Spy Story

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 With Sister and her mom at their old house in 1971.  I don't have many pictures from that time.  

 

The last time I saw Sister in Taipei was in 1998. She was living in Taipei with her husband and two boys and her mother. After that I saw her in the Boston area, where she moved with her two boys following her divorce.

     On that last visit, I was on my way back from spending more than a month in China, traveling down the Yangtze from Chongqing to Shanghai for a Life magazine story on the building of the Three Gorges Dam and to Suzhou for a story about American couples adopting unwanted Chinese girls. My problem with the authorities likely began with my name on the magazine’s masthead. And then the damage was compounded by my heading directly towards a sensitive area near the border in the Golden Triangle area. That’s where the photographer working with me and I were questioned by the police for the first time and had our passports taken away.

     We were actually in that neck of the woods—um rice paddies—to shoot a story about the women of one family for a National Geographic book. But clearly they feared I was doing a story about the drug trade. That or I was a CIA spy.

     I hadn’t focused on the history of Time Inc in China. The company was started by Henry Luce, a missionary’s son raised in China, who had connections with the CIA and close ties with Chiang Kai-Shek, leader of the Kuomintang Nationalist party in the Chinese Civil War. A war he lost to Communist Party leader Mao Zedong. Chiang and much of his army and many of his supporters, including Sister’s father, fled to Taiwan to regroup.

    So not only was the company I worked for suspicious, but the company I kept: I had studied in Taiwan and spoke a little Chinese, suspicious in itself. I was later to discover that Chinese who spoke good English then were mostly engaged in surveillance. And the better the English the higher the position in the Ministry of Public Security, also called the Foreign Affairs Police. They needed to keep an eye on me. And they did.

Sister and I in front of the modern apartment building where her house used to be.