The Write Place At the Write Time. The writing has been copyrighted, so if you wish to use or quote anything in this story you must properly cite the source, including the author's (Don MacLaren's) name.
Digging to China
When I was a kid my friends and I tried digging to China – which seemed like another world to us - but after a while we abandoned the idea. Eventually I figured that I could get there faster if I joined the Navy and went there on a ship.
I made my first overseas cruise in November 1979 on the aircraft carrier Coral Sea, and Pusan, Korea (pretty close to China) was our first overseas port call. I remember gazing at the islands off the coast and at the mountains of mainland Korea that jutted up out of the sea like huge rocks. The sun was beginning to rise and its rays framed the scenery in a way I thought romantic.
Climbing out of the boat that took us from the ship to the shore, we went to Texas Street, which was filled with a lot of American-like bars where American-like bargirls tried to cater to us. Though I wasn't ready to make love with a prostitute, I danced with one – only the third or fourth time I'd danced in my life. She was quite beautiful, with black hair down to her shoulders, and - except for the kimchi/garlic smell on her breath - a sweet, pure scent emanated from her young body. Somebody threw coins in the jukebox and I left my inhibitions at the table as she led me to the dance floor. As The Beatles sang “Ticket to Ride” I made up moves. I think I did a pretty good job: The Funky Pelican, the Flying Turtle, the Sprinting Octopus. I felt like a goldfish riding a bicycle by the time my bargirl stepped on a cockroach with a "crunch".
The song ended and I ordered a vodka and orange juice. My bargirl asked me to pay her “bar-fine,” so I could take her out of the bar for the night, but I declined. Although she was a beautiful woman, the beauty added to my fears. I didn't want to fall in love with beauty only to end up discarded and alone on the western shores of the Pacific Ocean. And anyway, I didn't have enough money to pay her bar-fine.
So, instead of spending the night with her I rented a cheap room for myself near the bar. "You wan' girl?" the middle-aged woman who took my money at the hotel asked, looking up from her meal of rice, kimchi and meat, as she sat behind a partition. "No. Just the room," I told her.
"You no wan' girl? You sure?" she asked. "No wan' girl, wan' alcohol," I told her. So, shortly after I entered the cold, gray room, with torn, faded yellow curtains, she came back with a bottle of Korean soju – a drink stronger than wine, but weaker than whiskey. I pulled out the won I had in my pocket and she took what was needed to cover the bottle. I sipped the bitter liquor as I wrote in my notebook for an hour or so, trying to compose poetry. After I'd finished half the bottle I heard something scurry across the floor in the hall. I opened the door to find it was a rat. When it saw me it scurried into one of the other rooms that had its door ajar. I returned to my room and fell into a deep sleep on that cold December night. When I woke up a few hours later I went to the bathroom and found someone had vomited in it. Then I returned to my room to find two rats in the corner making love. I grabbed my things, went outside and bought some meat on a stick that a street vendor was selling. The meat tasted sweet and I thought it was spiced beef, but after I ate it another sailor walking by told me I'd just eaten dog.
I made my way down the street not sure of where to go or what to do until I looked to the hill west of the city. I decided to climb it. After 20 minutes or so of climbing what seemed to be an interminable number of steps that would lead me to my hometown on the other side of the world if I continued on them, I turned back toward the city and the Pacific waters beyond. As I did so, I recalled that someone on the ship had said you could get opium-laced wine in Korea easily and legally. After having read William Burroughs and listened to Lou Reed's song “Heroin” I'd become intrigued by opiates, (though scared of them as well) and I decided to look for that magical wine.
The Orient was an exotic place in my mind and still is in the minds of most Westerners. China, Korea, Buddhism and opium, along with a little kimchi and soju (but hold the dog meat please) mixed together offered something to me that seemed an alternative, though perhaps not an answer to my dissatisfaction with Midwestern Catholicism, Calvinism, hot dogs and Budweiser.
It was my last day in Pusan and I decided that in addition to a glass of opium wine I would try to find a Buddhist temple as well. (It might be good to hedge my search for vices with a visit to a house of God, I reasoned.)
But in Pusan I never did partake of the opium wine, nor did I find a Buddhist temple. Instead, I found the biggest sailor from my division as I turned a corner. He was looking for a restaurant that served hamburgers. Though I wanted to be alone, I couldn't think of a way to shake him. He found a restaurant and ordered. I sat down, resting from my long walk and lit a cigarette. He took off his jacket and rolled up his sleeves to reveal a tattoo on his right forearm: an “X” covering the faded name of “Lucy,” and what appeared to be a mermaid bearing the name “Jenny” on his left forearm. He commented on how the hamburger tasted strange. I thought it might be dog but didn't tell him. While he was eating I drank two cups of tea and looked out at the harbor, where I saw our ship anchored.
After three days in Pusan we patrolled the waters of the Sea of Japan and the East China Sea before hitting Subic Bay in the Philippines.
Walking to Olongapo City from the base, we crossed a bridge that goes over what both Filipinos and U.S. sailors called "Shit River," a river that makes an impression on the olfactory nerve just as its name would suggest – because the river is full of raw sewage.
But as we crossed Shit River I saw the most beautiful woman in the world on the other side. She was smiling as she turned her face from me, and her white, slightly crooked, teeth and sparkling brown eyes remained in my mind's eye. Her dress blew softly against her legs in the sultry breeze as children in boats on Shit River called out for “Piso! Piso!”(the Philippine currency). But the further I walked toward the woman, the further away from me she moved. Since that day I have often chased after the vision of that woman, but she has so far evaded my grasp.
* * *
After 18 days in the Philippines we pulled out of Subic Bay, went through the Straits of Malacca and headed to “Gonzo Station” in the Indian Ocean in January 1980. We then spent over a hundred days at sea without a port call, off the coast of Iran. Our jobs as Radiomen required us to work 12-16 hours a day, every day. Messages never stopped coming or going so there was always a backlog of work. I made copies, filed messages, making sure that all the immediate and priority messages were at the top of the stack, and called up the departments the messages were addressed to in order notify them. I also had to do field day (sweeping and mopping the spaces). During the mid-watches (the graveyard shifts) I would stand up for hours without a break, copying messages on a Xerox and distributing them in cubbyholes marked with the 30 or so different departments on the ship. Standing up for hours without a break my whole body ached from my heels to my brain as I began to develop sciatica.
At sea I read as much as possible in my limited free time. There was a tiny ship's library located on the deck below the hangar deck – near the enlisted mess decks - and I would often go to that library when we were in the Indian Ocean. The collection of books in the library was mostly pulp fiction, but there was a good collection of National Geographic magazines that I immersed myself in, reading the long articles. I also read the long articles and interviews with people like Joseph Heller, Bob Marley and Ed Koch in the issues of Playboy, Penthouse, Hustler and Oui that were sold in the ship's store. The library was staffed by a guy that blared “corporate rock” cassette tapes in his portable stereo throughout the day, thus making it difficult to concentrate on the reading and writing I did, but I managed nonetheless.
The Coral Sea had 4,500 men on it (women were not yet stationed on U.S. Navy ships) and our berthing compartment was occupied by about 70 men in racks three high in a space about the size of a small high school classroom. I tried to keep in shape while at sea, but because of the small amount of space available it was not easy to do calisthenics. Nevertheless, by positioning my body so that my arms fit into the narrow spaces between the sets of racks set perpendicularly against both the bulkhead and the narrow passageway that ran the length of the berthing area, I was able to do push-ups and sit-ups. After I finished those, I would go down the ladder one flight to the hangar deck, find a small, unoccupied space and jump rope, sweat falling from my body like rain in the extreme humidity of the Indian Ocean.
Thirty push-ups, then beginning F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby; forty sit-ups, then beginning Franz Kafka's The Trial; stretching while standing up – crossing my legs then bringing my palms to the floor and remaining there for thirty seconds, then beginning Herman Melville's Moby Dick, writing poems of unrequited love, Grand Rapids, San Francisco and Shit River, then beginning Jack London's Call of the Wild and White Fang; trying to draw pictures of the demons that visited me in dreams and in real life, then beginning George Orwell's Animal Farm and going on to Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and books of poetry by Emily Dickinson, Dylan Thomas and Lawrence Ferlinghetti; writing letters to the one or two friends I thought I had, writing letters to Mom and Dad that I rarely sent, writing letters to Magdalena, the girlfriend I'd made in the Philippines, that I could never seem to finish, then reading bits and pieces of Marcel Proust, William Blake, T.S. Eliot, Homer and Milton; jumping rope – three sets of a hundred, then reading W.B Yeats’ “The Second Coming” and the Book of Revelation in the Bible again and again, and then trying to write my own versions – again and again – in my notebooks. More writings by William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, more work in the radio shack, more flight operations, storms at sea, men falling overboard in the pitch black of night then miraculously rescued by the helicopter we would launch; General Quarters drills followed by an hour of sleep; walking on the flight deck one day and seeing a whale, listening to an ex-marine in our division telling us about when he had to eat rats in Vietnam in order to survive in the jungle…
* * *
The closest I got to mainland China in the Navy was Hong Kong in 1982 when our ship anchored off its shore. However, a little less than a month ago I moved to mainland China after three weeks spent visiting old haunts and old friends in Japan (where I lived for 11 years). I'd been watching CNN in my Tokyo hotel room before taking the train to the airport for my flight to Beijing, and the main topic of news was that China was about ready to overtake Japan as the world's second largest economy. Later, after arriving at my hotel in Beijing that evening I turned on the TV and watched the English-language news to find that indeed China had. It was as though the shifting tectonic plates of phases/locations in my life had drifted over one another in sync with the fate of the place I now called home.
I find myself lucky to begin another part of my life in China just as the country itself is experiencing a new phase of growth and discovery. Nevertheless, though I have finally reached China there is much more for me to learn, and I feel as if my digging has just begun.
Copyright © by Don MacLaren