My friend, Dr. Art Chen, obviously encouraged by the popularity of his three guest blog articles on his MIT experience has now written a fourth about his Chinese-American experience which is posted below.  Personally this blogger think his  writing has hit a sweet spot and he should be encouraged to start  his own blog series on Science Net. Readers agreeing with me should give him feedbacks.

The Spy Next Door

Art Chen

Based on the responses to my pieces, I thought it may be of interest to the readers of Larry’s blog to hear about some  childhood experience of this Chinese-American. This is an unusual story that is rare  not only for C-A but also for most  people.Our family returned to the U.S. in 1949 and settled in  the upper Westside in NYC – I was about ten years old.  Westside had a diverse population  and it had and still has a large Jewish population. As a young teenager, I attended a  Jewish summer camp.  The Holocaust was still fresh in many memories. I remember some of my fellow campers  mentioned that  they were learning to play music instruments because it is a skill that you can take it with you. In our  Westside neighborhood, kids form friendships easily and I became a friend with a Jewish teenager from Lithuania. We  hanged around and I was invited to his home for meals.  During the meal, his father told me that Vodka was good to cure  cold. My friend’s parents treated me well,  even took me to see my first French movies – the Ronde   - one of the few films of the 1950s  to contain overtly sexual themes.  It stimulated me to see foreign movies to this day. The only difference I observed was that my friend said that they do not celebrate Christmas and  do not have a Christmas  tree because they were Jewish. We, on the other hand, had a  Christmas tree even though we were non-religious.  My friend’s mother was very quiet, did not say much  but  always busy sewing making small income from neighbors I  gathered. And once when I wondered  into his father’s office, my friend told me to leave because no one was allowed in  there. We were fairly  close and had discussion about me joining the family to visit his uncle in Canada.Once I entered  Stuyvesant High School, schoolwork became heavy and I lost touch with my friend. Imagine my surprise when I came  home one day and turned on the TV; the breaking news  was that my friend’s parents,  Jack Soble and his wife, were  arrested as Soviet spies. They were Russians. Wow! The next few weeks was  filled with some anxiety.  But no one from the government came to see us.  Interesting. My theory was that either the FBI’s surveillance missed us or knowing that my father was with  KMT, FBI did not think that we could be involved. And in mid 1950’s, before the more liberal  immigration policy, there were very few Chinese in America. The quota for Chinese was about 100. Thus  few in number, C-A did not stimulate much emotion among the general population as now.  Now I learned that there was a secret program, Venona, an American government effort from 1943-1980 to decrypt  coded messages by intelligence forces of the Soviet Union.  Thus they know much more then what the public knew.What  happened to my friend?  The newspaper reported that he did not know that his parents were spies. He, a teenager,  changed his  name and disappeared. I never saw him again.Currently there is a TV series in America titled Amerika. Its  theme is a sleeper Soviet spy family in America in the 1970’s. The kids lived a normal life unaware of their  parents’ hidden occupation. To make the show interesting the series portrait many dramatic stories. The real spies’ life is more prosaic. Drama is the last thing they want to attract attention to them.  And real life proceeded fiction by decades. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_espionage_in_the_United_States#Soble_spy_ring

Note added by Blogger Y.C. Ho: readers may also be interested in my earlier article on spying and  surveillance  http://blog.sciencenet.cn/blog-1565-697764.html   as well as http://blog.sciencenet.cn/blog-1565-409455.html