Free The Distant Land of My Father by Bo Caldwell Page A

remembering my mother’s words from the week before.
    My father closed his eyes and nodded. “Yes,” he said, “it is.”
    That night was the only time I heard him speak of his kidnapping or the Japanese or their request for collaboration. He did not explain the faint lacerations on his wrists, reddish lines that looked like the smaller rivers on the globe in his office, or the bluish bruise below his eye, or the slight limp he had. The subject of his kidnapping was off-limits, and if I tried to venture anywhere near it in conversation, a look from my mother silenced me.
    My parents set about acting as though nothing had happened. They went out again, though not every night. They had friends in for cocktails and dinner, and on the surface the only thing that was different was the way Will Marsh gave me a hug and looked at me carefully and asked me how everything was whenever he came over. In the mornings, my father went to his office, and though we didn’t go to the Bund the next few Saturdays, he said it was because of the heat. I should stay inside where it was cool, he said.

    Over the next few weeks, my parents’ conversations with each other and with friends became more and more centered on the war that my father had said would not happen and would not matter. My father tracked it as though it were a weather system that he hoped would pass over us, and he recorded its progress in the accounting ledger he’d begun using as a journal. On the twenty-eighth of July, 1937, Peking fell to the Japanese, and in the days that followed, the Japanese army headed south, one long file going by way of the Nankow Pass and Shansi Province, the other heading toward Nanking via the railway from Tientsin. On the seventh of August, the Chinese National Defense Council declared a War of Resistance against Japan, and Chinese commanders were ordered to prepare to drive Japanese troops from Shanghai. The next evening, when my father went into the den and switched on his new Stewart Warner radio, he heard the news on XQHB instead of the usual tango program, and on XMHA instead of the soap operas, and he told my mother that the city felt like war. That same day, the International Settlement authorities declared a state of martial law, and from that time on, my father was never far from his radio when he was home.
    On an evening in early August, things grew more serious. A Japanese commander and his aide drove to the Hungjao airfield, which the Chinese military was using as a base. When they got there, a Chinese sentry forbade them to proceed. They ignored his commands and both were shot, as was the Chinese sentry. The bodies of the Japanese were found on the side of the road, mutilated. Japan demanded an apology and the withdrawal of Chinese troops thirty miles from the city. Those demands went unmet, and two days later, when my father was walking near his office, he saw the Japanese flagship Idzumo on the Whangpoo next to the Japanese Consulate, accompanied by some twenty warships. The next day, August 12, Chiang’s best military divisions arrived in Shanghai from Nanking and established themselves in Chapei, the Chinese area on the north side of Soochow Creek, and Kiangwan, further north still. The day after that, Friday the thirteenth, the Shanghai Volunteer Corps was called up. Orders for Volunteers to report for duty were broadcast constantly on the radio, and displayed on theater screens all over the city.
    And then China made a demand of her own, the withdrawal of Japanese troops by four o’clock the next afternoon. This was something new, an unprecedented firmness from the Chinese and a welcome change. The Chinese military was at last taking a stand, backed by the recent addition of modern bombers and ten two-thousand-pound bombs to Chiang’s air force.
    On that Friday afternoon, my mother had planned to take me to Whiteway & Laidlaw on Nanking Road for new school shoes. As Mei Wah drove us into town, I sat in the backseat of the