Profile | My life in Asia: American lawyer turned writer on China’s pull, Beijing’s Muslims and vanishing hutong culture, Mongolia, and sublime Taiwan
- A China watcher by his teens, M.A. Aldrich did ‘exhilarating’ legal work in Hong Kong in the ’90s before being sent to Beijing, on which he wrote two books
- He set up the first international-standard Mongolian legal practice before settling in Taiwan, which he says has achieved a superb combination of East and West
I was born in 1960, on the South Fork of Long Island, and grew up in a rural setting populated by farmers, fishermen, manual labourers and small shopkeepers. My mother, Alice Lapinski, was the daughter of Polish immigrants, my father, Elmer “Cappy” Aldrich, was a carpenter of English heritage who could trace our Long Island ancestry to the 1720s and our New England line even further back to the early 17th century.
By the time I came of age, Long Island, which once had deep cultural affinities with New England, was slowly becoming something of a suburb of New York and a lot of its traditional character was lost, sadly.
Watching China
There was nothing in my background that suggested I would have a long-standing interest in Asia. Sometimes jokingly I say I owe it all to Richard Nixon. The reason is, when I was 11 years old, I was fascinated by the grainy black-and-white images of Beijing broadcast to our television during Nixon’s trip there.
I was caught up in the media hype about the United States president going to a far away and forbidden country, the Cathay of our modern era. I was hooked. As a high-school student, I used to cut out and save newspaper articles about China. I had everything from photographs of the new beauty salons in Shanghai in 1973 to clippings about Mao Zedong’s death. I must have been the only China watcher for 100 miles.
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All about Asia
I showed up at Georgetown University, in Washington, in 1978 and elected to become an Asian studies major. I was delighted with my choice. Because Georgetown was a Jesuit university, the professors emphasised an approach to Asia that was holistic and cross-cultural. How can you understand Japan without understanding China and vice versa? Or East Asian Buddhism without its Indian antecedents?
My university years were also an important time for rapprochement between China and the US. Georgetown was one of the first universities that received mainland Chinese scholars. I remember these gentlemen wearing dark blue uniforms and blue caps trying to figure out how you eat hamburgers and French fries at the university canteen.
I also hung out with the first foreign exchange students, helping them with English or to adjust to some of our incomprehensible ways.
Orphan years
My father died suddenly when I was 19. Not long after, my mother fell ill with brain cancer. I had to go back to Long Island to nurse her while completing my studies at home. I had little emotional support but I felt that the steps I was taking were along the path of the obligations of the filial son.
In May of 1982, we hired a nurse to help care for my mother. This allowed me to enrol in more East Asian studies classes at the nearest university, the State University of New York at Stony Brook. When my mother succumbed to her illness, I should have taken time off to heal but I was focused on putting one foot in front of the other and ended up pursuing a graduate degree in East Asian and American diplomatic history.
After I finished, a Korean philosophy professor suggested an exchange programme to Gwangju, in South Korea. I arrived there at a tumultuous time, when the scars from the 1980 Gwangju massacre were still very raw and people were not all that welcoming to foreigners.
I called many of the lawyers plying the China trade in the 90s ‘reformed Peking opera junkies’. They were basically people like me
Laying down the law
It was while I was in Korea that I applied to Columbia University, because they had a Chinese legal studies programme. I returned to the US in 1985 but I soon found that there was a competitive aspect to law school, one that went against a lot of the ethics that I embraced, such as the mistaken belief that in competition all is fair. This was also the first time that I felt myself very alive to the fact that I had a working-class background.
To get work experience in the Mandarin-speaking world before graduating, in 1987, I took a leave of absence to work at Ding & Ding Law Offices, in Taiwan, under Ding Mow Sung. It was a fantastic experience in applying cultural and linguistic skills, commercial sense, proper draftsmanship and legal analysis to business projects.
Even though the traffic in Taipei was abysmal and the city buses overcrowded, these were minor irritations and I found notions of decency, kindness and etiquette that I absolutely adored in Taiwan. That’s also when I met Chuang Mei-chih, the woman who became my wife.
Peking opera junkies
I worked in Hong Kong for a time and then went back to America to finish law school. After two years in the US I discovered I had gone down the path of some Westerners, that is, after a number of years in Asia, your cultural points of reference are permanently changed; you can’t live happily anywhere else.
When we returned to Hong Kong, in 1992, my wife and I were much happier. The work was exhilarating, representing international clients wishing to invest in China. My colleagues and I ended up playing the role of amateur anthropologists, trying to create an understanding between very different mindsets.
I called many of the lawyers plying the China trade in the 90s “reformed Peking opera junkies”. They were basically people like me, who studied or grew up with Chinese culture and found their way into the legal profession. They were a great bunch.
Lost in Beijing
In April 1993, I was sent to Beijing for two weeks and ended up staying until 1996. I continued to go back and forth between Hong Kong and Beijing until I resettled in Beijing in 2005. The inspiration for my first book, The Search for a Vanishing Beijing (2006), came during this period, through time spent walking the hutongs and looking for historical sites.
The model for this project was a guidebook written in the 1930s by two foreigners, Lewis Arlington and William Lewisohn, who witnessed the early 20th century decline of the city. They were eager to record the sights of Beijing before neglect and disinterest erased them from the map. Although I knew the city in a time of renewal, I liked their approach as a way to reconnect the past with the present by walking in their footsteps.
Bridging gaps
My next book, The Perfumed Palace (2010), was about the Muslim community in Beijing. In part it was a reaction to rising Islamophobia in the West during the Bush administration. I have had Muslim friends since my university days and had wonderful experiences visiting the Muslim neighbourhoods in Beijing.
The Beijing Muslim communities have this incredible mixture of cultures so I hit upon the idea of a book celebrating this combination of the high aspects of Chinese and Islamic civilisation. I asked Lukas Nikol, a German graphic designer and photographer, to collaborate with me. He did a great job and took some amazing photos that offer a unique perspective of little-celebrated Muslim Beijing.
Mongolia bound
By 2009, I felt bored with Beijing, and China work had become routine. My law firm received a request from a Mongolian law firm for a senior lawyer who’d be willing to work with them to improve their standards of service. They were aware that their country was on the verge of a natural resources bonanza. The country sits on veritable mountains of gold, coal, silver, lithium, copper and other resources.
I went for two months and wound up staying six years to set up the first international-standard Mongolian legal practice. I found Mongolian lawyers to be extraordinarily able to adjust to the demands of a global practice. I worked with talented, capable and multilingual professionals.
Settling down
For years I had been dragging my patient wife along with me from Taiwan to Hong Kong to the US, to Hong Kong again and then Beijing and finally to Ulaanbaatar. Mongolians are incredibly kind but there’s no Chinese community there and daily life is pretty tough.
We agreed she would go back to her home village in Taiwan to build a retirement home for us and I would carry on with the Mongolian project since it continued to be productive and exciting for me. But, on Groundhog Day (February 2) 2015, I packed my bags and came home to her in Taiwan.
I must say this is the happiest stage of my life. I live in the deep countryside, a green, rustic part of the island that reminds me of my roots, oddly enough. To my way of thinking, Taiwan has achieved a superb combination of the best ideals of East Asia and the liberal West.
I wrote my third book, Ulaanbaatar Beyond Water and Grass (2017), here and am putting the finishing touches to Old Lhasa: A Traveller’s Companion. Whenever the plague lifts I plan to visit the areas of China associated with the Manchus to research my next book on their history and culture.
My ultimate goal now is to write a book that celebrates Taiwan and its culture, something that is missing from the literary canon on Asia.
