Born Under an Assumed Name

by Sara Mansfield Taber

  Soaking in Japanese ways through my eyes and ears and nose, I wandered through an exhibit of prints hidden away on a fashionable street in the Roppongi district. In the shrewd-eyed dragons and swirling-fingered demons of the prints, the scary, mysterious, and difficult portions of life danced. This was a relief to me. From what I’d seen, from my sojourn at Tachi, life didn’t seem to me as exclusively light-hearted and bold as Americans sometimes seemed to insist.

  On another weekend, I walked along the shoji door-lined outer veranda of an ancient Japanese farmhouse, its roof thatched and its body hunkered close to the ground. Inside, its ceilings were an exquisite lace of dark, aged beams. In stocking feet, I tiptoed along the time-smoothed wood floors, trying not to make a sound to infect the elegant quiet.

  Much later, I’d read in Tanizaki’s essay, “In Praise of Shadows” of the Japanese love of “worn beauty.” Unlike Americans, who favored the shiny, new, and bright, he wrote, the Japanese chimed to the loveliness that dwelt in the chiselings of wind and age. Further, Tanizaki wrote that his countrymen preferred “colors compounded of darkness.” “The Japanese accept darkness as inevitable,” he said, “while people in the West are always after bettering their lot.” According to him, the Japanese liked their tools, furnishings, and utensils to bear the marks of grime, soot, and weather—rather than bluffing, pushing away, blustering, or denying the effects of time and pain. The Japanese have a word for life’s intertwining of pain and beauty: aware.

  Older cultures, like Japan and the countries of Europe, who had attacks on their own soil, seemed to include in their view of life a sense of the tragic—a perspective that seemed truer to me than American bluster. America’s lopsided penchant for boundless, entrepreneurial—and only apparently innocent—optimism was what had led to disastrous wars, and to the needless sacrificing of our friends.

  Japan had once strived to dominate Asia as we were doing now. Each person, each country, was capable of both positive and negative acts, treated in both happiness and sorrow. People’s and countries’ stories tended to accent one or the other, some the glory, some the tragedy. To feel true, as in Japan, my story would always have to include both the bitter and the sweet. The terror-struck eyes of a Vietnamese girl or an American soldier, the bright orb of a tulip, the love and pain in my father’s eyes.

  One day I took tea with my friend, Sakiko, the Japanese diplomat’s daughter. Sakiko ordered us tea and bean cakes. When the kimono-clad waitress arrived with her small tray, the bean cakes were beautiful, delicate, sugary-looking mounds in pale pink and green. I nibbled one. It had a mushy texture and was far too sweet. Sakiko must have read my face. She said, “Try drinking some tea with it. It cuts the sweet.” The excellent tea did diminish the sweetness, and after a few bites, I could fully appreciate the mix of bitter tea and sweet cake.

  More revelations lay in store. One day a couple of girls came up to me near Shinjuku station and said, “May we speak Ing-rish with you?” They were identically dressed in their school uniforms: ankle-length plaid skirts, white blouses, and bobby socks. They giggled behind their hands as they asked, but they were intent.

  They asked me my name and how old I was and where I was from, question after question . . . and then they looked at their watches and said, “We are sorry but we must be going now. Thank you very much. ‘Until soon!,’ as you say in America.”

  Then, like Malaysian men, they linked hands as they went off together toward the train. Suddenly I was struck by one peculiarity of this. These Japanese girls were comfortable with being the same, and unafraid of intimacy. It wouldn’t have occurred to them to be cowboys or marines.

  But even comfort with conformity has its extreme. Japan is a fad culture—as we are, but, perhaps because of the country’s homogeneity, even more so. That year there was a Mona Lisa craze. There were Mona Lisa tea cups, hats, socks, sunglasses, blue jeans, frocks, and even sneakers. There was a rush among girls on Mona Lisa nose jobs. Then it was Mickey Mouse. What had happened to Buddhism, to the Middle Path, everything in moderation?

  The obvious faddishness of the Japanese makes an American marvel. We, after all, believe in individuality. We Americans take great pride in standing alone—even though it’s illusory. As a child, I’d gobbled this impossible ideal—and been disappointed in myself. All through my life, I had been unable to sing rounds. Every time I tried, I’d inevitably ended up singing what the person next to me was singing. I couldn’t hold independent and sing my own tune. The surrounding culture was too strong for me—and I had always criticized myself for this. I would finally, thirty years hence, become fully reconciled to culture’s compelling, shaping power—and forgive myself its hold. The truth is, we are a gregarious species. The English—whether compliant or not—are shaped by the English belief in the stiff upper lip. The Japanese—whether they wish to be or not—are influenced by their country’s belief in interdependence

  Perhaps the most important idea Japan held out to me was the lightning-bolt notion that to be sensitive could be positive. I saw this outlook in the solicitous tea shop hostesses, in the deferential girls on the streets, in the ever-considerate Japanese people I met. The Japanese seemed to have a special respect and radar for others’ feelings. To intrude or tread on another’s sentiments unwittingly was the greatest faux pas. Japanese ways were diplomats’ ways. In this aspect of Japanese culture I found confirmation. Why is it, in American eyes, that being sensitive is so much worse than its opposite?

  Japan was a salve for my past humiliations. Deep engagement was my nature, and this culture where I was born helped me come to terms with it. Years later, I’d discover a passage in the American book-of-all-books that further confirmed what I’d begun to digest in Japan—and what my father had always tried to convey to me, despite the overt messages of my culture: that it was acceptable to be downcast sometimes, to ripple with the wind: Aunt Alexandra has just admonished Scout that she ought to be “a ray of sunshine” in her “father’s lonely life . . . but,” Scout reports, “when I asked Atticus about it, he said there were already enough sunbeams in the family and to go on about my business, he didn’t mind me much the way I was.” Harper Lee’s hero believed in authentic feeling; she didn’t put up with false bluster.

  Different cultures validate different parts of you. They seep into you if you’re porous enough. Just as Japan validated subtle, nonverbal communication, Argentina and Spain, I would learn in my twenties and thirties, embraced people’s need for one another, and allowed free expression of a wide range of emotion, including difficult emotions like grief and jealousy, with an ease my culture did not. And while England shared, or was the fount of, our American emphasis on denying emotion and soldiering on—a quality both beneficial and problematic—that island offered a literary life and a delight in words I could find nowhere else. Being in another culture is protective, affirming. If you could become aware of and gather the permissions of every culture, you would probably feel most fully human of all.

  I had yet another puzzle to solve. What of my mental health? What was it that had sent me to Tachikawa and Dr. Cohen? In April, I came down with a fever and sore throat, and a doctor at the embassy dispensary gave me some medicine for my congestion. The next day, I was in PE class at school, doing gymnastics. I stood waiting my turn at the horse, and at once the room and people around me started to look fuzzy. Then, as I began my run toward the jump, I began to waver. There was the running me and then there was the removed one watching the runner. I could feel myself beginning to slip. Instead of flying over the hurdle, as I usually did, I jolted onto the leather top of the jump, and hung there, wobbling.

  I was afraid. Without asking questions or notifying anyone, I left school, walked to the local train station, and took the train to Tachikawa.

  In Dr. Cohen’s office—they had called him out of a meeting—I said, “It’s happening again, and I’m really anxious.” That was a word I had never used before the hospital.

  After just a couple
of minutes of my telling him what was going on, Dr. Cohen said, “I think we have our culprit. Ephedrin. I think we can say you have an allergy to ephedrin. I’ll check out the medicine you were taking before you came to the hospital just to make sure, but I’d put a million dollars on it.” Once this was confirmed, he went on to say that my case had puzzled everyone. My symptoms had never added up to schizophrenia, the dreaded psychotic illness that often launched itself at just my age, but they’d still been nervous about the possibility.

  By the time I left his office it was as though my world had turned from black to lemon. I felt bouncy even through the fuzziness. I was not inherently flawed after all. My sickness had been a fluke. Deus ex machinas occur in real life.

  Over the next weeks, Dr. Cohen coached me on how to handle this new information. “I don’t think I have to tell you that it would be best if you never take mind-altering drugs of any kind. Your brain is sensitive, and you’d be taking a risk.

  “Avoid ephedrin,” he said. “Check all medicine labels and I think you’ll be fine. I think the mystery of What Happened to Sara Taber? is solved.”

  This meeting with Dr. Cohen was a profound relief: my mental confusion had been caused by an external, physical influence, not an organic, mental one. Not only did this confirm that I didn’t have anything inherently wrong with me, but showed me that the American idea, that we should be unaffected by circumstances, was the true straitjacket. My whole life I’d thought I should be able to be unaffected by things outside myself, if I just exerted enough willpower or kept a stiff enough upper lip. Now I knew that to be affected by circumstances outside my control—whether a chemical change or a change of culture—was unavoidable and human. I didn’t have to castigate myself for feeling more comfortable in one place than another.

  This conversation also made me wonder: If a drug could transform me into another person, how stable was identity, or personality? We Americans are supposed to have selves as solid as the granite presidents at Mount Rushmore but, in fact, who we are might be a pin’s prick from crumbling. I was also struck by how a particular piece of information could alter your whole outlook, your whole sense of things. By resolving a conflict I’d been struggling with my whole life, this information about ephedrin gave me power. A sense of confidence replaced my long-standing feeling of inadequacy. I would soon see that the influx of information could work both ways. My father would shortly come by a piece of knowledge that would lead to a decline only ended by his death.

  How odd life is. What would I have missed if the lightning bolt had not hit and sent me to Dr. Cohen? Who would I have been?

  One afternoon toward the end of school, a ballerina friend of mine took me to her tea ceremony lesson. First, we sat in the sublime, impeccable hush of a small, tatami-matted room furnished only with a tiny, footed tray. We two American girls waited, completely quiet, and watched as the teacher—a beautiful seagull of a woman in a fine kimono, her eyes downcast—swirled the powdery green tea in an elegant earthen cup, in that pristine and lovely Japanese ritual.

  Afterward, exchanging formal bows and warm thanks with the suddenly spunky-eyed teacher, Tammy took me to the next room: the teacher’s workroom. Just adjacent to the elegant, Spartan tea ceremony chamber was a garage-sized atelier crammed with stuff: toppling piles of ikebana vases, buckets, tumbles of cloth, canned food, books, plants, parasols, bicycles, baskets: all the jumble of the world. Restraint and extravagance—both—mingled in this nondescript, revelatory Japanese house. This refined Japanese woman grabbed all the best of the world.

  Here and now, seventeen, in Japan, I kicked away the artificial notion of belonging to one country and insisted on being more than one thing: I can be American and I can be Japanese. I can be an outgoing American girl who wears ripped jeans and runs, shouting, with her friends down the street, devil-may-care. And I can be demure and Japanese, shawled in mauve, attuned to the sounds of brooks and breezes, slipping out in the silky dark to view the fingernail moon. I can be both.

  Taiwan jangled and clanged, America boomed, Holland plashed, Borneo twanged, Japan shushed and tinkled. I could love all these sounds. As for my aesthetic, I could love Dutch cozy clutter, Japanese worn beauty, Taiwanese dragon-fire garishness, wild Malaysian color and fecundity. I could be sophisticated and intellectual, and earthy and casual.

  Japan had given me myself: I could be both American and Japanese—and Dutch and Chinese. I could have my cake and eat it too.

  My creed could be curiosity about the world.

  23

  the emissary

  Almost exactly a year after my hospitalization, my father, my mother, Andy, and I watched Nixon’s arrival in China on television. A momentous event, Nixon’s handshake with Zhou Enlai bridged twenty-two years of hostility. Chipmunk-cheeked Nixon and thick-browed Zhou announced a “long march together” for peace. That handshake must surely have provoked in my father and his CIA colleagues some consternation about their careers. What did this concord mean about the way they had spent the last twenty years? Had all the effort devoted to frustrating the Chinese, all the sturm und drang, been worthwhile?

  Nixon proclaimed this “the week that changed the world.” He promised to reduce American military presence in Taiwan in exchange for peace in Vietnam. My father said, “I agree with Nixon on one point: this new warming of U.S.-Chinese relations does alter the world balance of power.”

  The thaw in China-America relations was radical, but there was small change on the ground in Southeast Asia. Both the USSR and China were supporting the North Vietnamese, and a big offensive was building. By March 30, the North Vietnamese had launched a huge offensive across the DMZ and were trying to seize as much territory as possible. My father reported to us that enormous losses had been incurred on both sides. The North had lost many thousands of men, but they had occupied large portions of the South (and thus successfully laid the groundwork for the final push yet to come). Defense Secretary Laird claimed success, but the North presciently announced that the South was not sufficiently willing to sacrifice in order to win the war.

  At these two sets of events, I rejoiced and grieved, holding in my breast these unruly emotions that seemed like the heart and lungs of the earth.

  While relations were opening up in foreign affairs, there remained in the Taber household mysteries unsolved. What had my parents’ hushed and fervent discussions of Mr. Smith amounted to? What of Lee, the man whose mention flashed a dark wash through my father’s eyes?

  My father had been enjoying Japan—grabbing print shows at his lunch hour, walking temple grounds, gazing at Mount Fuji rising godlike through the clouds. As usual, every day, he swallowed his dogged career frustrations and silenced himself like a good soldier, as his job and country required. By this point, he felt he deserved, at least, a promotion to a GS-16 if not an appointment as CIA station chief somewhere in the world. He put on a brave face—like most American children were taught to do as they ate their Rice Krispies and drank their orange juice in the morning—although the frustration at not properly advancing in his career, which had trailed him since I was small, must have been supreme.

  In the face of the CIA’s brutalities and his anguish about his own, to me very fuzzy, participation in dubious acts, and diminished by the Agency’s lackluster treatment of him, my father had, nevertheless, made his best effort to be one of those who can transcend unfairness and destruction. At this point, I might have said of my father what the nurse of The English Patient noted about the dying man in her charge.

  She knows this man beside her is one of the charmed, who has grown up an outsider and so can switch allegiances, can replace loss. There are those who are destroyed by unfairness and those who are not. If she asks him he will say he has had a good life—his brother in jail, his comrades blown up, and he risking himself daily in this war.

  But constantly swallowing foulness and moral frustration is not sufficient nourishment. Eventually the empty belly insists. How little we acknowledge
the man in the middle—the man crushing his disappointments, tamping down his careful judgments, smothering his true feelings, disguising his true self for some greater cause, or the man stuck in the wrong job—perhaps the story of most men, not just those locked inside secrets.

  But that middleman role, at the world’s most secret organization, must be particularly suffocating. It wouldn’t be until I read about life at the Agency in my fifth decade that I’d realize how crass, ruthless, and demeaning the Agency could be—depending on the executive branch of the moment. Under authority-loving presidents, agents and officers alike are used and cast off like plastic sacks. When useful for the American policy, they are pumped full of pure oxygen. When their ideas differ from the current ideology, they object to a dirty scheme or a certain set of lies or another man’s shaky but career-enhancing ploy, they are muzzled or disposed of.

  For his family’s sake, my father had sucked in his frustrations about his career and his boss’s aggressions and diminishments, and soldiered on, making the best. Where did my father belong? Probably at a college somewhere, in an old wooden office.

  But here was my father, going along, as I imagine him, meeting Japanese men in out-of-the-way tea shops, conducting briefcase exchanges in tiny art galleries, fairly serenely doing his duty at his post. There wasn’t much to trouble him about trying to influence the Japanese media. It could be justified.

  Then this happened. Another truth knocked at the door, identified the thorn. It was April, around the time Nixon authorized bombing by B-52s near Hanoi, and intensified bombing of the North. The American president kept up his false, optimistic front in the failing war, pronouncing that only by bombing could we achieve “peace with honor.”

  My father returned from the embassy this dark night, and his face was a wreck. He hugged me as usual, but something had shifted. I could feel it in his body: a wound, a tremor. Later, from behind the dining room wall, I heard him and my mother talking in the narrow, dark, wood-paneled back hallway that divided the dining and living room side of the house from the kitchen and maid’s quarters. It was a secret passage in which spies would hide or down which prisoners would escape.