by Ken Liu
It didn’t take me long to get used to living underground, to the constant noise of dynamite, hydraulic drills, the bellows cycling cooling air, and the flickering faint yellow light of arc lamps. Even when you were sleeping, the next shift was already at it. Everyone grew hard of hearing after a while, and we stopped talking to each other. There was nothing to say anyway, just more digging.
But the pay was good, and I saved up and sent money home. However, visiting home was out of the question. By the time I started, the head of the tunnel was already halfway between Shanghai and Tokyo. They charged you a month’s wages to ride the steam train carrying the excavated waste back to Shanghai and up to the surface. I couldn’t afford such luxuries. As we made progress, the trip back only grew longer and more expensive.
It was best not to think too much about what we were doing, about the miles of water over our heads, and the fact that we were digging a tunnel through the Earth’s crust to get to America. Some men did go crazy under those conditions, and had to be restrained before they could hurt themselves or others.
* * *
From A Brief History of the Trans-Pacific Tunnel, published by the TPT Transit Authority, 1960:
Osachi Hamaguchi, prime minister of Japan during the Great Depression, claimed that Emperor Hirohito was inspired by the American effort to build the Panama Canal to conceive of the Trans-Pacific Tunnel. “America has knit together two oceans,” the Emperor supposedly said. “Now let us chain together two continents.” President Hoover, trained as an engineer, enthusiastically promoted and backed the project as an antidote to the global economic contraction.
The Tunnel is, without a doubt, the greatest engineering project ever conceived by Man. Its sheer scale makes the Great Pyramids and the Great Wall of China seem like mere toys, and many critics at the time described it as hubristic lunacy, a modern Tower of Babel.
Although tubes and pressurized air have been used for passing around documents and small parcels since Victorian times, before the Tunnel, pneumatic tube transport of heavy goods and passengers had only been tried on a few intra-city subway demonstration programs. The extraordinary engineering demands of the Tunnel thus drove many technological advances, often beyond the core technologies involved, such as fast-tunneling directed explosives. As one illustration, thousands of young women with abacuses and notepads were employed as computers for engineering calculations at the start of the project, but by the end of the project electronic computers had taken their place.
In all, construction of the 5880-mile tunnel took ten years between 1929 and 1938. Some seven million men worked on it, with Japan and the United States providing the bulk of the workers. At its height, one in ten working men in the United States was employed in building the Tunnel. More than 13 billion cubic yards of material were excavated, almost fifty times the amount removed during the construction of the Panama Canal, and the fill was used to extend the shorelines of China, the Japanese home islands, and Puget Sound.
* * *
Afterwards we lie still on the futon, our limbs entwined. In the darkness I can hear her heart beating, and the smell of sex and our sweat, unfamiliar in this apartment, is comforting.
She tells me about her son, who is still going to school in America. She says that he is traveling with his friends in the southern states of America, riding the buses together.
“Some of the friends are Negroes,” she says.
I know some Negroes. They have their own section in the American half of the City, where they mostly keep to themselves. Some Japanese families hire the women to cook Western meals.
“I hope he’s having a good time,” I say.
My reaction surprises Betty. She turns to stare at me, and then laughs. “I forget that you cannot understand what this is about.”
She sits up in bed. “In America, the Negroes and whites are separated: where they live, where they work, where they go to school.”
I nod. That sounds familiar. Here in the Japanese half of the City, the races also keep to themselves. There are superior and inferior races. For example, there are many restaurants and clubs reserved only for the Japanese.
“The law says that whites and Negroes can ride the bus together, but the secret of America is that law is not followed by large swaths of the country. My son and his friends want to change that. They ride the buses together to make a statement, to make people pay attention to the secret. They ride in places where people do not want to see Negroes sitting in seats that belong only to whites. Things can become violent and dangerous when people get angry and form a mob.”
This seems very foolish: to make statements that no one wants to hear, to speak when it is better to be quiet. What difference will a few boys riding a bus make?
“I don’t know if it’s going to make any difference, change anyone’s mind. But it doesn’t matter. It’s good enough for me that he is speaking, that he is not silent. He’s making the secret a little bit harder to keep, and that counts for something.” Her voice is full of pride, and she is beautiful when she is proud.
I consider Betty’s words. It is the obsession of Americans to speak, to express opinions on things that they are ignorant about. They believe in drawing attention to things that other people may prefer to keep quiet, to ignore and forget.
But I can’t dismiss the image Betty has put into my head: a boy stands in darkness and silence. He speaks; his words float up like a bubble. It explodes, and the world is a little brighter, and a little less stiflingly silent.
I have read in the papers that back in Japan, they are debating about granting Formosans and Manchurians seats in the Imperial Diet. Britain is still fighting the native guerrillas in Africa and India, but may be forced soon to grant the colonies independence. The world is indeed changing.
* * *
“What’s wrong?” Betty asks. She wipes the sweat from my forehead. She shifts to give me more of the flow from the air conditioner. I shiver. Outside, the great arc lights are still off, not yet dawn. “Another bad dream?”
We’ve been spending many of our nights together since that first time. Betty has upset my routine, but I don’t mind at all. That was the routine of a man with one foot in the grave. Betty has made me feel alive after so many years under the ocean, alone in darkness and silence.
But being with Betty has also unblocked something within me, and memories are tumbling out.
* * *
If you really couldn’t stand it, they provided comfort women from Korea for the men. But you had to pay a day’s wages.
I tried it only once. We were both so dirty, and the girl stayed still like a dead fish. I never used the comfort women again.
A friend told me that some of the girls were not there willingly but had been sold to the Imperial Army, and maybe the one I had was like that. I didn’t really feel sorry for her. I was too tired.
* * *
From The Ignoramus’s Guide to American History, 1995:
So just when everyone was losing jobs and lining up for soup and bread, Japan came along and said, “Hey, America, let’s build this big-ass tunnel and spend a whole lot of money and hire lots of workers and get the economy going again. Whaddya say?” And the idea basically worked, so everyone was like: “Dōmo arigatō, Japan!”
Now, when you come up with a good idea like that, you get some chips you can cash in. So that’s what Japan did the next year, in 1930. At the London Naval Conference, where the Big Bullies—oops, I meant “Great Powers”—figured out how many battleships and aircraft carriers each country got to build, Japan demanded to be allowed to build the same number of ships as the United States and Britain. And the US and Britain said fine.[1]
This concession to Japan turned out to be a big deal. Remember Hamaguchi, the Japanese prime minister, and the way he kept on talking about how Japan was going to “ascend peacefully” from then on? This had really annoyed the militarists and nationalists in Japan because they thought Hamaguchi was selling out the country. But wh
en Hamaguchi came home with such an impressive diplomatic victory, he was hailed as a hero, and people began to believe that his “Peaceful Ascent” policy was going to make Japan strong. People thought maybe he really could get the Western powers to treat Japan as an equal without turning Japan into a giant army camp. The militarists and nationalists got less support after that.
At that fun party, the London Naval Conference, the Big Bullies also scrapped all those humiliating provisions of the Treaty of Versailles that made Germany toothless. Britain and Japan both had their own reasons for supporting this: they each thought Germany liked them better than the other, and would join up as an ally if a global brawl for Asian colonies broke out one day. Everyone was wary about the Soviets, too, and wanted to set up Germany as a guard dog of sorts for the polar bear.[2]
Things to Think About in the Shower:
1. Many economists describe the Tunnel as the first real Keynesian stimulus project, which shortened the Great Depression.
2. The Tunnel’s biggest fan was probably President Hoover: he won an unprecedented four terms in office because of its success.
3. We now know that the Japanese military abused the rights of many of the workers during the Tunnel’s construction, but it took decades for the facts to emerge. The Bibliography points to some more books on this subject.
4. The Tunnel ended up taking a lot of business away from surface shipping, and many Pacific ports went bust. The most famous example of this occurred in 1949, when Britain sold Hong Kong to Japan because it didn’t think the harbor city was all that important anymore.
5. The Great War (1914-1918) turned out to be the last global "hot war" of the 20th century (so far). Are we turning into wimps? Who wants to start a new world war?
* * *
After the main work on the Tunnel was completed in the thirteenth year of the Shōwa Era (1938), I returned home for the first and only time since I left, eight years earlier. I bought a window seat on the westbound capsule train from Midpoint Station, coach class. The ride was smooth and comfortable, the capsule quiet save for the low voices of my fellow passengers and a faint whoosh as we were pushed along by air. Young female attendants pushed carts of drinks and food up and down the aisles.
Some clever companies had bought advertising space along the inside of the tube and painted pictures at window height. As the capsule moved along, the pictures rushing by centimeters from the windows blurred together and became animated, like a silent film. My fellow passengers and I were mesmerized by the novel effect.
The elevator ride up to the surface in Shanghai filled me with trepidation, my ears popping with the changes in pressure. And then it was time to get on a boat bound for Formosa.
I hardly recognized my home. With the money I sent, my parents had built a new house and bought more land. My family was now rich, and my village a bustling town. I found it hard to speak to my siblings and my parents. I had been away so long that I did not understand much about their lives, and I could not explain to them how I felt. I did not realize how much I had been hardened and numbed by my experience, and there were things I had seen that I could not speak of. In some sense I felt that I had become like a turtle, with a shell around me that kept me from feeling anything.
My father had written to me to come home because it was long past time for me to find a wife. Since I had worked hard, stayed healthy, and kept my mouth shut—it also helped that as a Formosan I was considered superior to the other races except the Japanese and Koreans—I had been steadily promoted to crew chief and then to shift supervisor. I had money, and if I settled in my hometown, I would provide a good home.
But I could no longer imagine a life on the surface. It had been so long since I had seen the blinding light of the sun that I felt like a newborn when out in the open. Things were so quiet. Everyone was startled when I spoke because I was used to shouting. And the sky and tall buildings made me dizzy—I was so used to being underground, under the sea, in tight, confined spaces, that I had trouble breathing if I looked up.
I expressed my desire to stay underground and work in one of the station cities strung like pearls along the Tunnel. The faces of the fathers of all the girls tightened at this thought. I didn’t blame them: who would want their daughter to spend the rest of her life underground, never seeing the light of day? The fathers whispered to each other that I was deranged.
I said goodbye to my family for the last time, and I did not feel I was home until I was back at Midpoint Station, the warmth and the noise of the heart of the Earth around me, a safe shell. When I saw the soldiers on the platform at the station, I knew that the world was finally back to normal. More work still had to be done to complete the side tunnels that would be expanded into Midpoint City.
* * *
“Soldiers,” Betty says, “why were there soldiers at Midpoint City?”
I stand in darkness and silence. I cannot hear or see. Words churn in my throat, like a rising flood waiting to burst the dam. I have been holding my tongue for a long, long time.
“They were there to keep the reporters from snooping around,” I say.
I tell Betty about my secret, the secret of my nightmares, something I’ve never spoken of all these years.
* * *
As the economy recovered, labor costs rose. There were fewer and fewer young men desperate enough to take jobs as Diggers in the Tunnel. Progress on the American side had slowed for a few years, and Japan was not doing much better. Even China seemed to run out of poor peasants who wanted this work.
Hideki Tōjō, Army minister, came up with a solution. The Imperial Army’s pacification of the Communist rebellions supported by the Soviet Union in Manchuria and China resulted in many prisoners. They could be put to work, for free.
The prisoners were brought into the Tunnel to take the place of regular work crews. As shift supervisor, I managed them with the aid of a squad of soldiers. The prisoners were a sorry sight, chained together, naked, thin like scarecrows. They did not look like dangerous and crafty Communist bandits. I wondered sometimes how there could be so many prisoners, since the news always said that the pacification of the Communists was going well and the Communists were not much of a threat.
They usually didn’t last long. When a prisoner was discovered to have expired from the work, his body was released from the shackles and a soldier would shoot it a few times. We would then report the death as the result of an escape attempt.
To hide the involvement of the slave laborers, we kept visiting reporters away from work on the main Tunnel. They were used mainly on the side excavations, for station cities or power stations, in places that were not well surveyed and more dangerous.
One time, while making a side tunnel for a power station, my crew blasted through to a pocket of undetected slush and water, and the side tunnel began to flood. We had to seal the breach quickly before the flood got into the main Tunnel. I woke up the crew of the two other shifts, and sent a second chained crew into the side tunnel with sandbags to help with plugging up the break.
The corporal in charge of the squad of soldiers guarding the prisoners asked me, “What if they can’t plug it?”
His meaning was obvious. We had to make sure that the water did not get into the main Tunnel, even if the repair crews we sent in failed. There was only one way to make sure, and as water was flowing back up the side tunnel, time was running out.
I directed the chained crew I’d kept behind as a reserve to begin placing dynamite around the side tunnel, behind the men we had sent in earlier. I did not much like this, but I told myself that these were hardened Communist terrorists, and they were probably sentenced to death already anyway.
The prisoners hesitated. They understood what we were trying to do, and they did not want to do it. Some worked slowly. Others just stood.
The corporal ordered one of the prisoners shot. This motivated the remaining ones to hurry.
I set off the charges. The side tunnel collapsed, and the pile o
f debris and falling rocks filled most of the entrance, but there was still some space at the top. I directed the remaining prisoners to climb up and seal the opening. Even I climbed up to help them.
The sound of the explosion told the prisoners we sent in earlier what was happening. The chained men lumbered back, sloshing through the rising water and the darkness, trying to get to us. The corporal ordered the soldiers to shoot a few of the men, but the rest kept on coming, dragging the dead bodies with their chains, begging us to let them through. They climbed up the pile of debris toward us.
The man at the front of the chain was only a few meters from us, and in the remaining cone of light cast by the small opening that was left I could see his face, contorted with fright.
“Please,” he said. “Please let me through. I just stole some money. I don’t deserve to die.”
He spoke to me in Hokkien, my mother tongue. This shocked me. Was he a common criminal from back home in Formosa, and not a Chinese Communist from Manchuria?
He reached the opening and began to push away the rocks, to enlarge the opening and climb through. The corporal shouted at me to stop him. The water level was rising. Behind the man, the other chained prisoners were climbing to help him.
I lifted a heavy rock near me and smashed it down on the hands of the man grabbing onto the opening. He howled and fell back, dragging the other prisoners down with him. I heard the splash of water.
“Faster, faster!” I ordered the prisoners on our side of the collapsed tunnel. We sealed the opening, then retreated to set up more dynamite and blast down more rocks to solidify the seal.
When the work was finally done, the corporal ordered all of the remaining prisoners shot, and we buried their bodies under yet more blast debris.
