The Foreign Service Journal, January 2012

36 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / J A N U A R Y 2 0 1 2 be reunited for more than a year. When my fa- ther’s temporary assignment ended, he requested a diplomatic position in China. He had some background for this, as he had spent his junior year abroad at Lingnan University in Guangzhou and had followed up with Chinese-language study at the University of Washington, giving him a working knowledge of Mandarin (which he would later polish up at the Foreign Service language school in Beijing). In July 1945 he was sent east via Calcutta to serve as vice consul in Kunming. WithWorldWar II still on, his family could not join him; as a re- sult, he missed my birth in June of that year and would not see us again until mid-1946. Our fam- ily Christmas card for 1945 featured two separate photo- graphs: a snapshot of Dad on the steps of a temple in Chongqing (his second posting in China) and a group por- trait of the rest of us taken in a studio in Seattle. My parents rarely quarreled, but they did (by mail) dur- ing this period, and they were determined not to repeat that experience in 1949. So there was resolve, not bravado, in Mary Lou’s decision to leave Manila and return to Nan- jing. As she wrote to a close friend, Jean Smith, “To be frank, I’m scared, and it’s not a pleasant sensation.” But both my parents saw it as critical that the three of us get back to Dad before the city fell, because they had no idea when the Communists would allow us to rejoin him once they controlled the capital. Rushing into a city virtually under siege seemed an ironic choice, but the Nationalist generals’ well-known dis- taste for serious combat gave Mary Lou some comfort. As she wrote to Jean Smith: “There is a very nice air-raid shel- ter, and anyway, there probably won’t be very long fighting for the city. If I can only get back to Ralph. This all sounds weird, doesn’t it — it is, too, I guess. Don’t you dare tell your mother, because she might tell my mother that I’m worried.” When the three of us rejoined Dad in Nanjing, the lines of civil war lay outside the city to the north, close enough so we could watch the flashes of artillery across the river from our balcony. Yet Fred and I were largely oblivious to any danger. At 5 and 3, respectively, our interests focused on toys, games and birthday parties with our friends. Nor was ours the typical American childhood, as we might have lived it back in Seattle. We spent most of our time with the Chinese servants; and Amah, who took care of us, was our closest friend. My first language was the Bei- jing Mandarin I had learned from Amah; when our grand- parents visited us in 1948, they could only talk to me through an interpreter, my brother Fred. My favorite comic strip featured a Chinese Sad Sack who had lost his best friend in the civil war and ended up begging on the streets of Shanghai. We were in China, but not of China. The Chinese peo- ple we knew were the house servants, employees of the embassy, or middle-class families my parents met through Dad’s work and Mother’s volunteer service. When we drove out into the streets in the big American car, the crowds that slowly parted before us flowed anonymously past, notable to us only for their numbers. Ours was a cloistered world in the Nanjing compound; the daily drive to kindergarten, visits to friends’ houses and family trips to parks for weekend picnics had not brought us any closer to the lives of ordinary people beyond our gates. Nor had the civil war made much difference to us yet. The Communists Take Power On April 23, 1949, the Nationalists suddenly aban- doned Nanjing. They blew up their ammunition dumps and marched south, giving up their capital without resist- ance. As Mary Lou described it, “It is amazing to me how fast everything happened. Friday the Nationalists were in control, Saturday the looters were in control, and Sunday the Communists took over. We were indeed lucky there was no real fight — no fight at all for the city.” But it was still a difficult time for the remaining American diplomats and their families. F OCUS