04 Jul Chinese Ambassador – 1

Once, when we lived in Botswana, we got invited to a formal luncheon. The president was at our table, along with the American ambassador and her husband, a retired lieutenant general. Three stars. I’d never even been in the same room with such a thing before.

I liked him a lot. We’d both served as enlisted men in Vietnam, we’d both been wounded and we’d both been sent home. When that happens, you get to choose your next duty station. This being 1969, I chose Ft Ord, California, and the Summer of Love, but my timing was off. The Summer of Love had ended while I was in Vietnam. By the time I arrived at Ft Ord, nubile young ladies were sporting T-shirts with hieroglyphics of fish and bicycles. My table companion had chosen Ft Bragg and paratrooper school. I left the army when my hitch was up and went on to find other ways to misspend my youth. He stayed in and became a three-star general. We both made the right choice.

One of the first things I noticed about him was that he had a little purple-and-white lapel pin on his suit jacket. It was the kind of thing you wouldn’t recognize if you didn’t have one yourself, but I knew right away what it was. It was the lapel pin that comes in the box alongside a purple heart.

It’s not like you actually have to do anything to get a purple heart and I’d never thought having one was any great shakes of an accomplishment. If I wore a lapel pin for every occasion I’d been in the wrong place at the wrong time, you could melt me down and sell me for bullion . . . and mine had stayed in its box, lo those many decades. Until I saw one on a retired three-star general and it started me thinking. This guy has medals I never even heard of, and the one he wears is his purple heart? So, out of the box mine came. And onto my lapel.

Not long after that the Chinese ambassador threw a Moon Party to celebrate the fifty-eighth anniversary of Red China, and I got invited. Or, rather, Peggy got invited and I got to go. She was out of town tending to important Peace Corps business and I filled in for her.

In Botswana, the Chinese keep their embassy, along with their ambassador, tucked away behind a wall. It’s not a bad looking wall. It’s made of light-colored bricks intertwined with dark-colored bricks in a handsome lacy pattern, but it’s unusually high, a good ten feet, topped with eight strands of electric wire. And it’s not just the ambassador, the entire Chinese delegation is locked away back there at night. Most are locked in during the day, as well. Walls are one of the things China is famous for and you couldn’t shake the impression they were playing to their strengths.

At every other embassy in Gaborone and everywhere else I’ve seen embassies, local people are all over the grounds, working, or lounging in the yard. At the American Embassy the guards out front are Batswana. Batswana man the gates, operate the scanning equipment, inspect the cars, remove the bombs and decide who gets inside.

And nobody lives on the embassy grounds, not at ours nor at any of the other embassies, including ambassadors. Ambassadors have official Residences, drive to work like everybody else and hang out with diplomats from other places. On weekends they party and picnic and go on safari together, their families mingling in such a boisterous international profusion of children and dogs and spouses they have to send their kids back home for high school so they can learn about their own countries.

The Chinese ambassador lurked behind his wall in solitary splendor in one of the showiest residences around: two wings flared out from a five-story designer cylinder made of glass bricks topped with green-glazed barrel tiles on a curved, pagoda-shaped roof. Very eye-catching in a modern, Chinese-ish sort of way. Almost nobody ever gets to see it, though, because almost nobody ever gets past the wall.

On Moon-Party night, I arrived exactly on time. Ambassadors are like the Queen of England. When you visit one, you show up at the appointed minute. Only I wasn’t expecting the cars parked along the street and it took five minutes to find somewhere to leave mine so, when I went inside, I was one of the very last. I think they must have underground parking at Buckingham Palace to keep this kind of thing from happening.

Somewhere on the way in, a smiling lady handed me a lapel pin. It was two crossed enamel flags, one the blue and black and white flag of the Republic of Botswana. The other, red with an arc of yellow stars, the flag of the Birthday Country. Immediately, it became my second-favorite lapel pin in the world, but I slipped it into my pocket. I was already wearing my first favorite lapel pin and it seemed presumptuous to wear two.

The moon showed up right on schedule.

The Man in the Moon was there, hunched under his bundle of sticks the way the Tswana people see him, and the Chinese ambassador gave a short, rather charming speech in English. He pointed out the pleasure his people take in holding moon parties. He made the standard ambassador noises about all the money China was investing in Africa, and Botswana should hurry up and get some while the getting was good. He mentioned the increasing demand for pork in China, the surplus of pork in America, and suggested that he and our ambassador might have a business opportunity. He mentioned China’s One-Botswana Policy and said China appreciated Botswana’s One-China Policy. Then he pointed out that he had a new cook and that there was lots of Chinese food scattered about. When he was finished, a minister from the Government of Botswana got up and said basically the same thing, except the parts about the pork. And the food.

After sampling some of what might well have been pork, it was hard to tell, I went over and introduced myself to the Chinese ambassador. He was very cordial and spent what seemed like a long time talking about how much he liked America. He’d served in Washington and remembered the seasons. I remembered the seasons in Washington, too, at least one season. Winter. The coldest winter in 75 years while Peggy was training for Africa. He remembered them all. “Four seasons,” he said, “are good for the health.” I think the seasons are what he liked best about America.

I went back to the buffet. There were moon pies laid out on a table along with a lot of other Chinese food, some of which I could identify. The Chinese didn’t think of them as moon pies, they called them moon cakes, but they didn’t seem like cakes to me. They were made out of bean curd and looked to have been boiled instead of baked, so moon pies they remain in my memory.

After a while I got to talking with a young man who said he’d come to Botswana to build a school. He told me that he wouldn’t get another posting overseas, there were just too many people who wanted that sort of job. Share and share alike, I supposed. Good enough rationale for a country that pretends to still be Communist.

He hadn’t seen much of Botswana. I don’t think it was as easy for him to spend time outside of the wall as it had been for those of us on the outside to get in. I told him it was a shame, that Botswana was beautiful and that I loved it there. He stiffened a bit, and told me he loved China, so I asked him what Peggy and I should see if we went to China, and he gave me the name of a province.

When I looked blank, he said it was where Chairman Mao came from. This didn’t seem like a drawing card to me, and I just stood there while he kept talking-up the place. “Many good Communists came from that province,” he told me. From the poor quality of work the Chinese lavish on their overseas building projects, it seemed pretty clear this guy’s job qualifications consisted of scoring high on the good-Commie test.Then, starting to sound like some kind of missionary pushing the wrong book, he said, “You have heard of Communists, haven’t you?”

“I got this,” I tapped the purple heart in my lapel, “fighting Communists.”

I’m not sure I should have said that but it seemed right at the time. Besides, if he’d known what the pin stood for he might have thought, Ha. Score one for our side. Instead, he looked surprised and a little discombobulated by the news. He pulled himself together and said he was going to go get his wife so he could introduce us.

A few minutes later he came back and told me the women were in the kitchen, washing dishes. This happens sometimes at parties at my house, when the wives get tired of listening to the men talk and pick up the plates and migrate to the kitchen, but I can’t imagine it ever taking place at the Residence of the American ambassador. If nothing else, there would be Batswana to do the dishes.

Perhaps his wife wasn’t allowed to meet me. “It’s one thing to let her old man work outside the wall during the day,” you can just hear some functionary say. “But if spouses start consorting with foreigners . . . well, you never can tell what might . . . .”

Or, maybe she just didn’t want to meet me.

Perhaps she really was doing the dishes. Communists chatter a lot about how you should do your own domestic chores, but why just the women?

I never got to follow up because, bang, the party came to a stop. The eight-thirty closing time was as serious as the six-thirty opening, and I had to scoot. I was five minutes late in that direction, too, and one of the very last to leave.