Born Under an Assumed Name

by Sara Mansfield Taber

  This is the scene I hold tight.

  One day, a Friday afternoon, my father insisted we drive hours through rugged mountains to Sun Moon Lake. “The moon will be full,” he said to my mother. We stayed in a small, clean, white lodge that seemed like a castle compared to our little government-issue house. Flowered beauty was everywhere. There was an outbuilding with two huge Chow dogs barking threateningly on chains—the chill of menace that was always lurking in the Gimo’s Taiwan—but they were secured behind a high metal fence.

  For a wondrous weekend we romped in light-lanced woods. I rode my father piggyback as he galloped through paths of ferns. Nothing in the world was more fun than this. My father was my comfort and I was his. It was as if we were the only people in each other’s lives.

  Jouncing along, I was sure it would be this way always: My father would always be happy and so would I. Life would always be clear like the sky of this day, and love would always be a gold, unknotted thread. All my life, I would live in Free China, playing with my father.

  At evening, we dined near the lake, and the moon was reflected like a gold medallion in the shimmering black-purple water. When noon came on Sunday, we loaded into the car and set off, spirits high, down through the green humps of mountains.

  Along the way, old cars were stopped along the road, steaming or with flames leaping out of them, and people hurrying down the road or scurrying around with buckets. About halfway down, on a steep incline, my mother smelled smoke. My father stopped the car and opened the hood, which released a large, black, billowing cloud just like those coming out of the Chinese vehicles. My mother pulled us out of the car, yelling and beating at us to come faster, and we ran down the road. My mother yelled back to my father, “Charlie! Get away from that car!” but my father had already grabbed a tin bucket from the trunk, jumped down the ravine, dipped some water from the stream passing below, and thrown it into the radiator, dousing the flames.

  It was at this moment that I knew one thing for certain: we were all safe, and my father was not only the handsomest and smartest but the bravest man in the world.

  4

  night soil

  When I was a child we had few photographs, but there was one of my father on a hike through Formosa’s mountains. In the black-and-white picture, my father, in a coolie hat, was walking across a rickety bridge of two bamboo poles suspended high over a gorge at the bottom of which was a boulder-strewn, churning river. He held a walking staff, as a balance.

  For any person living in a foreign land, even a young child, something pure and strong and astringent rises up: A wish to cross the invisible chasm between herself and the native inhabitants of the land in which she lives. A wish for proof that unities, commonalities, and love are greater than all the differences that can be seen and smelled and touched.

  There are two kinds of loneliness: personal and national. At age seven, I was struggling against both—and striving for a place to rest in both the emotional and geopolitical realms. I needed a sense of belonging in China to set against the people in the chicken village. I longed to find one person who could merge my need for belonging.

  In Taipei, I could claim to know only one Chinese person well: my amah, Mary. To me, with Chinese people here in Taipei it was too close-too far, too close-too far. Except with Mary. She was the only person holding a stick that might be laid across the chasm, for me, between America and China.

  Mary was one of a string of amahs, nannies, and housekeepers who were important in my life: women whose patient eyes and gentle, helpful hands I would still be able to sense on my skin—like small, whispering, wafting gifts—forty years later.

  Under her curly black hair, Mary had a sincere face, with solemn eyes that squeezed together and glinted with pleasure when I asked her to play with me. Her eyes were nothing like the fierce eyes on the Taipei streets. They were M&M eyes: quiet and melting with love.

  My amah’s devotion had no dark line holding in its colors. One late afternoon I was drawing on the couch and Andy was playing cars with Mary. When my mother came home from her day at the orphanage, she opened the door and stood inside the doorway for a moment. At that instant, Mary was crouched under the rug in the living room, forming a mountain for Andy to drive his cars over.

  “Andy!” my mother said with a shocked tone in her voice. “Stop that right now. Think about poor Mary!”

  When Mary emerged from under the rug, my mother said, “You mustn’t do that ever again, Mary. You’ll spoil him. You’ll turn him into a little prince.”

  I knew, though, that Andy was Mary’s prince, and that I was her princess. My mother didn’t know about the candies of every color that Mary kept in her housecoat pocket, or about the trips to the market when Mary carried Andy on her back, gripping my hand to shield me from the Chinese women who wanted to stroke my hair. She taught us how to ask for sticky sweet noodles or the delicious grilled corn that the sellers were delighted to push into the hands of foreign children. Mary loved to show us off to the market ladies, but she held us tight.

  Each day Mary appeared at our house with the same grey skirt and pressed white blouse, and wearing a gold cross around her neck. Once, my father had told me Mary’s story: about how she was the eldest in a family of girls, that the grandparents she lived with were old and frail, that she’d had to go to work at age ten to support her family. “The job we offer to Mary is a very good one for her, for her place in life,” my father said.

  With the light off, watching shadows drift across the ceiling of my bedroom, I wondered about my amah. What does “place in life” mean? The next day, I could not put out of my mind the picture of Mary, as a girl only two and a half years older than I was, mopping some American lady’s floor. It gave me a strong wish to totter across the rickety bridge into Mary’s life. I studied Mary’s face while she was neat-ening up the living room. Her cheeks were soft and her movements gentle, but it was as if she had seen many things that I had not and could see a future I could not imagine. The look she returned was awash with longing and sadness.

  Mary was the only Chinese person with whom I had a sense of closeness, but it was not equal. Even to my child self, the inequality of my and Mary’s relationship was worrying. And as an adult—when I’d come to know that the amah-employer relationship was age-old and existed all over Asia—I’d find it still more disturbing. Though the relationship between the amahs and us American children was mutually agreed-upon, it was a stretched-thin version of human relations, an odd seesaw economy. On the one hand, we children were more vital to our amahs than they were to us: they required our parents’ money for their livelihood—and were all the more vulnerable because we might be spirited away at any time. On the other hand, we American children were utterly dependent on our amahs for our daily needs and our very safety. It was a crude exchange—money for love—and yet, love miraculously survived the contortion. I know this for certain—I see it in photographs of Mary holding a small American girl. Perhaps this amah-child love is prime evidence that human commonality trumps human difference.

  I had Mary, but I still desired a Chinese twin, someone my age who loved to draw like I did, who felt uncomfortable speaking up in groups of people, who knew what I felt at the exact moment I did. This was a hunger so deep—deep and bottomless as the ramshackle well my father and I once discovered in a deer woods—that sometimes I thought it might never go away. If I had such a Chinese friend, no matter where I was, everything would always be okay.

  I made a resolve to keep a lookout. “I may be what other people call shy, but I am also a close watcher,” my thoughts went. “My eyes are my brave part. They are not afraid to look down the steep drop-off of a mountain, or to observe poor Chinese people soaping their bare bodies in tubs in the street. Listening and waiting and viewing: I am good at them.

  “My eyes—I will never close them,” I thought. And, despite the habit they had of drinking in unsettling and contradictory sights, I was rewarded with strange magnificences. At
the Grand Hotel I loved to watch a beautiful Chinese lady who wore a scarlet-and-gold robe over her bathing suit. On the way up Yangmingshan to the embassy dispensary, I always looked for a hut of branches at a certain place in the forest, where I often saw a girl my age weaving baskets.

  I did not ever want to close my eyes. Something beautiful and small, like the pearl I’d once found hidden in an ugly, horny shell on the beach at Tan-Sui, might be lost. And the lost thing might be a dragon pearl, a miniature lustrous orb that would hatch into a glorious winged beast. And it seemed to me that though they isolated me and sometimes made me feel like an outsider, what my eyes gave me might be all the wealth I had.

  I thought again of the gazes of other people. They were a grand part of the wealth my own eyes hauled in. On the streets I saw fearful eyes or sharp ones or the terrifyingly eager ones in the chicken village, and then there were Mei-Lin’s eyes, leaping with playfulness, and Mary’s, chock-full of love.

  Placing my hand in Mary’s allowed her to lead me into the lacquered world of China, and into the midst of my own part-Chineseness—and made it possible for me to find, by keeping an eye out, on the curb of a downtown street, the Chinese person that I had been most wanting.

  I was walking down the street called Chung Shan Pei Lu with Mary. She was searching for the right fish. The strong, pungent smells were familiar and comforting to me, but so strong that I would forever be taken back to those streets whenever I smelled fish.

  My teeth were all sugary from the watermelon-colored candies I was popping into my mouth—the candies my mother hated me to eat, because they might be dirty or poisonous or rot my teeth. I’d seen the Chinese market children unwrapping and eating them, and when I was with Mary I forgot everything and was sort of Chinese myself. At one stall, I spoke my best Mandarin and asked for a ball of chewing gum. The stall woman was so pleased that I’d asked in Chinese—she chortled, smiling and pointing at me to Mary—she gave me a whole sack-full.

  I waited for Mary outside a shrimp shop on the crowded, narrow street. As I chewed my candy, I watched. I was an island in the swirling waters of scores of people with black-gleaming hair. I felt conspicuous and alone. A part of me wanted to be invisible and ordinary, ordinary as that little girl jumping up and down in the band of children playing with plastic fish on strings. She was not thinking about anyone else—just shouting and laughing.

  Then it happened. The thing I had been yearning for—the thing I would possess forever. Across the narrow alley of men pushing bicycles, and hawkers, and people shoving by with market baskets, I saw a girl about my age sitting at the curb. Her skinny, scabby legs were tucked under her, making a vee, with her knees forming the point. Her hair was messy, but shiny black like the sea sparkling at night, and she was wearing a faded, ragged shift.

  Clutching a book along her thin forearm, she was drawing quickly with a pencil, her face bent close over the page. Then, at one random instant—caught from the flash of time—she looked up. Our eyes locked. Her face was clear and clean. Her eyes were gentle and dark brown, and seemed very, very true.

  As our eyes melded, we searched for something. And suddenly we found it. It was, simply, there: a friendliness. Chemicals tingling across the boundary between two human bodies. We understood each other without speaking. We looked different—brown eye to green—but inside her body she was exactly like me. It was like she was American and I was Chinese; we were both, both.

  An old Ford suddenly roared between us, scattering the passersby, and afterward the raggedy girl was gone. I would never see her again. But something had shifted. It was like the drawer in a Chinese puzzle box had suddenly clicked open. I felt something invisible but strong and sinewy connecting the Chinese girl and me. A small, refreshing wind blew through me.

  Bedtimes, all through my Taipei years, I heard the screech of the night soil man. His singsong cries and the squeaks of the wheels of his cart were my lullaby. My father had pointed him out, an old man with knobby knees making his rounds with his wooden buckets in another part of the city during the day, but I thought of him as a nightwalker, a mountain cat that snuck through the city after dark.

  My father had told me what night soil was, and I imagined his secretive, deep-night activities. With a bullock at his side, with his sloshing buckets swinging on a pole and jumbled in his creaking cart, he finished his rounds—he spent all day dipping his product out of people’s sumps and mixing it with water—and stopped at the outskirts of town.

  Then the night soil man worked his magic at the edge of the padi.

  He poured out his brimming buckets into the mud and the green spikes sparkling under the moon, and the dung—my own dung mixed with that of the Chinese girls and boys and mothers and fathers—began to glitter. In the blackness, the sparkle grew, the sparks rose higher and higher, until there was a low fireworks display of gold, purple, emerald, and magenta across the stretch of the padi.

  That is how the rice grows, I thought, deep in my bed at night. I, and the Chinese people, make the night soil that makes the rice that pads out my body. I felt a calmness like cool dawn inside me. As my mother said, “Chinese and American, we nourish the earth together.”

  Over the years, China had crept into my body without my awareness, pouring in through my eyes in the day, and through my pores as I slept at night. The lively, jabbering, black-haired people; the cluttered, stinking streets of the city; the expanses of padi; the velvet blackness of the mountains had nestled into my mind. The small, tidy house inside the wall, my plain-walled room with its window to the garden, the very concreteness of the wall itself were a familiarity, a deep but unconscious comfort to me. They were the soil, the home among all possible others, of my early childhood.

  At this point in my life, I could love both China and America. The expatriate life was really the only one I’d known. To be American and to be Chinese were one to me. Doubleness was not the problem it would be for me later, when logic and competing viewpoints and a need to choose kicked in. It was a nai’f’s view of the world, but an emotionally true one. At seven my staples were Chinese rice and American milk. I could both wear my patent leather shoes and look into the eyes of snakes.

  Or perhaps because it was a given that America was above Taiwan, this ordered my life: all was right with the world.

  My father once took me to the central plaza of Taipei where a road circles a gigantic, heroic statue of Chiang Kai-shek. My father was almost running as we set out from the house. As he piggybacked me to the pedicab stand, I could feel his excitement—the shiver inside his body and a bounce in the middle of his paces. As he trotted, he told me we were going to see the great American president, the leader of the Free World: President Eisenhower. After the pedicab man let us out at the roundabout, we were standing in a crush of what must have been thousands and thousands of Chinese people. My father, who couldn’t see beyond the throng, put me on his shoulders and told me to look for a man standing up in a convertible in a motorcade.

  Little did I know that I was waiting for the man who would warn my country, in the final days of his presidency, of the dire danger associated with the ever-increasing power of the “military-industrial complex.” Eisenhower foresaw— looming like a dark and all-too-probable specter—the troubling consequences of a focus on commercial and military might over human considerations.

  After a long line of low, dark cars passed and people pushed forward in a scary, suffocating pulse, my father asked me, “Did you see him, Sweetie?” All I’d seen, floating above the open-air car, was a bald head. The most powerful man in the world had a large, shiny head. It looked like a perfect, gleaming, white-marble globe set on a pedestal.

  All around the edges of our years in Taipei, as American friends and colleagues came to and departed from the city, there was a vague, unspoken possibility in the air curling in and out like an invisible dragon’s tail. Will Pop get new orders? Will we receive an assignment to leave Taiwan? Will we return to the States someday?

 
; Then, one night, as my mother was dishing out the fresh, steaming rice, my father told us we would soon be leaving Taipei. We would be returning “home”: to America. “We’ll take a ship! It’ll be fun, a great adventure!” my father said, his eyes ablaze with excitement. “You’ll love it!”

  My father acted about the move like he did when he was about to embark on a hiking trip: his step was springy and his eyes darted with excitement. My mother’s eyes, though, were downcast. Years later she would tell me she hadn’t wanted to leave Taiwan. She loved her work at the orphanage and at the polio clinic. She felt needed—she was making a real contribution. “But your father wanted to move on.” My brother told me that my father had told him the Taiwanese government had uncovered the fact that the United States was supporting dissident groups, arrested many of those the United States had supported, and had declared that the associated American officials were no longer welcome.

  Had my father been forced to leave or was it his choice? Could he say, like my mother, that he had been making a contribution? Was he, instead, disillusioned by his work? At that point had he faced down his fears about harming his Chinese colleagues and informants, or had the fears, perhaps, grown? Had he managed to fashion any bridges across the Chinese-American strait? Did he feel he had helped build freedom or democracy? Or, by moving, was he trying to escape his doubts about his own and his country’s efforts? Or—was the motivation behind the move primarily to escape his boss? Or did he just want to move on? Did he simply want to taste the whole world?

  After the news, the air I breathed was faster, full of rush and jitter. People talked to us of nothing else. At TAS, all the other children exclaimed how lucky I was: In “the States” I would get to eat all the Hershey’s bars I wanted. I would look and be exactly like everyone else. The excitement, the pulse of movement, the regular migrations I had absorbed into the fibers of my body over the six moves we had made since I was born, took over my being, billowing the sense of adventure and hushing the sense of loss. The soy-sauce-and-tofu familiarity of my Taiwanese home was flattened under the practical adventurer’s boot. The air was Magellan air.