The Distant Land of My Father (29 page)

My mother said nothing.

I went to the counter to read the letter, which said just what my mother had said: that General Shang Chen was requesting that my father act as a liaison between American and Chinese troops in Chungking, the seat of the Nationalist government. He asked that my father travel to Chungking as soon as possible.

I looked at my father. He had turned on the water and was washing two beefsteak tomatoes my mother had set out for dinner. He set them on the cutting board and began slicing them into fat round slices that we would salt and eat cold. He put the slices on a plate and tossed the ends into the grocery bag under the sink. He rinsed our small wooden cutting board—my mother and I had bought it at Woolworth’s, one of our first purchases, and one my mother had let me pick out—and I watched the red watercolor juice from the tomatoes run into the sink. He dried the board, put it back in its place against the drain board, and wiped the counter, the picture of calm. Then he turned to leave the room. This was my father: no fuss, no muss.

At the door, he turned to us. “I’m going to clean up,” he said.

“What letter?” I said.

He didn’t answer.

“What letter?” I said again. “He says he was surprised to receive your letter.” I held the general’s letter out to my father, not worrying about my dirty hands.

My father shook his head as though I were asking the obvious. “A letter I wrote to him a while back,” he said. “To find out about things.”

“When did you write to him?” I said.

Now he looked me in the eye. “It’s not a daughter’s place to cross-examine her father.”

I looked outside at the garden and saw holly seedlings and junipers and I remembered his encouragements.
You’ll have pumpkins at Halloween, and your mother can bake the seeds for you. You can cut branches from the junipers for a Christmas wreath, and you can decorate the table with holly cuttings. You’ll have lilies just in time for Easter, and strawberries all summer long.
Only he always said
you,
never
we.

I said, “You knew,” and it made such sense. It made everything fit together so neatly that it almost didn’t hurt. “You knew all along. That’s why you’ve been so happy lately. Because you were leaving.”

My mother looked up, and I addressed her, as if explaining things she didn’t know. “He never planned on staying with us. That’s why he didn’t argue about this house, it’s why he didn’t move us to someplace bigger. He knew this was just a visit.” I looked at him then. “That’s right, isn’t it?”

It was the first time in my life that I had spoken angrily to my father, and he looked stunned. He said nothing. It was my mother who spoke.

“I know that, Anna.”

My father was looking at me as though appraising me. “Why don’t you get cleaned up for dinner? This conversation’s gone far enough.”

“But how can you leave us? You don’t know—”

“I know exactly as much as I need to know,” he said. “I already explained. This is my only decent choice here. So we might as well not dwell on it.”

I said nothing.

“Don’t cloud up on me, Anna. No melodrama. It’s how things are.”

I nodded, stung. It was the first fight we’d had like that, where it seemed there was no allowance made for my age. I felt not rebuked so much, which I often had, but more pushed away, and it hurt.

“Are we clear?” he asked. “Yes,” I said softly. “That’s my girl,” he said, and he walked out of the room.

My mother didn’t wait for me to say anything. She came and stood next to me and held me to her as I began to cry. “I’m sorry,” she whispered, “I’m so sorry.”

That was a Tuesday. My father made arrangements to leave ten days later, on a military transport that would depart from Los Angeles on the first Friday morning of October.

Over those ten days, I worked hard at convincing myself that his leaving would be a relief. It hadn’t been that bad without him, I thought. In a way it was simpler. Without him, I had spent more time with my grandmother. My mother and I had eaten out more. We’d done what we’d wanted, and we hadn’t had to worry about those quiet moods of his. We were both so good at catering to him, at revolving around him, and we’d picked it up again so thoroughly and so immediately when he’d come home—
home?
—that the mood and feeling of our lives had changed a lot after he joined us. So, I thought, back to what we were, which hadn’t been so bad after all. Be grateful, I thought, and I worked at keeping my mother’s words in my mind:
we’ll be fine, we’ll be fine, we’ll be fine.

All that effort paid off, to a point. It must have because I got through those awful days that precede separation. Things were almost festive that week, on the surface at least. I helped my father pack, and I laid out his new and laundered and patched clothes in the living room until he packed them the night before he left. We put a good face on it all, and the only time I let myself feel the huge sadness that I carried around was in my bed, once the lights were out and the house had been still for a long enough time to make me think my parents had fallen asleep. That was when I knew I would miss him the most. I loved that time of night, when I knew my parents were both asleep in their bed in the very next room.

And then it was his last night.

Dinner was an occasion—steaks and baked potatoes, ambrosia and angel food cake with strawberries—and after dinner, my father and I stood in our garden for a long time, sipping our drinks, his a glass of Scotch, mine a juice glass of Pabst Blue Ribbon, which he was allowing me this once. I didn’t like the taste much, but I liked the way the cold beer felt in my stomach and the way it made my head feel a little blurry. Inside I could hear the sounds of my mother and grandmother talking in low voices as they did the dishes and made coffee, while outside in the garden, my father reminded me about all the care it would need. When he started sentences with phrases like, “And then, in three or four months, Anna,” I didn’t, as he would say, cloud up, something I considered an accomplishment, one I was proud of. But when we came inside, my mother and grandmother had only to look at my face to know how much it hurt.

Even the next morning, I was calm, at the start. His flight wouldn’t leave until noon, but he had been instructed to be at the airport two hours early. We’d been up since six, though I thought I’d heard my father up even earlier than that, pacing.

When it was almost time to leave, I stood in the bedroom doorway, watching him finish packing. He wore suit pants and a white shirt and a red tie. He hadn’t put his coat on yet. I thought he looked very handsome. He placed his shaving kit in his suitcase and let the lid fall, then he stood and looked around him, checking the room. But he’d been thorough. The suitcase was the only thing left.

“Looks like that’s about it, huh?” He smiled at me.

“Yep,” I said.
Don’t cry.

“So,” he said, and he ran his hand across his cropped blond hair, a gesture so familiar that it hurt to watch. His suit coat was folded on the bed, and he put it on and straightened it, giving each white shirt cuff a quick yank. He was exact about his appearance. An inch of cuff, no more, no less, should show beneath your coat, he said. Then he leaned over to close his suitcase.

It was that sound that did it to me: those two neat clicks of the metal latches,
snap, snap.
All of my hard work at mimicking my mother’s composure over the last few days unraveled. I stared at those shiny silver latches as if I could pull my composure back from them, and I felt my father watching me. I knew that he moved toward me, that he put his arms around me and held my face against the cool whiteness of the shirt my mother had ironed last night.

“Anna,” he said quietly, “don’t do this now, all right? It’s not so bad, you see? It’s not so bad, Anna, just a little while again.”

I nodded stupidly, but I knew it
was
so bad. And as I finally cried in his arms, I felt a fierceness in his embrace and a sigh go through his chest that told me I was right.

a happy man

MY FATHER’S STAY IN CHUNGKING
lasted barely longer than his stay in South Pasadena. He was there for only eleven months, from October of 1944 until September of 1945. But that had been his plan. It was just a place to be until the war was over. When Japan surrendered in August, my father lost no time in trying to get back to Shanghai, which was all but impossible unless you were Allied or Chinese Nationalist military or government. As liaison between the American and Chinese troops in Chungking, my father qualified.

The second he left Chungking, he stopped considering himself an official. The war was over and he was in business, simple as that, though he knew business would be different now. The Treaty of 1943, signed by Britain, the United States, and the Nationalist Government of China, had abolished extraterritoriality, and for the first time in one hundred years, Shanghai belonged not to foreigners, but to China. The Nationalist government controlled business now. Even so, my father was certain there was a place for him.

He arrived by train at Shanghai’s North Station on the last day of September, just a month and a half after the end of the war. He carried two suitcases and he had made sure to have plenty of U.S. currency on him before he’d left Chungking. Nobody trusted the Chinese currency. The value of the Chinese dollar was decreasing, and the rate of exchange fluctuated from hour to hour and place to place. He’d heard the whole city was chaotic. It had taken weeks after Japan’s surrender for the Chinese to reclaim control, and American GIs and Chinese Nationalist soldiers and officials had not arrived until the third week of September. Everything was in a state of flux. Chinese authorities had begun taking control of businesses that the Japanese had controlled during the war, and many of those who’d left during the war were returning—American and British journalists, employees sent by foreign firms, fortune seekers and entrepreneurs like my father.

At the train station, he hired a pedicab and gave the address of his office on Yuen Ming Yuen Road. Once there, he paid the coolie and carried his suitcases to the doorstep and fit the key in the lock. When he pushed open the door, he felt as though he’d simply stepped back three years, to that limbo year that followed Pearl Harbor. Papers were scattered about, and a pile of newspapers in the corner looked as though it had been flattened into a bed, which was fine by him. He saw no reason to pay for a hotel.

Everything was still there: his carved desk, his chair, the water-color of the Public Gardens over the desk. And underneath a loose floorboard near the back wall were the things he’d wanted to save: his chop; the account ledger he’d been using as a journal, which he’d placed there only a few days before his arrest by the Japanese; eight hundred dollars in U.S. currency, plenty to get started, he thought; and my mother’s ivory comb.

From there he walked toward the Whangpoo, and when he first set foot on the Bund again and gazed around him and breathed in the sharp scent of the muddy river, he laughed out loud, for he knew one thing: that he would stay in Shanghai, no matter what. He was home—his real home this time, no bungalow, no city of angels. It was home now more than ever, because he’d tried someplace else and he’d found it wouldn’t work. He had been foolish to think he could have been happy anywhere else, he saw that now. How could a man like him live in a place like Pasadena? Too many rules, too much order, not enough to do, and what would he possibly have done for work? Taken up accounting? Imported Japanese tea sets? As for my mother and me, he didn’t know when he could arrange for us to join him, but he’d worry about that later. First things first.

He walked along the Bund for a while, getting his bearings. For the first time in years, there were American and British warships on the Whangpoo. The White Sun flag of the Kuomintang flew from the tops of government buildings, and pictures of Chiang Kai-shek decorated with paper flower garlands were everywhere. The bronze lions in front of the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank were back after having been hidden during the war, and when he stopped in at the Shanghai Club’s Long Bar, behind the bar he saw more brands of Scotch than he could count. Even the billiards tables had been repaired. The Japanese had lowered them by sawing off the legs, but here they were, good as new, remounted on wooden platforms and back in use.

After a glass of Dewar’s, he walked back up the Bund and turned down Nanking Road. Hawkers had set up rickety stalls over every inch of the sidewalk and my father saw things he hadn’t seen in Shanghai for years: toasters, cameras, typewriters, radios. Butter and powdered milk, canned meat and Spam, cigarettes and coffee. The streets were jammed, the shops crowded and noisy, their windows filled. He passed GIs buying things to send home to their wives, silk stockings and lingerie, embroidered slips and negligees and Chinese slippers. The big department stores were busy, too, and my father saw that once again, you could buy anything from the latest American lipsticks to rich Swiss chocolates at Sincere’s. There were also things he didn’t want to dwell on. Medical supplies and blood plasma were for sale because Chiang’s government had turned relief parcels from the American Red Cross into cash instead of distributing them by selling the goods to middlemen, who then resold them to anyone who could pay.