Word: mandarinism
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...black neighborhood of central Los Angeles, not far from the University of Southern California, where Paul Ho pursued a master's degree in engineering. A translator for U.S. troops in China during World War II, he instructed his wife that their sons were to stick to Taiwanese and Mandarin Chinese and not learn English until they got to America for a better chance of speaking it without an accent. As Sonia Ho recalls in careful but imperfect English, "When we first come to U.S., we don't know any words. David would come home from school...
...child, Ho had his math tables drilled into him in Mandarin, and to this day he does his calculations in Chinese. "But," he says, "I wouldn't even have the vocabulary to give a scientific talk in Chinese." He plays down the importance of being Chinese to his success--but that is a very Chinese thing to do. Instead, he cites immigrant drive: "People get to this new world, and they want to carve out their place in it. The result is dedication and a higher level of work ethic." He adds, "You always retain a bit of an underdog...
...physical type, and in superficialities of temperament, Hiss and Chambers could not have been more different. Hiss on first inspection looked like the Fred Astaire of the mandarin left, lithe and well bred, the Establishment's own darling prothonotary warbler. Chambers, sad-sack Dostoyevskian pudge, more Slavic than American in mind, with terrible teeth and an air of doom, seemed to inhabit a flinching shadow world. He dodged through the '30s packing a revolver and hugging the walls of dark corridors. A paranoid smudge, the mandarins thought, whose amorphous bulk concealed a damaged child given to imagining grandiose conspiracies...
...that happens, as it did for me last month during our federally mandated Older-brother/Younger-sister Dinner in Annenberg Hall, the last thing you want to do is to give the same blank stare you give your TF in your interdisciplinary section in advanced topology and conversational Mandarin. You want to keep that veneer of collegiate wisdom you have accumulated by spending $30,000 last year. You'll just have to smile, look her straight in the eyes and make something up fast. I did, and here's a partial transcript of that dinner...
...besides incumbency, is a tremendous ability to project empathy. Dole completely lacks this. It's part of his Lifer-ness that he simply is what he is; any efforts he makes to pretend otherwise inevitably seem tinny and false. Clinton, on the other hand, comes across as a Mandarin to Mandarins, would do better than Dole in coming across as a Talent to Talents, and might even be able to seem more like "one of us" to Lifers if Dole didn't have his heroic military service to backstop himself with his natural constituency...