The Distant Land of My Father (24 page)

When he had been back for a few days, and had had food and liquids and a bath and a shave and sleep, he learned that Fletcher had not returned. Barrows asked if he knew anything about what had been done to Fletcher, and my father groaned, for he had forgotten what he’d heard: that Fletcher had been taken to the roof, where he was bound and left there, exposed to the elements.

Five days after my father’s return, he was up and around. He wrote down as much as he could about his treatment in Bridge House, and he kept to himself, though he knew many of the internees made an effort to welcome him back. Martin tried; he approached my father and met his eyes and my father nodded, but Martin couldn’t speak, and that was all the conversation they had. It was enough for my father. After that he worked at putting Bridge House out of his mind. He concentrated on the future, not the past, and told himself that repatriation, not interrogation, was what should fill his thoughts.

The weather in Shanghai had been unusual all that summer, but in the days following my father’s return from Bridge House, it turned even stranger. What started as a steady rain became a downpour. A typhoon warning was issued, and wet gusts of wind tore at the huge plane tree by the main entrance. By the next afternoon the camp was flooded inside and out, and at dusk the plane tree blew over and fell to the ground, blocking the entrance to the camp.

The wind and rain eased the next day, and in the days after that, the flooding subsided. Lieutenant Honda called Barrows and my father in and instructed them to have the camp begin cleaning up. The first order of business was the plane tree. Barrows nodded; he had assumed they would be cutting it up and hauling it away.

“Colonel Odera orders that the tree is to be put back,” Honda said casually. “It is very beautiful and very old, and he does not want to lose it.”

Barrows and my father looked at each other and laughed, then stopped. Honda was serious. They tried to explain to him that a tree as big as that could not simply be “put back,” but Honda would hear no arguments.

“The colonel’s wish,” he said again, and he sent Barrows and my father on their way, giving them orders to have a crew of men working on the tree the next day, no matter what.

The next morning a crew of fifty men got to work, tying the tree with ropes and using two-by-fours for leverage to help them lift the tree and get it back into the ground. After lunch a new crew relieved them, and it was sometime after that that the gendarmes’ Chevrolet entered the main gate. The work crew was getting close to the point where they could begin to raise the tree, but everyone froze when the car drove into the camp.

The car stopped in front of the administration building. The gendarmes in the front seat didn’t move. No one did. Not my father, who had been near the tree, but had followed the car when it entered the yard. Not Barrows, or any of the other men near the car. Everyone waited, watching the gendarmes, who just sat in the front seat, staring hard at the internees as if daring them, waiting for them to do or say something.

My father was closest to the car. The gendarme at the wheel recognized him and nodded as though they were old friends. “You,” he said. “Open the door.” My father walked to the car and carefully opened the door.

At first he thought it was a prank; there seemed to be no one inside, not on the seat anyway. He thought perhaps it was some sort of delivery, because he saw something on the floor. And then he realized that it was a man. He glanced behind him, suddenly afraid, and met Barrows’s eyes. Barrows called for the camp doctors, and my father leaned into the backseat to help the man out. He thought about trying to lift him, but he knew he had no strength. Finally he stood back from the car and let Barrows climb into the backseat, where he sat for a moment, his expression stunned. When the doctors had carried out a stretcher, Barrows and the two of them lifted the man out of the car and onto the stretcher, then carried him into the camp’s makeshift clinic. It was Fletcher.

Honda had come out of his office by then. He called for work on the tree to resume, but no one obeyed. The men dropped whatever tools they had, they let the ropes and two-by-fours fall to the ground, and they walked toward the clinic.

By that time, Anderson and White had seen some twenty-five former guests of Bridge House, men they could barely recognize when they were brought in for care. But Fletcher’s condition was beyond the pale. He looked more dead than alive. He was naked and far too weak to stand, but that didn’t matter yet, as he was unconscious when Barrows and the doctors carried him into the clinic. In fifteen days, he had become a skeleton. Not only was he starved; he was so dehydrated that his internal organs were failing. The skin on his wrists and ankles had been cut to the bone, as though he’d been bound with wire.

My father watched as Anderson examined him, and he heard Anderson murmuring something. He was unconsciously reciting the names of the bones he saw protruding from the skin, as though he were teaching anatomy:
tibia, femur, ilium, sternum, clavicle.

It was after Fletcher had been bathed that they found some kind of message, letters scratched into the skin on the insides of his thighs. The word
murdered
was visible on the inside of one thigh; on the other was the word
roof.
There were scratches on his wrists as well, but no one could read them.

“Do you think he did it with a stick?” Anderson said softly, for it was clear that Fletcher was trying to tell whoever found him what had been done.

The camp doctors were certain that there was nothing they could do for Fletcher. He was too far gone, and although they doubted that he would survive for long anywhere, they insisted that he be taken to a hospital for more care. Barrows went to the colonel, and the next morning Fletcher was transferred. My father and a few other Americans watched him being taken out, a barely living corpse.

That afternoon Barrows talked the men into resuming work on the plane tree, which was already called Fletcher’s Tree. The colonel had given a direct order that they were to complete the work, and it was pointless to risk his anger, no matter how upset they were. By dusk, the tree was back up.

The next morning, Honda sent for Barrows and informed him that Fletcher had died at nine o’clock the previous evening. “He did not receive adequate care in that clinic of yours,” Honda said flatly. “We see now that your American and British medicine has its limits, do we not?”

At the beginning of September, 1943, the colonel announced that Americans and Canadians would be leaving camp in the middle of the month on the Swedish exchange ship
Gripsholm,
which had carried the first group of repatriates out of China a few months earlier. Negotiations were still in the works for other Allied nationals, so they would stay, for now. On August 14, an announcement in the
Shanghai Times
had said that the
Gripsholm
was leaving New York for Shanghai the next day, and that it would be carrying fifteen hundred Japanese, who would be exchanged for the same number of Americans and Canadians.

That afternoon, my father went to the carpentry shop the prisoners had set up. Martin, the man who resembled my father, was working there that day. Carpentry was a hobby of his, and he’d made a couple of small tables for the camp. He and my father talked for a few minutes about the exchange and about going home, and then my father asked his favor: Could Martin make him a small folding chair for the trip home aboard the ship? He didn’t want one of those big deck chairs, just a small chair he could keep with him.

Martin looked confused, but he didn’t ask questions. He just said he’d do what he could.

Two days later, Martin found my father in his room. He’d finished the chair, he said, and he set it up on the floor. My father was impressed; it was perfect. To brace the chair, Martin had used a hollow crossbar from a piece of brass curtain rod he’d found. The wooden slats were from a vegetable crate he’d found near the kitchen garbage. My father thanked Martin, they shook hands, and that was that.

When Martin had left the room, my father took from the large inside pocket of his overcoat the journal he’d been keeping. A week earlier he’d taken to rolling it up and keeping it in his coat, thinking that it was the safest place. It was sixteen typed pages on thin white paper. My father rolled it up again, as tightly as he could, then looked from it to the curtain rod that braced the chair. It looked possible. He knelt next to the chair and fitted the rolled-up diary into one end of the curtain rod and slid the journal all the way inside, and out of sight.

Finally the date for the exchange was set: the fifteenth of September. Early that morning, Barrows asked my father to be in charge of the baggage that was to be taken from the camp to the ship, a job my father was more than happy to do. When everything was ready, the Japanese searched every bag and suitcase and box. My father had strapped his chair to his suitcase, and the Japanese guard ordered him to undo it. My father did, and the guard searched his suitcase, then nudged the chair with the toe of his boot and told my father to put it all back together again. An hour later, my father and fifty-four other Americans were taken in army trucks from Haiphong Road to the docks at the Whangpoo, luggage in hand, where they boarded the
Gripsholm.
Because the ship would be stopping in other ports for prisoner exchanges, the trip would take much longer than usual, three months instead of one. My father didn’t care. All that mattered was that he was leaving.

Though he knew it would be hard on his heart and his legs, he stayed on deck for the ship’s departure, a gesture of respect for what he was leaving. He could not stand for very long. He was thin and weak, his feet and legs and joints ached, and his right hand trembled crazily when he waved to the few onlookers on the dock. He looked years older than he had ten months earlier; he knew that. He knew, too, that as a result of extreme vitamin deficiencies his complexion was sallow, and that the whites of his eyes were a dirty yellow hue.

As the
Gripsholm
began to travel up the Whangpoo, the skyline of the Bund grew small in the distance, and my father strained to keep it in sight. He grieved for the city Shanghai had become, and for what he had lost in the course of that transformation. But when the ship reached the Yangtze and later the Pacific, he ceased dwelling on those things. He was going to a place he would learn to call home, a place where he was loved.

waiting

ON A TUESDAY
in May of 1942, five months after Pearl Harbor, my mother had received a letter from my father, the first in a year. She came into the kitchen holding it in the air as though it were good news. I looked up from a page of long division I didn’t want to do. “It’s postmarked ‘Java,’” she said, her voice tight, and for the seconds that it took her shaking hands to tear open the thin envelope, I made a wish.
Maybe he’s on his way here.

And then my mother began to read: “‘The McLains are leaving today. They’re sailing on the
Tjisdane
for Java, and I’m hoping Mac will take this with him and post it there so you’ll know how things are. Shanghai is changed more than you can imagine, Eve. Spirits are low, there’s a closed-in feeling that brings on regret, and every week I tell more friends good-bye. Those of us who’ve stayed don’t talk about where it will end. I don’t know when I’ll be able to get another letter out, so this will have to do for a while, I expect.’”

The letter went on to detail some of Shanghai’s changes more specifically, much of which I didn’t fully understand. And then there was something I did understand: “‘Two months ago, I closed up the house and moved into town and took a room at the American Club, a few blocks from the Bund and my office. It’s easier to keep a low profile here, and I feel safer. It was the prudent thing to do, though not the easy one. I know that for many foreigners in China, servants are servants. But Chu Shih and Mei Wah had become friends to me, always had been really, but even more so since you left. Saying goodbye to them was harder than I care to admit. The only good thing I can say is that I was able to pay them well. Tell Anna that they will be all right, especially Chu Shih. He planned to go further south, to Canton, where he has relatives. As for our home, it is one of many beautiful residences that have been boarded up and deserted for now. I saw no other choice, as it is more and more dangerous in the Western Roads District.’”