Walking down the flagstone path to the modest brick suburban house that served as the residence of the ranking American official in Windsor, we were apprehensive about our first official occasion as a Foreign Service family abroad. The consul met us at the door, dressed in a pair of khaki shorts and nothing more. Bald, with knobby knees, bunions, and undisciplined sprouts of chest hair, he greeted us affably and invited us out onto the back porch to meet his wife and enjoy a glass of iced tea.
Also dressed in khaki shorts, but with a halter-top, she welcomed us warmly. We sat stiffly on the porch glider, which had not been oiled for some time and squeaked with every movement back and forth.
The women carried the burden of the small talk that followed, with Sheila asking the consul’s wife about her life and work. In soft tones from her native Virginia (the boss was also from there), she told us that she had been trained as a nurse, a profession that had served her well in the unhealthy climate of coastal Central America.
“I set great store by enemas, Sheila,” she said. “Whenever I’m feeling a mite puny, I just bend over and take a quart.”
The glider squeaked loudly as it moved back and forth in the dead silence that followed.
“How was your trip up to Windsor?” Sheila asked, alertly filling the void.
“Oh, we had a horrible time with our medical exam in Washington,” came the reply. “You see, neither me nor my daughter [a sallow 21-year-old who accompanied the new top couple] could produce the stool specimen required. It was Friday, and we thought we’d be stuck the whole weekend.”
The glider squeaked back and forth.
“So, what did you do next?” Sheila asked, helpfully.
“Well, my husband never suffered from this complaint. He produced a big one. We just cut it in three pieces and went on our way. That’s how we got to Windsor, Sheila!”
After a few more squeaks of the glider, we took our leave,walked to the car, drove around the corner, stopped, and broke down laughing. What have we gotten into, we wondered? Was this the same Foreign Service that produced Chip Bohlen?
Composing ourselves, we drove back to our hotel in silence.“Bend over and take a quart” became a secret family motto. But hilarity aside, our first call troubled and even shamed us. It took years before we told others of the conversation.
Management and Diplomatic Training
My colleagues were weak. The leadership example set by the new principal officer included driving the official car home each afternoon to watch Queen for a Day. The head of the visa section, a cultured and fastidious Europeanist, turned out to be an alcoholic who binged when his domineering wife was away, drinking vodka out of a paper bag in his desk drawer between visa applicants. I had not expected as the most junior of officers to have to send my supervisor home. The Consul kept the situation at arm’s length. “You handle it,” he said.
I did, and, in effect, ran the visa section. The staff, eleven .0214smart polyglot Canadian women from Ontario, Quebec, Serbia,with long experience in the Consular Service, kept me from making mistakes. I had much broader responsibility than most of my contemporaries working on one specialized kind of immigration problem in the huge visa assembly lines in Toronto, Montreal, and Rome. With immigration lawyers crossing from Detroit to push their cases, and congressional staffs a mere phone call away, I had to know the law and the procedures cold.
The flow of applicants provided endless variety. The Australian female bullwhip champion, a Polish spy, Cuban baseball players, Japanese chicken sexers, suspected Lebanese marriage frauds, and midget wrestlers were among my “clients.” I learned early one of the basic skills of diplomacy––imparting difficult news in a positive way. The cherry-cheeked grandmother had to be told that she had failed the Wasserman test for syphilis, but could get a visa after a big shot of penicillin. The middle-aged couple who had never formally wed despite twenty years together had to be told to go get quietly married during the lunch hour, lest their teen-age daughter find out she was illegitimate. The Iranian student who married an American prostitute from the pits of Detroit had to be told that this relationship would not get him into the United States or her out of jail.
Sheila and I, insular New Yorkers by birth, learned a lot about the American Middle West (two of our daughters-in-law are Michiganders). I found out how the United States and Canada manage their peaceful 4000-mile-long border, knowledge still relevant in the current age of borderless terrorism. We made lifelong friends. Our family grew, with the birth of second son Oliver in 1960. Inspired by a great folksinger named Odetta, I took up the guitar and sang to my boys, a practice that turned into a semiprofessional passion in later years.
My supervisors, such as they were, appreciated what I did for them and wrote glowing efficiency reports, which in turn convinced personnel in Washington to take a gamble and assign me to Chinese language training. We were thrilled when the word came through at the end of 1961. Reading the five-foot shelf on China during long Windsor evenings had implanted a fascination that was to last a lifetime. Two years of intensive Mandarin––one in Washington and one in Taiwan––would start us down a new path after a grim, if instructive start in the Foreign Service.
3
Learning the Chinese
Dr. Ma’s First Lesson
“You should know something important about Chinese feelings as you start your study of our language. Americans may think we are yellow, but we think you are purple.” Dr. Ma was sitting in his office under the fluorescent lights at a drab steel table that was standard Government Issue for classrooms. He wore a shawl, a scholar’s wool cap, and calligrapher’s gloves (with the fingers free) to protect against the fierce air-conditioning blast in Arlington Towers. An elderly, exiled editor of a major Catholic newspaper in Peking before the revolution, Ma was a fund of lore on Chinese attitudes, beliefs, and history. He had suffered when the Communists took over in 1949, was in poor health, and died a few months later.
Ma’s jolting description of the wide gap in perceptions that Americans and Chinese have of each other, of course, applies more widely than to mere appearance, but the sense of how strange Chinese think we look was a good place to start a long journey of learning. Later, when traveling in Taiwan and provincial Mainland cities where huge crowds would gather in the streets to ogle my family and me, I already understood that they saw us as odd zoo animals from another world.
Infant Formulas
World War II had transformed Asian language teaching. The urgent need for speakers and readers of Japanese and Chinese gave rise to a two-track system patterned after the way children learn to speak from their mothers and to read from their schoolteachers. Return to infancy was another rude shock for a twenty-five-year old.
Back in the garage at Arlington Towers at the beginning of 1962, we spent the first three weeks of our course mindlessly hearing and mimicking noises. Our mother was a language lab tape recorder. For six hours a day we drilled in class the four hundred distinct sounds that Mandarin Chinese uses to differentiate meaning. (English has twelve hundred such sounds). It was important to get the tones right. These are really directions of sound, rather than notes. The syllable ma pronounced with a high steady tone means “mother,” with a falling tone means “scold,” with a low dipping tone means “horse,” with no tone at all denotes a question mark, and so on. More dangerously, bi means “pen” with the low dipping tone and a rude word for “vagina” when pronounced high and steady.
The weeks of mime gave way to months of drill on meaning, patterns of grammar, and increasingly complex dialogues that dealt with social interaction, survival in daily situations, and later, history and economics. Seven weeks into the course we started the second track,