the United States just as it may be in your own country. Although you have probably read or heard of incidents of discrimination against Negroes in certain sections of the United States, bear in mind that discrimination is not confined to Negro Americans. Wherever a minority racial, cultural, or religious group exists, it may be the object of discriminatory practice.” The guidebook suggested “prejudice” was a universal phenomenon owing to “group” differences rather than an inherent defect of American society.96
The DOD guidebook’s sanitized narrative of American life further translated into concrete experience for the trainees through social programs. The Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, for example, started an Allied Officer Sponsor Program in 1959 to “promote [the] cultural and social integration of Allied students” by pairing them with an American officer who would “act as personal friends” and guide them through their time at the college.97 A “Hospitality Program” at the Great Lakes Naval Training Center attempted the same by encouraging local navy families to invite students into their homes “for visiting and informal dining.” These programs, no matter their origins, characterized the task at hand as a “unique opportunity” to promote one-on-one relations, “to help acquaint these men with America and Americans [and] plan[t] the seeds of real friendship and understanding.”98 A New York Times editor confirmed these positive attributes of the training program by quoting the words of one Korean trainee in his letter to a friend back home: “Until I saw America and talked and associated with Americans I doubted if what I heard about America was true; I know that there can be, and we can have, the same freedom of religion, speech, and press in our own country and in this whole human world.”99
Efforts to shape the perceptions of the military trainees invariably cracked at the seams. No number of guidebooks or sponsorship programs could keep the trainees from witnessing the blunt realities of the American color line, or from pursuing desires beyond the military lives imagined for them. For example, Pak Chŏngin, a division commander who studied at Fort Benning, recalled seeing “the discrimination against Negroes in the Southern region,” which he found “terribly distasteful.”100 Given the value placed on these MDAP trainees as cultural diplomats, the inability of U.S. government and military officials to control their negative perceptions of life in the United States had the potential of backfiring irreparably. Although the historical record does not show these subjects returning to their home countries politicized by their experience abroad, it does reveal how they posed a problem of an entirely different kind, one that officials had not foreseen: their desertion and subversive mobility in the United States.
SEEKING ASYLUM IN THE TRANSNATIONAL SECURITY STATE
No individual did more to confound the MDAP training program in the 1950s than Hsuan Wei, the subject who opened this chapter and who came to symbolize the unintended and undesirable consequences of U.S. militarization. By orders of the U.S. Navy for military training in September 1952, Wei arrived in the United States, and from 1952 to 1954 he attended a total of three courses at the Marine Corps School in Quantico and the Amphibious Base in Little Creek, Virginia. He completed his training with honors on June 4, after which he received orders to fly to San Francisco. From there, he would report to the staff headquarters of the Twelfth Naval District and await transportation to Taiwan. On June 8, he proceeded as directed, and was cleared for departure three days later. When his plane departed, however, Hsuan was nowhere on board. An immediate investigation revealed that he had checked out of his hotel with all of his belongings. No foul play was suspected. Instead, naval authorities seemed to know without a question of doubt that Wei had gone AWOL. The investigation and endless confusions that followed were beyond anything that officials could have imagined at that moment.101
A national manhunt ensued over the next few weeks, coordinated among Chinese authorities and U.S. Navy and immigration officials. Wei, meanwhile, had sought temporary refuge in Evanston, Illinois, where he enlisted the legal aid of K.C. Wu, the ousted governor of Taiwan Province known for his staunch criticisms of the Chinese Nationalist government. Two months prior, Wei had made contact with Wu, expressing his growing disillusionment with Chiang Kai-shek’s regime.102 On Wu’s advice, two weeks after his disappearance, Wei wrote a letter to the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) office in Washington, D.C. that revealed his whereabouts. This move was a shrewd political strategy. In the letter, Wei invoked section 243(h) of the Immigration and Nationality (McCarran-Walter) Act of 1952 and the Refugee Relief Act of 1953. He requested political asylum and expressed his wish to stay in the United States for fear of persecution back home. The letter announced his defiance against Chiang’s government, at once removing his taint as a deserter by proclaiming himself an asylum seeker.103
On July 3 in Skokie, Illinois, U.S. naval authorities apprehended Wei and escorted him back to San Francisco, determined to return him to Taiwan immediately. But his request for asylum posed complications that the navy could not ignore. On July 7, while Wei remained in custody at the Twelfth Naval District, the State Department’s Director for Chinese Affairs, Walter P. McConaughy, convened a meeting with other state and navy officials to discuss possible actions toward his deportation. The meeting generated a sea of confusion about whether Wei should be deported through immigration or military channels, and concluded with no agreement. According to the state legal advisers, the navy was not “legally empowered” to remove him from the country, “no matter how politically desirable such action might be.” Joseph Chappell, the assistant director of the Visa Office, expressed the willingness of the INS to “look the other way” while the navy deported Wei. He admitted this had been done in past cases involving other attempted desertions by foreign trainees, but the state legal advisers could not verify this claim. They cited their own recollections that such cases “had been handled under regular deportation procedure.”104
This discussion revealed the fundamental newness of the problem Wei’s case presented. The uncertainty of whether Wei should be deported by the INS or the navy drove officials in endless circles. Hsuan Wei defied simple dichotomies—he was both a political problem and a military problem, yet there was no remedial means for handling both. The meeting ended with an agreement to consult more MDAP and INS officials.105 That same day, the Chinese naval attaché drew a more definitive conclusion about Wei’s case: “Hsuan’s motivation was believed to be selfish rather than political,” he stated, and “if he succeeded in his effort to abandon his post of duty and start an easier life in this country, other defections of Chinese military officers in similar circumstances could be anticipated, with serious prejudice to Chinese military discipline and to the Mutual Defense Assistance Program.”106
Concerns about the possible ripple effects of Wei’s “selfish” act were not misguided. In the following years, as Wei battled his way through lengthy court hearings and appeals to remain in the United States—in the process capturing the media spotlight and winning legions of supporters around Chicago where he continued to reside—the State Department confronted a handful more cases involving Chinese military deserters who filed for asylum and whose cases shared many other similarities.107
Wei’s subversion defied easy categorization; he was neither a “Communist agent” like Yi Sa Min nor a subject who espoused “leftist inclinations” like Misao Kuwaye or Calvin Kim. Quite the contrary, Wei was an avowed “anti-Communist” who wanted nothing more than to see the communists driven out of his homeland. Nonetheless, he threatened the government because his decision to go AWOL and remain in the United States occurred at the precise junction of two overlapping forces: the U.S. militarization of Asia that depended on his labor as a military and cultural asset, and the anticommunist purge that deemed his “foreign” presence in the United States a threat to national security. That he was caught between these imperatives was not a coincidence. Instead, it revealed the contradiction at the heart of the U.S. empire in an age of decolonization: that the impulse to militarize and liberate Asia from communism reproduced and magnified the very problem of subversion it sought to contain.
This contradiction is further embodied in the McCarran-Walter
