842. Letter from Martin to Clough1
I am writing in response to the Department’s telegram 3375 instructing me to investigate instruction in Chinese available at l’Ecole d’Interpretes at Geneva and Chinese tutors at Bern and Zurich, if any. On Thursday afternoon, November 14, Bob Ekvall and I interviewed. Mrs. Paul Chu, Chinese teacher at l’Ecole d’Interpretes, and on Friday morning I talked to Madame Piguet at the school itself, which is part of the University of Geneva. Late Friday afternoon I flew to Zurich hoping to talk to Dr. Peng, the Chinese language teacher there. Though I was disappointed to find that he had left town with his entire family for a few days, I was able to discuss the problem with our Consul General, who had been totally ignorant of what it was all about, and to suggest certain questions be put to Dr. Peng by the Consulate General immediately upon his return to Zurich.
Both Ekvall and I were impressed with Mrs. Chu, the professor at l’Ecole d’Interpretes. Her kuo yu is spoken with a genuine Peiping accent and her English is fluent. Moreover, she claims to have had five years’ experience in teaching Chinese, two at Geneva and three at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., where she received her M.A. Mrs. Chu is very much interested in the problem of interpreting and has a good opinion of her own abilities to teach it, which, I should say on a first impression, is well-founded. She teaches two classes on Saturday morning at l’Ecole d’Interpretes, one in interpreting and one in advanced conversation. These [Facsimile Page 2] are the only advanced Chinese courses taught at the school. They cost only 12 francs per term.
Mrs. Chu would not commit herself to give private tutoring, although Ekvall and I judged that she probably would if presented with the actual opportunity. She felt that her two hours of instruction per week at the University would be sufficient for a good student to maintain his proficiency. While this may be somewhat optimistic, I personally doubt that one hour a day would be necessary in addition to the two hours on Saturday. If Dexter were to enroll in the two classes at the University, two or three hours per week of supplementary tutoring from Mrs. Chu would be more than adequate to meet his needs. Mrs. Chu indicated that she would charge 10 francs per hour for private tutoring. If Mrs. Chu is [Typeset Page 1450] unwilling to give private tutoring, there are one or two other Chinese in Geneva who could do so.
While I do not have the final answers on the situation in Zurich, my feeling is that probably Dr. Peng would be able to give Dexter the necessary practice, although I doubt very much that his professional qualifications and capabilities in teaching interpreting approach those of Mrs. Chu in Geneva. I hope that during this week you will receive a telegraphic report from Zurich as to Dr. Peng’s capabilities and interest in doing the job. As it looks now, from the standpoint of maintaining and increasing his language and interpreting proficiency, Dexter should be assigned to Geneva. As you are aware, Bern has not turned up any potential instructors.
I feel that it is a mistake to assign Dexter to an already existing slot either at Geneva or Zurich, and the officers in charge of these posts are of like mind. The reasoning of the Consuls General is quite simple and, to my mind, understandable. Their offices do not suffer from an excess of slots to cover the work that has to be done. Thus they are not eager to accept an officer for one of these slots who is from the outset going to devote at best only 3/4 of his time to the job. In my own case, I can tell you frankly, that the Minister and others here are not at all happy about the amount of time I am away from my job at [Facsimile Page 3] the Embassy. In effect, the Geneva assignment takes about 1/4 of my time, and of course recently the Delhi conference has taken me away for a much longer period. In my case the Geneva assignment is at least related to the work I do here, although, as I am sure CA is aware, I am supposed to be covering the work here of 5 or 6 other geographic offices in the Department as well as that of CA. In the case of Dexter, if he were to be assigned to Zurich, for example, which is purely a consular post, his work would be entirely unconnected with the Geneva meetings and the time spent on them and on language training would be a dead loss to the Consulate. An assignment like this would not be fair to the Consulate or to Dexter himself.
As for the Geneva assignment, I think it would be very unfortunate to put Dexter in a general service officer’s slot. The only reason for Dexter’s assignment and for his continued language training is that at Geneva we are maintaining some sort of tenuous diplomatic contact with the Chinese Communists. The history of the past 4–5 years has demonstrated that the Peiping regime has to be dealt with, at least at this minimum level, and I see no reason to believe that developments in the future will make it any more possible to refrain from having some dealings with the authorities who control some 1/2 billion of the world’s population. Certainly our operation in Geneva is important enough to stand on its own feet, at least to the extent of providing the salary and perquisites of one full-time officer. I feel that developing Dexter and, I hope, several other language officers as first-class [Typeset Page 1451] interpreters-cum-negotiators will pay off in the long run regardless of who controls China. We are certainly never going to get back to the “Taipan” and “Legation quarter” days.
Thus I sincerely hope that another look can be taken at Dexter’s assignment, as I do not think we should try to fit him into some pre-existing slot entirely unrelated to the real purpose of his assignment to Switzerland, which would not allow him to contribute his best either to the work of the local office or to our own operation. Why not frankly assign [Facsimile Page 4] him to Geneva for the purpose of our operation and let his spare time be utilized for economic and political reporting, for cultivating contacts with Asian delegations assigned to Geneva and in other ways useful both to his own development and to the work of the Consulate General. Both Gowen and Popper have told me they could find plenty of useful work of this kind for him to do.
Sincerely,
First Secretary of Embassy
- Source: Department of State, Geneva Talks Files, Lot 72D415. Official Use Only; Official–Informal. Martin signed the original “Ed.” A copy was sent to Johnson in Prague.↩