The Distant Land of My Father

by Bo Caldwell

  Even the next morning, I was calm, at the start. His flight wouldn’t leave until noon, but he had been instructed to be at the airport two hours early. We’d been up since six, though I thought I’d heard my father up even earlier than that, pacing.

  When it was almost time to leave, I stood in the bedroom doorway, watching him finish packing. He wore suit pants and a white shirt and a red tie. He hadn’t put his coat on yet. I thought he looked very handsome. He placed his shaving kit in his suitcase and let the lid fall, then he stood and looked around him, checking the room. But he’d been thorough. The suitcase was the only thing left.

  “Looks like that’s about it, huh?” He smiled at me.

  “Yep,” I said. Don’t cry.

  “So,” he said, and he ran his hand across his cropped blond hair, a gesture so familiar that it hurt to watch. His suit coat was folded on the bed, and he put it on and straightened it, giving each white shirt cuff a quick yank. He was exact about his appearance. An inch of cuff, no more, no less, should show beneath your coat, he said. Then he leaned over to close his suitcase.

  It was that sound that did it to me: those two neat clicks of the metal latches, snap, snap. All of my hard work at mimicking my mother’s composure over the last few days unraveled. I stared at those shiny silver latches as if I could pull my composure back from them, and I felt my father watching me. I knew that he moved toward me, that he put his arms around me and held my face against the cool whiteness of the shirt my mother had ironed last night.

  “Anna,” he said quietly, “don’t do this now, all right? It’s not so bad, you see? It’s not so bad, Anna, just a little while again.”

  I nodded stupidly, but I knew it was so bad. And as I finally cried in his arms, I felt a fierceness in his embrace and a sigh go through his chest that told me I was right.

  a happy man

  MY FATHER’S STAY IN CHUNGKING lasted barely longer than his stay in South Pasadena. He was there for only eleven months, from October of 1944 until September of 1945. But that had been his plan. It was just a place to be until the war was over. When Japan surrendered in August, my father lost no time in trying to get back to Shanghai, which was all but impossible unless you were Allied or Chinese Nationalist military or government. As liaison between the American and Chinese troops in Chungking, my father qualified.

  The second he left Chungking, he stopped considering himself an official. The war was over and he was in business, simple as that, though he knew business would be different now. The Treaty of 1943, signed by Britain, the United States, and the Nationalist Government of China, had abolished extraterritoriality, and for the first time in one hundred years, Shanghai belonged not to foreigners, but to China. The Nationalist government controlled business now. Even so, my father was certain there was a place for him.

  He arrived by train at Shanghai’s North Station on the last day of September, just a month and a half after the end of the war. He carried two suitcases and he had made sure to have plenty of U.S. currency on him before he’d left Chungking. Nobody trusted the Chinese currency. The value of the Chinese dollar was decreasing, and the rate of exchange fluctuated from hour to hour and place to place. He’d heard the whole city was chaotic. It had taken weeks after Japan’s surrender for the Chinese to reclaim control, and American GIs and Chinese Nationalist soldiers and officials had not arrived until the third week of September. Everything was in a state of flux. Chinese authorities had begun taking control of businesses that the Japanese had controlled during the war, and many of those who’d left during the war were returning—American and British journalists, employees sent by foreign firms, fortune seekers and entrepreneurs like my father.

  At the train station, he hired a pedicab and gave the address of his office on Yuen Ming Yuen Road. Once there, he paid the coolie and carried his suitcases to the doorstep and fit the key in the lock. When he pushed open the door, he felt as though he’d simply stepped back three years, to that limbo year that followed Pearl Harbor. Papers were scattered about, and a pile of newspapers in the corner looked as though it had been flattened into a bed, which was fine by him. He saw no reason to pay for a hotel.

  Everything was still there: his carved desk, his chair, the water-color of the Public Gardens over the desk. And underneath a loose floorboard near the back wall were the things he’d wanted to save: his chop; the account ledger he’d been using as a journal, which he’d placed there only a few days before his arrest by the Japanese; eight hundred dollars in U.S. currency, plenty to get started, he thought; and my mother’s ivory comb.

  From there he walked toward the Whangpoo, and when he first set foot on the Bund again and gazed around him and breathed in the sharp scent of the muddy river, he laughed out loud, for he knew one thing: that he would stay in Shanghai, no matter what. He was home—his real home this time, no bungalow, no city of angels. It was home now more than ever, because he’d tried someplace else and he’d found it wouldn’t work. He had been foolish to think he could have been happy anywhere else, he saw that now. How could a man like him live in a place like Pasadena? Too many rules, too much order, not enough to do, and what would he possibly have done for work? Taken up accounting? Imported Japanese tea sets? As for my mother and me, he didn’t know when he could arrange for us to join him, but he’d worry about that later. First things first.

  He walked along the Bund for a while, getting his bearings. For the first time in years, there were American and British warships on the Whangpoo. The White Sun flag of the Kuomintang flew from the tops of government buildings, and pictures of Chiang Kai-shek decorated with paper flower garlands were everywhere. The bronze lions in front of the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank were back after having been hidden during the war, and when he stopped in at the Shanghai Club’s Long Bar, behind the bar he saw more brands of Scotch than he could count. Even the billiards tables had been repaired. The Japanese had lowered them by sawing off the legs, but here they were, good as new, remounted on wooden platforms and back in use.

  After a glass of Dewar’s, he walked back up the Bund and turned down Nanking Road. Hawkers had set up rickety stalls over every inch of the sidewalk and my father saw things he hadn’t seen in Shanghai for years: toasters, cameras, typewriters, radios. Butter and powdered milk, canned meat and Spam, cigarettes and coffee. The streets were jammed, the shops crowded and noisy, their windows filled. He passed GIs buying things to send home to their wives, silk stockings and lingerie, embroidered slips and negligees and Chinese slippers. The big department stores were busy, too, and my father saw that once again, you could buy anything from the latest American lipsticks to rich Swiss chocolates at Sincere’s. There were also things he didn’t want to dwell on. Medical supplies and blood plasma were for sale because Chiang’s government had turned relief parcels from the American Red Cross into cash instead of distributing them by selling the goods to middlemen, who then resold them to anyone who could pay.

  After an hour of walking, he suddenly wanted coolie food. He stopped at a stall on Foochow Road and bought noodles and cabbage. Next he was going to buy copies of the Shanghai Evening Post and Mercury and the North China Daily News and head back to his office and read every inch to find out what was what, and who was here, and where the opportunities were. But as he started walking back, he forgot about the papers, and for a moment it was as though he’d dreamed the last four years. Parked on Foochow Road just a few doors down was his Packard, he was sure, the same car he’d turned in to the Japanese in 1942. It was dinged up and filthy and the left rear fender had been lopped off somehow, but he was certain it was the same car. He’d known the dealer who sold him the car in 1936, and he knew for a fact that his was the only Packard of that model and color brought into Shanghai that year.

  He just stood for a moment, watching and waiting to see what was next. A Chinese man sat at the wheel, smoking a cigarette. As my father watched, he got out of the car and slammed the door. Before he headed off, he spat on the hood of the c
ar.

  My father hurried after him. He called out in Mandarin for the man to stop, but the stranger kept walking. My father ran to catch up with him. He put his hand on the man’s shoulder and turned him so that they faced each other. Then, as though it were the most natural thing in the world, my father explained in perfect Mandarin that the man had no right to this car.

  “It is a government car,” my father said, “Chiang’s car,” and he showed the stunned man his identification papers from Chungking, which bore the bright red seals of the Nationalist government. The man hesitated. People had stopped to listen, and an old woman clucked at what she saw. My father heard someone say, “Thief!” and for a moment he was outraged. Then he realized they were referring to the man in front of him. My father waited another instant, and then he held out his hand.

  “Give me the key,” he said in Mandarin. “Do not shame our Generalissimo. No good can come of such a thing.”

  For a moment, the man looked indecisive, even afraid. Then he dug into the pocket of his grimy coat, dropped the key into my father’s palm, and walked away.

  My father nodded to the onlookers as though dismissing them, then walked to the car and got inside. It smelled strongly of garlic and cigarettes and grime, but he didn’t care. He started it up and listened carefully to the engine. Not perfect, but it would hold out for a while. He drove to his office and picked up his suitcases, then he started down Nanking Road toward Hungjao, as though this were just any day. As though he’d never left.

  He found the house ransacked and dirty but uninhabited. By noon the next day he had hired a Chinese man and his wife to care for him and the house. A woman house servant was something new—before the war, women were hired only as amahs, to care for children—but he had no quarrel with having her around. He gave the two of them instructions and money to cover their first week’s wages and food for the three of them, then went back into town to buy what he needed, for starters—some new clothes and shoes, a box of cigars, new sheets and towels, dishware, flatware, a bottle of good Scotch.

  He had planned his next step for days. He went to the Chinese Consulate and showed his papers from Chungking around again, and within a week he was given the necessary and hard-to-come-by import license. With that in hand, he made contact with vehicle dealers in the United States, some of whom were the same men he’d dealt with before the war. Two months later he brought in and sold at a healthy profit his first few Dodge trucks and cars. They cost him twelve hundred dollars, and he sold them for six to eight thousand dollars. After that, he started in with newsprint, another badly needed commodity, buying it for one hundred twenty dollars a ton, then selling it for over six hundred.

  The household purchases he made the day he returned to Hungjao were his first and last; everything else he left to the servant couple he had hired. The only problem was that they were far too timid and cautious to buy anything more than what was required for meals. So, except for a crude table in the kitchen that the housekeepers had found stuffed in a corner of the attic, and cots that my father had had delivered, the house remained unfurnished. It was as though the three of them were camping out, just using the house until they moved on. My father seemed not to notice. He returned mainly to sleep and bathe. Other than that, he stayed in town, and his servants were left to themselves.

  Even so, his life was familiar again. The restaurants and bars had come back to life, and my father was at his old haunts, restaurants like Jimmy’s and Kafka’s and St. Petersburg, nightclubs like the Argentina and the Metropole, Ciro’s and Caliente, the Lido. American films were brought in from Chungking: Naughty Marietta with Jeannette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy played at the Roxy, and Aloma of the South Seas with Dorothy Lamour was at the Nanking. Many of the country clubs around the city had been turned into internment camps during the war, but they reopened, too, and my father drank and talked while the bands played “Sentimental Journey” and “Accentuate the Positive” in the same places that had housed internees only a few months earlier.

  On New Year’s Eve, my father toasted 1946 with friends in the Horse and Hounds Bar at the Cathay Hotel, and they all agreed it was going to be a good year. My father insisted on buying the champagne because, as he explained to anyone who would listen, he’d had a good week. He’d just learned that thanks to the help of a U.S. senator who’d been a classmate of his at Vanderbilt, the U.S. government had released his assets frozen in the Bank of New York nearly three years earlier by the Office of Price Administration, around four hundred thousand dollars. It was more than enough to take care of my mother and me and to get him started, and he saw it as an omen. Business would be good; life would be good. He was back in the city he loved, and for the first time since before the war, he was a happy man.

  tickets

  IN MAY OF 1945 when the war in Europe ended, my mother grew more hopeful that my father would return, despite the fact that we’d heard nothing from him since he’d left seven months earlier. On the afternoon of Tuesday, August 14, when Japan surrendered and the war was officially over, the siren on top of the Los Angeles Times building blared the news and everyone celebrated, including my mother, who began to act as though my father would show up any day. When August became September she said less, but her expression remained determined as she doled out made-up reasons for his silence. I didn’t question her certainty out loud, but I was more and more skeptical. He had been gone for a year, and I had learned firsthand that if you were without someone you loved for a year, it got easier. You didn’t miss them as much, you didn’t even think of them as much. But I kept my thoughts to myself. In the second week of September I started ninth grade, my last at South Pasadena Junior High.

  Finally, on the last day of September, we heard from him again. The Santa Anas had kicked up that week, which meant the wind was blowing the wrong way, bringing us hot air from the desert instead of cool air from the Pacific. The temperature was nearly one hundred degrees, and everything felt wrong.

  I had dragged myself home from school and was lying on the living-room floor where it was cool, listening to Frank Sinatra and wondering what I would be like when I was twenty-five, the age I considered adulthood. I was picturing the kind of house I would have. It would be more spacious than our bungalow, and lighter and cooler, maybe on a hill, with lots of windows. I pictured what I could remember of our house in Shanghai, and I thought I’d like something like that—verandahs, a staircase, lots of room, only here, not in China—and I wondered if it had bothered my mother to live in such a small house after such a large one. I was sure it had bothered my father.

  I started to think about Mark Young, a handsome boy in my social studies class whom my friends had labeled as too quiet. I liked his quiet. I considered him a find, and I was wondering whether or not he was going to pay any attention to me at the dance the next night, and what I would do to encourage him if he didn’t. I had decided that I would choose the boys I dated with great care. I wanted someone who would never leave me, and I knew that it might take time to find someone like that.

  The doorbell rang, and I heard my mother walk to the front door, her bare feet patting the wood floor. She had just taken a bath and was wearing a cotton robe, and the scent of lilac drifted into the living room as she passed. Hot weather didn’t agree with her. It never had, not even in Shanghai, and I always associated her bad moods with the heat.

  I heard her open the door and say hello. She said something else, and then the door shut and I heard paper tearing. Then silence.

  “What is it?” I said.

  She cleared her throat, and then she read aloud: “‘Am in Shanghai, all is well. Recovered house, hired cook. Business opportunities unbelievable. Hope you are well. Date of return to States indefinite. Joseph.’”

  It was as breezy as an I’ll-be-late-for-dinner phone call. I tried to understand what it meant, why he wasn’t coming home, but I came up empty. “I don’t understand,” I said.

  My mother stood in the doorway. Her face wa
s drawn. “Well,” she said, “it appears that your father has not seen fit to come home just yet.”

  I nodded stupidly. “He can, but he won’t?” I asked, more an accusation than a question.

  “If you have to put it like that, yes,” she said. And then she walked to her bedroom and closed her door softly behind her, and I knew that she was upset and wanted to be alone. I turned up the record so I wouldn’t hear her.

  That night I called my four closest friends, one at a time, and casually mentioned that we’d heard from my father and that he wasn’t coming back for a while, taking back all my mother’s he’ll-be-back-when-the-war-is-over predictions I’d been quoting so confidently. “Oh, it’s all right,” I said in answer to their surprise. “It’s just how he is. We’re used to it now.” And then I moved on to topics more interesting: the dance on the following night, and how tall some of the boys were getting, and how broad their shoulders were, and how far we thought a girl named Valerie Rutherford was going with the high-school boy she was seeing. When I hung up, I felt cold inside. I hoped those phone calls had done what I’d wanted them to, which was to make my father go away, so that I wouldn’t have to talk about him in school. I doubted I could act so casually about him face-to-face.