Building A Life Beyond War
``Ordinary People'' is an ongoing series introducing you to people we rarely write about, people who don't make the headlines because they aren't making news, but who in their own way often lead extraordinary lives.
At 18 months old, he was given to a missionary family for safekeeping while his father fled the 1932 Japanese invasion of China.
At 10, he was imprisoned in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp in Shanghai - the only Chinese among thousands of Americans and Europeans.
At 14, as he and his missionary family reached the top of a gang plank on a ship bound for America, an emissary from his father tracked him down and wanted him back - but the missionaries would not agree.
So unfolded the dramatic childhood of a man whose entire life has been out of the mold: James Su-Brown, retired colonel and senior military judge, now a Seattle lawyer.
Meet Su-Brown, 58, these days, and he looks like an ordinary enough lawyer: suspenders, crisp shirt, wing-tip shoes. True, there is a hint of the importance war and the military have played in his life: His office wall is decorated with oil paintings of fierce, glowering American soldiers.
But the genial Su-Brown tells a life story that, if you read the plot in a potboiler, you'd pronounce it overwrought or contrived.
He was born Su Jin Ling (Jin Ling means Golden Tombs, the old name for the city of Nanking or Nanjing) in December 1931 in China. By 1932, the Japanese had invaded the coastal areas of China, and Su-Brown's father, the business manager of the important southern Nanking University, fled as the university was relocated inland, in what was called ``free China.'' About that time, his mother died of tuberculosis.
Su-Brown's father decided to give his baby boy, then 18 months old, to American missionaries he knew, the Browns; America wasn't yet in the war. ``They thought the war wouldn't last long, and when the Japanese were defeated, he'd claim me.''
But the war got worse. The Brown family, which included a young daughter, moved to a mountain resort for five years, but after the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, they headed for Shanghai to return to the U.S. by ship.
Shanghai was chaos and mass confusion. Stampeding crowds tried to get to the last ships leaving for the U.S.; the Browns didn't make it. The family was sent to one of five prisoner-of-war camps for foreigners, each with 5,000 to 6,000 people. Most of the incarcerated were British, Dutch, American.
Though the Browns had not legally adopted him, they told authorities he was their legal son, so he was allowed to stay. ``I made a real effort to forget my Chinese; I was scared I'd be thrown out on my own,'' Su-Brown says. He was about 10 at the time, and would remain behind the barbed wire for the next 3 1/2 years. ``By that time we had completely lost contact with my real father.''
Of the camp, Su-Brown says, ``It's just war.''
They cooked on stoves made of coffee cans and mud; four families were crammed into each small room, divided only by sheets. The children attended school in English, taught by missionaries or businessmen. The inmates ran everything inside the camp. The camp was built around a chemical factory that was a target of Allied bombings.
The American former prisoners were sent on hospital ships back to the U.S. As the Browns boarded and reached the top of the gangplank, surrounded by hundreds of people, an American airman ran up, shouting for them. ``I've got news about Mr. Su!`` he said.
Somehow his father had found out the Browns had been interned in Shanghai and, learning the airman was flying to Shanghai, asked the American to find his son.
But Su-Brown didn't want to return to a father he didn't remember; for some 13 years, the Browns had been all the family he'd known. The Browns didn't want to let him go.
He's not entirely sure what happened, but the Browns boarded the ship - and he went with them.
When the family reached San Francisco, the ordeal was not over. They were immediately imprisoned in a detention camp, because only Mrs. Brown was actually a U.S. citizen. The Episcopal church was finally able to free them about a month later. But not long afterward, his real father arrived to claim him. By then, Su-Brown was 14.
A compromise was reached: He was to belong half to his real father, half to the Browns. The Browns formally adopted him in Iowa, and he was named James Crawford Su-Brown (Crawford was Mrs. Brown's maiden name).
Strangely, Su-Brown says, his father seemed to abandon him after that.
His father had, during the war, become involved in the ``cooperative movement'' in China. ``This was a compromise between communism and Chiang Kai-shek. It had great concern for the poor, but a lot more democracy than the communists allowed,'' he says. Su was executive secretary of this movement, but ``it didn't thrive. The Americans were so committed to Chiang, they didn't see it as a compromise. . . . '' The Americans somehow brought him to the University of Washington, where he was supposed to work with the economic department. In other words, they sort of shelved him, as a political refugee.
``He got disillusioned, and decided politics was not for him.`` Instead, he became a minister.
The Browns ended up returning to China, and they sent Su-Brown to an Episcopal boarding school for boys in New York.
Su-Brown, feeling abandoned, hated the school. ``It was a terrible culture shock.'' He was the target of some schoolboy prejudice, his previous spotty studies meant he had to struggle to catch up, and the school's regimentation reminded him of the POW camp.
The Browns, meanwhile, got caught up in the Chinese civil war, and were once again evacuated from China.
By then, Su-Brown was a full-scholarship student at Oberlin College, where he couldn't keep busy enough. Despite a full schedule of classes, he worked full-time in a factory, doing chrome work for cars. ``I was very interested in poor people, I wanted to see what it would be like to be a worker. . . . I found out it was dull, terrible.'' Later, in an effort to get over his shyness, he forced himself to sell knives door-to-door.
After college, he studied law, among other things, for a while. Then he was drafted and sent to Germany; it was 1957.
``I was gung-ho,'' he says. ``I wanted to see what the lowest life was like.'' Although he'd been in ROTC in college and could have become an officer, he says, he wanted to go in as a private.
``It was worse than the factory,'' he says. One day, shooting the breeze with the other soldiers, he discovered he was the only one who hadn't been in jail before. ``It was really the dregs of life.''
He finished law school, and when in 1961 he was called back to service in the Berlin Crisis, he volunteered this time as a lawyer-officer, in the Judge Advocate General corps.
He ended up making a career out of the military. The reason, he says, was a combination of being used to a disciplined life, a desire to lead, a need for challenge, and a feeling for the common man. He worked his way up from lawyer to senior judge of the Court of Military Review in Washington, D.C., and the rank of full colonel.
That feeling for the common man, however, he says changed over the years. ``By the time I became a judge, I was getting cynical. I feel criminals are pretty hopeless.''
In 1985, after 20 years of service, since he was eligible to retire he figured that's what he should want to do. And there was another factor: Another Chinese-American lawyer, with a year more in the service than Su-Brown, was promoted to general.
That told him that he would never make general, he says. ``There would not be two Chinese generals'' in the JAG corps, Su-Brown figured.
``Basically in everybody's mind there's some sort of quota for minorities, I guess you might put it,'' he says. But, he adds, ``Maybe full colonel was the top I could get, anyway.''
He and his wife settled in Federal Way, where she had a sister.
He got a call from the lawyer Charles Herrmann, who wanted him to help open a large new office in the International District, specializing in personal injury. In two months, Su-Brown says, business has boomed.
Su-Brown says he works with many poor people, particularly immigrants, and does a lot of free legal work. Many of his clients get into problems because they don't understand their rights and the legal system, he says.
But, also, many highly successful immigrants in business come to him, usually off the street, saying, ``I trust you, I want to do business with a Chinese.''
If you have a candidate for us, someone you think would make a good profile for Ordinary People, let us know. Write to Ordinary People, c/o Scene, The Seattle Times, P.O. Box 70, Seattle, Wa. 98111. Make sure you include your name, address and a daytime telephone number.