Born Under an Assumed Name Read online

  This interaction, had I been older, might have revealed the reason I hardly knew my relatives. The Midwestern mosquitoes had just reconfirmed my father’s conviction that exodus had been the best course. My father was relieved, on joining the government, to have shed the Midwest and left family obligations behind. He was the firstborn and golden boy, but one of his brothers who had run away to the marines at age fifteen was constantly in hot water; his grandmother, who lived with them, domineering; and his father unpredictable. When my father traveled to Japan on the troop carrier at the end of the Second World War, he had discovered his elixir: the boundless, strange, fascinating world beyond America.

  My mother also had her grounds for escape. Family dynamics in her case, too, may have contributed. As the ninth child, she received little attention—or was viewed as a pest. Or it may be that my father’s work made it too complicated to keep in close touch: relatives had to be lied to. I have heard that, because of this, Agency families are most comfortable with each other. Whichever it was, my mother was grumpy and my father was trying to endure, but Andy and I were happy to be camping and swimming in brown ponds with our cousin and eating sticky candy.

  One night, we went to a drive-in with Scott, Aunt Fran, and Uncle Carl. Snuggled in the car in the dark, with my back against the sticky hot vinyl seat, with the wide black sky overhead and the Hollywood feature flickering on the screen, and with my brother and my parents near me munching cheeseburgers and french fries like me, I thought, “This is what’s so great about America.”

  From the state park, we traveled west to visit my mother’s mother, her sister and brother-in-law (my Aunt Norma and Uncle Irvin), and their three children, Linda, Randy, and Brian. They lived in New Albany, Indiana, a tiny town set down in the flats near Louisville, Kentucky, in a white bungalow on a quiet street down which brown mongrel dogs moseyed bovine-slow in the heat. When I stepped out of the clammy car at my aunt and uncle’s, my immediate thought was that I’d stepped into a book. The house and the street fit perfectly into the America I’d imagined when I’d sat at the NACC Club in Taipei.

  The days in New Albany were glorious: hot, sweaty, and perfect. Every day, our cousins, Andy, and I grabbed our suits, ambled down wide streets lined with small cottages, cut through backyards and alleys, and wound up at the neighborhood pool. There, luxuriously parentless, we cannonballed and “dolphined” all day, watched over by a lifeguard who was the cousins’ neighbor, and ordered hot dogs and Cokes whenever we felt hungry. Every now and then a neighbor kid dashed in, breathless, to deliver a message from my mother and Aunt Norma, instructing us when to come home, or when to meet them for a five-cent cone at Ben Franklin’s. But usually, during these dreamy days, we played in the cool, light-lanced turquoise of the pool until after five, returning home just as the platters of fried chicken and potato salad were being placed on the long picnic table in the backyard. At the pool, I was immediately accepted as one of the clan. The sense of being known, of not having to explain who I was, unlike in all the places I’d ever lived—Randy simply said, “This is my cousin,” and that took care of it, no questions asked—was an ice cream sundae with a cherry on top for me.

  At bedtime back at Aunt Norma’s, we all took turns using the bungalow’s single bathroom on the ground floor. Even the bathroom enchanted me. A sign above its door read, in down-home wisdom that still seems like Indiana to me: “When I works, I works hard. When I sits, I sits loose. When I thinks, I falls asleep.”

  An evening, as we slurped ice cream in the darkening firefly air, I came upon a comforting thought. I am a link on a chain of connected people. I am a link in the necklace of an American family, and I am also a link in the necklace of America.

  This thought seemed valuable and essential; it made my body feel like all my bones were sparkling-white, straight and strong, and the muscles that hugged them trim, taut, and limber. This golden chain would keep me from all harm.

  But this magic chain, this precious sense of affiliation, was fleeting and flittery. Repeatedly in the years to come, the golden circlet would slip off my neck, leaving me adrift. I would recover it in unexpected places—at twenty-two as an intern in a warm-hearted, shoestring clinic for emotionally disturbed preschoolers in Cambridge, Massachusetts; in the unadorned seminar rooms and musty library stacks of graduate school in my mid-thirties; with a college friend on a white-rock, sweet-humming Wyoming mountaintop at forty-nine. But I could never simply will the circlet to be found. It only appeared when it wished to—its filigree clasp never secure enough to hold for long.

  But here in New Albany, I, the girl raised among the scarlet and clanging funeral processions of Taiwan and the pine-scented hushes of Japan, wakened to a dream that would possess me forever afterward—that bountiful, rooted, family-stuffed, and, to the Foreign Service child, unattainable utopia. As we traveled from country to country, I would tow with me in my Pan Am flight bag a mental home movie of this New Albany summer, saturated with yearning.

  All the way into my forties, even after discarding a quintessential American small city life in St. Paul, Minnesota, in favor of the worldliness of Washington, D.C., I would—perversely—long for small-town America. I would ache for a place I probably wouldn’t fit in once there.

  On the drive back to Washington, we stopped at an amazing American place: a rest stop with a hamburger restaurant, a snack bar with milkshakes, and a little shop with dazzling souvenirs like baseball hats labeled “Ohio,” American flags, and miniature license plates with children’s names on them. Muttering about cheap trinkets and junk, my father said, “Oh, all right”—and bought us each a license plate. Mine spelled Sara with an “h,” but I sat with it in my lap the remainder of the drive.

  When we pulled up in Bethesda, life, unlike in Taiwan, did not yield up oddities and curiosities, like sea-echoing conches and Chinese prayer charms on a shore. Every week was predictable. We did our shopping at Bradley Shopping Center, where we bought things at Bradley Food and Beverage, Bruce Variety—a wonderful shop jammed with buttons and envelopes and kick balls and gingham and frying pans and three-packs of socks and underwear and bobby pins and curlers and Halloween masks and every other useful item you could dream of—and at Strosnider’s Hardware.

  Here in America my father no longer wore his baggy khaki shorts to work; he wore suits. My mother wore practical shirt-waist dresses with belts, and I wore shifts and skirts, but not my smocked dresses. They needed too much ironing; we didn’t have a laundry maid anymore. Being fancy was not a part of life in Bethesda, but I didn’t mind. I was with my family and I was busy reading fairy stories, and playing “going on a ship” with Andy. Being American in Taiwan and being American in America were very different. The best thing of all about being American in America was that no one noticed me, and no one wanted to touch me. I adored being invisible.

  In Bethesda, we didn’t have any servants or an amah. My missing of Mary was like the gnawing feeling you have in your belly when you have skipped lunch. Mostly I tried not to remember her. If I said I missed her, my mother said, “I miss Mary too.” Then she added her hallmark phrase, “But I try to think, Wherever I am is best” and so I tried to think that too. Cleaving to my mother’s practice of stalwart optimism would stand me in good stead, particularly during this period of childhood when I had no say as to where I lived—until one evening back in Washington in my teens, when I would shriek at my mother and rush upstairs crying, yelling, “No, this place is not best!”

  Every day was the same here: my mother and my father went to work and Andy and I attended Radnor Elementary School, five blocks away. My mother taught English to African and Middle Eastern students at Georgetown University. My father was gone for long days at work at “the State Department,” a huge white building downtown with a thousand white corridors. I pictured my father at work in a cube-shaped office, locked deep in that mazelike stockade near the Washington monument. Years later, I would come to know that he was really working in an entirely differ
ent building in an entirely different location in an entirely different state, but, for now, there was no reason for me to doubt my father’s words. My parents had always had secrets associated with my father’s work—“things children don’t need to know.” I took it for granted that everyone’s father’s job entailed secrets.

  Here in Washington, though, my father’s work suffused little of the whispering or vague sense of menace that wavered around his Taipei job. There was no midnight rustling, no sweaty smell of fear. Any secrets that existed were offshore, floating around, invisible particles in the far-off sea.

  My father worked at the China Desk, he said, and his work, even though we were now in America, was still China-watching, but from afar. Here my father seemed more tired than he had in Taipei. The China Desk at Headquarters didn’t seem like my father’s cup of tea, as my mother would say. He left for the State Department at about 7:30 in the morning and returned at about 6 p.m., and when he got home he just wanted a beer, and he didn’t want to talk about his day at the office, even when my mother asked. He just said, “Same old, same old,” and waved his hand as if to erase the tedium and the office politics—even though I heard my mother muttering about “that mafia.” In Taipei he used to come home all fizzed up, like he had ginger ale bubbling in him instead of blood, and now it was as if the ginger ale had gone flat.

  Foreign Service and intelligence officers—I would come to know—usually disliked their returns to Headquarters. When I was in my forties, working and raising children in Washington myself, I would often grouse to my father about the competitive, aggressive ethos in the city, and about the utilitarian view of people some Washingtonians seemed to have. With his penchant for using as few words as possible, he would offer his confirmation, “Washington is tough.”

  One day my father came home and it seemed like his ginger ale had not just gone flat; it was sour. I heard my mother saying in the kitchen, “Charlie Taber, you’ve got to keep your mouth shut.”

  “I can’t say nothing if I know an action is wrong.”

  “You did that in Taipei and you saw what it did. All it did was hurt you. You can’t expect anything different. That man only loves his ‘Yalies.’ Anyone who didn’t go there has to kowtow even more.”

  My father’s Taipei boss had returned to Headquarters too. The chipping-away of my father was continuing.

  By this time, the middle of 1962, China was finally beginning to emerge from the disastrous Great Leap Forward, which had taken place while we were in Taiwan. During the Great Leap Forward, Mao organized his people into work brigades on vast communes to maximize industrial production in rural areas. He had conceived of this three-year plan as a way to catch up with America and Britain, but the brutal collectivization he had imposed on the peasantry had led to agricultural stagnation, famine, widespread starvation, and desperate demoralization of the Chinese population. The Chinese people had been forced to eat husks and leaves from trees as the food they produced was taken away by force. Thirty million had starved to death while Mao had posed as the leader of world Communism, and made speeches about achieving a land of plenty through the force of will. A fair claim may be made that the Great Leap Forward was the largest man-made disaster in history.

  Enthusiasm for the Communist revolution had flagged badly during this punishing social upheaval, and Mao had now begun a “revisionist bourgeois restoration,” including the introduction of private agricultural plots to buoy his people’s spirits and create incentives to productivity. While this mini and temporary recuperative capitalist thrust was underway, the cult of Mao was mushrooming, and the underpinnings of the upcoming, even more punitive Cultural Revolution being laid down. The China Desk, my father included, had the task of tracking these events.

  As for events on other continents, many African states were gaining independence from their European colonizers. The Congo had already freed itself of the Belgians, and Uganda and Tanganyika would be independent by the end of the year. The Europeans had learned that imperialism had too high a price, while the United States, conversely, was just warming up to the enterprise. The Cold War was in full swing; the arms race was underway and U.S. spy planes were patrolling the air spaces over both the USSR and China. Khrushchev and Kennedy, the new imperialists, were engaging in the war of nerves that would lead to the Cuban Missile Crisis.

  Usual weekend afternoons, my father would relax in his black peasant slippers, reading a tan paper-covered Chinese book back to front and up to down. My mother would fix dinner: frozen vegetables and minute steaks or fish sticks. Andy would play out in the backyard in the huge, wooden packing crate stamped with big, black Chinese characters that came on the boat with our HE—which our father had hammered into a playhouse with, to our admiration, a ladder and a loft. I would draw a ballerina while I sat cozily on the couch in the living room, and the dog next door would bark.

  Weekends were the only time I sometimes felt like the same person I had been back in Taipei, especially on the days when we went to the homes of other Foreign Service families to eat Chinese food. These evenings in Northwest Washington; Chevy Chase, Maryland; or Vienna, Virginia—wherever our Taipei friends had set down—my father and the other men spoke Chinese and we all dove for beef and green peppers, cashew chicken, Peking duck, and spring rolls from the lazy Susan in the middle of the table. Hurling American manners to the winds, everyone reverted to the customs we picked up across the sea: the noisier the people, the messier the table, the better the meal. And my father’s laugh when the men joshed around was confident and loud and hearty like it had been back in Taipei. My father told jokes, too, more than at home, when he was usually sapped from the office, in a conversational, confiding, folksy-but-man-in-the-know, slightly wry tone, and the men broke into hee-hawing, honking laughs. Even though they were sitting among their lipsticked wives and wriggling children, there was something private about the men and their half-English, half-Chinese jokes; in the way they leaned across the bosoms of the ladies to hear each other; in the way their eyes twinkled when they said certain words, when they mentioned certain people’s names. “Joe sure lost his pants that time,” one of them said. Or: “I never could tell if Chang was on the level.”

  Sometimes the wives chimed in. My mother always looked at Mrs. Thompson when she told a certain story. “Remember the time our two dumb husbands forgot the password and they were standing there, doubled over laughing like hyenas, in the middle of the street?” By the time the two mothers were halfway through the story, all the grown-ups at the table were clutching their stomachs and rocking back and forth like wild hyenas themselves—while we children just sat there and stared.

  Back here in the States, we had to eat at other Foreign Service families’ homes in order to eat Chinese food, because there were no smelly restaurants with tasty, soy-saucy dishes in Bethesda. But there were Twinkies, and there were raisin boxes, and circus car boxes of Animal Crackers, and accordion straws. McDonald’s had just erected its golden arches out on Rockville Pike, and Howard Johnson’s advertised twenty-eight flavors of ice cream. And, there were candy and chewing gum. Food was the one thing that was familiar here—since we always had American groceries from the commissary in Taipei. To eat food here that we ate back in China was comforting: it felt like Mary’s hand smoothing my hair.

  For the child uncertain of her reception on return to a country left behind, food can be the key that opens the door. Give a Frenchman his goat cheese, a Chinaman his rice bowl, an American his burger—or his Hershey’s Kiss—and he’s home free. American candy and gum: I knew just what to do with them.

  America was candy heaven. Tootsie Rolls, both the tiny ones and the big ones with sections like fat worms: they stuck to your teeth and then turned into a soft, sugary, chocolaty squash in your mouth. Candy cigarettes: how cool we looked hanging them blasély from our first and index fingers. Cracker Jacks: the caramel made the popcorn stick to your teeth, and then there was the little present inside, a plastic gun or a little b
ell. And, of course, Mounds, Almond Joy, and Milky Way bars, the creamy, caramelly, coconutty, chocolaty staples of our lives: either nibble them so they last, suck them like lollipops, or peel the chocolate off the outside with your front teeth and then gobble the sticky insides fast.

  Back at TAS, new students fresh from America would hand out candy bars like they were gold booty. Candy is America, I concluded back in Taipei when I was five—and now I finally had it all at my fingertips.

  But gum was even better, the best of all—as American as all get-out, like Lucille Ball. In Taiwan, when I took my first piece of gum between my lips it was as though I was Columbus discovering America—and now I was in Gum Heaven. Perhaps because my parents didn’t let me have it much—my mother said it was vulgar—I had a thing about gum. A gumaholic, I hid and hoarded it. I loved to chew gum while turning the pages of a book or twirling a ring on my finger. I loved the ritual of opening a pack with the zip string, fishing out a single slice, and then lingering over the luxurious decision about whether to roll it up first or simply wad it—with a slurp of sweet—between my lips.

  And then there was the joy of choice—America is nothing if not the land of variety: Wrigley’s Spearmint, or Doublemint, “Doublemint, Doublemint, Double-mint/Two Mints in One/Doublemint, Doublemint, Doublemint Gum,” or Dentyne, with its thin, spicy slivers. And then there was Bazooka Bubble Gum: nothing could match the satisfaction of a big pink wad in your mouth and the dependable treat of unfolding the predictably bad comic you could barely understand. But Juicy Fruit was my favorite of all, that is, until I discovered Beechnut Fruit Stripe gum. What other country besides America would be clever enough to invent striped gum? No country has gum as good as America, I gloated, and so I chomped into gum like it was the main road home.