Distant Land of My Father

by Bo Caldwell

  He thought for a moment and stared hard at me, as though he was playing a game and was searching for a clue. And then he said, “Hsiao t’ou,” thief.

  “Hsiao t’ou,” I repeated. I knew the word, but not what he was saying.

  Chu Shih nodded back at me. “Hsiao t’ou,” he said more urgently, and then he added, “Hsiao t’ou take your father.” He smoothed my hair awkwardly, something he’d never done before, and I thought he must have seen my father do it.

  I let my breath out, the only sound in the room. He was telling me that my father had been kidnapped.

  Chu Shih handed me the cup, and I sipped the tea, the same tea he’d made for me when I fell from the second branch of the Chinese magnolia in the backyard the year before and broke my arm. I tasted ginseng and rose oil, licorice and saffron. It was warm and sweet and smelled vaguely floral, and I drank it without hesitating. Chu Shih had cured me of stomachaches and toothaches and tiredness and fever, and I knew enough to do what he said.

  When I finished the tea, I lay down again and stared at the few soft stripes of afternoon light that managed to make their way through the wooden blinds. Chu Shih was back at his burner, fooling with the teapot and putting things away, but I knew he was only trying to look busy while I was, he hoped, falling asleep.

  “My mother,” I started, but Chu Shih shook his head.

  “She will come,” he said. “Later.”

  I reached into my pocket and found the small cardboard box, my purchase from the afternoon, which seemed like at least a day ago. I opened it and took out the elephant, and held him up to the light. He looked brave, I thought. There was no telling what a beast as brave as he could do. I touched his trunk and put him on the table so that I would not harm him by holding him too tight. And then I fell asleep.

  When I woke, the strips of light were gone, and the room had the dimness of the last minutes of day. Though I didn’t feel hot, I was damp from sweat and my chest felt tight, as though something were binding me. I started to sit up and saw, on the blackwood table next to Chu Shih’s bed, the teacup, filled again. I picked it up carefully, my hands shaking, and drank the lukewarm tea.

  I heard Chu Shih sounds in the kitchen, the soft scraping and padding of his cotton shoes on the quarry tile floor, the sound of a wooden spoon on a ceramic bowl, the sharp sound of slicing on the butcher block, and I got up from the bed and went to find him.

  The kitchen smelled of ginger and scallions and garlic. Chu Shih stood at the sink. When I came in and stood next to him, he set a piece of sesame bread in front of me, and I realized I was starved.

  He was making chiaotzû, steamed dumplings. I watched as he dropped minced ginger into a metal bowl and combined it with what would be the filling for the dumplings: ground pork, shredded cabbage, green onions, eggs to hold everything together. He shook in soy sauce and sesame oil, salt and pepper, half a cup of oolong tea that he’d steeped hard and strong, especially for this, and the smell got better and stronger, so that all I wanted was to eat one now. Last was a dash of sherry, which he added to most of what he cooked, a trick my mother had taught him, like adding coffee to chocolate to make the taste stronger.

  “I can help?” I asked.

  He nodded toward the huge maple worktable in the middle of the room. “Tso,” sit, he said, and though he was stern, I understood that he wanted me to stay.

  I sat down on one of the worn stools and Chu Shih dropped a handful of flour onto the table in front of me, where it made a small poof!, then settled. I smoothed it into a circle, the table cool and hard and solid against my palm, then I rubbed flour between my hands as though it were talc. Chu Shih sat down next to me and floured more of the table, then took a ball of dough from a ceramic bowl and began to flatten it, first with his huge hands, then with the rolling pin, back and forth, back and forth, his motions even and controlled. When the dough was rolled almost as thin as paper, he turned a teacup upside down and began cutting out circles with the rim, his wrist making quick, sharp turns. Then he slid the circles—the skins, we called them—toward me, one by one. I picked each one up and held it carefully in my palm while I put a forkful of the filling in the middle. Then—this was the hard part—I folded the circle into a half circle, and pinched the edges together hard, the way you would the edge of a pie crust, turning the half circle into a crescent as I worked. When I finished, I set the fat moon-shaped dumpling on a metal tray in the middle of the table and started another.

  We worked that way in silence. A few times I thought I heard steps in the rest of the house and I looked at the door, waiting for someone to enter, but no one did, and each time Chu Shih nodded sharply at the chiaotzû I was making, telling me to pay attention to what I was doing.

  I understood that we were waiting. It was common knowledge, even for a child: after someone had been kidnapped, you waited until you heard what to do next, and then you waited until the person you loved was finally home. That was how it worked. I knew about kidnapping the way I knew about beggars. It was part of life, so much so that I was never allowed to go anywhere alone. I had heard stories since I was small. The stories that frightened me most were about young girls who were taken by troupes of acrobats and forced to drink vinegar to soften their bones and make their spines more supple so that they would be better performers. Or girls who were taken to brothels, which I took to be a mispronunciation of “brothers,” and I wondered what had made the brothers so evil that they would kidnap their own sisters. I was taught to be wary of all of the everyday strangers around us: hotel boys, theater ushers, waiters, flower girls, newspaper sellers, coolies, mafu, carriage men. No one was trustworthy; anyone could be a fahsiong, a trafficker, literally “father-brother,” someone who was cunning and ruthless and patient, who might abduct a female and sell her. A woman was called a t’iaotsû, or item, a girl was a shiht’ou, or stone, and once she’d been taken, her abductors would hide her in a bakery or barbershop or who knew where until she could be sold and forced to “sell her smiles,” another phrase I took literally.

  At the time my father was kidnapped, the most common victims were wealthy businessmen like him, men who were blindfolded and carried off in broad daylight. Kidnappings were reported almost every day in the North China Daily News. I heard my mother relay those stories to my father when she thought I was out of earshot, stories that fascinated me as much as they frightened me. A broker from the Shanghai Stock Exchange was taken while buying stamps, the owner of the Buick agency on Nanking Road was whisked away while leaving the Empire Theater. The kidnappers could be anyone: members of the Red Gang or Green Gang, who could be told apart by how they held their cigarettes; or outlaws; or political extremists like the Blue Shirts, who were ultra-loyal to Chiang Kai-shek and threatened anyone who dealt with the Japanese or the Communists. Many of the city’s affluent businessmen simply took the threat in stride and hired bodyguards, menacing White Russians or bulky Chinese boys from the country, a practice my father viewed as showy and unnecessary, nothing more than a way to get “great face.” He depended solely on Mei Wah, a strategy that, until now, had worked just fine.

  And so, as Chu Shih and I made chiaotzû after chiaotzû, I kept my questions to myself. When we’d finished and he got out the huge bamboo steamer and let me arrange the first batch of dumplings on spread-out cabbage leaves to cook, a first, I saw that I was being comforted, and the fear inside me rose like dough.

  Chu Shih and I ate our fill at the kitchen table, and still the rest of the house stayed quiet. Though it wasn’t typhoon season, there was a strong hot wind outside that made the house rattle, and each time it did, Chu Shih looked anxiously at the door, then at the windows, and each time he smiled nervously when he saw me notice his anxiety. The sky outside grew black. When I stared hard at the windows, watching for some sign of my father, I no longer saw the magnolia and the plane trees and the willows, but only the reflection of my own worried face in the dark glass.

  That was when my mother came for me: jus
t when it was night.

  She came into the kitchen without a sound, and I jumped when she touched my shoulder and spoke my name. Her face was pale, and there were circles under her eyes. I reached for her as though I’d never expected to see her again.

  “Anna,” she said, and she loosened my hold on her and knelt next to me, so that we were at the same level. Her fingers shook as she set a pink and gold package of Ruby Queen cigarettes on the table. When she pushed my hair off my face and pressed her palms against my cheeks, her hands were cold. She smelled of Chanel No. 5, the scent so strong it was like something you could touch, which made me start to cry because it seemed so everyday, and the night was so wrong.

  “Are you all right?” she asked, and although I thought I was, her question made me cry more. My mother looked truly confused. She turned to Chu Shih and said, “She’s been like this all day? You should have come—”

  “No, no,” Chu Shih said, “just now. Not all day.” He shook his head and looked grieved, as if he had been the cause of my tears.

  I caught my breath and ordered myself to calm down. I was, I told myself, my father’s daughter, which meant I had a certain standard to meet. There was no reason to act like this; I certainly wouldn’t have fallen apart if he had been in the room. I took another breath. “I was afraid.”

  My mother nodded. “I know,” she said. “Let’s go upstairs and you can tell me what happened.” She stood and smoothed her skirt, and I started to follow her out of the kitchen. She stopped at the door and turned to Chu Shih.

  “You’ve checked the doors?”

  “Shih,” yes.

  “The windows?”

  “Shih.”

  “Well, then,” my mother said, “we’ll be fine. We’ll all be fine.” And she took my hand.

  When we reached my room, my mother sat on my bed, her legs crossed, her back straight. Despite her composure, in that instant I thought she might cry and I stared at her hard, willing her not to. She coughed, covering her mouth with a white handkerchief, and licked her lips. Then she patted the space next to her and forced a smile. I sat down beside her.

  “Are you all right?” she asked. She looked evenly into my eyes, concerned.

  “Yes,” I said. “Chu Shih gave me tea.”

  She nodded. “That’s good. You needed to rest.”

  “Where is he?” I asked. I felt as though we’d been talking for hours, avoiding that question.

  My mother brushed my hair from my face. She took a deep breath and exhaled unevenly. “I don’t know exactly,” she started, “that’s part of the problem. We don’t know exactly who’s abducted him. It could be any number of—”

  She stopped and looked at me. “Let me start again,” she said, and she told me about calling Will Marsh and getting the money that the men had demanded, and arranging for Will to see that it was delivered. She said she was sure that my father would be returned the next day, or the day after that at the latest. Everyone knew, she said, that people who were kidnapped were well cared for, and released once the kidnappers had their ransom.

  It all sounded like a business arrangement, and though I listened hard, it made no sense and had nothing to do with my father being hit with a gun and pushed into a car and taken away. My mother’s anxious tone did not reassure me.

  “Where is he?” I asked again.

  She took another breath. “I told you. I don’t know. I just know he’ll be home soon. I’ve done all I can do.”

  “Why did they take him?”

  My mother smiled grimly and looked away from me. “Hard to say,” she answered. “That’s something else I don’t know.” She stared at her skirt. “Your father,” she said, and her voice caught and she cleared her throat. “Your father is somewhat unpredictable. And he’s very”—she paused—”complicated. He has strong ideas and people don’t always agree with those ideas, and he does what he wants, whether people like it or not. And sometimes it gets him into trouble.” She looked at me and said, “Can you understand that?”

  I nodded, and she attempted a smile. Then she closed her eyes and smoothed the delicate skin under her eyes with her fingers. “I’m so tired,” she murmured, and for a moment I was stumped. My mother was never tired, and I was suddenly concerned that maybe things were even worse than I’d thought.

  “Are you all right?” I asked.

  She opened her eyes and seemed to think for a moment. “Yes,” she said, “I’m all right.” She leaned close and kissed my forehead, then stood up. “Get your shoes off, Anna, and we’ll get you ready for bed.”

  My shoes. I stood, remembering my father’s office as though it were last year, forgotten till this instant, and I backed away from her as though she’d asked the unthinkable. “No,” I said suddenly, and then, thinking I was being rude, I added, “No, thank you.”

  She laughed. “What’s the matter with you? Come, take off your shoes and dress and put your nightgown on. It’s late.”

  I shook my head and took a few more steps back.

  “Stop it, Anna,” she said, more firmly now. “Don’t be difficult. We’re tired and upset. Just put your nightgown on and get into bed and you’ll fall asleep, and things will be better in the morning. You’ll see.”

  But I didn’t see. I didn’t see how things could be fine, or how she could be so calm, or how my father could possibly be all right, or how the criminals who had taken him would ever return him with everyone acting so casually. And I certainly didn’t see how taking my shoes off and letting my mother find the yen I had kept would help.

  “I want to keep my shoes on,” I said, and I hoped a reason would come to me.

  “Don’t be silly,” she said.

  “I’m not. I’m just not taking my shoes off. I might have to get up in the night.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” she said. There was an edge to her voice, and when she stood, she looked at me so matter-of-factly that I almost lost my nerve and gave in.

  “I’m not taking them off,” I said again, mostly to myself. “And I won’t go to sleep if you take them off of me.”

  She took a deep breath and stared at me hard. I stared back and told myself that I was as strong as she was, just not as big. Finally she said, “You’re not yourself, but I’m far too exhausted to argue with you. Let’s just hope you’re reasonable in the morning.” She turned to my bed and pulled back the sheets. “Fine. In you go.”

  I had not moved. “You have to promise,” I said.

  “What?” The thinness of her voice let me know that her patience was all but gone.

  “That you won’t take them off while I’m asleep.”

  She did not hesitate. “Of course I will. Children don’t sleep in their shoes. Period. Now get into bed and go to sleep.” She looked at me and softened. I was terrified of this stance I’d invented, and it must have showed. “Anna, please. Everything will be all right in the morning. You’ll see.”

  I nodded and got into my bed in my clothes and tried not to wince as my dirty shoes slid between the whiteness of clean cotton sheets. I thought of all the dirt and grime I’d seen all day, and I felt as though I’d brought it all home with me.

  “I’ll tell you what,” she said. “Let me go and change out of these clothes and I’ll sit with you until you’re asleep. And I won’t take your shoes off unless you tell me it’s all right. Deal?”

  I nodded.

  She turned and walked out of my room and I watched her until she turned the hallway corner to go to her bedroom.

  I sat up and pushed the covers off and pulled off my shoe, took the yen out, and squeezed my foot back into my shoe. The yen note was limp and damp. I unfolded it and tried to smooth it against the sheet, then held it up and examined it, wishing that it could tell me something I didn’t know. Then I went to the window, pushed it open, and unlatched the screen. I leaned out enough to reach the loose tile, the second one on the right. I refolded the yen and pulled up the tile enough to slip the yen underneath it, then pulled it up again to
make sure I could reach the yen later. I could. I latched the screen, closed the window, and got back into my bed, my heart pounding as though I’d committed a crime.

  A door opened and closed down the hall and I heard the softness of my mother’s steps. She came down the hallway and into my room, wearing a white satin robe that I knew was soft as water.

  “I brought you something,” she said. “Maybe it will help.” She handed me a postcard. The back was filled with a neat black handwriting that was far too complicated for me to decipher.

  “No,” she said, and she turned the postcard over. “The other side.”

  The front was a photograph of a city of lights. It was twilight, and behind the city were dark blue cut-out mountains that looked so close, they might have been right behind the houses. In the lower corner it said something that I tried to sound out.

  “The city of angles,” I read.

  My mother laughed gently. “No, Anna, the City of Angels. It’s Los Angeles, in California. My mother sent the picture, and it’s where I grew up. I was thinking we might take a trip there sometime.”

  I looked at her uneasily. “A trip?”

  She shrugged. “A vacation,” she said. “Just for a while.”

  I nodded and looked back at the postcard and stared hard at the lines and intersections of all those streets, everything so straight and precise. It looked like a city of angles.

  “The City of Angels,” I said, and I turned to my mother. “Is it nice?”

  She was quiet for a minute. Then she said, “Yes. And it’s safe.”

  I nodded. That day I understood, for the first time, the appeal of “safe.”

  “Why don’t you put it under your pillow and I’ll tell you all about it tomorrow?”