CHARLIE TWO SHOES

The story of Charlie "Two Shoes" Tsui is a remarkable odyssey to freedom, a

love story of devotion, brotherhood and perseverance against seemingly
unbeatable odds. Norman Vincent Peale, the progenitor of positive thinking,
once labeled Charlie's life one of the most inspirational he'd ever read.

Historic events in China and the United States greatly influenced his life.

Charlie was 11, hungry and frightened after World War II, when U.S. Marines
fresh from the bloody battles of Iwo Jima and Okinawa were sent to China in
October 1945, to secure the surrender of stranded Japanese troops. The
Japanese wouldn't surrender to the Chinese, certain they'd be slaughtered after
their horrific treatment. They would only surrender to American troops.

Finding themselves in the crossfire of the Chinese civil war that resumed after
the great war between Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist troops and Mao Tse-tung's
Communist peasants, the Marines took over an air base just north of Tsingtao,
China, a hundred yards from Charlie's mud-hut village.

Many of the village children came begging for food, having known nothing but the
deprivations of war and inhumane treatment by the Japanese. The Marines
tossed them chewing gum or a bite of K-rations. The children were their only
relief from homesickness, a link to siblings they hadn't seen in years.

One little boy, Tsui Chi Hsii, came with peanuts and other items from his family's
garden to swap for K-rations. He befriended Marines in Love Company, 26th
Marines, 6th Marine Division, who admired the boy's resourcefulness.

He was clearly smart and knew opportunity when he saw it. He traded
vegetables and firewood for K-rations to feed his family. The men called him
Charlie, and in time he became a little brother.

One night as Charlie prepared to return to his family's hut, the Marines tossed
him a sleeping bag and asked him to stay. He did, after getting permission from
his father, who already had too many mouths to feed. He kept their fires stoked.
They'd tell him that when they got orders to go to the Marine compound in
Tsingtao, they'd take him with them. They were joking. But the boy took them
seriously and when it came time for them to go, Charlie gestured that he was
ready to go, too. They promised his father they'd look after him and send him to
school.

His new home was the former Shantung University, a girl's school requisitioned
as barracks for several rifle companies. The Marines issued him sheets and a
blanket and taught him how to make his rack and assigned him a footlocker to
stow his gear. Then he went to the mess hall for his first encounter with a knife
and fork.

Lt. Kenneth Creswick, who felt responsible for the boy, went to the men to collect
a few bucks and the next day came back with a bicycle. The Marines spent days
teaching Charlie to ride and soon he was tearing around the compound. Then
Creswick came back, asking for pieces of uniforms and he took Charlie to a tailor
to fashion the pieces into small Marine uniforms and coats to fit the boy.

Over the right shirt pockets, the tailor sewed "Charlie TuShu." To the men, that's
what his Chinese name sounded like. Putting on that uniform and seeing his
name, Charlie felt like a Marine. He cleaned his gear and polished his brass and
took his duties seriously, even standing in line to get his hair whacked into a
crewcut. He learned to march, make his bunk so a coin could bounce off it and
he learned Marine lingo: chow, mess hall, gangway, head.

He also learned a few other choice words, but the Marines threatened to wash
his mouth out with soap if they heard him utter them.

Charlie loved his new Marine life, especially the movies shown in the mess hall.
He'd never seen one, but when the projector began to rattle, Charlie was always
in the front row. He especially liked the cowboy movies. Gene Autry and Roy
Rogers were his favorites. America was the land of the cowboys -- of campfires
and harmonicas -- and he memorized the songs the cowboys sang. His favorite:
"Home on the Range." That was the first one he played when one of the Marines
tossed him a harmonica from his sea bag. Charlie sat on his bunk and practiced
seemingly non-stop, driving the men crazy.

As they promised, the Marines sent him to school, first to a Chinese school,
admonishing him when he skipped to go swimming. He didn't like the Chinese
school, he wanted to go to an American school and learn English. There wasn't
one, until military officers and American executives began to pour into Tsingtao
with their families in the months after the war. Soon, there was talk of an
American school and Creswick promised he'd look into it, but sternly ordered
Charlie to continue going to the Chinese school.

All the while, they all fed him stories about America.

In July 1946, the U.S. government shut off supplies to Chiang, sensing that
China was lost to the Communists -- yet the death throes would continue another
three years. America was backing a losing horse and began to pull troops.

Charlie began to see his new life come undone, his Marine family unraveling as
buddies left for home each month and he began a series of long goodbyes.
Marines like Ed Grady of Connecticut and Jack Hutchins of Kentucky were
certain they'd never see him again, but for 35 years kept photos of him in their
wallets or on mantels. When Grady's own children misbehaved, he'd admonish:
"Why can't you be like Charlie Two Shoes?"

As Marines left, others arrived, among them two North Carolinians -- Don Sexton
of Greensboro and William Bullard of Autryville -- who would play a profound part
in the years to come.

On Aug. 1, 1946, the 1st Marine Division ordered that forces in Tsingtao be
reduced to a reinforced infantry battalion -- 3rd Battalion, 4th Marines. The
remainder were sent home. The 3rd Battalion would remain in Tsingtao and
Marine Capt. Charles Robertson was ordered to form a rifle company from the
men left at the compound. Robertson hand-picked his men and designated the
unit "Love Company."

When Robertson toured his new barracks he found a Chinese boy with a Marine
crewcut and tidy uniform. He said nothing. When he returned the next day for a
formal inspection of Love Company, the boy was standing before his bunk,
shoulders squared, uniform pressed, shoes spit-shined. The men told Robertson
that Charlie was one of them, so the captain told them to make sure he didn't get
hurt and, defying regulations, made Charlie a part of Love Company.

By mid-1947, even as Marines left, hundreds of wives and children of American

officers and executives continued to stream into Tsingtao. The American
Tsingtao School had opened and a Nebraska-born nun named Sister Mary
Blanda had returned to the city after fleeing the school she'd established before
World War II. The first day she walked into her new class, she was struck by the
international diversity of her students. Fifteen countries were represented,
including China. And Marines had enrolled a handful of Chinese boys, including
one decked out in a crisp uniform cut to size -- Charlie TuShu.

Sister Blanda led him to Christianity and a young American missionary named
Miriam Matthews taught him English and baseball.

Each month, Charlies buddies took up a collection to pay the $30 tuition. Charlie,
now 12, started the first grade, but soon skipped to the third grade and at the end
of the school year had been promoted to the fifth.

As they consumed math and English, Sister Blanda's "little Marines" were taking
catechism lessons. One Sunday, two Marines took Charlie to receive his first
Holy Communion at the twin-spired St. Michael's Cathedral. Bishop Fulton Sheen
delivered the sermon and Charlie was given his first communion by the famed
Francis Cardinal Spellman of New York City.

Soon his Marine family was beginning to break up again. As the Marines left,
they promised Charlie they would come back for him, because Marines don't
leave their brothers behind. They told him their addresses in America and he put
them to memory.

When Peking (Beijing) fell to Mao's troops, the evacuation of Marines and sailors
accelerated. As the remaining Marines broke down lines, blew up ammo dumps
and loaded supplies, Chinese Nationalists flooded Tsingtao Harbor, begging the
Americans to take them from China, certain their lives were in danger.

Charlie knew his friendship with the Americans would be fraught with danger, but
he felt safe with Sister Blanda. Yet soon, in March 1949, she was gone too, and
the Chinese nuns sent the boys home.

Communism swept over China, forever changing Charlie's world. Martial law was
declared and Mao's troops arrested thousands suspected as counter-
revolutionaries and put them in prison or executed them. Charlie's mother feared
the Communists would arrest her son, too, and harm her family. She told his
father to dig a hole where their son could hide.

Soldiers came to his village, tipped off that a boy who had lived with Americans
was hiding. Charlie climbed out of the hole still wearing his Marine uniform. He
was told only to forget about the Americans. His mother frantically burned the
evidence of his Marine life -- uniforms, books, papers and his address book for
his American buddies. Charlie rescued his green Marine trousers from the fire.
His mother relented, but dyed them black.

At 17, Charlie returned to a Chinese elementary school, working hard to catch

up. He'd virtually forgotten his native language. He'd work his grandfather's fields
until it was time to go to school. At 19, he graduated from elementary school,
wearing his Marine trousers -- the ones his mother dyed black -- on graduation
day. That would become a ritual for important dates in his life.

With the help of a friend, he prepared for a high school equivalency exam instead
of going the traditional route and passed it. Next he passed a college entrance
exam and was assigned to study agriculture in Jinan, 200 miles from Tsingtao.
He stayed to himself, not knowing who he could trust and concerned he might
say something that would draw suspicions. He graduated in 1959 -- wearing his
Marine pants in the class picture.

In America, Jack Hutchins struck it rich drilling for oil in central Kentucky, then
lost his fortune. Don Sexton and wife Arrie found God in North Carolina and
started a family. With each newborn, he was taken back to a boy he'd left in
China and wondered if Charlie was still alive. Ed Grady kept a photo of Charlie in
his wallet and William Bullard displayed one on the family mantel.

After college, Charlie went to work for the Chinese agriculture department in
Shantung Province as a research assistant, focusing on silkworm research and
cultivating mulberry trees in northern China. But immediately, he got caught up in
a massive political upheaval -- Mao's Great Leap Forward. It was an ambitious
economic development program that would make China less dependent on the
Soviet Union and overtake Britain industrially within 15 years.

Yet in no time, Mao revised that goal to two years. Suddenly, communes charged
with overcoming an iron shortage were firing up crude backyard furnaces 24
hours a day. Production left no one out. Farmers and peasants left their fields.
College students were sent to communes along with government workers. Cities
shut down. Factories turned into giant smelters.

Charlie's research was put on hold and he was sent to the countryside as a
member of a four-man team driving coal to the communes. Some days, he could
barely see his way with all the smoke in the air from the furnaces. For months,
farmers, students and government workers slept in the fields by the furnaces,
constantly feeding them with coal and fanning them with windboxes. But the
crude furnaces didn't generate enough heat to melt ore into iron. It came out in
unusable lumps as the crops rotted in the fields.

The Great Leap Forward was disastrous, but Mao pressed on until poor planning,
gross miscalculation of production goals and natural disasters led to a
devastating famine.

In the midst of the disaster, Charlie was thrust into a new role, one that would
cause severe repercussions for him in the next cataclysm to sweep China -- the
Cultural Revolution. Mao feared dissent and knew that resistance movements
that toppled governments were historically mounted by intellectuals. The
chairman ordered China's best-educated into national disaster teams to go to the
farms and villages to coax farmers into increasing production.

Charlie found himself as an unwitting government agent. Assigned to cover four

villages in Shantung Province, he was part of a team headed by a dedicated
Party woman. His job was to assess local conditions and make weekly reports of
the numbers of people starving or ill. His figures were used to parcel out food
rations to those villages.

While he encouraged farmers not to give up, he knew the rations barely kept
people alive and began inflating numbers of the starving to increase food going
to the villages. If 8,000 were ill-fed, he wrote down 12,000.

In return, the farmers out of appreciation produced more. But his team leader
was watching.

After the Great Leap Forward and the famine it wrought officially ended in 1962,
Charlie was reassigned to an agriculture research group 200 miles south of
Jinan, in Lao Chun, testing fertilizers and overseeing a program to replenish
trees lost during the famine. His parents wrote of a girl in the village, Zhu Jin Mie,
a teacher. He should come home to meet her.

He did, and they wed in an arranged marriage. Charlie returned to work in Lao
Chun and on his next leave, their first child was conceived. Back in Lao Chun, he
got his first whiff of the trouble ahead. He'd avoided political involvement, but
many his age were joining the Communist Party. A friend approached with
concern: "Your name came up last night. I think you're going to have trouble. I
think it has to do with associating with foreigners when you were young."

The government, he said, was investigating Charlie's "unclear record."

The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution began ominously with Defense

Minister Lin Piao introducing intensified political training in the People's Liberation
Army. The Chinese general promoted the cult of Mao with the little red book
"Quotations from Chairman Mao." Every soldier was ordered to carry it; then
every citizen.

It was the end of China's political moderation and a triumph of Party zealotry.
Charlie became one of the revolution's first victims -- and though he didn't know
it, he was lucky. By 1966, Red Guards terrorized the country and no one was
safe. Party leader Deng Xiaoping -- who would lead the country after Mao died --
was openly ridiculed and spared only because he had been with Mao on the
Long March of 1934.

Had Charlie not been arrested in the beginning, before the tumbrels rolled in
earnest, he likely would have perished. The purge of the winter of 1962 was
limited to those with "unclear records," or those with ties to old enemies.
Dredging up the specter of foreign foes diverted attention from domestic
problems -- millions starving to death.

A few days after his friend's warning, Charlie was called to see his boss, Kou
Mon. On Kou's desk was Charlie's personnel file. He asked Charlie about his
association with American Marines. "We have many enemies," Kou said.
"America is our worst enemy. Whatever we do, they don't like. If there is a war,
like in Korea, they are against us."

He wanted to assign Charlie to an "education team" that would tell the public that
the Americans mistreated the Chinese people. Charlie told Kou he had known
Americans, but it'd been a long time ago and he'd forgotten most of the
experience.

Two weeks later, he was dismissed and sent home. After hatching a plan to
escape to Hong Kong and send for his family, he was caught trying to steal silk
that would pay for the passage. He was convicted as a spy and sent to a
Communist prison for political prisoners in Jinan.
He would spend seven years there, and another 11 under house arrest. But he
never renounced the Marines, holding true to Sister Blanda's lesson: It is noble to
die for your beliefs.

In summer 1971, an amazing rumor swept the country. U.S. President Richard
Nixon planned to come to China to meet with Mao and Premier Chou En-lai.
China invited the U.S. table tennis team to compete against the Chinese team.

The Bamboo Curtain was beginning to part. It was the first meeting of officials
from the two countries in more than two hostile decades. Ping Pong Diplomacy
opened new relations, with Nixon announcing that the United States would relax
a 21-year trade embargo against China.

Charlie followed the news through Party-issued broadcasts over his village's
intercom system. Turning off the intercom, he closed his eyes and tried to picture
the faces of his friends. Over the years, he'd ended his prayers every night with a
word or two about them. He figured that many had fought in Korea, then
Vietnam, and he'd asked God to protect them.

Reading about the developments in China in his morning newspaper, Don

Sexton wondered if Love Company could find Charlie. Half a world away, Charlie
wondered the same. The prospects of clearing his name and getting word to
Sexton and his Marine buddies that he was still alive -- and yearned to come to
America -- had never been better.

Two months before the 1976 U.S. presidential election, Mao died. Jimmy Carter,
a Georgia peanut farmer, was elected and made China a priority. As a Navy
submarine officer in early 1949, his ship had cruised up the Chinese coast from
Hong Kong to Tsingtao, docking at the Pagoda Pier guarded by remaining
Marines in China.

A year after Carter's election, Deng Xiaoping wrested control of the country from
Mao's hand-picked successor, Hua Guofeng. Deng preached economic and
social moderation and suddenly talks between the United States and China
turned to normalizing relations.

That happened Jan. 1, 1979, when Carter invited Deng to Washington.

Suddenly, the Party decided Charlie had been punished enough and restored his
citizenship. Officials gave him permission to write his buddies in America. He
wrote three letters and sent them to addresses he'd set to memory 30 years
earlier. One made it to hog farmer William Bullard in North Carolina.
The former Marines of Love Company regrouped and overcame many
bureaucratic obstacles to bring Charlie to America -- only China wouldn't let his
family join him.

On May 10, 1983, a Pan Am jet carrying Charlie Two Shoes touched down at
San Francisco International Airport.

Soon Charlie reunited with his buddies from Love Company and Sister Blanda.
As his visa's expiration date came and went, the former Marines and hundreds of
other Charlie supporters fortified efforts to win an extension and send for
Charlie's family. They argued that Charlie suffered greatly because he refused to
betray his American friends. He was branded a spy and counter-revolutionary. If
he'd betrayed his friends, he would have lived a comfortable life as a hero in the
eyes of the Party.

Instead, he suffered for 18 years.

Still INS refused to extend, saying there were other immigrants more deserving.
It took Bob McEwen, then a congressman from Ohio, to appeal to U.S. Attorney
General Edwin Meese, himself a former Marine, to make a stand for Charlie. At a
White House picnic, McEwen and Meese approached President Ronald Reagan
to make a final pitch."

"Mr. President, we've tried everything," McEwen said. "We've played the
regulations as far as they can go. Now time is of the essence. We need an
executive decision. Otherwise, the regulations are going to guarantee that an
injustice is done."

Reagan already knew Charlie's story. "Ed, let's see what we can do," he said to
Meese. "Let's do what's right. Fix it."

The next day Meese announced he'd granted Charlie an indefinite stay of
deportation that allowed him to stay and his wife and three children to join him.

In 2001, Charlie and two of his children became American citizens and a year
later at a ceremony at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, Charlie became the
Marine Corps' 18th honorary Marine.

At both events, he wore his old Marine trousers. The ones his mother dyed black.