Distant Land of My Father

by Bo Caldwell

  I frowned at the idea of importing wasps. Will gave my father a sidelong glance and said in an offhand way that I associated with adults, “But you can’t blame those cicadas for moving in with you out there. That’s quite a spot. Sounds to me like the Schoenes will be there for a hundred years, give or take. They’re not leaving Shanghai.”

  I took this as more teasing, but when I looked at my father, he wasn’t laughing.

  “You’re right about that,” he said simply. His voice was flat, his mouth a straight line.

  “Still? Even with Thursday?” Will turned his full attention to my father, and I understood that the conversation had turned adult, and that I was no longer part of it.

  My father shrugged. “A skirmish is supposed to make me pack my bags and walk away from my business? I don’t think so.”

  Will glanced around the crowded restaurant, and when he looked at my father again, his eyes were intent. “You’re nuts, you know that? Everything’s changed, and you’re a fool if you don’t admit it. Shanghai’s not going to bounce back this time. There’s a lot more at stake here.”

  My father finished his chicken, then stared at his plate, checking, I knew, to see if he’d missed anything. He always cleaned his plate and picked bones clean. Then he glanced at me, trying to gauge how much of the conversation I understood, which wasn’t much, though he had tried to explain things to me. The day before, he had told me that a war might be starting, but that it was far, far away, and that it wouldn’t affect us. He said there would be a lot of talk about it, but I wasn’t to worry because we were safe and sound. Nothing would change.

  On July 7, just a few days before, there had been a skirmish that became known as the Marco Polo Bridge Incident. It didn’t sound like much at first, just another border incident, people said. The Marco Polo Bridge was an arched stone footbridge in the village of Lukouchiao, twenty miles west of Peking. The bridge stretched nearly two hundred and fifty yards across the Yungting River, with three hundred marble lions set along either side of the bridge. Reports about exactly what had happened were confused and contradictory, but the gist of it seemed to be that Japanese soldiers had crossed the bridge, then refused to budge, forcing Chinese militia to fire on them and giving the Japanese a pretext for invasion.

  Will leaned closer to my father. “I’m telling you, Shanghai isn’t going to stay peaceful. That may mean a lot of trouble for us, or it may just mean inconvenience, but either way, we’re about to become onlookers of a war. With box seats, no less.”

  My father laughed in a way that sounded good-natured but that made me nervous because I heard the disagreement in his tone. “But don’t you see? Onlookers, you said, that’s exactly it. No matter what, we’re just privy to a family squabble, all from a very comfortable guest room called the International Settlement. We mind our manners, we don’t favor one side over the other, we politely look the other way when it gets nasty. This is between the Chinese and the Japanese. It’s not our concern.” He took a long drink of beer. “And by the way, the Japanese will never make it this far south. That’s a long way. A few units in Peking are no reason to leave. It just won’t happen, not on the scale some of these guys are talking about anyway.” He looked at me then, and I must have looked worried, or at least puzzled, because he winked and added, “I won’t let it.”

  Will said only, “You’re an optimist.”

  My father laughed. “Wrong. I’m a businessman. And I don’t make money by leaving my place of business.”

  Will said, “In that case, you’re a fool. Or else you’ve got a good reason to stay.”

  My father gave Will a careful look. “Now, that’s a funny thing to say.”

  Will shrugged. “I’m just talking about your business, Joe. What did you think I meant?”

  My father’s face reddened.

  Will went on. “Because I just can’t figure out what else it would be, what else could keep you here, and I just wonder. What kind of hold does this place have over a guy like you?”

  My father shifted in his seat. “It’s got no hold,” he said, “and I still say it won’t happen. It’s a lot of talk is what it is, people overreacting. I’m dealing with the Japanese, I’ll keep dealing with them, and any high-minded somebody who doesn’t is throwing money away. I’ll sell them whatever I can—newsprint, oil, insurance, Dodge trucks, for crying out loud—just as long as I’m not breaking any rules. What are you saying, that I’m supposed to shut down and stop making money because a few shots were fired on a bridge?” He shook his head. “The Communists are the ones to worry about, they’re the danger here. Bunch of bandits. The Japanese are just guys like us, out to make a buck.”

  “Or a yen,” I said suddenly. Will laughed. My father silenced me with a look.

  Will took a box of Craven A cigarettes from his shirt pocket, shook one out and lit it. And then our table was silent for a long moment.

  “You want an answer?” my father said finally.

  Will nodded. “As your friend, yeah, I’d like an answer. What keeps Joseph Schoene in Shanghai?”

  My father lit a cigarette, then inhaled deeply and held the smoke in as though it were the answer, then exhaled slowly toward the ceiling, nodding. “Business,” he said flatly. “My business and none of yours.” And he stood to leave.

  He was quiet as we walked down Nanking Road, and I worried that he knew what I’d done. The folded yen made a wrinkle under the thinness of my cotton sock, a rough spot that was like an accusation, and I had to fight the urge to blurt out my secret and make amends. But I wasn’t worried enough to confess. The yen felt like a treasure, and I wasn’t going to give it up. If my father noticed my worry, he didn’t let on, and I was glad of his inattention, a first. After a while, I stopped thinking about it so much and gave in to the distractions of Nanking Road.

  Nanking Road was Shanghai’s biggest shopping street. My father said it was the biggest shopping street in China, a claim I never doubted. The whole street felt like a festival, with shop banners of scarlet and gold and white hanging like oversized streamers, a place where the storefront windows held anything you could name: hand-sewn silk underwear, Japanese wedding kimonos, electric razors, newspapers from all over the world, cashmere sweaters, porcelain, pottery, jeweled opium pipes, pianos. The first few blocks were mostly Western offices and stores—Kelly & Walsh, the American Book Shop, Whiteway & Laidlaw, the American Drug Company, the Chocolate Shop. My father had learned to fox-trot and tango and peabody at the Arthur Murray Dance Studio—a concession to my mother, who loved to dance—and earlier that week he’d taken me to see The Gold Diggers of 1937 at the Grand Theater.

  But after a mile or so, the street became Chinese. One shop sold only chopsticks, another silk umbrellas, another lamps and lanterns, and another only walking sticks carved from wood, or bamboo, or rattan, or willow. My mother bought silk at Lao Kai Fook, the colors so deep they looked like wet paint. When she’d chosen one, a clerk in a long gray gown would nick the fabric with round-handled scissors, then rip it straight across, the sound like that of paper tearing. The Chinese department stores were there, always crowded and noisy. Wing On was famous for its linens and tablecloths and sheets, but there was also Sun Sun & Sincere, where you could buy anything from anyplace—French perfume, Scotch whiskey, German cameras, English leather, Chinese pajamas and slippers and silks.

  That day my father let me wander in the shops, an indulgence since he himself wasn’t much of a shopper. The only time I knew of him shopping had been the year before, when the English department store Lane Crawford had closed. They’d had a huge liquidation sale, and my father became their best, if unlikeliest, customer, going every day as though shopping that sale were his employment. He picked out tailored serge suits, wool sport coats and trousers, cashmere sweaters, shirts and Jaeger underwear and silk ties by the dozen, leather loafers and wing tips. On the first day, when he came to the counter with an armload of clothing, he talked a clerk in the men’s department into letting
him use one of the huge drawers behind the counter for his stash, and every day, as the prices went down, he added to it. When he finally brought everything home after settling up and loading the trunk of the Packard with his purchases, my mother had laughed as Mei Wah brought in box after box. “Now, that’s shopping,” she’d said, and my father had turned to her and said seriously, “No, it’s business.”

  It was a few minutes before two when we reached Tibet Road, where Nanking Road became Bubbling Well Road. We were to meet Mei Wah where we always met him, in front of the Park Hotel, the tallest building in the East, taller than any of the buildings on the Bund. The Park was across from the Race Course and the Public Recreation Ground, a huge park with a swimming pool, a golf course, a baseball field, tennis courts, and probably more, though I didn’t know what.

  The Park was a little more than a mile from the Bund, a long walk for me, and I was dragging. My father asked me to hurry up—Mei Wah would be waiting for us, he said—and I tried to. When we got to the corner and my father looked at his watch, he said we were a few minutes early, and there was no sign of Mei Wah.

  “Have a seat, Anna. It won’t be long. You can watch the birds.” My father nodded toward a stone bench under a willow tree a few feet away, and I sat down in the shade gratefully, glad to be out of the sun. The bird men were out—that was what I called them, mostly old men who owned pet birds and liked to air them in the early morning and afternoon in the summer and spring. But I was too tired to take much notice of them.

  I held a small wooden box in my hand. Inside was my one purchase, a tiny elephant carved out of ivory. It reminded me of the elephant on my father’s chop. Mei Wah had told me that in India elephants were good luck, especially if the trunk was raised, as this one’s was. Now the elephant was wrapped in cotton wool and packed in a small box, which I held carefully.

  I’d decided on the elephant at lunch. My father’s tone of voice and the accusatory look on Will Marsh’s face had given the day the frayed-edge feeling of worry. I didn’t like arguments, and as I sat on the bench, I concentrated on home as a way to make the worried feeling go away. I imagined the coolness of our house. I knew that when we got there, my father would pour himself some Scotch and go out to the verandah. I knew he would not want to talk, that he would want to be alone. I knew that my mother would have bathed. She would be wearing the deep blue silk kimono that my father had brought her from Osaka last year, and her hair would be swept up on top of her head instead of coiled at the base of her neck, her only concession to the heat. She would smell of lavender and Cashmere Bouquet, the only soap she used, and she would be sitting in the study, reading Life or The Saturday Evening Post, and listening to Let’s Dance, an NBC Network program that the American radio station in Shanghai carried. She liked the Latin music. I would sit with her on the cool leather sofa and show her my treasure, and tell her about our day.

  None of those things happened.

  A car turned onto Bubbling Well Road at the corner. The sun made it hard to see, and I stood, thinking it was Mei Wah. My father was several feet away from me, right on the corner so that he was in plain sight, and he squinted at the car and shaded his eyes, then looked at his watch.

  The car came closer, and I saw that it wasn’t my father’s dark green Packard. It was a black sedan, solid and imposing and modern looking, and it slowed as it neared us. Then it stopped at our corner. My linen dress was limp and I tried to smooth the wrinkles out, thinking these must be friends of my father’s and that I would be introduced and expected to shake hands and be polite. But when the back door opened, my father’s expression changed from annoyance to surprise.

  Two Chinese in dark blue trousers and tunics jumped from the car and stood on either side of my father. They spoke to him in Cantonese, their southern accents harsh, their words unrecognizable to me. My father tried to pull away, and he strained to look at me and said, “Run, find Mei Wah!” I didn’t want to leave him and I started to move toward him, but one of the men glared at me. His skin was terrible, so pockmarked that he looked diseased, and I backed away from him and watched, terrified, as he hit my father on the back of the head with the butt of a pistol, grimacing as though he were the one being assaulted. My father slumped and was shoved into the backseat of the car, and the two men pushed in after him, one sitting on either side. The door was pulled shut and the car drove away, the sound of its tires on the road a raw scratchy sound that tightened my throat and hurt my eyes.

  I stood there, my heart thumping wildly in my too-small chest. I looked around Bubbling Well Road, expecting my father to reappear behind me or beside me or across the street, and I saw that people had stopped walking and were staring at me, as though they, too, were waiting for whatever was next. I was embarrassed. They seemed to think it was my turn now, that I was supposed to bring him back.

  “He’s gone,” I whispered, hoping that those were the magic words.

  Only seconds had passed, but the world felt different and I was suddenly cold. Then another car turned the corner, and I stepped back and leaned against the wall of the apartment building, feeling its cool roughness on my back through my dress. This time it was our car, and I let my breath out when I saw the long green hood and the bright white of Mei Wah’s turban. I wiped my hands on my dress and tried to see the humor in the trick my father had played on me, setting all that up, and I hoped I’d be able to laugh with him.

  The Packard jerked to a stop in front of me and Mei Wah got out of the driver’s seat. “Come,” he said, and he took hold of my shoulders and pushed me roughly into the backseat. And then he was at the wheel and the car lurched into the street. He looked at me in the rearview mirror as we sped down Bubbling Well Road, and he shook his head.

  “Where is he?” I asked, for the backseat was empty except for me. No father. No magic. No trick.

  “Very bad,” was all Mei Wah said. “Very bad indeed.”

  acrobats and vinegar

  WE DROVE ALONG STREETS I KNEW, but nothing felt familiar. We crossed Chengtu Road and passed the American Women’s Club, where my mother often met friends for lunch. We crossed Yates Road with its lingerie shops, and we reached the apartment buildings where my parents’ friends lived—the Uptown, the West Gardens, Tiny Mansions, the Medhurst. But that day I could name none of them. At Avenue Haig I stared hard at the centuries-old cemetery and the Bubbling Well Temple and the Bubbling Well itself, all sources of good luck, I believed, simply because they were old and Chinese. I wanted Mei Wah to stop so that I could touch the water in the well, or leave something for Kwan Yin, the Goddess of Mercy, for it was said that she heard the cry of the world. But having anything to do with the Chinese gods was something my mother strictly forbade, so I said nothing.

  Mei Wah sped by everything. We left the International Settlement through the Great Western Road exit, and Bubbling Well Road became Great Western Road. We turned onto Columbia Road and passed sprawling estates with latticed windows, Western homes made of sturdy brick, Spanish and Mediterranean villas with red-tiled roofs. We passed south-facing gardens that offered glimpses of tulip trees and lily magnolias and lion’s head camellias behind garden walls that were topped with barbed wire and shards of broken glass, and I knew that we were home.

  Mei Wah turned the sharp corner of our driveway and barely stopped the car before he jumped from the front seat. He jerked my door open and lifted me from the backseat, then carried me quickly into the house. I held him tightly and his beard rubbed against my cheek as he ran.

  He passed through the kitchen in a few strides, calling for Chu Shih, and when he rounded the corner and reached the cook’s bedroom, he rapped on the door and didn’t wait for an answer before he pushed it open and laid me on the bed. He said something to Chu Shih in rushed Chinese that I didn’t understand, and Chu Shih said, “Shei?” Who?

  Mei Wah answered only, “Pu chihtao,” I don’t know, his voice gruff and angry. Then he hurried out and I was left in the dim light and quiet heat.
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  I had started to cry by then, wanting to follow Mei Wah and find my mother, partly for comfort, but also because I wanted to hear whatever it was that Mei Wah told her right now, which I knew would be the real story, and more than they would tell me later. But Chu Shih turned and started mixing something on the electric burner he kept in the corner of his room, his large back to me. When I sat up, he made a clucking sound and patted the air next to him as though it were a bed. “Pu tung,” stay put, he said, and I lay back on his bed.

  He was making something to soothe me. Every Saturday he went to the Old Native City’s Chinese pharmacies, where he bought things he believed in, medicines and herbs and fairy-tale ingredients that possessed healing powers, things with names like toothed-bur clover and coltsfoot, shepherd’s purse and Chinese angelica, names that were too strange and wonderful to be made up. It was Chu Shih who seemed made up, a kind and magical giant. He was from the north and was huge, over six feet tall and more than two hundred pounds. He was never afraid, and when he entered the room, he always looked as though he was sure you’d be glad to see him. I never knew his age, but he seemed old and strong and wise.

  I lay on his bed and watched as he worked in silence, leaning over the cramped corner where he’d set up his private kitchen, his short blue cotton jacket the size of one of my coats, his black trousers immense as tablecloths. Finally he turned and came toward me with a steaming cup, the porcelain so thin that the rim was translucent.

  I sat up and took a deep breath. I was still crying, mostly the crying that comes at the end of fatigue and fear. Chu Shih cleaned my face with a cool, damp linen towel that smelled of lemon and cucumber. Then he looked at me for a long moment, his eyes sad, his expression worried, and he whispered a word I didn’t know. I shook my head. He tried another; no again. We always spoke in bits and pieces, our own blend of English and Mandarin, a language that worked fine in our day-to-day lives. But it was clear that we didn’t have words for what had just happened.