The Distant Land of My Father (36 page)

He was, in every way that I could judge, the exact opposite of my father, and as far as I could figure out, he was a safe person to love. Nevertheless, for the first few months, I fought my feelings for him. It was too early, I thought, I didn’t know him well enough. I was afraid that once I loved him, he would leave. And I didn’t want to make the mistake my parents had made, though I wasn’t even sure what that was. But I lost my fight. He was a sport I could not help but watch, and in the fall of 1949, I finally gave in and admitted that I was thoroughly in love with him.

I even knew when and how it happened: from ten o’clock to ten-fifty on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings in Josiah Royce Hall, where the two of us sat with some twenty-one other freshmen who’d also registered for English 51, American Literature—Realism to the Present. Jack Bradley sat in front of me during those first few weeks as we listened to passages from Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain and Henry James, all read to us and patiently expanded upon by Professor Edward Daniels, a man who clearly loved literature so passionately that at the start, I wanted to do well in the class only for him, because I could see how much he wanted us to love what we read. I listened hard and tried to take in all that Professor Daniels said, but I also took in Jack Bradley: the way the back of his chestnut hair was so neatly cut, and the one-of-a-kind graceful curve of his hairline at his neck, the solidness of his back and shoulders. As the days grew shorter and the semester wore on, Professor Daniels’s love for great writing got mixed up with my feelings for Jack Bradley. By the end, I loved them both, the words and the boy, and for the very first time since my childhood in Shanghai, a small hard knot inside of me began to dissolve—and I was happy.

the poor in spirit

ON A COOL NIGHT
in the third week of April of 1949, my father went for a walk along the Bund. It was sometime after three, and he’d been asleep in his office since midnight. He’d started sleeping there now and then, on a flimsy camp bed he’d set up near the window overlooking Yuen Ming Yuen Road. That small room had come to feel more like home than home did. The air smelled of cigar smoke and stale newspapers, comforting smells, and there were no reminders of the past there, nothing to make him think of my mother, or of me, or of Shanghai as it used to be.

When he woke that night, he found himself restless and unable to return to sleep, something that happened often. It was the silence that bothered him. He was used to noise in that part of the city—traffic and shouting, the sound of people talking and laughing and arguing—and the stillness made him anxious. He was stiff and groggy, and he decided to do what he had done most nights for the last month: take a walk while the city was quiet, for the hours before dawn were the only time when Shanghai felt familiar anymore. In the smoky night, he could walk along the Bund, still his favorite part of the city, and it was easy to remember why he had loved this place. He even liked the pungent, smoke-and-fish smell of the Whangpoo. It was one of the few things about the city that had not changed.

From his office, he followed his usual route, walking first to Peking Road, where he turned left, toward the Bund, intending to turn right at the corner and walk the length of the waterfront down to the Shanghai Club at Number 3. But for the first time in a month, he found that his familiar walk was not possible, for when he turned the corner, he faced half a dozen Nationalist soldiers who stood guard in a line across the Bund as matter-of-factly as if they did this every night. Their faces were expressionless, their stance no-nonsense. My father was curtly told that he could not pass, and that he was to leave the vicinity immediately.

My father faked nonchalance, nodding grimly as though he’d expected as much. He turned from the soldiers and walked purposefully away from them and toward the Garden Bridge, his head down, his hands jammed in the pockets of his worn herringbone coat, all the while wondering what in the world was going on. When he had gone two hundred feet, he glanced back and saw the sentries pointing toward the water, at what he didn’t care, as long as they weren’t watching him. When he reached the Public Garden, he stepped carefully onto dark wet grass and ducked under a cypress tree, then stood there for a moment, listening and waiting. But nothing happened. There was no yelling, no pounding of soldiers’ feet, so he decided to cut through the garden to the Whangpoo so that he could see what was up.

He headed toward the giant magnolia tree and the bandstand, eerie in the stillness of night. When he reached the riverfront, he faced south and stared toward the Bund, looking for what he didn’t know. Then he stared harder, trying to interpret what he saw: a line of coolies walking evenly from the Bank of China to an ordinary-looking freighter tied up across from the Cathay Hotel. Electric lanterns hung from the freighter’s masts, and in that wide golden circle of light he could see the coolies’ dark blue tunics, and the way they stooped from the weight of whatever was in the packages hanging from the bamboo poles they bore on their shoulders. As each coolie crossed the gangplank and reached the freighter’s deck, he was relieved of his load, and he methodically turned back toward the Bund.

The scene appeared at once both ordinary and bizarre. The coolies shuffled between the Bank of China and the freighter and back again, and the crew, too, seemed to be following a routine, moving around on the decks of the ship as though departure was imminent. There was no commotion, no shouting or hurrying, nothing but the fact of the middle-of-the-night darkness to signify the unusual. My father wondered if he’d overlooked some obvious explanation for this strange nighttime activity. Perhaps there’d been something in the paper. He glanced around him as though expecting a fellow bystander to explain, but he found only acacias and willows and white poplars leaning toward him, pushed by a woozy breeze from the Whangpoo.

He looked back at the coolies and the freighter, determined to make sense of what he saw, and as he stood motionless next to a monarch birch, he heard the strange rhythmic chant that coolies sing-songed as they worked. He’d heard the sound a thousand times, maybe ten times that. But never at this hour, never after dark, and the sound made the skin on the back of his neck prickle with apprehension.

Somehow the sound made things clear. Suddenly he knew; it was crazy, but here it was, right in front of him, and he let his breath out as he realized what he was seeing.
Chiang’s stealing the gold,
he thought, and he shook his head in amazement at the idea and that he had happened to be an eyewitness.

It was a few days before my father’s journalist friends could confirm his theory, but they did confirm it: Chiang Kai-shek had robbed the vaults of the Bank of China, taking the gold that belonged to China’s citizens, many of them his last Nationalist supporters, to help finance his retirement years in Taiwan. The seemingly ordinary freighter that my father watched that night was crewed by members of the Nationalist navy, men Chiang had carefully chosen. Also aboard were a handful of officials of the Bank of China, who had been bribed with the guarantee of safe passage in return for opening the bank’s vaults.

My father was amazed. Even though he’d felt that Chiang had at times acted brazenly since the civil war that had begun only days after Japan’s surrender in 1945, this was by far the most appalling of Chiang’s actions.

Chiang had lost much in those years. Thousands of Nationalist soldiers had defected to Mao’s People’s Liberation Army as it moved southward toward the Yangtze River. Chiang had fled first to Fenghwa, the coastal town to the south of Shanghai where he had grown up, and later across the China Sea to the safety of Taiwan. In January of 1949, Peking and Tientsin had fallen to the Communists without a fight, and in that same month Chiang retired. To my father, it seemed that the Communists took control of the country so quickly and easily that it was as though he had glanced up from his desk one day and found China permanently changed.

Although nearly four years had passed since the end of Japanese occupation, life was worse in Shanghai. Once again, it was a dangerous place. The Nationalist government, already corrupt, had become desperate, and a reign of terror had begun as the government tried to retain control of the city. An arrested man was guilty until he could prove his innocence; anyone accused of collaborating with the Japanese was taken to Bridge House for questioning, which usually lasted until money changed hands.

The city became a place of extremes. The shops on Nanking Road were busy, nightclubs filled. But so were the streets—with garbage, and refugees fleeing the civil war in the north. Most of the trams and buses had long ago broken down, and the ones that did run were packed with people. Traffic was backed up in the streets for blocks, but the police only stood on the corners and talked. Each night hundreds of people died on the streets from cold and starvation. Each morning municipal trucks made their rounds, gathering the bodies.

There was guerrilla activity in Hungjao, and my father found himself anxious and jumpy. Wanting at least the trappings of safety, he began to buy guns, at first a couple of .45’s and .38’s, and then a few carbines, and finally a small water-cooled machine gun that was a rarity. He had seen only one like it in the city.

By the winter of 1948 another exodus had begun, and my father once again found himself saying good-bye to friends. Foreign firms began closing their offices and either leaving altogether or moving to the safety of Hong Kong, and even foreigners who’d been determined to stay made plans to leave. Some went to Bangkok and Manila and Hong Kong to wait things out; others left with no intention of ever returning, selling the belongings they couldn’t take with them to the secondhand dealers on Peking Road.

While those around him packed and booked passage and said their good-byes, my father remained, believing again that the whole thing would blow over. He had guessed wrong with the Japanese, but the idea of China becoming Communist was too far-fetched. The United States would come through, he thought, or Chiang would regain his political strength, and even if those things didn’t happen, he couldn’t imagine the Chinese people truly embracing communism, a system that seemed to go against their whole way of family-centered life. So he figured he’d wait. He’d keep a low profile—a talent he’d developed to a science—and he’d keep making money. Shanghai was the only place he
could
make money anymore. He’d lost thousands thanks to the Japanese, and now he was making it back, and more. He’d even follow the rules, and in that vein, he got rid of his .45’s, his .38’s, his carbines, and his water-cooled machine gun, for the government had recently said that citizens had to turn in their guns. He didn’t want trouble, but he also didn’t want to give those guns to the Nationalists, so he took all of them except a .38, which he thought he could get a license for, put them into a gunnysack, and went out to the small pond in the back corner of the garden. It was late at night and the servants had gone to bed and the grounds were still as he took each gun from the gunnysack and dropped it gently into the water, making certain that it landed where the mud was deep. As he walked back to the house, he felt he’d made a good decision. He’d gotten rid of the guns, for now. He could retrieve them when all this blew over.

While he told friends that he had no desire to leave Shanghai, there was another part to it. Even if he’d wanted to leave, what would be the point? Where would he go? Who would welcome him? Everything he had was in Shanghai now. He’d exiled himself, and there was no going back.

My father would remember the spring of 1949 as a time of noise. On a cool day in February, he was startled by a disorganized racket of sound that included trumpets and cymbals and drums, and when he went outside, he found some thirty young men in the street, all playing their instruments at the same time, but all seeming to play different songs. The sound was horrible. When he asked the young bandleader who they were and what they were doing, the young man confidently gestured to his band with his baton and replied that they were from the Evening Star High School, and that they were practicing so that they would be able to give the People’s Liberation Army a proper welcome when it entered the city. My father suggested they practice elsewhere, but he was told that was not possible, and the noise started up again. And from that night on for the next three months, the band practiced in the street from eight to nine every night. My father routinely closed all the doors and windows of the house, stuffed cotton in his ears, turned the radio on as loud as it would go, trying to ignore the noise outside.

The People’s Liberation Army entered Shanghai on the night of May twenty-fourth. On the morning of the twenty-fifth, my father found long lines of People’s Liberation Army soldiers in blue-gray uniforms sitting on the curbs. They rested their rifles across their knees as though awaiting instructions and they remained that way until evening, when they retired to camps set up around the city. They refused all offers of food. They were clean and disciplined and in no way threatening. Nationalist troops had surrendered without a struggle, and my father watched from his window as Chiang’s troops left the city. The retreat seemed as though it would never end; for two days and one night, soldiers passed in rows of four, row after row after row, leaving the city as fast as they could, seeming to simply disappear.