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Born Under an Assumed Name

Page 33

by Sara Mansfield Taber


  My mother was back on her feed, treating leprosy victims, struggling children—as she would later treat napalm-burned children in Vietnam.

  My father, the refined and elegant covert officer; my mother, the half-embassy lady and half-peace corps volunteer: these were my parents. Andy, meanwhile, read about the White Rajah, the different Bornean tribes, and the hornbills and gibbons secreted deep in the jungle—an interest he would one day carve into a career as a wildlife biologist.

  My family was expert at the twin requisites of good travelers: discomfort and curiosity. Our patron God should have been Ganesh, the elephant of overcoming obstacles. We had adventures in our family, instead of relatives. That was the trade-off.

  On the fourth of July, as took place in every American embassy around the globe, we went to the embassy party in Mr. Taylor, the consul’s, walled garden. With the Malay and Chinese guests, we ate hot dogs and hamburgers. The buns had been flown in from the commissary in KL—that was the cool way to say Kuala Lumpur—along with Ripleys potato chips, Cokes, ice cream, and ginger ale. It seemed surreal to be eating burgers at the edge of a jungle inhabited by people who lived in houses roofed with leaves and didn’t know what a television was.

  Even though we were in faraway Borneo, we did the normal American things—though they all had a Bornean flair. I was of age to hold an American driver’s permit, so my father taught us to drive in the consulate Land Rover, careening along the empty strips of gravel road that cut, like machetes, into the jungle.

  Early on in the summer, a small occurrence startled me out of my diplomat’s daughter complacency. My mother enrolled me in a swim team at the public pool, where an American Peace Corps volunteer whom she had met was teaching Malaysian kids to swim. I was not interested in competing, and soon quit. What was striking to me, though, was that this lanky American gave me no special attention. In fact, I was of less interest to him than the Malay kids in his charge, and I was taken aback. I found this both discombobulating and bracing. I was not the center of the world—and maybe the world was more interesting than I was. This little upset was the first jog onto a new path.

  My mother had structured my day. Borneo was a time of calm, of liking my mother. In our eagerness to sample Borneo, we were in sync—and she had arranged my day, like pieces of furniture, into a lovely whole. Each day I awakened to the sound of the rooster who lived in the compound at the rear of our house. I slipped on a shift, brushed my long hair loose, and then proceeded into the cool, open dining room. I ate my gracious breakfast with a glass of powdered skim milk. Then I mounted my bicycle and rode down the hill and into the neighborhoods of walled houses in the Kuching outskirts, to my batik teacher’s house.

  Riding to batik, along the padi and then winding through the humble, shacky houses, I was humming. I was not thinking about anything, even myself. I was just a girl on a bicycle, her legs pumping, her arms strong with steering, the damp breeze on her brow, passing by the houses with eaves, the children running in slapping shoes, and the mothers chattering in their clangy language—just experiencing the deliciousness of hearing, seeing, and smelling, without thinking.

  Ramsay Ong was a brilliant batik artist who had agreed to take on Clive, the Canadian boy, and me, for art lessons. For three hours each morning, we sat on the concrete floor of the veranda at the front of his elegant, antique-filled, low-bowing house beside a fish pond and a garden of fecund tropical plants, and painted large pieces of muslin with wax. After each waxing we scrubbed our paintings with dye, in darker and darker colors, until, with the last dying, they were finished pieces in four or five crackled colors.

  Painting with my waxy brush in the sun of Ramsay’s patio, my life seemed like a batik painting: I came into the world with a fresh, clean piece of muslin. Each time I moved, that piece of cloth had been dunked into a new, distinctive, vibrant color, and as I lived along in that place, portions of that color had been waxed permanently into the cloth. In transit between countries, the cloth had been crumpled and wadded and the wax had cracked so that the dyes of the ensuing places had bled into and mingled with the previous, to make the rich, multicolored picture that was my unfolding life. Wax and dye, wax and dye: that is life.

  I painted a turtle, an owl, a castle—and then, later in the summer after trips into the jungle, I painted a woman in a straw hat with a plow, an Iban kampong.

  Clive was the gifted artist of the two of us. He painted graceful men carrying bows through the jungle, and women in bright, ornate sarongs. We quickly became fast friends. This was my first experience of having a boy as a real friend. It was as though I was tuning up for real romance, for there were sweet rhythms in the air between us as I told him about the kids at Sidwell and he talked about how his father hated his artistic bent. “I hate my boarding school in BC,” he said.

  “I’m a little nervous about going to mine in Japan. Who knows what it’ll be like,” I told him. With Clive, I felt at ease. My shyness loosened. Unlike the earlier rehearsals with boys, Clive and I knew each other as real people rather than images in books or characters of our imaginations.

  These mornings on Ramsay’s veranda were a time of utter peace—the peace of doing, creating while surrounded by other quiet creators, a circumstance I would cherish throughout my life. We chatted, but mostly we painted, and Ramsay painted alongside us, spinning out stunning painting after stunning painting of willowy women on the planks of longhouses, small houses on stilts above rivers, chickens and roosters being fed by slender lads, men laboring in padi. Midway through the morning, Ramsay’s servant brought us lemonade on a hand-wrought silver tray.

  On the beat of twelve, I biked back home through the curtain of sweltering heat, to the coolness of the house, where my mother, Andy, and I ate one of Hipni’s simple, delicious meals. My father sometimes joined us, the consulate was that close by. After lunch, everyone rested. Sometimes I lay in my room, under the whisking cool of the fan, and dozed or read, or I went outside and sunbathed. After our siesta or “kip,” and after the usual brief afternoon shower, we went to “the club” for a dip. At five or so, we returned home and got ready for dinner and my father’s arrival. We dined on lasagna or veal scallopini, and then slipped into our cool beds. It was a perfectly balanced, luxurious life.

  “The club,” set up decades before by the British, was a white building with low eaves and verandas set high on a hill in the middle of a rolling golf course. A swimming pool sat on the crest of the hill beside the club building. Set as it was on the highest rise in Kuching, the club truly lorded over the town.

  The club dining room smelled of tea and cakes. Like in Taiwan, white-jacketed waiters brought Andy and me sweating glasses of ginger ale and hamburgers, and our parents toddies and cups of tea, even when the air was steamy and soggy.

  The many British and other colonial—Australian and Canadian—women wore shirtdresses and batik shifts. The men wore loose trousers and open-collared, loose batik shirts or safari shirts with epaulettes. Talking to all the Anglophone people at the club, I again felt a rushing back of my old diplomatic self. I plied my formal manners.

  The luxury of the British colonial way of life is impossible to resist—the ironed white table cloths; the food and drink brought at your whim (just sign the chit, no money involved); the serene, dustless, gracious houses; the club life. It is almost like living in a book—and offers both a sense of the absurd and a sense of dabbling in moral trouble. The inequities glare, but if you’re on the lucky side of it, it’s seductive.

  One afternoon, my father—who was game but laughing and shaking his head at the ludicrousness of it all—joined the British men and a sprinkling of Canadians and Australians for their game of Hounds and Harriers. This was a crazy routine in which one man took off from the top of the golf course in the heat of the day, and broke a path through the jungle, leaving signs and way markers as he ran along. After a time, the herd of other players left the top of the hill, raced off into the jungle, following the signs, until t
hey returned, five miles later, sweaty as rags and puffing with exhaustion. My mother, Andy, and I waited at the pool until the first man was spied. Looking like bedraggled shipwreck survivors—oh, how the British love tests of endurance—the men straggled up the hill and fell in piles before a table of shandies, and slowly revived as they downed the lemonade-beer, puffing and snorting about what a good run it had been. “Only mad dogs and Englishmen . . .”

  I watched Mrs. Clement, wife of the British consul, beside the turquoise sparkling pool. She had deep breasts and wore a royal blue swimsuit that showed them off. She was very pretty, and very polite, but the politeness was a kind that made you feel dismissed and small. When she said hello to me it also felt like good-bye.

  She treated the waiter similarly; sitting at her customary table, she summoned him with two disdainful fingers and issued her order without looking up. “Yes, Mis-see,” the deferential waiter said, and slipped soundlessly off to fulfill her command.

  “These Malays,” she commented to Mom in passing. “They’re nothing like the Chinese. They don’t know how to work.”

  Mrs. Clement’s comment made me cringe. I loved the delicious leisure of the club, but all this luxurious graciousness—all this distilled beauty—depended on servants, on a human caste system. St. Peter’s, European castles, Asian palaces, British clubs: all built on the backs of peasants.

  One day we were eating curry puffs and taking drinks at the club—orange squash for Andy and me and shandies for my parents—in the coolness of the rattan-furnished dining room with the big-winged fans rotating, leisurely, overhead. I felt as though I was living in an E. M. Forster novel.

  Andy wanted another orange squash. With an expert flick of his finger, my father signaled the white-jacketed waiter, a quiet, straight-postured Malaysian man in his ubiquitous spotless white jacket.

  When the waiter brought the drink on a small silver tray and placed it before my brother, my father, looking crisp in his pressed white shirt, just kept listening to my mother and didn’t seem to notice. Later, when we were about to leave, and my father signed the chit, he scribbled his name in his illegible, offhand chicken scratch, and handed the note back to the waiter with the same casual ease.

  That’s when it hit me like an invisible blow inside my chest. We were just like Mrs. Clement. Maybe we felt guiltier—and my father was a deeply fair man—but our actions were the same as hers. Our good manners and easy life depended on viewing others as if they didn’t exist. This was the rub: Elegance and sophistication equaled seeing through people. Beauty was cold and exploitative. It was suddenly upsetting to see my father treating the quiet-moving waiter as though he barely existed. It didn’t match my image of my father, or of us.

  That evening when my mother asked me to ring the bell, as she sometimes did, to summon Hipni so that our dinner plates could be removed and dessert brought, I said, “No. I don’t believe in having servants. I’m not going to ring a bell for a human being.”

  My mother said, “Please ring the bell, Sara.”

  “No, I won’t. I can’t.” I both felt my mother’s words pushing at me like a command and a clutching inside. I felt tears rising. Maybe it was all the poverty I’d been absorbing, or maybe it was the complexity of trying to be a sophisticated diplomat’s daughter and also be a good and fair human being, or maybe it was the legacy of Sidwell, of feeling invisible myself, but I suddenly felt chaotic and rampant.

  My father understood that this was not about defiance. “Sara, the world is not a fair place. I know you don’t feel comfortable having servants do things for you, but the truth is, we are offering Hipni something very valuable to him. We offer Hipni, his wife, and sister a much better job than they would have otherwise—an easy job at a much higher salary than they would get on the local market.”

  This didn’t convince me.

  Then my mother added another facet to the complexity of this crystal globe I was trying to balance. “You know,” she said, “Hipni has his own servant at his home by the river.”

  How do I put all this together—the snooty British, our polite but exploitative manners, Hipni’s servants? Does feeling guilty make you any less culpable for the inequalities in the world?

  Propriety, custom, rules, and roles were reassuring; everyone knew what to do, jobs needed to be done. All my life I’d heard embassy mothers debate whether or not a lady should be friends with her servants. “If you give them an inch they’ll take a mile. If you’re too intimate with your maid, it’ll be harder to give her instructions. It’s good to have clear boundaries,” the argument went, but there were always people who wanted to know the people who worked for them as people.

  This concern about servants was more common among Americans. The people I’d known from other, older cultures seemed more comfortable with inequity, with people’s “stations in life,” with subsets of people serving other subsets.

  I’d come across a similar debate when I’d live among the sheep ranchers of Patagonia as a young adult. The peons would discuss the pros and cons while eating mutton barbeque under the enormous open skies of Argentina’s southern steppe. “Spanish landowners are like compañeros“ they’d say. “They don’t pay as much and they’re always late, but they’re like you and me.” British landowners, on the other hand, they’d say, “pay better and your check is always on time, but they’d never come and eat asado with us. They keep us here and them over there.” That was the dilemma: rules kept relations straight, exchanges fair, and roles clear, but they always had demeaning class divisions built into them. On the other hand, the colonial way of life was delicious. Who wouldn’t like it? Hipni, our cook, liked having a servant. And wouldn’t it be a more gracious and inviting world if everyone had someone to serve them once in a while? So I roiled.

  In my twenties, I would read Paul Scott, Rumer Godden, and Penelope Lively, and I would think, I have lived in the American Raj.

  Sarawak is a land of waterways: broad, narrow, shallow, and impassable, deep rivers along with rapid, narrow streams. There are few roads. Settlement followed the river system, as my father explained, and rivers provide the main communication system. On the lower reaches of the large rivers, Chinese, Malays, and Melanaus are mixed with Ibans. Villages of Malay and Melanau fishermen live in houses high on piles along the river banks. The people earn their lives through fishing, planting padi, and working timber and sago. A few run Chinese shops and bazaars. On rivers farther inland live the Ibans, Land Dyaks, and other tribes. The rivers—and lands—to the south and east, toward the Indonesian border, are virtually uninhabited. Tea-colored waterways lace in and out through the jungle, revealing a rubber plantation here, a square of padi there, but mostly miles and miles of impenetrable, dripping, fecund rainforest.

  We traveled upriver by boat to a river kampong. Here the river was fetid, overhung with crowded, dilapidated shacks. Crude, slender houseboats, and straw thatch-tented canoes hung with laundry and fishing poles, crowded the water along the banks. Rickety houses on stilts perched over the water. We disembarked at a drooping wooden dock and walked along the main dirt street of a village. We passed women carrying broad, flat baskets of durian fruit. We passed men bent over under the weight of huge bundles. We passed skinny-legged and skinny-armed children. Squatting beside a ramshackle house was an old woman with a filthy piece of cloth wrapped around her head, her lips red from betel nut.

  In a little cantina, we drank soft drinks from enamel cups. Below us, down a muddy alleyway to the river, I watched two women, hair tied up in old cloths, washing clothes in the stream.

  I pondered the poverty around me: the chattering of poor people and their quiet dignity; their dark, soft, strange eyes. I sat drinking my soda, worrying. Should I pity them, honor them, help them, observe them, or should I keep away? These questions would send me to work with the underclass after college.

  As a transient, a foreigner, as a diplomat’s daughter, I possessed perhaps the world’s greatest luxury: the freedom to leave.
Whatever problems the natives had to face I would never have to grapple with.

  We took a boat to a riverine island where the British established a resort, a Robinson Crusoe isle of clean thatch-and-reed huts set around a central canteen, and spent three days on its sandy shores, swimming and eating delicious trout and clams cooked for us by a man in a loose white shirt and sarong over a smoky open grill. This was the quintessential colonialist’s weekend.

  Another weekend, we drove for an hour and then walked for half an hour to make one of my father’s official calls. We passed through the flourishing stubble of slash-and-burn agriculture to an Iban longhouse: a multifamily house made of bamboo, set high on stilts above a dark brown, peat-flavored stream. The house was a rambling platform, one side of which was partitioned into family compartments. Along the other side was a veranda, the common gathering and working place. At one end was a round chamber for important meetings. A man with two teeth and a shallow bowl haircut identical to every other man’s guided us into this chamber, where we were asked to sit down. Ladies with their breasts bare, in sarongs, brought us cups of a cloudy liquid and offered us plates of mushed vegetables. The long-house dwellers sat all around us in a circle, watching us drink and eat. Women with betel nut-stained teeth squatted, and children stood at the edges. All of their faces were shining with sweat. There was a strong smell of bitter nuts, bodies, and flowers. We couldn’t communicate except through our interpreter. Just before we went outside again, two girls about my age, with red teeth and silver rings around their legs, were pushed in front of my father. The interpreter said the chief of the longhouse, in a gesture of honor, was offering them to my father: two virgins. My father, serious-eyed, thanked the chief, but shook his hand politely, no.

  Afterward, the chief led us to a little hut perched off the edge of the veranda. Inside the dark dome we saw small brown orbs hanging: the community’s collection of shrunken human heads.

 

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