The Distant Land of My Father (23 page)

On winter afternoons at Haiphong Road, my father stared hard at that photo, and he learned a trick to bring us closer: if he rolled up a piece of paper and used it like a telescope to stare at the picture, we seemed very near, and he could, for a moment, imagine himself on that beach with us, the reason for our smiles.

In June an American engineer died of a heart attack, and my father and three other Americans were permitted to leave camp to attend the funeral. The summer of 1943 was the wettest and coldest one that my father could remember in Shanghai, and when he returned to camp two hours after the funeral, he was soaked through and as chilled as if it were winter. But he didn’t care. When he hurried into the office to find Barrows, he was elated. At the funeral, he had been able to talk with an acquaintance who worked for the American Association, who whispered good news when the gendarmes weren’t looking: there was pretty sure talk of American repatriation, and it was rumored that British negotiations were in the works as well. He said some even thought repatriation was possible before year’s end.

Barrows stared hard at my father and finally allowed himself to smile. He slapped my father on the back and laughed, and told my father to tell him the whole thing again.

By the first of August, repatriation seemed imminent. Several of the men wrote letters to their wives and made bets with themselves: they wanted to see if they could beat their letters home. Rather than trusting the Japanese for delivery, they tried to smuggle their letters out of camp by addressing the letters to contacts in Chungking, the seat of Free China. Then they bribed one of the truck drivers or cooks to mail the letter to Chungking, where a contact would re-address the letter to its real recipient. Rumor was that a letter sent like that had a good chance of making it.

Richard Fletcher was one of those men. Shortly before dinner on an evening in early August, Fletcher and another American, Edward Martin, were talking with a Sikh guard named Amar. My father was in the office, and he glanced out of the window at the three men talking and thought it strange that Amar, a man who kept to himself, would be even civil to Martin and Fletcher. Martin walked away after a moment, and as he passed my father’s window, he nodded to my father, and they exchanged a thumbs-up. They were of the same build and both had very short blond hair and they were often mistaken for each other.

And then there was shouting, and my father looked back at Fletcher and Amar. Amar was yelling at Fletcher, who shook his head and tried to walk away. But when he turned, Amar grabbed his shoulder and spun him around, then pushed him roughly toward the Japanese administration building.

An hour later, my father was in line for dinner when he saw Barrows heading toward him, his expression pained, his jaw tight. When Barrows reached my father, he said, “Honda wants to see you. You’re to bring your coat.”

It didn’t register, and when my father didn’t react, Barrows shook his head and seemed impatient. “Get your coat, Joe, and we’ll get over to Honda and we’ll see what’s what. Standing here won’t help you out.”

My father nodded without speaking, then followed Barrows to the office, where he grabbed his coat. Barrows dropped a hard roll into the pocket, then led my father to Honda’s office.

Fletcher was there, sitting in a chair in front of Honda, whose sword lay across the desk. The lieutenant sometimes used its flat edge as a club, and it was clear from the lump on the side of Fletcher’s head that he had just done that.

Amar stared hard at my father. “This man was a witness,” he said. Then he looked at Honda. “He must be punished for not volunteering this information.”

My father felt Honda watching him, and for a moment, no one spoke. Then Amar began to speak furiously, telling of the wrong that had been done, and how it must be righted, and how these prisoners seemed to do as they pleased, was there no justice? This man Fletcher had asked him to disobey the colonel by smuggling a letter out of camp, and this other man, this Schoene, had been witness to the wrongdoing and had said nothing.

And then my father understood: Amar had confused him with Edward Martin, and at first he felt a wave of relief. This would be cleared up. Honda was focused on Amar, and my father saw Barrows look hard at Fletcher and asked his question by nodding toward my father.
Was it him?
Barrows’s look said. Fletcher shook his head.

“Lieutenant,” Barrows said evenly, “it is possible that there has been a misunderstanding here. With your permission, I will question one of the other internees.”

Honda regarded Barrows skeptically. “I will question
this
one,” he said, and he pointed to my father.

And then Honda turned to my father. “You,” he said. “You witnessed this betrayal?”

My father hesitated. He was about to explain what he’d seen, and that he and Martin were often mistaken for each other, but something stopped him. Suddenly it didn’t make any sense. It didn’t do any good for someone else to go instead of him. Martin had done nothing wrong—he’d only been standing in the wrong place at the wrong time. He’d sent his wife and three small children home early on, and he’d had every intention of following soon. Why should he be punished?

Everything seemed clear, and my father nodded at Honda. “I was there when they were talking, and what Fletcher was doing wasn’t so bad. He only wanted a letter to go to his wife, was all. It’s all your regulations that are the problem here, not us.”

Honda looked stricken, and my father braced himself for whatever was next. Honda took a large volume from the corner of his desk and began to leaf through it. “‘For disobedience to an officer, ten to twenty-five years’ imprisonment,’” he read. He flipped forward. “‘For disrespect to an officer, ten years’ imprisonment or death. For incitement to mutiny, twenty-five years’ imprisonment or death.’” He slammed the book shut and stared hard at my father. “Do you understand?”

My father nodded silently. Barrows started to speak, and my father turned to him. “For God’s sake, shut up,” he said. Barrows looked as though he’d been hit. He looked at my father for a long moment, stunned. My father nodded and Barrows said nothing more.

Fletcher and my father were led outside, where the black Chevrolet used by the gendarmes sat waiting in front of Honda’s office. First Fletcher was shoved roughly into the backseat, then my father. And then the car pulled away from the building and through the main gates.

When they arrived at Bridge House, my father and Richard Fletcher were immediately separated. My father was led to a large wooden desk, where the gendarme behind it handed him a printed form and told him to fill it in completely. My father did, writing in his nationality, his place and date of birth, and details of his personal history, including education and the names and addresses of family and friends. He signed the form, and he was fingerprinted, then stripped, searched, and given a cotton coat and trousers to wear. A guard led him downstairs to the ground floor, which had been designed for shops; Bridge House had originally been a modern apartment building. But the shops were cells now, and he followed the guard down a long dark hallway to the chief jailer, who sat at a desk at the end of the corridor. On the wall next to him were rows of metal pegs, and on the pegs were small wooden tags, each with a prisoner’s name on it in Chinese characters on one side and in English on the other. There was also a heavy metal ring with a number of keys, everything from small Yale keys that anybody could have, to huge, cumbersome things that were six or even eight inches long.

He was put in a room that was perhaps eighteen feet by twelve. It was very crowded, and the stench made him gag. Once his eyes had adjusted to the dim light, my father counted and found that twenty-five people, mostly men but a few women and one child, sat cross-legged in rows on the concrete floor. A box in the corner was the toilet. There was no room to lie down, no faucet to wash with, no heat. They had been given a bundle of blankets to share, and when the lights went out an hour later, my father watched as the prisoners formed groups of two to six and huddled close together, sharing a blanket. He felt the vermin and lice under his clothes. He heard the rats moving around the cell.

In the morning, he was given a bowl of boiled rice. Next to him was a Korean man who whispered stories to him: he himself had been jabbed in the leg with a bayonet, he said. My father guessed he was dying of blood poisoning. The Chinese woman weeping in the corner had been taken from her professor husband, the Korean said; now she had no idea where he was. A White Russian woman held her three-year-old son in her arms, awake or asleep. Several of the inmates had typhus, but the Korean told him that the only medical care consisted of visits by a female Japanese nurse accompanied by two petty officers. The nurse handed out aspirin for a fever or any other ailment, including boils, swelling, or VD.

My father remembered someone who’d been in Bridge House saying that you had to keep track of the days and hours in there, that doing so helped keep you sane. But by the time he remembered that advice, it was too late. The days had already run together.

He was given a bowl of rice in the morning and evening, sometimes with pickled vegetables or a dried herring head. Some of the Chinese boys would pick lice off him if he gave them some of his food. He was interrogated frequently, always at night. A gendarme would come to the cell and call his name, the door would be unlocked, and he would be led upstairs and told to write the approximate dates of the history of his life. When he had done this, he was told to do it again, and again after that, so that he wrote out his personal history perhaps a dozen times. Each time, it was translated into Japanese. Then the gendarme read it over and questioned him. His answers were written down in Japanese on large sheets of ruled paper, which, when complete, were folded into a sort of book that my father was forced to sign and fingerprint on the last page. Most of the prisoners’ statements filled half a dozen books. Some men had been questioned for a month, some for two or more. The intent of most of the questioning seemed to be to link the prisoner with British or American intelligence.

Interrogations were helped along with various kinds of torture. Some of these my father experienced, some he only witnessed. The gendarmes might beat a man with rubber truncheons, or they might force him to sit in a bright light for twenty hours or more. They used the water cure, letting one drop of water at a time fall on a man’s head for hours. They would force a prisoner to sit up or stand until he or she collapsed. There was also a way in which a man could be made to sit on a bench, his legs straight out in front of him and tied to the bench just below the knees. Then a brick would be placed under the heel, and the guard would hit the man’s heel with a small billy club. They might insert a bristle into the tip of a man’s penis, or place delicate bamboo pipes into a man’s nostrils and pour water into those pipes until the man almost drowned. This was what they did to my father. Within days, the pressure from the water had been so great that it burst both eardrums, and soon they were infected.

And then, as suddenly as he was taken out, he was returned to camp. His eardrums had started to heal by then, and though his hearing was compromised, it was improving. He had no idea why they were letting him go back to camp. He had not, as far as he knew, answered any of their questions satisfactorily. The questions always centered on American intelligence, a subject about which my father knew little, which was no accident. He had long been certain that no good could come of that type of knowledge, and he’d been careful not to pick it up.

He was driven back to camp in the same black Chevrolet, where he sat slumped in the backseat, not completely certain of what was happening. But then the car pulled into the main gate at Haiphong Road and he knew where he was.

The car stopped, and after a pause, the door opened, and John Barrows peered in at my father. “My God,” he whispered. He heard Barrows call for the camp doctors. Then he passed out.

His condition, though horrible, was no worse than that of anyone who’d been brought from Bridge House. In fact, Dr. Anderson told him that evening, he had actually fared better than most. My father asked how long he had been gone; he guessed a month. “Eleven days,” Anderson said grimly. “It just seemed longer.”