Hungry for any instruction on life, I turned to the poets. When I discovered William Wordsworth my heart quickened to his delight in the smallest sprigs:
My heart leaps up when I behold
A Rainbow in the sky;
So it was when my life began;
So it is now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die!
And my father suggested I study Emerson. His writings offered me clear and righting instruction on how to stand alone and cleave to your own truths:
Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself and you shall have the suffrage of the world.
My life is for itself and not for a spectacle. I much prefer that it should be of a lower strain, so it be genuine and equal, than that it should be glittering and unsteady.
It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.
I thrilled to his bracing, familiarly American advice. When I read these words, I felt grand and noble, not low like the girls at school gossiping about who was making love to whom, and who had drugs hidden in his locker.
These pursuits took the edge off, but the darkness and frustration were always washing just under my ephemeral skin, seeking a sluice.
Relief comes at odd times, in unexpected forms.
My bookbag weighed a ton as I trudged home from Wisconsin Avenue after a day of weaving around the India Girls. By the time I’d walked down Bradley, turned left on East, turned right on Stanford, and turned left on Maple, I felt like the jumble of books in my bag—like I was going every which way.
My mother was sitting on the couch when I got home—not fixing dinner; or telephoning Joe Rock, her physical therapist colleague, in the kitchen; or neatening up the living room; or writing up case notes at the dining room table. She was sitting and reading a mystery novel, like she used to do in Holland.
I fixed myself a glass of milk and a plate of Oreos and flopped down at the other end of the navy blue corduroy sofa. I felt like a blob with bone-weary arms and legs. As the chocolaty sugar and milk flowed into me I began to feel a little better.
“How was school?” my mother said.
“Okay,” I said. “Not great. Some of the girls are . . . Kids in the States don’t care.”
“Some of the girls are pretty cool, aren’t they?” my mother said. She meant they were self-involved and distant, not that they were attractive and hip.
There was a note of sympathy in her voice. Her body was relaxed too, in her shirtwaist dress. She wasn’t rushing to get something done. She wasn’t worrying; she was considering.
“Like that Hedley or that Alex,” she said, as though she, instead of me, had been standing in the hall by the lockers and the recipient of Hedley’s snub that afternoon.
“Maybe the best thing is to stay aloof, Sara.”
Aloof. That was a word I hadn’t thought of. Sometimes my mother had words like that, words other people didn’t use but were just right. She called my mood these days “the mulligrubs,” for instance, and it made sadness seem like a grumpy, quite overcome-able gnome sitting on a stump, instead of an impenetrable darkness.
I looked at the painting of a Taiwanese street over the mantel—it was all messy brush strokes of bright color and black accents that somehow caught the movement and stench of a Chinese street—and surveyed the artifacts of other places we’d lived. The old, hand-painted bellows and long-handled bed warmer, for hot coals, from Holland, and the rough-beautiful old stoneware plate from my babyhood in Japan. And I looked at Mom’s blond-oak head bent toward her book, and I felt assembled again.
In my pink bedroom that night, darkness fogging down around me, I slipped into sleep thinking of Mom’s word. Aloof, it was like a treasure, an answer.
The next day, I carried my word to school with me in my bookbag, and my bag felt lighter on my shoulder than it had in a long time. During the day, I fished out the word; I practiced being aloof. It worked. Hedley was laughing with Alex and Francie. I walked past her like she didn’t exist, like I didn’t care, like I hadn’t seen her. It was a revengeful sort of sweetness to return her favor, to pretend she wasn’t in the hallway like she did toward me, but oddly fortifying. A talisman. I’d crossed a rude bridge to greater freedom.
This credo of aloof was a new iteration of the Rawhide and marine guard version of me I’d decided to become back in the fourth grade at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Here at Sidwell, I felt like an unknown soldier. I marched onward, trying to be as aloof and impervious and spit and polished as an American serviceman. It felt normal, I knew how to do it, but my back and shoulders were not relaxed; they were ramrods.
I will need no one, I declared, but of course I couldn’t help but crave my fellows. Right now my solution was to be iron, even though my father said, “Stay open. Keep a lookout for the nice people who are often hidden.”
My mother gave me a silver word. My father gave me, a night after I’d had another lonely day and things were quiet in the house, one of those sentences that are driftwood planks onto which you can climb out of the sea.
From his green reading chair, he said, “Girl-child . . . Sam, rather . . . ” He grinned. “You know, I’ve noticed that you aren’t happy unless you’re creating. Why don’t you think about that. Maybe you should try poetry.”
I took to writing down my thoughts in a small black notebook. I fell in love with certain words and made lists of them: hickory, apple, turf, sod, fecund, hock. Hard words with dirt in them, words you could chew on. I stringed them together: oak-fair hair. As I wrote my first tottering poem, I felt holy. Real.
While a part of me was on the SS United States carrying me back to Holland to escape this America I didn’t understand, the other part was a quick study. After a while, as I babysat furiously—babies crying, toddlers whining, older children refusing to go to bed unless I read them six Dr. Seuss books—my garb from The Hague began to seem all wrong, like it belonged to a much younger girl far, far away. There was something I couldn’t fight going on. It is an almost impossible task, even for adults, to maintain two loyalties, and something in a young person craves loyalty. After a time, the here and now is irrefutable. You can’t feed off “then” for too long.
One day, I folded up my polite Dutch embassy princess self and packed it away in a trunk in storage. With my deep sense of diplomatic obligation to blend into the culture where I was set down, I breathed a huge sigh, hoisted the heavily loaded pack of this 1968 Washington, D.C., private-school America and humped it onto my back. I jettisoned my old self. I let go of the bowsprit.
Mornings, I dressed myself in a new uniform: my Dutch desert boots like Pop’s, Dutch knee socks, a fox-brown, hip-hugger corduroy miniskirt rugged like the woods, and a light blue chambray work shirt. These clothes felt right; they seemed to unite my old selves and my new Sidwell one. In them I could blend into America.
I now wore my long hair parted in the middle, hanging down on the sides of my face like a half-closed curtain; only the middle two inches of my face were visible. I worked to dissemble, to assume an alias, to be as American-cool as other kids, but an honest face afflicted me. I was so excruciatingly self-conscious I could hardly walk. I took things too deeply to heart. To be cool you have to be flit-hearted as well as hair-tossing confident.
I was a mass of conflict and the world around me was too. In early December, Nixon appointed Henry Kissinger as his national security advisor. Kissinger was the ultimate ardent hawk. As I would learn twenty years later in retrospective tomes on Vietnam, this appointment of Kissinger was an unprecedented power grab by the executive branch. Nixon and Kissinger both disdained the expertise of the State Department and CIA officers, calling them effete Ivy League liberals too cowardly to support America’s rightful dominant role on the world stage. Kissinger would ad
mit to Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci, “What interests me is what you can do with power.”
My father was reading aloud after dinner a description of Kissinger’s views. “I don’t think all this anti-Communist fervor is necessary,” he said. “Neither the Chinese nor the Russians are wealthy or powerful enough to take over the world, and I doubt very much that they have the will to do so. They’re poor countries; they have enough on their hands just trying to feed their people. I love The Russians are Coming, but the Russians aren’t going to land on Cape Cod. And the Maoists are dangerous to the Chinese, but not that dangerous to us. I don’t know what Nixon’s men are doing. Neither we nor the people at State believe increased aggression is the right course.”
I rose out of my brooding enough to catch a glimmer of the fact that my father was directly criticizing the government he was working for. I wondered: is he allowed to do that? But, again, I had missed my father’s slip. Andy, though, was cocking his head, over there in the chair with his book, in the funny way he did when he was thinking.
One rainy, cold day near to Christmas, my mother and father took Andy and me out of school. We drove to Baltimore, an hour away, to conduct some strange business. We entered a large courthouse building with broad steps across the front. We sat on benches like in a church, up near the front where there was a desk positioned high up on a platform. We were here in Baltimore to become naturalized U.S. citizens, to give up Andy’s dual citizenship in Taiwan and mine in Japan—a detail of our national statuses to which we’d never paid any heed. My mother and father had always just told us the children of Americans were Americans no matter where they were born. My parents were concerned now, though, that if they kept Andy’s Taiwanese citizenship he could be drafted into the Chinese army when he was fourteen. They’d decided to renounce my Japanese citizenship while they were at it.
Around us on the benches were poor-looking people hunched over books, with serious eyes and worried brows. The judge asked a woman who George Washington was. She faltered in broken English, but answered him correctly. Another woman with a foreign accent had to respond to a question about the Revolutionary War. A small man with tanned skin stuttered when the judge asked him something about his English. Seeing all the immigrants trying so hard to be American made me see that what Mom and Pop had said was right. This was the land of opportunity, no matter what. I felt smug since I knew the answers and could speak perfect American English.
The judge seemed to assume Andy and I needed little questioning—we were sitting here with our dignified, well dressed, very American-looking mother and father—though he perfunctorily asked me who Abe Lincoln was, and Andy what the Civil War was about. For a moment during the proceedings I had a flash that I’d like to keep my Japanese citizenship—to belong to two countries, to have an option, to keep that childhood part of myself—but the decision had already been made for me.
The judge’s voice was continuing. He was talking about how lucky we all were to be Americans, and about freedom, democracy, and independence, and my questions evaporated at the sound of these high-flying, austere, exhilarating words. Suddenly I felt like waving a flag, and when, at the end—our red-ribboned certificates in our hands—he had us all stand and swear our allegiance to the United States of America, my heart cheered.
As I swore, I felt billowy and sure and happy as Betsy Ross. It was as though Sidwell and the turbulent political world that was slowly breaking its way into my consciousness had melted away. This was the most high-breasted and red-white-and-blue I had felt in months, and more than I would feel for years ahead. For the moment, in the thrall of high and glorious words, I was American.
17
raspberries
In the lull between Christmas and New Year’s, still surrounded by the piles of books and scraps of wrapping paper, my father read from the Post. As of Christmas day, 540,000 American troops had been stationed in Vietnam; 30,610 had been killed in action, and 192,850 wounded.
Another day, in the clean, grey-branched freshness of the new year just before school started, over plates of my mother’s fried rice, my father gave us a China update. “The Cultural Revolution is over now,” he said. “Another disaster for the Chinese people. It’s a terrible loss for China. A whole generation has essentially been denied an education. The only book they’ve been allowed to study for years has been Mao’s Little Red Book“
“And what about Mao?” Andy asked.
My father explained that Mao had been sidelined now, and his wife and Premier Zhou Enlai were in charge. “They’re vying for power while they try to get China back on its feet and rebuild the Communist party. . . .
“I’ve been meeting with the Chinese and they all say it’s another rugged time for the common people in China.” His eyes had that haunted look again as he said this.
My father’s Washington job again entailed meeting with Chinese people to find out about the inside workings of the Communist administration. For this purpose, he met with Chinese dissidents and informants in obscure safe houses around Washington—always a dangerous undertaking for the Chinese. Decades later my mother told me, referring to his Chinese contacts, “Your father always worried a lot about his people.”
Andy and I were viewing the evening TV news with my father. We watched Soviet troops lining up in a wild countryside. “Things are extremely tense on the Soviet-Chinese border right now,” my father explained. “Large numbers of Chinese are crossing into Russian territory, and the Russians have amassed a million troops along the frontier. Both sides are threatening invasion.” A reporter announced the Chinese government was building underground shelters in Chinese cities in preparation for a nuclear attack.
Andy said, “Isn’t this a powder keg, Pop?”
“Ironically,” my father said, “this may promote peace. Because the Communist powers now fear each other, we may benefit. Our government may be able to exploit the tensions between them, and they may turn to us. Both the Chinese and Russians have made overtures toward our government recently.” Indeed, this inter-Communist tension, I read later, led to a “mating dance” with the United States; both Communist powers would eventually seek reconciliation with the United States as protection against the other Communist power. “Nothing is ever straightforward,” my father said.
“Russia and the U.S. are now spending $50 million a day on nuclear arms,” my father told us over another dinner. “The burden is becoming intolerable. But something beneficial is finally coming out of this. Finally the two superpowers have agreed to meet in Helsinki for SALT, the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, to try to halt the arms race.”
“Why do we want the role of being the world’s armory?” I said, getting warmer as I threw out questions. “Why can’t we be leaders in nonproliferation? How can we think we have the right to the bomb while other people don’t? And how can we accuse the Russians or Chinese of being belligerent when we are doing exactly the same thing?
“I can see how the Chinese and Russians see us: as people who want to take over the world. Why don’t politicians see how our behavior looks to other people? How can they not care?”
My father listened to me carefully, as if I were an adult.
Despite my reading and the words I held close as protection and exhilaration, my Sidwell days often seemed like wanders through a landscape as stark and empty as Siberia.
One day in the hall, a girl with silky walnut hair and blue eyes bounced up to me. She had a happy, chirpy voice. “I heard you came from Holland,” she said. “I used to live in Geneva; my father worked for the UN.
“I’m pretty new too,” she said. “This is a really hard place to fit in.”
As if this wasn’t enough, when she told me her name I trilled: it was the same as mine. She even spelled it the same: without an “h.”
Soon I had Sara over for thick Dutch pea soup. Because she too had lived in Europe and visited Holland, she understood why pea soup was important. We soon were fast friends, going to each othe
r’s houses after school to do homework, flopped out on each other’s beds or floors.
Sara’s house on Albemarle Street was like a small castle, a high, solid brick manse set on top of a wooded hillside. I was entranced. With its slate mansard roof; small, lead-paned windows; its portal, set in the roof with a cast iron fleur de lys; and its tall, medieval-looking wooden door, I felt as though I was a Dutch princess approaching her secret hideaway. Tall, straight-trunked trees that surrounded the path were white like beams of light.
Sara’s parents did the kind of meaningful work we at our Quaker school valued, jobs like the Peace Corps or VISTA that served humanity. Her father, a short man who had a fluffy mustache and merry Santa Claus eyes, was a botanist with the Environmental Protection Agency and her dark, wiry, tight-strung mother a staffer for California Democratic senator Alan Cranston.
Sara and I hung out in her third-floor turret room and commiserated like trapped Rapunzels. Perched at the peak of the high, dark house, halfway up the tall trees, it was like our own eagle’s eyrie. Inspired by the peaceniks in Life magazine, we sprawled on Sara’s rug and drew flower power signs. We studied books on wild-flowers.
Listening to Bob Dylan, Crosby Stills & Nash, James Taylor, and Joni Mitchell, we discussed Hedley and the other India Girls. “I heard Hedley is sleeping with Zeke.”
“I heard she was smoking hash behind the gym during second period. . . .” “I heard she got it from Clyde.”
Then the conversation twisted to Sidwell in general. “Some of the kids at Sidwell are such utter snobs,” Sara said. “So narrow-minded.” “And mean,” I said.
Born Under an Assumed Name Page 27