2007-05-03

the slow boat

Once I found out it existed, well, the slow boat to China was just about the only way to get there.
No one travels by boat anymore. Have you? Not one of those floating pleasure palaces loaded with swimming pools and shuffleboards (or whatever they do on those things), but a ship fitted for transport, not a vacation.

While it would have been a bit quicker to slide into China on one of those pressurized tubes called an aircraft, my trip wasn't really motivated by a goal any more specific than to "experience China", so there was no real need to get in fast, hit places on a checklist and then tube it on out. The jolt to the system is pretty rough, and jetlag is only one symptom. It is always profoundly weird to step off of an airplane and taste the air, take in the weird new landscape around you. Your first impression of the country becomes the airport, a shopping mall distinguished only by the Asian editions of time and the nutritional information on the Snickers is labeled in Chinese. You didn't glide gracefully there, you were teleported in, and the shifts of night and day are the least of your problems.

There are a million other ways to slide, paddle and zip around the surface of the earth, but they seem to be getting slowly killed off by these glittering steel tubes hurtling through the sky that plunk us at our destination: disoriented, thirsty and tired.

The Yanjing departed from the Japanese port of Kobe, a beautiful little city mostly renowned for how un-Japanese it is. In the mid-nineteenth century a small clutch of Europeans had established a small trading port here, bringing with them a rabid desire for houses without dirt floors and a mania for freshly baked bread, two things that have caught on here like wildfire. The city occupies a warm and fuzzy space in the Japanese imagination, a true domestic example of the sophistication and refinement of Europe. Just look at the old stone townhouses! The bakeries! The cheese shops! The only thing missing are living, breathing Europeans. They had absconded at some point in the intervening hundred and sixty years, chased out by Japan's rollercoaster relationship with the outside world. Coming to Japan can be like walking into a bad shower, the country scalding you one moment and freezing you the next. It takes time and patience to learn how to jiggle the handle to that happy medium. And now that I'd learned here I was, walking up the gangway to a ferry, bound for the Chinese Mainland.

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I met another gangly looking white guy with a backpack at the boat terminal, and we chatted as we boarded the boat and then watched Japan slide away. He was from the Netherlands, and was taking a year off from his IT job to travel the world. This was his third boat in just so many weeks, having taken the ferry from Russia to Korea, then Korea to Japan. "This boat!" he told us immediately, "It's... so nice. They gave us beds!" The last few he'd taken had been large carpeted rooms where everyone fought for floor space to roll out their futon and sleep on their bags. He had slept uneasily, his laptop nestled under his head, digital camera held close. This time he had booked himself a private room, but it hardly seemed necessary. I was in steerage, which was a bunk with clean sheets and a curtain you could pull around you for privacy. The folks around me were mostly Chinese of unguessable ages somewhere between thirty-five and seventy, their skin calloused to a brown toughness, their eyes bored. They hunkered down in their bunks and barely emerged the whole trip, whittling away the time with naps and snacks of sunflower seeds. Just down the corridor was a young American couple who had been teaching English in Osaka for a year, and were going home by way of China. They were both noticeably short, even in this diminutive country. Farther down were two Japanese backpackers comparing the various clips on their bags.

A quick run up and down the boat unveiled three main floors: first class private rooms on the top, the dining quarters on the second, and the steerage bunks on the first. The ship was an odd duck, half-heartedly gilded in brass and faded carpeting, but whose entertainment facilities consisted of Chinese television in the lounges and a dusty looking mahjong room on the second floor. A staff of bored looking young women in uncomfortable looking uniforms of synthetic material would spend their hours polishing the banisters and vacuuming the rugs, keeping them clean but worn,the poor materials that had not expected to be put to this much service.

Below the main decks you climbed down into the depths of the hull, the section of the ship with the least pitch, which is probably why they put the bath and the steel blue room with the ping pong table down there. A handful of dead arcade games were kept company by a growing wave of old carpets. A crew member locked the doors behind me as I climbed back above decks, shutting them off until the officially regulated bath time. Life on the open seas.

I wandered back to the main lobby in the center of the ship only to find the American couple strapped awkwardly into a set of bright orange life jackets, arms flapping helplessly. Without warning I was grabbed by a girl in a scratchy powder blue suit stuffed me into a life jacket, grabbing the cords from my hands to tie them into tight, burly little knots. I gathered from the impassive look on her face that we weren't sinking, but you couldn't be sure. Maybe the ship sank a few times every voyage.

We were paraded up and out through the decks, by the girls in the scratchy looking synthetic blue suits, joining other hapless passengers wrapped in orange. Some passengers who had inexplicably not been rounded up lounged by the windows, looking at us first with surprise, then pity. We were taken outside and lined up in front of three male crew members in jumpsuits and hardhats who stood legs apart, hands folded behind their backs. The vests propped our arms up at an silly angle a few inches off our bodies, dangling helplessly. I propped my thumbs on the vest straps, putting me in a pose that looked somewhat like a 19th century plutocrat, surveying his factory. Life on the open seas.

While the Asian passengers were lectured through a megaphone in Japanese and Chinese, one of the crew members took me aside with the American couple and the Dutch guy, who had also been rounded up. "I wilr now review safety procedures of ship. OK?" We nodded.

The ensuing explanation must have been memorized word for word out of some nautical safety manual, but the crew member's tongue sounded like it had been soaked in painkillers, flapping helplessly against acrobatic sounds like l's and v's. He gamely recited the safety procedures, most of which were lost in a long stream of soft consonants. My mind started to wander, and I tried to imagine the best way to write out that stream of sound on the page. The closest I came up with was "ferghjngsshijegrwa. OK?" Lots of soft consonants. My attention would sometimes snap back as the stream of consonants took a recognizable shape. I remember them sounding like this:

"Two short blasts is fiair in rear of ship. One short blast one long blast is fiair in fghringhe. Two long blast is fire in passenger quarters. OK? Ther is no smoking inside the ship. Smoking is only outdoors of the ship. There is no smoking in the beds. OK?"

"That's okay, I don't smoke," I volunteered with a smile.

This provoked a burst of laughter, which he sustained for just a few beats longer than seemed natural. Life on the open seas.



Properly briefed on what to do in case of an emergency, we were finally left to ourselves. Some people opted to watch Hollywood movies dubbed into Chinese. They nodded off as Steve Martin swam through an impeccably furnished American household of screaming blond children. I found a spare table on the very top floor and sat down to write in my notebook. A Chinese mother and a little button of a boy took two of the seats next to me. They took out his English workbook and began to do exercises that involved crayons, coloring and counting. I kept on waiting for the mother to lean over and impress some English on the kid by white man osmosis, but they seemed perfectly content to fill in the lines and count 1-2-3 on their own, and I was happy enough to leave them to it.

After a few minutes another man joined us, brazenly taking the seat across from the mother. He had twinkly eyes and a mustache perched on a weary and weathered face. He was wearing an undershirt without any sleeves, long ropey arms extending out. He offered to draw the boy's picture, and the astonished young mother agreed, her Japanese fluent, touched with the vaguest of accents. He pulled a calligraphy pen and a clean square of stiff cardboard rimmed in gold out of his bag and began to flick out a version of the boy's face on the white square in thick black lines. After just a few minutes he had produced one of those caricature portraits that you see people do on the street, the face balanced vaguely between reality and a kind of cartoon abstraction. He handed the picture over to the boy, free of charge, then offered to do mine.

As he threw down each stroke he explained to us that one of his jobs on the ship was as a "cultural-liaison", and was here to see that the passengers enjoyed themselves. He always did a few caricatures as a way of breaking the ice. He chatted as he drew, about the viability of this ferry, the busy summer season, its precarious position between freighter and cruise ship. He gestured over to a couple of young Chinese guys smoking at the table next to us. "They work construction and factory jobs for a year or so in Japan, then bring the savings back to their families when they've got enough cash. Some of them are carrying about seventy, eighty thousand dollars. Cash. Right guys? How much you bring with you?" They smiled affably and waved off the question.

The finished drawing was unmistakably me, but not the image I had been carrying around in my head. I had recently shaved my head and was wearing glasses, and he'd given my face a contemplative scowl, eyebrows arched downwards. The face looked hard, angular, and vaguely German. He signed it with a flourish and handed it over, before moving on to a stocky Chinese guy in his mid-30s who had been peeking over at our table, unable to contain his curiosity.

Half an hour later the cultural-liaison in the wifebeater was taking us all up to the bridge, each of us clutching a square cartoon version of ourselves. The young mother, her son, the stocky Chinese guy, his wife, and myself. Our guide was the only native Japanese speaker, but we had all spent enough time on the islands that it became our common language, which seemed to color our reactions to everything around us. We nodded with deep interest when he showed us the nautical charts and beamed with enthusiasm at the islands that slid by us. The crew went about their jobs matter-of-factly, steering the steel ship along the southern end of the Japanese archipelago. Everything was exciting, we gawked like children, asked questions politely, and took photographs. After a few brief minutes of all that we were escorted back to the passenger deck, and the cultural liaison moved on to a new group of passengers, dully absorbing a Hong Kong soap opera.



Before leaving I had hopes of finishing Moby Dick on the boat, imagining long leisurely hours reading on the deck, but now that I'd made friends I set it aside and talked about China. The Chinese man and his wife had lived on the northern coast of Japan for the past eight years, as he had worked as an engineer for a major electronics firm and she had done graduate work in architecture. He had recently switched companies, to a Japanese-Chinese joint venture tech firm in Beijing, she was looking for a position teaching architecture. They were in no particular hurry to get back, and had chosen the ship both for the ease of travel, and because they could simply take the eleven boxes of stuff they'd accumulated in Japan along with them.

People who has lived in Japan for a few years but didn't grow up there seem to ease into the same overall attitude towards the place. The country is basically benign, with a host of quirks and pathologies that are at first infuriating and then kind of endearing. Like a good-natured friend who speaks in non sequiturs, you learn to smile and nod. So what if the cops are lazy and ineffectual: there's barely any street crime! We all start to develop the same absurdist bent to our humor, whether from rural China or urban USA.

Being so easy to talk to, I was eager to find out what I could about Mr. and Mrs. Wang. They seemed like ideal people to talk to: educated people who formed opinions slowly, and looked at the issues facing China with both personal concern and a bit of foresight. Mr. Wang had eyes that lit up in conversation and a smooth, plump boyish face despite the few wisps of hair on his head. His wife wore glasses close to her face and spoke fluent Japanese that she enunciated extremely carefully.

They seemed extremely concerned and interested in the issues of climate change and environmental destruction, but they tempered it with an observation that is hard to answer to. Basically, who is the US to lecture anyone on conservation? As for recent Chinese history they seemed to see it mostly as a tragic series of setbacks to development, but nothing to waste too much time worrying about. "I was five at the time of the Cultural Revolution, and my parents were university students. Very lucky, we weren't affected by it." "Those ten years set China back for decades..." And moving from Japan "We'll of course be making a lot less than we were making in Japan, but things are so much cheaper in China that in one way we'll be making more."

It only occurred to me after the fact that the conversation I had just had would have been almost impossible if I'd flown into China. On the boat we had the space, the table, the chairs and the luxury of time to talk. While it's probably not practical for most people to travel this way, it's an absolute shame that they don't. Your few hours on a plane feel like absolute dead time, which the airline does everything in its power to help you kill. There was the obligatory television here, but other than that all they gave us were tables, chairs and a slowly scrolling view of the Japanese islands. We would enter China in one slow tracking shot, not just a single cut.

After dinner that evening a voice came onto the PA System, letting us know that at eight PM that evening an "amusement party" would be held in the mess hall. I walked in at about a quarter after the hour to find practically every seat filled, Mr. Wang belting out a brief ballad into a microphone, a karaoke machine cranking accompaniment, the audience of fifty people swaying vaguely side to side in their cafeteria chairs. The singing got worse as the minutes and the beer bottles piled up, and I started to develop a theory about how the tonality of the Chinese language makes it impossible to sound good in Western style pop songs, the tricky little tones sliding up and around when they should be landing, thunk, on the beat. The whole thing seemed to be less about the singing (which was pretty awful) or the songs (which were saccharine), than the social bonding, the polite claps given for a good job, and the obligatory plastic flowers handed to each participant as they took their little bows, passing the microphone on.

I had just about reached my limit when a cross eyed little Chinese man got up to sing a Japanese ballad. The song was one of the syrupy sweet nostalgia ballads of a man longing for spring in his hometown in Tohoku, Japan's bitter and dumpy north east. An area of Japan that, due to it's crushing poverty, had contributed a large number of settlers to the Manchurian colony, and a large number of young men to the Imperial armed forces. The man chewed on the lyrics, his Chinese accent giving a mushy edge to the crisp Japanese syllables. It was a song of the Great Pacific War, of Tohoku men pining for home as they were pinned down, dying on foreign soil. And it was being sung, enthusiastically and tunelessly, by a Chinese man who looked like he had been born around 1945.

It was nearing nine in the evening, and the man's alley cat rendition of the Japanese ballad had thinned even the polite applause. The mic was passed to one of the young women in the powder blue suits that had strapped us in life jackets, polished the banisters and served our dinner. Her previous look of crushing boredom had been washed away by a glazed look of contentment. The calm look of a princess, or a pop star, basking in attention that is their absolute right to receive. She thanked us several times as the karaoke machine played the opening bars of the song.

It was beautiful. At first I felt my pet theory about Chinese singing crumble, then my critical thinking, and finally my spine. She had a clear and serene voice that would land on the edge of the melody and hover there, quivering. Balanced in the most delicately precarious of places and held there by firm technique, before sliding to the next tone. She still wore the same pitiful little suit, but her voice silenced the room, and for the first time I wondered just what all those Chinese lyrics meant. The song finished and she took her bows over the final bars of the karaoke synthesizer. Someone handed me a handful of plastic flowers which I tentatively held out to her, and she accepted with a curtsy and the princess smile.

The emcee walked on and thanked us for coming, the amusement party was over. It was nine o'clock, and the party had proceeded for one thin hour, a sliver of unreality into our day. I hadn't even had time to check the thick book of song listings. Who knows, maybe buried in there somewhere was the song I'd been humming for days. "Slow Boat to China."