The Distant Land of My Father (22 page)

It seemed that most of the men had been taken from their homes, but some had been picked up off the street, and a few had just been yanked out of hospital beds. They were told they were “prominent persons and dangerous criminals,” but no one was certain what that meant, or what they had in common. There were bankers, businessmen, journalists, carpenters, engineers, perhaps forty ex-police, and a few seamen. There were two bishops (one a Methodist and the other an Irish Anglican) and two doctors (an Englishman named Andrew White and an American named Robert Anderson). There were a few known collaborators, presumably there to spy. At roll call and meals and command performances for Colonel Odera, my father kept looking for the connection, staring at the men around him as though they were a puzzle to be solved, asking himself the same question over and over again:
What did we do?

Barrows was a practical man, and he decided the first thing to do was to ask the colonel if he could telephone the American Association and arrange for food and supplies to be brought in for the camp until they were able to set up a kitchen. The colonel said yes, Barrows made the call, and the next day a lunch of sausage sandwiches was brought in. When the first delivery of supplies came two days later—a truckload of mattresses sent by the British Residents’ Association and on loan from the Shanghai Volunteer Corps—Barrows told Lieutenant Honda that it was both customary and necessary to give the driver a receipt for goods received. When Honda said that would be permitted, Barrows quietly wrote on the back of the receipt a list of what was needed next: blankets, pots and pans, toilet paper, soap. It was the first of many lists.

Barrows and Kelley then set about organizing the camp. They instructed each room to elect a room captain, who would attend weekly captains’ meetings with Barrows and Kelley, then report back to the men, so that they would be able to communicate quickly and efficiently. My father knew an American who had been a bugler in the Marine band, and he was quickly drafted into signaling meals, wake-up, and lights out. Morning roll call was at seven, followed by breakfast, which, for the first few days, was dry bread with glycine powder and weak tea. Later it was rice or a porridge made from cracked wheat, which Barrows managed to get for the camp through the Red Cross. The porridge had a nutty flavor that somehow wasn’t bad day after day after day, and my father was glad to get it. Lunch was stew or rice, dinner more of the same, or sometimes fish or fried eel, though the fish was often inedible. The only meat was slaughterhouse scraps that had been frozen in cubes and sent to the camp. It soon became apparent that the quality of the meat had an inverse relationship to the amount of garlic used in its preparation: the worse the meat, the heavier the garlic. And there was always weak tea, sometimes steeped from nothing more than garden lettuce.

Once food and supplies were on the way, Barrows and Kelley assigned jobs to everyone in camp. The jobs were classified as specialist and nonspecialist jobs. Specialist jobs included tasks like carpentry, electrical repair, plumbing, medical and sickroom duty, and cooking. Nonspecialist jobs were the everyday, not-an-option chores like kitchen detail, which involved cleaning and picking the worms out of the uncooked cracked wheat that had been left to stand too long.

The internees were fingerprinted repeatedly, and they were required to fill out form after form giving personal information and history, all of it on Municipal Council forms, as though these had been legitimate arrests. Photographs were taken for propaganda purposes, my father guessed, and the camp was often inspected by high-Gendarmerie officials. Internees were forced to bow to all Japanese officers and sentries, and to Colonel Odera when he arrived at the camp each morning. When, after one of the camp’s first attempts at bowing, the colonel was displeased with the result, Lieutenant Honda began conducting bowing practice just after roll call, forcing the men to bow a dozen times or more before they were permitted to line up for breakfast.

During the first week of December, the colonel said it was reasonable for the internees to expect visits from their families eventually. In addition, each internee would be allowed one parcel and one letter a month from families in Shanghai. This was good news until Lieutenant Honda set out the specifics. Visits would be limited to one ten-minute visit per year, with the supervision of the guards. Letters were limited to two twenty-five-word letters per year to families residing outside of China, and one letter per month to families still in Shanghai. All correspondence would have to be approved by the camp censor. My father was pessimistic about a letter actually finding its way to South Pasadena. Besides, what was there to say? What good news could he pass on? And so he didn’t write.

The only news the camp received was from the Japanese-controlled
Shanghai Times
and a shortwave radio that got scratchy reception of the Russian station in Shanghai. Those two sources kept the camp vaguely informed concerning the war in Europe, but they knew very little about things closer to home. Only news of Japanese victories was let through; any Allied progress against the Son of Heaven was censored both in print and on the air. In early December, the camp was barred and blockaded for air raid warnings, and Barrows and Kelley were informed that the camp was to be blacked out. Barrows protested strongly and explained to Honda that the blackout of an internment camp was absolutely contrary to international law, especially since the Swiss Consulate had not even been informed of the existence of the camp. Honda replied that two lighted Japanese hospital ships had been sunk by Allied planes and that it was the colonel’s solemn intent to protect the camp to the last man against the angry Chinese mob.

But the most galling of the colonel’s edicts had to do with money. Lieutenant Honda informed Barrows and Kelley that the internees’ home governments would be billed for all supplies that were brought into camp, including coal, wood, and food. My father and others were appalled. It was unthinkable that Japan would not provide for its prisoners, and the idea of home governments being forced to repay Japan for their internment was deeply upsetting. But the colonel was determined. Home governments would even be billed for heat, he said, and a portion of the amount billed would go toward heating the Japanese administration building at the camp. Many men said they would far rather be cold than do anything to provide heat for the Japanese.

At the start, there seemed to be only three circumstances in which a man would be permitted to leave camp: if his wife was critically ill and death seemed imminent; if his wife died, in which case he would be allowed to attend the funeral; or if the man himself was so ill that he required medical care beyond what the camp doctors could provide, a matter that the colonel and Lieutenant Honda would decide. An American banker suffered a heart attack, a Greek seaman contracted meningitis, and one of the bishops developed what the camp doctors were certain was a malignant growth. Each of those men was taken to an outside hospital, and each time it was a long job to convince the Japanese that he was truly ill, and that an ambulance was needed. And each time the man died soon after he reached the hospital.

But in early December, when they had been at Haiphong Road for a month, they learned that there was a fourth reason to leave camp. Early in the day on December 5, Lieutenant Honda sent for Barrows and my father and asked them to bring an American journalist named Peter Young to him. Young should bring his overcoat, the lieutenant added. When Barrows asked why Young was wanted, Honda replied only that he was being taken out for questioning by the gendarmes. Barrows then asked if Young was being taken to Bridge House, and Honda’s scowl told him he was correct.

Young was returned from Bridge House sixteen days later. The gendarmes said he was only submitted to gentle questioning, but when my father opened the door of the gendarmes’ car, the sight of Peter Young was terrifying. He was emaciated and could not walk. He was filthy, his hair and unshaved beard as matted as dead weeds. My father carried him directly to the internees’ clinic and the camp doctors.

My father had known Young before they were interned, and so the two camp doctors, Anderson and White, asked him to help with Young’s care. My father observed a changed man. He bathed and shaved Young, then fed him warm rice and gave him hot drinks, and although Young was incoherent for most of that first night, he did seem to know that he was being helped and was grateful. In the morning, after his clothes had hung on the line overnight, they were covered with hundreds of dead lice.

Young was at first hesitant to speak. The gendarmes had made it clear that he was not to talk about what had been done to him. But his silence was so anxious, and the look in his dark eyes so wild and panicked, that my father thought talking about it was the only way to calm him down. What happened in Bridge House had been a mystery for years, and it was with dread that my father listened to Peter Young for two days, gritting his teeth during the worst of it, trying not to react, giving Young fluids and trying to get some food in him, and to make him believe the lie that he was safe now.

And as he listened, he developed a new theory about why they were here. Maybe Young was not an isolated case. Maybe he wasn’t the only one who was wanted for questioning—he was just the first. Because perhaps that was what all these men had in common: they were all wanted for questioning by the Gendarmerie, and it was just a matter of time before each man’s turn came.

That winter was particularly cold. In a pile of trash in one of the rooms, my father found a thermometer, which he hung outside the office window. When he checked it each morning, he found the outside temperature was often below twenty degrees. For the first month there was almost no heat, but even when there was, it was inadequate, and a cold winter’s afternoon might find as many men as would fit sitting close together in the old greenhouse, where it was a few degrees warmer than the barracks. Many of the internees had chilblains, their hands and feet raw and red and inflamed from the cold and wet. But despite that and the freezing temperatures, the whole camp was often made to stand outside for half an hour or more for roll call, the quartermaster insisting that they remove their hats as a sign of respect as the Rising Sun was raised on the flagpole left by the U.S. Marines.

By January, when a man was told that he was to be taken to Bridge House, my father and others lost no time in filling his coat pockets with whatever they could imagine might help: biscuits, cigarettes, toilet paper, coins. Those who were returned were always in the same condition, emaciated and weak, with haunted expressions that made my father want to look away. Each of them was cared for in the same way that Young had been: a bath, a haircut and shave, something to eat, lots to drink, and the chance to tell someone who could be trusted about what he had been through. It all became routine, even in February, when nine men were brought at the same time.

Once again, my father worked at adapting. He learned to think about other things when Colonel Odera talked about the internees’ wives being able to visit soon, and he learned to smile and clap his friends on the back when they cheered at the possibility. He learned to eat fish he wouldn’t have touched a few months earlier, to force himself to choke it down no matter how it looked or smelled or tasted. At least it was food—protein at that, hard to come by. And he learned to make believe, for just a moment when he needed it, that my mother and I were close. In the pocket of one of the pairs of trousers he had packed on that hurried November morning, he had placed a photograph of us, one he had taken years earlier at the beach at Tsingtao. I was a toddler, gleeful and triumphant as I stood on sturdy legs on the sand next to my mother, her arm supporting me. I grinned wildly at the camera, and at my father holding it. My mother knelt on the sand next to me, giving me balance. Her wavy hair touched her shoulders, and she wore a tight long-sleeved sweater and a long full skirt that was tucked around her legs, except that the curve of one of her calves showed, lovely and graceful. The fitted sweater revealed the round fullness of her breasts, and the expression on her face as she stared hard at that camera, laughing and trying to hold me still, was all confidence. My father had carried the photograph in his wallet for as long as I could remember, and though as a child I did not know the words to describe my mother’s look, I knew it when I remembered it: she was sexy and young and beguiling in that photo, a woman any man would find appealing.