The Distant Land of My Father (32 page)

My mother was in good spirits when we boarded the ship, and with the good-byes over with, I began to cheer up, too. My mother suggested that we stay on the deck to bid farewell to California’s coast, and we found two chairs and faced them toward the rear of the ship. The
Laura Maersk
was guided by tugboats from the harbor to the sea, first through San Pedro Harbor’s Turning Basin, then the Y-shaped Inner Harbor, then the channel and into the Outer Harbor, and finally past the breakwater. But as Cabrillo Beach Park faded in our wake, my mother’s good spirits seemed to as well. She grew quiet, and when we could no longer make out a single thing on shore, she said she was going below to rest, and that I should not wake her for dinner.

It was the start of what turned out to be a pattern. For most of that journey, my mother was fatigued and out of sorts, and I was left to my own devices. Her inattention and bad humor made me cross at the start, because I saw no reason for them. We were doing what she wanted, weren’t we?
She
was the one who’d dreamed this whole thing up;
I
was the one who had reason to be unhappy, because I was the one who hadn’t wanted to go. But somehow we’d traded places. She had slipped into the role of the morose captive, and I had become the carefree adventurer. I’d decided that going to Shanghai at the age of fifteen was a very glamorous and exotic thing to do, and that there was no reason not to enjoy it.

No one bothered me on the ship, about what to do or where to go, about the dishes or the trash or homework, and I did what I wanted. I sat in the afternoon sun and played shuffleboard with anybody I could find—old men, middle-aged women, young married couples who seemed not that much older than I was. I read shadowy mysteries and risqué romance novels that my mother wouldn’t have approved of had she noticed, and I sat on a deck chair and pretended to doze near a couple I was sure were newlyweds so that I could eavesdrop on their romantic talk. I wrote letters to Mark Young that I planned on mailing from Shanghai, letters in which I tried to sound worldly and independent:
Miss you dreadfully—I ache for your smile!—but life is very full here in exotic Shanghai, and there is so much to take in!

And I spent hours imagining our arrival and our reunion with my father. In my mind, he would be waiting on the dock as the
Laura Maersk
approached. He would shield his eyes against the sun as he looked up at the ship and anxiously scanned the deck for us. Because of his eagerness, he would spot us long before we found him, and he would call out and wave his arms. When we came off the ship, he would say, “What took you so long?” Then he would wink at me and boast about how much I’d grown. He’d ask me if I had boyfriends, and he’d say they must be lining up for miles, and I would blush. I imagined the scene several times a day, refining it and adding to it each time, and soon the whole thing felt real, far more remembered than imagined.

On August 7, we reached the estuary of the Yangtze River. We’d seen the coast of China for several days. When the blue of the ocean turned muddy, my mother smiled and said we were getting close.

And then we were there, traveling up the Whangpoo toward the Bund. My mother and I stood on the deck and she pointed out Woosung, and then, on the east bank of the Whangpoo, Pootung with its docks and oil yards, its fish canneries and factories. I nodded vaguely as she talked quietly about the geography of this foreign place I once knew, but my thoughts were not on what she said. I was thinking about the only thing I could just then: the heat.

It was impossible to ignore. I felt captured, bound, and gagged, and though I had thought I remembered the heat and had told my mother I did when she tried to prepare me for it, I was certain I’d never known anything like it. There was no breeze, nothing to even push the hot air around. Heat clung to us, a suffocating feeling, and I looked frantically at my mother and thought,
What have we done?
It was as though we’d traveled to hell, by choice.

My mother wiped her face with a lace-trimmed linen handkerchief that looked as limp as wet tissue, then glanced at me. “You see?” she said. “
This
is what I was talking about.”

The ship docked at the Bund, and I stared hard at the famous skyline. I had hoped that the names would come back to me at the sight of those buildings, but not many did. The Hongkong and Shanghai Bank, I thought, and I remembered rubbing the lions’ noses. Jardine Matheson, and the Customs House, with Big Ching—words I hadn’t thought of in years surfaced in my mind like bits of wreckage from a sunken ship. I couldn’t remember any of the others, but I told myself I would relearn them, and my spirits rose as I looked below and saw a small crowd on the dock. I scanned the crowd quickly for my father, half hoping he’d be on stilts again. But there were no stilts, and no one who resembled him, at least from that distance.

My mother turned from the deck railing. “Shall we?”

“I’m looking for him,” I said.

She sighed and smoothed my hair gently. “Oh, Anna, I’m sorry. I should have explained. I knew he wouldn’t be here yet. We have to go through Chinese customs and immigration, and he knows how long that takes. But he’ll find us.”

I swallowed hard, surprised by my disappointment, then followed my mother off the ship.
Don’t argue,
I thought.
At least you’ll see him soon.

Two hours later, my mother and I were still waiting in line on the customs jetty on the Bund, and three hours after that we were nearing the front of the queue at immigration. We had had no food since toast and juice that morning, we were filthy from the grime and film of travel, and the heat had become like a nagging illness, something you just couldn’t shake.

When we finally emerged from the Customs House, it was nearly six o’clock in the evening, and I looked around me in shock, for I found myself in the dirtiest and shabbiest place I’d ever been. I’d expected someplace glamorous, like Paris maybe, and although the buildings that faced us on the Bund were beautiful—stately and majestic—the street itself was crowded and chaotic, packed with cars and people and pedicabs, all competing for far too little space, a crazy version of musical chairs. Everything was filthy, the odor nearly overpowering, the sidewalk lined with garbage and rickety, makeshift stalls where hawkers held out all kinds of things—watches and shirts, electric razors and cartons of cigarettes, canned goods and jewelry—all the while yelling things I didn’t understand. There were beggars every-where—lying on the sidewalk, propped against buildings, huddled in entries as though they had been deposited there. With their diseases and open wounds and missing limbs, they hardly looked alive.

I looked around for something good and did not find it. And I thought,
This? This is the place he couldn’t leave, the place he had to come back to?
Just standing on the street was a sentence I didn’t think we deserved.

My mother glanced about nervously, and I was startled at her expression. I saw that she was afraid, and for the first time in my life, I had the urge to take care of her.

“What is it?” I asked.

She attempted a smile. “I’m just not sure what to do next.”

I thought the heat must be getting to her. My mother was never uncertain, and what we should do seemed obvious to me. “We just wait for him, don’t we? You said yourself.”

“That’s what I’d thought, but it’s getting so late that I . . .” Her voice trailed off and I wanted to reassure her, but didn’t know what to say.

We waited for another minute, and I was about to take my mother’s arm and try to lead her across the street through the anarchy of the traffic and trash when a car pulled up perhaps twenty feet away. It was a Packard, and though it was beat up and matched no memory of mine, I knew, without knowing how, that its owner was my father. As if to answer my thoughts, the car stopped, the back door opened, and he got out.

I caught my breath at the sight of him: he was so
clean,
so pressed and spotless and handsome in his white linen suit that he seemed to have materialized more than arrived, and I wondered for a moment if I’d made him up. I was immediately embarrassed for my mother and me. I tugged on her sleeve like a child—his appearance had reduced me to one—and my mother nodded and stared at him without speaking, just as I did. She smoothed her rumpled skirt, a sad gesture because it didn’t help. I saw how difficult it was for her to be seen like this, so grimy and traveled.

He stood by the car for a moment and scanned his surroundings, and when he saw us, he leaned into the car and said something to the driver, then walked purposefully toward us. I held back, expecting my mother to run to him the way she had at Union Station, but she didn’t. She waited next to me, and as my father neared us, she took my hand and squeezed it twice, her signal for
Be brave.
I squeezed back, glad for her encouragement, for I was afraid.

“So
here
they are,” he called jubilantly as he approached us. His voice was so loud that I looked around to see who else he was talking to, but I found no one. He went on. “Here are my girls, and none the worse for wear,” and he laughed. I winced and tried to hide it with a smile, for I couldn’t tell whether or not he was teasing. We were most definitely the worse for wear, as anyone could see. He leaned toward my mother and kissed her cheek, then put his hands firmly on my shoulders and kissed my forehead, his hands keeping me at arm’s length so that I wouldn’t muss him, I guessed. But when he met my eyes, though it was only for a moment, I saw the reason for his formality: he was nervous. He looked us over, and he laughed loudly and somehow strangely, especially because there wasn’t anything funny that I could see.

“Come on now, let’s get your things and be off to dinner. We’ve got a full schedule this evening. Lots to do around here,
plenty
to do,” and he turned toward the car and whistled for his driver. I knew it wouldn’t be Mei Wah, but I was still surprised to see the burly Chinese strongman who got out of the front seat, and another word surfaced from my childhood in Shanghai:
bodyguard.
He wore a dark suit and looked like my father’s opposite. My father called something to him and motioned to our luggage, which the driver began to carry to the car as effortlessly as if all we’d packed was air.

My mother and I watched in silence, as though the loading of the luggage were a ceremony with great meaning. I found the silence awkward, but I could think of nothing to say, though I’d pictured my father and me talking up a storm as soon as we saw each other. When the car was loaded, my father turned to us. “Off we go,” he said, as though he were our tour guide.

My mother coughed slightly, a sound I knew as a signal that she disagreed. Apparently my father had forgotten her language. “Joseph,” she said, “we’re really not presentable. We should at least change and—”

“Nonsense. You’ve just arrived in Shanghai—the Paris of the Orient!—and we’re not going to waste your first night here. You’ve come all this way, there’s no use sitting at home.” He gave her a long look and he seemed to soften for a moment. “You look as lovely as ever,” he said simply. Then he looked at me and winked in a stagy way. “I’m showing you off, is what I’m doing, to the whole town.”

I smiled weakly. My mother and I followed him to the car.

All that night he was cheerful as Christmas morning, laughing and making toasts, waving and calling out to acquaintances across the restaurant. “We’re celebrating,” he kept saying, and he’d clink glasses yet again, and say how good it was to have us here. But there was an almost manic quality to him, and with each dinner course, with each toast and new introduction, I wanted to say,
What’s wrong? It’s just us.

At last, after dessert and coffee and cordials, he asked my mother if she was ready to go, and when she nodded wearily, my father smiled gently and looked like himself for the first time that night. “Then we’re off,” he said, and he rose and led us to the entrance and to the Packard outside, where he got into the front seat with the driver.

I slumped against my mother in the backseat. I thought I had never been so tired. My whole body felt worn down. I started to fall asleep, but my mother’s voice woke me when we were only a few blocks from the restaurant.

“Where are we going?” she asked. I felt her shift on the seat next to me.

My father didn’t answer.

“Joseph?” she said.

“Not to worry,” he said, his voice low. “Hungjao isn’t ship-shape yet, is all. So I’ve arranged for an apartment in the Concession for now. You two will be comfortable there. And I’ll go out to Hungjao and have it ready in a day or two.”

My mother fell back against the seat. I could feel her disappointment and fatigue. “Oh,” she said dully. “I’m sure we’ll be fine.”

The apartment my father had arranged for us was on Rue Ratard in the French Concession, and you could tell it had once been someone’s nice home. The Copen blue drapes that hung from floor to ceiling had not always been faded. The wainscoting on the walls had not always been chipped. The Oriental rugs had not always been thread-bare, and the parquet floors hadn’t always been warped. I was certain that the windows overlooking the street had once been clean, the mahogany furniture new, the wallpaper bright, the rooms elegant. You could tell. But I guessed that it had been neglected for years, and I wondered just when it had changed.