She chose graduate school, but it would come later. First, she wanted to expand her knowledge of Chinese. If she knew Chinese culture and could speak the language, she figured that she could parlay a graduate degree in business or political science into a career in diplomatic service or with one of the corporations trying to cash in on the big new market in China. At Guilford College, not far from her parents’ house, she found a young student from Taiwan, Bie Ju, who agreed to tutor her in Mandarin. Susie soon became convinced that if she went to Taiwan to study she could learn the language much faster because she would be forced to use it regularly. Bie suggested the Mandarin Training Center of Taiwan Normal University in Taipei, where non-Chinese study the language as well as Chinese history and culture. Susie applied in the fall of 1979, was quickly accepted, and began making plans to spend a year in Taiwan.
“I realized that I had chosen a very competitive field and that I was going to be playing ‘catch up’ for the next four years, or more,” she later wrote. “I had a limited budget and no time to waste. I knew that I could also do primary research while I was in Taiwan that would be the kind of firsthand information other graduate students would not have. This was no time to do things the tried and true way. It was a one-shot chance to have a better future for the three of us, and I was obsessed with taking it.”
She dreaded telling her parents. John and Jimbo had settled happily with them, and Bob and Florence were enjoying their company. Her parents didn’t like the idea of her going to live in a strange country with two small children. They tried to talk her into leaving the children with them. Tom was upset, too. She had mentioned to him in September that she was thinking of going to Taiwan, but he never dreamed that she would go through with it. When he called Susie to see about having the boys visit for Christmas, Susie told him that they couldn’t because she and the boys were leaving for Taiwan. He tried to talk her into leaving the boys with her parents or dropping them off in New Mexico with him. This was a Third World country, he reminded her; she’d never been out of the Carolinas or New Mexico; she had no idea what it could be like. But Susie was determined that she was going and taking the boys. When Delores found out, she was flabbergasted. Why on earth would Susie want to do such a thing? And why would Tom allow it? It was the craziest thing she’d ever heard, she told friends. But Susie’s parents and Tom realized that Susie had made up her mind and that no amount of reasoned argument would change it. Stopping her would be all but impossible.
“I was firmly advised that I could not do it (not true),” Susie later wrote, “that I did not have enough money (almost true), and that if I were more experienced I would know better than to try (true).”
Susie wrote to another friend from Taiwan, Gwen Kao, whom she had met in Albuquerque, to tell of her plans. Gwen was visiting her family in Taipei and wrote to say that she would still be there when Susie arrived. She also mentioned that her sister-in-law owned an apartment that Susie could rent for eighty dollars a month. Susie called Gwen in Taiwan and accepted. Things were falling into place perfectly, she thought. She even had received a favorable response from one of several institutions in Taipei she had written to in hopes of finding a part-time job teaching English during her stay. And Bie had called her brother, Henry, and asked him to meet Susie at the airport on her arrival.
Susie was more excited and ebullient that Christmas than her family could remember seeing her in a long time, and three days later, she said happy good-byes and departed with six suitcases, $1,800, and a bagful of Star Wars toys.
“It was to be for all of us the journey of a lifetime,” she later wrote.
Her plane was late leaving Los Angeles, and twenty-six hours later, after several stops, it landed in Taipei at 2 A.M. Susie and the boys were exhausted, and Susie was nervously uncertain about what lay ahead. She was irritated to learn that her luggage had been left in Los Angeles. She had only two carry-on bags, one containing a single change of clothes for the boys, the other filled with toys. She was buoyed, however, when she walked into the reception area and saw a big banner, held aloft by Bie’s smiling brother and his wife Marie, saying WELCOME SUSIE LYNCH.
The Jus took Susie and the boys to their apartment and put them to bed. Susie remained with them three days while she got established in Taipei and waited for her lost luggage. Gwen came and helped her enroll at the Mandarin Center and find a childcare center for John and Jim where the director spoke a little English and the fee for both was only eighty-five dollars a month. Then she took Susie to see the apartment she had rented. It was new, just six months old, but small and cheaply constructed, a fourth-floor walk-up on a narrow alley in Yuan Ho City (city of eternal harmony, Susie later translated in a letter home), a working-class area, a sharp contrast to the luxury Susie had known all of her life.
Susie would have to share the apartment with her landlady, who did not live there but retained the largest bedroom and came three or four nights weekly to cook for and entertain friends, occasionally sleeping over. Susie and the boys had two small bedrooms. They shared the bath, kitchen (two gas burners, a tiny refrigerator, and a sink), and living area, which included a TV, with their landlady. Susie decided to sleep in the same room the boys slept in and turn one of her rooms into a study. Not until she moved in did she realize that she had no closets and much of her precious room would be consumed by stand-up dress racks that she had to buy.
Originally, Susie had planned to spend the first month getting to know the city, but her classes were to begin only five days after her arrival, long before she had learned streets, bus schedules, shopping techniques, and other things she needed to know to attend to their daily needs. By her second week, she knew that she was in trouble.
“I had come to realize how out of control the situation was,” she wrote. “I found myself being too demanding of myself and of John and Jim. I was expecting all of us to be ‘super heroes’ and developed a ‘Lone Ranger Complex.’ I felt (guilty?) I was being especially unfair to John and Jim since this trip was for my career and to their advantage in that respect but it was not something to which they felt a real commitment. I knew only too well that this trip had been my decision and mine alone. I felt total responsibility for success or failure for the first time, and it was frightening.”
She systematically began to organize her life, studying maps, exploring, learning bus routes and shops, making lists of contacts she might need, finding a church to attend, and within two weeks, although her performance in class suffered, she felt that she was beginning to get control. With the strain, as well as the novelty and excitement, of being in a new place beginning to dissipate, she also began discovering many things she did not like.
The pollution that constantly clouded the city annoyed her, as did the constant noise and crowds. The buses were so packed that she felt like a sardine riding them, she wrote. And everywhere she seemed to encounter filth. She was wary of eating in restaurants because of the poor hygienic practices she observed, and the only public rest rooms she would use were at the Hilton Hotel. All others she found abominable. She carried packets of sanitized towelettes wherever she went.
In her apartment, she discovered hordes of roaches and set about killing them with noxious sprays. She blamed the roaches on her landlady’s poor housekeeping, which she resented. “I found many frustrations and aggravations from sharing a bathroom and kitchen with Chinese,” she wrote. “My standards were simply not theirs. I ended up doing a ridiculous amount of cleaning just to stay even. For example: the refrigerator was never cleaned by anyone else; in six months the floor was mopped twice. In the bathroom the standard method of cleaning was to rinse everything with water—no soap or disinfectant. However, the most difficult thing for me to handle was the occasional guest of my landlady who deposited his or her toilet paper in the trash can instead of the toilet. I was totally shocked the first time it happened and had to instantly create a new rule that the children were not to ever use that trash can.
“This place is wonderful for germs and not so wonderful for people,” she wrote Aunt Su-Su.
Few foreigners ever had lived in the area of her apartment, and she and the boys attracted attention every time they went anywhere. Some people reached out to touch the pale, fair-haired boys, frightening them and causing Susie to become resentful. After a few weeks, though, they became less an oddity, and life settled into routine.
In February, Jim began to be troubled with bronchitis. Susie took him to a neighborhood doctor, who suggested that the problem lay in allowing Jim cold drinks with his meals. Susie dismissed this as absurd. The antibiotics that the doctor gave him didn’t help, and Jim’s condition was worsened, Susie felt, by her landlady, who believed that “fresh” air was necessary to good health and left doors and windows open even on the coldest days.
By the end of February, Jim had pneumonia. And Susie and John were sick as well. She took Jim to Taiwan Adventist Hospital—the best in Taipei, she’d been told—where the doctor insisted that he be admitted. She and John stayed with him, sleeping in the same bed. By the next day, disenchantment had set in.
“The toilet overflowed and I received a lecture, in Chinese, on why it was my fault,” Susie later wrote. “Since I did not understand much of what was said, a nurse who knew a bit more English than the others came in to explain. It seemed that I had committed the unpardonable sin: putting toilet paper in the toilet. Where, I asked, was one to put it? ‘In the trash can, of course, where everyone else puts it.’ Their disgust at my ignorance was obvious and no one bothered to hide their feelings. That night the last straw arrived in the form of tribes of roaches which came out of the dresser drawers to feed off the sticky floors. I could not take any more and left the next morning.”
The hospital stay cost $125, wiping out Susie’s emergency reserve. And all of them were still sick. A friend at the Mandarin Center whose sister was a nurse came to Susie’s aid. The nurse recommended antibiotics and the proper amounts to take. Susie bought them and she and the boys went to bed and stayed there for a week.
Their illnesses cost Susie ten days of classes, and she was hopelessly behind when she returned. She struggled to keep up but couldn’t, and she decided she’d have to switch to a slower class. She was incredulous when, in applying for the transfer, an administrator ruled her absence unexcused. “You know the rules,” she remembered him telling her. “You must notify us in advance if you are going to be ill.”
She received the transfer anyway, and soon afterward a new opportunity opened for her. An English teacher at the Language Training and Testing Center lost his job because of political statements, and Susie was asked to fill in. She accepted to replenish her emergency fund.
Her life became even more hectic. She was up before 6 A.M. every day, getting the boys ready for day care. Once she got them off, she rushed to the bus stop for the long trip to the Language Center on the packed buses she so hated. She taught from 9 to 11, and barely had time to catch a snack on her way to her studies at the Mandarin Center. “I always wondered what it would be like to come to class prepared, but I never found out,” she later wrote. After class, she had to run to make the bus home so that she would be there when the boys arrived. The bus stop was five blocks from her apartment, and she stopped to pick up groceries and other necessities as she made her way home. “As I shopped my way up the street, it was not always easy to keep smiling. I was really beginning to hate being ‘the American.’”
With luck, she arrived home in time to change clothes and prepare snacks for the boys before they got there.
“
On the
good
days, there were letters from the States to read while I waited,” she wrote. “I loved to see the little school bus arrive with the boys. It came to signal the victory over one more day.”
Yet the day was far from done. She still had to cook dinner, bathe the boys, and put them to bed with a story, before she cleaned up the day’s mess, got her own bath and tried to find a little quiet time for study. The schedule had one advantage: it left little time for thinking about Tom.
Near the end of March, five days before Jim’s fourth birthday, a call from home brought news of Paw-Paw’s death, sending Susie into depression. By the next month, she was even more distressed. Even in the slower class she was not able to keep up her studies. And Jim developed pneumonia again.
She later wrote about her thoughts at the time. “I had to make a major decision: how long should we stay? How dangerous was his condition? What was causing it? I was told that he suffered from a pollution allergy but that was a vague diagnosis. The only thing I was sure of was that Jim was either on antibiotics or he was sick. He had always been cooperative and uncomplaining, but I was shredding emotionally. At this point, our landlady came to announce that she was allowing a Chinese couple to move into her room for the next three months. The thoughts of sharing our apartment and what little privacy we had were just too much. I knew that we had to move or leave. Our current situation had become intolerable.”
Not only was the situation intolerable, she could see no hope of improvement. Completely frazzled, she decided she had but one recourse: to return home. That night, she put the boys to bed, read them a story, and lay down with them until they dropped off to sleep. She later remembered the night clearly.