The Distant Land of My Father (51 page)

The easy chair and ottoman, both of them worn, were at the foot of the bed, facing the opposite wall, which was covered with the kind of bookshelves that you put up yourself. An old black-and-white TV sat on the middle shelf, wedged into the middle of the books. I recognized the set: it had been Jack’s and mine, and my father had offered to drop it off at Goodwill two years earlier when we’d gotten a new set. I did not see the new Philco Table TV we’d given him last Christmas.

I sank down onto the patched ottoman. The whole place was smaller than our living room, and though everything was clean, it was also worn. The rug was threadbare, the walls dingy, despite the white paint. The bookshelves that lined the far wall were packed with books, and I stood and scanned the titles. It was an odd collection. There were some classics, Modern Library editions of Austen, Freud, Keats, Shelley, Tolstoy, and some history and current events. There was a handful of health and diet books, and plenty of self-improvement books and pamphlets:
How to Boost Your Brain Power to Enrich Your Life; How to Say a Few Words—E
ff
ectively; The Harry R. Lange Do Sheet System of Personal Efficiency.

But the majority of the books were religious. I was intrigued; I’d never known my father to be much of a reader of things spiritual. But I ran my fingers across the spines of a whole section of New Testaments and counted fifteen of them, including two in something called Pitman’s Shorthand. There were some of the spiritual classics my grandmother loved—Therèse of Lisieux, Julian of Norwich, John of the Cross,
The Cloud of Unknowing
—but there were also books by Billy Graham and Mary Baker Eddy,
The Sermon on the Mount
by Emmet Fox,
My Utmost for His Highest
by Oswald Chambers, almost as though my father was trying to cover his bets. And there were twenty-nine books by a Christian mystic named Joel Goldsmith, all of them underlined and highlighted. I opened one called
Practicing the Presence
and read an underlined passage:
God is the very strength of my bones; God is the health of my countenance; God is my fortress and my high-tower, my safety and my security . . . God in the midst of me is mighty, and because God is in the midst of me, I need nothing; I lack nothing. Of myself I have no ability; I have no understanding of my own, but God’s understanding is infinite.

At the far end of the room, in the added-on alcove, were a small refrigerator and a miniature gas range and oven. A shelf over the range held a few canned goods: Franco-American spaghetti, a jar of Ovaltine, Chase & Sanborn instant coffee, Campbell’s soup, V8 juice. Taped to the wall nearest the range were two recipes in my father’s handwriting. One was for something called “Diet Stew,” which included hamburger, cabbage, onions, celery, and tomatoes. The other was for
chiaotzû,
and I pictured Chu Shih as I read the ingredients:
2 lb. pork, 2 lb. cabbage, 3 thumbs ginger, 2 bunch onions, 2 eggs, 2 t. salt, ¼ cup sesame oil, 2 T. soya sauce.

A large window overlooked a postage-stamp garden, most of which was shabby and neglected—I could see a few heads of lettuce and some scrawny tomato vines—but there was a corner that I was certain had been in my father’s care. Four rosebushes were in bloom, plus some gardenias and a small orange tree.

That cramped alcove apparently doubled as an office, for next to the stove and pushed up against the window were an old swivel chair and desk. The desk was nicked and dented and old, the kind of unappealing office desk, huge and metal, found in government offices. I sat down and the swivel chair creaked. The hand-me-down Royal typewriter that Jack had nabbed for my father when the secretaries at Flintridge bought new equipment was in the center of the desk, and next to it was a sheet of paper that said,
Résumé—Joseph Schoene.
I read my father’s account of his professional life:

January 1955–Present: Building maintenance, Bradbury Building. Seeking to improve position.

Proprietor of poultry farm, October–December 1954. Sold farm for profit.

School janitor, June–September 1954. Quit to improve position.

Owner and manager of Aberdeen Poultry Farm, Hong Kong, 1954.

Prisoner of Communists, 1951–1954.

Claims adjuster and importer-exporter, Hong Kong and Shanghai, 1931–1951.

Prisoner of Japanese, 1942–1943.

The rest of the desk was covered with papers—medical bills, lab reports, receipts from “Reliable Drug Co., The Rexall Store,” a paper bag from another pharmacy with a shopping list—and over-the-counter medicines, not a surprise because of my father’s strong belief in self-prescribed drugs, usually taken in double the recommended dosage on the theory that if a little was good, a lot was better. I’d seen him browse in the Fair Oaks Pharmacy the way other people browse in bookstores. On the windowsill behind the desk were what I assumed were his current favorite medications: a bottle of PeptoBismol, Tums, Milk of Magnesia.

In the middle desk drawer was a cigar box. I took it out and opened it and found what I supposed were treasures: a list of one hundred of the world’s languages, written in pencil on pages ripped from a spiral memo pad—
Afrikaans, Amharic, Apache, Arabic, Arabic Mogrebi, Armenian, Aymara
—pages and pages of languages, with English listed at the end, just after Welsh and Yosuba. I had no idea what it meant. There was an eight-by-ten black-and-white photograph taken in the lobby of the Bradbury Building. My father wore dungarees, a work shirt, and work gloves. He leaned against a dust mop and grinned at the camera. Four sheets from a memo pad were held together with a straight pin. On each one was a Chinese character, and below it, the individual strokes required to make that character, and I understood that he was practicing. I had no idea what the characters meant. There were a few black-and-white snapshots: our house in Hungjao, my father playing polo, Chu Shih standing in front of the house. He stood very formally, and I stood next to him, holding his hand.

In the lower drawer was a thick file labeled
Bills Outstanding,
and in it I found bill after unpaid bill, both new and old, some from just after his return from Hong Kong seven years ago. The bills were mostly medical, but there was a little bit of everything. He owed a whole range of people and companies: the Reliable Drug Co.—The Rexall Store, $33.19; Edward Henderson, M.D., Orthopedic Surgery, $63.45; the Memorial Hearing and Speech Clinic, $32.00; Michael F. Swan, M.D., M.C., Nephrology and Internal Medicine, $170.10; Theodore Aarons, M.D., Dermatology, $37.10; the Los Angeles County General Hospital, which was known among other things for admitting indigents able to meet residence requirements and county jail prisoners, $65.17. There were overdue notices from the Central Public Library, and a letter from his landlord’s lawyer, dated four months earlier:
Three Day Notice to pay rent or surrender possession of the premises.

Some of the bills had messages stamped at the bottom in red or blank ink:
Past Due,
they read,
Please Remit, Second Request, Final Notice, This account has been assigned for immediate collection.
Some included handwritten notes:
Do you want us to take further action on this? We need payment now!
A pharmacy bill from six years ago:
When are you planning to pay this bill?
A vitamin supply company:
We would be happy to fill your order, but a review of our files indicates that a previous order from you remained unpaid. Demand is being made for immediate payment of $38.85, and $9.00 service charge, for a total of $47.85. We can no longer defer to your creditor’s faith in you. Payment must be made now.

He was turned down for magazine subscriptions because he owed them money from past subscriptions, $18.97 to
Popular Mechanics
and $7.93 to
Reader’s Digest.

All of these were neatly filed, stapled to the return envelopes, as though my father had fully intended to pay them eventually. I knew my father; I was certain that he’d been thinking that any day now, things would turn around and he’d be on his feet again, making money. But all you had to do was look around that room and you knew that was a lie. Whoever lived here did so in poverty.

There were odd notes and pictures taped to the walls. Photos of the girls and me were taped to the refrigerator, and pictures that they’d drawn decorated a cupboard by the stove. A fold-out postcard of the Bund was over his bed, and taped to the wall above the phone was a scrap of paper with my telephone number on it. Next to it were two photographs. One was of my mother and me at the beach in Tsingtao. I was around two years old; my mother looked young and beautiful, and I remembered that my father used to keep it in his wallet. The other photograph was of my father and me standing in front of the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank. My father smiled broadly at the camera. I was six; my hand rested on one of the bronze lions that stood guard at the entrance. And stuck in the mirror frame over the dresser was the postcard I’d sent him six years ago, when I had reluctantly answered his first letter. I read it with difficulty:
Hi—Got your note and the gift for Eve. Thank you. We’re all fine. Glad things are going well for you. Best, Anna.

Those were things I understood. There were also handwritten notes taped here and there:

Priorities—Start—Persevere—Do!

Love, Lay, Listen, Let, Light.

Keep it simple—Leave it to Emmanuel.

Pray for inspiration and intelligence, claim understanding, and believe that Divine Love is working through me.

Ever ready—Be prepared—Be ye ready and alert!

I had been in the room for nearly two hours and nothing made sense. I was tired from sorting through papers and clothes and books, and I was upset by the oddness of the place. If you asked a stranger who lived here, I could imagine the answer:
A man who had next to
nothing, whose health was precarious. A man who was in so much debt he could never hope to recover. A man who seemed intensely spiritual, a man who seemed disturbed.
Janitor, debtor, dreamer, schemer; rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief. My father had just about all of it covered.

I had looked at everything in the room, I thought, through all of the desk and dresser drawers, through the papers on the desk. I’d scanned the books, I’d looked at bill after bill, waiting for something to catch my eye. Nothing did.

And then I saw it: a wooden fruit crate on the highest bookshelf, almost touching the ceiling. I pushed the ottoman to the bookshelf and pulled the crate down, not caring about the dust that came with it. Then I put it on the bed and sat down.

In the box, I found a manila envelope with my name in pencil in my father’s even handwriting. I pulled out its contents and found his letter to me, the map, and the journals. I read the letter and looked at the map. And then I opened the first journal—an accounting ledger—and I felt a wave of affection. I remembered him buying these ledgers at the paper store I had loved in Shanghai.

The journal, too, was addressed to me:

January 25, 1938

My dear Anna,

I have had the notion of writing some things down for you, some things about Shanghai and about what is happening around me in this amazing place, at this amazing time. I want you to know these things, and writing them down seems to be the only way to tell you. If you were here, I would probably try to explain it all to you, the way I always do. Your mother is often reminding me of your age—She’s only a child, Joe, she’ll say—because, she says, I often expect too much of you. So it’s probably
better that
I write these things down, so that you can read them when you are older.

But I couldn’t tell you these things now, even if I wanted to. You and your mother left Shanghai yesterday, and overnight, I have become a wanderer. I could not leave yet—there is too much business to do, too much opportunity—but seeing you off yesterday was more painful than I care to admit.

So I will have to settle for this, for these pages as our conversation. I hope that you will understand it all someday, and that you will find it at least mildly interesting.

I flipped through the pages of that first ledger with something like awe. I lost track of time, and when I finally looked up, it was getting dark in the room. I stood and turned on the overhead light, which made the room look even dingier than it had in daylight, and as I looked around me, I imagined my father watching TV here, reading in the easy chair, warming up a can of spaghetti, calling me and telling me how well he was doing, and I ached with regret.

I spent the next four nights at home reading my father’s journals. Each night, I read late into the night, until I couldn’t stay awake anymore. I couldn’t read them during the day—it was too hard to put them down, and the one time I tried, I was cross with the girls afterward because all I wanted was to be reading again. So after dinner, once Heather and Eve were asleep, I sat in the living room in the same Morris chair that my father had loved, and I read. Jack wandered in a few times, asking when I was coming to bed and pointing out that it wasn’t as though I had a deadline here. Once he stood behind me for a moment, and I could hear the evenness of his breathing, a sound I loved.