The Foreign Service Journal, January 2012

J A N U A R Y 2 0 1 2 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 35 F OCUS ON FS R EFLECT IONS U NTIL W E M EET A GAIN y mother, Mary Lou Sander Clough, had just turned 31 when our family arrived in Shanghai toward the end of the Chinese Civil War in February 1950. She was married to my Foreign Service officer father, Ralph N. Clough, and was the mother of two sons: Fred, 6, and me, 4. Though young, Mary Lou was a veteran diplomatic wife who had learned Spanish in Honduras and Mandarin in China, and had ventured outside the foreign enclaves in both countries to engage with the local people as a volun- teer. In Tegucigalpa, she had taught in a school for deaf children; in Beijing, she had bicycled across the city to teach an adult class in English. And in Nanjing, she had spent long hours raising money for the YWCA and work- ing at a feeding station the organization had set up to care for the thousands of refugees from civil war and famine. It was a tense time. In 1948 Ralph had volunteered with other young officers to stay behind in China to rep- resent the United States after the Nationalists had lost the north to the Red Army. He was sorely needed as a certi- fied Chinese-language officer; in fact, he was the only flu- ent Mandarin-speaking American other than Ambassa- dor Stuart left in the embassy, which was located in Nan- jing at that time. Staying in China was not just my father’s choice, but my mother’s, as well. In November 1948, following embassy directions, she had reported with other Foreign Service women and children for evacuation from Nanjing to a refugee camp near Manila. But in February 1949, she dis- obeyed explicit State Department orders and flew with my brother and me back to China to be with her husband. One Separation Is Enough My parents had been separated once before and hated it. In February 1945, my father was ordered back from Tegucigalpa to Seattle for a draft physical. He failed due to bad eyesight, and the State Department sent him on a temporary assignment toWashington, D.C. Because there was no housing available in the city, my mother, pregnant with her second child (me), stayed behind with her par- ents. She could not have foreseen that her family would not O N THE EVE OF M AO ’ S VICTORY IN 1949, A F OREIGN S ERVICE WIFE BREAKS EXPLICIT S TATE D EPARTMENT ORDERS SO SHE CAN REUNITE HER FAMILY . B Y M ARSHALL S. C LOUGH Marshall S. Clough was a Foreign Service child who grew up at posts in China, Hong Kong, Switzerland, Britain and Taiwan. He recently retired after 36 years as a professor at the University of Northern Colorado, and has published three books on the history of 20th-century Kenya. This ar- ticle is excerpted from his current project, a book about his mother and father.