concerning thing—was that Russia exploded a test nuclear bomb. Bombs like that scared me, but my father said, “Don’t worry, our American president knows exactly how to handle these kinds of things.”

  As an adult I would wonder about reassurances like these from my father. Did he really believe what he was saying? Was he truly confident and optimistic about American wisdom and omnipotence, or was he protecting his small daughter from fear? Perhaps back then, still brimming with the afterglow of World War II, he believed America had the corner on nobility. I know that not too long afterward, his thinking shifted. And just as my father’s perspective would alter—one’s sense of one’s country fluctuates over time—my own blindered patriotism would swing.

  Soon, my mother was singing, leading us in croaky renditions of the servicemen’s anthems: “Anchors Aweigh,” “The Caissons Go Rolling Along,” and “America the Beautiful.” Singing them, I felt as indomitable as General MacArthur wading ashore in the Philippines.

  Stacks of terra cotta pots—vases and plates and bowls and huge urns—stood in firewood-like piles along the walls of the buildings, up to the roof of every house in the village. Children in tattered clothes ran to and fro. Bicycles leaned against the fronts of the houses, chickens wandered, and old men with long white beards squatted along the street in twos and threes.

  We drew into the center of the village, up the single dirt street, and innocently got out of the car to ask directions to the central pottery workshop. The moment the car pulled to a stop, the people of the village converged, coming from every direction like specks of iron shooting toward a magnet, into a whirlpool around the sedan. It was as if they had never seen pale-skinned people before. By the time my feet touched the ground the vehicle was surrounded, six people deep on all sides. Instantly, I was pressed against the car’s rear fender, bodies pushing against me every which way.

  I felt I was being smothered. Fingers grabbed at every part of me. Boys and girls of all sizes, in tattered shirts, with sores on their arms and bright, watery eyes, shouted to one another as they pinched my arms and shoulders and hands. Each time one hand was withdrawn, two more replaced it. A woman with needle-thin wrinkles all over her face and eyes like bright ebony slits grabbed a piece of my hair and pulled. She squabbled something to two other women, who then reached out their arms to do the same. I couldn’t escape. I tried to shelter my face, but the strangers grabbed my hands down again. Babbling lots of Chinese words, one old lady pressed her face close. She had blank eyes that I couldn’t see into. Suddenly she yanked my ponytail and put it in her mouth, as if to taste it.

  The crystal coach had now vanished entirely, and with it dry land. I was in a new, terrifying element: an ocean of fear. Underwater, caught in the welter of a constantly surging sea. I was panting now, trying to get my head above the swells— gasping, gasping for air.

  Just in time, the embassy chauffeur barked out a fierce-sounding phrase over and over. He waved his arms like fan blades, and the crowd pulsed back.

  The crowd shrank into the stoops and pockets of the village, but I could still sense the gleaming eyes watching us as my father and the embassy driver led us down a dirt alley to the pottery shed we had come all this way to see. After viewing the many pots, adorned with intriguing, hand-painted, looping-tailed dragons— my mother bought a flower pot and an urn—we rested for a while, under an umbrella at the back of the village leader’s house. While sipping a cool, fizzy drink, I listened to the other side of my home of Taiwan: the familiar, soothing, human and natural sounds of the countryside—chickens clucking, boys shouting, old people yammering at children, the rush of a nearby Chinese stream.

  My body could suck the right amount of air again, now that the people had shrunk back. But standing in the middle of the messy, fish-smelling street, I had changed from one kind of girl to another. In an instant, the disturbance inked itself into my brain, and into the chambers of my heart. Indelible now, in my ideas and on my skin, was the girl seen by the eyes of an old Chinese woman: an odd, funny-looking misfit. Now I was, not a royal American, but an ugly little sparrow, who, when spied, would become prey to a swarm of vultures wanting to skewer her with their insatiable eyes and pluck off her wings and legs.

  Forever after—through my childhood and into my grown womanhood—I would not be able, ever, to lose the frightening image of the wild-eyed old woman pointing at me and nattering to her friends with an exhilarated laugh coming out of her mouth—nor the animal urge to flee to the safety of our American house behind the wall. From this moment, I would strive, by power of will, to make my face and my dirty blond hair and my skinny body and arms and legs invisible. I would try to shrink narrower and narrower, until, like a pencil line in the air, or a slit into another world, I was too narrow for other people to see.

  The safest thing, I decided as I sat by the trickling Chinese stream, would be to become a mole in a burrow, or a girl behind a Made-in-America, one-way glass wall, who could spy out and see the world, but could not herself be seen.

  Back at this juncture—1961—I couldn’t even begin to imagine that this China of rag-clad peasants in coolie hats might one day be a veritable dragon—an economic and political one—with a strength superior to that of the United States. It was inconceivable—to me, my father, and my country—that American arrogance could circle back and get us, and that China might one day be on the brink of owning us.

  For now, here, age seven, in this Taiwanese pottery village, I had learned a stark, permanent-ink lesson: to be American was to be a unique, strange being— superior but in danger.

  3

  whispers

  One steamy night, I was asleep—deep in the velvet, tropical darkness—when the phone trilled. I heard rustling, the click of the phone receiver being picked up. Then: my father’s low voice. Whispers drifted into my room and trickled down my body. And danger fluttered, like a fleet, invisible bird, winging through the damp, dark air.

  My childhood was full of whispers. Secrets tingled at the rim of our Taipei life, but most were so well concealed that they were mere ripples in the air, pulses on the skin like the caresses of a lost, wayward breeze. I hardly noticed them; I assumed shushes and asides, innuendos and hints were part and parcel of every family’s life. But on this particular night, the whispers became loud and ominous. I witnessed distress in my father’s face, and danger itself slipped briefly into the open.

  My life was a clear sky.

  My father arrived home from the mountain. His shirt-back was wet through with sweat. His dark, wiry hair was still wind-stunned, despite his efforts to finger-comb it down. He slumped his equipment to the floor: his canteen in its army-drab sling, his canvas rucksack and bedroll, his belt with the knife and hatchet hanging down. He looked up at me and at Andy. We were eagerly watching. His face and his knees were bright red, from sun, but his face was lit by vigor, by joy.

  Handing us sugary rice candies, he said, “You’ll come next
time. Yu Shan, Mount Morrison. A splendid climb.”

  At our rice and tofu dinner he fastened us with the stories. The buck seen deep in the woods, an eagle soaring over the highest rocks, the intense thirst he felt on the descent. The thrill of hurling himself, naked as a deer, into the stream at the foot of the mountain. After dinner, he showed us his blisters—his “merit badges,” he called them. For us, they were as good as war medals.

  When he was taking his shower, I went over to the pile my father dropped beside the door. I dug into the pocket of his pack. “I found ‘em,” I said to Andy— tossing him another of the pink candies my father kept for quick energy. Their scent was almost sickly sweet.

  Putting a hunk of the hard candy in my mouth, I settled my back against my father’s pack and took a swig from his canteen. As the cool water mixed with the sweet candy taste in my mouth, Andy and Mom and the whole house melted away. And for a few delicious moments, I was him: my invincible, brave father.

  In the morning, as I sat on my parents’ hospital-cornered, army-blanketed bed, my father put on his baggy khaki pants (some days, if it was extra hot, he put on his baggy khaki shorts), his airy, white, Chinese-tailored cotton shirt, his tie, his khaki jacket, and the light tan Clark’s desert boots he bought before I was born, when my parents were on TDY—Temporary Duty—in Hong Kong.

  Even at seven, I knew his two pairs of British-made desert boots—one tan, the other chocolate-brown—represented something important, private, to my quiet, elegant, self-denying father: an intellectual seriousness, a sturdiness, a person’s right to a few small preferences. Later I’d know my girlhood sense of reverence for my father’s boots was on the mark: they were symbols of his deepest affiliations, of the inner self he too often had to keep under wraps. Those supple, hand-sewn shoes stood in for my father’s Anglophilia, his admiration for the elegance of British rhetoric, his belief that a pair of stout walking shoes was a person’s most essential item of apparel: they could carry you out of any swamp of difficulty.