The Distant Land of My Father (6 page)

Two Chinese in dark blue trousers and tunics jumped from the car and stood on either side of my father. They spoke to him in Cantonese, their southern accents harsh, their words unrecognizable to me. My father tried to pull away, and he strained to look at me and said, “Run, find Mei Wah!” I didn’t want to leave him and I started to move toward him, but one of the men glared at me. His skin was terrible, so pockmarked that he looked diseased, and I backed away from him and watched, terrified, as he hit my father on the back of the head with the butt of a pistol, grimacing as though he were the one being assaulted. My father slumped and was shoved into the backseat of the car, and the two men pushed in after him, one sitting on either side. The door was pulled shut and the car drove away, the sound of its tires on the road a raw scratchy sound that tightened my throat and hurt my eyes.

I stood there, my heart thumping wildly in my too-small chest. I looked around Bubbling Well Road, expecting my father to reappear behind me or beside me or across the street, and I saw that people had stopped walking and were staring at me, as though they, too, were waiting for whatever was next. I was embarrassed. They seemed to think it was my turn now, that I was supposed to bring him back.

“He’s gone,” I whispered, hoping that those were the magic words.

Only seconds had passed, but the world felt different and I was suddenly cold. Then another car turned the corner, and I stepped back and leaned against the wall of the apartment building, feeling its cool roughness on my back through my dress. This time it was our car, and I let my breath out when I saw the long green hood and the bright white of Mei Wah’s turban. I wiped my hands on my dress and tried to see the humor in the trick my father had played on me, setting all that up, and I hoped I’d be able to laugh with him.

The Packard jerked to a stop in front of me and Mei Wah got out of the driver’s seat. “Come,” he said, and he took hold of my shoulders and pushed me roughly into the backseat. And then he was at the wheel and the car lurched into the street. He looked at me in the rearview mirror as we sped down Bubbling Well Road, and he shook his head.

“Where is he?” I asked, for the backseat was empty except for me. No father. No magic. No trick.

“Very bad,” was all Mei Wah said. “Very bad indeed.”

acrobats and vinegar

WE DROVE ALONG STREETS I
KNEW
, but nothing felt familiar. We crossed Chengtu Road and passed the American Women’s Club, where my mother often met friends for lunch. We crossed Yates Road with its lingerie shops, and we reached the apartment buildings where my parents’ friends lived—the Uptown, the West Gardens, Tiny Mansions, the Medhurst. But that day I could name none of them. At Avenue Haig I stared hard at the centuries-old cemetery and the Bubbling Well Temple and the Bubbling Well itself, all sources of good luck, I believed, simply because they were old and Chinese. I wanted Mei Wah to stop so that I could touch the water in the well, or leave something for Kwan Yin, the Goddess of Mercy, for it was said that she heard the cry of the world. But having anything to do with the Chinese gods was something my mother strictly forbade, so I said nothing.

Mei Wah sped by everything. We left the International Settlement through the Great Western Road exit, and Bubbling Well Road became Great Western Road. We turned onto Columbia Road and passed sprawling estates with latticed windows, Western homes made of sturdy brick, Spanish and Mediterranean villas with red-tiled roofs. We passed south-facing gardens that offered glimpses of tulip trees and lily magnolias and lion’s head camellias behind garden walls that were topped with barbed wire and shards of broken glass, and I knew that we were home.

Mei Wah turned the sharp corner of our driveway and barely stopped the car before he jumped from the front seat. He jerked my door open and lifted me from the backseat, then carried me quickly into the house. I held him tightly and his beard rubbed against my cheek as he ran.

He passed through the kitchen in a few strides, calling for Chu Shih, and when he rounded the corner and reached the cook’s bedroom, he rapped on the door and didn’t wait for an answer before he pushed it open and laid me on the bed. He said something to Chu Shih in rushed Chinese that I didn’t understand, and Chu Shih said,
“Shei?”
Who?

Mei Wah answered only,
“Pu chihtao,”
I don’t know, his voice gruff and angry. Then he hurried out and I was left in the dim light and quiet heat.

I had started to cry by then, wanting to follow Mei Wah and find my mother, partly for comfort, but also because I wanted to hear whatever it was that Mei Wah told her right now, which I knew would be the real story, and more than they would tell me later. But Chu Shih turned and started mixing something on the electric burner he kept in the corner of his room, his large back to me. When I sat up, he made a clucking sound and patted the air next to him as though it were a bed.
“Pu tung,”
stay put, he said, and I lay back on his bed.

He was making something to soothe me. Every Saturday he went to the Old Native City’s Chinese pharmacies, where he bought things he believed in, medicines and herbs and fairy-tale ingredients that possessed healing powers, things with names like toothed-bur clover and coltsfoot, shepherd’s purse and Chinese angelica, names that were too strange and wonderful to be made up. It was Chu Shih who seemed made up, a kind and magical giant. He was from the north and was huge, over six feet tall and more than two hundred pounds. He was never afraid, and when he entered the room, he always looked as though he was sure you’d be glad to see him. I never knew his age, but he seemed old and strong and wise.

I lay on his bed and watched as he worked in silence, leaning over the cramped corner where he’d set up his private kitchen, his short blue cotton jacket the size of one of my coats, his black trousers immense as tablecloths. Finally he turned and came toward me with a steaming cup, the porcelain so thin that the rim was translucent.

I sat up and took a deep breath. I was still crying, mostly the crying that comes at the end of fatigue and fear. Chu Shih cleaned my face with a cool, damp linen towel that smelled of lemon and cucumber. Then he looked at me for a long moment, his eyes sad, his expression worried, and he whispered a word I didn’t know. I shook my head. He tried another; no again. We always spoke in bits and pieces, our own blend of English and Mandarin, a language that worked fine in our day-to-day lives. But it was clear that we didn’t have words for what had just happened.

He thought for a moment and stared hard at me, as though he was playing a game and was searching for a clue. And then he said,
“Hsiao t’ou,”
thief.

“Hsiao t’ou,”
I repeated. I knew the word, but not what he was saying.

Chu Shih nodded back at me.
“Hsiao t’ou,”
he said more urgently, and then he added, “
Hsiao t’ou
take your father.” He smoothed my hair awkwardly, something he’d never done before, and I thought he must have seen my father do it.

I let my breath out, the only sound in the room. He was telling me that my father had been kidnapped.

Chu Shih handed me the cup, and I sipped the tea, the same tea he’d made for me when I fell from the second branch of the Chinese magnolia in the backyard the year before and broke my arm. I tasted ginseng and rose oil, licorice and saffron. It was warm and sweet and smelled vaguely floral, and I drank it without hesitating. Chu Shih had cured me of stomachaches and toothaches and tiredness and fever, and I knew enough to do what he said.

When I finished the tea, I lay down again and stared at the few soft stripes of afternoon light that managed to make their way through the wooden blinds. Chu Shih was back at his burner, fooling with the teapot and putting things away, but I knew he was only trying to look busy while I was, he hoped, falling asleep.

“My mother,” I started, but Chu Shih shook his head.

“She will come,” he said. “Later.”

I reached into my pocket and found the small cardboard box, my purchase from the afternoon, which seemed like at least a day ago. I opened it and took out the elephant, and held him up to the light. He looked brave, I thought. There was no telling what a beast as brave as he could do. I touched his trunk and put him on the table so that I would not harm him by holding him too tight. And then I fell asleep.

When I woke, the strips of light were gone, and the room had the dimness of the last minutes of day. Though I didn’t feel hot, I was damp from sweat and my chest felt tight, as though something were binding me. I started to sit up and saw, on the blackwood table next to Chu Shih’s bed, the teacup, filled again. I picked it up carefully, my hands shaking, and drank the lukewarm tea.

I heard Chu Shih sounds in the kitchen, the soft scraping and padding of his cotton shoes on the quarry tile floor, the sound of a wooden spoon on a ceramic bowl, the sharp sound of slicing on the butcher block, and I got up from the bed and went to find him.

The kitchen smelled of ginger and scallions and garlic. Chu Shih stood at the sink. When I came in and stood next to him, he set a piece of sesame bread in front of me, and I realized I was starved.

He was making
chiaotzû,
steamed dumplings. I watched as he dropped minced ginger into a metal bowl and combined it with what would be the filling for the dumplings: ground pork, shredded cabbage, green onions, eggs to hold everything together. He shook in soy sauce and sesame oil, salt and pepper, half a cup of oolong tea that he’d steeped hard and strong, especially for this, and the smell got better and stronger, so that all I wanted was to eat one
now.
Last was a dash of sherry, which he added to most of what he cooked, a trick my mother had taught him, like adding coffee to chocolate to make the taste stronger.

“I can help?” I asked.

He nodded toward the huge maple worktable in the middle of the room.
“Tso,”
sit, he said, and though he was stern, I understood that he wanted me to stay.

I sat down on one of the worn stools and Chu Shih dropped a handful of flour onto the table in front of me, where it made a small
poof!,
then settled. I smoothed it into a circle, the table cool and hard and solid against my palm, then I rubbed flour between my hands as though it were talc. Chu Shih sat down next to me and floured more of the table, then took a ball of dough from a ceramic bowl and began to flatten it, first with his huge hands, then with the rolling pin, back and forth, back and forth, his motions even and controlled. When the dough was rolled almost as thin as paper, he turned a teacup upside down and began cutting out circles with the rim, his wrist making quick, sharp turns. Then he slid the circles—the skins, we called them—toward me, one by one. I picked each one up and held it carefully in my palm while I put a forkful of the filling in the middle. Then—this was the hard part—I folded the circle into a half circle, and pinched the edges together hard, the way you would the edge of a pie crust, turning the half circle into a crescent as I worked. When I finished, I set the fat moon-shaped dumpling on a metal tray in the middle of the table and started another.

We worked that way in silence. A few times I thought I heard steps in the rest of the house and I looked at the door, waiting for someone to enter, but no one did, and each time Chu Shih nodded sharply at the
chiaotzû
I was making, telling me to pay attention to what I was doing.

I understood that we were waiting. It was common knowledge, even for a child: after someone had been kidnapped, you waited until you heard what to do next, and then you waited until the person you loved was finally home. That was how it worked. I knew about kidnapping the way I knew about beggars. It was part of life, so much so that I was never allowed to go anywhere alone. I had heard stories since I was small. The stories that frightened me most were about young girls who were taken by troupes of acrobats and forced to drink vinegar to soften their bones and make their spines more supple so that they would be better performers. Or girls who were taken to brothels, which I took to be a mispronunciation of “brothers,” and I wondered what had made the brothers so evil that they would kidnap their own sisters. I was taught to be wary of all of the everyday strangers around us: hotel boys, theater ushers, waiters, flower girls, newspaper sellers, coolies,
mafu,
carriage men. No one was trustworthy; anyone could be a
fahsiong,
a trafficker, literally “father-brother,” someone who was cunning and ruthless and patient, who might abduct a female and sell her. A woman was called a
t’iaotsû,
or item, a girl was a
shiht’ou,
or stone, and once she’d been taken, her abductors would hide her in a bakery or barbershop or who knew where until she could be sold and forced to “sell her smiles,” another phrase I took literally.

At the time my father was kidnapped, the most common victims were wealthy businessmen like him, men who were blindfolded and carried off in broad daylight. Kidnappings were reported almost every day in the
North China Daily News.
I heard my mother relay those stories to my father when she thought I was out of earshot, stories that fascinated me as much as they frightened me. A broker from the Shanghai Stock Exchange was taken while buying stamps, the owner of the Buick agency on Nanking Road was whisked away while leaving the Empire Theater. The kidnappers could be anyone: members of the Red Gang or Green Gang, who could be told apart by how they held their cigarettes; or outlaws; or political extremists like the Blue Shirts, who were ultra-loyal to Chiang Kai-shek and threatened anyone who dealt with the Japanese or the Communists. Many of the city’s affluent businessmen simply took the threat in stride and hired bodyguards, menacing White Russians or bulky Chinese boys from the country, a practice my father viewed as showy and unnecessary, nothing more than a way to get “great face.” He depended solely on Mei Wah, a strategy that, until now, had worked just fine.