A Sidewalk Feature Takes Me Back

 When Anitra and I walk home from the Real Change office, we regularly meet this, one of my favorite Seattle landmarks. That's the headquarters of the Seattle Fire Department, viewed from the Main St side, looking east toward Second Avenue. From this angle it looks like a joke. Someone decided to split the sidewalk into a high sidewalk and a low sidewalk. So, for fun, when we approach I like to nudge Anitra toward one or the other. Say I nudge her to the high sidewalk. Then I take the other one at the last minute. And see if she breaks into an impromptu travesty of Loch Lomond.

If we look at it from further out, we realize that it's really a wheelchair-ramp to an unmarked blue-green door of the Fire Department.

It happens I remember that the door used to be marked as the entrance to a public restroom, that is now no longer accessible. I always find it locked now. But that's not the triggered memory that I'm talking about in the title. The game I play with Anitra reminds me of an obsession I had when I was 6 or 7 years old

I was caught up with the idea that I had a trajectory. As a body in motion I leave a track. If I pass through an opening, and then later, upon return, choose not to pass through that opening in the reverse direction, then I have wound my trajectory around one side of that opening. In the case of the wheel-chair ramp, if I take the high side going east, and take the low side coming back west, altogether I will have wound my trajectory once counter-clockwise around the railing.

Imagine I was leaving a string behind me, everywhere.  One long, long, string, like the drag line of spider, all the way back to the hospital room in Greenville General where I was born, where it would be anchored. Every time I were to wind it around an obstacle, it would be that much harder to pull the string straight, if I ever wanted to.

That's exactly what I imagined when I was 6 or 7, and it horrified me then, that I might be in that fix. Not to be able to straighten out my life path! It would be like being caught in a trap, ready to be devoured by some monster. I wouldn't be able to run freely, my string radiating freely, pivoting around South Carolina.

Fifteen years later I was an undergraduate discovering my own personal proof of the Fundamental Theorem of Algebra (which says that complex polynomials factor completely) and my proof ended up being the winding number proof. It's an approach that derives the theorem by studying the way polynomials map circles in the complex plane to curves, with particular attention to the number of times the curves wind around zero. Discovering that proof drew me further into the mathematics of properties of space that stay the same when you straighten wrinkles, and so I ended up being a topologist. But my original fascination with the subject was rooted in fear of being trapped in a tangle.

I'm now utterly over that childhood fear. I still imagine the drag line behind my life trajectory. The difference is now I love the tangles. Now I deliberately wind myself around things. If you see me walking down the street and I weave first right then left around various sidewalk signs, light posts, and such, you'll know that's what I'm doing. I'm tangling myself in everything, because I've figured out who the monster is, and I'm quite happy with being devoured by her.

Speaking of Gun Control

[Reminder: Some of my posts, including this one, are memoirs of my abusive childhood. In this post I'm relating events that happened around spring, 1959. The links to the right can be used to follow backward through the memoirs, or to restrict viewing to other kinds of posts.]

So today, for the first time since the Bill of Rights was ratified, the Supreme Court said that, yes, it means individual citizens have a right to own guns, at least for home defense. As some of you may know, my views on gun control are insane. I not only oppose gun control, I think the government should give guns out to people who can't afford them. Poor people need self-defense, too. The constitution says people have a right to lawyers, and the courts have decided that means that if you're too poor to hire one, the government has to provide one. That's the way it should be with the right to bear arms. It doesn't make sense to tell me I can bear one, if I don't have one. And ammo. Make mine an Uzi, thank you.

I've never used a firearm. There's three reasons for that. One was the old student deferment, and the high draft lottery number. Another is the ongoing poverty, preventing me from purchasing one. The third has to do with my Father.

When my Dad came back from Taiwan in 1959, I wanted to patch up our relationship. From age six on I couldn't bring myself to initiate a conversation with him. It was extremely awkward, and I wanted to break out of it. What I felt I needed was for him to offer to do something with me that I could stand. For that to happen he needed have some minimal respect for me, enough to pay attention to what I was interested in, and propose we do something having to do with it.

He constantly struck out on this front. He suggested taking me fishing. I hated fishing. He suggested taking me to ball games. I hated ball games. I told him I wasn't interested, and he would throw up his hands and say, to my Mother, "I can't do anything with him. He hates everything."

One day he was driving me and the neighbor kids to a school event. He started to complain to them that I never liked to do anything. He said, "Like right now, I know that if I offered to take him to a firing range and teach him to use a rifle, he would turn me down."

I jumped at that. I said, "Would you do that?" He said he would. He was shocked that I finally found something we could do together that I was into.

If the offer had been to take me hunting, I would have turned it down flatly. I don't have any desire to kill my own meat. But I was fine with target practice. And at the time (I was 9) I hadn't ruled out the possibility that I might want to enlist some day. Wouldn't it be handy to already know how to use a weapon?

It never happened, of course. All the talk about, "He never wants to do anything," was just abuse. It wasn't really about what I wanted or what I rejected. It was about having an excuse to put me down.

For the next four or five years whenever he tried to use that line on me I said, "So, OK, when are you going to teach me how to use a rifle?" Each time he would grit his teeth, and say, "I've told you before. Soon." And then he'd change the subject.

Eventually, I got tired of that game.

Father's Day Post

[Reminder: Some of my posts, including this one, are memoirs of my abusive childhood. In this post I'm going back to pick up on something that happened in Taiwan in 1958 to my Dad when I wasn't there. 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 did some good things. Very little of the good things he did involved me, but I can appreciate them anyway. I've already talked (Dictatorship & Thievery) about how he blew the whistle on graft relating to the construction of the swimming pool at an enlisted men's club in Taipei.

I mentioned that my Father dealt then with the stress in part by going to bars after work. One such trip resulted in both his best moment and worst setback.

It happened after my Mother and I had left Taiwan. One evening my Father went with a fellow officer to a Taipei bar that was regularly frequented by servicemen. When they walked in to the place, they found a drunken US soldier causing a scene. My Father confronted him, telling him he had to leave the bar. The soldier not only refused to leave but became violent, took a swing, and my Father had MPs haul him out of there and taken to the brig.

It would have been no big deal, but it turned out it was a congressman's son. Worse, it turned out it was a congressman who took money from the construction company that was mishandling the swimming pool work. My Dad had stepped on a land mine.

He could have gotten out of it by backing off from the graft charges, and dropped charges against the congressman's spoiled brat of a son. But he stood his ground on both counts. The result was a bad review that meant a missed promotion.

The lost promotion crushed him. He had adopted the army as if it were a mother surrogate. He felt betrayed, and it added heavily to all the other bitterness he had about his life. Suddenly his turning away from a career in printing and journalism looked like a disastrous mistake.

But through it all he continued to declare his loyalty to the army, and he stood his ground on the principles. That was great.

It was too bad he treated me so badly I couldn't tell him then how great I thought it was.

Christianity For Dummies

[Reminder: Some of my posts, including this one, are memoirs of my abusive childhood. In this post I'm relating events that happened during from summer 1958 through winter 1959. The links to the right can be used to follow backward through the memoirs, or to restrict viewing to other kinds of posts.]


[Above: Some results of a "for dummies" image search. At least three of them are real books.]

After a couple of weeks my Grandmother returned to her house and my Mother and I went back to living in the garage. I turned 9. We lived there, just the two of us, from summer through fall and part of that winter, while my Father finished out his duty in Taiwan. There was a great deal of sexual abuse. It's difficult to estimate the number of rapes that I endured but there was at least one incident per week.

That fall I started 4th grade at the same Van Asselt Elementary school where I had started 3rd.

My social life was complicated by the fact that my two best friends were brothers living next door, one a year older and one a year younger, and the two of them didn't want to hang out with each other.

I tried to look for a girlfriend but ran smack into the "boys of that age don't like girls" mythology that is so entrenched in American culture. It's one of my biggest regrets in life that I caved into the peer pressure and not only stopped looking for a new girlfriend but pretended I didn't like girls to get by. The regret probably fueled a lot of my determination to not conform later.

The combination of sexual abuse and sporadic social isolation led to long bouts of day-dreaming. At that time most of the day-dreaming was the sort that everyone expects of a 9 year-old. I used the apricot tree in our back yard for a space ship, and flew it to Mars. The old decrepit tool shed, underneath which my Grandfather, when he was alive, raised chickens and rabbits, had a raised sheltered entrance big enough for two adults to stand on. It was my time machine.

Christmas was memorable because we had a plastic tree that stood about 14 inches tall on our coffee table. I loved it.

At school I tested high on math and was separated every day for an hour from my 4th grade class-mates so I could attend math period with a 5th grade class. I still complained of boredom, but was told flatly that I wouldn't be allowed to skip any further ahead, for now.

Throughout all this time I was attending weekly Sunday School classes. My Mother had been brought up Baptist but publicly converted to my Father's Episcopalianism. She kept up appearances by attending Trinity Episcopal on First Hill with my Father's other relations. The church had a Sunday School class that met in the basement at the same time as the service they all attended, so that us fidgety bored kids could be educated in the ways of God, and not disrupt mass.

Being an avid learner, I tried very hard to make what I was taught my own. I paid close attention to all the doctrine and tried to figure out how it could made sense to me.

I'm convinced converts never really believe what people born into a religion believe about it. This applied to my Mother, whose Baptist fatalism did not get replaced. It also applies to people we don't necessarily think of as converts. For instance, say some guy is raised as a Christian, then decides as an adult there is no God. We wouldn't say he was a convert, but he is willing a convert to atheism. It's been my observation of such people that no matter how confirmed they are in their atheism, they always bring to it most of the same metaphysical assumptions they had as Christians. They'll also bring a lot of the social mores and habits. If they come from a proselytizing tradition, they will still proselytize, for atheism now. If they were brought up Puritanical, they will still confuse serious with somber.

I began as a polytheist. I was prepared to drop that for Christian dogma, but I couldn't easily jettison the metaphysical underpinnings of polytheism. I tried anyway.

A turning point occurred soon after my Father came back from Taiwan. He came back some time around January of 1959. He still wasn't around all the time because he had to commute to and from Fort Lewis a lot.

One day while he was gone my Grandmother was sitting on her living room couch and talking to me, while my Mother was in the basement using Grandmother's washing machine. Grandma stopped talking in mid-sentence, in mid-word even. Her mouth was still open to pronounce the word she was saying, but the sound stopped. After a minute I panicked. I waved my hands in front of her face and shouted. She sat there like a statue. I was witnessing one of her strokes for the first time.

To be clear, I didn't know that this was another of a string of strokes. I hadn't witnessed the previous strokes, so I didn't know this was in any way the same.

I was afraid she was going to die. She already looked dead.

My Mother called an ambulance and Grandmother went back to the hospital.

That Sunday I insisted on attending Mass with my parents for the first time, because the mythology was that I needed to pray for my Grandmother to get well, and praying supposedly worked better in church.

I was aware of everybody around thinking I was cute, praying so hard for Grandma. The minister was told about it after the service and I overheard him remarking what a fine, pious, boy I was becoming.

A few days later Grandma had recovered and came back home, and I was sure my praying had helped bring that outcome about. I remarked to that effect to my parents. They just laughed, and said, "You know, it was the 6th or 7th stroke she's had. She lived through the others without your help."

It completely demolished the fragile hold I had on Christian mythology. I had to start all over trying to make sense of it with the new understanding that what I got told in the Sunday School classes was just the simplified Christianity for Dummies version.

Bath Time

[Reminder: Some of my posts, including this one, are memoirs of my abusive childhood. In this post I'm relating events that happened during the summer of 1958. The links to the right can be used to follow backward through the memoirs, or to restrict viewing to other kinds of posts.]

I've slowed down on these memoirs lately because I'm entering territory that's less comfortable.

After my Mother and I moved back into the garage my Grandmother's house on Beacon Hill, there was an immediate escalation in the rapes and other forms of sexual abuse. I don't want to describe it all. But one incident might stand for several.

My Grandmother was in poor health. I didn't know it at the time, but she had already had a number of minor strokes. Actually, someone might have told me that, but it wouldn't have meant anything to me, because I didn't know what a stroke was. If I thought about it, I probably envisioned a fainting spell that would be over in a minute and have no lasting effect, so long as you didn't concuss yourself when you fell.

Sometime that summer she went to the hospital. The impression I was given was it was nothing special and she'd be back in a week or so, but meanwhile my Mother and I could house-sit.

So I slept on the couch in the living room while my Mother slept in a room that served as a guest bedroom.

My Mother was still forcing herself on me during baths. Most of the times the rapes were done under the cover of cleaning me. I had to be cleaned inside, too, she said.

But having the house to ourselves seemed to make my Mother want to be more overt. Maybe it was knowing that the noises I made would be less likely heard outside.

She walked in on me during a bath wearing only a bathrobe and threw it open and ordered me to fondle her genitals. That was impossible for me. I just froze. So she lost her temper and raped me anally for a long time. It was clearly not cleaning this time; it was punishment for disobeying her.

The rape continued so long that I disassociated. I had a kind of out of body experience. I returned to awareness to discover that I was losing control of my bodily functions.

When I did, my Mother became angrier than ever and started spanking me hard and that only made it worse.

I screamed so hard I lost my breath and choked for air, and then screamed more.

Then she said, "You clean it up."

Fetid Dog Love

[Reminder: Some of my posts, including this one, are memoirs of my abusive childhood. In this post I'm relating events that happened around May, 1958. The links to the right can be used to follow backward through the memoirs, or to restrict viewing to other kinds of posts.]

My last two months in Taipei were tinted with fear, as I heard more and more rumors of Mainland China's plan to either invade or bomb Taiwan. I've written about this already, out of sequence, in A Cacophonous Nudge. It was right about the same time as the solar eclipse in mid-April that my father told my Mother and I that we wouldn't be staying with him for much longer. The Army was shipping out large numbers of dependents to get them out of harm's way.

Our departure was set for the middle of May. I would miss the last couple of weeks of school. Ordinarily I wouldn't have minded, but the next thing I knew our class was having a spelling bee as part of a school-wide contest, and I won, and the teacher said I did so well I might easily win the whole contest. The 1st prize would be a pair of binoculars. Oh, man, I wanted those binoculars. Stupid Army Brat life, I thought. Every time something good comes along, you have to move away, I thought.

My Mother and I were booked on a great-circle flight to Seattle by way of Anchorage.

Up to this time in my life I was lukewarm toward the dog, Koko. He didn't particularly care one way or another about me either. But a funny thing happened when they said we couldn't afford to take him back to the States with us. All of the sudden I couldn't take it. It wasn't like they were going to put him down or sell him for meat. They arranged for the the magician and his wife to keep him. But I broke down into tears in front of them and hugged the dog and told my parents they were horrible, and I couldn't stand to lose him.

I didn't know at the time what came over me. Now I get it. Enough other over-reactions of that sort have happened since. I had experienced too much neglect and emotional abandonment from my parents. Their plan to abandon Koko recalled it all.

My Father made it up to me by buying me a pair of binoculars. He figured, better buy them in Taiwan at the low prices there, than pay two or three times as much back home.

The flight seemed to take days. The stop at the Anchorage airport was notable only in the fact that it was snowing in May.

My Mother and I wound up back in Seattle living in the garage behind my Grandmother's house again. We were there maybe one week at most when we got word that Koko would be arriving by freight plane at Boeing field in a couple of days. Having seen my emotional outburst over losing Koko, the magician and his wife decided to spend their own money to reunite us.

We were driven to the airport by one of my cousins. Koko was delivered in a box with holes for breathing. One whiff, and I began to regret I'd made such a scene back in Taipei. He reeked of his own feces and urine, not having been let out of the box for the whole trip. We took him home and did all the things people will recommend, baths with shampoo, baths of milk, baths of tomato juice. We shaved him completely, and tried it all over again. Nothing worked. That was one stinky dog. He lived more than 8 years after that and we never got rid of the smell.

Still, I thought of him more as a brother from then on. My parents hadn't succeeded in getting rid of him either.

Obligatory House Boy

[Reminder: Some of my posts, including this one, are memoirs of my abusive childhood. In this post I'm relating events that happened around March, 1958. The links to the right can be used to follow backward through the memoirs, or to restrict viewing to other kinds of posts.]

The second house in Taipei, the Japanese-style house, was one-story, set within a yard entirely enclosed by an eight foot wall. Unlike the Chinese-style house before it, this one had a back yard. More precisely, it had a back garden.

Being eight years old, I cared very little about the aesthetics of Japanese gardens. The plants got in the way. But there were a couple of other features of that back yard garden that really got my attention.

There was a whole 'nother house inside the garden. About the size of a garage built for a compact car, it was meant as a live-in dwelling for a servant.

Now, we had had maids before, but they only worked part-time, and they slept somewhere else at night. But here we were living in a house that was DESIGNED to accommodate a live-in servant.

So, what do you know? We had a house like that, so we got a live-in house-boy. As if the possibility created a necessity.

It turned out he was a vast improvement over the maids. He spoke English so well I was sure he was a Chinese spy (which was OK by me). He spent his evenings ironing and reading poetry. He helped us kids make big firecrackers out of little ones.

The other feature of the back yard was a little concrete structure up against the wall, just outside my room. It was a concrete box about four feet high and eight feet long with a small opening on one side. It was our bomb shelter.

The "bomb shelter" at the previous house was the basement. I was never allowed to go down into the basement, so it was purely theoretical. At this house, the bomb shelter was open and waiting. I got a flashlight and explored it. It was terribly disappointing. I always wanted a bomb shelter that would double as a club-house. This one was literally just a box. There wasn't even any light.

The neighbors had bomb shelters, too. We kids spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to outfit our bomb shelters to make fun club houses.

Then, air raid drills started, and everyone had to pile into the things.

Major Magician

[Reminder: Some of my posts, including this one, are memoirs of my abusive childhood. In this post I'm relating events that happened February or March, 1958. The links to the right can be used to follow backward through the memoirs, or to restrict viewing to other kinds of posts.]

After my Father returned from the Mountain we had a new friend visit. I have always thought of him as Major Magician. I can't remember his name. I called him that because he was an amateur magician, always ready to impress me with some trick. He carried cards and pieces of rope and handkerchiefs around. My favorites were the rope tricks. I think it was another hint of a nascent interest in topology. I cared less about the tricks themselves than the different kinds of knots he could show me.

We had another dog-related incident that showed the interesting consequences of living in a country where dog is on the menu. While entertaining Major Magician a Chinese man dropped by to deliver a package. Ordinarily we would take the package at the gate, but because we had a guest we just buzzed the delivery man in. The dog, Koko, went berserk.

Koko was the most laid back dog you ever saw. Until then. We couldn't figure out why he went nuts until Major Magician mentioned that Koko might have a good idea what our visitor has been eating lately.

Mind you, I have no problem with eating dog. I'd be willing to try it. I'm just saying, if you live in a country where it's customary, keep an eye on Fido. He could take it personally.

Major Magician was the first regular friend that my Father had in Taiwan that interacted with the rest of us. He and his wife lived on the opposite side of Taipei in a middle-class neighborhood dominated by walled pre-war Japanese-style housing.

We went to visit them one evening. It was a beautiful house. The adults gathered around a table in what looked like a meditating room. It was a bare room with a long sliding paper wall that separated it from the main living room, and had glass doors opening to a walled garden. Major & Mrs. Magician used it for a dining room, usually. This night they used it to play four-way strip poker with my parents.

I was supposed to nap on a couch in the other room, but somehow when your Mother is playing strip poker in the next room it's hard to sleep. Especially with all the giggling. I had to get up and ask for a glass of water. Sure enough, by the time I got there Mom had lost. She always lost. Which was weird, because I'm sure she was the best poker player.

We loved the Japanese-style house, and hated the Chinese-style house that we had been living in, that we didn't renew our 6 month lease on the latter, and moved into one of the houses in Major Magician's neighborhood.

Our new house was a one-story house on a narrow dirt road. We were one block North from a large expanse of rice paddies. I learned what rice paddies smell like up close. They smell just like water buffaloes, which smell like a cross between an outhouse and old gym shoes. Fortunately, the prevailing winds favored us.

The Stray

[Reminder: Some of my posts, including this one, are memoirs of my abusive childhood. In this post I'm relating events that happened February or March, 1958. The links to the right can be used to follow backward through the memoirs, or to restrict viewing to other kinds of posts.]

A big stray dog was wandering outside in the street one day. He was thin but even though his ribs were showing he looked strong. He stood as high as my chest.

Being used to goofy, jolly, American dogs, I reached out to pet him, and he snapped. He just missed my fingers; I could feel the breeze made by his jaws. I said, "What a bad dog! Bad dog!"

About fifteen minutes later I had wandered up by the main highway. I heard the screech of tires and a loud thud. I turned in the direction of the sound and saw a crowd forming.

It occurred to me that I shouldn't look. It might be one of the neighbors. But I was drawn irresistibly. I forced my way through the crowd and found myself staring at the face of the stray dog that had snapped at me.

There was something wrong with the sight. It took me a second or two to register what was wrong. Finally I got it. It wasn't that the head was detached from the body, which was lying 6 feet away. It was that I could see pavement through the dog's mouth. And out of the corner of my eye I could see Taiwanese cutting up the body for distribution to the bystanders.

I wanted to scream but couldn't. I was too dazed. I walked away slowly until I reached the dirt road leading to our house. I passed an old American woman going toward the accident. She couldn't know what had happened. She probably thought the victim was human. But, still, she smiled ear to ear when she saw me and she said, "Not a very pretty sight, eh?" And she laughed.

That got me screaming. I screamed, "GET AWAY FROM ME!" and ran to the house.

I believed that my saying, "Bad dog!" had killed him. Now it dawned on me that he had snapped at me because he was afraid of me. I had known that the locals ate dogs, but it hadn't occurred to me that it would give the dogs the right to fear people.

Very Bad Night, Part II

[Reminder: Some of my posts, including this one, are memoirs of my abusive childhood. In this post I'm relating events that happened the night of my Mother's birthday in February, 1958. The links to the right can be used to follow backward through the memoirs, or to restrict viewing to other kinds of posts.]

The house was quiet for about half an hour. I was still upset from all the screaming, and was lying awake in bed with the lights off, when I heard my Mother coming up the stairs, and then she opened the door to my room and asked me if I was awake. I tried pretending I was asleep, but she knew I wasn't and told me to get up and come to her bedroom.

On the way I could look over the railing and see my Father passed out on the floor of the living room.

In the bedroom my Mother first had me help her out of the dress she fought so hard to get into hours earlier. Then she told me she wanted me to lie down with her to keep her company. For a few minutes we just lay there, hugging each other, nothing else happening. I was still in my pajamas, she was in her underwear.

Then she insisted that it would be better if we both took our clothes off. I didn't see how it would be better at all, but she insisted she needed to be closer, to help her get over what she'd been through that night. I still resisted; she got me to agree finally by offering to turn the lights out right away.

So we got naked, she turned out the lights, and for a few minutes we were in bed hugging in the dark. Then she began fondling me and telling me she wanted me.

That was totally absurd. I was 8 and a half. Sure, I had been over-sexed following the first major head injury, but that effect had run its course at least three years before. Not to mention that I didn't know what intercourse was.

When she realized that I wasn't going to be physically able to have intercourse with her she acted as though it were a tragedy for me. her attitude was "You poor thing, I'll have to do something for you." It didn't make any sense to me. Just seconds before she was the one with the sexual need. Now I was supposed to be in need. It was so confusing I didn't know what to say.

She got out of bed, grabbed a swirled tapered candle off her dresser, and said, "I'll take care of you in the bathroom."

In the bathroom she pushed me down on my hands and knees and raped me with the candle.

It hurt and I begged her to stop. She laughed and kept at it. When I continued to cry and beg, she eventually became angry. "I know it doesn't hurt. Stop being a crybaby"

Finally she let me go and I ran to my bedroom and the imagined security of my own bed. She let me lie there in the dark by myself long enough for her to smoke a cigarette. Then she popped her head in and said, angrily, "I know it didn't hurt, you filthy liar." And she left, slamming the door.

It had hurt. It still hurt then. I didn't lie.

Very Bad Night, Part I

[Reminder: Some of my posts, including this one, are memoirs of my abusive childhood. In this post I'm relating events that happened the night of my Mother's birthday in February, 1958. The links to the right can be used to follow backward through the memoirs, or to restrict viewing to other kinds of posts.]

During most of the six weeks my Father was at the Mountain my Mother subjected me to moderate but almost daily sexual abuse. It subsided as she began her preparations for the romantic evening to celebrate his return.

In spite of all the sexual abuse I knew next to nothing about sex, really. In fact I wouldn't have called anything my Mother did to me sexual at the time. Sex was something else. It was what Mommies and Daddies did in their bedrooms at night. I didn't know what that was, but I was sure my Mother missed it and that what she did to me was at least partly an inadequate substitute. It wasn't the real thing, it was a poor imitation.

My theory was that when people get to be really, really, grownup, like 13 or 14, they start to need this sex thing and have to have partners to help them with it (touching yourself makes you sick, Mommy said) and if the partners they get aren't around or they spend all their time being mad then they start hurting. And to fix the hurt they need to do things to their kids that are icky. But it's not their fault, it's nature's fault. Nature makes grownups sick.

[Below: The same person, before and after puberty. Note the "bedroom eyes" on the right.]

So I felt sorry for my Mother, and I was really hoping that when my Father came home and saw how pretty she was in that dress and saw what a great dinner she made for him and how nice she smelled, and how I said I loved him and then excused myself and didn't cause any trouble for the rest of the night, that he wouldn't shout or anything, and they'd end up in bed and have sex, whatever that is, and Mommy would be all better.

He was supposed to get home at 6 PM. He actually called at 6:30 or so to tell us he got delayed and wouldn't make it until 8 PM. So that was nice.

But after 8 he wasn't there, and he also wasn't there at 9, 10, and 11 PM. There were no more calls to apologize for being late.

I stayed up late with my Mother. It was a Friday so I didn't have to get up early the next morning. She cried off and on for hours. I said, maybe something bad happened to him. She said, "Sure." But she didn't bother making any emergency phone calls.

He came to the front gate at about Midnight. After my Mother unlocked the gate a couple of other officers walked him to the door of the house and put him in a chair. He was only able to stand with support.

He was supposed to come straight home after getting back to Taipei, but instead he spent 6 hours in bars with his buddies.

As he was brought in the door I said, "I love you Daddy," just like we rehearsed it. Then my Mother gave me a sign to get the hell up to my room. I listened from the top of the stairs.

The dinner had already been done away with. My Mother started out explaining that. Dad muttered something like, "That's nice." She then tried, "Do you want to go upstairs or do you want to have fun down here?"

He said, "Why don't you get me a beer?" About then, my Mother started screaming. I don't remember a lot of what she screamed. Then she broke out into sobbing, and she said, "You don't love me anymore." Then she screamed at him some more. Then there was more sobbing.

It went on for about an hour. There were sounds of dishes being smashed. By the time it was over I had retreated to my room for real and was trying to deny that anything important was happening.

Interlude, With Zipper

[Reminder: Some of my posts, including this one, are memoirs of my abusive childhood. In this post I'm relating events that happened 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 went back to the Mountain in the first or second week of January, 1958. While he was gone my Mother took advantage of connections with other military families and American ex-patriots nearby so we could get around better, and so that I could be gotten out of her hair some of the time.

One of those ex-patriots was an old American man who spoke Chinese. I was turned over to this guy for hours on weekend afternoons. He lived nearby and agreed to meet me at the house and take me on long walks. He wore a threadbare old black suit and a black hat. I'll call him Mr. Dunn, he was thin as a rail. I'd guess he was in his 70s.

Mr. Dunn took me straight into the thick of the poor people's market near our house. He knew what was being sold at each stall and could answer questions about it. But he wouldn't buy anything except occasional fruit. When he did he haggled, and later told me, "If you don't argue the price down they'll just take advantage of you."

He took me further. The walks took us through many parks and a zoo. I think we walked several miles each time. There were street vendors and musicians. There were street magicians. I always dragged my feet as we passed by these, and Mr. Dunn always said, "They're just trying to get our money."

One such encounter made a lasting impression. A street vendor was selling glass prisms. He held one to my eyes so I could see the colors. I wanted one, but Mr. Dunn said no. The price was probably pennies American.

Well, it was his money, but I had to wonder why I was being shown all this if the purpose was just to walk on by.

I fared better at home when my Mother arranged for an older boy to come over to keep me company. He was about 11 years old, so 3 years older and not someone who'd usually want to spend time with me. He was there, if I remember right, because his parents made him come. It was the Christian thing to do. At first he resented it. But he started to enjoy his visits when he found out I liked math. It was something we had in common. He gladly tutored me.

I was supposed to be learning long division in school, but, as often happened, the technique was taught as a mechanical procedure. When I asked my friend to teach me long division, he began the same way. I told him I didn't want to know how to do it, I wanted to know why you did it that way. That led to a wonderful afternoon, in which the two of us worked out the reasons together.

My Father's extended stay at the Mountain was set to end on a Friday in February that happened to be both my Mother's birthday and their 10th anniversary.

As the date approached, my Mother began to lay plans for his return. I was supposed to eat early, before he arrived that afternoon. She was going to set up a romantic candlelight dinner, just for the two of them. She would be wearing her sexiest dress. I would have to greet my Father at the door, and tell him how much I missed him. But then, I was supposed to excuse myself and go to my bedroom and stay there no matter what I heard.

It was clear to me that my Mother was desperate. There was trouble in the marriage. Putting on this special dinner and wearing this dress and keeping me out of the way was going to make everything better.

Dad was supposed to arrive around 6 PM. My Mother worked on the dinner and getting dressed and made up just right the entire afternoon. I helped when I could. I remember standing on a chair to zip her into her man-killer dress. I liked zipping. The zipper is a really cool invention.

The USO Show, Part IV

[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.]

So. I was seated at the post-show banquet with headliner Ms. Whiting (or whoever she was) and my parents. I followed prior instructions and kept quiet as much as possible, and just tried to enjoy the adults' banter. That ended when my Mother told me to eat my potato salad.

I didn't want any potato salad. I don't remember why. Maybe I didn't like the way it looked. Maybe I didn't like the way it smelled. Maybe I was trying to save room for dessert. Anyway, I balked. "Do I HAVE to?" My Mother's knee-jerk reaction was the, "Do what I say, we're in public," reaction.

Margaret Whiting defended me by making fun of the situation. She basically asked the question, when would there ever be a dinner special enough that I could eat what I want? The show and banquet were supposed to be fun. The message was essentially, "Lighten up, Mrs. Major Browning." (I remember her calling my Mother that.) My Mother backed down.

After that I wanted Ms. Whiting to be my new Mother. So when dinner was over and all were standing around smoozing over drinks, I hung around her. As soon as she had a moment's break I asked her if I could talk to her in private. She asked what it was about, and I whispered to her that it was about my parents.

She gave me a knowing look, and then she announced to the others that she would be right back and she led me outside the tent.

We couldn't have been out there for more than ten minutes but we covered a lot of ground. I told her my parents abused me and she said, "Your Father? He doesn't seem the type." I told her he used to beat me but now just yells and that the worst was from my Mother. I told her about the rapes. She said, "Oh, yes, I noticed something bad in her eyes."

She told me she had been abused too. She said she couldn't take me away from my parents because it wouldn't work. She would just land in prison. She said if she reported it, my parents would probably retaliate against me before the authorities would act.

I was in tears after hearing all this. No one had ever laid out the barriers to getting help so clearly before.

But she said she might be able to help with advice. She questioned me about how my parents talked about me. I told her they called me idiot and basket-case and freak all the time. She asked me what I liked doing. I told her I liked music and math, but since surgery I wasn't able to do music anymore. She said, probably the music won't work, but I'm sure that if you worked hard on the math they'd eventually be amazed and they would back off some.

She came up with a trick to play on my parents to get me started off as a math genius in their eyes, and quickly rehearsed it with me. My line was simple. I just had to say "39" at the proper moment.

Before we rejoined the party, she offered special advice on dealing with my Mother. She said that she looked like people she had known before that had "an evil eye.'" Her face changed from right to left as she went from kind to mean. Ms. Whiting told me that I should try whistling or humming a tune my Mother wouldn't know and move from her right side to her left and back again, and one side should elicit the kind face, the other should elicit the mean face.

Then we returned to the party and she brought me by the hand to where my parents were standing and announced, "Hey, everyone, I've just been talking to this kid outside and he's is a mathematical genius!"

My parents laughed. My Father said, "That's no genius, that's my son."

Whiting said, "Well, he may be your son, but he's a whiz. I'll prove it to you.I'll give him a puzzle, and I'll bet while all of you are scratching your heads over it, he can solve it in a blink of the eye!"

[Above: Numb3rs establishes the genius of Charlie Eppes simply by briefly showing this formula that you don't understand in the opening credits of every show.]

The puzzle was a word puzzle having to do with ages. I don't recall the exact puzzle but it could have gone like this: "I'm twelve years older than my brother. In 15 years I'll be twice as old as my brother was 15 years ago. Think hard. How old am I?"

"Think hard" was my cue. The idea was to blurt out "39" even while she was asking the question, so no one would get it before I did.

Needless to say, part of the fun was that she was older than 39. But no one thought that I would have come up with the joke. They assumed she did.

My parents were suspicious, but Ms. Whiting did a great job of acting, denying any coaching.

By the time my parents got around to asking me if I was coached, during the drive back to Taipei, I was able to present an elaborate explanation of how I had solved the puzzle, because i'd had enough time to work it out on my own by then. I just let them think I had done the reasoning on the fly.

They were floored by it.

After we got back to Taipei, my Father spent a couple of days and nights with my Mother and I, and then returned to the Mountain. The next 5 or 6 weeks I was alone with my Mother in the Chinese house.

Oh, by the way, my parents and everyone else who was at the banquet who ate the potato salad fell violently sick in the evening after. It was tainted.

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.

The USO Show, Part I

My Father came back to Taipei to take us to the Mountain for a USO show. Early in the morning on a Saturday or Sunday we set off. My Mother and I rode in the back seat of an Army staff car, while Dad rode in front with the driver.

It was my first trip outside of the city and the first hour or so was wonderful. I'd never seen anything like the Taiwan countryside. I still see images of it in my dreams. It wasn't only beautiful, it was strangely beautiful. One of the scenes that had a huge impact on me was the sight of a cliff, not far from Taipei, in which there were built homes. All you saw of the homes were massive doors reinforced crossing iron bars and barred windows. I was impressed by the adaption to the terrain.

It wasn't all cliffs and hills and mountains. We traveled for some time from town to town through a plain. The towns were generally dusty, impoverished, and bleak, but they seemed to me to be places that the people living there must care about.

As we reached hills the driver pulled the car over, and my Mother and I were blindfolded. We remained blindfolded for what seemed like an hour. The idea was that we wouldn't be able to tell the spies who captured us how to get to the Mountain base.

Finally we were allowed to see again. By then we were into mountains. There were miles and miles of winding roads past of terraced rice paddies. Then the roads snaked higher into rocky cliffs and the occasional temple or isolated dwelling that looked carved out of rock.

After those scenes the actual mountain base that my Father worked at was a let-down. When we got there we were on the top of a mountain alright, but it was an undramatic rounded mountain, so rounded that the top was almost flat. Flat enough that it had a small airfield. I had imagined pinnacles, or at least precipitous drops from an edge. There was just a gentle slope falling away from the top.

We got there early enough that we had a few hours to kill before the show. My Father took me to the quonset hut where he worked at a desk and introduced me to his staff.

There was a bookshelf near the entrance to his office that was filled from top to bottom with Ace Doubles. It was the science-fiction stash of one of Dad's subordinates. I had not been introduced to written science fiction up to this time. I poured over the covers oohing and ahhing over bug-eyed monsters abducting leggy women while being zapped by guys in sleek spacesuits. Even after I was told that there were never half naked women in the stories, I was still sure I wanted to check them out. It was another way science hooked me.

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.

Wrong and Right

[Reminder: Some of my posts, including this one, are memoirs of my abusive childhood. In this post I'm relating events that happened in December 1957, when I was 8. The links to the right can be used to follow backward through the memoirs, or to restrict viewing to other kinds of posts.]

The first few weeks in Taipei were hectic and bewildering, and just wrong.

One of the just wrong parts was the lecture my Mother and I got about how we were now targets for kidnap, torture, and ransom. Supposedly the Communist Chinese had spies all over the island and would want to interrogate us for secrets my Father might have let slip out at home. So there wouldn't be any slips, but they might do it anyway, and then try to ransom us. The lecture was basically to tell us to be "careful" and not to expect the ransom to be paid. This was without a doubt one of the most useless lectures I've ever endured. We still had to walk the dog, so we had to be out in the neighborhood. Thanks, Dad.

[Above: Peter Lorre as the generic international kidnapper in The Man Who Knew Too Much might have been preferable to my Mother.]

Hectic and wrong was the homework. It was evil. I could barely carry all the books. There were no overnight lockers at school so all the books had to be hauled back and forth every day.

Also, with this new school I was finally introduced, for the first time, to the "read the chapter and then write essays on the questions numbered such and such at the end" method of quasi-educational torment. Most of these questions were unbelievably non-directive generalities demanding inappropriate specificities, that began with the phrase "compare and contrast", which, if properly answered, could be split into several thousand graduate student topics for people who had a graduate library to do the extra research required, but which an 8-year old with a twenty year-old textbook couldn't begin to answer. "Compare and contrast the social systems of Ancient Babylon and Egypt in the time of the Pharaohs, giving concrete examples to illustrate your points." "Compare and contrast the chief resources and industries of the Southeastern United States and the Midwestern United States. Be specific." We were also required to turn in outlines of each chapter and graded on them. I never figured out what the basis for grading of the outlines was. I probably spent an hour every day just fretting over how much detail to include.

The 6 or 7 hours of homework per day could not be done by me alone. I had to be helped by my Mother (I'm sure the school took this into account in deciding how much homework to assign. They wanted to force parental tutoring.) With her help the homework time was reduced to about 4 hours, but her help also probably was one of several factors that triggered an increase in sexual abuse.

Another was just the fact that I was home so much with her. School let out for me by noon. I was bussed home, I walked the dog a couple of times, and that was my time outside the house. Fear of kidnapping meant I had to spend no more than twenty minutes at a time walking the dog. The theory was they couldn't prevent an abduction but they wanted to know when it happened as soon as possible.

There was a maid around but she stayed out of the way and only worked a couple hours per day.

To top it off, my Father started coming home later and later. I didn't know why at first. All I knew was that it was making my Mother sad and irritable.

So the fondling became more frequent and the frequent baths (because of the soot from the furnace) became frequent occasions for anal rape.

The ongoing rapes aggravated the existing bathroom phobias, making school that much worse.

As I've said the school day for me was a four hour shift. There was no lunch break per se -- you were supposed to get breakfast and lunch at home -- but there was one recess break in the middle of the four hours that allowed everyone to use the bathroom and eat a bagged snack and/or play in the walled playground area if there was still time. For me, in the first month, there was never time. The bathrooms were too crowded and unfamiliar (Chinese-style trench toilets) and I couldn't use them. So focusing in class the last two hours became nearly impossible, and that made trying to make sense of the homework harder, which put me in harms way with my Mother that much more.

Two brighter developments. A routine eye exam at school discovered that I couldn't read the board because I was near-sighted, not because I was illiterate, as the teacher had first assumed. So I got glasses.

My Father also signed me up for the Children's Book of the Month Club, and the first book in the mail was David & the Phoenix. The book came just when I needed it, on the heels of the disappointingly brief affair with Diana. It reinforced her world view beautifully. It was in some ways a 1957 precursor to the Harry Potter novels although much shorter.

In it a boy meets a Phoenix and receives instruction from him on practical matters of life, such as knowing the differences between Gryffins, Gryffons, and Gryffens, or what to do when you encounter a Chimaera. Then they have to fight an evil scientist who is after the one-of-a-kind bird and wants him dead or alive.

It was done in humor but it had a clear message to me. If you reject imagination, you are really rejecting soul and humanity, and ultimately that leads to callousness.

American School

Within a day or two of seeing my new house, I was also going to my new school.

The new school was the Taipei American School. The online descriptions of this school tell you very little of what it was like in 1957. For one thing, it's moved since then. For another, back then it was so overcrowded that there were two shifts of students, a morning shift and an afternoon, each a fast-paced four hours. The same teachers that taught the mornings would teach afternoons. I drew the morning shift upon arrival, so I had to get up in the dark, dress, get breakfast, and walk to the highway, where a bus would come to pick up me and a handful of other American kids from my immediate neighborhood.

Even with the two shifts class sizes were enormous. My class had around 75 kids. We were in a long narrow classroom that had five files of desks extending away from the front and the blackboard back to the hinterlands. I was initially seated in the hinterlands but complained of not being able to read the writing on the board from there so I was moved to within 10 feet of the front. I could read the board there by squinting at it if the writing was large enough. Sometimes I had to get up and walk over to it.

To make up for only four hours of instruction the teacher gave us massive quantities of homework.

Once again, I had to prove myself. You would think, since almost every student there was a child of parents staying only temporarily in Taiwan, that there would be a culture that accepted new students easily. But no. The standing assumption by both teachers and other students is, you're a dunce until you prove otherwise. Even if the other students only arrived in the school 2 months before you.

The task was made worse by the Christmas show. The school had an annual Christmas show for the benefit of parents in an assembly hall, and my class was going to sing a song on stage. The song was We Three Kings. It was discovered that I didn't know the words of this universally beloved musical masterpiece. Ergo I was a dunce.

My parents were also stunned to learn that I didn't know We Three Kings. "You loved that song, and you used to sing it all the time." My Mother guessed eventually that it was probably part of the musical knowledge that was destroyed by the doctors in Maryland.

It didn't help that my speech was still slow. I was still laboring to speak by visualizing the written words as I went along, and I hadn't mastered inflection.

On top of all that I had become a fanatic about proof. Nothing convinces morons that you're dumber than they are than constantly demanding explanations from the morons for all their moronic pronouncements.

[Above: Nothing but maple trees in this Vermont park, as you can plainly see.]

An example of how I was treated as a moron: Our geography book had a section on New England states that I had to read for homework. The next day in class I pointed out that the book's statement that New England has mostly maple trees was wrong. I was asked what made me think I knew more than the authors of the book. I said that I'd lived in New England for over 4 years and while there were maples, most of the trees were other kinds. I was told with a smug smile that maybe I wasn't as observant as I should have been.

The breakthrough that earned me some respect happened after Christmas. My parents got me a globe that year. I had the instructions to the globe with me the day the teacher tried to tell the class during geography lessons that latitude lines go pole to pole and longitude lines run east-west parallel to the equator. Everyone laughed when I raised my hand to tell her it was the other way around. The teacher gave me an argument and when I asked her to look it up said with a smug smile she didn't have to, she KNEW she was right. So I got out the instructions to the globe, which included that piece of information, and that was the end of the smug smiles where I was concerned.

Every new school was like that. It would always take some minor demonstration that the squirrel spinning the wheel in my head wasn't dead.

Soot and Codes

The house we moved into in Taipei was a rental that passed from one US military family to the next. I know because along the outside of the house there was a pile of garbage that had been left by previous occupants that contained old American magazines going back a couple of years.

The house was very Chinese, I think. It was two stories, not counting the basement, which only held the coal furnace. The first floor had picture windows that looked out into a small yard. the yard was enclosed by a wall topped with broken glass embedded into the concrete, to discourage thieves. The entrance through the wall was through a gate at a corner.

The flooring throughout the house was cement. There was a drain in every room. This turned out to make a lot of sense. The coal we got to supply our furnace was bituminous, and the operation of the furnace filled the house with soot every morning. We'd wake up each day looking like we belonged in a minstrel show. The floors and walls would also be covered with soot.

There was no way my Mother was going to clean a house like that. Fortunately, maids were cheap. We got a Taiwanese maid. She simply threw buckets of water on the walls and floors and swept it down the drains, which dumped the soot and water soup into the river behind the house.

What I thought was so Chinese about the house was the way the upper story rooms were arrayed along a balconied walkway that looked down on the living room. It's a design that I've only seen in Western houses built since WW II created an interest in Asian designs. It meant the living room had about an 17 or 18 foot ceiling, instead of an 8 foot ceiling. You almost felt as if you were still outdoors. If it weren't for the walls and the cement floor, and the missing sky light, and the fact that there are no windows other than the one big one one the side facing the yard.

We'd barely settled in when my Father told us he would be leaving my mother and I alone there for six weeks while he "went to the Mountain." The Mountain was a location we weren't permitted to know anything more about, except that it was on a mountaintop of Taiwan, an island which, aside from the relatively flat area of Taipei, is itself mountain upon mountain, from north to south.

Now, I was trying to patch things up with my Father at this time. I thought the change of place might provide an opportunity. I saw him doing a cryptogram puzzle from a puzzle book and asked him how he did them. He told me how he looked at patterns and the frequency of letters. When he finished he complained that he'd done them all.

So I volunteered to make up new codes for him to crack. I scrambled the alphabet and wrote out a sentence with the new values.

When he would get the answers too fast I had a flash of insight. I could make a completely different kind of code. I invented a code that was essentially a vector code. After the beginning, the substitutions depended on the letters previously encountered in the message.

My Father was stumped, of course. It wasn't fair. A code that diabolical is too hard to decipher from such a small sample. But he was able to get it anyway, by guessing,.

Silly me, the only sentence I ever encoded was, "My Father is going to the Mountain next month."

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?