Distant Land of My Father

by Bo Caldwell

  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.

  The sounds of the place were eerie, too strange to ever become routine. Because of the way the buildings were built, the acoustics were like those of a concert hall. There were more than two thousand men in each block, and every one of them could hear everything that went on in the building, even just one man talking in a normal voice. On a winter afternoon when the rain nagged at the windows and ceiling and walls, they were waiting for their second meal, and except for the rain, the whole place was silent. And then they heard the old Buddhist at the other end of the hall say, “Waiter, bring me twenty ravioli, will you?” and the place was filled with the unfamiliar sound of laughter.

  At night there were whistles that told them what to do. The first whistle meant get ready for bed, and the prisoners would unroll their blankets or whatever they had. The second whistle meant get in bed, and the third whistle meant lights out. When the place fell into darkness, there was an ocean of voices that heaved one huge sigh, a sound of fatigue and despair and pain. And then the music would start, the guards playing one of the two records they had, either Artie Shaw’s “Lady Be Good” or a somber piece by a German orchestra—no one ever knew its name.

  Late in the night on the second Christmas Eve, the solid silence of the place was broken by someone’s beautiful singing of “O Holy Night,” and my father recognized the rich voice and strong New Orleans accent, and he lay in his cell and listened in awe. The man’s deep voice echoed through the corridors and cells, and my father thought he even felt its vibration inside of him. Fall on your knees, oh hear the angels’ voices, Oh night divine, oh night when Christ was born. My father listened as though the sound could save him.

  The man singing was Mitch Patten, my father was sure. He’d run the Shanghai office of J. T. Edwards Ltd., cotton controllers of Boston, and my father had known him through business and seen him at parties. Both of them were man-about-town types. Mitch was young, only twenty-eight, and tall and handsome, over six feet, an extrovert who loved a party and a good time. On a warm night some months later, my father heard Mitch’s voice again, this time against a backdrop of commotion: the sounds of someone thrashing about, the banging of metal against the walls, the sound of Mitch’s voice as he wept and yelled. The place was silent as everyone listened unwillingly to his collapse, and then to the sound of the guards trying to subdue him. But he finally just wore himself out, and my father listened to the sound of Mitch’s cell being unlocked as he was taken from it, then the sounds of footsteps as Mitch was led down the hall and finally chained to the bars of my father’s cell, where he collapsed on the hallway floor, weeping. “Some American company for you,” the guard whispered, and then they’d left Mitch there for the night. As my father listened to him weep, he repeated a Cantonese phrase that Father McKenna used often: Pu yao pa, pu yao pa. Do not be afraid.

  In the morning Mitch was taken away, and there were only whispered rumors about how everything had been so sudden, and how he’d torn his clothes and thrown his waste bucket and smeared excrement on the wall. My father did not speak for four days afterward.

  Like all prisoners, my father was given paper and pencil and told to think over what he had done with his life, and to then write his confession, which was to include where he had gone wrong. T’anpai, the guards said over and over again, t’anpai!, confess! He was also to write his complete life history, a detailed account of the events of his life since the age of six. The questions to be answered were extensive and detailed: What is your age, your place of birth? Who are your parents, your siblings? What are their occupations? What schools have you attended, what courses did you take? When did you arrive in China, and what places have you visited? Do you have guns at home? To what political party do you belong? Do you know President Truman? Do you own land? What are your attitudes toward the officials of the People’s Republic of China?

  When he’d answered all the questions, the completed forms were carefully folded and taken away, and my father never saw them again. And then he was asked to write it all again, and again after that, a total of five times in the course of his imprisonment.

  He, like hundreds of others, was accused of being a spy. More than that he didn’t know, until late one winter’s night in 1953 when a guard called his name and unlocked the heavy steel door, then told him to come along. He led my father down the dimly lit passageway and then downstairs into what felt like a dungeon, further down than he’d ever been before. His legs were stiff and cramped from confinement and inactivity, and he shuffled as he walked.

  He was taken to a small room at the end of a corridor. The sign on the door said COMMANDANT. The guard knocked and was told to enter, and when my father followed him into the room, he found the warden of the jail, Colonel Wang. He was sitting at his desk, smoking a long tailored cigarette. Next to him was a simple table covered with a red cloth, where a Chinese girl sat at a typewriter. On his other side was a guard whose eyes were closed, and my father wondered if he was sleeping. As well he should be, my father thought, for he guessed it was the middle of the night. The jail was eerily silent.

  The guard motioned for my father to be seated on a hard wooden chair that had been placed directly in front of the colonel’s desk. He did as he was told, and the guard trained a bright light across his face. And then the colonel began to speak.

  He addressed my father by his Chinese name, and he smiled broadly as though they were old frien
ds. My father bowed, as he was required to, and the colonel nodded. “Such good manners! And from an American!”

  My father said nothing, waiting.

  “We have something to talk about, but first you need food, do you not?” The colonel stared at my father for a moment, and he nodded. “I see that you do,” the colonel said, and he motioned to the guard, who handed my father a bowl.

  My father stared at the bowl and saw that it held an egg. He had had very little protein for months, and he had to resist the urge to crack the egg and wolf it down on the spot. But he didn’t want the colonel to have that pleasure, so he said casually, “Thank you.”

  The colonel smiled again. “Go ahead. Eat. You will need your strength. And protein is good for the mind.”

  My father cracked the egg open and stared for a moment. There was a chick inside, pin feathers and all, and for a moment he thought he might be sick. He glanced at Colonel Wang and saw how carefully his reaction was being watched and enjoyed. It was all a test, or a dare, just a trick to see what he’d do. And so he did the most unpredictable thing he could think of: he ate the chick. At least there would be protein.

  Colonel Wang grinned and nodded his approval. “A tough one,” he said. “China-born is a tough one all right,” he said. “Now, to our business, China-born. We have information that you have firearms at your house. You have refused to confess thus far; now we will make you confess. What about it?”

  My father worked to keep his voice calm as he answered. “I have no illegal firearms,” he said. “The only firearm I have is a thirty-eight, which you gave me permission to have. I have a license for that, and I was keeping it only to protect myself. You know how the city is these days.”