The pace was a language marathon—six hours of class and three to four hours of homework each weekday for eleven months. My three classmates––Roger Sullivan (later deputy assistant secretary of state for East Asian affairs), Stan Brooks (later consul general in Shanghai), and Tim Manley (who served at our Embassy in Taipei)––were talented, hard working, and humorous. We became fast friends. (The process has been known to create lifelong enemies, too.) Happily, we moved along at more or less the same pace.
Our teachers were skilled and versatile. Mr. Li Tsung Mi was an erudite linguist who knew the origins of the words and ideograms and how they related to one another. Miss Ouyang Chao was an inventive discussant, who forced us to build our halting child vocabularies into real conversations. When we could say and comprehend more, Dr. Ma added substance to our education.
Dr. Ma performed another valuable service. He gave me a real Chinese name. Normally, when naming purple foreigners, the Chinese choose characters that are phonetically as close to the sound of your surname as they can find. They sound all right but don’t mean anything, and identify you clearly as a barbarian outsider. Under that formula, my name would combine three characters with the sounds pu, la, and te. Dr. Ma wanted all of us to have names that sounded roughly right but meant something to Chinese. Pu was a regular surname with only two easy-to-write strokes. To that he added li, to force or propel, and de virtue. So I have gone through life as “Self-Propelled Virtue Pu.” Chinese have always liked the name and invariably ask me how I came by it.
Singing for Kennedy
Vivid glimpses of Washington’s glitterati enlivened the plain daily grind of language learning. The advent of the Kennedy administration brought columnist Joe Alsop to the height of his influence. A World War II veteran of a Japanese internment camp in Hong Kong and service in Chungking with Flying Tiger General Chennault, Joe had strong opinions about China. He also believed he had influenced my decision to study the language and kept in close touch when we returned to the capital.
One summer morning, he telephoned to say that he was organizing a dinner for “the Young Man.” Would we join him, bring the guitar, and provide the entertainment? Sheila took the call sitting on the staircase with Windsor-born two-year-old Oliver behind her, a bottle of shampoo in his hand, poised over her head. As she struggled to guess which “young man” Joe had in mind, Oliver began to pour. Quelling him, she realized Alsop was talking about the President of the United States. The idea of singing for John F. Kennedy terrified us both (by now duets with Sheila were our best numbers), but we accepted immediately.
Georgetown was bathed in a lovely summer evening light as we approached Alsop’s house on Dumbarton Avenue, guitar case in hand, shadowed along the street by discreet well-dressed men with hearing aids. They closed in as we moved to enter the house and thoroughly inspected the guitar in the decorous Secret Service manner. Once inside, we found Joe’s closest friends, people like the British ambassador, Phil and Katharine Graham of the Washington Post, the Chip Bohlens, all straining to create a natural atmosphere for the “Young Man,” who was relaxed and cordial. Jacqueline Kennedy was in Newport, so the gorgeous Mary Meyer (later tragically murdered while jogging on the Georgetown Canal) kept the president company on this occasion. As normal for Washington parties, the talk covered all the issues of the day, particularly Medicare, which had that day failed to pass in Congress. At Joe’s after dinner roundtable, the president voiced his disappointment in no uncertain terms. Phil Graham kindly asked me if I had anything I wanted to say, in which case he would arrange for me to get a word in edgewise. I demurred, having no view on the topic.
Later in the garden, Sheila and I sang “St. James Infirmary,” “I’ll Fly Away,” and “John Henry.” The president listened politely. Attorney General Robert Kennedy, arriving late from a trip to Michigan, chinned himself in a nearby tree.
Taiwan at Last
The prospect of living and communicating in a real Chinese place had buoyed us through the long months of drudgery in Arlington Towers. We were itching for the final phase of our formal training, a year at the FSI Field School in Taiwan. Our teachers thought we were ready, too. After eleven months training in Washington, my classmates and I qualified at level 2 (out of 5). This meant that we could operate safely in a Chinese environment, but were not yet able to work professionally (level 3). We infants had become teenagers.
Sheila was eager, too, having studied the spoken language at her expense with FSI teachers in the evenings during our months in Washington. The State Department provided no money to train wives.
We had never been to Asia. The long flight to Taiwan via Hawaii and Japan with two small sons, Adam and Oliver, was a major passage for our family. We fought jet lag and culture shock in Tokyo, our sense of strangeness compounded by staying at the Imperial Hotel designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. This massive pile of scratchy yellow masonry, earthquake-proof by virtue of its thickness, made its inhabitants feel like ants in a hill. After two days of peering sleepily through misty pollution at the famous sights of Japan’s capital, we took off for Taiwan. Arriving at the airport in Taipei, we found instant comfort because we could actually communicate. The long hours of training began to pay off.
In 1963, the Republic of China on Taiwan, like the People’s Republic of China across the Straits, was a single-party police state under an authoritarian ruler. But in contrast to the economic stagnation and starvation on the Mainland, rapid growth in agriculture under a land reform program designed by American and Chinese economists and enforced by the strict government was beginning to spur the entire economy. Nationalist Mainlanders under Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and his wife, the fearsome, accomplished Wellesley graduate Soong Mei-ling, dominated politics, the army, and the police. Native Taiwanese, who had received higher education as doctors and agriculturalists under Japanese rule (1895–1945), were taking charge of the economy and the underground political opposition.
The FSI Field School was located in the city of Taichung, nearly ninety miles down the coast, happily removed from the distractions of embassy life, the demands of the ambassador, and the grim, drizzly weather of the capital.
Today Taiwan’s largest city, with a population of several million and a bustling port on the Taiwan straits, Taichung was then a much smaller, slower place, where 600,000 people dwelled. The city limits ended long before one reached the sea. Electricity was limited and nights were dark. Motorbikes and cars had yet to replace bullock carts and pedicabs, though the process had begun. Water buffaloes plowed the green rice paddies under sunny skies, framed by wrinkled, blue mountains in the background. We rented a Japanese-style house in a walled compound at the end of a dirt road, a short bike ride from the school, and settled in happily.
“It is a shock to find oneself a curio,” I wrote my parents. “Yesterday I was downtown engrossed in bargaining for a balloon for the boys. Nearing the end of this exhilarating process, I looked up and found myself surrounded by a crowd of at least fifty people. Sheila, on the other hand isn’t just a curio, she’s a phenomenon!
Walking in the park the other day, clad in her rather full blue overcoat (the one that makes her look like a six-foot tea cozy), the Chinese crowded around exclaiming “Tai da” (“too big”). The reaction, far from being mirthful, was one of awe and amazement. It was Queen Liliakulani walking in their midst.” (She was also carrying our third son.)1
Sheila wrote:
The boys are really thriving, and they’ve made a clutch of Chinese friends in the neighborhood. Yesterday Adam sailed forth bright and early, dressed in blue overalls, a red shirt, cowboy hat jammed down over his nose, red bandanna around his neck, and a flashy Hong Kong cap pistol and holster low on the hips. He was met by a horde of admirers outside the gate, and they escorted him to their stomping