It was seven o’clock in the morning, and a girl I’d never seen before had awakened me in my bedroom. She was asking me questions in a language I didn’t perfectly understand.
“What are you doing here?”
“How do you feel about the President Nixon?” (She pronounced it Nee Ke Sun)
“Do you think the Communist bandits should be allowed into UN?”
In the doorway behind the questioner, as she bent over my bed, the mother of the family I was living with was pantomiming not to talk to her, not to tell her anything.
“I don’t know anything about Nixon,” I said in broken Mandarin. “I know nothing about politics. I am a student. I study art, calligraphy, Chinese language.”
That was true. My political activism had gone as far as campus protests against college investments in Dow Chemical (napalm) and anti-Vietnam-war peace marches on Washington. Fifty years ago, I knew nothing about geopolitics. But when most of my Seven Sisters sisters headed to Europe for a finishing-school type junior year abroad, I went to Asia. I was a Chinese major after all. A blond Chinese major. And you couldn’t go to mainland China then.
My family in Taipei, Taiwan, had a daughter just a year older than I. She became Jiejie, Older Sister, to me. That evening, when she got back from work as an English language secretary, she explained the girl in my room.
“She lives in this alley and she is a member of the Nationalist youth. It is her job to report every stranger in the neighborhood to find out if they are Communist sympathizers.”
Those six months in Taiwan rerouted my path, though not in the way I expected. My Mandarin certainly improved, but it would never be adequate to teach or translate. I got my first real job at Time Inc as a copy clerk, because, my boss said, “I figured if you could speak Chinese, you could write English.” I wound up traveling all over the world as a writer for Life magazine—including to China, where, once again, it was assumed that I was a spy.
I’m going back to Taiwan, now, to spend a few weeks with Older Sister. She still has an apartment in the same place, though the old building with its outdoor kitchen and open sewers has long been razed for a new one. Taipei itself has become a modern city that yet retains the charm of the night markets and temples and art and food—oh, the food!
But I know a lot more about politics now. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has led to rising tension on both sides of the hundred-mile Taiwan Strait. Years ago I saw camouflaged gun emplacements above the rice fields. Now China’s sabre rattling includes fighter jets, bomber patrols, warships and subs, while Taiwan, which produces the bulk of the world’s semiconductor chips, gets ever more armaments from the U.S. And although Taiwan has become a successful democracy, it’s scarier there now than when I first went there under Chiang Kai-shek’s martial law. And with the inauguration of a wild-card president in the U.S.,
I can’t help worrying that China will take advantage of our distraction.
I’m going anyway. My problem, though is the same as it was a half century ago: Keeping my mouth shut.
