The Distant Land of My Father (16 page)

Everyone was shouting and crowding to the dockside of the ship, trying to get a last glimpse of some father or husband. My mother guided me through the crowd, asking stranger after stranger to please let us through so that her daughter might wave good-bye to her father. Other mothers were trying to do the same for their children, but somehow my mother succeeded. She parted a sea of mothers and grandmothers and secretaries and children, guiding me to the ship’s railing, then stood behind me, her hands firmly on my shoulders.

“Now,” she said. “Look.”

The gangplanks were just being raised. I searched the crowd below for my father and saw mostly men just like him, men in suits, waving to those they loved, but all of them seeming to stare up at me. I stared back at them stubbornly.
It’s only a few months,
I thought.
Don’t be a baby. Make him proud of you. You’re your father’s daughter.
I looked at the Bund and saw the Cathay Hotel, the Palace, Big Ching at the top of the Customs House, then I looked toward the Garden Bridge and started from there: the NYK Line, the Banque de l’Indochine, the Glenn Line, and I knew I could go all the way down the Bund to the Shanghai Club. I had learned what he had taught me.

“Look,” my mother said suddenly, “there!” And she laughed and her grip on my shoulders tightened. She pointed down and to the right. “See him?”

And there was my father. He was easy to spot as soon as you looked in his direction. You couldn’t
not
see him, for he’d brought my stilts and stood three feet higher than anyone around him. He waved awkwardly, almost falling over, and he grinned. I laughed and waved back. “Be careful!” I called, and he waved again.

There was a loud whistle, and a violent slamming as the gangplank was pulled up. The commotion grew even louder. The crew yelled, the men on the dock called last-minute advice, the women and children around us waved more urgently. I stared at my father harder, willing him to save us.
Don’t let this happen; surely you can do something.

The ship began to move. Another loud whistle, and the ship began to ease away from the dock.

“Let’s go below,” my mother said, her voice low and flat.

I shook my head. “I want to watch.”

She hesitated, but she didn’t say no. Only, “I don’t think I can. I’ll be sitting nearby.” She walked over to one of the teak deck chairs set out in rows in the middle of the deck. There was a spent quality to her voice. She suddenly looked exhausted.

I looked back at my father. He was alone. Most of the other men were already heading back to their offices along the Bund. He’d gotten off the stilts and stood holding them. I wondered if he would take them all the way back home to Hungjao, or just leave them in his office for now. I wondered what he would do tonight for dinner. Jimmy’s, I thought, or maybe Sun Ya’s, for long-life noodles.

I waved once, a small wave, more a signal than a good-bye. He waved back, and I saw him smile. And then, as the ship slid from the wharf and was pulled by tugs into the Whangpoo, we simply stood staring at each other from a greater and greater distance, until I couldn’t be sure it was really him that I saw, and until I couldn’t be sure there was anyone there at all. But he was there. I knew him. He would not leave until I was out of sight.

the city of angles

ON THE FIFTEENTH OF FEBRUARY
, 1938, after traveling 5,673 miles, my mother and I arrived at San Pedro Harbor in Los Angeles. My grandmother met us at the ship. She was not at all what I expected. She was taller than my mother, nearly five feet nine, and although she wasn’t overweight, she was a large woman. She was attractive, but not nearly as feminine as my mother, and I saw right away that she was a no-nonsense sort of person. She walked with her back straight and her head high, and when she hugged me and kissed my cheek, I smelled Pep-o-mint Life Savers, which made me think I would like her.

After a porter had loaded our luggage into the trunk of my grandmother’s blue Plymouth, she drove us home, across the vastness of Los Angeles. She and my mother sat in the front seat and talked about how the city had changed. I sat in the backseat, looking out at Spanish homes with red tile roofs and wrought-iron balconies; groves of orange trees that stood like soldiers in rows that seemed to go on forever; spacious streets lined with tall palm trees that swayed softly overhead; and far away, in the background, purplish mountains like something I would draw. Everything was bright: red geraniums, crayon-green lawns, bougainvillea of a deep pink, and above us, the sky a startling blue. There was no garbage in the streets, there were no beggars in the doorways. The air smelled of oranges and jasmine, and it was so clean that I thought it should have a different name from what we breathed in Shanghai. The whole place seemed enchanted. “Is this real?” I whispered once. My mother, sitting in the front seat with my grandmother, only laughed.

My grandmother talked as she drove, telling me things I tried to remember so that I could tell my father when he joined us. We were headed to South Pasadena, she said, about ten miles to the east of downtown Los Angeles. It was where my mother had grown up, where my grandmother still lived, and where we would live now. My grandmother said it was just right: big enough and small enough. None of that mattered much to me, but when we turned off of Monterey Road and onto Chelten, my grandmother’s street, I caught my breath, for in the middle of the street grew three huge oak trees, each of their trunks as wide as a door. I felt my grandmother watching me in her rearview mirror, and she smiled and explained that rather than remove the trees, the city had simply paved the street around them.

“Those are
quercus,
” she said. “Native oaks. They’ve been here since this whole place was wild.”

I met her eyes in the mirror and nodded, as in awe of her as I was of everything else. She turned into a driveway across from one of the oak trees in the street and said, “Here we are.”

My grandmother’s home was a two-storey, Spanish-style house with a red tile roof. It was U-shaped, with the patio at its center and all of the rooms opening out onto it. Colored tiles were set around the doors, and bright woven rugs covered the floors. The guest room—“Your room for now,” my grandmother said as she led me to it—had doors that opened out onto the garden. My bed was an old oak trundle bed covered with a white comforter embroidered with dragonflies. An antique, the bed had been my mother’s when she was small, and before that my grandmother’s. It was so low to the ground that when I sat on its edge, my knees came to my chest, as though I were Alice in Wonderland, a fact that I took as an omen: nothing was going to fit here, everything would feel odd.
I
certainly did, sitting in that small room on that strange bed, still in my navy wool cardigan and tartan skirt and shiny black shoes.

When my grandmother left the room, I just sat there for a while, too nervous to explore the house, too unsure of myself to do anything at all. Finally, shortly before dinner, there was a knock at my door, and when I murmured, “Come in,” my grandmother pushed the door open and stood just inside the room. The ceiling was low, and she, too, looked like the wrong size, which was somehow comforting. She wore a dark green suit that set off her blue-green eyes, and her brown hair was brushed back, framing her suntanned face. I thought she was beautiful.

“You’re wondering what to call me,” she said.

I felt found out. I
had
been wondering that, and though it wasn’t my major worry, it was on my list.

She smiled easily. “Thought so. How about Gran?”

I nodded stupidly, and wished I could say something to show her how smart I was. I considered blurting out everything I knew about the Bund as an attempt at impressing her, but I dismissed the idea as inappropriate. “Gran sounds nice,” I said.

“Then Gran it is,” she said. “Though you’ll have to help me get used to it. I’m new at grandmothering.”

“I’m new at granddaughtering,” I said.

She laughed a wonderful laugh, deep and easy, one that didn’t make me feel laughed at. “You’ll learn,” she said. “We both will.” And then she turned to leave, waving good-bye absently. “Wash your hands and come down to dinner, Anna. We don’t want you starving yourself up here.”

I did as I was told and went downstairs to find my mother and grandmother—
Gran,
I practiced under my breath—at the large oak dining-room table, my grandmother looking stately and official at the head of the table, my mother a little disheveled. She’d loosened the top buttons of her blouse and her hair was mussed from traveling, but she looked happy and relaxed, and the sight of her gave me hope. We were served hamburgers and fresh fruit by my grandmother’s cook and housekeeper, a woman named Ella. But although I was starved, I didn’t touch my food. I had been taught since I was small not to eat until I’d been given permission, and I knew that fresh fruit had to be boiled before you ate it. My mother had started eating without hesitating, and it was only after she’d taken several bites that I was able to catch her eye and communicate my question to her: Was the food safe?

She did the worst thing she could have done; she laughed. “Oh, Anna, it’s all right. Eat everything, eat all you want. Everything’s safe and wonderful and good here. You don’t have to worry about food anymore.” She stared at me for a moment, then added, “Actually, you don’t have to worry about anything.”

I looked at my grandmother, expecting to see more amusement. Instead I found her gazing at me somberly. “The girl is conscientious,” she said matter-of-factly. “Quite admirable.” She nodded and I began to eat.

That night when I got into my funny bed and slipped between pale blue cotton sheets, I could hear my mother and my grandmother talking downstairs. The radio was on, and they were listening to the
Palmolive Beauty Box Theater
with Jessica Dragonette and Benny Fields, one of my grandmother’s favorite shows, she’d said. It sounded like home: grown-ups talking into the night, the radio on in the background, and outside, the breeze ruffling the leaves of the plane trees—no, I thought, they were called sycamores here.

I got out of bed and went to the window and pushed it open a few inches. It was just starting to sprinkle, and the air smelled of eucalyptus and rainwater and earth, almost like Shanghai. I breathed in the scent to make things better. I could see the oak trees in the road, tall and stately in the nighttime shadows, and they somehow reminded me of my father, maybe because they looked so strong, or maybe because they seemed far away, though they were only in the middle of the street. I hadn’t thought of him very much that day, a first since we’d left Shanghai; there had been too many new things to think about. But in that instant I could see him and hear his voice, and I was stricken with guilt. On the voyage over, I’d planned on missing him constantly. I’d imagined myself as long-suffering and noble, similar to the characters in some of the soap operas I’d heard on the radio, a somber girl who never stopped thinking of her beloved father.

But already I’d betrayed him. I’d forgotten him on my very first day here, and I saw that I was a traitor, the most disloyal daughter a person could imagine.

A few days after our arrival, my grandmother woke me early in the morning and told me to get up, that my mother and I were moving into our house. I sat up in bed and watched as she gathered the few things my mother had unpacked for me—shoes, a few dresses, a sweater, toothbrush, hairbrush, underwear, pajamas. Then she told me to get dressed and come downstairs.

When I came into the kitchen, I saw my mother in the driveway, loading our things into the trunk of my grandmother’s Plymouth.

“She’s in a hurry,” my grandmother said.

I turned and found my grandmother standing behind me, and I looked up at her.

“But she’ll calm down. Don’t worry. She’s just a little unsure of things for the moment.”

She took my hand and squeezed it once, and I smiled gratefully. Her hand around mine was warm and strong and soft. I hadn’t realized that I was anxious about my mother, but I was.

We joined her outside then, and my grandmother drove us to our new home, a California bungalow that my grandfather had bought as an investment shortly before his death. We didn’t have far to go. Our house was only a few blocks away, on Bucknell. My grandmother had had the place cleaned and repainted, and she’d furnished it with odds and ends she’d had in storage.

“You can walk to my house any time you like, Anna.” As she pulled into the driveway of our house, she pointed to a huge old oak tree on the corner. “Kids call that the Tarzan tree,” she said. “That’s your landmark,” and she looked at me in the rearview mirror. I nodded, grateful for any landmark at all.

The house looked as though it had just grown from the lot. Trees surrounded it, eucalyptus and oaks and Chinese junipers, and a broad porch spanned the front of the house. The house’s foundation was made of round stones, which, my grandmother said, had been gathered in the Arroyo Seco, a canyon that ran through the northwest part of Pasadena. The stones had been worn smooth by weather and time, and the chimney was made of the same stones. Where they stopped, the house was made of redwood, and the roof was pitched and so shallow that it was almost horizontal. The eaves curved up a bit, making the house appear as if it might fly. Over the gable was a weather vane, topped by a wrought-iron squirrel that stared intently in the direction of the wind.