I’m not saying at the age of eight I definitely met J. Edgar Hoover at his office in the FBI wearing a dress and makeup, only that I
ANYWAY, THIS WOMAN ON the plane kept talking about Helen Gandy, Hoover’s personal secretary, and how important she was to him. And yet, she never once mentioned Clyde Tolson, the associate director of the FBI with whom Hoover had lunch and dinner every day and traveled constantly. Tolson inherited Hoover’s estate, and they’re buried side by side.
She leaned over to me at one point and said, “I’ll trade you my
Anyway, a few minutes later she started saying, “Let’s do a biopic of Erik Prince!” She said it as if she was free associating.
And I thought:
But: Take the high road, right? I bought another
Let that be a lesson, though. Who knows what kind of amazing stories she could have gotten out of me if, instead of swiping my magazine, she’d just offered me her paper and started up a friendly conversation?
Not that I love chatting on airplanes, or ever. I do like to keep to myself, a fact that drives my family insane. My mother in particular is incredibly outgoing. She doesn’t believe anyone else should have secrets from her, ever. She’s the kind of person who runs her gloved finger along the top of a picture frame to see if there’s dust on it. I think that’s ridiculous. Who cares if there’s dust up there? If the house is a mess, let’s talk about the dust that’s down here on the table.
When my sister was living in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, my mother and I were visiting once, and as usual Mother was snooping. She went up into the attic, which was a bedroom, poked around, and came down to the first floor to tell me to go up there.
“Why would I do that?” I asked.
“To see how horrible it is,” she said.
“I don’t want to!” I said. “I wasn’t invited.”
“I want you to see it!” she insisted.
“I don’t want to see it!” I insisted back.
This is the kind of thing we fight about: whether or not to go into my sister’s attic to look at dust. I am all for people getting to keep private rooms private. Not so my mother. In fact, her snooping is such that she thought nothing of breaching national security.
After the tragic assassination of John F. Kennedy, the Warren Commission put together its famous report of what happened. Well, my father had an early, top-secret copy. He brought it home with him from work one night and, knowing my mother was eager to peek at it, hid it well—or so he thought.
My mother found it and locked herself in the bathroom so she could read it in peace. My father banged away at the door, but she wouldn’t open it. Finally, my father took the door down with an axe. You’d think that would be enough to convince my mother to let secrets stay secret, but no, she’s still just as snoopy as ever.
When it comes to what to conceal or what to reveal, I err on the side of privacy but also honesty, as you may have guessed by now.
I think it’s best never to lie, because when you tell lies, you have to remember them. It makes life really complicated. I always tell the truth. It gets me in trouble sometimes, but at least I don’t have to keep track of a whole bunch of crazy stories—at least not crazy ones that are made up!
When in Rome …
I Still Wouldn’t Eat Monkey Brains
MY FAMILY IS ORIGINALLY Norwegian. We were thrown out of Norway in the ninth century and wound up in Scotland. Our coat of arms says, “Make peace, not war.” It may as well have said, “No live food, please,” for we are a timid people when it comes to eating, and my extensive business travels through Asia have definitely challenged my constitution, and my sense that what constitutes good manners must be universal.
For example, one doesn’t firmly shake hands in Malaysia. Traditionally, you put both your hands out and then touch your heart. And invites aren’t always real. I was asked to someone’s home in Malaysia and said, “Yes!” Well, the person asking me was deadpan. He walked away without saying anything else. The people I was with said, “You have to say ‘no’ the first two times you’re asked, and then you say ‘yes’ the third time.” I wasn’t actually invited to dinner! It was just the first ask.
It’s important to do research if you’re going to another country, especially if you’re doing business there. You have a responsibility to know the ways of the culture. What if someone from Malaysia comes here? Should they shake our hands? I think generally it’s good to practice house rules, to make an effort to adopt local customs. But it’s also good to be flexible when it comes to our expectations of people from abroad.
When it comes to food, I never want to be an ugly American, but I also don’t want to end up in a hospital, if only for psychological reasons. I’ve had some very disquieting food experiences, and they have seriously tested my ability to be a gracious guest. Let me tell you a little about how I wound up in Korea and Japan, and then I’ll tell you about things crawling off my plate.
Parsons developed academic options abroad called Two Plus Two Affiliate Programs, whereby students would spend two years at a Parsons affiliate abroad followed by two years at Parsons in New York. I was flying somewhere in Asia once a month for eight years, and for example, I was not permitted to visit Seoul, South Korea, and Kanazawa, Japan, on the same trip, because culturally it would be insulting to each party to reveal that you were traveling for any business other than theirs. You’d like to think you could just pretend you’d arrived fresh from New York City, but they would find out. I learned a great deal about homage and ego in these cultures.
And the food did occasionally scare me. At one dinner in Korea at a Japanese restaurant called the Great Wall, a plate came out with something on it that looked like a big Tootsie Roll. I was looking at it and waiting for everyone to be served before beginning. And as I was contemplating it, it started to squirm its way off the plate. It was a live sea slug.
