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More reviews by Peter Gordon
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The Distant Land of My Father by Bo Caldwell
BO CALDWELL's first novel, THE DISTANT LAND OF MY FATHER, is the story of a young girl (and later woman) growing up in pre-WW2 Shanghai (and later, Los Angeles) and her relationship with her father, a American fixer and entrepreneur who can't seem to get China out of his blood and who badly misreads the lead-up to both Pearl harbor and the Communist victory and ends up in prison camp not just once, but twice.
There is something almost unrelentingly romantic, if not entirely politically correct, about pre-War Shanghai and its subsequent decline. And now that just about the only place can indulge one's nostalgia for this time of opulence and decadence is in Hong Kong's China Club, one takes welcome refuge in books.
Those of a romantic bent are unlikely to be disappointed, for THE DISTANT LAND OF MY FATHER has the loving but eccentric parents, the parties in the French concession, the large cars, the gruff but loving Chinese servants, barbarous Japanese soldiers, the steamed dumplings, gangsters, tea dances, Chinese mistresses, steamships and all the other ingredients we have come to expect in a book of this kind.
Anna, the narrator and daughter, loves her father Joseph Shoene to distraction as a little girl, feels betrayal when he chooses his life in Shanghai over staying with Anna and her mother in California and finally reconciles with him when he returns destitute and spiritually renewed after being booted out of, first, China and then Hong Kong.
But on the whole, I found the book rather stretched -- it tries to cover too much ground, geographically and temporally -- and therefore somewhat simplistic and not entirely credible. James Clavell and JG Ballard wrote entire books about internment under the Japanese; Joseph's experience, including beatings and torture, was handled here in a chapter or so. And he went through it again under the new Communist regime -- all in another two-dozen pages.
Anna's feeling of betrayal does not, as a result, generate much sympathy. The "betrayal" was that her father, after repatriation to America in a prisoner swap, choose to return to China as an expert military liaison, rather than sitting out the War in suburbia.
The book floats over Shanghai and the real issues of the time -- rather as did many of the Westerners who lived there. In that sense, the book is accurate.
Peter Gordon
25/11/2001
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Peter Gordon is editor of The Asian Review of Books. |
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