The Distant Land of My Father (28 page)

The transformation of our garden was already well under way by the time my mother got home that afternoon. I was pulling up grass in the back corner when I heard the back door open and close. I looked up in time to see the surprise on her face, and I saw the dismay as well. If my father saw it, he gave no notice. He called to her that we’d found something to do with ourselves and that we were doing it for her, so she’d have beauty just outside her window. Then he went back to work, and that was that. My mother stood watching him for a moment, and when I met her eyes, I saw an expression that had become familiar since my father’s return, a mixture of resignation and affection and worry.

At the start, the afternoons I spent out there were for him, so that I wouldn’t hurt his feelings. When I got home from school I found him watching for me, eager to show me what he’d done that morning, or what he planned to do next, and I said how different it looked already, then I changed out of my school clothes and into old jeans and went to work with him. But soon I began to look forward to being out there with him, not just for him, but for myself. The place really did begin to change, and my father began to change as well. He filled out and looked more his age, and, for the first time since his return, he seemed content.

My grandmother drove us to the nursery, my father with his gardening books in hand, and he would ask what might work where. Strangely enough, many of the plants that had thrived in Shanghai would grow well here, despite the fact that we were half a world and an ocean away, and we started with those: wisteria and camellias, bougainvillea, gardenias. My father added red geraniums, which I wasn’t crazy about, but which he loved because of their brightness—and which I grew to love because of him. We planted small Chinese blue column junipers along the back fence for privacy. My father said that they’d come in handy at Christmastime because we could make wreaths from the cuttings.

Along the side were the roses. Everything else he let me work on, but the roses were his, and he attended to them as though they were his life. “To grow roses isn’t difficult, Anna,” he told me. “But you have to follow some rules. You have to buy varieties for your climate. You have to buy the best plants available, number one grade. You have to locate and plant them properly. And you have to attend to their needs: water, nutrients, pest and disease control, pruning.” He taught me how to plant a bare-root rose, and I watched as he soaked it and dug the hole with a cone of soil in the middle, and then how he spread the roots over the cone so that they would fit it without bending, and how he placed the plant so that the bud onion was just above the soil level. He was protective of the roses in the extreme, and if I wanted to so much as cut a few buds for the table, he supervised, showing me exactly where to cut. When he pruned them back and I argued—rare—he reassured me that they would grow all the better because of it.

By late summer our garden was filled with roses. Pink and red China roses grew along the back, the flowers huge and heavy, and their old rose fragrance so strong that I smelled them as soon as I stepped outside. Climbing roses and miniature ones grew along the fence, and across from them were white damask rose shrubs. Light pink sweetheart roses grew next to the patio, for me, he said, so that I’d always see them first thing. And in the corner was a small shrub called Father Hugo’s rose, the golden rose of China, my father’s favorite. There were always roses on our kitchen table, and I often found a rose in a juice glass on the desk in my room. I came to think of that summer as a whole summer of roses, like a summer of gifts, one after the other, with my father at the center.

That fall I started eighth grade, my second year at the junior high. In those last weeks of summer, I came to believe that eighth grade was going to be a good year. We weren’t the youngest kids at school anymore, we knew our way around, and the older boys—the ninth graders—now and then took an interest in the eighth-grade girls. I looked forward to it as a year of increased independence and possibility, and as my first whole year in school with my father home. I planned on showing him off whenever I could, at school plays and Back to School Night and PTA meetings, whatever I could get him to attend.

In those first weeks of school, my father’s garden had a lot of com-petition for my time and attention, and I often begged off from working outside. My father waved away my reasons and went out by himself, and I felt like a traitor, but I did what I wanted anyway. I went to junior-varsity cheerleading tryouts and to the Rialto with girlfriends and met groups of kids at Fosselman’s after school, especially if I thought a boy named Skip Mitchell would be there. I had told no one of my interest in him, not even my best friend, Heather, because I was certain that I was in love with him, and I was worried about finding my true love at such a young age. He sat across from me in math, and my heart beat faster when he asked to borrow my eraser, a ruse, I hoped, to talk to me.

On a Tuesday afternoon in late September, I found my father sitting in the shade of the pepper tree outside, sipping a glass of water. He smiled when he saw me, and he motioned to the back corner of the yard, where a hole had been dug. Next to it stood a small eucalyptus tree in a nursery container. I looked at it, then at my father, and waited for him to explain.

“I thought we’d try a eucalyptus back there,” he said. “What do you think?”

I put my books on the patio chair and went and stood next to him. “You said eucalyptus was too temperamental.”

He shook his head. “You have to plant them right, is all. How they’re planted affects their growth for their whole lives. They have to be in good condition and you have to start with a vigorous plant. You don’t want any can-bound roots. But I think we can manage those things, no?”

I nodded. “And if I’m not mistaken, you like eucalyptus. In Shanghai, when you were little, you liked the way they smelled after the rain. And you liked the color of their leaves, and the smoothness of their bark.”

“I love them,” I said, surprised that he remembered things I had nearly forgotten, and even more surprised that he was mentioning Shanghai. He had never talked about what had happened to him there, or even what our lives had been like before the war, and the few times I had dared to ask, he had waved my questions away.

“Well, this is a good one. It’s
Eucalyptus nicholli,
a Nichol’s willow-leafed peppermint gum, a perfect garden tree.” He stood then, and I followed him to the small tree. It
did
remind me of Shanghai: its narrow leaves were a light green, barely tinged with purple. There were a few small white flowers, and its bark was light brown.

I touched the slender trunk and said, “It’s so soft.”

My father nodded. Then he plucked a leaf and rubbed it between his fingers and held it to me. “Smell,” he said.

I breathed in. “Peppermint,” I said.

“You like it?”

“I love it.”

He smiled, pleased, and then he stared at me for a moment in a way that looked so serious that I wondered if I’d done something wrong. But all he said was, “I’m taking a picture of you up here,” and he tapped his head. “You’re getting prettier all the time. Did you know that?” I felt myself blush and he laughed, and I wondered if I had imagined the sadness in his voice. And then he said something in Chinese,
“His hua hua chiehkuo, ai liu liu ch’êngyin,”
and although I didn’t remember the meaning, the sound of the words was familiar. My father looked at me carefully. “Do you remember?”

I hesitated, willing myself to remember. “Almost. I think Chu Shih said it when he pruned the roses.”

My father nodded and smoothed my hair. “That’s right. Seems like a hundred years ago.”

“What does it mean?”

“‘Love and attention make all things grow,’” he said, and I nodded, for I did remember once he said it.

We took turns digging. After nearly an hour, he finally said he thought the hole was deep enough. “Hold the can, Anna, and I’ll take the tree out.”

I knelt and held the edges of the can as my father jostled and pulled and finally slid the base of the tree and then its roots from the can. Then he set the tree on the ground and knelt next to it. “A little root-bound,” he said under his breath, “but we can fix that.” He told me to turn on the hose a little and bring it over, and when I did, he gently rinsed the soil from the tree’s exposed roots. Then he told me to shut off the hose and he said, “Do what I do, like so,” and he began to spread the roots out, gently untangling them the way you would wire, and arranging them in a sort of fan shape coming out from the tree’s center. “This will help,” he said.

We worked at the roots like that for perhaps ten minutes, both of us on our hands and knees. He was humming something, and I smelled sweat and Vitalis and Black Jack gum. Finally he sat back on his heels and looked at the roots. “Looks about right,” he said, and he stood and brushed his dirty hands on his already dirty khakis. “I think we’re ready,” and he picked up the tree near the base of its trunk and lowered it carefully into the hole. “Fill her in,” he said. We knelt again and gently pushed moistened soil into the hole, surrounding the roots, pushing in more soil, gently packing it down.

“Now we’ll water,” my father said finally, “and she’s on her way.”

He turned on the hose and handed it to me, and I stood next to the tree, moving the hose around the trunk, trying to make sure that water soaked in evenly. He watched for a moment, then nodded his approval. “Little by little, you see, Anna? This will be a good tree for you. Vigorous, durable. Your own peppermint tree. It can remind you of Shanghai, of the good parts.” And then he said he was going inside for a drink of water.

“I’ll come in a minute,” I said, “I just want to look for a while.”

He nodded and looked around the garden. “I know what you mean,” he said. Then he went inside.

When I’d soaked the base of the tree, I turned off the water and coiled the hose next to the house the way my father had taught me. Then I sat down on the step and took a deep breath. My hands and knees were caked with dirt, and it felt good somehow, not like dirt but like earth, even under my fingernails.

Sitting there alone, my father inside, the sounds of my mother moving around in the kitchen, all of a sudden I felt content. Not just happy, but something deeper, quieter, as though the three of us had finally landed. For the first time in a long time—maybe since I was a little girl in Shanghai—everything seemed truly all right. Maybe we, too, had been successfully transplanted; maybe that long move from Hungjao to South Pasadena had worked, and maybe we really could adapt. My father had been home for nearly ten months, and I had started to believe that what I had wished for had come true: he seemed to consider this home.

I looked at the roses along the side fence, still blooming though October was only a week away; the junipers along the back, already starting to grow and spread out a little; the bougainvillea and wisteria along the other side, romantic and a little wild, a concession to my mother. In three rectangular beds to my left were tomatoes and lettuce and strawberries, and in the narrow bed closest to the kitchen, a few herbs, parsley and thyme, rosemary and chives. “You see,” my father had said, “you’ll have a whole salad here, everything you’ll need.”

I breathed in and smelled eucalyptus and roses. I looked around once more for anything amiss. But there was nothing. It was perfect.

I went in to wash my hands and found my mother and father in the kitchen. My father had brought the mail in and was standing at the sink, gazing out at the garden. He had opened a quart bottle of East Side beer and poured himself some in a juice glass. My mother was sitting at the table, her hands spread out in front of her, a gesture I knew well, one that meant she was trying to stay calm.

“What?” I said.

My mother did not hesitate. “Your father received a letter,” she said simply. Her tone was one of forced evenness. “A letter from an old friend from Shanghai, Shang Chen. In China he was governor of the Hove province. Maybe you remember him, Anna. Your father’s polo team used to play his. He was quite good, your father says.”

I nodded stupidly, with no recollection of the man she had named. It was as though she were asking me to recall some other child’s life.

“Well,” my mother continued, stretching her hands out further on the table, “Shang Chen is now
General
Shang Chen, and he is the Chinese military attaché in Washington. It seems he can do something to help your father. He has a position for your father in Chungking, as a liaison between the American and Chinese troops. It sounds very interesting, doesn’t it?”

I wanted to ask her to speak English, please, as I had when I was small and Chu Shih asked me something in Mandarin. My mother’s words felt like some kind of code.

“Chungking,” I said, a guess of a response.

“Yes,” my mother said. “Chungking.”

My father faced us then. At least he faced my mother, and I saw that I’d walked into something that I shouldn’t be in on. “You have to see this, Eve,” he said. “There’s a war on, and they’ll send me someplace if I don’t go first. In my experience, the military sends you exactly where you don’t want to go, simple as that. Where would that be? Where would they send me? To Europe, where things are a mess.”