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.
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?