Every school-day morning, pressed handkerchiefs pinned to their clean shirts, the boys were carted off to a missionary kindergarten in a yellow pedicab bus filled with neighborhood Chinese.
Back to School
At the start of the 1963 school year in February, some twenty students and their families from the State Department and the U.S. military made up the population of FSI Taichung. Last year ’s class, soon to graduate, welcomed us new kids (the Platts, Brookses, Sullivans, and Tim Manley). The “old boys” included Morton Abramowitz, Harry Thayer, and Don Anderson, who would later make big names in Asia and Washington. In a few months, they and their families would proceed to assignments in Hong Kong, Taipei, Singapore, and Malaysia.
The school was a two-story building, honeycombed with small classrooms, all of which had windows. The teachers were all Mainlanders with pure Beijing accents, led by a soft-spoken American linguist named Gerardus (Gerry) Kok, whose academic bloodline included Monterey and Yale.
The infants had grown up. The routine of six hours of class and four hours of homework remained the same, but instruction was now one-on-one, beyond intense. Live materials, newspapers, radio broadcasts, oral discussion, and debate replaced the pablum of elementary texts. Still shy, and fenced off as foreigners, we did our best to practice in the street and on the trips we took with teachers at the end of each term. These travels broadened our experience with Chinese, enriched our vocabulary, and placed us in some ridiculous situations.
Sheila’s letter home that April describes one inadvertent sojourn in a hot-spring brothel. There were seven of us, including Roger and Margie Sullivan and three Chinese tutors from the school. We had been driving for days over the mountains of northern Taiwan in a Chevrolet Apache van. Exhausted and hungry, we arrived in the town of Beitou just after dark.
Our travels that day brought us down out of the mountain to a hot-spring resort north of Taipei, where we discovered that all hotels are dual-purpose affairs, partly for travelers, but mostly for good time Charlies. Each had a staff of young ladies to assist the Charlies in having a good time. The gents picked an establishment called the “New Life Hotel,” and we were helped to our rooms by clouds of young ladies, one called “Goldie” in Chinese. The tutors thought the whole thing fairly amusing but not too far out of the ordinary. But we thought it a scream, especially when Goldie wanted to help N. & me take a bath. We managed to get rid of her, and had a lovely time wallowing around the hot spring water, from which we emerged much refreshed, but smelling strongly of sulfur. As we were going to bed, the door was practically broken down by young “misses” as they are called, who wanted, to use the local euphemism, to “rest a bit” with Nicky, who said no thank you. We were the only Americans in this establishment, so maybe we got special attention. Anyway, the giggles, door slamming, and other activities during the night were formidable, but we rather enjoyed, in a surrealistic way, the idea of sleeping in a brothel!
Our Chinese really benefited in the process. We are on really cozy terms with those particular tutors now––our first Chinese pals. They are humorous, jolly people and real artists at enjoying themselves. During the trip, each new bit of scenery, dish of food, or whatever, was greeted with sighs and cries of delight, Chinese style, and we have become quite good at being delighted ourselves.³
Studying the Chinese
Like Dr. Ma in Washington, our teachers in Taiwan yielded a wealth of lore on how Chinese think. One morning, I was studying the word duifu, an all-purpose term that means to “deal with,” ”cope,” or “handle.” The teacher asked me how I would “deal with” a Chinese visa applicant who had no chance of getting into the United States. I answered that I would inform him right way, saving him time and effort. The teacher shook his head. The Chinese approach to duifu was completely different. It would involve inviting the applicant to fill out forms and return every few weeks. Each time he returned you would invent a new excuse; the case had to be referred to Washington; word had not yet been received from the State Department, and so on. After several visits, the applicant would realize on his own that he would never get a visa. He would, however, be grateful that you had not “poured cold water on his head.”
“In our society,” I replied, “That’s called ‘giving a person the runaround.’”
The teacher noted with delight this new American slang term, and replied, “Our society has different, indirect ways of ‘dealing with’ people and situations.” Later on when dealing with Chinese, I knew when I was being given the duifu treatment. I also turned the tables, to good effect.
The teachers also taught us the art of yanjiu, which means to study” or “analyze.” In practical terms it means examining from every angle any contemplated action and constantly revisiting your conclusions, right up to the time of the action itself. It could take up to two hours, for example, to decide what to eat or where to stay. Time was plentiful in the Taiwan of the sixties, and everybody seemed to enjoy the process. Later, in the Mainland, I found Chinese just as prone to interminable yanjiu, though for different reasons. Fear of making a mistake rules in a tense, competitive society. Even now, anyone trying to organize a conference, plan an event, or introduce a new policy in China will run into hours, even days of yanjiu and the changes and delays that result from the process. Irritating though it may be to people from the West, I benefited from grasping the practice early on.
Breakthrough to Fluency
I finally achieved genuine fluency during a weekend with a brilliant and eccentric teacher named Zhang Damu, who moonlighted as an instructor of Chinese composition at elementary schools throughout central Taiwan. He had refused my invitations to tour together down-island, suggesting instead that I take him on his teaching rounds in my car. He asked me to prepare a five-minute introduction of myself—who I was, where I came from, why I wanted to learn Chinese, and so forth—which he would then ask me to present in Chinese to the students of each of his classes.
The prospect—imagine a purple adult six-footer, making his maiden speech in Chinese to a classroom full of tittering Taiwanese sixth-graders!—was alarming. But I did it, and got better each time. In two days we visited six schools, three classes at each school. By the eighteenth session, I was teaching the entire hour, answering questions about America (“Does everyone wear six-guns?”) and asking the students about their own lives. Zhang, who knew exactly what he was doing, would disappear from each class after introducing me and make me fend for myself. After that weekend, I was confident that I could finish any sentence I started. The inhibitions were gone.
When the FSI course ended in early 1964, I qualified with the rest of my class at the 3+ level, which meant I was ready to work professionally in Mandarin Chinese. Our command of the language was still rudimentary, we found. It would take years on the job, as well as constant practice, for all the material that had been stuffed into us to settle.
Meeting Generalissimo and Madame Chiang
One day that spring, while we were on the road with some tutors, an ornate invitation arrived at the school from the capital, Taipei, requesting the presence of Mr. and Mrs. Nicholas Platt at the annual garden party hosted by President and Madame Chiang Kaishek. The teachers were impressed and the students envious. How had this happened? Why were we singled out?
It turned out that my uncle Joseph H. “Sandy” Choate III had written a letter about us to Madame Chiang’s close confidant and assistant, Pearl Chen. Sandy was a lawyer in New York who for decades had managed the financial affairs of Chang Hsueh-liang, the notorious “Young Marshal.” Hsueh-liang, a Manchurian warlord turned Nationalist general, had made history by kidnapping Chiang Kai-shek at a hot spring near Xi’an in 1936. After surrendering himself and his boss, the Young Marshal was placed under house arrest for most of the rest of his life (he was