Born Under an Assumed Name

by Sara Mansfield Taber

  But then came the steamy night—a night like one hundred others—when the whispers that had been encircling me became loud enough to hear, when they staked out a claim in the material world.

  Soon after the deep-night phone call and my father’s urgent whisper, from my dark bed, I heard an odd and disturbing sound. I heard my father quietly open the front door. I heard low voices in the study: my father’s Chinese and a Chinese man’s Chinese. I tiptoed into the hall and saw a man with a worried face being given a cup of tea by my mother. She and my father wore their Japanese yukatas. I could tell by the way my mother was standing with her arms wrapped tightly around each other that she was afraid.

  Then, suddenly, my mother turned and saw me. She rushed toward me and hissed, “Come here, Sara. I’m putting you in Andy’s room tonight.”

  “But Mom!” I said.

  “You do as I say,” she said, her hands shaking, pushing me out of the hall. She hurriedly made me a pallet of rush mats, blankets, and sheets on Andy’s floor and made me lie down.

  “Now go to sleep. Don’t say a word.” And she rushed out of the room. Then she did something she had never done before: I heard her lock the door.

  Feeling my mother’s haste and terror in my own body, I couldn’t close my eyes. On my pallet, I listened to my parents and the Chinese man speaking in the hush. There were long yammers and then whispers, and then slower yammers in a string. I heard my mother hurriedly tiptoeing around and closing doors. Then the Chinese became lower and lower, like an eel lashing in the sea.

  In the early morning I heard rustling again, but by the time I got up—though I could see my bed had been slept in and roiled by someone other than me—the Chinese man was gone.

  At breakfast, my father’s face was drawn. He looked like he might cry. My mother was only drinking coffee for breakfast; she usually had toast and a boiled egg. Her face looked tired, but she was pulsing like a pot of milk about to boil over. Her eyes were shooting streaks of fury.

  Finally, she had to overflow, even though Andy and I were there.

  She hissed to my father through clenched teeth, as though she was continuing a conversation already begun, “’That poor man,’ I agree, but why didn’t they send him to the Townsends? They have grown children. I can’t believe they’d send him to us—putting our young children at risk . . . ” Her voice was like shrieks of lightning, and also like stones scraping down a hill.

  My father’s eyes went narrow, but then he reached out his hand. “Okay,” he said. Then he pulled my mother’s pushing-away body into a hug and said, “It’s all right, Lois. We had to help. He could end up like Lee or the others, Lois.”

  My father looked sick. “What else could I do? . . . What good do we do these well-meaning people, our friends?”

  “But isn’t it his choice?”

  My father’s lip trembled, as if he might burst into tears. “Yes, but Chu doesn’t know what choice he is making. As Lee didn’t. We’re giving them a false choice because we’re giving them false hope. These people think they can rely on us.”

  Lee was someone something had happened to back when we lived in Japan, when I was born. I saw now, for the first time, the look of utter sadness that I would see shadow my father’s face, out of the blue, at Lee’s name, for the rest of my life.

  So the man had been Mr. Chu, my father’s friend?

  My mother nodded now and sank into his hug at last, but her eyes had turned into black pools.

  My father patted her again on his way out, and said, “I’ll call you later, when I hear any news.”

  After my father left, my mother quickly turned around. Her face was all angled up with tension. She looked us so fiercely in the eyes that I felt fear like a ghost steal into my body. “Sara and Andy,” she said, “I want you to listen to me. If anyone with a Chinese voice calls and asks for a Mr. Someone with a Chinese name, you say to him, ‘There is no one here by that name,’ okay? Do you understand?”

  We stared at her and nodded.

  My mother then sat down at the table, heaved a big sigh, and sipped her coffee, like everything might be all right. But now, eating my rice cereal, I had in my mind a fixed picture: a Chinese man, quaking inside our house, his face, in the low lamp light, damp with sweat. Into my belly dropped little nameless jumping beans of fear.

  My father told me thirty years later of the unease still in his gut from the events of that night in Taipei. The man who’d come to our house that night was an important anti-Chiang newspaper editor, a member of the “Third Force,” a political group situated between the Communists and the Nationalists, being pursued by the jealous Gimo’s ruthless police. The police could have broken down our door, dragged him out of the house, and tortured him to death. The editor escaped being captured that time around. “But by supporting him,” my father said, his eyes soft, his brows bent with concern, “did we do that man any favors? It may be that all we did was put him in great jeopardy.”

  In my father’s effects, after his death, I came upon a packet containing a ream of documents about the trial of a Chinese editor who had doubted Chiang’s ability to overcome the Communists and suggested that Taiwan work out some sort of compromise with the Mainland. He’d been sentenced to seven years in jail for his outspokenness. I wondered whether my father or others in the CIA had suggested or even written his copy. I also wondered why my father had reserved these documents from the many he could have kept. It implied a significant attachment.

  For the anti-Chiang people in the underground press and the other Nationalist Chinese operatives, my father himself brought me to understand, we Americans were lifelines, life buoys. We were also like matches to their grenades. And, at worst, we were children tossing them time-release suicide bombs. To Washington, what was the loss of one man in a fight for the good? As Graham Greene put it in The Quiet American, “How many dead colonels justify a child’s or a trishaw driver’s death when you are building a national democratic front?”

  The night of the Chinese man’s visit was the first whisk of the tail of the secret tiger of my father’s work, the first hint to me of the secret plots in which he engaged— and of his doubts about some of these actions. The tail grazed my cheek, and the animal passed into the night—but the sensation of flicking fur remained.

  In addition to secret and dangerous acts, there were other murmurs in the ear: dark hints about my father’s relationships with his boss and his department.

  An evening soon after the secret visitor, when my father got home from work, there was a fretful feeling in the house. My father had come into the house in a hurry and immediately gone into the bedroom with my mother.

  I overheard my mother saying, “Charlie, why on earth did you have to tell him your doubts? You shouldn’t be so trusting. He’s a climber and a brown-noser. He’ll do anything to get ahead. He’s an ideologue; you know that. He’ll always think he’s right, and he’ll always come out on top. If you’re right, he’ll sacrifice you.”

  At dinner, my mother’s face was closed, her eyes looked watery, and she kept rushing to her room. While my father acted as though nothing had happened, my mother seemed scared; her eyes either looked out into the distance, or down toward the ground.

  A day or two later, my mother got suitcases out and began packing them. My father went into the room and closed the door. I could hear his soothing voice through the wood of the door. Only then did my mother unpack her slips and blouses.

  I would learn, years later, that my father’s Taipei boss punished those who differed with his aggressive anti-Communist schemes. My father didn’t know it, but at a particular instant, on one of these days, in this stretch of time, a black dot was stamped on his file, an ink mark that would blot the white cloth of his career and spread into an indelible stain of frustration. Another way to see it: an invisible thorn was planted in his body—a thorn that burrows deeper and deeper until it stabs the heart.

  My father was thirty-four. He did not know that, in an instant,
the course of his life was laid out. The knots were cinched. And he was from America, the place where a man makes his own destiny.

  Decades later, I asked my father why he picked the career he did.

  I had read National Security Council Directive 10/2, issued in June 1948, which defined covert operations as actions conducted by the United States against foreign states “which are so planned and executed that any U.S. Government responsibility for them is not evident to unauthorized persons and that if uncovered the U.S. Government can plausibly disclaim any responsibility for them. . . .”

  The document further explained that the CIA was authorized to carry out clandestine activities, including “propaganda, economic warfare; preventive direct action, including sabotage, anti-sabotage, demolition and evacuation measures; subversion against hostile states, including assistance to underground resistance ovements, guerrillas and refugee liberations [sic] groups, and support of indigenous anti-Communist elements in threatened countries of the free world.”

  “It was the patriotic thing to do,” my father said, in answer to my puzzlement about how a caring man of conscience would choose a job in covert operations. “We’d just come out of World War II. The most important contribution a person could make at that time, it seemed to us, was to stop mad men like Hitler. Government was the place to be back in the fifties.” In fact, the CIA, and its predecessor, the OSS, was, at that point, an elite club engaged in a fight against fascism and communism. A stronghold of those with social power and wealth, it drew disproportionately from the Ivy Leagues. In 1943, for example, at least forty-two members of the Yale graduating class went into intelligence work.

  “In addition,” my father went on, “it was a good job, even a fascinating job, with security and excellent benefits. Your mother and I had been through the Great Depression, you must remember.”

  Both of my parents had grown to adulthood on the watery oatmeal of the Depression. During the thirties, my father’s ten-plus extended family had had to live in a boiler room because they had nowhere else to sleep. While my mother’s family of eleven grew their own food and always had shelter and enough to eat, they lived hand-to-mouth. My grandmother served meals to desperate homeless men who wandered onto their Indiana farm at dusk.

  My father, an artistic Washington University political science graduate with a thick brush of dark hair and warm, hazelnut eyes behind horn-rimmed glasses, grew up in St. Louis, the son of two Missourians. As I remember them from infrequent visits, his father was a now doting-now irascible man, and his mother as sweet as her German chocolate cake. I have since heard, though, that they could be tough on his younger siblings, and the household was not a serene one.

  When my parents met, my mother, sharp as an egret, with eyes of greyed moss, was a newly minted physical therapist sporting a perky, blond ponytail. She was the ninth child of a gentle Indiana forester father and a mother who, overwhelmed by her enormous brood, sewed her children’s underwear from flour sacks. I can imagine that government service (wives were considered part and parcel of a man’s available resources when he took an assignment) seemed a perfect arena for my mother to employ her rigorous, patriotic, eager-to-sacrifice, Midwestern bravery, her compassion for the poor and the disabled, and her can-do optimism, and for my father to apply his talent for languages and his innocent intellect, shiny as a fresh quarter. Leaving behind their stressed families, my parents were game for adventure, and had much to gain, and nothing—they thought—to lose. The new job looked like hope, a secure future, and glamour to boot.

  “We didn’t really think about it,” my father said when I asked about whether he and my mother had thought about what covert work would mean. “We were young and just glad to have a good job.” They had been recently married, at twenty-four and twenty-six—by a justice of the peace in St. Louis—and had traveled to Washington, D.C., on their honeymoon. My father had been accepted to a political science graduate program in Syracuse, and my mother was set to put her physical therapy degree to use. For a lark, during their honeymoon, my father put in an application at the government, and lo and behold, he was offered a job with the U.S. Information Agency. When soon thereafter he was offered another job with the new intelligence service it seemed like icing on the cake.

  Nevertheless, it strikes me as strange that my parents didn’t consider, as they signed on the dotted line, what they would be doing, what secrets could mean, how secrets could multiply and corrode—or about how work that requires shading and two-sidedness, and unquestioning adherence to a policy dictated from on-high, could gnaw at a man’s heart.

  Furthermore, my father joined an agency where abandonment was in the contract: We owe you nothing. We will not be there for you, and furthermore, you are muzzled. Is any idea pure enough for this?

  From their stories, I know my parents arrived at their first post in Asia eager and optimistic. It was as if they were walking under a magnificent, towering torii gate into a glorious Japanese garden.

  All through my days, I watched my parents, like a monkey in a tree overlooking a hut. In Taipei, it was like our whole family was on a stage in front of the Chinese. My mother’s roles were American embassy hostess—gracious server of tea and cookies to Chinese ladies and other embassy wives, and health worker—saver of Chinese orphans and polio victims. My father’s role was to save the world from Communism. To me, as a child, both of these roles seemed straightforward.

  But as a twenty-year-old visiting my father in Vietnam when the sham of American pretense was in clear sight, I would look back and see that my father’s role was not as simple as my mother’s. Each day, he received his orders from Washington ready to do his duty. But then he also sat alone at his desk and thought through the implications of what he was being asked to do. When he had joined the Agency he’d been eager to fight fascism. But, as it turned out, fighting fascism wasn’t clear-cut: when did covert operations against fascists become fascist themselves? He couldn’t quite be the “good soldier.” He was tender and sweet—my mother always said “too sweet for this world.” My mother could squat down in the orphanage pigsty and feed the pigs, and know she was doing good. My father, on the other hand, was tangled in the meddlesome strings of the American puppet master. It was a sticky web that placed everyone in jeopardy—the Chinese the Americans supported and those Americans themselves.

  There were those bedroom-door murmurs of the troubling nature of my father’s employment. Also swirling around were other hushed truths: wisps of my father’s vulnerability, of the fervid emotions that dwelt deep in the calm brown pools behind his eyeglasses. Unlike some of the other hints, these stole down to my bones even as a young girl, because they sprang from ardor, running clear and crisp as a mountain stream: my own and my father’s. They forecast the way the story would play out.

  We were at the Grand Hotel on a Taipei afternoon when the sky was bright as sapphires. Swimming in the shining turquoise pool at the mountain’s knee, I was happily climbing all over my father, as I always did, when I heard my mother shrieking from the poolside. Suddenly, the Chinese lifeguard came roaring across the pool, reached for me, and, to my shock and hurt, tossed me out of the way. He then put his arm around my father, who was gasping for air and gulping in water.

  When we were back at the poolside table, dripping, wrapped in our mono-grammed Grand Hotel towels, I asked my father, “What was wrong, Pop?”

  “You were pushing my head under for long periods and I couldn’t touch the bottom there, Sara.”

  A shudder passed through my body. I hadn’t known. I hadn’t known I needed to know. I’d thought my father could touch the bottom of any sea.

  I held my arms stiff at my sides while we rode home in the car. I couldn’t forget the look of my father gasping for air.

  I would always think of my father as strong, but forever now, I would know a delicacy, a fragility, in my father that caused me to tremble inside. This was a sense that would ripple into a deep-lodged fear for my father’s safety, f
or the safety of men. A strange sense that—sensitive beings that we both were—it would be up to me to save my father. I dashed it away, but it sank and stayed—lurking like a terrifying giant squid, like a warning—in my deepest waters.

  My father pulled our navy blue, round-fendered Rambler up beside a high, dirty concrete wall topped with barbed wire and broken glass that extended as far as I could see on the left side of the car. The wire and glass looked almost like a tangle of Christmas tree ornaments. My father told us to wait in the car. He was going into the building to see if he could identify the man who stole our radio and binoculars a few nights ago. My mother gave him an encouraging pat on the shoulder as he climbed out. He entered a door in the long concrete wall. My mother told us the grey-block building was a prison. While we waited, Andy and I tickled each other. We were having fun, but Andy started crying and told my mother, “Sara hurt me.”

  My mother waved her hand back over the seat. “Hush. Behave yourselves.”

  My father’s face, when he emerged, was as grey as the wall and his eyes were narrowed and sad, like he’d seen a snake or a ghost. He said to my mother, “I wish I hadn’t done it.” He then whispered to her several more sentences. I heard the words “shackles” and “beaten.”

  My mother shook her head and touched his neck. “You had to do it. There has to be a line. There’s no excuse for stealing.”

  At the wheel of the car, though, my father rubbed his eyes. I had just seen how the strains of his work were starting to play in him. Month by month, year by year, his lights would become a little dimmer.

  In the darkness of night, and now in the bright of day, I sensed the pain playing through my father’s lean body. Over the next twenty years, his life would become one of inner torment and outer slippery slopes—until he seemed to be suffocating with the effort of keeping quiet.

  These painful moments in Taipei were a whiff of the troubling nature of my father’s special work: of the inordinate exposure and extraordinary hiddenness that were by-products of signing the loyalty oath, the mix of internal conflict and external threat that were part and parcel of my father’s chosen profession. They were also the first intimations of my father’s sensitivity and vulnerability: a sense that would grow in me through time into a strong, fumbling, inarticulate urge to protect him.