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

car and tried to picture my feet in saddle shoes, which seemed so grown up that I was having a hard time imagining them. I was so focused on my feet that it was only when my mother groaned that I looked out the window to see what was wrong.
    The city had been transformed, and I looked out on streets that should have been familiar but had become nightmarish. We passed barbed-wire barricades and sandbag shelters, and foreign soldiers stood on every corner. Chinese crowded the streets and sidewalks and doorways, their possessions in wheelbarrows or carts or just strapped onto their backs. They were refugees, my mother said, people who’d left Chapei and Hongkew to the north of Soochow Creek to make their way across the Garden Bridge because they were afraid to stay where they were.
    My mother immediately gave up on buying shoes. The wind was blowing and the red warning light on the top of the Customs House was blinking, signaling a typhoon. She told Mei Wah to just turn around and take us back home. On our way, we passed the Great World, a six-storey amusement hall on the corner of Avenue Edouard VII and Tibet Road in the French Concession. I remembered its shooting galleries, hall of mirrors, Ferris wheels, Chinese classic dramas, magicians and fireworks and acrobats, but a few days earlier, it had been converted into a refugee center, as had theaters and schools around the city. It was mealtime as we passed. I looked out at a line of people that seemed endless, all of them waiting for a bowl of rice.
    When we got home, my father met us at the door. It was only four o’clock, and it was unusual for him to be home so early. His expression was grim, his mouth a straight line. When my mother got out of the car, he said only, “It’s Chapei.” Then he looked at me and said, “You might as well see this,” and he took my hand and led me up the outside stairs to the verandah, then to the north side of the house, where he put his hands on my shoulders and faced me toward Chapei across Soochow Creek.
    The sky was a Halloween orange, darker than sunset and tinged with black, with low clouds that were blacker still. The air smelled of smoke, and there was a sound I’d never heard before. The closest thing was thunder, but this was faster and staccato sharp, an aggressive rapping that I wanted to stop.
    “It’s started,” my father said. “That’s the sound of shelling. Things won’t be the same for a while now.”
    We watched in silence as it grew dark. By dusk the whole sky over Chapei was black smoke, and when we finally went inside, I stayed close to my parents out of fear, as though no place was safe. In the den, my father switched on the radio, and its miniature cathedral shape made me think of Mass. Keep us safe, I thought. My parents were listening to the news: the first shots had been fired at Yokohama Bridge, on the northern border of the International Settlement, leading to an exchange of fire between the outposts of the two militaries. Across the Whangpoo at Pootung, Japanese marines were disembarking from their cruisers under covering fire from gunboats.
    The next morning, the clouds over Chapei were still black. The sound of shelling had become a backdrop that seemed to be everywhere and to come from all directions. It made my head hurt. There were other sounds, too, which my father said was cannon fire and the playback of shelling from ships, and firing from the gunboats in the Whangpoo, all of it making the French doors that opened onto the verandah shudder.
    My parents had been invited to a wedding reception that afternoon. The bride was the daughter of my father’s first employer in Shanghai, a man who ran the Asiatic American Underwriters, and there was to be a garden reception at the Cercle Sportif in the French Concession. It was clear that my mother had no wish to go, but it was equally clear that my father had no intention of staying home. He’d been at home more than usual that week, acquiescing to