Born Under an Assumed Name

by Sara Mansfield Taber

  On our way back to Kuching, my father shrugged off the offering of virgins. “He was just showing me respect,” he said. My mother said, “Did you see the maggots in the bottom of our glasses? Ughh!” Andy said, “Where do they pee?” My mother said, “Mrs. Cassell told me that the jungle people are so intrigued with modern inventions that they name their children Helicopter and Brassiere!” Andy asked, “Are you sure they don’t shrink heads anymore?” It was goofy, creepy, intriguing, and strange. I didn’t know where in my own head to put this longhouse with its collection of heads.

  The longhouse gave me a sniff of the just-out-of-the-jungleness of human nature—and the precariousness of civilization. With one wisp of the wind, one little nudge, we’d be tipped back into vengeful, fury-and-blood tribal warfare: hand-bent bows and poisonous, blood-dipped, feather-swathed arrows.

  Back in Kuching, Borneo seemed riotous. Neither careful nor neat, it was a place of clutter and clash, a realm of multiple angrily and pacifically cohabiting cultures, with a mismatched jumble aesthetic. Choose what you want from among shouting parrot and peacock colors: brown with red, with yellow, with pink; black and fuschia; or screaming green. Unlike France or Holland, or messy chambray shirt and jeans America, Borneo opened my eyes to the world’s fecundity, its extravagances, its generous, infinitely fruiting nature. Like Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Little Prince, I walked around in wonder. It seemed a kingdom of excess, multitudinous, anything-goes freedom. “If it’s worth doing, its worth overdoing.”

  Sarawak yielded up two experiences that changed my life. The first was a trek.

  My father drove Andy and me in the Land Rover for three hours over mushy ruts cut through the jungle to a little outpost of three small buildings. There, we parked. In front of one of the buildings, we met Father Downey, a round American, a slim guide, and another local man. We’d come to accompany Father Downey on one of his missionary rounds. We slathered our legs with insect spray, hoisted our rucksacks, and the six of us started down a narrow path leading straight into the jungle. We carried U.S. Army canteens and we wore green khaki jungle boots with rubber soles we’d bought at the market. We wore hats, but still, in ten minutes, we were already dripping with sweat.

  Soon we got our stride. The path was narrow and wet. The jungle was close and claustrophobic. We crossed tiny rivulets and brooks on felled logs. There was cawing overhead, and the drone of insects. We spied a gibbon hanging from a long vine, and a hornbill. Otters slooped through the currents of a stream.

  At one point, when our spirits were drooping, the guide had us sit down on the path, while he plunged off to the right. Soon he returned with what looked like six long staffs. They were not staffs, but lengths of cane. He showed us how to rip off a hunk of the stalk with our teeth, suck and chew the fiber until all the sweet was gone, and then spit out the remaining wad of plant. The cane was lightly sweet, and utterly refreshing—a new discovery. We didn’t have to suck on stones here: we could chew cane.

  Finally, at the end of three hours, we saw a bright opening in the forest. All around was scrub, interspersed with fruit and rubber trees, and vegetable and pepper gardens. Ahead was an open green, and behind it hills of padi. Walking ahead we found on the green a tiny hamlet of bamboo huts on stilts, surrounded by palm trees. Red hibiscus flowers laced their way up the stilts. Beneath the tiny houses chickens skittered.

  On our approach, we passed a line of six or eight upright stones, animist figures like ancient beings, being licked by some scruffy goats. I stopped a minute to circle the stones. The figures seemed open-faced, small, and friendly.

  Up a rude ladder, in one of the houses, a woman in a faded sarong served us tea. She smiled at me and listened intently to the priest. A boy led us to the hut on stilts where we’d spend the night.

  After simple plates of brown rice and vegetables served by the woman, four young men appeared at the ladder of our hut. Father Downey greeted them with open arms and beckoned them up, then got busy with what he was here to do. My father, Andy, and I sat with our backs against the bamboo walls as Father Downey read for an hour from the Bible. As he read on with the drone of an insect, I thought of the collection of small stone figures outside in the pasture. It seemed so violently wrong to me. I thought about imposition—about the priest’s imposition of his beliefs on people with their own perfectly serviceable religion. I thought about missionaries and about the U.S. government: how both imposed their ways on others with a sense of righteousness. To a fault, I’d be wary of imposition always—that of others and my own.

  At night, we slept fitfully, slapping mosquitoes, sticky with heat, on mats placed over the bamboo-slat floor. Accompanying us, all through the jungle-black hours, was a chorus of crickets and chickens and insects.

  The next day, with Father Downey tapping his Bible and clapping his young protégés on the back, we set back through the jungle.

  On the return trek, Andy and I were exhilarated. We fancied ourselves explorers, discoverers of new monkey species. How quickly the explorer took us over. The more mosquitoes and disasters, the better the heroism, the better the story.

  On the way back through the swampy forest, I longed to go more deeply into cultures than the embassy life allowed or promoted. I was burning to understand what the stone figures meant to the villagers. I wanted to understand as an insider, not just as a watcher against a backdrop.

  The second happening was this. One afternoon, when I returned from batik, I found my mother sitting with two guests in the rattan chairs in the first living room overlooking the garden. The woman had long straight hair like mine and was dressed in a plain jean skirt and a tucked white blouse. The man, tall and burly, had a full, scruffy beard. The two looked American, but there was something unkempt, vaguely wild, and totally intriguing about them. My mother patted the seat beside her and offered me some lemonade from a tray.

  She introduced the couple as two anthropologists from the University of Michigan who were studying the jungle Dyaks. I spent the next two hours listening, rapt, to stories of thirty-day river trips through the jungle, afternoons passed eating fish and talking to toothless women in longhouses, and of weeks devoted to helping out with the slash-and-burn rice harvest. The couple explained that they had only as many possessions as they could carry on their backs and fit into a dugout, and otherwise lived from the jungle. Gibbons and orangutans swung from the trees outside their tiny jungle hut.

  I listened, mesmerized, as the couple gobbled up the tuna fish sandwiches, spicy crackers, pineapple, and homemade ice cream my mother offered them. I had never heard of a life so romantic or fascinating. Their tales reminded me of sitting in my amah Mary’s house, back in Taiwan. Even back then, perhaps, eating red rice with Mary’s bent parents looking on, the quest of my life had been laid down.

  Living somewhere, having a house, and establishing a routine of life, is different from just visiting. But it is an in-between existence. It is neither like being a tourist, nor the same as being “of” the place, living “on the local market” as the embassy people say. Being with an embassy was like peering in a window—tasting only the appetizer of the other culture.

  As an embassy person you’re not a visitor, you’re something else. You have access to the local people, and to experiences a visitor does not, but you are mainly a kid with your own kind against a foreign backdrop. Still, backdrops are significant. They penetrate deep.

  I resolved, here and now, to become an anthropologist so as to study other cultures. And I did, in the end, do just that. My twin passions—to discover cultures and figure out what made people tick—led me first to study psychology in college, then to earn a master’s in social work, and finally to complete a doctoral program that let me explore to my heart’s content the interplay of personality and culture. First as a psychiatric social worker, then as an academic, and finally as a literary journalist, always following my nose, I immersed myself in the lives of Mexican and Vietnamese immigrants, Patagonian sheep ranchers, Spani
sh dairy farmers, and French bakers.

  Kuching renewed in me a thirst for adventure, a taste for the foreign, a draw to places with strange milk. Our treks through the jungle gave me an instinct for the pleasures of grubbing—and for wooly places. In Asia you’re already on the fringe. Disappearing into Mongolia or Tibet is a real and tantalizing possibility.

  In just three months, Borneo had left me a large bequest: a sense of the world as a fruit tree for the plucking. This outlook made me do unwise things like enroll in graduate school in Washington state where I knew no one, and live in a dismal basement apartment in the rain. You can be too intrepid for your own good. But it would also make me game for a move to the stubby outlands of Patagonia, a couple of years I’d trade for none in the world.

  Another bequest of Kuching: a sense of acceptability. The great gift of an ex-pat community is that you can always belong—because no one does. Belonging is easiest abroad—there you automatically belong to the human race.

  As things would turn out, I’d always feel best abroad. It would always feel right to me to carry out daily life among people who lived in a different way, and where there were curious icons to puzzle over. It is far easier to struggle with another culture than to struggle with your own.

  In Kuching, I felt like my most natural self. Some people like to be at the center of things, to put their stamp on all that takes place. I, instead, was hungry to gather the many ways of the world.

  Here in Kuching, all my longing was transformed to fascination. The urge for security and belonging was replaced by the quickening of curiosity. And Borneo was a banquet for the curious.

  Late summer, my father received an old copy of the Post. He read aloud to us over dinner. “America is so polarized,” he said. “Some are afraid it will explode. A commission assigned to study the situation stated the divisions were ‘as deep as any since the Civil War,’ and might ‘jeopardize the very survival of the nation.’ Nixon had ordered secret surveillance of his critics. One senator described the Nixon crowd as having a ‘Gestapo mentality.’”

  Washington seemed so far away.

  Several times with an English family—Mr. Sanderson was the head accountant for the East Malaysian government—we took trips to Giam, a spot by a jungle stream about an hour from Kuching, where there was a lovely waterfall cascading through the deeps of green. While the Sanderson girls, Moira and Daphne, and Andy and I took turns shrieking under the waterfall, the mothers prepared the picnic. Mrs. Sanderson opened a huge wicker hamper. Inside, to our astonishment, were porcelain plates and silver flatware. Next, Mrs. Sanderson opened up a huge thermos. Inside was a delicious curry made by the family’s cook. With flowered plates in our laps and silver spoons in our hands, we sat sweltering in the heat under an umbrella of singing green, eating a curry made of all the spices of the world.

  Like Clive, brown-eyed, short curly-haired Daphne welcomed me into her life as another English speaker her age. Clive, Daphne, and I made a threesome.

  Daphne and Moira had been sent from Borneo to England to boarding school from the age of six and it so happened they would be leaving for England on the same day (in a couple of weeks) that Andy and I would be leaving for Japan. Mrs. Sanderson said to my mother, “I apologize in advance for Moira. She may well make a scene at the airport,” she said. Moira was eleven, and would not see her mother until the next summer.

  My mother replied, “Don’t apologize for Moira. When I send Sara and Andy off, you’re going to see me bawling! Moira and I can bawl together.”

  Time slid toward the end of August—and our departure. A part of me wished I could stay in Kuching for the year, study by correspondence, take treks on the weekends, but another part of me was excited about boarding school and seeing Japan—my birthplace. I had the romantic notion that boarding school would be wonderful—like Putney School in Vermont, a free school I’d read about at Sidwell where teenagers built barns, created their own government, and learned by following their noses.

  My mother welled up at the drop of a hat these days, even though she was delivering us to school, while my father kept pooh-poohing our dread. “Oh, I envy you,” he said. “You’re going to love Japan.” My father had always spoken of Japan with a dreamy hush in his voice—as if Japan held a secret that could be found nowhere else—something to do with Japanese block prints, with Mt. Fuji, with monks holding gnarled staffs. It was the place where he fell in love with the world.

  In the moist, orchid-blooming warmth, my father sat us down in the corner of the living room a couple of days before we left. He looked at us square. “This is very unlikely to happen,” he said, “but I want you to know what to do if you were to be kidnapped.” He had told us that there was an almost infinitesimally small possibility that a CIA officer’s child might be abducted in order to obtain information or money from the officer, or to pressure the officer’s government.

  “If you were to be taken captive just tell your captors everything you know. I haven’t told you anything of value, so, pretty soon they should figure out you’re of no worth to them and set you free.” My father presented this as though it was simple fact, a mooring for him and us to tie up to. (Only three decades later, with teenage children of my own, would I be able to imagine what it must have been like for my parents to fear for their children’s safety in this way.)

  He shifted again, reaching out his arms. “Now, don’t be afraid at the new school, Girl. Just be yourself. They’ll love you. You conquered Sidwell. You can conquer Canadian Academy too. And you too, Jonge,” he said, hugging Andy on his other side. As always, my father’s words were gifts of freedom and release.

  As we drove down the wide, empty, jungle-lined swath to the airport, my stomach jittered. I was leaving my Kuching home as a marine guard with a lump in my throat and a stone in my pocket—stiffened with the knowledge that the Clement and other British children in Kuching had gone off to boarding school across the world since they were six. Within the hour, my mother, Andy, and I would board the Fokker Friendship for Singapore. From there we would fly to Hong Kong, switch planes, and then fly to Tokyo. From Tokyo we’d take the bullet train, an amazing train that could go two hundred miles an hour, to Kobe.

  On the tarmac, my chest started to heave when I looked up at my father’s face—so handsome and serious—to say good-bye. He put his hand on my cheek and started to say it. “You’re going to love Japan. This is another great adven—” And then he choked up.

  I hugged my father as tightly as I possibly could. He smelled so clean, his body strong and sinewy, this man: my father. Smothering my face into his chest, I gulped in the feel of his arms wrapped around me.

  When we unclasped, he picked Andy up in a big bear grapple, and I shouldered my marine corps gear. Turning away from him, as I would so many times, I felt a plunging sadness—and a fortification as I assumed his independent, jaunty stride. I fixed my eyes ahead toward the horizon and walked toward the Fokker Friendship purring on the airfield.

  Book 6

  MOSS

  Kobe and tokyo, Japan,

  1970–1972

  20

  gaijin

  Japan was where I found my truth—which was buoying, and where my father found his—which was devastating. Neither of us had been looking for the information that came to hand. Mine landed out of the blue and his chased him down.

  At Kobe train station, we took a taxi to Canadian Academy (CA), trying to pronounce the school’s name to the cabbie as a Japanese person would: Cah-nah-dee-anu Ah-cah-day-mee. The car beeped and twisted its way through the tight-packed streets, and then up onto the ridge that flanks the city. From this elevation we could behold the wide, modern urban jumble below.

  Abruptly, the cab swerved to the left off the main boulevard, and started climbing a road so steep it felt as though we were going to fall off backward. The cab driver swore and rubbed one hand up and down his head. He ground the car into the lowest gear, and my mother, Andy, and I looked at each other and c
rossed our fingers. Finally, about a mile up, the cab turned right and passed through a pair of stone pillars and onto a campus perched on a terrace partway up the still-rising mountain, where the buildings stopped. Beyond, I could see an intriguing graveyard rambling up the slope, and then scattered trees mounting toward the summit. But ahead was a beautiful half-timbered building that looked like a Swiss hotel, with a modern wing built out one side; an old, haunted-looking house like something out of The Addams Family; a prefabricated gym; and a modern-looking building that looked like it could be a dormitory; along with playing fields. We checked in with a Japanese woman sitting at the front desk of the hotel-like edifice. This was the main classroom building, and it turned out that the girls’ dorm was the modern one while Andy’s was the moody house.

  At the genkan entry hall of the girls’ dorm—beckoned in by the house matron, a Mrs. Elliot—we placed our shoes in little cubbyholes, chose flip-flop slippers from a shelf, then proceeded into the dormitory proper. Double rooms ran along one side of the building, one after the other, with bathrooms on the opposite side.

  My room was on the third and top floor of the dorm. The room was just big enough to accommodate two twin beds, two dresser-closets, and a big window looking out onto a strip of woods headed down the mountain. The room was plain and functional, and a big question mark: my roommate had not yet arrived.

  We stayed in a hotel the first night, and then wandered around downtown Kobe—bombed to rubble during World War II and now a gleaming ultramodern skyscape of immense department stores; shimmering boutiques sporting bizarre shoes, chic frocks, and U.S. Army jackets; restaurants with frontal display cases of plastic food; and tucked-between, tiny tea shops.

  In the corner of one of these tea shops with eight or so tables, where we stopped in for a snack, was a recessed alcove in one wall in which hung a beautiful calligra-phied scroll. Below it, a low, rectangular vase supported a single spray of flowering cherry. “A tokonoma,“ my mother said. “A lot of Japanese homes have them too. They’re one of the ways the Japanese honor beauty.” The arrangement was like a Dutch still life, only not rough and wild, but exquisitely refined: a single, pristine apple as set beside a tumble of worm-eaten Dutch ones. “Shibui,“ my mother said. “That’s the word in Japan for ’simple elegance.’” This quiet, arresting nook, easy to overlook at the back of the shop, sent a ripple through me. I sensed this was a sip of the nectar my father associated with Japan.