The Distant Land of My Father (18 page)

On an afternoon in the spring, my grandmother was acting strangely at Vroman’s. She seemed to be hiding something, and although she frowned at me when I came near, telling me quite clearly that there was something she didn’t want me to see, I was more curious than afraid, and I stayed close. When we reached the cashier, my spirits fell. She had not asked me to choose a book, my punishment for being nosy, I thought. She was buying two books, and I hung back, hoping to redeem myself at the last minute. But it was too late; she paid for her books and took my hand and we left the store.

When we were in the car, she handed me her package. “These will get you started,” she said. “Go ahead. Open it, Anna.”

I unwrapped the brown paper and let my breath out slowly. And then I sounded out the titles:
The Clue in the Diary
and
The Secret of Red Gate Farm.
I looked to her for explanation.

“They’re about Nancy Drew,” my grandmother said. “I think you’ll like them. Your mother and I will read them to you at the start, but I have a feeling you’ll be sailing through them all by yourself before we know it.”

I only nodded and stared hopefully at the illustrations on the book covers. Each pictured the same young woman in the midst of some dangerous-looking situation. In
The Clue in the Diary,
she leaned over to pick up a diary from the grass; behind her, several firemen moved toward a huge white house in flames. I was fascinated, and I opened the cover and found another illustration. In this one, a man sitting forlornly in an armchair faced that same brave girl, while a woman leaned over him, speaking. That illustration had a caption below it, and I held it eagerly out to my grandmother, far too impatient to be bothered with sounding out the words.

“What does it say?” I asked urgently.

She smiled and took the book from me, then held it out in front of her, her trombone stance, she called it, because she wasn’t wearing her glasses. And then she read, “‘Don’t give in to Nancy Drew!’ his wife screamed.” My grandmother closed the book and handed it back to me. “Well, what do you think?”

I took the book and held it close. “Thank you,” I whispered, feeling as though I’d been given treasure.

I fell in love with Nancy Drew. Each afternoon and evening I pestered my mother and grandmother until they read to me, and when they tired of it, I pored over the book myself, though my progress was slow. The more I learned of Nancy Drew, the more I liked her, and I resolved to be like her, capable, confident, cheerful, loyal, never afraid, always on the alert. We even had something in common, a fact that I took as a good sign: we lived with only one parent. Her mother had died—I hadn’t yet learned how—and her lawyer father was raising her. I did not dwell on the differences in our circumstances. We were similar, I told myself, because we also shared this: we loved our fathers dearly.

Only hers was present, and mine wasn’t. I was certain he would come soon, but when? At first I’d expected him to appear any minute, and for a while, I asked my mother constantly when he would arrive. Again and again she answered that she didn’t know. She was sure he hadn’t been able to close down his business yet, she said, so it would be a while. “But soon?” I pressed. “Soon,” she said, and the edge in her voice told me not to ask more.

So we waited. My mother enrolled in the same type of accounting correspondence course my grandmother had taken a decade before, and she began to study, “just for something to do,” she said, insisting that it wasn’t for the money, since my father had provided for us well. I went to school and spent afternoons with my grandmother and rode the Big Red Cars with my mother to the movies and to Santa Monica beach and downtown. I even made a friend, and after that a few more, and when their mothers asked where my father was, I learned to say that he was away on business but would be here soon.

On the last day of school, I brought home all of my schoolwork in a big folder I’d made the day before, and my mother oohed and ahhed at how much I’d done, and how much I’d learned. I, too, was surprised when I saw it all in front of me. I had learned to print the alphabet and how to use periods, commas, question marks, and exclamation points. I had learned to carry when I added, and to borrow if I needed to subtract. I had learned that I lived in the city of South Pasadena, in San Gabriel County, and I had learned about the first Californians. I knew how they used what grew around them to survive. I learned about the yucca plant, and how the Indians made rope and sandals and mats and baskets, even soap from it, and how they boiled its buds and flowers and fruits to eat. I learned about manzanita and piñon nuts and mesquite beans, and how to crush dried acorns in a mortar, then bake them in unleavened cakes. I had even tasted the stuff and wished I hadn’t. I learned about Cortes, Cabrillo, and Sir Francis Drake, and about Father Junipero Serra and his twenty-one missions. And against my desperate protests that went unheeded, I had played a silent Indian girl in the school play,
Discovering California,
and I had learned how stage fright felt.

At home I had learned to do things that others had done for us in Shanghai: to clear the table and wash the dishes, to sort laundry into lights and darks before filling our Maytag washer, to answer the phone politely and ask who was calling, please. I had learned never to think about Chu Shih because it was too painful, because although I was sure I’d see my father soon, I had come to think that I might not ever see Chu Shih again. My mother talked often about my father coming here, but she never mentioned us returning to Shanghai.

I had also learned about my mother. During that year, I watched her so closely that I annoyed her at times, but I didn’t care; I wanted to understand why she was so different here from the way she’d been in Shanghai. She looked different, to start. She had cut her beautiful hair, and wore it just above her shoulders, and it was as soft and bouncy as the Breck advertisements she loved to show me in magazines. All of her elegant Shanghai clothes were zippered in garment bags in the back of her closet. No more cheongsams and tight, fitted dresses. Now she wore dirndls with wide, high waistbands, colorful Mexican cotton skirts trimmed with ruffles and embroidery, white cotton peasant blouses, and flat sandals. She painted her toenails the same deep pink as her fingernails and the new lipstick she wore—“Rose Doré by Max Factor,” she’d told me proudly—and she had freckles on her face and arms and legs from the sun. She didn’t carry a purse unless she had to. When she went out, she carried only a Lady Buxton wallet, with her keys attached to a key chain inside the billfold. She was so completely different from the way she presented herself in Shanghai that I felt embarrassed for her when we walked outside, as though she were walking around naked.

At the start, I thought that the person she was here was a mask, a sort of disguise she was wearing until she returned to Shanghai. My real mother—my Shanghai mother, with her beautiful, mysterious chignon and silk dresses and reserved composure—was there, somewhere. She was just hidden away from the chaos of this city of angles. I understood that, because that was exactly what I was doing at school, pretending I was perfectly at home in this brand-new place, just holding out until my father finally joined us.

But after a while I changed my mind. I decided that as far as she was concerned, we were home. While she mentioned my father often and wrote to him regularly and spoke about him with a certain fierceness, I mistook her steeliness for lack of caring, and I decided she didn’t really miss him.

At least not like I did. I didn’t just miss my father. I lacked him, and without him, I didn’t feel like myself. I was afraid that his absence showed on me somehow, and I thought of Shanghai’s beggars. My father had told me once about pain from phantom limbs, and I understood, for I, too, was a beggar now, missing not a limb or an eye or an ear, but a father, and here in this land that was supposed to expand my soul, I no longer felt whole.

lost horizon

ON A QUIET NIGHT
in January of 1940, my father ate dinner with Will Marsh at the Holland, a small Dutch restaurant in the French Concession. The night was very cold, and after dinner they walked quickly toward the Nanking Theater to see
Beau Geste,
their hands stuffed into their coat pockets. But as they turned down Avenue Edouard VII, they came upon a crowd gathered around a streetlight. It was just before nine, and they stopped to see what the matter was. It had to be something extraordinary for people to stand in the cold. When they managed to get close, they, too, stared hard. On the sidewalk, propped against the streetlight, was the decapitated head of a young Chinese man. The neck was still bleeding and there were drops of sweat on his brow. His eyes were open, his lips parted. A note in Chinese was tacked to the streetlight:
Take notice: here is what happens to journalists who write articles against the Japanese and Wang Ching Wei government. Stop your attacks, or you will su
ff
er a similar fate.

Will Marsh recognized the victim and told my father that he had disappeared several weeks earlier, and that he had been the assistant editor at
Shên Pao,
Shanghai’s largest Chinese daily, a newspaper that was critical of the Japanese.

My father and Will went into the first bar they came to. They didn’t talk about what they’d seen. It was well known that Chinese journalists who dared to speak out against the Japanese or the puppet government headed by Wang Ching Wei were in danger. They both knew of the most recent examples: A bomb thrown into the offices of a Chinese newspaper had killed newsboys and office coolies. Six hand grenades thrown into another window had destroyed a printing press. Severed heads and fingers were anonymously delivered to offices or homes, and only a few weeks earlier, the editor of the Chinese version of the American
Evening Post
had been shot in the back while having lunch at his regular spot, a German restaurant on Nanking Road.

Journalists weren’t the only victims of the city’s violence. In a part of the city called the Badlands, an area that was made up of the western residential section outside of the Settlement but north of Hungjao, assassinations had become common. Number 76 Jessfield Road, an old Tudor home with a high wall and heavy iron gate, was the residence of Tiny Du, Shanghai’s ruling gangster. Wealthy Chinese were brought there and forced to watch the torture of other prisoners until they agreed to buy their freedom, either by joining the puppet government or by giving the government money. Under the protection of the puppet administration, the Badlands’ brothels and gambling houses and drug dens thrived. Most of them were residences that had been owned by foreigners who’d left Shanghai; now they had names like the Peach Blossom Palace, Hollywood, Good Friend, and though seemingly established by Chinese gangsters, the places really belonged to the Japanese. Downstairs there was gambling. Upstairs were girls and opium pipes and Shanghai’s specialty, a pink opium pill that melted in your mouth like an after-dinner mint.

As the city changed, foreigners fell into two groups: those like my father, who were determined to stay, and those who were eager to evacuate. The U.S. State Department urged all Americans whose work in Shanghai was not essential to return to the United States, and even made passage available. Many of the foreign firms encouraged evacuation as well, cabling regularly from their head offices overseas, warning Shanghai residents of impending danger. Will Marsh was in a third category. He was more than ready to leave, but he worked at the American Consulate and said he could not leave in good conscience.

My father didn’t completely rule out leaving. He just kept putting it off. Shanghai was booming, and business was great. There was too much money to be made, too much opportunity, to just walk away. When would he find a situation like this again? So he figured he’d stay a little longer. In the summer of 1941, he closed up the house and moved into town, where he took a room at the American Club, on Foochow Road a couple of blocks from the Bund and his office. And although he felt safer there, he really didn’t think he was in any danger personally. His dealings with the Japanese would work in his favor. He was still selling them oil and gas, whatever they needed. As long as he was within American regulations, he saw no reason not to.