Dad took in a refugee
Mr Loo, from
Red China who cooked
wonderful meals for us , I loved him with all my
little-girl heart. Frenziedly running over to shut off the radio when the
Chinese National Anthem played, I saw the
cold sweat on
Mr. Loo's face. One can appreciate the irony he must have felt serving a luncheon in our home for
Madam Chiang Kai-Shek.
(From his reaction one truly expected horns to be growing out of her head, but she was very nice.)
My sister and I befriended two girls named Ola and Tanya. They lived behind us in the Little American Village, Looking back, the man and woman they lived with ...he was a retired General (Taiwanese?) with a wooden leg, his wife dished out pickled watermelon rinds and candy similar to the white rabbit candy of today. Tanya and I would walk home through rice paddies where water buffalo slowly plodded across the humid fields, chewing salted seeds from a small store (more like a shack) we stopped at on the way home from the Taipei American School
After declassification, my father told us that these two girls were the children of the Dalai Lama . They were sheltered there under the protection of the US Government after escaping the Chinese occupation of Tibet.
These are childhood memories from that time. We were pretty oblivious, as young children are, of the immense history that was going on at the time.
We were taught in school there that Taiwan was neutral and independent of China at the time.
Oh my!! I think I'm in the middle of a political debate!