The Distant Land of My Father Read online

  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.

  Beside the river was a promenade that was more European than Chinese. Facing it were the offices of all of the large hongs, the Western trading firms and banks. That was what people first saw when they reached Shanghai: facades made of granite and stone, a clock tower, a green dome, marble columns, and a pair of huge bronze lions that told you Shanghai was a place to be reckoned with.

  On a Saturday morning in July 1937, my father came to my room early and woke me with a whisper. “Your mother needs her sleep,” he said softly. “Get up and get dressed and come downstairs. It’s time to go.”

  I nodded, and as I got up, I knew from the warm, still air in my room that the day was already hot. Chu Shih had told me that Chinese weather forecasts were based on the cycles of the moon, and this time of July was called tashu, great heat. It exhausted my mother. Every other year we’d escaped it by taking a steamer up to the port of Tsingtao, green island
, on Kiaochow Bay, to the north of Shanghai. We’d stay in a cottage there, a place my mother said she loved because the white sandy beaches reminded her of Southern California, and because the place was a relief from the flatness and humidity of Shanghai. But that year she refused to leave the city. “Things are a little uncertain,” was all she said, and when I’d asked my father what she meant, he said, “That’s just how it is,” which meant he didn’t want to talk about it.

  I put on a summer dress and white socks, then slid my feet into shoes that had damp insides and rims of mold in the toes, normal for summer in Shanghai. I hurried downstairs, knowing what the day would hold and happy with the prospect of it. My father and I were going to the Bund, which was exactly what we did every Saturday, always early, and always by ourselves.

  He was waiting for me in the kitchen, drumming his fingers on the butcher board and staring out the south window at the Chinese elm he’d planted the week before. His father had taught him about growing things when he was a child, and although it was unusual in Shanghai to find a wealthy businessman digging around in the garden, my father did so constantly, planting and replanting, pruning and examining, caring for elm trees and magnolias and Chinese junipers as though they were his wards. There were plane trees with mottled trunks whose bark I liked to peel when no one was looking, Hankow willows that bent in the breeze like gentle ghosts, a black-wood acacia, angel’s tears narcissus with their small white flowers, and—my father’s favorite—yellow and coral and pink cathedral roses that bloomed recklessly and, my mother said, far too long, all the way through September.

  When I walked into the kitchen, he turned from the window. “That elm’s roots aren’t taking hold,” he said, the same thing he’d said the night before. He handed me his idea of breakfast—a handful of sugared lotus seeds and a boiled Chefoo pear to eat in the car—then he swooped me up and carried me outside.

  Mei Wah was my father’s age and had been his chauffeur for years. He drove us the five miles to downtown Shanghai in my father’s Packard, which smelled of Mei Wah’s patchouli and Egyptian cigarettes, a scent that I loved because it was mysterious and familiar at the same time. We headed east across the city along Bubbling Well Road to where it turned into Nanking Road, then north along the Bund. We crossed Soochow Creek on the Garden Bridge, the last bridge before the creek met the Whangpoo. And then Mei Wah pulled over, and my father and I got out.

  “In front of the Park Hotel at two,” my father said.

  Mei Wah nodded, then pulled away from the bridge.

  My father and I walked the short distance to the Broadway Mansions, a redbrick apartment building with staggered terraces that looked like giant steps. We took the elevator up and got out on the top floor, the Foreign Correspondents Club, where my father nodded to some American journalists he knew. One of them winked at me as though we shared a secret, and I smiled, then followed my father out to the terrace that overlooked the Bund, so that we could find out what I knew.

  We stepped outside into heat so thick it wasn’t like air. It had rained the day before, and everything felt wet. My father seemed not to notice. Sixteen storeys below, the Bund was spread out like a gift, and he looked at it as though it were something of great beauty. I stared, too; it seemed as if we could see the whole world from where we stood. I spotted the huge magnolia tree in the Public Gardens, tiny from here, and the bandstand where people had picnics in the summer before listening to the Municipal Orchestra on Saturday evenings. A little further down were the silkworm mulberry trees that grew next to the iron benches set along the river’s edge.

  Finally my father spoke. “How many buildings do you think you can name, Anna?” he asked. “More than last week?”

  I nodded. My back was damp and the thin linen of my dress stuck to my skin, but I tried not to notice it. This was important, and I wanted high marks. The buildings along the Bund stared back at me as though they, too, were waiting for me to start, a dare. Finally I took a breath and pointed to the first buildings on the other side of the Garden Bridge. “The British Consulate,” I began, and I looked down at its huge gates and expansive lawn, all of it guarded by Sikhs in red turbans. “And then the Russian Consulate.” Words I knew but didn’t understand.

  My father nodded. “That’s a start,” he said, his voice restrained.

  “Then the trading firms and banks,” I said cautiously. “The NYK Line, then the Banque...” I paused, trying to remember how to say the word.

  “De l’Indochine,” my father said quietly. “Go on.”

  “Then the Glenn Line,” I said, “and Jardine Matheson.” I took a breath, my confidence gaining slightly. “Then Yangtze Insurance, the Yokohama Specie Bank, and the Bank of China.”

  “And then?” My father shook a cigarette from the package of Lucky Strikes that was in the pocket of his seersucker coat. He lit it slowly, waiting for me to continue.

  “And then, at Nanking Road, the Cathay.” I stared down at one of the busiest corners in Shanghai, the intersection of the Bund and Nanking Road, marked by the green pyramid tower of the Cathay Hotel, twenty storeys tall. My father had taken me there, and I remembered a place as lovely as a dream: rose drapes, crystal lights, a dance floor so polished it looked wet, paintings of dragons on the ceiling.

  My father rested his hand on my head and smoothed my hair. “That’s good, Anna,” he said, “you’re learning,” and I savored both his affection and his approval, more valuable and certainly more rare. “Listen and I’ll tell you the rest.”

  And then he continued down the Bund as I tried to pay attention so that I could do better next week. “Across from the Cathay is the Palace Hotel, where your mother likes to eat lunch and go to the tea dances. Then the Chartered Bank of India, America, and China; the North China Daily News; the Russo-Chinese Bank; the Bank of Communications; the Customs House, with Big Ching on top.”

  He paused and I whispered, “Big Ching,” for luck. It was thought that Big Ching brought all of Shanghai good luck. There had been fewer fires since the clock was built, which the Chinese said was because of the chimes. The god of fire confused them with fire alarms, and concluded that Shanghai had enough fires without his sending more.

  My father continued. “Next there’s the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank, Anna. That’s the largest bank in the Far East. You see it?” I nodded and gazed at white pillars and a green dome and huge bronze doors, then at the two bronze lions that stood guard at the entrance. One lion roared, the other rested. They, too, brought good luck, if you rubbed their noses.

  “And then,” he said, “when you cross Canton Road, you’re almost at the end. There’s the Union Building, the Shanghai Club, and the McBain Building.”

  I nodded and stared at the six columns in front of the Shanghai Club. I knew it was famous for its bar, the longest in the world, over one hundred feet. But my father had told me something that I found more impressive.

  “They iron the newspapers there,” I said softly.

  My father laughed. “Hao tê-hên,” he said, very good. “We’ll celebrate.” And this time he didn’t smooth my hair, he mussed it, a stronger show of affection, and I felt my face grow hot.

  We took the lift back down and went out into the heat and across the Garden Bridge on foot. At the start of the Bund were the Public Gardens, and I took my father’s hand as we neared the magnolia trees. The crows that nested in them were known for their meanness, and I felt certain that they particularly disliked small girls.

  On the Bund, everything was so busy and crowded and loud that I thought we must be in the center of the world. On our left were the jetties, where coolies unloaded barges and ships and cranes hovered overhead. In the street, trams rattled past us and cars fought for space while rickshaws wove around them. The coolies who pulled them never looked up, and their long black queues of hair looked like braided whips on the bare skin of their backs. On the sidewalks were hawkers, some of them offering to polish my father’s shoes, others holding things out for sale
, things like fountain pens, Chinese slippers, cold drinks, pomelos, and small green bananas that you would never eat without washing and maybe boiling. And there were the beggars, all ages, all of them missing something—a few teeth, a leg, an arm, an eye, a nose. They hunched in doorways, they crouched along the curb, they stood in the street, ahead of us, behind us, next to us, in our steps, everywhere, all of them demanding cumshaw, at least a few dragon coppers.

  My father and I walked without speaking. I held his hand tightly and concentrated on staying close. He was alert and appreciative, taking everything in as though it were his. The air smelled of garlic and bean curd frying in peanut oil, of smoke and the Whangpoo and of too many people. Cars honked, coolies called for people to make way, turbaned Sikhs directing traffic yelled and blew high-pitched whistles that hurt my ears. It seemed as if everyone was talking. Chinese compradores, employees of the foreign firms, argued in hurried Mandarin. Two Frenchmen chatted alongside us, and behind us, English cotton merchants with bowler hats and walking sticks talked business. Next to us a mother scolded her children in a language I didn’t know.

  At the Customs House, my father stopped to watch a passenger liner that had just docked, the streamers that clung to its sides already damp from the humidity. “More griffins,” he muttered. “Bunch of four-minute tourists,” his name for travelers who stopped in Shanghai for only a few days. A small band on the ship’s bow played as passengers talked and laughed and made their way down the gangplank. It was easy to spot those new to Shanghai. My father said you smelled Shanghai before you saw it, and as we watched, a woman in a dark suit winced when she first took in the Whangpoo’s stench of fish and garbage and smoke from the ships’ coal burners and the cotton mills and power company. She leaned on the railing as though she might faint. But then she glanced up and saw the Bund, and her expression changed from distaste to wonder, and for a moment she just stared.