The Distant Land of My Father

by Bo Caldwell

  The guard left the room for a moment. When he returned, he carried a basket full of firearms. On the top was the water-cooled machine gun.

  My father was startled, but he looked at the colonel and said, “Yes, those are my guns. But they weren’t in my house. Everybody within five miles of my place knows I threw those guns into the pond.”

  “No,” Colonel Wang said evenly, his tone scolding. “They were all over your house.”

  “I threw them into the pond when the Nationalists came, long before you were here.”

  Colonel Wang was still shaking his head. “China-born,” he said calmly, “do they look as though they have sat in mud?”

  My father took a breath. “It is well known that I destroyed those guns.”

  Colonel Wang leaned toward my father slightly. “So you think they are destroyed?”

  “I’m certain of it.”.

  “You will allow me to fire one at you?”

  My father froze as the colonel pulled out a chrome-plated Remington .45. It looked like new. “If this gun has been sitting at the bottom of a pond for years, I am most surprised,” he said coyly.

  “The only gun I had was a thirty-eight. That’s what I have told you. I have nothing to add.”

  Colonel Wang aimed the gun at my father for a long moment. My father stood motionless, staring at the desk. He thought of Hungjao, and of the huge plane tree he had planted. He thought of the way my mother looked when she was getting ready for bed as she undid her hair and let it fall down her back. He thought of watching me sleep when I was small. And then he closed his eyes.

  A minute passed. One of the guards shifted and stifled a yawn. Suddenly the colonel laughed, and he motioned to the guard. “Take him,” he said, pointing the gun at my father once more. And he placed the gun back in the basket.

  The guard led my father back up the stairs, prodding him with his gun. My father concentrated on not tripping on the stairs—his knees shook, and the sweat that had soaked him had made his thin shirt cold and wet on his back.

  “You’re pretty lucky guy,” the guard said.

  “How’s that?” my father answered, trying to catch his breath.

  The guard laughed. “Looks like no execution for you after all. Not tonight anyway. Lucky, lucky guy.”

  His eyesight diminished, his legs weakened, he suffered from dysentery and he lost weight, going from a solid and barrel-chested two hundred pounds to a skeletal one hundred and thirty. Because he always chose thin rice for warmth, he became severely deficient in vitamin B, which led to beriberi, an illness of the nervous system. It started as a strange relaxed feeling in his legs, the sensation almost pleasant, and it grew to numbness and swelling and then to stabbing pain that made him cry out for the guards, annoying them so much that they placed him in solitary confinement, an octagonal cell six feet across and fifteen feet high. There was a small peephole in the door, and no vent or window. The floor was covered with a leather mat, the walls with leather mattresses, and when he entered the place, the crazy scratching on the walls told him that men had lost their minds in that room. He was allowed no change of clothing, no bathing, and given no water to wash his face. There was no waste bucket; he was given ashes to cover his excrement. But, the guards said, he could move and use his legs in there, and maybe that was what he needed.

  It wasn’t. His condition only grew worse. And now he was alone.

  The trustee who brought him his food was a Russian named Nikolai Petrovich, an old man with cataract-blurred eyes who smelled of cigarettes and something more pungent, and who always spoke of himself in the plural. On one of my father’s first days in the jail, Nikolai had admired my father’s heavy wool sweater. Even the opportunity to bribe a trustee was a godsend, and my father took the hint and handed the sweater over, hoping that it would someday help. It did. Nikolai took a liking to my father—”We think you’re not so bad,” he confided—and he did small favors for him. A little extra rice, an occasional cup of strong tea, an old pair of socks that Nikolai found in an empty cell, which my father used as mittens. My father viewed him as a future investment, the only one he had.

  On a rainy morning when my father had been in solitary for what he guessed was several months, Nikolai was unusually talkative and my father asked the favor he had been pondering.

  “You know that priest? Father McKenna?”

  Nikolai grunted and regarded my father coolly. “We know him,” he said. “Shênfu,” he added, spiritual father, Mandarin for priest.

  “Will you give him something for me?”

  Nikolai hesitated and my father said nothing, waiting. Finally Nikolai shrugged, and my father opened his hand. Nikolai nodded and took the scrap of toilet paper and read my father’s message without hesitating: Father, I am in despair. Can you give me something to fill the black hole of my thoughts?

  Nikolai smirked at first, but then he refolded the paper and nodded. “We’ll see what we can do.”

  A few nights later, my father woke in the middle of the night. At first he thought the cold had woken him. He found the old socks he used as mittens and pulled them over his freezing fingers, then breathed on his hands to try to warm them. And then he heard it, and he knew it was not the cold, but the sound of people that had woken him.

  A huge crowd seemed to be leaving a concert hall or theater, and it seemed as though they were just outside in the small courtyard below that was used as an execution ground. The noise was tremendous, hundreds of muffled voices leaving and passing below and then into the night, and my father listened with awe and fear and amazement and even longing at the sound of so many voices, and he covered his mouth with his hands to keep from calling out.

  In the morning he chalked it up to a dream. He had dreamed far stranger things; this one had just seemed more real.

  But that night he heard the sound of the crowd again. He heard it again the next night, too, and the night after that and after that, for five nights in a row. He had no explanation for what the sound was, but although it frightened him and he wanted a simple answer, he kept his question to himself. The guards were never there to ask anyway; on those nights they seemed to go to the other side of the building.

  Then, on the sixth night, the sound was tremendous, like a thousand people passing by. There seemed to be a leader as well, someone wearing wooden clogs whose footsteps clickety-clacked on the brick courtyard below. The leader was shouting some sort of commands that my father did not understand. And then, slowly, the sound died out.

  The next morning when Nikolai brought my father’s rice, he was agitated and anxious, and as he handed the bowl to my father, he motioned for my father to come closer. The clothes he wore came from other prisoners: my father’s sweater, someone else’s shoes, Martin’s gloves, Muto’s wool cap. Nikolai leaned close to my father and his eyes were wild. “Did you hear it?” he whispered.

  My father regarded him carefully, wondering how to answer. Nothing was straightforward anymore. He’d already decided that he was probably losing his mind, and because he could see no benefit in making his loss known, he only shrugged.

  Nikolai nodded. “You did,” he said. “I can see it in your face. You heard it every night, didn’t you?”

  My father nodded tentatively and Nikolai looked satisfied for a moment. Then fear shaded his face, and he leaned closer. “It is the spirits of the dead, passing through.”

  My father shook his head.

  Nikolai’s expression didn’t change. “You don’t know of the executions? A thousand every day last week.”

  My father searched his face for contradiction. “Impossible,” he said.

  Nikolai’s eyes filled and he shook his head. “No,” he said. “Anything is possible in these times. There is no limit to what is now possible.”

  My father nodded, and Nikolai whispered, “We’re afraid, all of us,” and then he stuck his hand out. “Here. From your shênfu.” He handed my father a scrap of folded toilet paper. And then he was gone.

>   My father walked slowly to the corner of his cell. With effort, he sat down and leaned against the wall and closed his eyes.

  He agreed with Nikolai: the limits were gone. A thousand a day executed in Shanghai. Seven thousand last week. Impossible to comprehend. Had the Chinese authorities gone mad? Hard to tell in here, because the limits here were gone, too. The limit to how hungry you could be, and how weak, and how discouraged, and how sick. The limit to how hopeless you could feel, and, if you let all of that sink in, there was no limit to your despair. He was forty-seven years old but felt far older. He suspected he’d been at Ward Road for two and a half years, but he’d lost track. He weighed eighty-five pounds and was nearly paralyzed from the waist down. He had not slept through the night since his imprisonment.

  He took the scrap of toilet paper that Nikolai had given him and smoothed it across his thigh, which he knew was the size of a healthy man’s upper arm. He could see that there were marks on the rough paper, but he couldn’t read them, and the fact almost made him weep, for it felt like a great loss. He held the paper up to where the most light made it into his cell, and he tried to read again, and as he peered hard, he made out careful handwriting. And then, with work, he made out Father McKenna’s words: Joseph, Do not be afraid—He will not let your foot slip. Think of the Beatitudes: Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are the meek of heart, for they shall inherit the earth.

  headlines

  IN THE SPRING OF 1952, when I was finishing my junior year at UCLA, my mother and I learned of my father’s imprisonment. We did so courtesy of Life magazine, which, in its issue of May 19, included an article on Americans who were being held captive in Red China. My mother called me to tell me about it, saying that she had feared as much but had kept her worries to herself. When I’d hung up the phone on the second floor of the dormitory, I hurried through campus toward Westwood Boulevard. At Janss Drugstore, I placed the magazine on the counter and handed over my twenty cents, then hurried back to the dorm with the magazine as though it held shameful news, something that no one should see.

  In my room, I sat on my bed, the magazine in front of me. On the cover was a photograph of the French-Arabian actress Kerima, the starlet from Outcast of the Islands, who said she was “une femme sans homme . . . My heart does not make boom boom for anyone.” I turned to the table of contents and found the article I was looking for—”Red China’s Captive Americans”—and my hands shook as I turned to page fifty-one, where I found before-and-after photographs of Father Robert W. Greene, a forty-year-old Maryknoll priest who had recently been released from Communist prison. “One betrayed and tortured priest is freed, but many more U.S. citizens remain Communist prisoners,” the article said, and on the following page were the photographs of some fourteen Americans listed as dead or under house arrest. I scanned them and did not find my father, and I turned the page again. This time the heading read AMERICANS ACTUALLY IN JAIL, SOME FOR MORE THAN A YEAR. Facing me were the photographs of some thirty-six Americans, almost all men. And there, in the fifth row, second from the left, I found him: Joseph Schoene, Shanghai businessman, imprisoned April 1951.

  I stared at it hard. It was a photograph I knew, for I had been present when it was taken. It was in September of 1946, during the few weeks that my mother and I were in Shanghai, on one of the only afternoons I had spent alone with my father. We had eaten long-life noodles for lunch—”just like old times,” he’d said—then we’d gone to his office, and after that we’d walked along Nanking Road. The afternoon should have been nostalgic and even sentimental, but it was neither. It just felt like my father was killing time for those few hours. He was distracted and I had the feeling I was keeping him from something. He had said he needed a new photograph for business reasons, and our last stop had been at a photographer’s studio, where I stood behind the camera and watched as my father posed and talked with the photographer. When they’d finished, he winked at me and awkwardly tweaked my cheek, as though I were much younger than I was. “I’ll save one for you if they’re any good,” he said, and I tried to smile, wanting to ask if we could have a photograph of us together, but not having the nerve.

  Here was that same photograph, my father looking young and handsome and distinguished. He was surrounded by thirty-five strangers. Four were businessmen, one an explorer. The rest were clergy, Lutheran and Presbyterian and Church of Christ and Methodist missionaries, a Maryknoll sister, Jesuit and Vincentian and Passionist and Franciscan priests. For a long time, I just sat there, stunned, the magazine spread out in front me. It was one thing to think that my father was in Shanghai living it up; it was quite another to know that he was in prison, that his future was uncertain, and that there was nothing anyone could do about it.

  When my roommate finally came in an hour later, I was still sitting there. She glanced at me and then stood still, staring. “What is it?” she said. “You look horrible.”

  “Nothing,” I said, and I closed the magazine and slipped it between my books. “I think I’ve got the flu.” I picked up my books and grabbed my sweater. “I’m going to the library,” I said, and when she called after me, I did not answer.

  I told no one, but carried my father’s imprisonment with me like an awful secret. Every morning when I woke, I remembered it again and had to think through it as though it were new news. It gave me nightmares. It stayed with me wherever I went and forced me to think about him more than I had in years, and I found that all my years of trying to teach myself not to care about him had backfired. Now that I was older, I missed him more than ever. And despite the anger and hurt, I loved him intensely. I read the article in Life more times than I could keep track of, never mind the fact that it didn’t mention anything remotely specific about my father, and the faces in those photographs grew familiar from my late-night examinations of them. At Mass I prayed that God would be with them.

  Not even my mother and I talked about my father’s imprisonment. I didn’t know what her reasons were; mine were the same as always, that talking about him only made things worse. But that was business as usual between the two of us, for by then we hardly spoke of my father at all. He had become like a distant relative, a man we never mentioned, not on good days or bad, on Christmas or Easter or birthdays, not even when my mother received her quarterly check from my father’s agent in New York. My father was not mentioned when Jack and I announced our engagement in February, or when I graduated from college in June of 1953, or two weeks after that, when Jack and I were married at Holy Family Church. My father, I explained matter-of-factly to my future parents-in-law, was no longer part of my life, and no longer the recipient of my affection. On that beautifully still summer morning, it was Jack’s father who walked me down the aisle, first past friends and then past my mother and grandmother, and finally to Jack, standing at the front of the church and looking intense and certain and determined until he saw me, and then he just looked happy. I felt as though I had come home from a long and arduous journey, and although at times I felt suspicious that I’d found someone I loved so early and so easily, in the end, I stopped worrying and let myself do what I really wanted to do: to be with Jack.

  In the fall, Jack would begin teaching history at Flintridge Preparatory School for boys, and over the summer he helped coach the Flintridge cross-country team in the afternoons, and did odd jobs to pay the bills—he mowed lawns, he painted houses, he trimmed hedges, whatever he could find. I started a part-time job at the Huntington Library in San Marino, where I cataloged manuscripts, a job for which I was well suited and one that probably saved me for a while because it forced me to think of things besides my father. It was the most orderly activity I’d ever imagined. I was given a box of turn-of-the-century letters that described early California and one of the state’s first important families, the Arguellos. It was my job to read each letter, make a folder for it from light blue, acid-free paper, and then, on the front of the folder and in legible script with a number
two pencil, to note the date of the letter, the author, the addressee, and any historical details mentioned in the letter. My days were spent in near silence, and by the end of the afternoon, after reading letter after letter, I felt as though I’d been living in Spanish California, and I had to remind myself what day it was when I carefully put everything away at five o’clock.

  Jack and I rented a small garage apartment on Monterey Road in South Pasadena, only a few blocks from my grandmother and mother, a fact I later came to appreciate. We furnished it with odds and ends from secondhand stores, an eclectic mix at best, and when we moved in during the second week of July, the apartment was still nearly empty.

  The rest of that summer we were like teenagers with no parents, doing whatever we liked. Jack cut his chestnut brown hair very short and he looked like a kid, especially when he was asleep, which was when I liked to watch him and consider my good luck. We played miniature golf at Arroyo Seco and walked to Gus’s Barbeque on Fair Oaks and then to the Rialto, where we saw Casino Royale, Roman Holiday, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. We played bridge with friends and watched TV—Playhouse 90, Your Hit Parade, Ed Sullivan’s Toast of the Town. On Friday nights we stayed up late for Steve Allen on the Tonight Show. Jack’s one indulgence was buying records, which he did every chance he got. A record was barely in the stores before he brought it home. He was a romantic through and through, and all that summer, we listened to Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby, Perry Como and Rosemary Clooney, and we danced in our stocking feet in our barely furnished home.

  In the fall Jack started teaching and my job at the Huntington was extended to full time. The weather finally turned cool in mid-October, the prettiest fall I’d ever seen, with beautiful clear days and nights, and all of Los Angeles was a place I never wanted to leave. We spent our first Thanksgiving alone in a cabin in Lake Arrowhead, and in December, to make up for it, we hosted Christmas Eve dinner for both families, a baker’s dozen of guests. Jack wore a chef ‘s hat and apron and cooked a fourteen-pound turkey, and though it was a little dry, nobody really noticed, thanks to the martinis he’d perfected. I made cornbread dressing and green beans and mashed potatoes and gravy that had only a few flour lumps floating on the top, and I didn’t burn a thing, a first.