The Distant Land of My Father (11 page)

Not my father. He seemed numb. Each morning he came downstairs dressed as though he were going to his office, but when he opened the morning’s
North China Daily News,
he headed to the den instead of the car, and passed the morning and sometimes most of the day listening to the news from the radio. Eventually he might have Mei Wah drive him to his office, but he was never gone for long.

My mother’s response was exactly the opposite. She became busy, far busier than I’d ever seen her. Until then, she’d led a life of leisure, and it was something she did well. She might eat breakfast at the Del Monte, then lunch at the Cathay, with drinks first in the lounge. She went to the tea dances at the Palace Hotel and met my father for cocktails at the Cercle Sportif Français or St. Anne’s Ballroom, then cutlets à la Kiev and tea sweetened with strawberry jam at D.D.’s. Her evenings were filled with dancing at the Casanova or the Ambassador or the Tower to the music of Artie Shaw, or to the Filipino orchestra at the Venus Cafe, or in the clover-shaped ballroom of the Majestic Hotel. Bridge parties, garden parties, dinner parties. Summer evenings spent listening to the Municipal Orchestra at concerts in the Public Gardens on the Bund.

But now she was always occupied and usually distracted. She sat at the mahogany dining room table and polished the ornate silver tea service, a wedding gift from her parents, until its brightness startled me when I passed through the room. She took the drapes down and handed them to Chu Shih to take outside for airing, then she put them back up herself. She ironed our clothes, something I’d never seen her do, had not even known she could do. The first time I saw her doing it, I just stared.

“I’m not sure what you’re looking at,” she said evenly. “My mother taught me to iron, and it’s something I enjoy.” She sprinkled the white sailor collar of my dress with water, then pressed hard on it with the iron, making the collar hiss. “It calms me,” she added, and I knew enough not to ask more.

But after the first few startling days, my mother’s cleaning and polishing and ironing calmed me as well. I liked seeing her occupied, and as the city outside us grew more chaotic, the inside of our home grew more orderly by the day. I tried to believe my father’s regular dinner-table reassurance that everything was all right. It would all end soon, and life would be as it was.

In September, I started school at the Convent of the Sacred Heart in the French Concession. The children of most of my parents’ friends went to the Shanghai American School, also in the French Concession on Avenue Pétain, but my mother had insisted on Sacred Heart. And so, on the ninth of September, I put on my new white blouse and blue tie, the navy blue skirt and blazer, the skirt four inches from the floor when I knelt. I stood very still as my mother brushed and combed and braided my long hair, asking me questions all the while. Had I brushed my teeth? Did I remember Sister’s name, the one we’d met? Was I excited? Wouldn’t school be wonderful? I nodded when I could, and gave the briefest answers possible when I had to speak for fear that my voice would crack and my mother—or worse, my father—might see my terror. And then, finally, after throwing away my scone and American apple when my mother stood to get her jacket, I followed Mei Wah to the car.

There were many things to be afraid of at school; this was one of the few things of which I was certain. There were other children, for one. Our house was so quiet, I wasn’t used to being around children calling jokes and yelling to one another and laughing and running. I was also afraid of schoolwork. I’d heard stories about difficult endeavors like printing and cursive and subtraction, all of which seemed too much to master in only a few hours every day.

My nervousness did not prove unwarranted. School was a trial and a constant challenge in those first months. Maybe I was distracted and could have done better without the backdrop of a battle. As it was, I struggled in every subject, and I was always anxious at my desk. Each time Sister Terèse entered our classroom and whispered to Sister Matthia, I stared hopelessly at my lap, sure that I had done something wrong, that I had failed so miserably on some test or at some assignment that they weren’t even going to bother to return it to me, just show me out, and that would be that.

October brought more sandbags, more barbed wire, more Volunteers patrolling the streets, more Japanese troops. The whole city was dusty and grimy from the constant shelling, and it looked as though it were being carelessly dismantled, just knocked down with great blows. At home our meals changed. Chu Shih was a good enough cook that they were still substantial, but a meal with meat became an occasion, and fresh fruits and vegetables were rare. Foreigners continued to leave Shanghai. Again and again my parents said good-bye to American and British and French families who lived nearby, and the Settlement and Hungjao began to feel empty. We, apparently, weren’t going anywhere.

On a cold, still night in the middle of November, I woke to find my father in my room. He was standing at my window, looking out toward the city. There was something about the way he stood that alarmed me. I got out of bed and went to him, and when I took his hand and he looked down at me, I became afraid and said, “Are you sad?”

He smiled, barely. “Yes,” he whispered.

“Why?” I asked, also whispering.

He sighed and looked out the window again. “Something’s happened that I didn’t expect,” he said. “Shanghai has fallen to the Japanese. The Chinese general has ordered his soldiers to leave the city. Which means Shanghai is now controlled by the Japanese.” He looked down at me. “Do you understand any of that?”

I shook my head. I understood that my father had been wrong. More than that I wasn’t sure.

He did not speak for a moment. I knew he was still sad, and I wanted to stay there with him and keep him company, because I knew that being sad alone was worse than being sad with someone else. But I was so tired that I began to lean against him, almost falling asleep, and after a few minutes, he picked me up and carried me to my bed.

after the fall

A
STRANGE
THING
HAPPENED
after the fall of Shanghai. Despite the visible reminders of the battle—the city blocks of barbed wire, the sandbags and barricades, the patched-over, repaved streets and filled-in craters in front of the Great World and Wing On Department Store and the Palace Hotel—the Settlement and the Concession resurrected themselves almost immediately, and for foreigners, my parents included, life was once again good. Friends of my parents who had left Shanghai because of the battle, going to summer resorts like Peitaiho and Wei Hai Wei in the north, or to even further places like Manila and Hong Kong, decided the city was safe again, and began to return.

My father acted as though nothing had happened. He and my mother resumed their social life, dancing at the Cathay and the Ambassador, going to the Capitol Theatre to see Charlie Chaplin or Humphrey Bogart or Charles Laughton. He said the only thing that was different was the curfew, which meant that they had to be off the streets by 10
P.M.
The Japanese gendarmes and sentries who enforced the curfew were not to be fooled with. They stood guard at the exits from the Concession and the Settlement, and passersby were required to show their respect by bowing. I had seen those sentries, and the sight of their dark uniforms and antiseptic masks frightened me. Chu Shih reinforced that fear by telling me that if you failed to show sufficient respect—especially if you were Chinese—you were punished, even bayoneted. And just about anything was reason enough for a beating.

Soon after Japanese occupation, business resurrected itself, too, and before long Shanghai was booming. My father said the Bund was crowded with more trading vessels than he’d ever seen, and at dinner each night, he talked excitedly about new cotton and flour mills, about factories that produced just about anything you could name—hats and glassware, thermos bottles and flashlights, electric fans and cigarettes. He started to deal in raw materials that were brought in from the interior, Japanese-occupied territories, selling iron ore and coal, tungsten and antimony. He went to his office every day, and he received calls constantly at home, but if the dinner conversation ventured anywhere near the details of his business, he became wary, and my mother quickly asked me how school was. My father’s business had become a subject she didn’t enjoy.

I found my father’s excitement and optimism contagious, and when he said that things couldn’t be better, I believed him. So I was surprised and confused when my mother and I went into the city the first time after the Japanese had taken control. The city streets were not the same, and everything looked far from all right. Japanese sentries were everywhere, and people dressed in not much more than rags crowded into doorways, streets, sidewalks, even window ledges.

Things didn’t feel the same at all. I was more closely watched and Chu Shih was more insistent about locking the doors and windows at night. Hungjao, the area we lived in, became a no-man’s-land. Though officially outside the boundaries of the International Settlement, for all practical purposes Hungjao was part of it, except that the question of who had jurisdiction over it—the Chinese municipal authorities or the International Settlement—had never really been answered. But once the Chinese officials began leaving the city, the Japanese Military Police simply took charge, and their attitude toward Hungjao residents was an uneasy mix of resentment and admiration. There were frequent complaints of brutality at the hands of the Japanese, and residents were careful not to aggravate them. One evening I heard my father telling my mother a story he’d heard from Dr. McLain. That afternoon, he said, something in the hedge near Dr. McLain’s driveway had caught Mac’s eye. He’d thought it was some kind of animal, but when he went to investigate, he discovered the head of a Japanese soldier. He wasted no time in wrapping the head in a burlap sack and taking it to the Hungjao aerodrome, more neutral territory than his own backyard, he reasoned. He left it there behind the acacia bushes along the road. He had no idea how the head had gotten to his property. What he did know was that if the Japanese found it, there would be serious consequences for him.

When my father finished the story, my mother’s response was curt. “How much more proof do you need, Joe? This place is changed.”

My father ignored her. He refused to dwell on the darker side of Shanghai, and if my mother commented on any of it, he encouraged her to look the other way. He seemed to see plenty of reasons for optimism. Each evening when he came in from his office with news of someone else who’d come back, he told us with a smug, I-told-you-so edge to his voice.

“You see?” he said at dinner one night. It was November and I could hear the distant sound of foghorns on the Bund, a sound that always made me feel lonely. My father pointed his fork at me as though I’d invented evacuation. “We just had to wait it out, was all.”

My mother glanced at him, her eyes the deep rich brown color of the French coffee she drank every morning. You could stare at my mother’s eyes without meaning to. I saw people do it all the time. Then she lowered her gaze to the gardenias and pink roses that I had helped Chu Shih arrange in the center of the table that afternoon. She reached for her water glass, her silver bracelets clicking together as she moved, and though she said nothing, there was disagreement in the air.

In addition to the import-export business, my father started up in the insurance business again, adjusting claims for American Asiatic Underwriters. And he pursued a third line of work, smuggler. He had started smuggling tungsten in the early 1930s, buying it in the Chinese interior and selling it in Shanghai to businessmen from Hong Kong, the United States, Britain, and Japan. After tungsten, he smuggled in tires and newsprint and scrap metal. The scrap metal was easy, as it tied in with his insurance business. When he learned of a piece of machinery or a truck that had been destroyed, he simply offered to buy it for scrap from the owner. Selling it was easy. The Japanese were maintaining an army out of scrap metal, and had been doing so for years, buying it from the United States government, which shipped it on the American President lines right to Kobe Harbor. My father, on his trips to Japan, had seen whole shiploads unloaded, and talked of storage yards for scrap iron that covered square miles of land. And he had joined in, selling every bit of scrap metal he could get his hands on.

He was also smuggling yen. Although the Japanese government tried to prevent its currency from being taken out of the country, the foreign black market for yen was thriving. Before the occupation, my father had bought cheap yen in Shanghai or Peking, then traveled to Japan, where he could turn it back into U.S. dollars for a good profit. Traveling to Japan was no longer possible, but, more important, it wasn’t necessary. There were plenty of Japanese businessmen right in Shanghai looking to buy, and my father accommodated them gladly, bringing them one hundred yen notes strapped to his body and exchanging them for U.S. dollars or Shanghai dollars, either one would do. And although
what
he sold might change,
whom
he sold to never did: always the highest bidder, plain and simple, regardless of nationality. My father was not one to play favorites where money was concerned.