Born Under an Assumed Name Read online

  I thought about the objects I would put in the suitcase Santa Claus had given me for Christmas: one of my spelling tests marked with a big “A,” my collection of wooden Chinese dolls, my pad full of ballerina drawings, and my bell from the Temple of a Thousand Steps.

  But I would be packing much more: indelible pictures of my father speaking rapid-fire Mandarin, striding off in the hushed morning cool to meet a Chinese man on a back street of Taipei, spark-eyed and invigorated after mountain hikes—a young man in his prime, confident of his abilities, optimistic about the fairness of the world as he might never be again.

  Into my suitcase, weighty but invisible, I would also be packing a reflex love for Asia. For after Taiwan, every time I saw an Asian face on a street anywhere in the world, I would feel an instant crazy bond. I would smile familiarly as I approached, feeling a cousinship with the passing person based purely on gleaming black hair and features set in a particular plane.

  I would also carry with me a peculiar collection of smells, sounds, and a certain look to things: the red-and-black lacquered roof curve of a layered pagoda; the light-brushed, up-to-down beauty of a shan shui; the rough-textured straw of coolie hats; the strangely reassuring Chinese scent of fish and soy sauce mixed with chickens, bodies, and lotus blossoms; the squabble of toothless women; the shouts of joyful, patchy-clothed children; and keening music. Never again would I have this riot for the senses. All down the years, I’d hunt for it in Chinatowns, Chinese restaurants, Asian emporia, and films. I’d haunt Asian art museums, a stalker after a disappearing slip of harlequin cloth. Whenever browsing through a magazine I came across a photo of a padi, my heart would pause and drink in a great draft, as if it had been thirsty for a long, long time.

  After Yi Kuang, the raggedy girl, and the street children of Asia, I knew dirt, poverty, and sadness were real; life wasn’t always clean like an American mall or beauty parlor or Episcopal church. This early acquaintance with poverty led me, in my twenties and thirties, to work in the projects of Somerville, Massachusetts; a psychiatric emergency service in San Jose, California; and the Hispanic slums of St. Paul, Minnesota.

  My sojourn in Taipei—and my family’s later stints among the poor of Malaysia and Vietnam—also instilled the conviction that I should live without. I should be able to live as simply as the poorest person in the world. I would be thoroughly content when, in my late twenties, I lived in Patagonia—in a corrugated metal Quonset hut where a natural gas canister for heat, light, and cooking; an outhouse; and a handful of poor sheep farmers for friends met all my basic needs.

  From Taiwan, I left with a child’s naive assessment that, at the very least, I had an obligation to devote a part of myself, at all times, to the hurts of the world, like a kind of prayer, a bow of loyalty, respect, kinship, and acknowledgment to all those who would never have American abundance or freedom or optimism. For a long time, I would keep sadness with me, like a signet ring—or a sailor’s stripes—so as to know what I knew, to know who I was.

  One night, I came upon my father hugging my mother in the living room. Boxes of the clothes she collected for the orphans were piled around the living room floor, and she was dabbing her eyes with a crumpled up hanky. When she saw me, she immediately straightened up and said, “Oh, Sara’s here.”

  She wiped her eyes and said, “Go back to bed, Sweetie. Everything’s okay.” But I knew it wasn’t: my mother was sad that we were leaving Taipei. I knew this like I knew padi was rice.

  I lay with my eyes open in the hot, chirping dark for a long time.

  The next day when we left the house to go see friends, my mother wore her dark glasses.

  A few weeks later, on a bright day after school, my father and I looked out over the broad, lettuce-green padi that seemed to stretch forever into the distance. As my father squeezed my hand here on the muddy dike that stretched for miles along the town side of the padi, looking out over what seemed the entire expanse of China, I felt a sublime contentment. My whole self rushed out over the land, like a fast swooping hawk, to join it. I stood for a few moments, just watching the straw hats of the people squatting far off in the mud, and inhaling the warm, stinky-soft air from over the expanse before me.

  I did not know it yet, but this was how it would be forever. Just before leaving each place I lived, I would be out walking and a surge of contentment would rise within me. Somehow, the country, its people, my life in that country and among its people, would spread out before me whole and verdant. The land would shine, all its beauties apparent for the first, and final, time.

  The morning we left Taiwan, the air was sweet as ginger ale, bubbly and clear.

  I awakened well before dawn, before anyone else was awake. Mary helped me put on my traveling clothes. People in those days dressed up for plane journeys. She brushed my hair free and put on my headband. She handed me a rattan purse filled with candies—her gift to me. I felt like a princess in my puffy, light green dress with its crinoline underneath and my necklace of pretend pearls, holding my purse—but my stomach was a sour, uncomfortable, cold pool.

  At breakfast, I couldn’t eat, I was so excited about going on the airplane. Andy ran around the empty house in circles. My mother asked my father ten times if he had the orders. He kept patting the passports in his hidden chest pocket.

  Finally the embassy car came, along with friends in another car. We had to get to the airport four hours early, for processing and all the good-bye formalities.

  In the grey-furnished living room, now stripped of any sign of our life there, Mary stood in the center of the hemp carpet. My father, dressed in his smartest suit, hugged her, patted her shoulder, and handed her an envelope. He made a last-minute check of his pockets—passports, tickets, orders, money—a gesture that would become familiar as breakfast through the years of my childhood. Then he stood by the door: the spruce American official readying himself for his next assignment.

  My mother in her pretty belted flowered dress, her handbag over an arm, embraced Mary’s small, thin form. All she said was, “Oh Mary, thank you.” Tears trickled down Mary’s cheeks and wetted her neck. My mother’s torso shook and she put on her dark glasses. “The Browns will love you,” she said. “You’ll be okay.” Mary nodded her head, her body shuddering.

  Then Mary grabbed Andy, who was still running around the room. She hugged him as if she would never stop. Then it was my turn. Mary bent down and took my hands. Her voice was thick. “Eat lots of candy, Sara,” she said, and then she hugged me.

  Though I was too excited to pause for long, the look in Mary’s eyes that morning would stay with me forever. Her young face all crumpled up, her eyes creased as the tears poured down her cheeks. In her deep brown eyes: all the losses of the world, and all the worlds yet to be lost. This was the precise moment when the tincture of loss that would tinge the rest of my Foreign Service childhood trickled through my open eyes and into my blood.

  Leaps later in time, seeing Mary’s eyes, shining still, in my mind, I would be seared by her vulnerability to our departure: What became of her? . . . And by my vulnerability to the loss of her: Where did the hugeness of my love for her go?

  So strange, the way we Americans—always moving on—minimized the loss of these amahs who’d been, for years, quiet but essential dispensers of love and service in our households. Perhaps we just weren’t trained to know what to do with sadness of the size and shape of these women—and so, we could only flee.

  This departure from Taiwan, and from Mary, would leave me, not only pierced by loss, but thirsty for it. All my life, I would feel as though I must travel, or die— and simultaneously as though, once I departed, either I would perish, or I’d never see my loved ones again.

  At the airport, it seemed like one hundred people were gathered to see us off. I found a wall to lean against, dug my hand down into Mary’s purse, and got out a hard, red chunk of candy. My father, who seemed busy and removed, shook hands with, and slapped the backs of, lots of close-cropped Chinese m
en in uniforms and clean, starched suits.

  One day, in my twenties, watching some cheap film about a Banana Republic in a California movie theatre, these Chinese men in their uniforms and sharp-crisp suits would suddenly spring into my mind, and it would seem as though they, and we, were in a movie of crooks and gangsters parading as legitimate officials—the American government, justifying itself as choosing the lesser of two evils, too often in pacts with highly questionable characters. The same image, and shudder of recognition, would pass through me over and over again through the years: Pinochet, de Klerk, Somoza, the Shah, the Saudi princes, the Taliban, Saddam Hussein . . . Even at this juncture: here, back in Taiwan, 1961, the Algerians had just declared independence from their colonizer, France. Couldn’t the American government have taken note?

  Finally, we boarded the Northwest Orient Stratocruiser that would transport us to Japan for the three-week ship voyage “home.” Foreign Service officers had a choice of returning either by ship or by plane. As my parents loved ship voyages, we were going to sail home from Yokohama on SS President Cleveland.

  I spread out my petticoat and smoothed my green gingham skirt. A little nervous now, I leaned against my father, who patted my hand. He appeared calm as a mountain, confident about this return to Headquarters. My mother, across the aisle, gave me a quivering smile from behind her dark glasses. Andy squirmed and pointed out the window to my mother, and we all waited for the plane to start taxiing.

  The airplane was long and fancy. We were traveling first class, and as we taxied down the runway, the stewardesses treated us with honor. They passed down the aisles with big rattan platters of candies and gum, and they handed out slippers. The bathroom was furnished with little piles of soap and perfume that we were allowed to keep.

  As we rose into the sky, for a fleeting instant I thought I heard the screech and clang of Chinese funeral music. Almost immediately, though, it became the drone of the plane. And a few minutes later, when I looked out the window, I saw only clouds. Taiwan was gone.

  Book 2

  GUM

  Bethesda, Maryland,

  1962–1964

  5

  cross my heart

  Sometimes, in life, there is an opening in the sky: an aperture like a porthole through which your crystal coach could pass. Through the spiracle in the air, you can see your other life: a toy-sized village with a main street and smaller lanes with porch-fronted cottages, a place where you know everyone and where everyone carries a little portion of your history in his pocket. A place where, at ten, you and your friend Charlotte ate worms, where at thirteen you and Charlotte gagged on Camels behind the dilapidated Atkinson barn, where at sixteen the two of you sewed Juliet dresses like the ones in Zeffirelli’s film for the junior-senior prom, and to which you returned from college to see your old friend and picked up talking in your mother’s old linoleum kitchen like you’d never left.

  There is this yellow-bright opening—this chance—and then the moment passes and you’re swept by.

  Embarking up the long, awning-covered gangplank and stepping onto the C Deck of SS President Cleveland, I found myself in a sparkling, floating luxury planet. The walls were clean-spanking white, the railings that lined every hallway and deck turned of gleaming brass. While waiting to set sail, we explored the top stories of the ship: the gilt and white ballrooms; the brocade and velvet lounges; the dining room of tables set with starched, white tablecloths, hundreds of crystal glasses, and thousands of pieces of sparkling silverware; the bursar’s shop with little Japanese boxes, folders, and fans, and Hawaiian muumuus and leis, and Hershey’s bars. As we passed up and down the shining, waxed stairways, and in and out of the magnificent rooms, I was now, for real and at last, a princess.

  The moment we set sail—I recall the voyage in my fibers like a tonic of memory—Taiwan seemed to wisp even further away on the Pacific breeze, and Washington, waiting on the other end of the blue and secretive ocean, seemed far off, invisible somewhere beyond the dazzling blue horizon. The three weeks of the journey lulled the whole family. Andy played with military toys and I with dress-ups in the well-equipped nursery, and my mother lolled and chatted in a chaise lounge on the Promenade Deck, while my father took bracing constitutionals around and around and around the D Deck, his head held high, as if he were Columbus sure of the Indies. Only one thing on the journey unsettled me: a glimpse of a girl down the gangway leading to the second- and cabin-class staterooms. The passengers in those lower decks of the ship, I learned, were prohibited from entering our first-class realms. This was my first acquaintance, other than knowing the military ranks, with a caste system within my own kind.

  That jarring moment aside, the blue-rippling sea, the balmy air, the gentle undulation of the ship, and the shrimp cocktails on deck as we watched the sun set rocked me and the rest of my family into drinking in each day as if it were fresh fruit nectar. The twenty-one days were twenty-one gifts of blessed, luxurious leisure, of time stolen from time. These were the days before long-distance calls, when the world still offered pause.

  Every blue-bright, Pacific day of the voyage, my father took Andy and me up on the fore deck of the ship to look toward America—a morning ritual. With the spray hitting our faces, the green ocean glinting, the sky a clear, endless Neverland, we saw nothing but more sea. After a long gaze, we returned—holding our father’s hands—to, respectively, our flouncing, metal tanks, and deck-walking.

  Then, after many days of this routine, one day up on deck, there it was: in a growing, tawny strip at the far edge of the sea. “That’s your home, Girl and Boy— the United States of America!” my father said. As I looked, my chest swelled with air so crisp and delicious it seemed like it came from a newborn planet.

  From San Francisco, we flew over the continent toward my father’s new job at the China Desk in Washington, D.C. Over the droning hours of the flight (these were not jets we flew on), I looked down upon the vast, spreading lands of America as they changed hues from tawny at the coast, to evergreen, to tawny again, to sandy-brown, to evergreen once more, and then to a rambling stretch of yellow and green. As we banked to land, the earth all bright green now, ribboned here and there with glinting blue rivers and streams, my heart thumped with excitement. My mother patted my arm. “We’re almost home!”

  But as it turned out, Bethesda, Maryland, was another foreign country. I supposedly belonged here but I almost felt as much like a lone scarecrow among regular Americans as I had in Taiwan surrounded by poor Chinese. The SS President Cleveland had thick, silky cords to grab onto. Here in Bethesda, there was nothing to keep me steady. I hung on to my father’s arm and stood close against my mother wherever we went.

  It was strange to have everyone around me speak English. The world was loud and frenetic and distracting when I understood all the words swirling around me. And America looked different from Taiwan. The houses were mostly brick and had squares of green grass and big trees in front of them. There were no walls around them, so the houses didn’t protect you from robbers or give you turrety privacy like in Taipei. Here, everyone could see everyone else. Also, there were more cars than people in the streets, and the parked Buick, Chevy, and Ford station wagons took up half a block. There were no pedicabs and only children rode bicycles. The buses were new and didn’t spew smoke, and people didn’t throw up out the windows. There were no coolies in stiff, straw hats; no poor, butterscotch-skinned people in rags; no chickens skittering near your feet; and no water buffaloes. There were just ladies in curlers with four or five clean-noisy children in shorts trailing them at the grocery store, or shouting on the green-patch lawns with squirrels in the trees.

  In America no one ate rice. They ate steaks and potato chips, which were very good, but I missed Yuki’s fresh-cooked fried rice, served in a white bowl decorated with brushy blue fish. In Bethesda, it never smelled of fish, pee, or lotus blossoms. It smelled of gasoline and barbeques. There was no flashing crimson or scarlet or gold, and I never saw a lante
rn swinging in the dark night air.

  Two weeks before school started, and after we’d unpacked our HE—government talk for Household Effects—into our standard, red-brick colonial house, with a front and back yard, on Wilson Lane, we drove in the sweaty car to sweaty Indiana—it was August and there was no air conditioning in our Rambler (few had it back then)—to see some of my mother’s relatives. Overseas, we were a self-contained mobile unit and my parents hardly ever mentioned relations. I had a lot of aunts, uncles, and cousins, but my parents didn’t nourish the ties. I didn’t understand their lack of interest in family; I was hungry for it.

  We met up with Uncle Carl (my mother’s brother), Aunt Fran, and their son Scotty at a camp site in a state park. At the picnic table, we ate hamburgers my mother and Aunt Fran patted into wet, pink rounds and cooked on the fireplace grill. The meat dripped fat and made the fire spurt, and they smelled delicious. Scotty talked about rocket engines and propulsion all through the hamburgers, the potato chips, and the marshmallows. I liked Scotty by definition; he was my cousin.

  “It’s hot as sin,” my mother kept saying as the sun dipped into the trees, and the mosquitoes were “eating us alive.” In desperation, we climbed into our tents well before dark. Then, in the middle of the night, the mosquitoes were stinging us so badly that my father lifted me and Andy up one by one, groggy and sticky-hot and whimpery from the itching, and put us into the car to sleep. In the morning, he commented to my mother, “Welcome to Indiana.” Her face had three huge, angry-looking bites on it, her hair was scraggly, and she looked like she hadn’t slept in a month. She scowled and whipped the dishcloth at him and said, “Humph.”