It would have been far better if my father had exploded. Instead of breaking out of his walls, he shrank himself down, like Ken at Tachikawa, so as not to feel so keenly their encroachment. He’d received the message: individuals don’t matter in the grinding of the geopolitical machine. A man used to being invisible, he just went one better. After a while, even his body seemed to assert: I am nothing. I am disposable. My soul, my talents, and my loves have no importance. I have been, and will be, just a tool for others with more forceful agendas.
Pathology—self-silencing—can be a sanctuary, the only way, sometimes, to express the truth when it is forbidden. The truth is slippery, but once we give up what we do know, what do we have? This is what my father, the spy, gave to his daughter.
So sick at the end, he became a whisper—until, one day, he could no longer be heard. My father, man of mist.
24
my america
On May 20, during my last month of high school, Nixon attended a summit meeting with Brezhnev. After three years of negotiation, President Nixon and Premier Brezhnev now signed the SALT agreement. They had agreed to limit production of the defensive anti-ballistic missiles and to a freeze on missile launchers. It appeared that the superpowers were learning to cooperate. Preparation for global annihilation would continue—an agreement on offensive weapons had not been reached. But Nixon was now viewed all over the world as a champion—China had been opened and detente forged with the USSR.
As tricky Nixon gloried, via his duplicity, my father struggled in the quicksand of his.
Again, events seem paired, white with black.
In June, near graduation, a stark and horrifying photo was beamed around the globe. It was the picture of a naked girl fleeing a Vietnamese village that had been bombed with Napalm. This picture illuminated, with harsh noon light, the shedding of values that rides sidesaddle with bombs.
As I shuttled to and from the American School in Japan on the crowded, hot train, pressed between perspiring bodies, glimpsing the stacked blocks of the Tokyo outskirts, I thought of the girl from the burned village—who blurred into the raggedy girl—and what it meant about being American and a patriot.
To stand with your shoulders back as an American was a tall order. The United States of America had wrought destruction all over the world during the past century. If with great power comes great responsibility, we had ignored ours too often. Up to the age of thirteen, I’d treasured the notion that my country had a nobility unsurpassed by others. The Vietnam war had put this faith to a stringent test.
After living thirty more years, after Chile, Afghanistan, and Iraq, it would be even clearer to me that we were no better than any other country, especially under conditions of war. War is the great leveler—the lowest common denominator.
But, to give my country the benefit of the doubt, neither, perhaps, was America worse than other countries in positions of supremacy. A look at any dominant culture’s history—that of the Romans, the English, the Belgians—suggests that power releases a ruthless imperialistic urge, a lust for hegemony.
Ruth, the wise girl who had introduced me to Mishima’s novel of early love at the tea shop the previous year, had also brought to my attention the master writer’s harsh side. Mishima was a potent and haunting figure to American students, as a man preoccupied with face and honor and who vaunted the ancient Japanese practice of hara-kiri. Not a day passed when some boy at my schools in Kobe or Tokyo didn’t commit the last act. He’d stab his imaginary dagger into his breast, then—eyes rolling, beginning to stagger—he’d drag the knife in the excruciating, holy, death-dealing square: left, down the left side, right across the gut, up the right side and back to the heart. Then the torso-clutching and the agonized, melodramatic collapse. And, of course, the loyal retainer always stood by ready to lop off his head if by some chance, this maneuver failed to kill the actor.
Ruth lit a cigarette and said at the time, as if it was self-explanatory, “Oh, Mishi-ma is in touch with the underside of Japan. Japan is a country that is known for its serenity and beauty, but smoldering, concealed underneath is a terrible sense of honor and pride—and ferocious violence. Mishima is an ode to violence. He is a terrifying man himself, and in tune with the Japanese potential for explosive, blind aggression. I think he’s brilliant.”
In a tapping of her cigarette, my young-old friend had revealed the smoky side of Japan, cloaked under the bright brocade cloth. She made me see my new-old country from a new visage: Not only America was warlike. There was potential for violence everywhere.
But still, here at the end of my senior year, it seemed to me, Americans were an especially warlike people. We had, after all, assumed the role of the world’s armory. The American penchant for arrogant, unilateral aggression upset me. It seemed to me that we were extravagant: yes, perhaps extravagantly open to newcomers—but also extravagantly violent.
Over the past two years, I had learned something important from Japan, something that made me take a hard look at America’s propensity for hubris and riding roughshod over continents.
One day in Tokyo, when yet another pair of bobby-socked Japanese girls approached me to speak English, with the eagerness that had once annoyed Annie and me, the picture flicked in the frame and the Japanese girls seemed delightfully eager to learn about another culture—and humble in their thirst. An American might ask, Where is the pride of these people? But the Japanese were hungry—maybe a devastating defeat has this consequence—and they were willing to do what it took to obtain the knowledge they desired. A measure of humility—an admission of not yet knowing—is required for learning, and the Japanese girls weren’t afraid of this. Put them beside the American man who won’t ask for directions, or a president who won’t look at the complex truth about the country he’s labeled his enemy.
Another experience of Japanese humility: at a Christian-Zen commune Andy and I visited one long weekend, the residents undertook a pilgrimage at the turn of each new year. For a week, to assure their own humility, they donned monks’ robes, packed their begging bowls in knotted furoshiki-carrying scarves, and walked into the cities and farmlands, offering to clean residents’ toilets in exchange for a bowl of rice.
At this same commune, the resident sage gave me a healing massage and then, as he chanted, delivered me his verdict, “Your country need to improve. America need to find humility.”
Frequently my family and I stopped at the gleaming chrome bakeries that dotted Tokyo. The pastries were always superb. The humble, eager Japanese bakers had mastered not only French patisserie, but also German kuchen and American donuts. When I would interview master bakers in France as an adult, they would admit that the Japanese could bake a baguette as fine as the French, and sometimes finer.
On this same theme, my major professor in graduate school at Harvard would describe to me Japanese anthropologists’ behavior at international conferences. “They’re always very quiet during the talks, and never ask questions during a lecture, but invariably, afterward, two or three Japanese will come up to me and they’ll have the most trenchant and insightful responses of anyone there. The Japanese learn what we have to offer and then do us one better.” It seemed to me that the Japanese propensity for humble absorption was a great strength, and a source of power. And it could be ours.
To be excellent, as I drew from these experiences, America did not have to be pompous and bellicose. As I’d learned at Tachi, it takes greater courage and strength to be receptive and humble, to admit shortcomings and try something new—which this is ultimately more successful—than to bluster, act cocky, and obfuscate. If open and receptive, we could learn from the Japanese’s sense of humility and reverence for beauty and craft; the Netherlander’s social ethic; the bracing aphorisms and radical, if flawed, attempts at equality of the Chinese. We could soak up lessons from other cultures, and be the stronger for it. It didn’t have to be either-or: My country right or wrong. My country do or die. American or Japanese. American or Dutch. A
merican or Chinese. In my vision, America could include.
This is my America: A country that is self-respecting, strong, humble, curious, receptive, empathic, generous, truthful, and wise. A tolerant, plural, cosmopolitan place bound by diplomatic civility. Rather than the tribal, enemy-requiring, “fear and spear” patriotism Senator John Kerry and others have described, our love of country could be large enough and hope-filled enough to embrace all human beings. We could stand for the principles of universal human rights; excellent education for all; generous care for the downtrodden, jobless, sick, and old; and diplomacy and peace. Ours could be a mature love of country. Not the callow infatuation that requires thrill and fireworks to sustain itself, but the deeper love and faith of long-term loves, characterized by self-criticism, adjustment and compromise, and the constant effort to move closer to embracing the whole, complicated messy truth.
If, as William James contends, in his aforementioned 1906 essay, “The Moral Equivalent of War,” “the popular imagination fairly fattens on the thought of wars,” an “equivalent of war,” an outlet for the martial urge, must be provided if there is to be any hope of peace. James’s answer to the human need to work with others toward something glorious is the universal conscription of youth:
To coal and iron mines, to freight trains, to fishing fleets in December, to dishwashing, clotheswashing . . . to foundries and stoke-holes, and to the frames of skyscrapers, would our gilded youths be drafted off, according to their choice, to get the childishness knocked out of them, and to come back into society with healthier sympathies and soberer ideas. They would have paid their blood-tax, done their own part in the immemorial human warfare against nature; they would tread the earth more proudly.
James’s answer still holds. If the martial urge needs to be fed, through conscription we might marshal a youth corps to battle the ongoing worldwide challenges of poverty, ignorance, illness, and environmental degradation. As James said at the beginning of the twentieth century, “It would be simply preposterous if the only force that could work ideals of honor and standards of efficiency into English or American natures should be the fear of being killed by the Germans or the Japanese.”
In my vision, America sees itself as part of a community of nations, an integral and wise member of the mutually caring group of nations rather than the fearful, pugnacious, renegade wolf prowling outside the circle of wagons. E pluribus unum. Not E pluribus plures.
In my ruminations about cultures, it appeared to me that America and Americans, like all countries and all nationalities, of course had some unique and glorious attributes. America was the land of free speech and thought. America, founded on a rejection of power and authority and the casting-out of kings, was the place in the world where a person could say what he believed and where having divided sentiments didn’t make him unpatriotic or a traitor. A fervent American fourteen-year-old could letter a sign of protest and march for her ideals. To question the status quo was essentially American, to love America was to want it to be the best it could be—and America was a safe place to ask for the best.
America, too, was the place that promised—and delivered on the promise of—a better life. It was the place a poor young couple could land and know that, through the solid, free American schooling, their children could improve their lot. America was the land of possibility. A pair from humble Midwestern roots could, with the GI bill and hard work, get college degrees, move into the upper middle class, and serve their country, as could all those immigrants swearing their allegiance to America in courtrooms across the continent.
America also offered, infinitely, the opportunity for creativity, innovation, and spontaneity. All through my life as a child, and this continued as an adult, when I returned from abroad, a sense of exhilaration flooded through me: a sense of certainty that in America you could conjure and then materialize dreams. In other, more tradition-bound countries, playing it safe, avoiding imposition at all costs, never taking chances were the watch words. Class and propriety were determinative and paramount. Americans were less bound by these strictures, and this allowed them an unusual adventurousness.
In addition, Americans were a wonderfully welcoming people. Upon my childhood arrivals at American airport immigration desks, the officer would always issue a hearty “Welcome home!” and my heart would sing—and upon my adult returns from Latin America or Europe I would always heave a huge sigh of relief to be back in the land where you could wear an old T-shirt and jeans and still receive respect, and where people’s predisposition was friendliness. Of his 1950 departure from America, the Czech poet Czeslaw Milosz wrote, “That was probably the most painful decision of my life. . . . During my four-and-a-half-year stay, I had grown attached to this country and wished it the best. . . . I had never come across so many good people ready to help their neighbor, a trait that would be all the more valued by this newcomer from the outer shadows, where to jump at one’s neighbor’s throat was the rule.”
I had reaped from my country-hopping childhood a deep fascination and respect for other cultures, and a staunch belief that all cultures have their own vital integrity. While America was exceptionally open and rich in opportunities, I’d concluded by now, it was no better than any other country. Japan, China, and Holland maximized certain human potentials, and we others—all equally important and valid contributions to the human stew.
What was the personal legacy of all this? The truth is, all my travels would leave me, rather than sated, insatiable: craving other cultures and the stories of other people’s lives. At times during my life this tendency would seem a healthy passion, at other times an addiction. In college, I would spin lives in the air like plates. In graduate school, I would study cross-cultural human development, a blend of psychology and anthropology—as close to traversing and tromping the world as I could figure out.
After my globe-sprawling childhood, it would be hard for me to pledge allegiance to a single country. A mobile, international childhood breeds little loyalty to particular nationalities or institutions. What is national loyalty and pride? What are they good for? While they afforded some protection, they mostly got countries into trouble, it seemed to me. Of course it is important to identify with something larger than yourself, to take responsibility and to seek to help your fellow human beings, but why should this stop at a border?
At seventeen in 1972, as I fantasized about staying in Japan forever, I was in danger of idealizing Japan as I had the United States at ten, but the fact was, Japan wasn’t all sweet cakes and being a gaijin could be tough.
Some of the very things I loved were the ones that grated most. The Japanese absorption I admired, for instance, was another two-sided matter. On the one hand, the Japanese girls on the street were like supplicants. They stood very close as they talked to me, seeming almost childlike. But, though their eyes looked innocent, there was also something imperative and powerful about their interest. They wanted to drink us in. It was flattering, but it also felt dangerous. Like they were undercover competitors, thieves, or spies.
I hated, also, their pushy indirectness. They seemed to always say “yes” when they meant “no.” And while I appreciated them, I also disliked the stiffness of all the rituals and formality. The Japanese always seemed proper and calibrated, never spontaneous. You had to read between the lines too much and I couldn’t decipher the lemon juice. What did they really think? I felt like I’d never know. I disliked this Japanese extreme indirectness as intensely as I did extreme U.S. brashness.
Then there were the red-faced, drunken businessmen on the train. They stood close to me, breathing into my face, trying to feel me, as though they had a right to me. Being a gaijin girl was sometimes quite unpleasant.
My ballet class also unsettled me. Three days a week I took dance lessons at a studio two subway stops from home. In the tiny changing room, beside the petite, slim-hipped Japanese girls, I changed into my regulation leotard and pink ballet slippers. The girls hung up their middy-style uniforms
, and I hung up my jeans and loose, flowery batik shirts.
In class, in the empty room with the barre looking out over the city ten stories below, we lined up to do our jetés and our twirls. But unlike my ballet classes in America, we performed in order of our mastery. The single boy in the class, and I, the lone American, were the class klutzes. We were always last, and following after the well-practiced pairs of girls in front of us, we were gangling, gawky giraffes.
Removing our leotards after class, a girl asked me, “Don’t you take singing too? Do you practice everyday?” For me, ballet was a way to get exercise, and maybe acquire some grace along the way. For the Japanese girls, this was serious business. In Japan, I realized, you did nothing except all the way, aiming for precise mastery, toward some external goal. It seemed there was no such thing as casual, or “just for fun.” This was the freedom of America: dabbling.
And then there was this, perhaps most perplexing of all: the homogeneity of the culture. An American could never melt in. You could never not be a gaijin in Japan. Everywhere I went, I heard that word whispered as people looked at me. Whether I wanted to be or not, I was stuck with being American. It is logical and exhilarating to declare oneself a citizen of the world. But until that day when the boundaries vanish, we are all stuck with our passports. This is the bitter and the sweet.
And there was growing up as a spy’s daughter. As with charm, beware of secrets. As for those raised by mythic, famous parents, growing up in a mythic organization of a mythic country bestowed me blindness and burdens. The romance of the Agency: I see it in the faces of proud CIA kids who’d be horrified at their father’s involvements if they looked closely. CIA operations officers are basically missionaries with money and explosives. The romance of secrecy walks hand in hand with the headlongness of aggression.
Born Under an Assumed Name Page 44