Distant Land of My Father

by Bo Caldwell

  “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

  APRIL 1981. On my fiftieth birthday, the seventeenth of January, I received a gift of tickets for the third time in my life. This time it was two tickets to Shanghai, a gift from my husband and my daughters, though only Heather and I will go. Jack is something of a homebody, and leaving Flintridge, where he is head of the history department, is not easy in the middle of the semester. Eve takes after her father—and her namesake—and gets nervous when she is away from home, even at twenty-six. There is an ethereal quality to her that makes her attachment to this earth and its things tenuous at best. She has my mother’s deep brown eyes, her even temper, and her love of order, and she can gaze at you in a way that makes you wonder what she knows about you.

  Heather is a different story. She is and always has been the adventurer and entrepreneur. As a child she was the lemonade-seller, the scrounger of quarters from underneath the cushions of the living-room sofa, the inventor and doer of endless household chores in the name of earning another dime, which she would spend as fast as she could, as though buying things was a competition. At twenty-four, she is just a year older than my father was when he returned to China in 1930. Sometimes the expression on her face has an intensity that is so like him that I am startled, and I have to stare for a moment to bring her back into focus.

  The tickets were Heather’s idea. She was the one who did the research and planning, and it will be the two of us really going. The other two have assured us that they will be with us in spirit. We leave in the morning, and I have said my good-byes, which felt important, even though we will be gone for only two weeks. Last night I visited my grandmother. She will be ninety-six next month, and she is the most beautiful person I have ever known. Although her body is weak and she requires live-in care, her mind is sharp, and she, more than anyone, understands what it means for me to return to Shanghai. When I kissed her cheek, she held my face in her hands and looked me in the eye. “Look for the best part of them,” she whispered. “Don’t dwell on the rest of it. They loved you dearly.” I nodded. “I know,” I said. For a strange thing has happened as I’ve aged: I have felt my parents’ love more strongly every year, even with them gone.

  So now it is Heather and me. She arranged for our visas, and page seven of my passport shows my tourist visa from the Consulate-General of the People’s Republic of China. We will fly to Hong Kong on Cathay Pacific Air. From there we will board the passenger ship Jinjiang to Shanghai, a journey that will take fifty-eight hours–three days and two nights. She wanted me to approach Shanghai in a familiar way, from the water, not the air. We will disembark at the International Passenger Terminal to the east of what is now the Shanghai Mansions, but what used to be the Broadway Mansions, where my father and I looked down on the city so many years ago. After two weeks, we will leave for Los Angeles from the Shanghai International Terminal, a good decision, I think. It would be difficult to leave by sea a third time, too slow and too painful.

  I have read the guidebooks. I know the city will be much changed from the city of my childhood. The books say that the run-down buildings give the city a feeling of decay and neglect. The city is crowded, and its roads and houses and factories are decades old. I read that tipping is forbidden in China, and I smile as I remember my father’s painstaking efforts at cumshaw wherever he went. As a result of Pinyin, the system of romanization introduced by the People’s Republic in 1958, even the names are changed. The Whangpoo is the Huangpu, Nanking Road is Nanjing Lu, and Hungjao is Hongqiao, though its villas and estates are still the favored homes of foreigners and diplomats.

  A few things are still there. The Old City remains, where Chu Shih bought the ingredients he used to heal us–ginseng, pilose antler, tiger bone wine. The Cathay, where my mother loved the tea dances, is still a hotel, though it is now called the Peace Hotel, and the Park Hotel remains also, on that corner across from the Race Course–the People’s Square now, and the seat of city government–where my father was kidnapped.

  And there is the Bund. It is there, the books say, that you will find hints at Shanghai’s past. Though today it is called Zhongshan Dong Yi Lu, and although the busier wharfs are no longer there, the buildings are much the same, and if you start at Waibaidu Bridge–the Garden Bridge–you can walk along the waterfront past European-style buildings and imagine what the city used to be like. A paragraph describes the former occupants of the Bund, and I can hear my father’s voice as I read the list: the British Consulate, the Russian Consulate, the NYK Line, the Banque de l’Indochine, the Glenn Line, Jardine Matheson, the Cathay Hotel, the Palace Hotel, all the way down the Bund to the Shanghai Club.

  In the old guidebook that my father left me, I find listed the Chinese names that Chu Shih used for the seasons, and I see that early April, when we are traveling, would be called ch’ingming, pure brightness. I find the phrase fitting. To be able to return to one’s past, to visit a place where much was lost but also gained, is a gift, a gift of pure brightness. And I am ready.