Sydney, Australia 1960-62

It is late March 1960 and from my airplane flying over the Asian Pacific Ocean from Taipei, Taiwan to Sydney, Australia, I was looking back upon the first 20 years of my life with my parents in their Foreign Service. I was struck by how amazing it was that my family and I were able to travel much of the globe the way we had, during brutal war times and now in relative peace time.

 

A mere 16 years earlier, in 1944, the entire world was ablaze in World War II. These same Asian Pacific waters that I was flying over had hid the savage fleet of over 170 Japanese submarines hunting for Allied ships while my parents, my 4-month old brother and I at age 4 were sailing aboard an American troopship from Bombay, India to Los Angeles, California. At that time, in the midst of savage armed conflicts, my 27-year old father had been assigned to his first diplomatic posting overseas to Chicago as vice-consul in the ROC Consulate General. We had escaped war-ravaged Chongqing, China five months earlier by flying in a US military transport plane over “The Hump,” the most dangerous airlift in historical times, over the Himalayas to India. Approximately 30% of Allied airmen were lost on this air route providing the only materials-supply and human lifeline in and out of China.

 

On December 31, 1943, we boarded The USS Hermitage – originally an Italian ocean liner named SS Conte Biancamano that had been commandeered as an Axis enemy vessel, renamed and recommissioned by the Americans and used to transport Allied troops across the Pacific and the Atlantic Oceans. By carefully zigzagging over the oceans for over 2 months, the captain and crew of the troop transport successfully evaded the Japanese submarines through the South China Seas and the Indian Ocean, skimming past Australia and Tahiti into the Pacific Ocean towards California, USA to deliver its precious cargo along with my family and me to the United States.

 

Now, 16 years after our earlier series of wartime voyages by sea and air aboard troop carriers, my 16-year old brother and I flew over peaceable waters in a commercial airliner destined southward to Australia, once again for Father’s work; this time, for his assignment as the ROC Consul General to Sydney. I knew little about Australia except that the British had settled Australia as an outlying colony in the late 18th century, and that the ANZAC (Australia New Zealand Army Corps) had fought bravely in WWII against the Axis powers in Europe and against the Japanese in SE Asia.

 

Kangaroos, koala bears, wallabies and a variety of 3,000 other indigenous creatures cohabited in a vast land of only 10 million people, mostly populated along the southern coast of Australia in urban Canberra, Melbourne and Sydney which was the largest Australian city of approximately 2 million. I would come to appreciate Sydney as another gemlike Victorian port city of undulating green hills and shimmering ocean waters similar to that other famously picturesque City by the Bay – San Francisco.

 

  

 April was autumn in Australia, the reverse of the season for that time of year in the northern hemisphere, and the academic year had already begun in February. We were once again late for the beginning of another school year in another country.

 

When Father, Mother and my five-year old brother later arrived in June, Father assessed the local landscape and immediately launched into a concerted goodwill effort with the local Australians, as well as with the local Chinese community who numbered under 30,000. A “White Australia” national immigration policy instituted in 1901 restricted non-white immigration to Australia, primarily aimed against the Chinese who had begun entering Australia during the 1850’s Australian Gold Rush much like the America Gold Rush of 1849. After WWII, under Prime Minister Robert Menzies, this anti-Chinese law was gradually lifted, but it was not fully dismantled until 1973.  Father was sensitive to the discrimination against the Chinese and was determined to aid in establishing a more positive profile of his countrymen and country.

 

After WWII, Taiwan had few economic and trade incentives for Australia and in the beginning of Father’s tenure he felt it difficult to establish a strong public relations foothold in the Sydney social and political establishment. Taiwan was intent on developing a long term, massive technology, industrialization and infrastructure plan and growing international trade was viewed as the early steps towards accomplishing such a vision. At the time of our arrival, Taiwan exported a meager US$1mil per year, primarily straw hats, and imported a few million US$ of wool from Australia. To remedy this paltry trade relationship, Father called on his Taiwan business contacts to develop trade between the 2 countries.

 

Taiwan’s participation in the 1961 New South Wales Trade Fair was another way in which Australians were exposed to more Taiwan agriculture and new industrial products beyond mere straw hats. In my cheongsam (chi pao), I volunteered to work the ROC trade fair booth by greeting guests who were interested in our displays of Chinese art and replicas of cultural artifacts from the Palace Museum. Most visitors were polite and appreciative but I also encountered some harassment from rowdy young Australian men. One day when I ignored the disrespectful boorishness of a particularly obstreperous group, they loudly sneered, “So where are the opium and pipes, China girl?” I sarcastically flung back, “Oh, you mean the poison that the Westerners forced into China to offset your trade imbalance?” Taken aback that a Chinese girl retorted boldly in English, the ruffians scurried away but I called after them, “Better you go back to school and read up on your history, mates!” When the Taiwan Trade delegation supervisor reproachfully reported my sharp comments to Mother, she smiled approvingly, exclaiming, “That’s my daughter!”

 

From my earliest childhood, I remembered mother’s angry outrage at the 19^th Century placard the British Colonial forces had posted at the gate of the Shanghai Huangpu Park: “Chinese and Dogs Not Admitted.” Father’s attempts to calm mother that this insult was possibly a myth as no photos were ever found, fell on mother’s deaf ears. No matter the case, I thought the “White Australia” policy was misguided and racist.

 

Aside from the occasional grievance and run-in, we mostly found that white Australians were genial and easy to get along with. The Australian-Chinese citizens were hard working and focused on putting everything of themselves into their new chosen home. They were upwardly mobile people who valued education, thrift, integrity and community service, all qualities which helped gradually counteract the century old discriminatory practices.

 

Australia was also a country with an uncommonly high literacy rate and cultural enthusiasm among its citizens, bred in civility and decorum in the manner of their fellow British countrymen. The opera, ballet, theater, symphony and art galleries were avidly supported by the government and the people, and it dawned upon my parents that while Australians much admired Chinese art, they openly commented that Chinese ink painting was frozen in a 2000-year old time capsule. Thereupon which, Father invited 7 contemporary young Chinese artists from Taiwan to exhibit at the respected Sydney Dominion Art Gallery. The Sydney press and art critics raved that the young Chinese artists were as avant-garde as their talented Western counterparts . A new-found respect from the Sydney art world for modern Chinese art also elicited a strong sense of pride among the local Chinese community. Among the young Taiwan artists, Liu Guo Song 劉國松 was the most admired. Mr. Liu later became a world-renowned modern artist, noted as the “The Father of Contemporary Ink Wash.”

                                      

  Shortly after we settled into our new home in Sydney, the high society formal annual ball season in the European tradition was beginning anew that June of 1960. Father and Mother, the new ROC consul general and his wife, were invited to attend, suitably attired in black tie and formal gown. To Father’s regret, I was too old at the age of 21 by established rules and customs of the day, to be presented to the governor of New South Wales and polite society as a coming of marriageable age debutante. However, the Australian and Chinese social networks swept me up as a guest in a dazzling fest of balls at the luxurious Sydney Trocadero Ballroom which could accommodate a room of several hundred dancing couples to live orchestras. 

 

Father had rented a majestic house in North Sydney across the Sydney Harbor to keep up appearances with the grand residences of the diplomatic corps of other nations. Mother had brought a Taiwanese cook-housekeeper who helped us immensely around the house and with entertaining the local society. Father and Mother were committed to representing Taiwan by putting the best face forward, and they utilized their own wages and loans to supplement our scant government allocations to perform their duties.   

 

My family began to adapt comfortably into the diplomatic as well as the Australian and Chinese communities and, in time, new friends streamed through our waterfront house enjoying the sweeping harbor views and expansive grounds. I was invited to many social events and night clubs at the top Sydney nightclubs, in particular at the Chequers Nightclub, owned by 2 Chinese brothers, Keith and Denis Wong, who recreated a Hollywood glamour to their club. Chequers was touted by Variety, the popular U.S. publication, as one of the “Top Ten Nightclubs in the World” and featured the biggest international stars on its stage and through its doors. I especially remember that the Wong brothers were active in Chinese community affairs and strong supporters of Chinese cultural events such as Lunar New Year, Lantern Festival, Dragon Boat Racing and even Chinese opera. The Wongs and several other Australian-Chinese demonstrated civic leadership in the Australian society.

 

Almost every day, crossing the Sydney Harbor Bridge to and from my various classes in art and design in central Sydney, my part time work at a local hospital in town to pay for my tuitions, and evening courses at the University of New South Wales to continue my formal education, I would gratefully wave at the bridge toll booth keepers in my agile little Ford Anglia with its diplomatic license plate, without having to stop to pay as part of the customary international courtesy toward families of diplomats.

 

From time to time, I accompanied Father to his official obligations as well as a variety of social events, substituting for Mother who disliked the small talk of large social gatherings, but when Mother’s mother, my grandmother, passed away in Beijing of cancer in late 1960, I stepped in for Mother whenever needed - sometimes at scintillating events but more often at stifling official duties. A dense, dark shroud laid across Mother’s mood as Mother went into a one-year mourning seclusion. Mother’s father had followed the more traditional Chinese 3-year long filial mourning period when his mother had passed away. Father and Mother had fully expected to be reunited with their families after the inevitable defeat of Japan from the moment of their departure from Beiping for Kunming on September 13, 1938 until China’s civil war shattered that dream in 1949.  Mother was never to see her mother again. Nor Father, his father. Their grief was like a forever tattoo on their souls.

 

Father’s and Mother’s sacrifices may not have been in vain. Their diplomatic efforts, throughout Father’s postings, yielded some tangible results. Australia was no exception. By 1967, trade between Taiwan and Australia exceeded US$60 million through the hard work of 尹仲容先生 and the ROC Central Trust and Investment Commission 中央信託局 and a permanent trade representative stationed in Sydney. In more recent years, trade between Taiwan and Australia is reported to exceed US$20 Billion. Relations between the two countries has never been stronger. Annually, almost 166,000 tourists visit Australia and another 17,000 Taiwan students study in Australia.

 

At the time we were living there, the continent of Australia seemed very distant and sequestered from the USA-USSR Cold War, the Berlin Wall dividing East and West Europe, the looming Vietnam War and from our Beijing family suffering starvation from the disastrous famine of the PRC Great Leap Forward. Yet those dire events were never far from my parents’ minds.

 

Back in 1944, our ship USS Hermitage had skimmed the shores of Sydney, Australia, conveying its human cargo to a hopeful future in the United States with expectations that the Second World War would end soon and a new world order would be established by a victorious, enlightened Allied partnership, by the founding of the United Nations and by life enhancing technological advances from man in space as well as the peaceful harness of nuclear energy and control of infectious diseases such as TB, small pox, typhoid, cholera.  But 20 years later, during my 2-year interlude in Sydney, I grew conscious that the world had not improved as hoped, that human nature remained unchanged and that while I had very much benefitted from my life on the move with my parents, the swift passage of time quickened my yearning for more stability and place to call my own home.

 

The British Pakistani writer said “We are all refugees from our childhood…there was a moment when anything is possible. And there will be a moment when nothing is possible.” In Australia at the age of 22, I was tired of feeling like an itinerant refugee from my childhood, from different cultures, school systems and countries. I had held the hope of becoming a journalist from the time of elementary school following the comic book heroine “Brenda Starr.” At St. Scholastica’s in Manila I was given the opportunity to be the class reporter leading to the position of editor of the school paper and editor of the school year book. In Taiwan, at Taida, I helped the founding of the Taida FLD journal “The Pioneer” by contributing several articles. For me, I came to realize that Australia did not hold a permanent home for a diplomat’s family nor a future for me and that my father could, at any time, be ordered to serve in another country.

 

A gifted young physician whom I had met in Washington DC in 1960, was training in Radiation Oncology and Nuclear Medicine for the treatment of cancer. He wrote a letter to me every day from the day we parted in March,1960. Each letter was numbered so that I would not miss a day of his life. Dr. Peck Lau tried to persuade me daily that we could share a meaningful and happy life together while he continued his specialty training in the emerging field of cancer treatment at the University of California San Francisco Medical Center and I, toward a degree in journalism.  I had pondered his proposal for more than 2 years, over more than 720 letters handwritten on stationary and those once familiar light blue with red and dark blue stripes “Par Avion” air letter, and in 1962 I was ready to traverse across the Pacific Ocean once more, toward a life with Peck Lau and a home of my own.

 

                                  Father and me at Sydney Airport in 1962