The Distant Land of My Father (5 page)

A waiter handed my father a menu and he read what he thought I might like. When he finished and I said nothing, he laughed softly, for he realized I was overwhelmed. He ordered barbecued chicken for both of us, a lemonade for me, a Clover beer for him, and he told me I was in for a treat.

We’d just been served our food when we were joined by Will Marsh, a friend of my father’s who worked for the American Consulate in Shanghai. He was at our house often, and was my favorite of my parents’ friends because he always acted more like he was my friend, too. That day at Jimmy’s, he smiled at me and held out his hand, and I gripped his hand the way my father had taught me—“no cold fish, now, all right, Anna? A good strong grip is how you do it”—and I looked Will Marsh in the eye and smiled at him, and I saw the pleasure and approval that my apparent confidence brought to my father.

Will sat down across from us. I didn’t know if my father was hand-some—he mostly just looked like my father—but I knew Will Marsh was. He looked like a movie star, confident and friendly and tall and strong, with thick dark hair and brown eyes, and I was always a little in awe of him.

“Tell me what’s new in the land of Hungjao, those great western suburbs, home of the wealthy taipans,” he said, and he smiled.

I licked barbecue sauce from my finger and blinked tears from my eyes. I had a paper cut, and the sauce stung sharply. But I thought about home, and I tried to come up with something interesting, something adult. The yen came to mind, and I looked at my father, who seemed to read my thoughts and frown. “We planted a new Chinese elm,” I offered.

Will feigned amazement. “No kidding. Another addition to that Public Garden you call a backyard?”

I smiled, pleased for my father. “It’s beautiful,” I said, “but noisy.”

Will leaned forward. “How so?”

“The cicadas,” I said.

My father nodded. “They seem to consider us home. A whole city of them.”

Will shrugged. “That’s easy enough. You need a batch of cicada killers.”

I smiled at his teasing, picturing soldiers armed with nets, but he was serious. “No, they’re digger wasps, and they kill those noise-making cicadas, then use them for building up their nests. That’s what you need, all right.”

I frowned at the idea of importing wasps. Will gave my father a sidelong glance and said in an offhand way that I associated with adults, “But you can’t blame those cicadas for moving in with you out there. That’s quite a spot. Sounds to me like the Schoenes will be there for a hundred years, give or take.
They’re
not leaving Shanghai.”

I took this as more teasing, but when I looked at my father, he wasn’t laughing.

“You’re right about that,” he said simply. His voice was flat, his mouth a straight line.

“Still? Even with Thursday?” Will turned his full attention to my father, and I understood that the conversation had turned adult, and that I was no longer part of it.

My father shrugged. “A skirmish is supposed to make me pack my bags and walk away from my business? I don’t think so.”

Will glanced around the crowded restaurant, and when he looked at my father again, his eyes were intent. “You’re nuts, you know that? Everything’s changed, and you’re a fool if you don’t admit it. Shanghai’s not going to bounce back this time. There’s a lot more at stake here.”

My father finished his chicken, then stared at his plate, checking, I knew, to see if he’d missed anything. He always cleaned his plate and picked bones clean. Then he glanced at me, trying to gauge how much of the conversation I understood, which wasn’t much, though he had tried to explain things to me. The day before, he had told me that a war might be starting, but that it was far, far away, and that it wouldn’t affect us. He said there would be a lot of talk about it, but I wasn’t to worry because we were safe and sound. Nothing would change.

On July 7, just a few days before, there had been a skirmish that became known as the Marco Polo Bridge Incident. It didn’t sound like much at first, just another border incident, people said. The Marco Polo Bridge was an arched stone footbridge in the village of Lukouchiao, twenty miles west of Peking. The bridge stretched nearly two hundred and fifty yards across the Yungting River, with three hundred marble lions set along either side of the bridge. Reports about exactly what had happened were confused and contradictory, but the gist of it seemed to be that Japanese soldiers had crossed the bridge, then refused to budge, forcing Chinese militia to fire on them and giving the Japanese a pretext for invasion.

Will leaned closer to my father. “I’m telling you, Shanghai isn’t going to stay peaceful. That may mean a lot of trouble for us, or it may just mean inconvenience, but either way, we’re about to become onlookers of a war. With box seats, no less.”

My father laughed in a way that sounded good-natured but that made me nervous because I heard the disagreement in his tone. “But don’t you see? Onlookers, you said, that’s exactly it. No matter what, we’re just privy to a family squabble, all from a very comfortable guest room called the International Settlement. We mind our manners, we don’t favor one side over the other, we politely look the other way when it gets nasty. This is between the Chinese and the Japanese. It’s not our concern.” He took a long drink of beer. “And by the way, the Japanese will never make it this far south. That’s a long way. A few units in Peking are no reason to leave. It just won’t happen, not on the scale some of these guys are talking about anyway.” He looked at me then, and I must have looked worried, or at least puzzled, because he winked and added, “I won’t let it.”

Will said only, “You’re an optimist.”

My father laughed. “Wrong. I’m a businessman. And I don’t make money by leaving my place of business.”

Will said, “In that case, you’re a fool. Or else you’ve got a good reason to stay.”

My father gave Will a careful look. “Now, that’s a funny thing to say.”

Will shrugged. “I’m just talking about your business, Joe. What did you think I meant?”

My father’s face reddened.

Will went on. “Because I just can’t figure out what else it would be, what else could keep you here, and I just wonder. What kind of hold does this place have over a guy like you?”

My father shifted in his seat. “It’s got no hold,” he said, “and I still say it won’t happen. It’s a lot of talk is what it is, people overreacting. I’m dealing with the Japanese, I’ll keep dealing with them, and any high-minded somebody who doesn’t is throwing money away. I’ll sell them whatever I can—newsprint, oil, insurance, Dodge trucks, for crying out loud—just as long as I’m not breaking any rules. What are you saying, that I’m supposed to shut down and stop making money because a few shots were fired on a bridge?” He shook his head. “The Communists are the ones to worry about,
they’re
the danger here. Bunch of bandits. The Japanese are just guys like us, out to make a buck.”

“Or a yen,” I said suddenly. Will laughed. My father silenced me with a look.

Will took a box of Craven A cigarettes from his shirt pocket, shook one out and lit it. And then our table was silent for a long moment.

“You want an answer?” my father said finally.

Will nodded. “As your friend, yeah, I’d like an answer. What keeps Joseph Schoene in Shanghai?”

My father lit a cigarette, then inhaled deeply and held the smoke in as though it were the answer, then exhaled slowly toward the ceiling, nodding. “Business,” he said flatly. “My business and none of yours.” And he stood to leave.

He was quiet as we walked down Nanking Road, and I worried that he knew what I’d done. The folded yen made a wrinkle under the thinness of my cotton sock, a rough spot that was like an accusation, and I had to fight the urge to blurt out my secret and make amends. But I wasn’t worried enough to confess. The yen felt like a treasure, and I wasn’t going to give it up. If my father noticed my worry, he didn’t let on, and I was glad of his inattention, a first. After a while, I stopped thinking about it so much and gave in to the distractions of Nanking Road.

Nanking Road was Shanghai’s biggest shopping street. My father said it was the biggest shopping street in China, a claim I never doubted. The whole street felt like a festival, with shop banners of scarlet and gold and white hanging like oversized streamers, a place where the storefront windows held anything you could name: hand-sewn silk underwear, Japanese wedding kimonos, electric razors, newspapers from all over the world, cashmere sweaters, porcelain, pottery, jeweled opium pipes, pianos. The first few blocks were mostly Western offices and stores—Kelly & Walsh, the American Book Shop, Whiteway & Laidlaw, the American Drug Company, the Chocolate Shop. My father had learned to fox-trot and tango and peabody at the Arthur Murray Dance Studio—a concession to my mother, who loved to dance—and earlier that week he’d taken me to see
The Gold Diggers of 1937
at the Grand Theater.

But after a mile or so, the street became Chinese. One shop sold only chopsticks, another silk umbrellas, another lamps and lanterns, and another only walking sticks carved from wood, or bamboo, or rattan, or willow. My mother bought silk at Lao Kai Fook, the colors so deep they looked like wet paint. When she’d chosen one, a clerk in a long gray gown would nick the fabric with round-handled scissors, then rip it straight across, the sound like that of paper tearing. The Chinese department stores were there, always crowded and noisy. Wing On was famous for its linens and tablecloths and sheets, but there was also Sun Sun & Sincere, where you could buy anything from anyplace—French perfume, Scotch whiskey, German cameras, English leather, Chinese pajamas and slippers and silks.

That day my father let me wander in the shops, an indulgence since he himself wasn’t much of a shopper. The only time I knew of him shopping had been the year before, when the English department store Lane Crawford had closed. They’d had a huge liquidation sale, and my father became their best, if unlikeliest, customer, going every day as though shopping that sale were his employment. He picked out tailored serge suits, wool sport coats and trousers, cashmere sweaters, shirts and Jaeger underwear and silk ties by the dozen, leather loafers and wing tips. On the first day, when he came to the counter with an armload of clothing, he talked a clerk in the men’s department into letting him use one of the huge drawers behind the counter for his stash, and every day, as the prices went down, he added to it. When he finally brought everything home after settling up and loading the trunk of the Packard with his purchases, my mother had laughed as Mei Wah brought in box after box. “Now,
that’s
shopping,” she’d said, and my father had turned to her and said seriously, “No, it’s business.”

It was a few minutes before two when we reached Tibet Road, where Nanking Road became Bubbling Well Road. We were to meet Mei Wah where we always met him, in front of the Park Hotel, the tallest building in the East, taller than any of the buildings on the Bund. The Park was across from the Race Course and the Public Recreation Ground, a huge park with a swimming pool, a golf course, a baseball field, tennis courts, and probably more, though I didn’t know what.

The Park was a little more than a mile from the Bund, a long walk for me, and I was dragging. My father asked me to hurry up—Mei Wah would be waiting for us, he said—and I tried to. When we got to the corner and my father looked at his watch, he said we were a few minutes early, and there was no sign of Mei Wah.

“Have a seat, Anna. It won’t be long. You can watch the birds.” My father nodded toward a stone bench under a willow tree a few feet away, and I sat down in the shade gratefully, glad to be out of the sun. The bird men were out—that was what I called them, mostly old men who owned pet birds and liked to air them in the early morning and afternoon in the summer and spring. But I was too tired to take much notice of them.

I held a small wooden box in my hand. Inside was my one purchase, a tiny elephant carved out of ivory. It reminded me of the elephant on my father’s chop. Mei Wah had told me that in India elephants were good luck, especially if the trunk was raised, as this one’s was. Now the elephant was wrapped in cotton wool and packed in a small box, which I held carefully.

I’d decided on the elephant at lunch. My father’s tone of voice and the accusatory look on Will Marsh’s face had given the day the frayed-edge feeling of worry. I didn’t like arguments, and as I sat on the bench, I concentrated on home as a way to make the worried feeling go away. I imagined the coolness of our house. I knew that when we got there, my father would pour himself some Scotch and go out to the verandah. I knew he would not want to talk, that he would want to be alone. I knew that my mother would have bathed. She would be wearing the deep blue silk kimono that my father had brought her from Osaka last year, and her hair would be swept up on top of her head instead of coiled at the base of her neck, her only concession to the heat. She would smell of lavender and Cashmere Bouquet, the only soap she used, and she would be sitting in the study, reading
Life
or
The Saturday Evening Post,
and listening to
Let’s Dance,
an NBC Network program that the American radio station in Shanghai carried. She liked the Latin music. I would sit with her on the cool leather sofa and show her my treasure, and tell her about our day.

None of those things happened.

A car turned onto Bubbling Well Road at the corner. The sun made it hard to see, and I stood, thinking it was Mei Wah. My father was several feet away from me, right on the corner so that he was in plain sight, and he squinted at the car and shaded his eyes, then looked at his watch.

The car came closer, and I saw that it wasn’t my father’s dark green Packard. It was a black sedan, solid and imposing and modern looking, and it slowed as it neared us. Then it stopped at our corner. My linen dress was limp and I tried to smooth the wrinkles out, thinking these must be friends of my father’s and that I would be introduced and expected to shake hands and be polite. But when the back door opened, my father’s expression changed from annoyance to surprise.