Third Generation Legacy: Saudi Arabia 1972 (I)

 

Estelle Tsui Lau 劉立璀

 

Estelle Tsui Lau is Ambassador Tien Pao-tai's granddaughter, Judith Lau's daughter. She earned a MA, and Ph. D. in sociology from the University of Chicago and a law degree from Harvard University. She is the author of "Paper Families: Identity, Immigration Administration, and Chinese Exclusion" (Duke University Press, 2007).

                        

From the moment the plane doors began to close in Fresno, California, I realized I had made a big mistake.  After my older sister Laura backed out of going to Saudi Arabia with our grandmother in 1972, I took up the dare from my grandmother that I was also too chicken to go with her to Saudi Arabia for a year.  By the time I arrived in Jeddah, I was so certain I did not want anything to do with Saudi Arabia that I spent nearly the first month on California time. Despite my grandmother’s pleas, yelling, threats, bribes, and attempts to put me on the correct time zone by even having me take sleeping aids, I persisted in my dogged refusal to shift time, waking, dressing and eating my meals on California time and otherwise making it very clear I did not want to be there.  She invited young people to the house whom I refused to acknowledge.  She took away my trinkets and toys from my home, saying “If you don’t have all these things from home you will stop thinking about it,”  and in response I refused to eat until my keepsakes were returned. 

 

Throughout this month of hot and cold warfare with my grandmother, my grandfather remained cordial but silent, standing quietly with a somewhat pained expression on his face as my grandmother and I squared off day after day.  Finally, one day he knocked on my door and came in with a plane ticket in his hand. He sat down and very calmly stated, “Estelle, you have a choice.  You can either stay and starting tomorrow go to school and keep a regular schedule or you can take this ticket and go home.”  I was thrilled, but he continued, “This is completely your decision. But if you go home, I want you to know that you will be the laughing stock of your friends and family. Either way, you decide tonight and this ends one way or the other by tomorrow morning.” 

 

My  student ID

 

My grandfather left the room, leaving my plane ticket with me.  I was stunned, but now realize that my grandfather, who had not raised his voice, who had not participated in the drama in the household for the previous weeks had assessed me and found my weak point – my pride!  The next day I got up and went to school.  While I remained homesick and rebellious throughout my stay in Saudi Arabia, blaming my grandmother for my exile from home, it took me many years to realize how my grandfather -- leaving the plane ticket sitting on a shelf in my room-- in fact, achieved my “cooperation” using diplomatic skills that, at the time, were lost on an eight-year old.

 

When I finally emerged from my self-imposed exile within my exile I found myself living in a three-story mansion that looked more like a small bank than a house, surrounded by a large dry garden with roses and a tall wall with a guard at the front gate which was always closed.  It was particularly thrilling when the ROC flag was raised over the house or a small one on the front bumper of the car unfurled when my grandfather was present.

 

My grandparents had two maids – Mrs. Kung from Taipei, an excellent cook and Nina from the Philippines who were my companions. They lived in a small room on the third floor amidst the boxes of wine and liquor that were permitted for foreign diplomats to entertain privately behind the closed gates.  My grandparents were often out or busy, so the maids allowed me to squeeze into a space between the kitchen cabinets and the wall in the kitchen where I would watch them prepare meals. I would follow them to their room and lounge on their beds during their “time off” never considering that I was a pest. 

 Jacqueline Hovig, my future Aunt at Christmas in Jeddah with my grandparents     

  and domestic staff Mrs Kung and Nina, in  Jeddah, Saudi  Arabia, X'mas 1973

 

One or the other would stand nearby me as I rode an old bicycle around the yard and accompany me when I would insist on going to ride a Ferris wheel at a small amusement park just a few blocks from the mansion in the evenings.  I would ride the Ferris wheel repeatedly for sometimes half an hour at a time as there was nobody else at the small park and they would stand at the bottom waiting for me to indicate that I was ready to get off. 

 

At the time, self-absorbed with my own loneliness, I never considered what my grandfather might have been doing that kept him writing at the small desk in his bedroom or at the embassy or often absent from Jeddah traveling.  I now know that he had been working relentlessly to preserve and foster what ties the ROC had in the middle east and deepen ROC’s ties with Saudi Arabia.  My grandfather had developed a great respect for King Faisal whom he described as an abstemious monarch with a prodigious curiosity for world affairs, who comported himself with rectitude and sober dignity and devoted all his energy to the modernization of his country. In my mind, my grandfather had described himself and it made sense that the King and my grandfather shared a warm rapport. He spent much time in Riyadh in the royal reception room waiting on the King’s availability to discuss world affairs which, I learned much later, resulted in the Royal Crown sponsoring the initial investment in ROC’s Hsinchu technology park and the burgeoning of Taiwan’s semiconductor industry.

          

      

Grandfather and King Faisal in Saudi Arabia, 1972

 

I don’t recall much of the landscape of the city outside of the view from the second story of the house which looked out onto a large, mostly dirt square the size of four or five soccer fields with other ambassadors’ homes also marked with flags on top of their square white buildings when the ambassadors were in residence.  Nor can I recall what I looked at from the Ferris wheel other than an unexceptional landscape of whitewashed buildings and walls in a bone dry landscape of dirt with twinkling lights in the otherwise quiet. Looking at the unfamiliar sky as I turned endless circles on the Ferris wheel,  I would recognize a few constellations which made me feel closer to my home and family in California.

 

Everyday my schedule was pretty regular: following a short bus ride – I was the last student on in the morning and first off in the afternoon – I “attended” classes during the day at the American run Parent-Teacher School where I felt hopelessly out of place working alone on my 3rd grade Malloch Grade School curriculum while “classmates” who rarely spoke to me sat in tables grouped together working on their projects.  Lunchtime was even more solitary as I ate by myself at my desk the odd Chinese sandwiches the maids would pack for me in the morning and then would wander the schoolyard watching others play double jump rope. 

 

One day, there was an especially long game going on with many students changing places and becoming more excited as it drew out. I think because of their excitement or my enthusiastic smile as I stood watching, they forgot who I was and someone gestured for me to join in.  Surprised and thrilled I stepped up without thinking and immediately broke the game as I had never double jumped roped before.  As the ropes tangled around my ankles a universal cry went up around me and the other kids shook their heads looking sadly at me and started up again a few feet away. I got two ropes and showed the maids how to turn them to teach myself the basics after that day, but was never invited back into the lunchtime games again that year.

 

After regular school, I would come home and wait for my grandparents to come out of their rooms – my grandmother had a large suite with a sitting area and massive bedroom with an adjoining bath, while my grandfather had a smaller room next to mine and we shared his bathroom on the other side of the large staircase landing area.  When my grandparents were home, they kept mostly to their rooms unless they were hosting guests in the formal rooms downstairs.  My grandfather enjoyed listening to records – whose Western classical melodies would waft through his closed door into the otherwise hushed household.

 

By mid-afternoon, my grandmother would begin to chivvy us to get ready and we would climb into their car for the ride to the ROC embassy where the second part of my school day would begin.  Compared to the quiet of the house and the alienation from American School, our arrival at the Embassy would be greeted by teens and children of the embassy employees who would vie for my attention and a smile or friendly comment from my grandfather before he would quickly disappear into the large embassy followed by his staff who had been standing off to the side of the car quietly waiting for us to descend the vehicle. Surrounded by the cheerful attention of the Embassy children, I would scamper around to the back area of low buildings that housed embassy staff and some classrooms in which we were supposed to continue improving our Chinese.

 

I was placed with children who were five or six years old for the first part of the afternoon to learn characters and read short children’s stories.  I was surreptitiously petted and fawned upon by these smiling youngsters whose Chinese mastery humiliatingly outstripped mine until I was allowed to go to an English class taught by grandmother with older junior high or high school students.  In defiance, I worked hard not to learn any Chinese, instead learning by rote memory the stories in Chinese so as not to have to learn any characters, knowing that the teachers would never scold me or tell my grandparents how lazy I was.