The Distant Land of My Father

by Bo Caldwell

  I refolded it and handed it to my mother. “Neat,” I said. “Congratulations.”

  She started the car and said, “There’s no need for sarcasm.”

  I stared out the window. “It’s not sarcasm,” I said. “I just have no idea what to say.”

  “In a hundred years, I wouldn’t have dreamed that I’d be apart from your father.”

  I nodded. “I just try not to think about him,” I said matter-of-factly. “There are lots of better things to pay attention to.”

  In March of the next year, my senior year in high school, my mother requested that a final judgment be entered, which it was. The Final Judgment of Divorce arrived at our house by messenger. It was a strange day, for an hour after that news arrived, decidedly good news came in the mail: I’d been accepted as an entering freshman to the University of California at Los Angeles, my first choice, for the upcoming fall.

  We celebrated that night with my grandmother, in the same way we’d celebrated all of our collective birthdays and special occasions: with a nice dinner out. That night we went to a new Italian restaurant in Hollywood, Miceli’s, where we sat upstairs at a carved wooden booth, the table covered with a red-and-white checked tablecloth. Bottles of Chianti and fake grapevines hung from the ceiling, and the walls were covered with painted murals of busty girls in off-the-shoulder blouses and full skirts frolicking in the Italian countryside. The whole place smelled like warm bread.

  By the end of dinner, my mother’s food was almost untouched. She had been quiet, almost morose, and more worried than she had been in months. While I often found her behavior perplexing, this time it made no sense at all. I was growing annoyed with her. She should be happy, shouldn’t she? Or at least relieved? Au contraire, as my French teacher would say.

  “Genevieve,” my grandmother finally said, “what is it that’s bothering you? Is this regret or worry or the flu or some combination?”

  My mother’s cheeks flushed and she looked down at her uneaten meal. “There’s something else besides the divorce,” she said. “I don’t want to talk about it more than we have to. It may not get the popular vote,” she added dryly, and glanced at me. I shrugged, my teenage shorthand for, So what am I supposed to do?

  My mother took a breath and said, “I’ve changed our name, Anna’s and mine. The spelling of it, I mean. I’ve thought about it for a long time. There’s no telling what he’s doing in Shanghai, what sort of trouble he might get into. I want to be apart from that. From who he is now. And so I’ve changed the legal spelling of our last name. It’s Shoen now, S-H-O-E-N. So it sounds the same, but we won’t be associated with him.”

  I stared at her hard, not understanding what she said. “You changed my name? How can you change my name?”

  “With a court order,” she answered easily, and she suddenly seemed relieved. “It’s quite simple actually. This was the right time to do it. You’re coming up on a new start, Anna, where no one will know you. So you won’t have to go around explaining to everyone. You’re still Anna Shoen. It’s only the spelling, and it’s only for practical reasons.” She took a long drink of water. She looked at my grandmother and me in turn, and she seemed more confident and sure of herself than she had in months. “In any case, it’s done.” She turned to me. “And you’ll just have to trust my judgment on this one. It’s for the best, I assure you.”

  My grandmother shook her head. “Well, it sounds as though the matter’s settled, Anna. I’d suggest you learn to live with it.” Though her words were neutral enough, the flatness of her tone made it clear that my mother’s action had taken her by surprise, and that she was not impressed.

  I graduated from South Pasadena High School in June of 1949, and in September, just before I started at UCLA, my mother received a hefty check from my father’s agent in New York, a man named James Rankin, whose name and handwriting I was to see for years, and whom I never met. I often tried to picture him, and usually came up with someone tall and thin, which was the way his name sounded to me. In his letter, Mr. Rankin explained that my father had asked him to express his sorrow in what had come to pass, but that he had also seen it as inevitable. My father fully understood my mother’s decision, Mr. Rankin said, and he would not shirk his financial responsibility. The substantial check that was enclosed would be the first of many.

  That check seemed to represent some kind of permission for my mother, something to do with finality, and she reinvented herself yet again. The first thing she did was to buy our bungalow from my grandmother, a gesture that my grandmother insisted was completely unnecessary. But my mother would not be dissuaded. “I want to be able to call it my own,” she said. “I know it doesn’t make sense to you, and I know it seems unnecessary. But it’s important to me. I want to own this house.” My grandmother acquiesced. My mother’s only compromise was in the below-market price she paid for the house.

  The second thing my mother did was to go shopping, and although the sight of her coming home every day with more and more packages was startling, I was glad to see it. In the three years since our trip to Shanghai, she had spent almost nothing on herself. Fashion had changed dramatically after the war, and my mother loved the new styles—tight waists and bodices, rounded hips, longer skirts. She bought afternoon dresses, and wool slacks, and cashmere sweaters, high heels and T-straps that made her look like a movie star. And a dinner dress with a tight bodice and long full skirt—the New Look, she explained proudly.

  She was, once again, a master at adaptability. She cut her hair, a feather cut this time, a shorter style that framed her face. She began to spend more time dressing before she went out, even if she was just going to the market or shopping or on other errands. She always had to be prettier, with higher heels, more stylish hair, more beautifully manicured nails. I watched her transformation with equal parts admiration and awe.

  When she helped me move into my small dormitory room, she was the one who turned heads, which was fine by me. The limelight was not something I sought. A colorful father and elegant mother had made me only too glad to be part of the background in public, a desire my mother didn’t understand. At the end of summer when she urged me to shop for new college clothes, my response was a disappointment to her, for the most she could talk me into was a plaid street dress, two pairs of shoes—loafers and saddle oxfords—a Pendleton fisherman’s knit sweater, and some gray flannel slacks that I loved and wore so much that she finally bought me a second pair, saying that at least this way I could get them cleaned. I did, however, agree to a trip to the beauty salon, where I had my shoulder-length hair cut in a chin-length bob, a style I liked for its practicality, its straightforwardness, and its simplicity.

  The fact was that I couldn’t imagine I’d have time for fashion and elaborate hairstyles at college, for I planned to be disciplined and study hard. I would major in history, I thought, and I would take advantage of cultural opportunities and become sophisticated in the arts, like my grandmother. I would get a part-time job, so that I wouldn’t have to depend so much on my mother’s financial support. I would take care of myself.

  But my program was short-lived, for in the fall of my freshman year I fell reluctantly in love with a boy named Jack Bradley. He ran on the cross-country team and on Saturdays he worked at Bullock’s Wilshire, where he sold women’s shoes and where I went every chance I got with no good reason other than the fact that I wanted to be near him. I would stand behind leather purses and handbags so that I could watch him unobserved. It seemed I couldn’t stay away from him, and my heart beat faster when he was near. He had a crooked smile and clear blue eyes that I was sure could never lie and that at times could focus on me so intently that I felt undone inside, or unlaced, as though just by looking at me he were gently taking me apart to see how I worked. He was dependable but not predictable, honest but also guarded. He was competitive in the extreme. When he was with friends, he was only too glad to turn everything into a contest: at the pool, who could hold their breath underwater th
e longest; at the beach, who could swim the furthest out. Who could name the song playing on the radio, who could rattle off state capitals, who knew the population of Los Angeles? He thrived on winning, and although track was his sport of choice, he was good at just about anything he tried—golf, tennis, baseball, even basketball, though he was only five-foot-nine. He was forthright and thorough and the most earnest person I had ever met. He was also orderly in the extreme, always on time, always organized. Even the way he ate was orderly, one thing at a time—salad, then potatoes, then meat, no mixing things up—and at the end of a meal his plate was always clean.

  He was, in every way that I could judge, the exact opposite of my father, and as far as I could figure out, he was a safe person to love. Nevertheless, for the first few months, I fought my feelings for him. It was too early, I thought, I didn’t know him well enough. I was afraid that once I loved him, he would leave. And I didn’t want to make the mistake my parents had made, though I wasn’t even sure what that was. But I lost my fight. He was a sport I could not help but watch, and in the fall of 1949, I finally gave in and admitted that I was thoroughly in love with him.

  I even knew when and how it happened: from ten o’clock to ten-fifty on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings in Josiah Royce Hall, where the two of us sat with some twenty-one other freshmen who’d also registered for English 51, American Literature—Realism to the Present. Jack Bradley sat in front of me during those first few weeks as we listened to passages from Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain and Henry James, all read to us and patiently expanded upon by Professor Edward Daniels, a man who clearly loved literature so passionately that at the start, I wanted to do well in the class only for him, because I could see how much he wanted us to love what we read. I listened hard and tried to take in all that Professor Daniels said, but I also took in Jack Bradley: the way the back of his chestnut hair was so neatly cut, and the one-of-a-kind graceful curve of his hairline at his neck, the solidness of his back and shoulders. As the days grew shorter and the semester wore on, Professor Daniels’s love for great writing got mixed up with my feelings for Jack Bradley. By the end, I loved them both, the words and the boy, and for the very first time since my childhood in Shanghai, a small hard knot inside of me began to dissolve—and I was happy.

  the poor in spirit

  ON A COOL NIGHT in the third week of April of 1949, my father went for a walk along the Bund. It was sometime after three, and he’d been asleep in his office since midnight. He’d started sleeping there now and then, on a flimsy camp bed he’d set up near the window overlooking Yuen Ming Yuen Road. That small room had come to feel more like home than home did. The air smelled of cigar smoke and stale newspapers, comforting smells, and there were no reminders of the past there, nothing to make him think of my mother, or of me, or of Shanghai as it used to be.

  When he woke that night, he found himself restless and unable to return to sleep, something that happened often. It was the silence that bothered him. He was used to noise in that part of the city—traffic and shouting, the sound of people talking and laughing and arguing—and the stillness made him anxious. He was stiff and groggy, and he decided to do what he had done most nights for the last month: take a walk while the city was quiet, for the hours before dawn were the only time when Shanghai felt familiar anymore. In the smoky night, he could walk along the Bund, still his favorite part of the city, and it was easy to remember why he had loved this place. He even liked the pungent, smoke-and-fish smell of the Whangpoo. It was one of the few things about the city that had not changed.

  From his office, he followed his usual route, walking first to Peking Road, where he turned left, toward the Bund, intending to turn right at the corner and walk the length of the waterfront down to the Shanghai Club at Number 3. But for the first time in a month, he found that his familiar walk was not possible, for when he turned the corner, he faced half a dozen Nationalist soldiers who stood guard in a line across the Bund as matter-of-factly as if they did this every night. Their faces were expressionless, their stance no-nonsense. My father was curtly told that he could not pass, and that he was to leave the vicinity immediately.

  My father faked nonchalance, nodding grimly as though he’d expected as much. He turned from the soldiers and walked purposefully away from them and toward the Garden Bridge, his head down, his hands jammed in the pockets of his worn herringbone coat, all the while wondering what in the world was going on. When he had gone two hundred feet, he glanced back and saw the sentries pointing toward the water, at what he didn’t care, as long as they weren’t watching him. When he reached the Public Garden, he stepped carefully onto dark wet grass and ducked under a cypress tree, then stood there for a moment, listening and waiting. But nothing happened. There was no yelling, no pounding of soldiers’ feet, so he decided to cut through the garden to the Whangpoo so that he could see what was up.

  He headed toward the giant magnolia tree and the bandstand, eerie in the stillness of night. When he reached the riverfront, he faced south and stared toward the Bund, looking for what he didn’t know. Then he stared harder, trying to interpret what he saw: a line of coolies walking evenly from the Bank of China to an ordinary-looking freighter tied up across from the Cathay Hotel. Electric lanterns hung from the freighter’s masts, and in that wide golden circle of light he could see the coolies’ dark blue tunics, and the way they stooped from the weight of whatever was in the packages hanging from the bamboo poles they bore on their shoulders. As each coolie crossed the gangplank and reached the freighter’s deck, he was relieved of his load, and he methodically turned back toward the Bund.

  The scene appeared at once both ordinary and bizarre. The coolies shuffled between the Bank of China and the freighter and back again, and the crew, too, seemed to be following a routine, moving around on the decks of the ship as though departure was imminent. There was no commotion, no shouting or hurrying, nothing but the fact of the middle-of-the-night darkness to signify the unusual. My father wondered if he’d overlooked some obvious explanation for this strange nighttime activity. Perhaps there’d been something in the paper. He glanced around him as though expecting a fellow bystander to explain, but he found only acacias and willows and white poplars leaning toward him, pushed by a woozy breeze from the Whangpoo.

  He looked back at the coolies and the freighter, determined to make sense of what he saw, and as he stood motionless next to a monarch birch, he heard the strange rhythmic chant that coolies sing-songed as they worked. He’d heard the sound a thousand times, maybe ten times that. But never at this hour, never after dark, and the sound made the skin on the back of his neck prickle with apprehension.

  Somehow the sound made things clear. Suddenly he knew; it was crazy, but here it was, right in front of him, and he let his breath out as he realized what he was seeing. Chiang’s stealing the gold, he thought, and he shook his head in amazement at the idea and that he had happened to be an eyewitness.

  It was a few days before my father’s journalist friends could confirm his theory, but they did confirm it: Chiang Kai-shek had robbed the vaults of the Bank of China, taking the gold that belonged to China’s citizens, many of them his last Nationalist supporters, to help finance his retirement years in Taiwan. The seemingly ordinary freighter that my father watched that night was crewed by members of the Nationalist navy, men Chiang had carefully chosen. Also aboard were a handful of officials of the Bank of China, who had been bribed with the guarantee of safe passage in return for opening the bank’s vaults.

  My father was amazed. Even though he’d felt that Chiang had at times acted brazenly since the civil war that had begun only days after Japan’s surrender in 1945, this was by far the most appalling of Chiang’s actions.

  Chiang had lost much in those years. Thousands of Nationalist soldiers had defected to Mao’s People’s Liberation Army as it moved southward toward the Yangtze River. Chiang had fled first to Fenghwa, the coastal town to the south of Shanghai where he
had grown up, and later across the China Sea to the safety of Taiwan. In January of 1949, Peking and Tientsin had fallen to the Communists without a fight, and in that same month Chiang retired. To my father, it seemed that the Communists took control of the country so quickly and easily that it was as though he had glanced up from his desk one day and found China permanently changed.

  Although nearly four years had passed since the end of Japanese occupation, life was worse in Shanghai. Once again, it was a dangerous place. The Nationalist government, already corrupt, had become desperate, and a reign of terror had begun as the government tried to retain control of the city. An arrested man was guilty until he could prove his innocence; anyone accused of collaborating with the Japanese was taken to Bridge House for questioning, which usually lasted until money changed hands.

  The city became a place of extremes. The shops on Nanking Road were busy, nightclubs filled. But so were the streets—with garbage, and refugees fleeing the civil war in the north. Most of the trams and buses had long ago broken down, and the ones that did run were packed with people. Traffic was backed up in the streets for blocks, but the police only stood on the corners and talked. Each night hundreds of people died on the streets from cold and starvation. Each morning municipal trucks made their rounds, gathering the bodies.

  There was guerrilla activity in Hungjao, and my father found himself anxious and jumpy. Wanting at least the trappings of safety, he began to buy guns, at first a couple of .45’s and .38’s, and then a few carbines, and finally a small water-cooled machine gun that was a rarity. He had seen only one like it in the city.