Please Enjoy Your Happiness (21 page)

Every now and then, Yuki, we would see the black silhouettes of Chinese junks, their sails flying, nets out, scouring the ocean
for shoals of fish. They took no notice of the
Shangri-La
. For them it was as if we, with our nuclear weapons and the power to obliterate whole cities, did not exist. One afternoon I heard strange sounds echoing across the open water. I borrowed some binoculars and climbed to the perch I often used for solitude above the captain and the bridge. There, far away, a group of men lay in the sun under an awning that shielded the junk’s deck from the heat. I guessed they were listening to the gongs and drums and high-pitched voices of Cantonese opera, sung by stars whose identities were known only in China, a place in those days where not even Maria Callas was known. If there ever is a war, I remember thinking, it will be fought in the dark between two nationalities that know almost nothing about each other but that swallow the bait of mutual hatred and fear like swirling swarms of sardines.

We would be in Hong Kong in a few days. I would try to find Paul Feng again, I decided. I had not seen him since June when he gave me the copy of
The True Story of Ah-Q
. I wanted to talk to him about the book.

I asked you about
Ah-Q
. I said, ‘Is this a comedy? Is it a farce? Was the author poking fun at the system?’

You put on your serious schoolteacher face, so I knew I was supposed to listen carefully. You said, ‘You must decide for yourself. You are old enough to make important decisions. Your impression of that book may be different from mine. Defend your impression. Yes, do that. But listen carefully to what older people say. They may talk nonsense, which, in this case, sharpens your understanding of what is nonsense. That big officer on your ship who called me a “spider”. Was that nonsense? Was that humour? I know what it was! You decide. If you do that you will become a wiser man . . . sorry, a very young man so wise.’

I also was looking forward to replenishing my supply of
China Reconstructs
. I wanted to read about the progress of the Great Leap Forward, about which Paul Feng had been so enthusiastic. This was a plan, then in its second year, which Chairman Mao had decided would greatly boost industrial and agricultural production. The ‘masses’ – not the bureaucrats – would make this possible.

Also, I had made two new friends on the ship: a tall German immigrant named Gunther Erlichmann, who was always looking over his shoulder, and a guy named Oscar Garcia Muñoz from Seattle, who said he was a
pachuco
(teenage member of a Mexican-American street gang). To prove it, he showed me a tattoo of a cross, crudely etched into the web between the thumb and the forefinger on his right hand. He said it was the mark of a gang member. Gunther and Oscar, who liked the fact I was regarded by the overlords with suspicion, had almost convinced me to join them in visiting a genuine Hong Kong bordello.
The World of Suzie Wong
– Richard Mason’s tale about a young British painter who falls in love with a Chinese hooker who wore dazzling, tight silk cheongsam dresses – was a big hit on Broadway in 1959. A Hollywood production company was already at work in the back alleys of Hong Kong’s Wan Chai bar district, scouting locations to turn the book into a film. More than one hundred beautiful Hong Kong women had answered a casting call published in a local newspaper, hoping to star as Suzie Wong. Oscar was supernaturally excited about ‘slit skirts’.

‘What is a
pachuco
?’ I asked him.

‘A
pachuco
is a good Mexican. I spent time in jail. I read that book about Suzie Wong, man. That’s all I could think about – slit skirts! Legs! Yeah! So I figured if I joined the navy I could
meet girls in slit skirts. This is my big chance. I enlisted for four years so I could do this. And now, God has given me the opportunity to get laid by a golden girl whose language I don’t understand. Do you know what that means? Two people who don’t understand each other, thinking their separate thoughts . . . me speaking my English and she speaking her Chinese. I would love imagining what she is saying, what she is thinking. Nothing can be as cool as that!’

He was already in a profound state of delight. He had dreamed about this for months, maybe years. Yes, he believed he had been ‘blessed’.

‘But, Oscar,’ I said, ‘we were in Hong Kong just a few weeks ago. Didn’t you have liberty then?’

‘No, man. They had me on report. I had to stand extra duty.’

‘But why?’

‘You know . . . They make you take a rubber when you leave the ship, and no man I knew ever wore a rubber. That’s for fags and mommy’s boys.’

‘And this time?’

‘This time I am gonna be smart. I’ll take one of the damn things and then I’ll give it to you for safekeeping. I can’t stand rubbers. There is something about the touch and feel of them that reminds me of the dead.’

One peaceful Sunday, while the
Shangri-La
was patrolling, I took out all your letters and I read them again one by one. I arranged them in chronological order. At that point you had written me fifteen times. During the entire summer, you probably wrote twenty letters. Half of those letters disappeared. I asked Red and Jim about them as they vanished one by one, but they just shook their heads and rolled their eyes. I began worrying that the missing letters had been confiscated by
Chaplain Peeples. He had asked me to join him in Hong Kong to help distribute the toys he had gathered for Operation Handclasp. He seemed to know a lot about me when he interrogated me before. I began imagining that the letters were hidden inside one of his stacks of dirty books. He was probably waiting for the appropriate moment to use them when he lectured me again on the dangers of befriending women who worked in bars. Or maybe he would quote from them during one of his sermons about the power that sin has over the innocents of this world. We sailors on our first cruise overseas were sinful children, in his estimation, but not exactly lambs of God.

The chaplain wanted me to photograph the gift-giving. I had asked him why there were so many plastic guns of all kinds in the bags of toys he showed me. I had this vision in my head of hundreds of small Chinese children brandishing their firearms and chasing the chaplain round and round the orphanage on a day when he had one of his migraine headaches. The arming of the children would take place near the Happy Valley Racecourse, a favourite with the elite of the Hong Kong establishment. The kids came from one of the orphanages run by the Po Leung Kuk organization, which had for the last hundred years been housing hordes of abandoned children and fighting the abduction of women and kids who were forced to work as prostitutes or labour in sweatshops.

A new letter had arrived. I had not opened it yet. I was saving it until I could examine my state of mind and the meaning of our friendship, Yuki-chan. I felt increasingly uneasy. There was so much I did not understand. At times I felt as if I had plunged into an abyss. At times I felt an incredible longing. When I try to imagine your face – something that I still do – I felt the pain
of something long denied: a kiss. I had just turned twenty. A young man that age really is still a child – I know that now. The kiss is an impulse. If we kissed then we would kiss again, and then September would come and we would both be desperate. We would be missing each other, and desperate. If I decided that I was in love, you would reject me. Yes, I know that now.

You would have said something like: ‘It is so easy for a child, boy or girl, to fall – yes, to fall – in love. For you, it is like jumping out of a window with flames at your back. But for an old woman like me who has scars and bruises, it is not so easy. In fact, it is impossible. So, don’t fall in love with me, Paul-san. If you do, you will be disappointed and you might not want to love anyone else again.’ That is what you would say. I was sure of it. I had never told anyone that I loved her or him, probably not even my mother or father, both of whom gave evidence of disappointment about that. They did not kiss. They did not hold hands. They never embraced under a full moon. In correspondence this week with a woman whose books I carried to school when she was sixteen and I was seventeen, she told me I was ‘very romantic’ but ‘brooding’, and that she was afraid she had ‘hurt’ me by cutting me off mostly because she wanted to dance and wanted to be kissed. I was not ‘gawky’, she said, although that is how I saw myself. It was not until after I met you, Yuki, that I slowly started realizing there was no poetry in holding back, in refusing to admit to love. There was only poetry in declaring and celebrating love. I clearly remember that in England I asked my mother at the dinner table why so many of the songs on the radio were love songs, and she gave a little sigh – the sort of sigh you gave sometimes when you looked at me, your eyes piercing the gloom of the White Rose bar, your stare without any kind of expression and just a trace
of a sad, sad smile on very thin lips, forcing me to stop breathing for that instant because I felt the first hint of desire.

The bond between us had grown and grown and grown until it had come to this moment when I sensed in your most recent letters a note of desperation. I read each letter several times. The more I read your question, ‘Do you remember me?’ the more guilt I started to feel about leaving you. It was the first time I was aware of the burden. Or was it a responsibility? Or was it just a matter of a young man growing up who had not much experience when it came to love, or in fact of sex without love? I did not even know there was such a thing. I was young enough to still believe, naturally and intrinsically, as if it were both a conundrum and a gift to humanity, that love was more powerful than sex. Or was it that love had to come first, before sex? Or was it that I was a weird kid, awash with hormones, denying myself the sexual marauding that just about every sailor did in our ports of call? Was I crazy? Did I not shiver the last time I was in Hong Kong when the Eurasian girl kissed my wound after the struggle over the
Outline History of China
in the Suzie Wong bar? That was just a peck on the cheek. What was a kiss involving the lips of a man and a woman like, I wondered. What was it like when they were in love?

All these thoughts chased each other inside my mind like dogs spoiling for a fight. I felt like throwing up. It was a moment of darkness. The stark neon light overhead did not help and provided no comfort. The moment I had not really thought about before was making itself known. The
Shangri-La
would leave Yokosuka for the United States on 22 September and arrive in San Diego on 3 October. The
Shangri-La
would leave, and there was nothing you nor I could do about it, Yukiko. I could not jump ship to stay with you. The difference in our
years never was an issue. I was not even aware of that. Only my mother, in a follow-up letter to the one in which she called me an ‘idiot’, brought up the matter of age, asking the question, ‘How old is she?’

How did I reply? ‘I am sorry, Mum. I don’t really know. I never asked.’ Or did I say something like, ‘Yuki is probably about thirty,’ and nothing more because it never occurred to me in my naivety that it would be a problem?

I don’t remember what I said to my mother. But I do remember she wrote me yet another letter full of contempt in which she said, ‘Don’t be a fool,’ and I had not a clue what she meant.

The ship would leave, and then I would not see you again –
ever
again. That idea entered my mind like a spear. It was so frightening that I erased it immediately, put all your letters back in their envelopes, locked them in my desk drawer, and opened your new letter.