Back in the front living room, I stood with my mouth slightly open—tasting the air of the house, taking in its low-stated beauty, its petit grandeur, its strangeness. Strange because, to my astonishment, I realized the front and rear walls of this spacious, tidy house did not exist. The house was simply open to the elements, like a jungle shelter. Delighted and amazed, I felt my entire body loosen and fill with light, fragrant air.
It was an extension of the sensation that had flown into me when I’d stepped into the bright doorway of the plane. For the instant that I’d stood there at the opening to a strange world, I’d felt the surge of contentment of being where I belonged: at the threshold of a new and fascinating country. I was charged: every pore open. My peripheral vision was restored, my blinders removed, my ears perked, my fingers itching to touch fabrics, thorns, pistils of plants. I was thirsty to drink in the new colors, the new choruses of sounds, the new blends of people. Assailed by the new and strange beauties and elixirs, I wanted to settle myself at a rattan table or pedal off on a bicycle and sample it all.
The next day, I awakened to the sound of cocks and gibbon calls. From the whisper of light bedclothes, I watched geckos skitter up the wall. Seeing them, I curled up, snug and happy under my sheets, as I had years ago in Taipei, the geckos familiar miniature dragons overseeing me, like gargoyles, keeping out the demons.
Soon after breakfast served by Hipni in a sarong and white jacket, my mother, all bubbly with excitement, took us downtown to the market. “Sara, you’re going to love it,” she said.
The market was a kaleidoscope of colors, sounds, and smells. First I was a girl looking eagerly this way and that. I felt light on my feet, trying to direct my eyes up, down, and side to side all at once, in order to take in all the wares for sale in the jumbled shops wedged tight one after another: the gorgeous batiks with a strange and wonderful bitter fragrance, the intricately carved silver necklaces and earrings, the strange fruits and vegetables, the stalls of wild meats hung on strings, the crates of pirated records, the hand-stitched and embroidered clothing, the jumbles of buckets, oddly shaped rakes, plastic tubs, and bamboo tools. And to watch all the different shades of caramel and toffee people in wonderful, flower-strewn clothing: A woman in a hot pink sari embroidered in gold yelling at an Indian man seated on a pile of rugs. A pair of slight, graceful Malaysian men strolling down the street hand-in-hand. A group of children dressed in ragged shorts scrambling after a ball. A hawker of chicken satay sticks yelling from his makeshift grill. Women in fruit-color prints with baskets on their arms wandering from stall to stall. I tried to parse the sounds: the clacking of Malay, the jangle of Chinese, the whine of British English, the up-down rhythms of an Indian language, the shrieking of a different kind of music from every stall. The air smelled of crab, it smelled of bodies, it smelled of cumin, and of bitter fruits . . . In this sultry air, damp and heavy with moisture, my body slowed to the natural pace of the tropics. I could only walk languidly in the heat, the dress I’d made out of an Indian bedspread clinging to my back.
Then suddenly, while looking at a platter of shining fish, I felt woozy. The market turned in circles. Lumpy durian and surreal, spiky, rouge-colored rambutan fruits like something out of a sci-fi film; baskets of silver bangles; hangings of mango, bark, and lime batiks spun suddenly in a whirling, clashing jetstream of color around my head. The Indian, Chinese, and American rock music mixed together into a garbling blare. The odors of bodies, putrefying vegetables, diesel, and incense assaulted my nostrils. Now they were smothering me. My pores poured sweat. I was going to faint. I squatted, put my head down, and breathed fast until finally, my mother bending over me with concern, I still felt weak but no longer as though I would both throw up and black out. I clutched my mother’s hand. She hailed a cab, and we went home. I lay in my bed in my new air-conditioned bedroom through the afternoon, ashamed by what seemed a clear case of culture shock.
I slept for two days. Maybe I’d gulped too fast.
On my second foray into town, restored, I was able to take in each facet of downtown Kuching with pleasure. I was taken by the little capital with its hubbub of people strolling among the hornbills, parrots, and birds of paradise like white tigers. I loved all the bare toes of the steamy place. There is a singular beauty to bare toes—sparkling, manicured toes in sandals; grubby working toes in zoris. I loved the shops of olive-colored urns painted with ochre dragons. I loved Kuching’s blare: the incessant, full-blast din of mixed-up music, the twang of a sitar jamming with a Steppenwolf harangue. And the car and motorbike horns beeping and blasting as though their drivers had only that day discovered the joys of the internal combustion engine. I loved the clipped d’s and r’s of Malay and the long-lost but oddly familiar hard consonants of Chinese. I loved the men in white shirts and checked sarongs and the women in their sarongs of hot pink, mango, and lime flowers, all liquid grace. I loved the hot colors and the hot food to go with the hot, steamy air. The slow, watery movements of equatorial life enchanted me.
Watching the women moving like graceful swans across the rivers of the bazaar, gazing around at the oranges and silvers of the fish, at the extravaganza of colorful fabrics, at the tribal shields and woven baskets decorated with geometric frogs and snakes hanging from the stall poles, I fell in love.
Right away I adored batik cloth. I decided the sarong, after the sari, was the most beautiful kind of female dress: a simple tube of cloth doubled over in front, and cinched with a silver belt at the waist. It is partly the way a sarong feels—whis-pery, cool, and romantic around your legs. And you walk with shorter steps; you slow to tropical languidness. My mother and I were both taken by the colorful, spicy fabric that came in every tropical shade: the greens of pine and broad leaf palm; the reds of geranium, hibiscus, and fuschia; the oranges of mango, saffron, tangerine, and pineapple; the blues of sky, 1 a.m., and cobalt. The designs of orchids and snakes and dragons curling in and out of one another.
My mother bought me a piece of cloth for a sarong, pinkish-red on one half, white on the other, with saffron flowers scattered overall. After buying lengths of batik, my mother led me to a tailor who would make us simple dresses. I was fitted for one in lime and one in watermelon. Forever after it would seem to me that a batik shift was the perfect summer dress.
At one of the storefronts that offered pirated tapes, Andy and I ordered a three-hour tape made of our favorite singles: Steppenwolf, the Rolling Stones, the Doors. With some of the money I earned babysitting in Chevy Chase when I was still planning to emigrate to Holland, I bought myself a silver ring.
“The amazing thing, Pop, is that there’s no American influence at all,” I said to my father at dinner.
“Not a McDonald’s on the whole of Borneo.”
Even though I had never been here in my life, walking around Kuching I had a keen sense of return.
The feeling was of elation, of jail break. And I hadn’t even realized I had been in jail for the last couple of years. Ah, the wild happiness of being abroad. It was a feeling deep inside—of light flooding. Colored lights. Pinwheels. The caramel lights of whiskey. I was back in the gorgeous-glorious. This felt like the purest me. I was toffee at the moment in cooking that it turned to itself. It was as though, after a long hiatus, I’d recovered the file, the identity, the correct dossier.
As for my father’s dossier . . . Two fierce-looking Sikh men in turbans—instead of the usual allotment of marines—stood guard at the entrance to the American consulate, which occupied the second floor of a nondescript, concrete building on the central plaza in downtown Kuching, just a few minutes from home.
The consulate consisted of the consul, Mr. Taylor; my father, the vice consul; and Mr. Giddings, the communicator, a Vietnam veteran. In addition to being the vice consul of East Malaysia, my father had been appointed consul of Brunei, a British protectorate, by Queen Elizabeth II. I was “the vice consul’s daughter“; it sounded like something from a book. My father’s primary job, as I would learn af
ter he retired, was to make contacts with the “overseas Chinese” in Kuching, in hopes of finding some who traveled back and forth to China, had high or inside contacts there, such as in the atomic bomb project or in the upper echelons of the Communist Party, or in the jails, and could report juicy morsels back to him. He was also to monitor the Communist insurgency from Kalimantan, the Indonesian southern half of the island. He had regular consular duties as well.
This was the first tour abroad during which I was aware of the true nature of my father’s work. Knowing he was a spy strangely changed little. I acted the diplomat’s daughter. There was just a tiny added shiver in all we did.
At the dinner table, my father regaled us with stories of his consular duties—those he could talk about. Often, he was beset with an American twenty-year-old hippie who’d been roaming around Borneo and, now that he was ready to head home, had been refused permission to enter Singapore, the only route back to the States and the world—due to the length of his hair. The Singaporean authorities arrested boys with locks. So, my father had turned into an appearance advisor.
“What do you think I should have done, Sara?” my father asked me one day after seeing in his office a young man with a passion for turtle biology who had just spent a month on the islands nearby, and had shoulder-length hair. I imagined a handsome boy I might see at an antiwar march in Washington.
“He told me the Singaporean authorities were unfair. I agreed and then I told him the best thing would be to go right to the barber and get a haircut.”
Despite my own knee-jerk outrage at the Singaporean policy—People should be free to dress and be any way they wish; it’s a free world! —I realized sometimes the practical was the only route. In the bold, equatorial light of Borneo I couldn’t miss the truth that people in different cultures had fierce and varying outlooks, some of them too rigid for a twenty-year-old American to take on.
“I guess he has to if he doesn’t want to go to jail. Unless he can find a freighter. . . .” Freighters figured large in my and Andy’s images of wild, Asian romance.
“He came back today with a crew cut,” my father reported the next day. There was a little start inside me; I envisioned the beautiful American hippie transformed to fuzz-topped soldier or scraped-bald prisoner.
My father seemed happy in Kuching. It was such a rare place, with mountains to drive over in the consulate Land Rover, with village chiefs to interview and Chinese to ferret out and meet. The job had taken my father out of the mainstream, which seemed both good and bad. It was a backwater, but a welcome reprieve from office politics and frustrations, and I thought my father relished the role of lone operative. The haunting that had sometimes lurked like a dark shadow in the backs of his eyes seemed to have slipped away, but there was both a “devil may care” and a “damned if I do and damned if I don’t” quality to him. Years later he would evaluate his accomplishments in Kuching: “Did we think we were going to find a kingpin, a fount of information about China in Kuching? Nothing much came of all that. I didn’t get much from those Chinese.”
But while my father later pooh-poohed his posting in Kuching—by nature a humble man, he always downplayed the worth of his accomplishments—his good friend, another CIA operative, reflecting on it all, said, “I think it was a treat for your father, a bit of R & R. And what your father did in Kuching was a creditable contribution to our work. His opening up a station there was a feather in his cap.”
Kuching mornings I awakened in a cool, clean, muffled quiet, and to a rhythmic, soft shushing sound. Swish, swish went Ani’s broom early mornings—and intermittently throughout the day. She moved, like other Malay ladies, with the graceful, slow movements of a swan. Her clothes, too, seemed to flow. With one hand, she whisked her broom of soft grass across the living room floor. She moved so silently and was so quiet in her being that she was barely perceptible, even to those a foot away—the ideal servant, or spy.
After I got dressed each morning, I wandered into the dining room where the long table was set with four places. Each place had a small plate on which was waiting a thick wedge of pineapple or a curve of papaya, with a slice of dewy lemon for squeezing on the sweet, orange flesh. After we ate our fruit, Hipni brought in homemade buttered toast and eggs on fresh white plates.
Hipni was a wonderful cook. From the moment we first set foot in the house, I hadn’t entered the kitchen and almost never had my mother. The kitchen was Hipni’s abode and he was such a master that it didn’t make sense to interfere. Lunch began with British cream crackers sprinkled with spices—followed by club sandwiches or french fries and hamburgers. The Americans before us had been Italian, and so Hipni cooked excellent lasagna and spaghetti, as well as delicious Malaysian curries. For treats, he made us homemade potato chips or ice cream—out of powder from a can obtained with great difficulty from a special shop at the market.
Sometimes, on weekends, we went to the stinky, bustling market for dinner. My parents knew a special stall that served big spicy crabs that were pure—to use my mother’s word—“delectamy.”
One Saturday, my mother said, “I was at the Seventh Day Adventist Hospital today and made a discovery. Let’s go over there after lunch!” She had an impish twinkle in her eye.
My father drove us in the consulate Land Rover to the Seventh Day Adventist compound, near a roundabout in the broad, empty airport road. There, from a little plywood booth set on the roadside, we bought what a sign advertised as “ice cream sandwiches“: a scoop of soy milk ice cream placed between the two halves of a hamburger-like roll. That was how far we were from America.
And we were so ice cream starved that it tasted excellent.
Steamy afternoons. Each day after lunch, a misting rain descended for an hour or so. Afterward, vapor rose over the streets to the height of our thighs. As my mother, Andy, and I walked down one of the residential streets designed by the British one day, white dampness rose around our legs and all around, under the high fronded canopy of green. At a large, open house, we played mahjong with a Canadian family—the father was a lumber expert—that had been planted in Kuching for decades. They had a sandy-haired son named Clive who was my age and had an appealing, offhand way of talking while he explained the game. I loved the feel of the ivory bricks, their clicking sound, and the flicked strokes of their intriguing characters.
My mother was all funny charm, talking with Clive’s mother about the adorable children at the Cheshire Home for Crippled Children where she was now volunteering. “I want to take them all home,” she said to this angular lady in a faded batik frock. My mother was giddy with happiness. She was inspired, like me, by the jungle air, the swirling batiks, and the sweet-eyed people.
Life in Sarawak constantly offered up the strange. An anteater lived in our sewer, and every twilight, Hipni made sure the dining room was clear of snakes before we went in. From some secret source, he appeared one day with a snake stick. It was a long pole of wood, itself twisty and long like a snake—to post over the entrance to the house.
Steamy-thick nights we sat on the veranda in the darkness, mosquito coils we called pucks glowing like dragon eyes, speaking only now and again, and then quietly, taking in the caress and insect hum of the silky night.
Life was too intriguing, absorbing, and complete in Kuching to miss America, though sometimes during my siesta, or while I was sunbathing outside on the orchid hill, I wished I could show Sara the batiks, the tapestries of jungle life.
I had been whisked into a limbo. It was a new kind of moratorium: a rest from worries about fitting in, a respite from worrying about my country’s actions abroad.
My mother was in her element in Kuching. Back to her double life: working at the Cheshire Home and at a leprosarium—and giving teas for Malaysian and Chinese ladies, along with hosting dinner parties, as part of her official duties. Within a week, it seemed, my mother became friends with everyone: a Chinese doctor, the museum director, nurses, missionaries, nuns. Happiness came easily to her here,
unlike in Washington. Malaysia was a place barely retrieved from the jungle. It was perfect for her: she was always happiest with dirt under her fingernails. And she was living at her fullest, by her treasured creed: “At the end of the day, if I feel I helped someone, I can feel my presence on earth was worthwhile.”
I was walking among small thatched houses down a small dirt street in a walled compound way outside of town. I was with my mother, and there was a man with us, an eager man, leading the way.
As we came abreast each dwelling, the man, my mother, and I squatted to greet the small occupant, a weaver who looked as old as the earth, seated, legs extended, in front of the doorway at a backstrap loom. Beautiful red, yellow, and black patterns rippled along each frame. Each time we squatted, my stomach clenched in revulsion and fear as I extended my hand in greeting. All the weavers had leprosy—we called them lepers then. Each weaver’s hand was a palm studded with gnawed-off stumps for fingers. My mother, bringing her physical therapy skills to help the inmates, held each person’s hand with almost reverential tenderness. As my hands met those of the villagers, their hands were rough, dry, and scaly, like I imagined an elephant’s skin would be. But once I calmed myself, I lifted my eyes to smiles.
My mother’s behavior spoke her values: that we were no better than anyone else, not better than a disabled orphan, not better than a Dyak, not better than a leper. In fact, people who were suffering might be more worthy. We should not dress in a superior way, and should treat everyone with equal respect.
Born Under an Assumed Name Page 32