Born Under an Assumed Name Read online

  After a breakfast of donuts from the PX, my father paused at the door to wipe his horn-rimmed glasses and gave us all kisses before he set out the door to work. He left on foot into the steamy heat, to do his important work for President Kennedy and the Gimo.

  Much of the work of the American intelligence community in Taiwan at this time was on the up and up. About China, the outside world heard no more than rumors . . . about Mao’s campaigns to militarize his people, about weapons programs, about plans for further conquest in Asia. The CIA’s main mission was to run down hard facts about Mao’s activities and intentions and to support Chiang in thwarting them.

  But another aspect of the Agency’s agenda was much more devious. While with one hand, the American government was stacking the repressive leader’s deck, with the other, fingers crossed, it was seeking to undermine him, even to reshuffle the deck entirely. Even as it backed the repressive Chiang regime, it was giving clandestine support to secret “Third Force” anti-Chiang opposition groups, a dicey activity at best.

  At six o’clock, as soon as my father came in the door, and after hugging each of us—he whirled me in the air like a Sikorsky rotor—my father took off his socks and his desert boots and donned a pair of black cloth Chinese slippers. He breathed a sigh of relief, like he always did, and then I knew I could have his full attention.

  While my mother went into the kitchen to see how Yuki was coming along with our dinner, my father read to Andy and me. He was reading us Chinese folk tales. In the past he’d read us books like Winnie the Pooh, the Better Homes and Gardens Story Book, Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes, and Tales from the Arabian Nights. During this delicious after-work hour my father always played whatever game we begged him to play. Sometimes it was Chinese checkers, sometimes it was American checkers, sometimes it was Rogers’ Rangers—which meant wrestling on the floor. We threw ourselves on my father’s hiking-fit, hard body and tried to wrestle him to the ground, in the best game of all.

  After dinner—today we had rice with tofu and beef and bamboo shoots—my mother herded us off for our baths and my father entered his study.

  In my father’s study there were lots of books, books like Red Star Over China, The Chinese, and Socialism of Our Time. On the bookshelf there were also piles of Chinese newspapers. The study was where my father did his tai chi, practiced his Chinese characters, and met with the men who visited him. His study was also where he just enjoyed being with himself. There was a stone head of Buddha and a framed, signed photo of the Gimo on my father’s desk. The Buddha had whorls meant to be snails on his head, snails that kept him cool in the heat, my father told me, as he meditated on the world’s suffering. Snails were always crawling around in Taiwan—on the walls in my rooms and on the padi stalks—so I could imagine them planting themselves on the Buddha’s head. My father loved the rough-stone Buddha head with its deep, kind expression.

  But my father’s eyes didn’t have the same, happy-hearted sun glints in them when I asked him about the portrait of the Gimo. To me it seemed a wonder that my father possessed a portrait signed by the Gimo himself, but it was like he had stuck it on his desk out of obligation—like the presidential portraits mounted in every embassy in the world. He explained that, yes, the Gimo was the leader of Taiwan, and we Americans supported him, but “he is not the noblest of men.”

  Most Americans in Taiwan agreed about Chiang’s questionable morality—he had had his followers trained by the Nazis, and he was a dictator and a crook— but he’d led the anti-Communist fight on the Mainland, and though he’d lost, the American government had deemed it “in our interests” to put its eggs in Chiang’s basket. In this era of Red Devils, fascist dictators were preferred to Communist ones.

  When I studied it up close, the uniformed man in the photograph seemed to emit trickiness through his stern eyes. These slipped-out doubts about the Gimo from my careful father might have served as my first clue that something was not as it seemed—that work in support of ruthless dictators is not to every American official’s taste—but a seven-year-old who adores her father is not on a search.

  To me, my father’s study was a place of solemnity and magnetic fascination. Once I was dressed in my white cotton pajamas, and with my wet hair combed slick along my head, I went to sit on a flat, square zabuton cushion on the floor beside my father at the low, shiny table my parents bought in Japan, near where I was born. Spread in front of him was a Chinese newspaper, of many sheets, covered in characters columning up and down the long pages, and to the side there were two open, large hard-backed books also covered in characters. Over these my father was poring. Beside him, in low stacks, and in high-toppling stacks, were small, square flash cards, each with a Chinese character on one side and an English word, penned in my father’s light, sketchy bird-foot print, on the other. As he read, my father consulted the cards. His absorption in his work was so complete that he didn’t seem to know I was there. I just sat quietly, enjoying his soft rustle and the scent of his woody, paper and ink smell. Soon, though, he patted me briefly on the hand. He gave me a small pile of his flash cards with Chinese characters to practice copying.

  Sitting beside my father during that brief hushed period of night just before I went to sleep, a longing to study, to pore over books as he did, grew in me like a plant pushing inside its pot. In the afternoons, my mother and I made flash cards of my English spelling words, and as my mother said them to me, I spit the spelled-out words back to her in the fast, expert, gunshot way that my father spoke Chinese. Because our government had sent my father to Yale University to study Mandarin for a year when I was three, he could read the long pages of picture puzzle characters and speak Chinese with all the right tones.

  Sometimes, in the evenings, my father held a gathering of his work colleagues: tall American men with butch-cut hair, the spectacled missionaries from the local hospital, or some earnest Chinese men. I heard them speaking, louder and louder, in Mandarin Chinese’s sharp, piercing high and low tones, as I tried to sleep. Once in a while, the men broke into hard, strong laughter, and I could hear my father’s laugh mingled with the others’. “The Chinese loved your father,” my mother always said. Hearing the men laughing in their own special world, I longed to grow up to be one of them, laughing boisterously in another language.

  A deeper, soft-tissue residue of my Taipei men-watching stints was a sense that men possessed a sacred, hidden knowledge—and also, a deep inner reserve, a granitic strength. I saw in these men of secrets and plots a kind of special force characterized by a supreme capacity for self-denial, an ability to live with duality and ambiguity for the sake of something beyond themselves. These were the groping, unreasonable idealizations of a young girl. Most girls worship their fathers—at least for a time—but my own adoration had, perhaps, a peculiar power, reinforced by the scent of secrecy.

  Those days, peering from the doorjamb, I was perhaps seeing my father at his height, at his most buoyant. His laugh was loud and carefree with confidence and optimism, unburdened by the doubts that would later weigh down his pockets like stones and turn his laugh into a startling, rare joy.

  The whispers were always there: momentary surfacings of my father’s true affinities and convictions; hints of the secret nature of his work; intimations of his doubts about his engagements; and scents of their perilous nature—all of which had to be concealed. The stirrings were there if I could have read them, but I was yet seven, still reading the Weekly Reader. There were so many levels of secrecy that, now when I put my mind to it, they seem to mushroom until they fill the world.

  One of the whispers had to do with my father’s views of Communism. One night at the NACC Club, my father mentioned again Mao’s determination to make all his people equal. This story of Mao’s actions puzzled me. It didn’t make China seem as bad as an evil king in a fairy tale. “What’s so bad about Communism, Pop? It sounds kind of good.”

  He explained that, in order to have all his citizens contribute to the product
ion of food for their poor country, Mao had moved thousands away from their homes and careers to toil as peasants on remote farms. “This is a good ideal, but it is wrong-headed because it denies Mainlanders the freedom to follow their dreams and build their own lives.” But the worst thing about Mao’s policy, my father said, was that millions of people, including great thinkers and scholars, had been executed or sent to the countryside sentenced with cruel hard labor for disagreeing with Mao. “In the free world, we believe people have a right to disagree with their leaders, and it is wrong to murder people who do so.”

  Still, he said, it was difficult, really, to know which system was best for China. Life under the old-style tyrannical landlords was bad for the common man. Perhaps this time of terrible disruption was necessary for China to move toward something better, and in the end there would be a better life for the Chinese people.

  “Relations between our country and China are complicated. However,” my father said, like he was netting back some escaping fish, “the most important thing for you to know is that President Kennedy is an excellent leader—the best in the world—and that our government is the best, most powerful, and most trustworthy on earth.”

  If I had been older, I might have been able to detect, like a telltale black strand in a head of blond hair, the ambivalence within my father’s reportage. I might have sniffed out, during these dinner table talks, the deeper truth that any good spy knows lies hidden within another man’s cover story. I might have sensed my father’s interest in Communism as a legitimate social experiment—especially in a country long plagued by crushing inequity and poverty. I might have known that, even though my father’s Taipei job was based on fighting Communism, internally he was giving Communism the benefit of the doubt—and that this was risky. The young intelligence officers at work in Taiwan could not but be affected by recent ideological trends in Washington. During the McCarthy era, there had been a vilification of both official and academic China specialists, who were suspected of pro-Communist sympathies. In government in the 1950s, it was obligatory to be fiercely anti-Communist, and the Taipei operation was sunk neck-deep in this conviction. This ideological conformity, and the atmosphere of fear that spawned it, were to hamper official China policy, and bind and twist intelligence officers like my father, for a long time to come.

  In a few years, my father’s political views would become apparent to me—he would be like a man stepping out of a fog in a movie—but, for now, he was the man who held my hand on pedicab rides and pointed out glittering temples, who ate Chinese octopi like they were donuts, and who, with his soothing hug, could make any carsick ride better. I was a child, wide open, simply absorbing the most obvious meaning in my father’s words: America stands for freedom. And those were the meanings he intended me to hear at this point in my life. They were the clearest and, most important, safest.

  Here is another of the signals I could have noticed: the soft nosing that told me of my father’s love for China—and of the danger associated with that love.

  My father deeply admired Chinese culture. He studied Mandarin with a passion and his eyes always squinted in a grin when Andy spoke the Chinese words he was learning in his Chinese nursery school, or when I ordered pi jiu or jiao zi, beer or dumplings, in Chinese for him when we sat in noisy, dirty, delicious restaurants. (My parents believed that the filthiest restaurants always had the best food.)

  Our house was filled with Chinese art. We had scrolls of old men drinking tea, of frogs and pine trees and crabs, and of poems in beautiful twirling characters that my father loved to translate. One of the poems started, “Life is but a dream, why should we be toiling?”

  We also had shan shui, “mountain-waters,” which was what the Chinese called landscapes—beautiful scenes of ghostly mountains with scholars’ huts tucked into forests, and wending rivers down below. Looking at these scrolls, I always imagined that I was the man in the hut, writing in a beautiful silence with only the sound of water flowing, and maybe a few cricket chirps. After Taiwan, in future places far, far away, such as the Sackler Gallery in Washington, D.C., when I came to gaze at a Chinese shan shui, a cool, calming river of deepest contentment would ripple through me.

  My father’s favorite piece of art was a painting of a caravan of camels trudging across the snows of a wild, empty land. He had admired a similar painting at a Chinese man’s house. A week later, the man appeared with the painting’s twin under his arm. He had gone to the artist and asked him to paint a replica for our family.

  My father loved many things the Chinese thought and did—their splendid architecture, their ancient and beautiful script, and their respect for the scholar. He admired the wise Confucian virtues of patience and contentment with little, and the Confucian belief that man was fundamentally good.

  And my father loved the Chinese landscape itself. Sometimes he took me down to the padi at the end of our lane when he got home from work. We gazed across the purple-bright mud, the yellow triangles of the rough straw hats of the people working, the infinite, soothing green. The padi was like the French painting of poppies my father showed me in a book, only instead of flowers there were yellow straw hats bobbing about in the padi’s green. As we stood in the blue and yellow twilight air, I knew, via an inner tingling, my father’s deep sense of peace.

  Was my father’s feeling properly called love? Or was this quickening that put a bounce in my father’s stride and shine in his eyes better called invigoration: the tumbling, the relief and pleasure that are roused when a person finds a hidden part of himself awakened and nourished by another culture? Was it the ardor that a Foreign Service officer often feels for early posts? Or was it the intellectual fascination that bubbles up when a person finds another culture simply paints each aspect of life with a different brush, in an unexpected tint he has never before known? Or was it simply the emotional sympathy of a judicious, sensitive man for those with less? Perhaps it was all these things. My father was always quiet about his pleasures. But to me, even as a girl, my father’s passion seemed ardent, like love—a dangerous love, it turned out.

  Even at age seven, I could smell the salt of danger in some of my father’s proclivities. First: Chinese shoes. My father loved his desert boots, but he also loved his black peasant shoes, the plain cloth slippers, so cheap any Chinese urchin could obtain them. Other fathers, I sensed, would not wear those shoes. Not Mr. Mason, for instance, or Mr. Summers. They wore suits like my father, and on the weekends they wore shorts and sneakers like he did, but they would never put on those Chinese shoes. I sensed that they were holding a line that my father didn’t see a need to hold. But my father was different from many of the other American fathers. Like the way he carried flash cards in his pockets and went for walks through the market streets in the early weekend mornings, and the way he didn’t worry about washing his hands like Mr. Mason did—first thing when he got in from a trip through the Taipei streets. There was a uniqueness to my father’s choice of slippers, something earth and salt.

  And then there was the doll-seller at the door.

  One Sunday afternoon, we were sitting in our tiny garden as the bell rang at the gate. When my father opened the door, a peddler was standing there. Shoeless and shirtless, in a pair of shorts held up by string, he was holding a bouquet of homemade, colorfully painted paste dolls on sticks.

  I said, “Oh Pop, can I have the one that looks like a clown?”

  My mother said, “Charlie, don’t you dare buy one of those dolls for her. That paste is poisonous. If Andy were to eat it . . .” Mom was keenly, and hourly, aware of all of the possible diseases that could strike and make us fall dead before bedtime. I felt the fear in her voice, like a small tremble inside my own body.

  My father said, handing the man a few coins in exchange for the clown doll, “It’ll be okay. Andy doesn’t eat dolls anymore. And, he’s poor,” he said, turning toward my mother. “This will help him feed his family tonight.”

  The same thing happened when th
e typewriter was stolen from my father’s study. My mother was worried and mad, but my father said, “It was probably some poor man trying to find a way to feed his children.”

  A pair of shoes, a doll-maker at the door, a typewriter: Why would these moments carry a whiff of riskiness so strong that they would tickle a child’s heart? Why was there a slip of furtiveness to my father’s simple enjoyment of the place he lived, the land to which he’d been assigned by his own government?

  Back then, I didn’t know that employees who differed from the accepted doctrine, who had socialist sympathies, or who just took a keen interest in the Chinese viewpoint, had been marginalized, had their careers ruined, or been pressed out, at the outfit where my father worked.

  My father was a sensitive man and his sensitivity extended to the Chinese. Was his too deep a sympathy? Later I understood that American officials were expected to study and take an interest in the countries to which they were posted. But their sympathies and outlook were always to remain strictly pro-American, their perspectives limited to promotion of American interests. Was my father in danger of “going native”? Is this why he would later have trouble getting promotions from the China Desk? It strikes me, looking back, that my father had to conceal so many things. He had to veil even his most elemental pleasures, like gazing at a Chinese vista. And it got dicier from there. His socialist leanings, his empathy for the poor: these could be misconstrued, or used against him.

  Of course, at age seven, I couldn’t have begun to plumb the subtle anxiety associated with my father’s feeling for China. It wouldn’t have made sense that loving another people should be a risky matter. So I overlooked the whispers. They were the background hum of my childhood, unattended to as the singing frogs in a swamp. I could only assume, like most children, my father was always safe.