Bound for Vietnam

by Lydia Laube

  My cabin, however, was as big as you would get in a stateroom on the QE2. It had a good red carpet, the first unstained carpet I had seen in China, and several iron-framed portholes that did not seem to have been opened in years; the screw bolts on either side were rusted solid. The attractive edging around the portholes had been roughly tacked on, but this fault was hidden by red velvet curtains. The big double bed that was the object of Creepy’s affections was set cozily in an alcove between two wardrobes and dark red velvet curtains could be pulled across it to form a snug nook. Patterned tiles decorated the nook’s ceiling and a porthole at the foot of the bed meant that I could sit up first thing in the morning and look at the sea. Against the bulkhead rested two blankets that had been artfully folded into the shape of lotus flowers. There was even a reading light, but it didn’t work. Not that I really thought it would.

  A dark-blue, vinyl couch was fixed to the bulkhead under a porthole on the other side of the cabin. Alongside it two comfy armchairs were separated by a laminex topped table complete with a two foot high plastic bonsai tree in a stand that looked about as genuine as a green plastic Christmas tree. There was a wall-mounted electric fan that worked! But the desk light didn’t, neither did the radio attached to the wall – the knob had seized. Ditto the wall clock. Beside an ample desk a metal rack fixed to the bulkhead held the omnipresent thermos and cup.

  The bathroom was very rusty, the ceiling was water stained, the light didn’t work and the usual plumbing repairs were necessary, but it contained a submarine deep bath, which was clean! and mobs of wonderful hot water. The toilet seat was a clunky, wooden model that looked indestructible and a large wooden letterbox held the toilet paper. An intermittent soughing noise, like the sound of waves in the sea, came out of the loo, and the water in it sloshed rhythmically back and forth. This sound increased in proportion to the speed or motion of the ship and when you sat on the toilet you were treated to a cold updraft every now and then, which was mildly disconcerting.

  My cabin’s position on the highest point of the ship’s prow made it utterly private, a novelty in China and a wonderful change. I was contentedly resting as bid when, at a quarter to five, two young ladies called to tell me it was supper-time. Because I was in the VIP room, I was treated like one for the entire voyage. I was made the number one pet of the crew and pandered to like royalty. It became quite embarrassing. The thought occurred to me that if Mao had travelled on this ship, he would have occupied this cabin; the bed I was sleeping in was the bed he would have slept in.

  The two young ladies escorted me through the hungry-lookinghorde that was kept waiting outside the door of the empty dining room until I was seated. Then they fussed over me like the VIP that I had suddenly and mysteriously become, as they tried to discover what I would like to eat. I said, ‘I will eat anything you bring,’ much to their amusement. Just then a waiter dumped a styrofoam food receptacle containing a heap of wet wooden clothes pegs on the table. ‘But I won’t eat that!’ I said. Gales of giggles.

  What I did eat was great; some sort of chopped spiced meat. I had no idea what, and I hoped it wasn’t one of the local exotica. At least I knew it couldn’t be rat. I had just read how Dalian folk had recently completed a successful campaign to exterminate their rodents.

  I sat on a small wooden stool at a rough wooden table to dine. Windows all around the large room opened onto the deck. The glass was missing from the one in front of my table, so I got a good stiff breeze in my face to accompany my meal. The wooden peg mystery was eventually solved. Your order was placed in a peg that had the number of your table written on it. And you did not get your nose inside a feed bag unless you had paid in full, up front. In one corner of the dining room, a man seated behind a wooden bench sold large bottles of warm beer. Qingdoa beer, the best in China, was seven yuan – about eighty cents. I don’t mind room temperature beer when the weather is as cold as it was up there, off the coast of Manchuria.

  When I had finished eating, my two escorts took me back to my cabin and invited me to dance in the restaurant at seven. I put on my dancing shoes. The restaurant turned out to be the grotty dining room thinly disguised. The main lights had been dimmed, a ring of coloured lights surrounded a cleared central area and a karioke had been set up in one corner. (Where some absolutely dreadful singing went on.) Creepy was seated at the door flanked by two muscled henchman, who were punching back would-be boarders like the heroes in a swashbuckling pirate film. A ticket was obviously needed for admission. I did not have one, but this omission was overlooked. No drinks were served, but your ticket entitled you to a carton of soy milk.

  A young couple sat down next to me and started a conversation. Creepy asked me to dance and as I was brought up never to refuse to dance with a gentleman unless he was dead drunk, I submitted. We did a sedate sort of fox trot around the floor. Then one of the girls asked me. It was a first for me to waltz with a woman. I am not too keen to repeat it either. There was no rock and roll on this coastal ship, as there had been on the Hai Sing, but there was a bit of disco. These frenetic Saturday-night revels ended early and abruptly. At twenty-five past eight the lights were thrown on and a general fast exodus erupted.

  I went to bed with a book, luxuriating in the best bed I had encountered on these travels. Encased in my wooden surrounds, I felt cocooned and warm. During the night I was awakened by the sound of something slamming rhythmically. I felt the ship rolling and knew that we had left the shelter of the bay and entered the open sea.

  By daylight the roll had increased, and I got out of bed to a steady lift and swell. The sun came up on a dark blue empty sea that had a few white-caps on it, but nothing else in sight. I had a wonderful bath in brown (I hope it was only rust from the pipes) water. Sitting in liquid up to my chin that tipped and dipped and sloshed with the movement of the ship, I had waves without even moving.

  I was left to spend a peaceful morning alone until eleven o’clock when I was again collected and escorted to a meal. My new friends from last night joined me. He was a doctor of medicine, she was a biologist, and they were part of a group on their way to Shanghai for a conference. I think Cupid had struck. This pleased me, as they made a happy couple.

  After lunch, the sun came out. It lay on my book as I wrote at the desk and patterned the carpet at my feet with the shape of the windows. All day we headed steadily south through a moderate swell. The weather became warmer and the sky cleared to a bright blue. That evening I walked around the deck. It was still warm and now it was so calm that the breeze hardly ruffled my hair. The sea remained wide and empty. We had passed only an occasional freighter going the other way. As dusk closed the day, dark gunmetal storm clouds, tinged pink at their edges, gathered. A passing container ship showed a light on the blackening expanse of the ocean and the clouds became screens for furnaces of fire.

  That evening I was escorted to the feeding station and helped to dine again, but fast! It was hard not to bolt your food when people stood three deep at your elbow waiting for your seat.

  I was woken at two the next morning by the decreasing of the ship’s roll and on looking out of the porthole I saw the lights of the Shanghai River in the distance. Shortly after three, we entered the channel of the river. Far away on each side fairy lights glowed that came closer together later as the river narrowed. It was very pretty, but I would rather have been asleep. At five there was a knock on the door. The young biologist had been brought by an officer to tell me to be ready to disembark at half past. We were to be escorted off first. My VIP status had now rubbed off on my two friends. More embarrassment! We three sat in the empty dining room watching the sun slowly turn the sky pink and light the buildings and ships that we slipped past.

  At six o’clock we passed under the suspension bridge and edged up to the dock. My bags were carried off the ship by a steward and with the help of my friends I was bundled into a taxi.

  I went to the Pujiang, the hotel I had stayed at on my previous visit to Shanghai. Here t
here was, as usual, no room at the inn. I left my bags in their care and went next door to the Shanghai Mansions for a very expensive, and meagre, breakfast. But I had the unmitigated pleasure of watching a family of four Chinese struggle to use knives and forks to eat their bacon and eggs. These were the first eating irons I had seen in a long while. The family held a piece of cutlery in each fist and tried to pick up their food as though they were tongs – a messy and not very successful operation. Meanwhile behind me there was a familiar slurping noise, which I took for granted to be a Chinese enjoying his gruel, until I discovered it came from an underwater vacuum cleaner that was being used to clean out the fish tank.

  Returning to the Pujiang to wait for a room, I sat in the foyer and chatted to an Australian couple who had two delightful kids in tow. After an hour they left seeking beds elsewhere, but I persisted in my vigil until after checkout time at twelve noon when I was told that there were no spaces in four-bed rooms. I was asked if I would take a single room instead. Would I what! The existence of this rare phenomenon had always been hotly denied in the Pujiang. I had been told that they never had any, not now, not ever. But the last time I had been here, only a few weeks ago, they’d had a restaurant serving breakfast. Now all knowledge of dining rooms and food was refuted, but the single room had appeared. I gave up on this puzzlement. Perhaps the restaurant had been converted into single rooms.

  My room turned out to be located on a floor way up in the Gods that must have been the former servants’ quarters. The lift and grand staircase ended at the fifth floor below it and from there you ascended a set of dark, steep stairs to the attic. I imagined the ghosts of weary maid-servants trudging up these stairs late at night.

  Most of the rooms on my floor were empty, but it was a good thing I did not have a lot of company. The polished wooden boards creaked and shook when anyone walked, or thundered, down the passage past my door. I turned on the television. The picture was heavily frosted, but Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev were dancing ‘Swan Lake’. Later it produced Dan Daily and Ernest Borgnine sprouting high-pitched, choppy Mandarin in a 1950s Hollywood musical extravaganza. I eventually worked out how to get the desk lamp to stay on. It only functioned when the switch was placed alongside the cupboard and the table squeezed up against it.

  One drawback to living in the attic was that the bathroom I had to use was three flights of stairs down on the third floor. I had to dash back up the main staircase with dripping hair, clutching my dressing gown and sponge bag to my chest as I passed respectably clad people going out for the day. The bathroom, in an annexe off the side of the building, was a dingy old square room covered all over in white tiles and with drainage holes in the floor that made it look like a gas chamber. The floor sloped away a good four inches as though the annexe was sliding down the outer wall. It felt as though I was still on the ship. Ancient pipes ran down the walls to two antique taps that spouted a solid jet of water which, without the refinement of a shower rose, pelted you from an overhead pipe. I got a drenching torrent of stone cold water and beat a hasty retreat. Ten minutes later it was still running cold, so I sought help. A housemaid said she would come and show me how to get hot water. I took off my clothes again, put them on the bench on one side of the bathroom and was standing there nude and freezing when she came in and said, ‘You wait.’ She removed her shoes, turned both the taps on full bore and latched the door open. I was on public view again. Then, to my amazement the maid calmly dropped her trousers, whipped off her shirt and joined me in the shower.

  This day was the first clear day I had seen in Shanghai. It was Monday and the factories had been shut for the weekend. The line of spectacular nineteenth-century buildings along the Bund, Shanghai’s famous riverfront, stood out against a blue sky. I was glad I saw Shanghai in this light. It was also fantastic to be warm enough to throw off my woollies, even though the locals were out buying their longjohns and the shops were full of winter fashions.

  Feeling the need to pig out on something uncomplicated, I walked to Nanning Street to disgrace myself at McMaggot’s with two Big Macs and a Coke. I wouldn’t be caught dead in a place like this at home. Sometimes in China, though, it was a welcome relief to eat something so utterly, familiarly western.

  At the river-boat office, just off the Bund, I managed to buy a ticket on the boat leaving that night for Wuhan. I would be able to change vessels there and go on to Chungking, which was almost as far as river passenger transport went. I walked back along the Bund, past the harbour and across Huangpu Creek, to the Pujiang. Styrofoam containers choked the creek and the edges of the river. On the bridge an old woman, who looked about the same age as her wares, sold hundred-year eggs from a wicker push cart.

  3 River Dragons

  At five in the evening I went to the riverboat terminal on the Bund. Boarding the steamer presented no problems, except that in this huge place there was no sign to tell me which ship left from where. I showed my ticket to several people stationed at gateways and sat in a waiting area I hoped was the right place. I allowed a porter to carry my bags aboard, more as an act of charity than from necessity.

  The big riverboats were better than the coastal ships. They carried about 700 passengers who were mostly accommodated in cabins that housed ten to twenty people. The entire bottom deck of the boat held cargo, and only a few people travelled deck class or slept in the corridors. Officially there was no first class – the top-ranking category was called ‘second’ as a concession to communist sensitivity. But in the isolation of the prow and away from the smelly, crowded areas, it was still exclusive. Third class was on the other end of the same deck and the hoi polloi were on the two lower decks. A guard, stationed on a chair at the entrance to the second-class section, repelled invaders from the lesser ranks. A big notice like a stop sign stood beside him. I supposed it said, ‘Peasants keep out!’

  I found myself sharing a two-bed cabin on the outside deck with a back-packing British female with no hair. The cabin beds had curtains that could be pulled around them for privacy. On one wall was a vinyl bench seat and, on the other, a small mirror-fronted cupboard hung above a wash basin whose taps produced brown river water.

  This ship, the Yangtze Star, was the cleanest conveyance I had travelled on so far in China. But there was the usual hawking and spitting all around. I always put my head out over the deck railing very warily. You could cop more than a face full of fresh air out there. The well-bred spat over the side, the ill-mannered, on the deck. But the decks and cabin floors were washed down frequently and the Western toilets in second class were swabbed out now and then. I was to find that other riverboats were also reasonably clean, which was a wonder after the filthy coastal ships, but their toilets usually suffered due to the inability of the locals to use them or flush them in the western way. Some Chinese relieved themselves how and when they liked. Through the door of a toilet which he had, with a singular lack of modesty, left wide open, I saw one man peeing on the floor. Another I caught unconcernedly spraying overboard.

  The Yangtze Star set off down the Huangpu River in the dark. The lights that strung out along the Bund looked sensational. It was fairyland. Shanghai’s pride and joy, the garish TV tower, with its iridescent pink and green lights, resembled something out of a Disney movie – lurid, sensational, and unbelievable. The shore lights gradually became further apart as we moved downriver making for the place where the Huangpu joins the mouth of the Yangtze, China’s longest river, at the sea. A dark junk slid past, outlined between us and the shore. Lit only by a dim lantern, it was an Oriental vignette. Many big boats towing barges on long chains also passed us, as well as small craft of all kinds – sampans, fishing boats and dugouts. Nothing was smart or new, and I saw no pleasure craft. The boats that were mostly used as work-horses on the river were long and narrow and had a wheel-house perched on their rear ends and open decks in front where cargo was carried.

  There were a few lights on the riverbanks far away as we passed around the island in t
he middle of the confluence of the two rivers and turned into the wide Yangtze channel.

  My room-mate, Susan, was going home to England via Beijing after working for a year in Japan. We investigated the boat and found no one on the staff who spoke a word of English and few facilities. There was a dining room of sorts, but most passengers bought meals that were dispensed in plastic boxes, all of which went overboard when they had finished. On one side of the ship a vendor sold fruit from boxes and, of all the curious things to find on a boat like this, a clothing stall had been set up on one of the companionways between decks. Here, amid much hilarity, I allowed Susan and the shop lady to convince me that I could not live without a pair of gold, yellow and black striped silk pants. I put the pants on and modelled them, much to their delight. It was the only time I ever wore them. Once off the boat I thought they were dreadful. I also bought a pair of knickers with a zippered pocket in front. For money? But how did you get to it when it was wanted?

  It soon became cold outside on the river, but it was warm and cosy in our cabin. Next-door we had noisy neighbours who shouted at the top of their voices, bumped the walls and slammed their door with absolute abandon. At times during the night we stopped at towns. The engines would shut down and the racket next door would start up again to mingle with the noise from the wharf and the stamping of heavy feet overhead where the bridge and crew quarters were.

  At dawn I looked out to see the immense, muddy brown waters of the Yangtze on which, partly shrouded by a grey mist, the river traffic meandered. A cold wind blew onto the deck and occasional whitecaps broke on the water. We stopped at a dreary riverside town where I watched a dredge working and a man on the deck of a pontoon below wash his longjohns and shirt in a tin basin and hang them on a conveniently strung rope.