The Distant Land of My Father (38 page)

The car jerked to a stop, and when he was pulled out of the backseat, he knew immediately where he was because of the trees. He was in the French Concession, on what had been known as Route Joseph Frelupt, and he was being pushed toward the entrance of Loukawei Jail.

Inside he was handed an armband, which he was told never to remove. It was, the guard said, his new identity: #744. He was then led to a block of twelve cells, each of them no larger than twelve feet by six. He was pushed into the last one and told that talking was not allowed, and that other rules for criminals were posted on the wall. Criminals were to spend all of their waking hours, five in the morning until nine at night, meditating on their crimes, it said. They were not to sleep during that time. They were to sit where the guard told them to, on the floor with their backs to the wall, and they were not to move from that position. There would be no reading, and there was no smoking. They would stand at attention for their guards.

The guard left and slammed the wooden door and my father sank to the floor as he was told, his back against the wall. The smell of filth and human waste in the room was overpowering, and he forced himself to think about other things so that he would not vomit. He had taught himself the art of intellectual diversion during those two months at Foochow Road, and he had convinced himself that that one skill would help him survive.

The trick was to think about places other than where he was, and so he thought of the beaches of Tsingtao, and of my mother swimming in the bay. He thought of a polo game in which he’d played particularly well. He thought of the Bund, and he forced himself to name each building from the British Consulate down to the Shanghai Club. He pictured the beautiful tree-lined boulevards of the French Concession, which, though they were just outside the window, seemed like streets from a distant land, and he tried to remember the taste of blini with caviar at the St. Petersburg restaurant on Avenue Haig.

Replace this stench with the scent of eucalyptus after the rain,
he thought. Replace the coldness of sitting on this floor with the solid grace of riding a polo pony. Replace the sight of men dying in front of him with the view of a bungalow’s small garden in Southern California: wisteria, jasmine, honeysuckle, junipers, and a fourteen-year-old daughter cutting roses.

Those substitutions he could do. The difficult part was the feeling at his very center: a tight knot of fear that he did not know how to dispel.

My father was a prisoner of the Communists from that April night of 1951 until January of 1954. During those three years, he was moved three times, from Foochow Road to Loukawei in the French Concession, and then to Chopay, a prison constructed recently though poorly by the Communists. The ventilation was poor, and the door had a small peephole so that the guards could watch prisoners constantly. And finally he was taken to the northeast of the city, across Soochow Creek to Ward Road Jail, the same jail in which hundreds had been tortured and killed by the Japanese ten years earlier.

Ward Road Jail had been built by the British and was said to be the largest prison in the world outside of Russia. Its walls were six inches thick, and it included eight buildings that held some four thousand cells, and at its height, the jail held fifteen thousand people. Each cell had a leader, a prisoner who was well versed in Communist doctrine and whose responsibility it was to discuss the failings of other governments. Prisoners could ask questions, but most refrained, for it was obvious that anything remotely anticommunist would lead to trouble. In addition to the leader, there were always spies, prisoners who had agreed to tell the guards of anyone who seemed antagonistic toward Mao. They were usually fairly outspoken in support of the government, and though my father guessed that he could usually tell who they were, he never knew for sure. And so he kept quiet, and mostly listened, nodding silently as though he agreed with whatever was being said.

My father thought of his cell as “the international quarter.” There were eighteen men, and he was the only American—the guards made a point of keeping the Americans apart. Among those in his cell was an Irish priest, Father Aidan McKenna, a small, fierce man with close-cropped reddish-brown hair and intense blue eyes who had worn out more than a dozen interrogators because he refused to say or sign anything. He had worked with the Legion of Mary, a Catholic lay group that the Communists insisted was an American spy organization financed by the United States government, and he was accused of being a false priest and a spy with the rank of colonel in the American army. The priest denied the charges but said he was complimented by his imaginary high rank. Although his obstinance made him a frequent target of the guards’ anger, they could not wear him down. He told my father he’d only denied his charges more resolutely, and prayed his matchstick rosary more fervently, and kept track more carefully of the number of days since he’d received the Body and Blood of Christ in the Eucharist.

There was Martin, a withdrawn Frenchman who had been a bookkeeper at Jardine Matheson, and Senna, an earnest Portuguese man who had tuberculosis that eventually killed him, and whom the guards forced to sit on the waste bucket in the corner. There was Muto, a Gypsy, small and thin and dark-complexioned, with bright eyes and a quick mind, who said his mother taught him to steal a chicken, his father a horse. He shared his bread with my father on the night my father was brought to Ward Road. It was a risk: giving anything to another prisoner, whether it was soap or food or clothing, was forbidden. Iritz was Hungarian and married to Muto’s sister, which was a puzzle: she wasn’t over twenty, and he was fifty-five, divorced a couple of times, short and bald with thick glasses. He received money from his family each month which he could use for toilet articles and vitamins, and he arrived with a large bundle of clean clothes—quite a status symbol at Ward Road. He was later allowed a cell to himself, all of which told the others that he was an informer. He was a con man known for double-crossing on the outside, and in Ward Road Jail, prisoners kept their distance.

There were two Russians, brothers, one married to a Russian, the other to a Chinese woman, both of them well known for crooked business in Shanghai. They’d worked with the Japanese during the occupation, and now they were gangster types. They did a lot of strong-arm stuff, holding people up and threatening them if they didn’t pay protection money. The Chinese wife committed suicide while they were in prison. The older brother went blind from illness and malnutrition, with the Communists all the while telling him he was faking it.

The others my father didn’t know as much about. They kept to themselves, and no one bothered them. The eighteen of them slept close together, lying alternately head to foot in order to keep warm. They didn’t talk much until Iritz had been moved out and they were certain they could trust each other. Sometimes they were allowed to shower and wash their clothes once a month, but there was no guarantee; they could go for as long as four months without bathing. They killed the lice with their teeth as dogs do, and they mashed stink bugs and bedbugs with their fists. When there were too many blood marks on the walls, the guards gave them small pieces of glass to scrape the walls with, and told them there was to be no more mashing of bed-bugs. The cockroaches were less of a problem. The Chinese prisoners killed them and ate them for nourishment.

They ate what they were given—potatoes, or pickled cabbage, once some seaweed, occasionally a soup made from a cow’s head, with eyes floating in the broth and with spices added so that at least it had some taste to it. There was
ta t’ou ts’ai
—nobody knew the English name—a kind of bamboo shoot but with the taste of chopped-up wood. Father McKenna let it be known that he hated the stuff, and for that he was given it and nothing else two times a day for six weeks straight. For the rest of them, there was always rice in one form or another, though they had to be careful of the small white rocks that were added and that could break your teeth because you were ordered to eat as fast as you could. There was congee, which was rice in hot water, maybe with a few limp string beans, or hard rice, which had been steamed at some point but was cold by the time they got it, or thin rice, which was soup, and which was what my father always chose because sometimes it was warm. Iritz often got
mant’ou,
Chinese steamed bread, heavier and more nourishing than regular bread. And there was always garlic, which they were given as a preventative for stomach worms.

They were fed twice a day, and between meals they sat cross-legged and immobile on the concrete floor. Scabies were common, and some rear ends were just raw flesh. Sometimes a man would get down on his knees and beg the guards to let him change positions—
Just don’t make me sit down
—but their requests were always refused. There was nothing to read except for a couple of Communist magazines and an old
Reader’s Digest
—nobody knew how it got there, but most of them knew it almost by heart. If they didn’t make too much noise, they could talk.

There was almost no news of the outside world. Father McKenna knew a little because the Catholic priests scratched Latin phrases to each other on the lacquer-painted waste buckets, which were collected and washed out and redistributed every day. The guards didn’t recognize the Latin as anything meaningful. There were no calendars, there were no clocks, but prisoners learned other ways to keep track of time. A crack of dim sunlight traveling across the floor and ceiling told the time of day. The summer heat brought prickly heat and boils; in the winter, hundreds died from the cold. Firecrackers in winter meant Chinese New Year, and that meant late January.

On a warm April morning as they ate cold rice, Father McKenna leaned close to my father. “Joseph,” he whispered, “today is the first Sunday after the first full moon following the vernal equinox.”

My father regarded the priest carefully, wondering if he was beginning to lose his wits.

Father McKenna grinned at his confusion. “Joseph, give thanks,” he whispered, and there was urgency in his voice.

“Give thanks for what?”

The priest looked genuinely surprised, as though the answer to the question were obvious. “Why, it’s Easter, Joseph. The Lord is risen. And we’re alive. That’s a start.”

My father nodded and then was quiet for a moment, and he did give thanks, for in those months at Ward Road, he had experienced the beginning of change. There was no wife and daughter waiting for his release this time; there was only an ex-wife and an estranged daughter, they were an ocean away, and chances were they didn’t even know of his imprisonment. He’d lost everything, he figured, and he’d finally started to try to find something inside, something to hold on to.

He gazed at the priest for a long moment and saw strength and affection in the older man’s eyes. And then he joked, “What did you give up for Lent?”

For a moment, Father McKenna looked stunned—what was there to give up? He shook his head and the two of them laughed out loud for the first time in months.

A guard looked in and yelled to be quiet, and Father McKenna seemed to catch his attention.

“You,” the guard said, “where does that food you are eating come from?”

The priest did not look up. “It comes from God,” he said simply.

The guard’s face turned red and he glared down at Father McKenna. “Your food,” he said, “is from the blood and sweat of the Chinese people,” and he bullied and harangued the priest for more than an hour as the others in the cell sat silently. But when he’d finished yelling, he still wasn’t satisfied, and he bound the priest’s arms with tourniquets and forced him to kneel. “Your God got you into this, now let Him get you out of it,” he said.

Father McKenna was undaunted. “To be a priest is to suffer,” he said evenly, “for a priest is an
alter Christus.
”

The guard left him like that, bound and kneeling, for the rest of the day. When Father McKenna was released that evening, he nodded at the guard. “Thank you,” he said, “for allowing me to kneel before my Lord for a while.”

The guard stared at Father McKenna for a long minute. Then he whispered,
“Súti”
—We are enemies until death—and he left the cell. They did not see him again.