The Distant Land of My Father (2 page)

I heard my mother’s voice then, and I turned from the doorway before my father saw me. She was descending the long curved staircase, and she wore a wine-colored silk dress with a border of pearls sewn into the neckline. My mother’s name was Genevieve, and it suited her: she was elegant and graceful, and was always known only by her full name, with one exception: to my father she was Eve, and when he said her name, he did so intimately. Our last name, Schoene—pronounced “show-en”—meant beautiful or handsome in German, and I thought it suited both of my parents. When I was afraid, I would repeat their names to myself, and the sound of those names lulled me and made me feel safe: Joseph and Genevieve Schoene.

My mother smiled at me, and I suddenly wanted her not to go out. I wanted her close, though there was no reason to be anxious. This was just an ordinary night. My parents went out most evenings. I learned only later, when my mother and I had moved to the United States, the startling fact that parents usually stayed at home with their children in the evenings.

My mother did not share my father’s passion for Shanghai, but rather held the city at arm’s length. It was an entity she did not want to know better, and she was every bit as diffident toward it as my father was affectionate. He knew every part of the city, while my mother knew only what she had to. She seemed to regard it as a temporary post, not a home, and she used what she called her landmark system. In each neighborhood, she chose a starting point, and she always started from that place, regardless of where she had to end up. In the French Concession it was the Cercle Sportif Français, a nightclub she liked on Route Cardinal Mercier. In the International Settlement it was the Sun Sun Department Store at the corner of Tibet and Nanking Road. On the Bund it was the brass lions in front of the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank. Her plan seemed to work; my mother was never lost. I understood her system, for I had a landmark of my own, a place I always started from to get wherever I was going, a reference point for everything I did. It was my father.

My father was, from my careful observations of him, a person who solved problems. When I was five, I accidentally swallowed a Reese’s cinnamon drop whole, and I began to choke. My father stood only a few feet away; we were at the home of his friend Will Marsh, and he was just saying good night. He glanced at me, looked back at his friend, looked at me again, and said, “Excuse me.” Then he simply picked me up by my ankles, held me upside down, and laughed when the cinnamon drop popped out of my mouth. For a long time, his ability to fix whatever was wrong was a given of my childhood.

There were other givens as well. My mother’s elegance, her patient manner, her propriety and composure. She taught me never to say I was full after a meal, but only that I had “had a sufficiency.” Her beauty was a given. I knew even as a young child that she was beautiful, not the way children
think
their mothers are—I knew she was, from the way men stared when she entered the room, the way other women regarded her, the intensity with which my father watched her. For a long time, her beautiful long hair was a given, always worn in a chignon at the nape of her neck. It seemed somehow private, the most intimate part of her, as though it held secrets she would never divulge. Her intense yet somehow odd devotion to my father was also a given. She was like his moon: she circled only him, yet always at a distance.

On that summer evening, when my mother reached the bottom of the stairs, she glanced around her as though getting her bearings. It was a familiar gesture; she was looking for my father, and it was what she always did first when she entered a room or a house or a garden. Now she glanced about and, not seeing him, looked at me.

“He’s outside,” I said simply.

She nodded, then leaned toward me, smoothing the wet strands of my bangs off my forehead. “You’re warm, Anna.”

“Can I see your hair?” I asked.

She stooped so that she was closer to my height. She did this gracefully, a small miracle in her long, fitted dress. She smelled like Chanel No. 5, and just under it, a trace of lilac from her bath. She turned so that I could see her back, and her hair was the way it always was, bound at the nape of her neck. I leaned close to see what she was using to hold it there. On the carved mahogany dresser in her room was a Venetian leather jewelry box that held in its crimson velvet lining more than a dozen fasteners and combs made of ivory, tortoiseshell, silver, jade. Tonight she wore my favorites: two intricately carved ivory needles that intersected and held her hair perfectly in place.

We heard my father’s footsteps then. My mother looked up, about to stand, and I asked the question that was always in my mind but which I had never voiced. “Do you love him more, or me?”

She did not hesitate. “I love you both,” she said simply. And then she rose, smoothed her skirt, and went outside to join him.

They left a short time later, after my father had showered and shaved and dressed in a dinner coat. He whistled “Moonglow” as he came downstairs, and I knew he was in good spirits. My mother stood at the large window in the kitchen, sipping a glass of sherry, waiting for him. He came into the room and smiled at her. And then he saw me, sitting at the table, drawing.

“You,”
he said, and he headed toward me and seemed as large as the huge brass lions that guarded the entrance of the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank. “And now for
you.
” And in two strides he reached me and lifted me from my chair and held me so high that I felt the closeness of the ceiling just above my head. I breathed in his scent of Old Spice and Four Roses and Philippine cigars, and I was certain that my father was strong enough to hold up the world. His hands were warm and firm and huge around my rib cage, and I wanted him to never put me down.

But he did, of course, and my sides stayed warm from his grip as he roughly kissed my cheek and held the door for my mother and headed into the still night, whistling again. I heard the sound of car doors as my parents slid into the backseat of the Packard, which waited for them outside, then the crunch of gravel as Mei Wah, my father’s Sikh chauffeur, walked to the front of the car, and then the sound of his door. And then I heard the even hum of the Packard’s engine, a sound I came to dread, as it eased toward the street.

I went out on the verandah. My father’s glass was still on the wall, empty except for its strong scent of Scotch. I watched the car slowly make its way toward the street, its red taillights bright. When it reached the end of the driveway and left the gravel to meet the road, it blew out a small cloud of dirt, like a kiss, and I took a deep breath and felt the fine dust of my father’s presence, familiar, another given, filling the cracks and covering the surface of my life.

shanghai

WHEN I WAS A CHILD
, my father handed Shanghai down to me as though it were my inheritance, a family treasure meant only for me. He took pains to teach me about the city, and there was an urgency in that teaching that said,
Listen, Anna, this is important, remember it.
He said he admired its aliveness, its possibilities, its spirit. I understood that he wanted me to love Shanghai too, and so I listened and I tried to see what he saw, and I remembered what I was taught, but not because I cared about Shanghai. Because I loved my father and wanted to please him.

My father differed from most of Shanghai’s foreign residents at that time, British and Europeans and Americans—Shanghailanders, they were called—who lived in the city for decades and took from it without hesitation. My father looked down on them, and although he was wealthy, we lived more simply than most of the foreigners my parents knew. We had only a few servants, and from the time I was five and able to dress myself and put myself to bed, our cook was the closest thing to an amah, or nanny, for me, an unusual situation and one that my mother had protested at first. But my father won her over, and by the time I was six, Chu Shih and Mei Wah were the only servants who lived with us. These things seemed to make my father feel that he was right in chastising the more ostentatious foreigners, who, he said, were houseguests without any manners, intruders who’d simply taken over their host’s home. Their appropriation was made easier because of extraterritoriality and the fact that at that time Shanghai was really three cities: the International Settlement, the French Concession, and the Chinese city. Foreigners in the Settlement and Concession were subject not to China’s laws, but to the laws of their home countries, which made them feel right at home on Chinese soil.

But for my father, China was home. He was born in the north, in Tsao Chou Fu in the province of Shantung, to Nazarene missionary parents. He grew up there and did not come to the United States until he was sixteen, when his parents were on furlough. When they returned to China two years later, he stayed in the United States and went to Vanderbilt University, where he met my mother at a fraternity mixer. He approached her because she was the most beautiful girl there; my mother said she liked him because he had nerve and was far more straightforward than the other boys. When he graduated in 1931 and married my mother a few weeks later, it seemed only natural to him to go home to China. He had, after all, lived there for far more years than he’d lived in the United States. And although my mother was doubtful—she was a Californian, eager to remain one, and Vanderbilt had been more than far enough from home—my father convinced her. It would only be for a few years, he said, of course they wouldn’t spend their whole
lives
in China. She finally said yes, despite the objections of her parents, particularly her mother, who did not trust my father’s easy charm. But my mother simply said it wouldn’t be for long, and in the end, there was nothing her parents could do.

My missionary grandparents had returned to Shantung province and started a village clinic there. A small cure was worth a hundred hours of preaching, my grandfather said, and although neither of my father’s parents had extensive medical training, they were able to provide basic care. They taught hygiene, and they cleaned cuts and boils. They treated skin diseases, blood poisoning, and eye afflictions. They gave cholera inoculations and tetanus shots to newborns to prevent lockjaw, and santonin for worms. They baptized infants dying of smallpox, and they instructed the sick in the teachings of Christ.

It was my father’s hope to help his parents in their work, and to start by going to Peking to study medicine at the Rockefeller Institute. He and my mother left for China in March of 1932, sailing from San Francisco to Shanghai on the NYK Line’s
Chichibu Maru.
From there my father planned to travel north to Peking, but when they arrived in Shanghai, they were told that Peking was unsafe. The Japanese had recently occupied it, and nothing was certain. Well, they’d wait until it
was
safe, my father said, and he took the first job he could find in Shanghai, as an automobile claims adjuster for American Asiatic Underwriters, starting at one hundred dollars a week.

And then his life changed: six months after his arrival in Shanghai, he received word that his father had died of diphtheria. A month later, his mother died of the same disease. My father was devastated, and despite my mother’s attempts at encouragement, he gave up his plans for medical training.

He turned instead to business; he had to do something while he and my mother decided what to do next. After six months with American Asiatic Underwriters he became a claims adjuster for foreign companies, and soon after that he started importing Dodge cars and trucks, which was easy because he knew all the car dealers, thanks to the auto claims business. Before long, something he’d never expected happened: he began to make money. With his success, he stopped thinking about going to Peking. My mother suggested that they just go home—
her
home, she meant, Los Angeles—where my father could start his own business. He had enough money now. But he wouldn’t consider it. There was far too much opportunity to pass up. Why would anyone leave now?
This
was home, at least for now.

My father was a good businessman, and he had some things working in his favor that others lacked. For one, because he’d been raised in China, he was fluent in Mandarin, unusual for a foreigner. On hearing him speak for the first time, Chinese were struck by his command of the language, and from the time I was small, he made sure I knew a little as well.
Ai
was love,
fuch’in
was father,
much’in
mother, and
nüerh
was daughter—me.
Lai pa!,
come here, he’d call to me, and when my mother came in from a day of shopping, the chauffeur’s arms loaded with boxes, he’d say,
T’iênhsia!,
everything under the sky! The word
coolie
was from
k’uli,
bitter strength, a definition I understood when I saw how hard coolies worked. When my father smoothly handed a bill to his barber after a haircut, or to a waiter for bringing him a newspaper, he’d lean close to me and whisper,
Cumshaw,
a Shanghai word whose literal meaning was “grateful thanks” but had come to mean simply “tip.” And later, as we clinked glasses over a lunch of long-life noodles at Sun Ya’s, my father’s glass filled with Chefoo beer, mine with jasmine flower tea, he’d watch me, waiting for me to remember, until I said,
Kanpei,
bottoms up!

He didn’t stop with the meanings of the words. When he knew them, he taught me their origins as well, a part of his thoroughness. Shanghai meant “on the sea” and was an early name for the city, from the time, centuries ago, when it was only a fishing village. And while Shanghai wasn’t exactly on the sea—it was some fifty-four miles from the Pacific, my father pointed out—there was plenty of water. The Whangpoo River, a tributary to the Yangtze, flowed along the eastern side of the city, and Soochow Creek ran from west to east along the north, then met the Whangpoo.

That was where the Bund started. It was Shanghai’s major thoroughfare, a wide boulevard that ran along the waterfront. While geographically it was on the east side of the city, it was really the city’s heart, for it was everything to Shanghai: main street, water-front, downtown, business and financial district, promenade. On the east side was the muddy Whangpoo River, winding its way toward the Yangtze, twelve miles away. Shanghai was a trading port, and the Whangpoo was a traffic jam of every kind of vessel. There were foreign warships and cruisers that my father named as we walked along the river—the HMS
Cumberland,
the USS
Augusta,
the Japanese
Idzumo
—and cargo ships and passenger liners from all over the world: the Messageries Maritimes Line, the Cathay American Line, the Nippon Yusen Kaisha Line, Britain’s
Empress of Asia.
Next to them were sloops and freighters, barges and ferries, and finally the smaller ones, the ones I liked, sampans and junks that looked like water spiders from the shore.