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My Father's Experience in SACO

Reflections on China

When my dad stepped off the troop ship in Calcutta, India in July 1945, he figured he would be in Asia for at least two years serving his country.  However, World War II ended suddenly and unexpectedly a few months later.  An admitted "Johnny-come-lately" to the war effort, he was glad to help his country during the conflict.  But once it was over, he wanted to get back home to Anne, start a family and begin a teaching career.  He told me several times that the best thing that ever happened to him during the war was finding and marrying Anne.

My dad continued serving in the U.S. Naval Reserve for several years after the war.  During the start of the Korean War, in 1950, he was promoted to Lieutenant Commander and a few months later, after completing an intensive submarine training program in Groton, Connecticut, he was certified as a navy submarine commander.  He was never called to service during the Korean War, though he probably could've commanded a submarine if he had pursued it, he once told me.

But he was more interested in education than conflict, so after the war he turned down a career in the navy and decided to become a college professor instead (a much better use of his talents).  He traveled around the world during the next four decades while helping poorer nations, including Bolivia, Thailand, Honduras and a dozen other countries, create schools and educational programs.

Above left:  The first photo taken of Don and Anne together.  This was in January 1944 in Dickinson, North Dakota, when Don was attending Naval Officer Training School nearby.  This was taken a few months after they met, around the time they secretly married.

Above right:  This is the last photo taken of Don and Anne.  This was in January 1999 in Las Vegas, Nevada.  Anne developed pneumonia shortly afterwards and died a few weeks later.  They had been married for 55 years.

Nevertheless, my father was very fond of the time he had spent in China and of the people he had met there.  He greatly admired the men of SACO, both Americans and Chinese, and spoke often of his time in China, almost always in glowing terms.  Having become somewhat-fluent in Mandarin Chinese, he even passed along to his children some of the words he had learned there, including mama fufu ("not too good, not too bad"), ding how ("excellent"), boo-eow kachee ("I appreciate it"), and shi-shi ("thank you").

My dad told me lots of funny stories about his time in China.  The Chinese soldiers he worked with, he said, had a great sense of humor and often encouraged him to speak his mangled Mandarin Chinese, much to their delight.  Apparently the Chinese words for "seven" and "eight," when spoken together fast, sound like the word for a part of the male anatomy.  During the evenings, while sitting around the campfire and drinking hot rice wine, his Chinese colleagues would encourage him to count from one to ten in Chinese, and when he said the words for "seven" and "eight," they always burst out laughing. 

I started telling a Chinese friend of mine this story a few years ago at my office.  I told him that my dad always made his Chinese colleagues laugh when he counted from one to ten in Mandarin.  But before I could explain why, my Chinese friend started laughing, because he knew exactly what I was going to say – and he was right.  Apparently it's a common problem among foreigners who try to speak Mandarin.

	Above:  My father, Don Leu, in 1999 after he'd been elected to the Bellingham School Board.  He passed away three years later at age 79.

But my father's spoken Chinese also paid off once in a while.  In the 1960s, we lived in the Bay Area and would occasionally go to Chinatown in San Francisco to eat at one of the popular Chinese restaurants there (our favorite was called Kuo Wah).  The restaurants were usually crowded, so patrons, especially Caucasians, often had a hard time securing a good table.  My father would call a restaurant a few hours beforehand and speak a few words of Chinese, then would say, "This is Dr. Leu and I would like a reservation for 7 p.m. tonight."  Of course, they figured that with a surname like Leu, this fellow must be an upstanding Chinese citizen, so they usually set aside a good table for us with a nice view of the city. 

When we arrived at the restaurant, my father approached the host and said, "I'm Dr. Leu and we have a reservation."  The host would usually look puzzled and ask of my Caucasian father, "You are Dr. Leu?"  Like I say, we always got a great table.  That's one of the benefits of having a Chinese-sounding surname (the name "Leu" is actually Swiss).  He never ordered rice, though.  After eating rice every night for the many months he was in China, he couldn't eat it again until decades afterward.

Humor aside, my father's experience in China had a profound influence on the rest of his life.  As a poor kid who had grown up in a poor logging town in the Washington Cascades during the Great Depression, his adventure overseas opened his eyes to other cultures and helped instill in him a sense of compassion for those who were less fortunate – as well as a lifelong desire to travel and expand his horizons.  His experience in China affected him spiritually, as well.  Never an outwardly-religious person – indeed, he typically shunned Western religions – he quietly adopted elements of the Buddhist and Confucian religions into his dealings with others, and with himself.

After leaving Shanghai in 1946, my father didn't return to China until over 50 years later, in 1997.  He and my mother, along with his older brother Bill and Bill's wife, spent three weeks traveling through China that summer with a tour group.  My dad told me later that it was one of the most memorable trips of his well-traveled life. 

During their visit to Chungking, where he had spent most of his time in China during World War II, my father ran into an elderly Chinese man who was, amazingly enough, one of the 1,200 Nationalist troops that my father had trained back in 1945 at Happy Valley.  Although my dad didn't remember him, the elderly man fondly remembered my dad.  In fact, the gentleman was so happy to see my father again that he started to cry.  My father was deeply touched by the encounter and said it was the high point of his visit to China.

Above left:  In Peking, China in 1997.  Don (wearing his iconic red hat) and Anne are on the right and Don's older brother, Bill, is on the left.  Bill joined the U.S. Navy in 1940 and was Don's inspiration for joining the navy in December 1941 after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.  Bill, stationed on the bow of the navy ship, U.S.S. Neosho, had witnessed the attack.

Above right:  Don and Anne in 1997 at the Joseph Stilwell Museum in Chungking, China.  The museum, near the former SACO base at Happy Valley, describes the American involvement in China during World War II.  This was where my father met his former student from 1945.