The Chinese loved Sandy Choate. Huge (six feet five inches and 250 pounds), with a prominent nose and flaming red hair, patches of which covered his entire body, Sandy was everything the Chinese thought a foreign devil should be. Witty and smart, he made many friends during periodic contact with the Nationalists. Madame Chiang and Pearl were among them.
Sheila wrote home the authoritative account of this meeting:
When we arrived, tired and dirty, at the Embassy in Taipei, we found the invitation to tea with the Generalissimo and Madame Chiang waiting—very elegant and formidable. We had no proper clothes with us, of course (white gloves were necessary), but friends in Taichung kindly sent some up, and the whole school was in an uproar because the President’s office had called about the invitation! It turned out to be a very large tea indeed. We were all delivered in big black cars, and sorted out on arrival into categories: Diplomatic corps, A.I.D., U.S.I.S., and something called “Others.” We were “Others,” placed at the very foot of the line with some Fulbright professors. We all snaked through the residence and shook hands with Madame (fierce) and the Generalissimo (old and rosy) and then were herded to the “Others” tables in the garden. Soon, an elderly Chinese lady rushed up. She was Miss Pearl Chen, Madame’s American secretary for 28 years, who urged us to get something to eat. We did, whereupon she urged us to eat it. We did, in front of her eyes. Then she said, “Good, now I can go and tell Madame you have had something to eat,” and hotfooted it off to do so. We were walking around admiring the garden (lovely with fat pots of daisies, snapdragons, verbena, palms & Korean grass, all marvelous and healthy) when up panted Miss Chen, perspiring heavily, and said that Madame wanted to see us and would we please follow her, which we did, galloping after her through the surprised guests.
Madame and the G. were sitting in a pavilion, and we were charmingly greeted, seated on pillows, talked to, and given tea, while the Embassy people stood around with their eyes out on stalks. Needless to say, this was all due to Sandy, whom she really likes. She is expecting to see him when he comes out, asked fondly after him, and really made a royal fuss. We were impressed, charmed, and generally bowled over by all this, and really had a lovely time on the reddest carpet you’ve ever seen. The Generalissimo speaks no English, but we were able to murmur appropriate politenesses in Chinese to him, which was lucky. The crowning touch occurred on the way out. As the Madame and the Generalissimo made their way through the crowd, she said loudly to me, “Goodbye, Mrs. Platt,” which practically finished the Embassy people.4
An event of no substantive importance whatsoever, Sheila and I valued the encounter later. It made us one of the very few couples of our generation to have met Chinese leaders from both sides of the civil war, Zhou Enlai and Madame Mao in the People’s Republic of China, President and Madame Chiang Kai-shek in Nationalist Taiwan.
Another far more significant development in the diplomacy of China marked our time in Taiwan. General De Gaulle announced that France would recognize the Communist government in Beijing. Washington was dismayed, but my classmates and I gathered in the garden of our house in Taichung to offer a private toast to Le Grand Charles. The logjam of history was breaking.
Tying a loose end in our family history, we made a brief side trip from Taiwan to Kyoto, Japan, to reestablish the relationship with Joseph Hardy Neesima’s university. As a fifth-generation direct descendant of Alpheus Hardy, and the first family members to visit the Doshisha in more than fifty years, we were treated royally. The chancellor of the university, the president of the student body, and the head of the Alumni Association were waiting on the tarmac at the airport and whisked us in limousines to the college administrative offices. There, under a stained glass window depicting the clipper ship Wild Rover, we were asked to fill in the blanks in the family tree since the last visit two generations ago, a daunting task completed by my father, who came a month later. This was to be the first of many visits, and an important connection when fate later shifted our career path to Japan.
4
Watching China
Newspapers Wrapped around Fish
The Mainland Section of the American Consulate General in Hong Kong was the China Watching headquarters of the world during the 1960s. Without diplomatic relations for more than ten years, all Americans could do was watch and listen. The three-story office building on Garden Road (still there, and larger) housed a staff of several hundred, many of whom were assigned to collecting and assembling data on the People’s Republic and guessing what it meant. Other sections did consular work, facilitated U.S. trade with Hong Kong and Macao, and took care of American citizens.
A newly minted language officer, I showed up for work at Garden Road in February 1964. As luck would have it, a shortage of analysts gave me a rare opportunity to choose the field I wanted to cover. China’s external affairs were hot. These were the peak years of Sino-Soviet polemics, month after month of propaganda broadsides exchanged between Moscow and Beijing, richly detailed and highly insulting barrages of invective between rival approaches to Communism (Khrushchev’s “revisionists” and Mao’s Stalinists). Dirty laundry about the relationship, collecting since the Soviets pulled their technical experts out of China in 1960, was now washed in the public media.
By comparison, domestic politics seemed cool and dry, but I was attracted by the opportunity to learn the names of China’s players and the system that they had built. I wanted to get the most out of Chinese language capability so arduously acquired over the past two years. My choice of internal affairs turned out to be momentous.
The process of watching China was, and still is, labor intensive. My colleagues and I read every newspaper we could get our hands on, including provincial publications smuggled into the colony wrapped around fish. Native linguists listened to every radio broadcast, from every province. Refugees were debriefed and their stories written up.
I was to sit each day at the end of a conveyor belt of such data, tasked to convert it into meaning. More than 90 percent of the material we analyzed was in the public domain. Clandestine sources and methods existed, to be sure, but their yield was limited. Our starting points were the prevalent slogans and the jargon of daily political discourse in the official media. Any deviation or repositioned language meant something. We felt like subscribers to a dull and repetitive orchestra that played the same pieces day after day. We listened for squeaks from the oboes or sour notes from the horns, changes of rhythm or volume, all potential indicators of debate or shifts in policy.
The reading skills I had acquired worked as a rough strainer. I could scan People’s Daily editorials quickly, moving smoothly through the set rhetoric. The formulations I could not understand right away signaled what was new and needed analysis. The Consulate General had a staff of translators I could consult, as well as a towering Manchu-language teacher named Tang Hung (also a fine painter), with whom I could discuss new terminology.
The Importance of Being Literate
Chinese literature provided a crucial code to political expression and debate in the Mainland. Editorials were shot through with references to figures and stories from great classical novels of Chinese literature. The plots and characters of The Three Kingdoms, Dream of the Red Chamber, Water Margin, to name a few, were embedded in the upbringing of every educated Chinese, whatever his or her politics. In particular, The Three Kingdoms, a fourteenth-century novel of struggle and statecraft set around 200 AD, represented an encyclopedia of every political and military ploy in the Chinese lexicon, as well as many of the plots in Chinese opera. If you had not read this book, you simply could not decipher the editorials. Other classics, including Confucius’ Analects and Sun Zi’s Art of War, also helped. These had been assigned reading during our training years. The time we had spent in Taiwan acquiring and reading pirated English translations of these works—one could buy the entire Encyclopedia Britannica for $18—turned out to have been invaluable.
In this most closed of systems, all serious political attacks were masked in cultural allegory. As we will see later, the opening shot of