The Distant Land of My Father by Bo Caldwell Read Free Book Online

ties by the dozen, leather loafers and wing tips. On the first day, when he came to the counter with an armload of clothing, he talked a clerk in the men’s department into letting him use one of the huge drawers behind the counter for his stash, and every day, as the prices went down, he added to it. When he finally brought everything home after settling up and loading the trunk of the Packard with his purchases, my mother had laughed as Mei Wah brought in box after box. “Now, that’s shopping,” she’d said, and my father had turned to her and said seriously, “No, it’s business.”
    It was a few minutes before two when we reached Tibet Road, where Nanking Road became Bubbling Well Road. We were to meet Mei Wah where we always met him, in front of the Park Hotel, the tallest building in the East, taller than any of the buildings on the Bund. The Park was across from the Race Course and the Public Recreation Ground, a huge park with a swimming pool, a golf course, a baseball field, tennis courts, and probably more, though I didn’t know what.
    The Park was a little more than a mile from the Bund, a long walk for me, and I was dragging. My father asked me to hurry up—Mei Wah would be waiting for us, he said—and I tried to. When we got to the corner and my father looked at his watch, he said we were a few minutes early, and there was no sign of Mei Wah.
    “Have a seat, Anna. It won’t be long. You can watch the birds.” My father nodded toward a stone bench under a willow tree a few feet away, and I sat down in the shade gratefully, glad to be out of the sun. The bird men were out—that was what I called them, mostly old men who owned pet birds and liked to air them in the early morning and afternoon in the summer and spring. But I was too tired to take much notice of them.
    I held a small wooden box in my hand. Inside was my one purchase, a tiny elephant carved out of ivory. It reminded me of the elephant on my father’s chop. Mei Wah had told me that in India elephants were good luck, especially if the trunk was raised, as this one’s was. Now the elephant was wrapped in cotton wool and packed in a small box, which I held carefully.
    I’d decided on the elephant at lunch. My father’s tone of voice and the accusatory look on Will Marsh’s face had given the day the frayed-edge feeling of worry. I didn’t like arguments, and as I sat on the bench, I concentrated on home as a way to make the worried feeling go away. I imagined the coolness of our house. I knew that when we got there, my father would pour himself some Scotch and go out to the verandah. I knew he would not want to talk, that he would want to be alone. I knew that my mother would have bathed. She would be wearing the deep blue silk kimono that my father had brought her from Osaka last year, and her hair would be swept up on top of her head instead of coiled at the base of her neck, her only concession to the heat. She would smell of lavender and Cashmere Bouquet, the only soap she used, and she would be sitting in the study, reading Life or The Saturday Evening Post, and listening to Let’s Dance, an NBC Network program that the American radio station in Shanghai carried. She liked the Latin music. I would sit with her on the cool leather sofa and show her my treasure, and tell her about our day.
    None of those things happened.
    A car turned onto Bubbling Well Road at the corner. The sun made it hard to see, and I stood, thinking it was Mei Wah. My father was several feet away from me, right on the corner so that he was in plain sight, and he squinted at the car and shaded his eyes, then looked at his watch.
    The car came closer, and I saw that it wasn’t my father’s dark green Packard. It was a black sedan, solid and imposing and modern looking, and it slowed as it neared us. Then it stopped at our corner. My linen dress was limp and I tried to smooth the wrinkles out, thinking these must be friends of my father’s and that I would be