had never been to Asia. The long flight to Taiwan via Hawaii and Japan with two small sons, Adam and Oliver, was a major passage for our family. We fought jet lag and culture shock in Tokyo, our sense of strangeness compounded by staying at the Imperial Hotel designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. This massive pile of scratchy yellow masonry, earthquake-proof by virtue of its thickness, made its inhabitants feel like ants in a hill. After two days of peering sleepily through misty pollution at the famous sights of Japan’s capital, we took off for Taiwan. Arriving at the airport in Taipei, we found instant comfort because we could actually communicate. The long hours of training began to pay off.
In 1963, the Republic of China on Taiwan, like the People’s Republic of China across the Straits, was a single-party police state under an authoritarian ruler. But in contrast to the economic stagnation and starvation on the Mainland, rapid growth in agriculture under a land reform program designed by American and Chinese economists and enforced by the strict government was beginning to spur the entire economy. Nationalist Mainlanders under Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and his wife, the fearsome, accomplished Wellesley graduate Soong Mei-ling, dominated politics, the army, and the police. Native Taiwanese, who had received higher education as doctors and agriculturalists under Japanese rule (1895–1945), were taking charge of the economy and the underground political opposition.
The FSI Field School was located in the city of Taichung, nearly ninety miles down the coast, happily removed from the distractions of embassy life, the demands of the ambassador, and the grim, drizzly weather of the capital.
Today Taiwan’s largest city, with a population of several million and a bustling port on the Taiwan straits, Taichung was then a much smaller, slower place, where 600,000 people dwelled. The city limits ended long before one reached the sea. Electricity was limited and nights were dark. Motorbikes and cars had yet to replace bullock carts and pedicabs, though the process had begun. Water buffaloes plowed the green rice paddies under sunny skies, framed by wrinkled, blue mountains in the background. We rented a Japanese-style house in a walled compound at the end of a dirt road, a short bike ride from the school, and settled in happily.
“It is a shock to find oneself a curio,” I wrote my parents. “Yesterday I was downtown engrossed in bargaining for a balloon for the boys. Nearing the end of this exhilarating process, I looked up and found myself surrounded by a crowd of at least fifty people. Sheila, on the other hand isn’t just a curio, she’s a phenomenon!
Walking in the park the other day, clad in her rather full blue overcoat (the one that makes her look like a six-foot tea cozy), the Chinese crowded around exclaiming “Tai da” (“too big”). The reaction, far from being mirthful, was one of awe and amazement. It was Queen Liliakulani walking in their midst.” (She was also carrying our third son.)1
Sheila wrote:
The boys are really thriving, and they’ve made a clutch of Chinese friends in the neighborhood. Yesterday Adam sailed forth bright and early, dressed in blue overalls, a red shirt, cowboy hat jammed down over his nose, red bandanna around his neck, and a flashy Hong Kong cap pistol and holster low on the hips. He was met by a horde of admirers outside the gate, and they escorted him to their stomping ground under a bush, where they placed him on a bamboo stool, seated themselves on stones in a circle around him and proceeded to admire him. Adam thought this was great, especially when they gave him some caps for his pistol, and he had a fine noisy time for the rest of the morning. . . . Adam and Oliver are known as “Big Tiger ” and “Tiger Number Two.”2
Every school-day morning, pressed handkerchiefs pinned to their clean shirts, the boys were carted off to a missionary kindergarten in a yellow pedicab bus filled with neighborhood Chinese.
Back to School
At the start of the 1963 school year in February, some twenty students and their families from the State Department and the U.S. military made up the population of FSI Taichung. Last year ’s class, soon to graduate, welcomed us new kids (the Platts, Brookses, Sullivans, and Tim Manley). The “old boys” included Morton Abramowitz, Harry Thayer, and Don Anderson, who would later make big names in Asia and Washington. In a few months, they and their families would proceed to assignments in Hong Kong, Taipei, Singapore, and Malaysia.
The school was a two-story building, honeycombed with small classrooms, all of which had windows. The teachers were all Mainlanders with pure Beijing accents, led by a soft-spoken American linguist named Gerardus (Gerry) Kok, whose academic bloodline included Monterey and Yale.
The infants had grown up. The routine of six hours of class and four hours of homework remained the same, but instruction was now one-on-one, beyond intense. Live materials, newspapers, radio broadcasts, oral discussion, and debate replaced the pablum of elementary texts. Still shy, and fenced off as foreigners, we did our best to practice in the street and on the trips we took with teachers at the end of each term. These travels broadened our experience with Chinese, enriched our vocabulary, and placed us in some ridiculous situations.
Sheila’s letter home that April describes one inadvertent sojourn in a hot-spring brothel. There were seven of us, including Roger and Margie Sullivan and three Chinese tutors from the school. We had been driving for days over the mountains of northern Taiwan in a Chevrolet Apache van. Exhausted and hungry, we arrived in the town of Beitou just after dark.
Our travels that day brought us down out of the mountain to a hot-spring resort north of Taipei, where we discovered that all hotels are dual-purpose affairs, partly for travelers, but mostly for good time Charlies. Each had a staff of young ladies to assist the Charlies in having a good time. The gents picked an establishment called the “New Life Hotel,” and we were helped to our rooms by clouds of young ladies, one called “Goldie” in Chinese. The tutors thought the whole thing fairly amusing but not too far out of the ordinary. But we thought it a scream, especially when Goldie wanted to help N. & me take a bath. We managed to get rid of her, and had a lovely time wallowing around the hot spring water, from which we emerged much refreshed, but smelling strongly of sulfur. As we were going to bed, the door was practically broken down by young “misses” as they are called, who wanted, to use the local euphemism, to “rest a bit” with Nicky, who said no thank you. We were the only Americans in this establishment, so maybe we got special attention. Anyway, the giggles, door slamming, and other activities during the night were formidable, but we rather enjoyed, in a surrealistic way, the idea of sleeping in a brothel!
Our Chinese really benefited in the process. We are on really cozy terms with those particular tutors now––our first Chinese pals. They are humorous, jolly people and real artists at enjoying themselves. During the trip, each new bit of scenery, dish of food, or whatever, was greeted with sighs and cries of delight, Chinese style, and we have become quite good at being delighted ourselves.³
Studying the Chinese
Like Dr. Ma in Washington, our teachers in Taiwan yielded a wealth of lore on how Chinese think. One morning, I was studying the word duifu, an all-purpose term that means to “deal with,” ”cope,” or “handle.” The teacher asked me how I would “deal with” a Chinese visa applicant who had no chance of getting into the United States. I answered that I would inform him right way, saving him time and effort. The teacher shook his head. The Chinese approach to duifu was completely different. It would involve inviting the applicant to fill out forms and return every few weeks. Each time he returned you would invent a new excuse; the case had to be referred to Washington; word had not yet been received from the State Department, and so on. After several visits, the applicant would realize on his own that he would never get a visa. He would, however, be grateful that you had not “poured cold water on his head.”
“In
