The Distant Land of My Father

by Bo Caldwell

  My mother turned from the deck railing. “Shall we?”

  “I’m looking for him,” I said.

  She sighed and smoothed my hair gently. “Oh, Anna, I’m sorry. I should have explained. I knew he wouldn’t be here yet. We have to go through Chinese customs and immigration, and he knows how long that takes. But he’ll find us.”

  I swallowed hard, surprised by my disappointment, then followed my mother off the ship. Don’t argue, I thought. At least you’ll see him soon.

  Two hours later, my mother and I were still waiting in line on the customs jetty on the Bund, and three hours after that we were nearing the front of the queue at immigration. We had had no food since toast and juice that morning, we were filthy from the grime and film of travel, and the heat had become like a nagging illness, something you just couldn’t shake.

  When we finally emerged from the Customs House, it was nearly six o’clock in the evening, and I looked around me in shock, for I found myself in the dirtiest and shabbiest place I’d ever been. I’d expected someplace glamorous, like Paris maybe, and although the buildings that faced us on the Bund were beautiful—stately and majestic—the street itself was crowded and chaotic, packed with cars and people and pedicabs, all competing for far too little space, a crazy version of musical chairs. Everything was filthy, the odor nearly overpowering, the sidewalk lined with garbage and rickety, makeshift stalls where hawkers held out all kinds of things—watches and shirts, electric razors and cartons of cigarettes, canned goods and jewelry—all the while yelling things I didn’t understand. There were beggars every-where—lying on the sidewalk, propped against buildings, huddled in entries as though they had been deposited there. With their diseases and open wounds and missing limbs, they hardly looked alive.

  I looked around for something good and did not find it. And I thought, This? This is the place he couldn’t leave, the place he had to come back to? Just standing on the street was a sentence I didn’t think we deserved.

  My mother glanced about nervously, and I was startled at her expression. I saw that she was afraid, and for the first time in my life, I had the urge to take care of her.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  She attempted a smile. “I’m just not sure what to do next.”

  I thought the heat must be getting to her. My mother was never uncertain, and what we should do seemed obvious to me. “We just wait for him, don’t we? You said yourself.”

  “That’s what I’d thought, but it’s getting so late that I . . .” Her voice trailed off and I wanted to reassure her, but didn’t know what to say.

  We waited for another minute, and I was about to take my mother’s arm and try to lead her across the street through the anarchy of the traffic and trash when a car pulled up perhaps twenty feet away. It was a Packard, and though it was beat up and matched no memory of mine, I knew, without knowing how, that its owner was my father. As if to answer my thoughts, the car stopped, the back door opened, and he got out.

  I caught my breath at the sight of him: he was so clean, so pressed and spotless and handsome in his white linen suit that he seemed to have materialized more than arrived, and I wondered for a moment if I’d made him up. I was immediately embarrassed for my mother and me. I tugged on her sleeve like a child—his appearance had reduced me to one—and my mother nodded and stared at him without speaking, just as I did. She smoothed her rumpled skirt, a sad gesture because it didn’t help. I saw how difficult it was for her to be seen like this, so grimy and traveled.

  He stood by the car for a moment and scanned his surroundings, and when he saw us, he leaned into the car and said something to the driver, then walked purposefully toward us. I held back, expecting my mother to run to him the way she had at Union Station, but she didn’t. She waited next to me, and as my father neared us, she took my hand and squeezed it twice, her signal for Be brave. I squeezed back, glad for her encouragement, for I was afraid.

  “So here they are,” he called jubilantly as he approached us. His voice was so loud that I looked around to see who else he was talking to, but I found no one. He went on. “Here are my girls, and none the worse for wear,” and he laughed. I winced and tried to hide it with a smile, for I couldn’t tell whether or not he was teasing. We were most definitely the worse for wear, as anyone could see. He leaned toward my mother and kissed her cheek, then put his hands firmly on my shoulders and kissed my forehead, his hands keeping me at arm’s length so that I wouldn’t muss him, I guessed. But when he met my eyes, though it was only for a moment, I saw the reason for his formality: he was nervous. He looked us over, and he laughed loudly and somehow strangely, especially because there wasn’t anything funny that I could see.

  “Come on now, let’s get your things and be off to dinner. We’ve got a full schedule this evening. Lots to do around here, plenty to do,” and he turned toward the car and whistled for his driver. I knew it wouldn’t be Mei Wah, but I was still surprised to see the burly Chinese strongman who got out of the front seat, and another word surfaced from my childhood in Shanghai: bodyguard. He wore a dark suit and looked like my father’s opposite. My father called something to him and motioned to our luggage, which the driver began to carry to the car as effortlessly as if all we’d packed was air.

  My mother and I watched in silence, as though the loading of the luggage were a ceremony with great meaning. I found the silence awkward, but I could think of nothing to say, though I’d pictured my father and me talking up a storm as soon as we saw each other. When the car was loaded, my father turned to us. “Off we go,” he said, as though he were our tour guide.

  My mother coughed slightly, a sound I knew as a signal that she disagreed. Apparently my father had forgotten her language. “Joseph,” she said, “we’re really not presentable. We should at least change and—”

  “Nonsense. You’ve just arrived in Shanghai—the Paris of the Orient!—and we’re not going to waste your first night here. You’ve come all this way, there’s no use sitting at home.” He gave her a long look and he seemed to soften for a moment. “You look as lovely as ever,” he said simply. Then he looked at me and winked in a stagy way. “I’m showing you off, is what I’m doing, to the whole town.”

  I smiled weakly. My mother and I followed him to the car.

  All that night he was cheerful as Christmas morning, laughing and making toasts, waving and calling out to acquaintances across the restaurant. “We’re celebrating,” he kept saying, and he’d clink glasses yet again, and say how good it was to have us here. But there was an almost manic quality to him, and with each dinner course, with each toast and new introduction, I wanted to say, What’s wrong? It’s just us.

  At last, after dessert and coffee and cordials, he asked my mother if she was ready to go, and when she nodded wearily, my father smiled gently and looked like himself for the first time that night. “Then we’re off,” he said, and he rose and led us to the entrance and to the Packard outside, where he got into the front seat with the driver.

  I slumped against my mother in the backseat. I thought I had never been so tired. My whole body felt worn down. I started to fall asleep, but my mother’s voice woke me when we were only a few blocks from the restaurant.

  “Where are we going?” she asked. I felt her shift on the seat next to me.

  My father didn’t answer.

  “Joseph?” she said.

  “Not to worry,” he said, his voice low. “Hungjao isn’t ship-shape yet, is all. So I’ve arranged for an apartment in the Concession for now. You two will be comfortable there. And I’ll go out to Hungjao and have it ready in a day or two.”

  My mother fell back against the seat. I could feel her disappointment and fatigue. “Oh,” she said dully. “I’m sure we’ll be fine.”

  The apartment my father had arranged for us was on Rue Ratard in the French Concession, and you could tell it had once been someone’s nice home. The Copen blue drapes that hung from floor to ceiling had not always been faded. The wa
inscoting on the walls had not always been chipped. The Oriental rugs had not always been thread-bare, and the parquet floors hadn’t always been warped. I was certain that the windows overlooking the street had once been clean, the mahogany furniture new, the wallpaper bright, the rooms elegant. You could tell. But I guessed that it had been neglected for years, and I wondered just when it had changed.

  I wondered the same thing about my father: When had he changed? Just after he’d left us, or just before we’d arrived in Shanghai? During our first few days there, I thought he was just nervous around us, and that the newness of a wife and daughter were what made him so unpredictable. But when he was still that way the second week and then the third and after that the fourth, I realized that this was who he was now, and that the impulsive man who’d taken us to dinner that first night was the real thing, and not an act.

  “Impulsive” was a compliment; “completely unreliable” was more accurate. We never knew when we would see him, and we rarely saw him two days in a row. He would say he’d come for dinner, then call an hour after he was to pick us up to cancel. One night he would be dressed immaculately—pressed shirt, silk tie, linen suit—and two nights later he’d show up in the same clothes, only by then they’d be rumpled and stained, and it was clear he had not changed since he’d seen us last. When he did keep his promise for dinner, he might take us to one of the nicest restaurants in town—Senet and St. Petersburg were his favorites—but it was just as possible that we’d end up eating noodles on Foochow Road, elbow to elbow with shopkeepers and clerks. Whatever the mishap, change of plans, or faux pas, his one-word explanation was always the same: business. Business was what made him late, kept him away, and delayed the work on the house at Hungjao.

  The one thing my father did do, the one thing we could depend on, was financial support. There was always money. He passed a handful of bills to my mother each time he saw her, he offered a few to me when we said good night, and he had cash delivered to our apartment on Rue Ratard several days a week, a gesture that seemed crazy at first, but which soon seemed as necessary as providing running water. Shanghai’s economy was in chaos. Rumors of civil war between the Communists and the Nationalists in northern China made people distrust China’s paper currency, and it was worth less every day. By that fall of 1946, you needed a suitcase of cash to shop for the day.

  During our first week in Shanghai, my mother accepted unconditionally my father’s constant use of business as an excuse. She began making up some of her own, to boot. She said his undependability was a phase, that he just hadn’t been ready for us, that he was embarrassed because the house was not prepared. He had always been a good provider, she said. Now he was afraid that he had lost face in our eyes, and he was frantically trying to make up for it. She was gracious without fail. Every time he canceled or showed up late, she made excuses for him and told me not to hold it against him.

  I nodded silently and tried, for her sake, to hide my anger, not always with success. “Don’t hold it against him, Anna,” she said. “Resentment does not become you.” I turned from her and said I was hoping to grow into it, because it probably wasn’t going to go away soon. In fact, resentment was something I clung to. I resented our apartment, I resented Shanghai, its dirtiness, its beggars, its crowdedness. And I resented everything about my father: his lateness, his cancellations, his inattention, his general disregard of us. Most of all, I resented the way he treated my mother, as though she were an acquaintance, nothing more. But resenting him, I knew, was a good thing. It meant that things didn’t hurt so much.

  On a Thursday morning in September, my mother and I celebrated the Feast of the Nativity of Mary at the early Mass at the Cathedral in Ziccawei. We had been in Shanghai for a month and a day, though it felt more like a year to me. All I wanted was to go home, but if I so much as mentioned the idea, my mother was short with me. We hadn’t seen my father in six days, a record. When she’d asked him about when we might be able to move to Hungjao, he had only shrugged, then changed the subject.

  After Mass, we took a pedicab back to the Concession. We’d almost reached our apartment—our cell, was what I had begun to call it—when my mother said suddenly, as if in answer to some question I’d just asked, “We’re going to move to Hungjao tomorrow. This is crazy.”

  I could only stare at her.

  “It’s ridiculous,” she went on. “We came here to be a family. There’s no reason that we shouldn’t join him. The house can’t be that bad, and it’s not as though we’re accustomed to luxury. We’ll pack up this afternoon. I’ll ask him to stop by this evening, and we’ll tell him. And all this foolishness will be over.” She looked at me, her expression hopeful and calm, so that it almost seemed like things had already changed. “Don’t you think?”

  I nodded, and did not tell her how wrong her plan seemed.

  We packed that afternoon. I felt like a child pretending to get ready for a trip. I couldn’t believe that he would come, that we would go. If my mother was uncertain in any way, she did not show it. She was all efficiency, packing as though our move had been planned for weeks, sorting the things we’d bought since our arrival in Shanghai into various boxes and crates. At seven o’clock she hadn’t mentioned dinner, and although I was starved, I knew she was hoping that my father would appear. Finally, at almost eight, she sat down and smiled, and although she looked tired, she also looked happy.

  “I know what we can do,” she said. “We’ll go to Jimmy’s. Do you remember it? We haven’t been there in all this time, because I was saving it for a celebration. But I think we’ve earned that today.”

  I was too exhausted and too confused to say anything but yes. My mother told me to hurry and clean up, and half an hour later, we were on our way.

  In that month, there had been much about Shanghai that I had not remembered, but when my mother and I walked into Jimmy’s that night, I remembered the Saturday my father took me there immediately. I remembered his suave assurance and his attention to me. I remembered his argument with Will Marsh, and the stolen yen in my shoe, and the shock of the kidnapping, which I hadn’t thought about in a long time. And I remembered how much I’d loved him then, and how he could do no wrong.

  And so when my mother and I walked inside, I just stood in the doorway for a moment, a little stunned by the presence of so much past. I breathed in that same American smell from years before—barbecued chicken and hamburgers—and I smiled and looked at my mother.

  At first I thought she must be ill. She looked stricken, as though she might faint, and I was afraid all the packing had made her sick. And then I followed her gaze and saw a familiar face.

  My father was there, and I felt a wave of relief and gratitude. I started to wave to him and to call out, but my mother grabbed hold of my wrist so hard that I tried to pull away, more out of anger than hurt.

  “Don’t,” she said firmly. “Just leave.”

  But it was too late, for I saw that he was with a Chinese woman I’d never seen before. She was leaning against him familiarly, and just as I looked, she said something and my father laughed and kissed her cheek. I was stunned at first. And then I had a worse feeling, for I realized I’d been expecting her all along. Things had been too strange; of course there was some explanation beyond business. As I stared hard and tried to see her more clearly, I was even more surprised; she wasn’t even pretty, really. When she laughed, there was something coarsely appealing about her, but she was no match for my mother. Which for reasons I couldn’t explain made everything seem worse.

  My father said something to her and looked around the restaurant. And then he saw us.

  For a moment, he just stared. Then he said something to the woman. I wanted to see her reaction, but I saw no more. My mother took my arm and guided me out of the restaurant and into Shanghai’s streets of beggars and hawkers and who knew what else, and she said that we were going home to our flat.

  There she gave me a glass of sherry, a first, which I drank as an act of t
rust, despite the horrible taste. She put me to bed as though I were a child, soothing me, talking in a low voice. She was gentle and seemed inexplicably calm, and I thought she must know more than I did, but I had no interest in knowing what that was. She told me to sleep and that we would talk in the morning. I shut my eyes gratefully. I felt sick and tired and sad.

  It was after midnight when I heard someone knocking on the door to our flat. It was quiet at first, then more forceful. I heard my mother’s steps moving toward the door, and I heard the door open and close, then my father’s heavier footsteps over my mother’s muffled ones.

  My room was on the second floor of the apartment, and my mother had closed the doors between us—my bedroom door, the door to the hallway, and the door to the living room—so there was no way to make out my father’s words. All I heard was the rise and fall of his voice, the tones going up and down, louder and softer, as he spoke to my mother. I did not hear my mother’s answers. Her voice was too hushed.

  For a long time, I stayed in bed. When I finally got up, I walked down the stairs and toward the double doors that led into the living room. I guessed my mother had meant to close them, but she’d left a crack, and I stood behind it, not really caring if they saw me. I was suddenly tired of both of them, and impatient. I just wanted whatever was going to happen to have happened. I wanted to go home, either to the one in Hungjao or the one in South Pasadena. Just not this sad apartment anymore.

  They were sitting on a worn chintz loveseat, like some old prop from a second-rate play. Both of them looked exhausted. My father’s linen suit was rumpled, his tie loosened. My mother was next to him, her back straight, and she seemed to be staring at the floor.

  Neither of them spoke for a moment. Finally my father faced my mother and looked at her carefully. “Could you possibly have thought that I wanted the two of you here? Could you possibly have thought that I wanted a family again?”