The Distant Land of My Father

by Bo Caldwell

  In the lower drawer was a thick file labeled Bills Outstanding, and in it I found bill after unpaid bill, both new and old, some from just after his return from Hong Kong seven years ago. The bills were mostly medical, but there was a little bit of everything. He owed a whole range of people and companies: the Reliable Drug Co.—The Rexall Store, $33.19; Edward Henderson, M.D., Orthopedic Surgery, $63.45; the Memorial Hearing and Speech Clinic, $32.00; Michael F. Swan, M.D., M.C., Nephrology and Internal Medicine, $170.10; Theodore Aarons, M.D., Dermatology, $37.10; the Los Angeles County General Hospital, which was known among other things for admitting indigents able to meet residence requirements and county jail prisoners, $65.17. There were overdue notices from the Central Public Library, and a letter from his landlord’s lawyer, dated four months earlier: Three Day Notice to pay rent or surrender possession of the premises.

  Some of the bills had messages stamped at the bottom in red or blank ink: Past Due, they read, Please Remit, Second Request, Final Notice, This account has been assigned for immediate collection. Some included handwritten notes: Do you want us to take further action on this? We need payment now! A pharmacy bill from six years ago: When are you planning to pay this bill? A vitamin supply company: We would be happy to fill your order, but a review of our files indicates that a previous order from you remained unpaid. Demand is being made for immediate payment of $38.85, and $9.00 service charge, for a total of $47.85. We can no longer defer to your creditor’s faith in you. Payment must be made now.

  He was turned down for magazine subscriptions because he owed them money from past subscriptions, $18.97 to Popular Mechanics and $7.93 to Reader’s Digest.

  All of these were neatly filed, stapled to the return envelopes, as though my father had fully intended to pay them eventually. I knew my father; I was certain that he’d been thinking that any day now, things would turn around and he’d be on his feet again, making money. But all you had to do was look around that room and you knew that was a lie. Whoever lived here did so in poverty.

  There were odd notes and pictures taped to the walls. Photos of the girls and me were taped to the refrigerator, and pictures that they’d drawn decorated a cupboard by the stove. A fold-out postcard of the Bund was over his bed, and taped to the wall above the phone was a scrap of paper with my telephone number on it. Next to it were two photographs. One was of my mother and me at the beach in Tsingtao. I was around two years old; my mother looked young and beautiful, and I remembered that my father used to keep it in his wallet. The other photograph was of my father and me standing in front of the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank. My father smiled broadly at the camera. I was six; my hand rested on one of the bronze lions that stood guard at the entrance. And stuck in the mirror frame over the dresser was the postcard I’d sent him six years ago, when I had reluctantly answered his first letter. I read it with difficulty: Hi—Got your note and the gift for Eve. Thank you. We’re all fine. Glad things are going well for you. Best, Anna.

  Those were things I understood. There were also handwritten notes taped here and there:

  Priorities—Start—Persevere—Do!

  Love, Lay, Listen, Let, Light.

  Keep it simple—Leave it to Emmanuel.

  Pray for inspiration and intelligence, claim understanding, and believe that Divine Love is working through me.

  Ever ready—Be prepared—Be ye ready and alert!

  I had been in the room for nearly two hours and nothing made sense. I was tired from sorting through papers and clothes and books, and I was upset by the oddness of the place. If you asked a stranger who lived here, I could imagine the answer: A man who had next to nothing, whose health was precarious. A man who was in so much debt he could never hope to recover. A man who seemed intensely spiritual, a man who seemed disturbed. Janitor, debtor, dreamer, schemer; rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief. My father had just about all of it covered.

  I had looked at everything in the room, I thought, through all of the desk and dresser drawers, through the papers on the desk. I’d scanned the books, I’d looked at bill after bill, waiting for something to catch my eye. Nothing did.

  And then I saw it: a wooden fruit crate on the highest bookshelf, almost touching the ceiling. I pushed the ottoman to the bookshelf and pulled the crate down, not caring about the dust that came with it. Then I put it on the bed and sat down.

  In the box, I found a manila envelope with my name in pencil in my father’s even handwriting. I pulled out its contents and found his letter to me, the map, and the journals. I read the letter and looked at the map. And then I opened the first journal—an accounting ledger—and I felt a wave of affection. I remembered him buying these ledgers at the paper store I had loved in Shanghai.

  The journal, too, was addressed to me:

  January 25, 1938

  My dear Anna,

  I have had the notion of writing some things down for you, some things about Shanghai and about what is happening around me in this amazing place, at this amazing time. I want you to know these things, and writing them down seems to be the only way to tell you. If you were here, I would probably try to explain it all to you, the way I always do. Your mother is often reminding me of your age—She’s only a child, Joe, she’ll say—because, she says, I often expect too much of you. So it’s probably better that I write these things down, so that you can read them when you are older.

  But I couldn’t tell you these things now, even if I wanted to. You and your mother left Shanghai yesterday, and overnight, I have become a wanderer. I could not leave yet—there is too much business to do, too much opportunity—but seeing you off yesterday was more painful than I care to admit.

  So I will have to settle for this, for these pages as our conversation. I hope that you will understand it all someday, and that you will find it at least mildly interesting.

  I flipped through the pages of that first ledger with something like awe. I lost track of time, and when I finally looked up, it was getting dark in the room. I stood and turned on the overhead light, which made the room look even dingier than it had in daylight, and as I looked around me, I imagined my father watching TV here, reading in the easy chair, warming up a can of spaghetti, calling me and telling me how well he was doing, and I ached with regret.

  I spent the next four nights at home reading my father’s journals. Each night, I read late into the night, until I couldn’t stay awake anymore. I couldn’t read them during the day—it was too hard to put them down, and the one time I tried, I was cross with the girls afterward because all I wanted was to be reading again. So after dinner, once Heather and Eve were asleep, I sat in the living room in the same Morris chair that my father had loved, and I read. Jack wandered in a few times, asking when I was coming to bed and pointing out that it wasn’t as though I had a deadline here. Once he stood behind me for a moment, and I could hear the evenness of his breathing, a sound I loved.

  “I miss you,” he said, his voice low.

  “I’m right here,” I said, and I reached for his hand.

  “You’re miles away,” he said, and he left the room.

  I ignored his loneliness. The one thing I wanted was to finish reading, and in as few sittings as possible.

  It was Monday night when I started reading. Late, late Thursday night, I finished. It was a little after three o’clock in the morning. The last entry was something my father wrote in February of 1954, after his release from Ward Road, when he was trying to gain permission to stay in Hong Kong. Hard to say what will happen next, he wrote. Once again, my life is unraveling, and I don’t see where things will end up. I have no home anymore. I am forbidden from returning to Shanghai, the one place I love. I am forgotten if not despised by my wife and daughter, the only people I truly love, and I am only starting to see what my mistakes will cost me.

  I tried to imagine his voice—the rhythm of it, his inflection, his emphasis—and I closed my eyes, picturing him. A man stands on the verandah of his home, looking out at the city th
at he loves and calls home, wondering if the talk is true. A year later he carries suitcases to his car, and he tells his wife and daughter good-bye. He tries to imagine joining them, but he knows it will break him. His city changes under the rule of strangers, and he is ordered to leave. He doesn’t; he is taken prisoner, and when he is eventually released and returned to his family in their faraway home, he knows he should be glad. He plants things in the hope of soothing his soul and of forgetting what he has seen. He grows gardenias and narcissus for scent, bougainvillea and wisteria for color, roses for love. And eucalyptus for the girl, so that she will remember him. He works silently, and he answers his daughter’s questions when he can. But he cannot stay in that distant land, and when he parts from his family a second time, he knows they will never live as a family again.

  Christmas, years later. He is imprisoned again. He lies in his cell and listens to the great sigh in the building when the lights go off, a sound he cannot describe, a sound he will never forget. He is sick, he is nearly starved, he spends a year alone. He repeats the priest’s words, again and again, his only refuge: 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.

  The man is exiled from the city he loves, forbidden ever to return. His wife has divorced him. His daughter does not know him. He has lost everything. When his former wife dies, he feels he will never recover. He walks down a short aisle and kneels at a casket, leans forward, kisses, kneels and prays. When he sees his daughter, he sees hope. It is the possibility of winning her back—of her forgiveness—that sustains him.

  I put my father’s words aside. I had never come close to imagining what had happened to him, and the revelation of it cut through me. I began to weep, and although I had cried every day since his death not even two weeks before, I didn’t cry out of grief that night. It was not the huge hole his absence had made in my life. I wept for my father, for his life, and for his loss.

  A month after my father’s death, I received in the mail a certificate notifying me of the scattering of his ashes: I, Patrick Freyne, master of the vessel New Dawn on the date of 8 in the month June of the year 1961 did proceed and engage in the scattering of the cremains of Joseph Schoene in the Pacific Ocean, at latitude North 34:47:86 longitude West 122:36:09. The time being 10:23 A.M., the prevailing weather conditions at the time were clear skies and calm seas.

  At night, when I lay awake and missed my father and regretted things I hadn’t said and done, I imagined his ashes drifting closer and closer to China, his home, and I felt a part of myself drifting further and further away from my family.

  I had started to sink by then. I felt far away from everyone, and a kind of numbness was the closest thing I felt to peace. I made lists of regrets in my mind, and I blamed myself for not knowing who he was—what he’d been through, and how he was living. He was your father, I thought. How could you have let him live like that? How could you not have known? In my mind, I apologized to him over and over and over again, but I felt no peace, only a sort of sinking down into loss, like settling at the bottom of the sea.

  That sinking feeling lasted for nearly a year. I was distant with Jack, distracted around my daughters, who had to tell me things several times to get my attention. Jack was, for the most part, patient. Though there were times when I saw anguish in his expression, he mostly tried to let me go, and seemed certain that eventually I would be all right.

  Time slowed down, and I felt as though I lived a different kind of existence than everyone else. Nothing seemed real, nothing was important, nothing mattered. Nothing inspired joy in me; there was nothing I looked forward to. And although I could see how much my remoteness hurt my family, there was nothing I could do to change it. All I could do, I thought, was wait.

  While I waited, I read about Shanghai. I read and reread the journals, I read the books he’d left me, I read everything about Shanghai that I could find in the Pasadena Library. I dreamed about it, I imagined it, I worked at picturing the things my father had experienced. But it was all so distant, as though I were reading about something I’d made up. Even my father seemed made up at times. I could not remember his voice, or his laugh, and it pulled at me.

  In April, eleven months after my father’s death, I began to feel a change. One night I woke at three o’clock in the morning, something I’d done often since my father’s death. I no longer tried to fall back asleep. I just got out of bed and went into the kitchen to sit and stare out the window. The world was very beautiful at that hour, and the night usually comforted me. The darkness made things feel less painful, and God felt very near.

  I’d been sitting by myself for perhaps half an hour when Heather, round and sturdy and sure of herself at five and a half, wandered into the kitchen as casually as though it were breakfast time. She walked to me and climbed into my lap, then sat back almost luxuriously, so at home and with such a strong and obvious sense of entitlement that I smiled.

  “What’s the matter?” she said matter-of-factly.

  “I miss Pop,” I said. “I’m still getting used to him not being here.” She nodded knowingly and I considered again an idea that my daughters made me consider frequently: that we are born with a certain kind of knowingness that diminishes with age. “I know,” she said. “It was too soon for him to go.”

  I nodded, too, for I couldn’t speak. Her answer made my throat and chest tight.

  We were quiet for a moment, and the solidness of the fifty pounds of her against my body was more comfort than I had expected or hoped for. Suddenly she turned to me and took my face in her hands, which was what she did when she really wanted me to listen. She looked me in the eye and her eyes were of a deep dark blue-green that was like the ocean, darker than my father’s but similar in their intensity. The only light was from the streetlight that spilled in through the window, and her eyes were shining in that way that children’s eyes do when they know a secret. Then she whispered, “I bought you a present.”

  I smiled. “Why? It’s not my birthday.”

  “I just did,” she said, and she shrugged. “Gran took me shopping, and I saw it, and I wanted to give it to you.” She touched my chest with her fingers as she said you. She paused and seemed to consider me. “Do you want it now?” she asked.

  “Do you want to give it to me now?”

  She nodded. “I think it would cheer you up.”

  I said, “Maybe it would.”

  She stood up and walked to the kitchen drawers. She squatted next to them and pulled out the bottom drawer, the junk drawer that I always planned on sorting. Then she reached toward the back, past a hammer and pliers and twine and I didn’t know what else, and she took something out. “I knew you wouldn’t find it here,” she said.

  “You were right.”

  She walked back to me and held out a small cardboard box. I took it and kissed her cheek and whispered, “Thank you.”

  “Don’t say thank you,” she said. “You don’t even know what it is.”

  I opened the box.

  Inside was a small ivory elephant, so much like the one that I bought with my father when I was a child that I caught my breath, thinking it was the same one. It wasn’t; when I held it up to the light, I saw that it was a little larger, and slightly darker, and less intricately carved. But it still felt familiar, and the feeling left me shaken.

  Heather was silent as I looked at her gift, and finally she pulled on the sleeve of my robe. “Don’t you like it?”

  “I love it,” I said, and I held her to me. “I love it very much.” I looked at her carefully and smoothed her hair from her forehead. “Why did you pick him?”

  “Gran said that he was from China and that he was good luck. And I said that you’re from China and that you’re good luck. So I thought you went together.”

  I nodded. “Why am I good luck?”

  She looked at me with disbelief. “You don’t know?”

  I shook my head.

 
“Because you’re here and you make me happy,” she said.

  She climbed back into my lap and laid her head against my chest, and I felt her breathing, even and deep. The feeling calmed me, and I remembered my father, coming into my room when I was a child, to watch me sleep. The thought that I had in some way comforted him, just as my daughter was comforting me, made me feel peaceful. And I thought to him, I understand.

  Then, as suddenly as the appearance of an unexpected guest, I felt him near. It was as though he stood perhaps two feet away from me, just to my left. Old Spice, I thought. Four Roses, Philippine cigars. In my mind, I could see his cropped blond hair, his blue eyes, his bearish stance. He wore the old jeans that he gardened in, and a white T-shirt underneath his maroon corduroy shirt. It had a zipper at the neck, which was always hot when I took it from the dryer when I did his laundry for him.

  I had not felt his presence in all those months, not waking or sleeping, and I stayed very still, holding Heather, who had fallen asleep in my lap. He seemed as close as my heartbeat, as near as my breath, and I knew then that I was deeply and passionately and permanently loved by him. That knowledge made something change inside of me. There was an odd shift in the balance of my heart, and on that quiet night, I felt blessed to have been his child.

  epilogue