The Distant Land of My Father

by Bo Caldwell

  By the winter of 1948 another exodus had begun, and my father once again found himself saying good-bye to friends. Foreign firms began closing their offices and either leaving altogether or moving to the safety of Hong Kong, and even foreigners who’d been determined to stay made plans to leave. Some went to Bangkok and Manila and Hong Kong to wait things out; others left with no intention of ever returning, selling the belongings they couldn’t take with them to the secondhand dealers on Peking Road.

  While those around him packed and booked passage and said their good-byes, my father remained, believing again that the whole thing would blow over. He had guessed wrong with the Japanese, but the idea of China becoming Communist was too far-fetched. The United States would come through, he thought, or Chiang would regain his political strength, and even if those things didn’t happen, he couldn’t imagine the Chinese people truly embracing communism, a system that seemed to go against their whole way of family-centered life. So he figured he’d wait. He’d keep a low profile—a talent he’d developed to a science—and he’d keep making money. Shanghai was the only place he could make money anymore. He’d lost thousands thanks to the Japanese, and now he was making it back, and more. He’d even follow the rules, and in that vein, he got rid of his .45’s, his .38’s, his carbines, and his water-cooled machine gun, for the government had recently said that citizens had to turn in their guns. He didn’t want trouble, but he also didn’t want to give those guns to the Nationalists, so he took all of them except a .38, which he thought he could get a license for, put them into a gunnysack, and went out to the small pond in the back corner of the garden. It was late at night and the servants had gone to bed and the grounds were still as he took each gun from the gunnysack and dropped it gently into the water, making certain that it landed where the mud was deep. As he walked back to the house, he felt he’d made a good decision. He’d gotten rid of the guns, for now. He could retrieve them when all this blew over.

  While he told friends that he had no desire to leave Shanghai, there was another part to it. Even if he’d wanted to leave, what would be the point? Where would he go? Who would welcome him? Everything he had was in Shanghai now. He’d exiled himself, and there was no going back.

  My father would remember the spring of 1949 as a time of noise. On a cool day in February, he was startled by a disorganized racket of sound that included trumpets and cymbals and drums, and when he went outside, he found some thirty young men in the street, all playing their instruments at the same time, but all seeming to play different songs. The sound was horrible. When he asked the young bandleader who they were and what they were doing, the young man confidently gestured to his band with his baton and replied that they were from the Evening Star High School, and that they were practicing so that they would be able to give the People’s Liberation Army a proper welcome when it entered the city. My father suggested they practice elsewhere, but he was told that was not possible, and the noise started up again. And from that night on for the next three months, the band practiced in the street from eight to nine every night. My father routinely closed all the doors and windows of the house, stuffed cotton in his ears, turned the radio on as loud as it would go, trying to ignore the noise outside.

  The People’s Liberation Army entered Shanghai on the night of May twenty-fourth. On the morning of the twenty-fifth, my father found long lines of People’s Liberation Army soldiers in blue-gray uniforms sitting on the curbs. They rested their rifles across their knees as though awaiting instructions and they remained that way until evening, when they retired to camps set up around the city. They refused all offers of food. They were clean and disciplined and in no way threatening. Nationalist troops had surrendered without a struggle, and my father watched from his window as Chiang’s troops left the city. The retreat seemed as though it would never end; for two days and one night, soldiers passed in rows of four, row after row after row, leaving the city as fast as they could, seeming to simply disappear.

  Two days later, two Communist soldiers knocked on my father’s door. They were, the shorter of the two calmly explained, representatives of the People’s Liberation Army, and they were speaking with everyone in the neighborhood. If residents were dishonest, the young soldier said, or if they refused to cooperate, there would be trouble. If residents cooperated, all would be well.

  “There is no cause for worry,” he said carefully. “We are here to protect you. To protect everyone, foreigners and Chinese alike, we’re all the same. No need to worry.”

  My father nodded as he listened, and then he smiled at the boy, for the soldier couldn’t have been more than seventeen years old, and the northern dialect he spoke was familiar. “Shantung province?” my father asked in Mandarin.

  The soldier looked surprised for a moment, and then he grinned. “Tsingtao,” he answered eagerly. Then he asked, “Why do you speak so well?”

  My father tapped his chest. “I am China-born, also from Shantung province.”

  Confusion played over the boy’s face and my father laughed. “Not to worry,” he said, and he gestured between himself and the two teenagers. “We’re neighbors now.”

  The soldier nodded, apparently relieved. “We will take care of you,” he said.

  “Then I’m in good hands,” my father said, and the two soldiers left. My father squinted against the afternoon sun as he watched them walk down the street toward the next house. These were good boys, he thought, just country boys, clean-cut, orderly. Maybe this would all be all right. There were bound to be changes. His business would no doubt be affected. But if worse came to worse, he’d just shut down his import operation for a while and live out here in Hungjao like a country gentleman, cows and chicks and dogs and all, until Shanghai came to its senses.

  The boy soldier from Shantung was right: there was no need to worry, at the start. The Communist troops were well disciplined, there was no looting, there was no interference with foreigners. Within days, the city looked better. The street cleaners and garbage trucks and traffic policemen came back. Almost overnight, there seemed to be fewer refugees. People’s Liberation Army sentries stood at their new posts in the streets, armed but not with bayonets, their bodies relaxed as they calmly regarded the city around them.

  The changes, when they came, were gradual. The first had to do with the money changers; the second, with spies.

  Because of his currency smuggling, my father had always watched the value of the Chinese yuan closely. In 1949 he watched without much surprise as the yuan fell in value from four dollars to one American dollar, but over that year, it eventually fell to an unprecedented fourteen million to one, a plummet that startled even him. U.S. currency was accepted everywhere, and in response to the continuing devaluation, money changers were soon found on every street corner. My father watched with fascination as the value of the yuan changed from hour to hour, and the money changers did a healthy business. In true Shanghai fashion, difficulty gave way to opportunity.

  In May, when Shanghai fell to the Communists, the money changers and their constant crowds disappeared. But after a while, when nothing seemed to have changed dramatically, the money changers cautiously reappeared, first one, then a few more as they came out from hiding. Soon they were all back, doing as healthy a business as ever. My father saw this as a good sign: those stories about the ruthlessness of Communist rule seemed untrue. No one bothered the money changers on their street corners. People’s Liberation Army sentries watched them calmly and said nothing. Within several weeks, the money changers were thriving, a stall on every corner.

  Then, overnight, they all vanished. Even their stalls were gone. The government had simply waited until all of them could be arrested at once, then eliminated the whole business overnight.

  Weeks later, my father saw another change, a sign on the front of the Central Police Station on Foochow Road: spies register here, it read, in characters three feet high. My father didn’t know what it meant. No one did, and soon the message was appe
aring all over the city, on police stations, on walls, and in the press as well, where citizens were urged to rid the city of its spies.

  My father watched warily as the government’s control of daily life spread. Private schools were taken over, businesses were investigated, their assets appropriated. Foreign firms were given the choice of leaving or being taken over by the government. Communist officials began to take a closer look at the businesses of foreigners like my father. What had he been trading? they wanted to know. What had he been selling? What he’d been doing was buying goods from elsewhere for as little as possible and selling them for a profit. The Communists said he was exploiting the Chinese people, but for reasons he did not question, they left him alone. But he did not count on more good luck. The next week he locked up the house in Hungjao, stored the few valuables he cared about in his office, and moved to a small apartment in town.

  The city began to change dramatically. Communist propaganda was posted everywhere, and in every school and factory, in every office and business, daily meetings were held so that Shanghai’s citizens could publicly confess and renounce their sins—and inform on those who were in any way antagonistic to the state. Brothers informed on brothers, fathers on sons, and anyone suspected of being a capitalist was arrested. A man could be arrested, charged, and imprisoned or executed all on the basis of his neighbor’s word. Mass trials were held at the former Race Course. Huge crowds turned out, tens of thousands of people all facing a makeshift stage. The trial was broadcast over loudspeakers to those present, and over the radio as well, and work stopped all over the city as citizens were compelled to listen. Accused criminals were paraded through the city wearing dunce caps, then led to the stage where witnesses could testify to the crimes committed. When the evidence had been presented, the crowd was asked what should be done. He is guilty, came the expected response. Kill him! And the accused was “liquidated” with a bullet to the back of his head.

  My father watched as the city turned into a place of fear. There were so many suicides from tall buildings that the government posted anti-suicide guards, for the bodies falling from the tops of buildings had become a public menace. Hospitals were filled with people who’d been hit by those plummeting to their deaths from above.

  The President Jackson arrived and departed and after that there were no more official passenger ships. My father found that his life had changed again. There wasn’t much of a social life for foreign residents. There were fewer and fewer left, for one thing, and second, many of his clubs and favorite haunts had closed. The Shanghai Club was turned into a seamen’s restaurant and hostel, with pictures of Mao Tse-tung and Chou En-lai covering the walls. The Country Club became a government school. Names that hinted at foreign rule were changed: Avenue Edouard VII in the former French Concession became Yenan Road, and Broadway Mansions, where my father and I had looked out at the Bund so long ago, became Shanghai Mansions.

  On April 27, 1951, the government made its most dramatic move yet: twenty thousand people were rounded up and arrested overnight, among them my father. At two o’clock in the morning, he woke to the sound of car doors closing outside of his apartment. When he walked to the window and looked out, he saw two Jeeps parked in the street.

  He opened the door before they knocked, and he faced four armed police from the Public Security Bureau. They wore padded blue uniforms and carried Luger pistols, which they used to prod and threaten him as they told him that he was accused of being a spy and that he was to come with them.

  My father was tense but managed to stay calm. People were being “taken in” all the time, in such great numbers and with such frequency that it was possible to think it would not amount to much. Maybe it was a formality.

  He was told he could get dressed, and that he could bring some clothes and a blanket—not a good sign, he thought. He packed four shirts and a pair of trousers and as many socks and as much underwear as he could find, and he pulled on khaki pants and a blue Oxford cloth button-down shirt that he’d recently bought for good luck.

  When he was ready, one of the guards put some ancient handcuffs on him and they led him outside, where he was shoved into the backseat of an American car. They drove to Foochow Road and stopped at the Central Police Station, only a few blocks from his office. There he was strip-searched and his belongings—including his belt and shoelaces, lest he consider suicide—were taken from him and put in an envelope with a number on it in thick black letters. When he had dressed again, he was taken upstairs and locked inside a small room with a guard just outside the door. As he walked, he had to hold up his pants, and his shoes flapped with his steps. Once in his cell, he did not allow himself to consider his situation very thoroughly. There were too many grim possibilities, so he just paced for a while, expecting he’d shortly be taken someplace else for questioning. And then everything will be cleared up, he thought. I’ve done nothing wrong.

  But the night wore on, and the day after that and after that and after that. Two weeks passed, almost three, and he was simply kept in that room. He was never questioned, he was never charged with any crime. He was just kept there and watched, as he grew more and more nervous. He was fed rice every day, either in soup or in a solid form that was like a salty doughnut, and he tried to act calm, knowing that he was in a waiting game, and that his jailers were watching his reaction. Although his outward appearance did not communicate his nervousness, his body did. His bowels stopped functioning, and to the amusement and amazement of the guards, he did not eliminate in all those days. The guards laughed and shook their heads at first, but their amusement grew to suspicion. What’s the matter with this guy? he heard them say. What’s going on? Then he heard the reason for their interest: the week before, a teenage boy had refused to go to the bathroom for a week. The boy finally became ill, and when he was taken to the hospital, the examining doctor found a ten-ounce gold bar concealed in his rectum. My father shook his head when the guard told him the story. “No gold,” my father said grimly. “Just fear.”

  At the end of three weeks, my father was taken downstairs into what seemed to be a holding area, a room twenty feet long and fifteen feet wide. When he’d gotten his bearings, he counted and found that, including him, the room held forty-three people. As in Bridge House eight years earlier, the stench in the place was horrible, and fleas and lice covered everything. A bucket in the corner served as the toilet. When night came, he found that he could not lie on his back, but was forced to lie on his side, fitted against other prisoners like spoons. If one person needed to turn over, the whole row had to do likewise. When five days had passed and yet another man was brought in, my father saw that those on the floor were the lucky ones, for the new prisoner was forced to sit on the waste bucket all night, sleeping if he could.

  My father was held in that room for sixty-one days; he kept track by making tiny marks on the wall behind him, close to the floor so that the guards wouldn’t see. He guessed it was around June thirtieth when a guard called the name Joseph Schoene and told him to come. He wasn’t allowed to gather his few belongings, a fact he chose to view as a sign that he was being released. As he stood and followed the guard, he was relieved that at least something was finally happening.

  That relief was short-lived. A guard pulled a gunnysack over my father’s head, then led him outside and pushed him into a Jeep. They took the sack off. He was told to keep his head down during the ride, and as he stared at the Jeep’s dirty floor, his head pushed down between his knees by the guard’s rifle across the back of his neck, he tried to picture Shanghai’s streets and where he might be. But he couldn’t; all he could do was try to stay calm.

  The car jerked to a stop, and when he was pulled out of the backseat, he knew immediately where he was because of the trees. He was in the French Concession, on what had been known as Route Joseph Frelupt, and he was being pushed toward the entrance of Loukawei Jail.

  Inside he was handed an armband, which he was told never to remove. It was, the guard said,
his new identity: #744. He was then led to a block of twelve cells, each of them no larger than twelve feet by six. He was pushed into the last one and told that talking was not allowed, and that other rules for criminals were posted on the wall. Criminals were to spend all of their waking hours, five in the morning until nine at night, meditating on their crimes, it said. They were not to sleep during that time. They were to sit where the guard told them to, on the floor with their backs to the wall, and they were not to move from that position. There would be no reading, and there was no smoking. They would stand at attention for their guards.

  The guard left and slammed the wooden door and my father sank to the floor as he was told, his back against the wall. The smell of filth and human waste in the room was overpowering, and he forced himself to think about other things so that he would not vomit. He had taught himself the art of intellectual diversion during those two months at Foochow Road, and he had convinced himself that that one skill would help him survive.

  The trick was to think about places other than where he was, and so he thought of the beaches of Tsingtao, and of my mother swimming in the bay. He thought of a polo game in which he’d played particularly well. He thought of the Bund, and he forced himself to name each building from the British Consulate down to the Shanghai Club. He pictured the beautiful tree-lined boulevards of the French Concession, which, though they were just outside the window, seemed like streets from a distant land, and he tried to remember the taste of blini with caviar at the St. Petersburg restaurant on Avenue Haig.

  Replace this stench with the scent of eucalyptus after the rain, he thought. Replace the coldness of sitting on this floor with the solid grace of riding a polo pony. Replace the sight of men dying in front of him with the view of a bungalow’s small garden in Southern California: wisteria, jasmine, honeysuckle, junipers, and a fourteen-year-old daughter cutting roses.