The Distant Land of My Father

by Bo Caldwell

  “It was awful,” I whispered.

  She leaned close and kissed my forehead. “I know,” she said. “I’m sorry.” We were quiet then, and for a moment I wanted to tell her everything—about the yen and about Jimmy’s and about my father’s mood that day—and to ask her for a bath and a clean nightgown and a better way to go to sleep.

  But I said nothing. I was too tired and too ashamed and too afraid. My mother seemed to be waiting, to be expecting something, but she didn’t ask. She just stayed close, patting my back and rubbing the spot that always hurt when I was tired, the spot that only she knew how to find.

  the battle of shanghai

  IN THE MORNING, I went with my mother to Mass at the Cathedral of St. Ignatius in Siccawei, in the southwest part of the city. Mei Wah drove us there with the car doors locked and the windows rolled up tight, and his hard expression and no-nonsense driving made it clear that he did not like us going out. But I could not remember a Sunday when my mother had missed Mass, and when she strode into the kitchen and called for Mei Wah, she had let it be known that no exceptions were going to be made that day. The two of us were going to Mass, as usual. My father never went; faith was my mother’s domain, a foreign country to him.

  Inside the church, I followed my mother to our pew and stood next to her and listened as Father Jacquinot spoke words that were like a door opening to a place I loved though I did not completely understand. “In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti,” he said, and I made the sign of the cross and tried to keep my thoughts on the Father and the Son. But over and over again, I thought of my father and I began to pray, not using the prayers my mother had taught me when I was small, but saying what I felt, pleading for my father’s safety, the only thing I wanted just then. And although I wasn’t completely sure that what I was doing really counted as prayer, I felt that God didn’t mind, that He even welcomed my worried thoughts. It was the first time I had ever prayed so directly and so plainly and with such urgency. While I listened to the Mass, and heard and sang the Kyrie, and the Gloria, and the Credo, the Sanctus and the Agnus Dei, and tried to think about those words, I prayed a second litany in my heart: Bring him home, keep him safe, bring him home, keep him safe.

  Mei Wah was waiting outside when we came out of the cathedral into the summer heat. He glowered at us and at anyone who came too close to us, and then he drove us home in angry silence.

  At home, Chu Shih had made round wheat cakes stuffed with lamb and hard-boiled eggs that had been steeped in tea soy sauce, things we usually had only on holidays or picnics, attempts to cheer us. I picked at my food as though it were a penance. My mother said it looked wonderful and barely ate a thing, then went to the den and sat staring at the Shanghai Times, pretending to read. The day before she had done as she’d been instructed. With Will Marsh’s help, she’d gotten together the money the kidnappers had demanded and sent it via their messenger, who had appeared at our door three hours after my father had been taken. She had not considered calling the Municipal Police—the families of kidnap victims never did, there was too much at stake. Now she was waiting, which was all she could do.

  All through that day and evening, my mother acted as though my father would reappear any minute. But he didn’t, not that day or the next, or the one after that. My mother grew more anxious each day. She ran to the phone every time it rang, and to the window every time a car went by. She looked up from the newspaper at every breeze, and when she heard Chu Shih in the kitchen, and when a dog barked in the distance. She appeared tired and frail, and her hands shook as she sipped rosemary mint tea, Chu Shih’s cure for nerves.

  Home felt like a rickety place that week. Because my mother was easily startled, I was reprimanded every time I made a sound. I wasn’t allowed in the garden, a place where I’d always had free rein—it wasn’t safe, my mother said. After the first two days, I just stayed in my room, where I tried to draw maps of Shanghai, wondering where in this vast city my father might be. And I wondered if I had somehow caused the badness. He had been kidnapped on the day I stole the yen, a secret that was too awful to tell.

  On Saturday, a week after the kidnapping, Will Marsh telephoned in the middle of the afternoon to tell my mother he’d received a phone call. My father would be dropped off on the corner of Bubbling Well Road where he’d been taken, and could be collected in an hour. Will said he would be there waiting, and that he would bring my father home.

  Everything was all right, I thought. Chu Shih had told me over and over again that my father would be fine, and I thought that when Will Marsh brought my father home, he would be the same as before. When Will Marsh’s brown Austin pulled into our driveway and I followed my mother to the front door, I expected to run to my father, to be picked up and swung in the air, to welcome him home just as I always did when he came home from a business trip.

  But at the front door, my mother held me back from running to the car, and my first glimpse of my father told me why. As he got out of the car, he looked and moved like an old man, and I realized I would have knocked him down. My mother walked to him and held him to her gently, and I heard her whisper, “You’ll be all right,” words that sounded good, except for the worry in her face. Then she turned to me. “He’s home, Anna, and everything’s all right. You see?”

  I didn’t see at all. What I saw was that my father looked horrible and as though he were in pain. His rumpled seersucker suit coat hung on him, and though he smiled at me, he seemed not to see me. I’d expected to be kissed and smiled at, to be comforted and reassured and made to feel safe again. But as I walked to him, I didn’t know what to do, he was so changed.

  When I reached him, he said nothing. He simply knelt so that he was my height, and then he held me to him tightly and I let myself be crushed by his wiry embrace. I could feel him shaking.

  In the evening, when he had showered and put on clean clothes, he had a dinner of noodles and tea. I stayed near him but out of sight, waiting for him to feel better. Finally, after he had eaten, I found him sitting on the pearwood bench by the large window that faced the garden. I sat down next to him without asking if he wanted me there, and when he looked at me and tried a smile, I took his hand and just held it for a moment, pretending that I knew how to comfort him. My mother had wanted him to go to St. Marie’s Hospital on Route Père Robert in the French Concession so that his physician, Dr. McLain, could just take a quick look at him. But my father wouldn’t consider it. So there we were, on a warm Saturday evening at home, staring out at willows and magnolias and the blackwood acacia.

  The evening was eerie. There were no cars on the streets, and the only sound was the cicadas. I thought of Will Marsh’s suggestion of cicada killers, and the idea made me shudder. Everything seemed alive in the garden: the plane tree in the corner moved slightly in the press of hot breath that passed for a breeze, and the huge magnolia in the center of the lawn nodded back, as though in private conversation. The willows and poplars along the back wall swayed like graceful women. I focused on the flower beds and said their names under my breath, names my father had taught me, practicing in case he should ask: poet’s narcissus, orchids, cathedral roses, the waterlily tulips he’d ordered from a catalog and planted as bulbs the day they arrived. I looked at the stone bench in the corner, under the plane tree whose leafy branches seemed like a kingdom all their own, and I wondered if any lizards were still out. It was the best place to catch them. And you could turn over the flat rocks that bordered the flower beds and find spiders and millipedes with red undersides and red dots on their legs, the ones that amazed me and frightened me at the same time.

  I was waiting for my father to speak, and finally he did. “We’re going to have to get rid of that acacia,” he said quietly, and he pointed to it below us. Its dark green leaves seemed somehow secretive in the dim light. “It was a mistake. In the right place it’s pretty well behaved, but down there, in all that confinement, it’s a troublemaker. The roots are too aggressive.”

 
; I nodded as though he’d said just what I was thinking.

  “It’s a bad actor,” he added.

  I nodded again. It was a phrase he used often for a plant or tree that did not do well where it was planted. We were quiet for a moment, and then, although I was afraid, I asked my question. “Who were they?”

  My father glanced at me, and I thought I saw some of his old look, an expression that was canny and knowing and appreciating the attention. He also looked exhausted and I immediately wondered if asking was a mistake.

  “They were Japanese,” he said simply, as though that explained everything.

  “But you’re friends with the Japanese,” I said. “You said that day at Jimmy’s. You buy and sell, you get them what they want—” I stopped when I saw him wince.

  “They want me to do more,” he said in a low voice. “They want me to collaborate.” He looked at me to see if I understood and I shook my head, wishing for once he didn’t have to explain. “To help them,” he said.

  “Help them what?”

  He laughed grimly. “That’s the question,” he said.

  “Are you going to do that?”

  He shook his head, started to say something, stopped. He seemed unable to answer the question, so I made a suggestion.

  “It’s complicated,” I offered, remembering my mother’s words from the week before.

  My father closed his eyes and nodded. “Yes,” he said, “it is.”

  That night was the only time I heard him speak of his kidnapping or the Japanese or their request for collaboration. He did not explain the faint lacerations on his wrists, reddish lines that looked like the smaller rivers on the globe in his office, or the bluish bruise below his eye, or the slight limp he had. The subject of his kidnapping was off-limits, and if I tried to venture anywhere near it in conversation, a look from my mother silenced me.

  My parents set about acting as though nothing had happened. They went out again, though not every night. They had friends in for cocktails and dinner, and on the surface the only thing that was different was the way Will Marsh gave me a hug and looked at me carefully and asked me how everything was whenever he came over. In the mornings, my father went to his office, and though we didn’t go to the Bund the next few Saturdays, he said it was because of the heat. I should stay inside where it was cool, he said.

  Over the next few weeks, my parents’ conversations with each other and with friends became more and more centered on the war that my father had said would not happen and would not matter. My father tracked it as though it were a weather system that he hoped would pass over us, and he recorded its progress in the accounting ledger he’d begun using as a journal. On the twenty-eighth of July, 1937, Peking fell to the Japanese, and in the days that followed, the Japanese army headed south, one long file going by way of the Nankow Pass and Shansi Province, the other heading toward Nanking via the railway from Tientsin. On the seventh of August, the Chinese National Defense Council declared a War of Resistance against Japan, and Chinese commanders were ordered to prepare to drive Japanese troops from Shanghai. The next evening, when my father went into the den and switched on his new Stewart Warner radio, he heard the news on XQHB instead of the usual tango program, and on XMHA instead of the soap operas, and he told my mother that the city felt like war. That same day, the International Settlement authorities declared a state of martial law, and from that time on, my father was never far from his radio when he was home.

  On an evening in early August, things grew more serious. A Japanese commander and his aide drove to the Hungjao airfield, which the Chinese military was using as a base. When they got there, a Chinese sentry forbade them to proceed. They ignored his commands and both were shot, as was the Chinese sentry. The bodies of the Japanese were found on the side of the road, mutilated. Japan demanded an apology and the withdrawal of Chinese troops thirty miles from the city. Those demands went unmet, and two days later, when my father was walking near his office, he saw the Japanese flagship Idzumo on the Whangpoo next to the Japanese Consulate, accompanied by some twenty warships. The next day, August 12, Chiang’s best military divisions arrived in Shanghai from Nanking and established themselves in Chapei, the Chinese area on the north side of Soochow Creek, and Kiangwan, further north still. The day after that, Friday the thirteenth, the Shanghai Volunteer Corps was called up. Orders for Volunteers to report for duty were broadcast constantly on the radio, and displayed on theater screens all over the city.

  And then China made a demand of her own, the withdrawal of Japanese troops by four o’clock the next afternoon. This was something new, an unprecedented firmness from the Chinese and a welcome change. The Chinese military was at last taking a stand, backed by the recent addition of modern bombers and ten two-thousand-pound bombs to Chiang’s air force.

  On that Friday afternoon, my mother had planned to take me to Whiteway & Laidlaw on Nanking Road for new school shoes. As Mei Wah drove us into town, I sat in the backseat of the car and tried to picture my feet in saddle shoes, which seemed so grown up that I was having a hard time imagining them. I was so focused on my feet that it was only when my mother groaned that I looked out the window to see what was wrong.

  The city had been transformed, and I looked out on streets that should have been familiar but had become nightmarish. We passed barbed-wire barricades and sandbag shelters, and foreign soldiers stood on every corner. Chinese crowded the streets and sidewalks and doorways, their possessions in wheelbarrows or carts or just strapped onto their backs. They were refugees, my mother said, people who’d left Chapei and Hongkew to the north of Soochow Creek to make their way across the Garden Bridge because they were afraid to stay where they were.

  My mother immediately gave up on buying shoes. The wind was blowing and the red warning light on the top of the Customs House was blinking, signaling a typhoon. She told Mei Wah to just turn around and take us back home. On our way, we passed the Great World, a six-storey amusement hall on the corner of Avenue Edouard VII and Tibet Road in the French Concession. I remembered its shooting galleries, hall of mirrors, Ferris wheels, Chinese classic dramas, magicians and fireworks and acrobats, but a few days earlier, it had been converted into a refugee center, as had theaters and schools around the city. It was mealtime as we passed. I looked out at a line of people that seemed endless, all of them waiting for a bowl of rice.

  When we got home, my father met us at the door. It was only four o’clock, and it was unusual for him to be home so early. His expression was grim, his mouth a straight line. When my mother got out of the car, he said only, “It’s Chapei.” Then he looked at me and said, “You might as well see this,” and he took my hand and led me up the outside stairs to the verandah, then to the north side of the house, where he put his hands on my shoulders and faced me toward Chapei across Soochow Creek.

  The sky was a Halloween orange, darker than sunset and tinged with black, with low clouds that were blacker still. The air smelled of smoke, and there was a sound I’d never heard before. The closest thing was thunder, but this was faster and staccato sharp, an aggressive rapping that I wanted to stop.

  “It’s started,” my father said. “That’s the sound of shelling. Things won’t be the same for a while now.”

  We watched in silence as it grew dark. By dusk the whole sky over Chapei was black smoke, and when we finally went inside, I stayed close to my parents out of fear, as though no place was safe. In the den, my father switched on the radio, and its miniature cathedral shape made me think of Mass. Keep us safe, I thought. My parents were listening to the news: the first shots had been fired at Yokohama Bridge, on the northern border of the International Settlement, leading to an exchange of fire between the outposts of the two militaries. Across the Whangpoo at Pootung, Japanese marines were disembarking from their cruisers under covering fire from gunboats.

  The next morning, the clouds over Chapei were still black. The sound of shelling had become a backdrop that seemed to be everywhere and to come f
rom all directions. It made my head hurt. There were other sounds, too, which my father said was cannon fire and the playback of shelling from ships, and firing from the gunboats in the Whangpoo, all of it making the French doors that opened onto the verandah shudder.

  My parents had been invited to a wedding reception that afternoon. The bride was the daughter of my father’s first employer in Shanghai, a man who ran the Asiatic American Underwriters, and there was to be a garden reception at the Cercle Sportif in the French Concession. It was clear that my mother had no wish to go, but it was equally clear that my father had no intention of staying home. He’d been at home more than usual that week, acquiescing to my mother’s nervousness. By Saturday he was feeling cooped up and he made a deal with my mother: they would go to the reception, but only for a short time, just to make an appearance. And they would take me with them, so that my mother wouldn’t worry.

  We left at two. My father wanted something from his office, and he told Mei Wah to drive to the Bund before going to the French Concession. But as we neared the city, the roads became packed with people. Mei Wah inched his way through the crowds and it took almost half an hour to reach Yuen Ming Yuen Road, where my father hurried into his office while my mother and Mei Wah and I waited in the car, the motor running. My mother tried to play “I spy” with me, but she couldn’t stay interested, and we had to keep starting over.

  We heard planes overhead, and although I’d heard the sound earlier in the day when Chinese Northrups had flown low over the Settlement, the noise was more frightening now because it was so much closer. I leaned forward and saw the planes through the front windshield. My mother’s expression became more anxious and she glanced at my father’s office but said nothing. Then the shelling grew louder, and the planes nearer still, and I heard Mei Wah curse under his breath. My mother looked around frantically, as though trapped, and she spoke in Mandarin to Mei Wah, who only shrugged in answer.