and one in Taiwan––would start us down a new path after a grim, if instructive start in the Foreign Service.
3
Learning the Chinese
Dr. Ma’s First Lesson
“You should know something important about Chinese feelings as you start your study of our language. Americans may think we are yellow, but we think you are purple.” Dr. Ma was sitting in his office under the fluorescent lights at a drab steel table that was standard Government Issue for classrooms. He wore a shawl, a scholar’s wool cap, and calligrapher’s gloves (with the fingers free) to protect against the fierce air-conditioning blast in Arlington Towers. An elderly, exiled editor of a major Catholic newspaper in Peking before the revolution, Ma was a fund of lore on Chinese attitudes, beliefs, and history. He had suffered when the Communists took over in 1949, was in poor health, and died a few months later.
Ma’s jolting description of the wide gap in perceptions that Americans and Chinese have of each other, of course, applies more widely than to mere appearance, but the sense of how strange Chinese think we look was a good place to start a long journey of learning. Later, when traveling in Taiwan and provincial Mainland cities where huge crowds would gather in the streets to ogle my family and me, I already understood that they saw us as odd zoo animals from another world.
Infant Formulas
World War II had transformed Asian language teaching. The urgent need for speakers and readers of Japanese and Chinese gave rise to a two-track system patterned after the way children learn to speak from their mothers and to read from their schoolteachers. Return to infancy was another rude shock for a twenty-five-year old.
Back in the garage at Arlington Towers at the beginning of 1962, we spent the first three weeks of our course mindlessly hearing and mimicking noises. Our mother was a language lab tape recorder. For six hours a day we drilled in class the four hundred distinct sounds that Mandarin Chinese uses to differentiate meaning. (English has twelve hundred such sounds). It was important to get the tones right. These are really directions of sound, rather than notes. The syllable ma pronounced with a high steady tone means “mother,” with a falling tone means “scold,” with a low dipping tone means “horse,” with no tone at all denotes a question mark, and so on. More dangerously, bi means “pen” with the low dipping tone and a rude word for “vagina” when pronounced high and steady.
The weeks of mime gave way to months of drill on meaning, patterns of grammar, and increasingly complex dialogues that dealt with social interaction, survival in daily situations, and later, history and economics. Seven weeks into the course we started the second track, learning to write Chinese characters, constructing them in the proper stroke order and making them look right. We were responsible for “active” knowledge of about eight hundred characters, which meant we had to know how to replicate the calligraphy precisely. The thousands of characters and combinations we studied later we learned passively, which meant we could recognize them in a text and know what they meant. Our goal was to read the media with speed and competence, rather than draft correspondence.
The pace was a language marathon—six hours of class and three to four hours of homework each weekday for eleven months. My three classmates––Roger Sullivan (later deputy assistant secretary of state for East Asian affairs), Stan Brooks (later consul general in Shanghai), and Tim Manley (who served at our Embassy in Taipei)––were talented, hard working, and humorous. We became fast friends. (The process has been known to create lifelong enemies, too.) Happily, we moved along at more or less the same pace.
Our teachers were skilled and versatile. Mr. Li Tsung Mi was an erudite linguist who knew the origins of the words and ideograms and how they related to one another. Miss Ouyang Chao was an inventive discussant, who forced us to build our halting child vocabularies into real conversations. When we could say and comprehend more, Dr. Ma added substance to our education.
Dr. Ma performed another valuable service. He gave me a real Chinese name. Normally, when naming purple foreigners, the Chinese choose characters that are phonetically as close to the sound of your surname as they can find. They sound all right but don’t mean anything, and identify you clearly as a barbarian outsider. Under that formula, my name would combine three characters with the sounds pu, la, and te. Dr. Ma wanted all of us to have names that sounded roughly right but meant something to Chinese. Pu was a regular surname with only two easy-to-write strokes. To that he added li, to force or propel, and de virtue. So I have gone through life as “Self-Propelled Virtue Pu.” Chinese have always liked the name and invariably ask me how I came by it.
Singing for Kennedy
Vivid glimpses of Washington’s glitterati enlivened the plain daily grind of language learning. The advent of the Kennedy administration brought columnist Joe Alsop to the height of his influence. A World War II veteran of a Japanese internment camp in Hong Kong and service in Chungking with Flying Tiger General Chennault, Joe had strong opinions about China. He also believed he had influenced my decision to study the language and kept in close touch when we returned to the capital.
One summer morning, he telephoned to say that he was organizing a dinner for “the Young Man.” Would we join him, bring the guitar, and provide the entertainment? Sheila took the call sitting on the staircase with Windsor-born two-year-old Oliver behind her, a bottle of shampoo in his hand, poised over her head. As she struggled to guess which “young man” Joe had in mind, Oliver began to pour. Quelling him, she realized Alsop was talking about the President of the United States. The idea of singing for John F. Kennedy terrified us both (by now duets with Sheila were our best numbers), but we accepted immediately.
Georgetown was bathed in a lovely summer evening light as we approached Alsop’s house on Dumbarton Avenue, guitar case in hand, shadowed along the street by discreet well-dressed men with hearing aids. They closed in as we moved to enter the house and thoroughly inspected the guitar in the decorous Secret Service manner. Once inside, we found Joe’s closest friends, people like the British ambassador, Phil and Katharine Graham of the Washington Post, the Chip Bohlens, all straining to create a natural atmosphere for the “Young Man,” who was relaxed and cordial. Jacqueline Kennedy was in Newport, so the gorgeous Mary Meyer (later tragically murdered while jogging on the Georgetown Canal) kept the president company on this occasion. As normal for Washington parties, the talk covered all the issues of the day, particularly Medicare, which had that day failed to pass in Congress. At Joe’s after dinner roundtable, the president voiced his disappointment in no uncertain terms. Phil Graham kindly asked me if I had anything I wanted to say, in which case he would arrange for me to get a word in edgewise. I demurred, having no view on the topic.
Later in the garden, Sheila and I sang “St. James Infirmary,” “I’ll Fly Away,” and “John Henry.” The president listened politely. Attorney General Robert Kennedy, arriving late from a trip to Michigan, chinned himself in a nearby tree.
Taiwan at Last
The prospect of living and communicating in a real Chinese place had buoyed us through the long months of drudgery in Arlington Towers. We were itching for the final phase of our formal training, a year at the FSI Field School in Taiwan. Our teachers thought we were ready, too. After eleven months training in Washington, my classmates and I qualified at level 2 (out of 5). This meant that we could operate safely in a Chinese environment, but were not yet able to work professionally (level 3). We infants had become teenagers.
Sheila was eager, too, having studied the spoken language at her expense with FSI teachers in the evenings during our months in Washington.
