The USO Show, Part II

The Liaison Officer

[Reminder: Some of my posts, including this one, are memoirs of my abusive childhood. In this post I'm relating events that happened in January 1958, in Taiwan, when I was 8 and a half. The links to the right can be used to follow backward through the memoirs, or to restrict viewing to other kinds of posts.]

My Father took me further into the quonset hut. His office was at one end. There was a window looking out at the base airfield. My Father's desk was next to the window. When we walked in there was another man sitting at a separate desk. He didn't look particularly Chinese to me but he was introduced to me as my Dad's ROC liaison officer. I don't remember his name so I'll call him Captain Li. The two of them shared the office.

After that introduction my Father left me in the office to check out preparations for the show. There was an awkward silence for at most a minute as I sat next to my Father's desk, looking across at Capt. Li, which ended when I caught sight of his abaci. He had two Chinese abaci lined up on his desk in front of him. Seeing me staring at them Mr. Li grinned widely and said, "So, you're interested in these. Do you like numbers?" I said I did. He said, "How high can you count?" I told him that I could count as high as nine hundred ninety-nine trillion, nine hundred ninety-nine billion, nine hundred ninety-nine million, nine hundred ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred ninety-nine. He swept his right hand across the abaci, in a fraction of a second, setting that number up. Then he said, "How much is one more than that?" I said I didn't know what it was called. He swept his hand back across the abaci, clearing beads and setting one, and pointed, "There it is, it's one quadrillion."

[Below: Capt. Li's abaci were Chinese-style suanpan with rounded beads, two above and five below the horizontal bar, like the one shown here on top. The other kind pictured beneath, with the diamond shaped beads, is the Japanese-style soroban.]

Then he said, "What's the largest number I could show you on these abaci?" The man knew I didn't know how to say it. He read it off. It was something in the septillion range. Then he said he could count higher than that, stating, "I could count to nine hundred ninety-nine dectillion, nine hundred ninety-nine noventillion, nine hundred ninety-nine octillion, nine hundred ninety-nine septillion, nine hundred ninety-nine sextillion, nine hundred ninety-nine quintillion, nine hundred ninety-nine quadrillion, nine hundred ninety-nine trillion, nine hundred ninety-nine billion, nine hundred ninety-nine million, nine hundred ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred ninety-nine, if I had time enough. Of course, I'm too busy, working here!"

He pried into my grades. I admitted they weren't that good. He said, "But in arithmetic you're good?" I told him that lately arithmetic was my best subject, followed by reading. He said he wasn't surprised, since I was the son of the Major. He then told me that my Father was in charge of the entire mountain base around us. Then he asked me, "And what do you think we do here?" I admitted I had no idea.

Just then a one-propeller plane was visible through the window. Its engine was being fired up. Capt. Li told me to watch. As I watched, the plane slowly lumbered down the runway toward us, and turned, and the engine raced, and the plane took off in the opposite direction. It looked like a fat swan trying to take off. Capt. Li said, did you notice anything unusual about that plane?

I said, "It was too heavy."

"Yes!" he said, "and why is it too heavy?"

I had no clue until he asked. His speaking the question out loud made me see the answer at once, and I blurted it out, "It's loaded with equipment... it's going to spy on the Mainland!"

He giggled. He said, "Yes, yes! You are so smart! You ARE your Father's son! Electronics! And who is spying on whom? Can you tell me that?"

I said, "Well, my Father is spying on the Communists, right?"

"Oh yes," he laughed, "he is spying on the Communists, certainly, and who else?"

"You?"

"Yes, yes! And we spy on the Communists, too, and also on your Father!"

We both laughed at that. I loved that captain. We had a great time.

Dictatorship & Thievery

The Republic of China took over Taiwan after the half-century Japanese occupation ended with the end of WW II. In 1949, the ROC was driven from the mainland to Taiwan in the Chinese Civil War. The capital of the ROC thus passed from Nanjing to Taipei under Chiang Kai-shek's rule. There was one political party, the Kuomintang, and the country developed under the martial law that already had existed earlier in the civil war, under the "Temporary Provisions Effective During the Period of Communist Rebellion." Martial law was in effect legally until 1987.

Today all that sounds that ancient history, but I was there in 1957, only 8 years later, when it wasn't ancient at all. There were a few ways that the political reality made itself felt. There were pictures of Chiang Kai-shek everywhere. One of the buildings at the start of our dirt road housed businesses and had hole-in-the-wall hovels in back where poor people lived. They cooked their meals and ate in the road, squatting around the fire. (I tried to learn that trick. Imagine not needing chairs, ever.) Behind and above them, always, the windowless wall of the building they lived in was wall-papered with dozens of identical posters of Chiang Kai-shek.

Military police directed traffic at all the busiest intersections. They all carried automatic rifles. My Mother and I were instructed to always be deferential to the Chinese, whether in uniform or not. There was a sense that the Kuomintang was insecure. They were trapped on an island and not sure they could even hold that. So there was a great deal of propaganda. In addition to posters there were speeches broadcast by loudspeakers around the city.

There were rumors of war. My Father confirmed nothing, but other children talked about military activities going on, such as shellings of off-shore islands. Some activities were evident but impossible to interpret, like the long convoys that would snake through the city, sometimes ROC convoys, sometimes US Army convoys.

The rumors of shelling may have just been out of date stories circulating about the First Taiwan Strait Crisis (1954-1955).

The US Army was expanding its role on the island, and that meant there needed to be good mess halls and servicemen's clubs. Over the Christmas break I was taken to such a club. My parents enjoyed a party while I and about a hundred other dependents were herded into a large ballroom to watch an American Western. Off to our right were windows maybe 6 feet high, for the length of the room, that had to be curtained during the movie. Before the curtains were drawn we had a view of a hole within which contractors were working to put a swimming pool.

Just before my Father left for the Mountain I found out that the swimming pool was what was keeping him at work late. He had discovered (surprise!) that graft was involved in its construction. The contractors were overcharging and my Father believed that Army officers who were supposed to monitor the contractors were taking bribes to look the other way. There were irregularities in accounting that appeared deliberate, and so forth. Dad was trying to get at who was responsible. There was fierce resistance and he was stressing out and drinking more, including after-work trips to bars with confidants.

My Father left for the Mountain right around Christmas. My Mother and I thought at the time that we wouldn't see him for the full six weeks, but just a week or 10 days later he was back in Taipei with a staff car to take us to the Mountain for a day, to see a USO show there.

Taipei

Taipei, Taiwan, was immediately red to me. That was the sense I had of it. Red, red, red, with smatterings of yellow, and only wisps of blue and green, except for the trees.

I loved Taipei from the first. The pier we docked at was a working pier next to warehouses full of cargo waiting to ship out or be trucked off. It was crowded with workers. There was no effort to put on a pretty face for new arrivals.

My Father met us at the gangplank. We had to wait for Koko and his crate to be lowered to the dock. There was some passport checking at a booth out in front of the warehouse. Then we were chauffeured off by Army staff car to our new home.

We passed through downtown Taipei along the way, and, as I said, that was red. Almost every store was decked out in Chinese red, with red banners, and red or yellow awnings, covered with large chinese writing.

Remember, this was the Fifties. Back in the US, beige was the king of colors. Mute was master. People who wore bright colors were shunned and ostracized, if not committed. People who painted their houses in bright colors were sued or evicted by their neighborhood associations. So the contrast to home was enormous. But there was also the fact that red was especially meaningful to me. It was the color of the i'iwi and the sacred color that gave rise to all colors. I felt like I was at the beginning of the rainbow.

The house we arrived at was in a middle class neighborhood at the outskirts of the city. One of the main highways out of the city passed a block away, leading to a hillside cemetery a mile or two beyond. You left the highway onto a side road that was paved for only fifty yards and then swung left parallel to the highway as a dirt road with walled middle-class chinese-style houses on either side for several blocks. After the road turned, our house was the first you encountered on the right side. The house directly across the street from us was, it turned out, the home of a Republic of China (ROC) general.

[Above: I've repeatedly tried and failed to find our house on satellite images. So here it is from memory. The houses were more rectangular than depicted. The stream was probably wider. The railroad is totally out of scale. Our house, in reality, was maybe 25 feet in front by 35 or 40 feet. The dirt road was narrower than shown. I was just trying to show where left and right was.]

If you went the other direction, swerving right when the road swerved left, you had to get out and walk. Rather than roads there were walkways through a warren of shops and shanties. We lived across the street from a poor people's bamboo village.

If you didn't swerve right or left but continued straight past the side of our house you crossed a stream, about 8 yards wide, which fed the main river that emptied into the sea and was also our sewer, and the place that our poorer neighbor-women did their laundry. There was then a little bridge you could drive over the stream. A few yards further and you were crossing a railroad track.

So much in one place! Life, death, commerce and cemeteries, poverty and wealth, dirt roads, steam engines, concrete walled homes alongside bamboo shacks. How can you not love a place that has all that?