Twenty-Two
Yield and overcome;
Bend and be straight;
Empty and be full;
Wear out and be new;
Have little and gain;
Have much and be confused.
Therefore wise men embrace the one
And set an example to all.
Not putting on a display,
They shine forth.
Not justifying themselves,
They are distinguished.
Not boasting,
They receive recognition.
Not bragging,
They never falter.
They do not quarrel,
So no one quarrels with them.
Therefore the ancients say, “Yield and overcome.”
Is that an empty saying?
Be really whole,
And all things will come to you.
—LAO TSU, TAO TE CHING
Lily, the thrush-voiced girl from the dorm, and Annie and I, Will and his brother, and some other students—most of us had come from the United States recently—had been talking in the cafeteria about the Vietnam War and American consumerism and America’s aggressive stance in the world, and we wanted to awaken our, to us apathetic, fellow students to these threats. With Dr. Mead as advisor, we inaugurated the Social Change Workshop. We started designing a slide show that would reveal to the students all the contradictions at play in the world. We began collecting photographs of Vietnamese children whose homes had been blown up, of American soldiers, of huge gas-guzzling American cars, of peaceful Japanese streams. In the structured context of these meetings, I found I could talk comfortably with Will, and successfully hide my feelings from myself as well as from him.
Andy was also in the workshop. My brother had come into his own. He had a good friend named Ian. Andy wore an Arlo Guthrie hat, the brown velvety corduroys my mother had made for us in Kuching, and a loop of sailing rope around his neck above his open-collared chambray shirt. At dinner, we sometimes sat together and traded our parents’ letters. We even shared friends, and sometimes gallivanted out for noodles together on the weekends. Alone in this foreign country, with our shared heritage as offspring of an American “diplomat,” we were knitted together. Some secrets make you strong.
Annie and I were downtown shopping on a Saturday afternoon. We browsed in Sogo Department Store and then wandered through the dingy open market stalls under the train tracks. Walking in the semi-darkness, trains rattling overhead, we fingered knock-off Levi jeans, tie-dyed T-shirts, tooled leather belts: coolness that could as easily be found in The Hague or Washington as here in the bottomlands of Kobe, one of the Japanese cities we Americans had firebombed with B-29s during the war. I bought a pair of imitation Lee jeans at half the American price. It was the same everywhere: Japanese Irish sweaters, Japanese Clarks desert boots, Japanese American University t-shirts. Blasting American music.
And everywhere we went, Japanese schoolgirls, in uniforms and rolled-down white bobby socks over their buckle shoes, came up to us, wanting to practice their English. “Will you speak Ing-rish with me? Will you speak Ing-rish with me?” They seemed so young and eager, even though they were probably our age. Annie and I rolled our eyes to each other when we saw them coming, but we patiently talked to them, indulging their adoration of our country. It would take me another year to see the Japanese girls’ curiosity in a different light.
Along with the schoolgirls, men with sophisticated Nikons frequently stopped us on the street, wanting to photograph us: against a brick wall, against a temple backdrop, with their arms lightly around our shoulders. They’d send us the photos later, showing themselves proudly at our sides. I wondered what they told their families about the gaijin girls in the photographs. Sometimes Annie and I were asked to model for shops and magazine ads. Once Annie decided to take one of the offered modeling jobs. Pantyhose packets appeared with her long legs positioned fetchingly on the shiny cellophane.
At times when these men approached us I put on the blinders I’d learned to use in Taiwan and pretended I didn’t see them. I told Annie, “Let’s hurry before they catch us.” The attention made me uneasy. There was something uncomfortable—and uncomfortably flattering—about the way the Japanese men admired gaijin looks, about how all these Japanese men wanted Caucasian girlfriends when there were plenty of pretty and sweet Japanese girls around. On the other hand, perhaps it is natural to admire different sorts of faces—for the GIs to be taken by the exotic beauty of Vietnamese women, for instance.
Though I loved Japan, and hated American foreign policy, I was secretly proud. All this admiration and imitation proved, despite our mistakes, American worth. We were the country everyone wanted to be like. And it’s easy to reject your country when it’s a given that you’re on top.
Mid-fall, Annie and I were talking in her family’s kitchen, baking banana bread, and listening to James Taylor’s “Fire and Rain.” As we listened, Annie told me about James Taylor’s hospitalization at McLean Mental Hospital outside Boston. I was intrigued by this story of someone who’d turned so sad at losing his beloved that he’d wound up needing special care. Perhaps because I had lost so many people and had felt the frayed hems of depression, the romance of emotional illness once again stole into me—but I never imagined it, really, touching me. I was still the marine, and psychiatry was for weak people.
All autumn, I wrote lots of letters on onion skin paper—to Clive, to Daphne, to Sara—trying to hold on to people, to prevent them from wisping away. In November I received a blue aerogram, a tri-fold of Oxford cloth blue, with gummed fold-over flaps, another cheap way to post letters abroad. The return address on the letter read Albemarle Street. Sara wrote that Lt. William Calley had gone on trial in Georgia for the My Lai massacre. She said the war was still horrific. . . . But her biggest news was that she had a new boyfriend. “We made out in Hedley’s rec room. It was wonderful. I got home all flushed and my mother, said, as usual, ’Have you been smoking marijuana?’”
I felt suddenly very alone—as though I’d been left at the top of the slide at the salt mines in Berchtesgaden. My friends were disappearing down a chute into the deep unknown and I was still standing exposed in the open air, holding childhood in my hands.
Deep in the night, in the pool of light from the small goose-necked lamp on my desk, Gretel asleep two feet away, I suddenly saw a cool, winter light flicking upon the cresting waves of the North Sea. I was standing on the beach at Scheveningen looking out over the ocean, my parents nearby on the strand. Suddenly I missed my parents with my whole body. They were two figures who had always been there whenever I needed them. I yearned for one of my mother’s Chinese meals. I longed for a walk with my father—to talk about the Japanese hush.
At the intimacy of my dusky desk, as I did three or four nights a week, I wrote to my mother and father. “. . . Annie and I are collecting Life magazine photos of the war and this guy is making them into slides. It’s going to be really cool. . . . I’m reading The Tao Te Ching. Have you ever read it, Pop? . . . How is Hipni, Mom? Have you had curry puffs lately? . . . What do you think I should do when kids tell me they’re taking drugs? Some of these missionary kids are really messed up. . . . I love Japan. You were right. It’s so beautiful. . . .”
My mother wrote letters every day or two. About the adorable children she worked with at the Cheshire Home, and about her and my father’s adventures. “We went down the river to a longhouse. We had to drink that awful rice wine with maggots in the bottom. And then the chief offered Pop the oldest virgin. Her lips were colored red from all the betel nut. . . . We went to Capit and our room was infested with flies. . . .” She loved all these semi-miserable, fascinating adventures. My mother said she and my father listened to the pirated tape we had had made of Step-penwolf, Jefferson Airplane, and Crosby Stills & Nash in the evenings, and cried.
My father wrote to me of meals with Chinese men, and the trips he took to find out about the Communist insurgents
. I pictured him eating dumplings in a dirty café near the market, gesturing with his chopsticks to a slick-haired Chinese man—or I imagined him with his staff, hiking briskly down a jungle path with his white tennis hat on his head, and then conversing with the village chief in a hut. I envisioned him listening intently to the Chinese growling from the shortwave radio in the bedroom, and leaving money for an informant in a rattan basket of orchids. Busy in my life, I conveniently forgot about the man, Lee, and Mr. Smith.
To my questions, my father always wrote back, “Trust yourself, Girl. Look inside yourself. You’ll always know what’s right.” He seemed happy; Borneo was always tossing adventures in front of a person. He told me not to worry about the war. Nixon was winding it down.
My parents’ letters made me feel strong.
Life was good.
One Saturday, Andy, Dottie (the girl who’d smoked marijuana to escape the thought of her father’s wrath), and I, all of us in a silly mood and inspired by the health-food craze, collected pine cones in the strip of woods bordering the graveyard, washed them in the girls’ dorm kitchen sink, and then set them to boil with ramen in a pot. The broth tasted disgusting, but the noodles were fine. Giddy as eight-year-olds, we sang a made-up song about pine cone soup.
Arriving home to Kuching for Christmas, I felt stalwart as a Brit. My father was brown and relaxed. Mostly he seemed contented, taking each day as it came, drinking Chinese beer. My mother too was invigorated. She was in her element, working with children with disabilities and adults with leprosy.
They regaled us with tales of their adventures and mishaps. One week, they had traveled in a raft of dugouts toward Kalimantan deep into the jungle, where the Communist insurgency was thickening. My father had received instructions to find out what he could about this Communist force deep in the rainforest. My mother said, “The oarsmen of our boats were trembling with their guns, Sara. We had no idea where the insurgents might appear. They were hidden with guns all along both sides of the river. It was really scary.” My father did not contradict her. Perhaps this was one of the incidents to which my mother was referring when, years later, she would draw her hand across her face tiredly and comment that their life in the Agency had too often been frightening.
One day we visited one of my father’s colleagues, a Chinese man. While we sat as ornaments to my father’s work, the man’s servants offered us a delicious sixteen-course Chinese dinner. For Christmas, we decorated a potted palm tree with tiny Iban baskets my mother had collected. On Christmas Day, which coincided this year with Eid, the end of Ramadan, we sat in the front room in good clothes among the orchids, and received visits from my parents’ friends and Malaysian officials. Hipni had made all kinds of goodies—curry puffs, herb crackers, spicy beef, which he served on a silver tray. He looked sharp in his starched white jacket. The people stayed for a punctual twenty minutes. They all had many rounds to make to friends and colleagues. The formal, familiar rounds of diplomacy were home.
My father rattled an old Washington Post. He read aloud an article on Vietnam. The article reported that the troops in Southeast Asia were plagued with loneliness, frustration, and a sense of futility. Some GIs had begun “fragging” their officers; some had killed them with “accidentally” thrown hand grenades. And the drug situation was out of control. The Army estimated that 65,000 GIs were on drugs; entire units were on heroin. The number of soldiers in combat was down to 280,000. As of now, 44,245 Americans had been killed in action, and 293,439 wounded. Little did I know how soon and how relevant these figures would be to my life.
I left Kuching strong and tanned, and fortified with love. I didn’t even have to clutch a sucking stone this time. I was a clear-eyed and indomitable soldier. I liked CA and I knew the drill.
21
tachikawa
You expect a boat to capsize once in a blue moon, but it’s unusual to pitch-pole, stern over bow, in flat calm, in the daylight.
The moment I was at my zenith, the crisis came.
Maybe I was more tortured than I’d known. People have a way of enduring, of weaving mantles that fend off worry and stress. But then sometimes the valve releases when a person is in an upswing, at her happiest and most thriving—like when a cold hits on the weekend.
Maybe sucking stones, marineing around, wasn’t going to work forever.
Maybe it was that I needed a new, more encompassing solution: some new way. Life delivers what you need. . . .
Maybe all the pieces—my country’s aggressions, the Vietnamese dying, the young GIs dying, the separation from my parents, my father’s secret, his worries, the places loved and lost, the years of marginality and the endless trying, the shyness, the perfectionism, the strain of being a marine, and James Taylor—all got poured into a big cauldron at once and began to boil.
Maybe everything was too fine, too perfect—and unbeknown to me, there was a thread in the cloth that was too tight. Quietly pulling, tugging, gathering. . . .
Or maybe it was simply a case of Deus ex Machina.
Whatever it was, I was suddenly fey. One morning I awakened out of fever, and was someone else.
Since Christmas, I had been burning the candle at both ends—literally—except my candle was a flashlight. I liked everything I was doing but I was burning too brightly. I went to play rehearsal until late five nights a week; we were doing a play called Man and the Masses, about a woman trying to start a peaceful revolution among working people. Annie was the star, and I was one of the supporting witches. Despite a dragging fatigue, I stayed up past lights out, flashlight in hand, every night to study.
One night, I got a splitting headache and a raging fever. I sweated and shivered until dawn. Mrs. Elliot telephoned the missionary doctor in downtown Kobe, called me a taxi, and dispatched me off to his office. No one knew it, but I was entering an unknown country.
Riding in the small, black taxi, I was being whisked along the city streets, and the music on the driver’s screeching radio suddenly blasted James Taylor’s “Fire and Rain.” Still feverish, I felt as though I was floating inside the song.
We were in a neighborhood now of tiny, narrow twisting streets lined with tight-packed walled houses. The driver pulled up at a small, mossy-looking home with a tile roof. The waiting room was like a living room, with, as I see it, old overstuffed chairs in dim mossy-brick patterns like the streets outside.
The doctor was short and grey-colored, in a white coat. In the examining room, I could tell he didn’t like me. Perhaps he was solely used to serving missionary or Japanese children. Maybe the school didn’t call on him very often, and the sudden appearance of this embassy child was out of order. Or maybe he didn’t like the way I was dressed in my hurriedly flung-on Indian print dress with blue jeans underneath. In any case, he seemed rattled or in a hurry.
But I was woozy and aflame. He gave my body a quick runover—stethoscope, ear pokes, a peering into my eyes—and allowed that I was sick. He gave me a vial of medicine. He rushed me out, as if I were dust he wanted to sweep out the door of his examining room and then out the door of his house. He told me to look for the cab outside, down the street.
Back at the dorm, I took the pills and lay on my bed. My Singapore Airlines poster with the willowy Malay women batiked in scarlets and hot pinks was at first reassuring, but then began to waver. I looked at the small batik Ramsay gave to me, and I wanted to cry.
By the second morning, though, I was tough. I was also gone. The fever had broken—and I was a girl I didn’t know.
I took my pill, walked through my school day, did all the usual things, but everything had changed. The classrooms slanted, I could barely stay awake.
It was as if I was encased in gauze, and now, instead of being the person who inhabited my own body, I was a watching spirit, a couple of feet distant, watching my body and my mouth—now strangely charged up and vehement—do and say things that had nothing to do with me. I was also like some wise old man, stroking his chin, following myself, watchi
ng this other antic me do strange things. Inside my gauze, I was philosophical about this turn of events, oddly calm—the sense of disturbance was faint like the palest pink in a morning sky. I mused to myself throughout the hours as I watched that other me speak, “That isn’t true,” but I had a strange detachment, a sort of wait-and-see attitude about it all. None of it mattered all that much, and it was kind of interesting to watch, to see what this other Sara did. She was giddy, she was outspoken and forthright in a way I’d never been. She had a loud voice, and strode around like a pirate, all confidence and purpose and devil-may-care. She did not hesitate. But what a mess she left—for me to clean up afterward.
Things began to roll like I was in a movie. After English class, I cornered Annie and whispered, “I took acid.” Later I told her, “I got drunk in the graveyard.” It was also like watching a silent movie because the old, normal Sara was silent. She couldn’t speak. She was just watching this new one do things.
I was now the producer, the director, and the actress in my own movie, a movie of a foggy world in which I was the only salient actor.
The night of the first day I was back in school, I had play practice. Somehow, in a confused blur, I got through it. I didn’t have many lines, or maybe I didn’t have to perform—we weren’t very far along in rehearsals. I loved being one of the witches stirring the Macbeth pot, but I had a roaring headache the whole evening. I insisted on staying late even though people told me I looked tired and overwrought and should go back to the dorm. I was a fever of fatigue, restlessness, and agitation. When I finally left, the hallway out of the gym was dark. I was all alone. This was when I began to act strangely. I suddenly felt light, elated. I reached into my pocket and took out a pack of gum I had been keeping there. With a bolt of glee, I scattered the slices along the hallway. I fancied people finding them there the next day, treats waiting for them. They’d think fairies put them there.
Born Under an Assumed Name Page 37