Slow Boats to China

by Gavin Young

  The wording made it seem as if I had landed at Tawitawi; if I had, I could have been in touch with the Moros.

  Meanwhile, Frank Manching took me to an excellent seafood restaurant opposite the Coca-Cola bottling plant for lunch. It had bamboo walls, mother-of-pearl chandeliers and bamboo furniture, and our waitress might have won the Miss Zamboanga beauty contest the week before.

  ‘Take her with you on the next ship,’ Manching said when she brought our lobsters.

  ‘I am always sea-seek,’ she said, smiling.

  Across the road, Coca-Cola bottles exploded in the heat singly and in bursts like sub-machine-gun fire.

  *

  That evening in a café off Pershing Plaza I bought the daily Zamboanga Times, and found in it the sort of violent events the Haji had warned me about. Eight people had been killed and seventeen wounded in three separate incidents in Zamboanga del Norte and Basilan districts by the Moro National Liberation Front in west Mindanao. Six labourers of the Basilan Timber Company had been killed and eight wounded when their logging truck was ambushed by men with machine-guns and grenades. A report from Iligan City said that groups of medical specialists had begun operating on the critically wounded victims of grenade explosions in the cities of Iligan and Ozamis.

  On another page an advertisement said: ‘The Search is on! Join the search for the 1980 Miss Gay Universe. Coronation will be on Sunday, March 9th. Interested parties are requested to please contact Juan Cruz of Juan’s House of Unisex.’ The contest was sponsored by Philippine Airlines, the Zamboanga Coca-Cola Plant, Beautifont by Avon and Zamboanga Barter Traders.

  I wondered whether to see a movie. ‘Strictly for adults: The Love Butcher turns a quiet neighbourhood into a slaughterhouse.’ Alternatively, I could see a ‘very special presentation’ of The Thundering Mantis, a kung-fu film from Hong Kong starring one Ricky Wong. Instead, I promenaded with students and soldiers in Pershing Plaza, the tiny green island at the heart of Zamboanga, and at last, feeling hungry, came across Jimmie’s Happytime Eatery near Manching’s office.

  A uniformed guard stood at the door with a pistol in a holster in his belt and a twelve-bore pump gun on his hip. The place looked closed, but a pleasant-faced young woman said, ‘Come in. Half an hour more.’ Only when I was seated at a small plastic-topped table did I notice that she was scared. I ordered Chinese noodle soup and a San Miguel beer and looked around. The room was nearly empty, but on my right three thick-necked, heavy-shouldered men sat at a table covered with empty beer bottles, their faces coarse-skinned and mottled from the beer before them and all the liquor they’d consumed over the years. They were muttering, their heads close together over the bottles. One man had wrapped his hand around a glass, and you could hardly see the glass for the hand. They wore long, loose shirts over their trousers, and their clothes looked lumpy, as though they were carrying books in their pockets.

  Before my order came, a man at a table on my other side pushed back his chair and darted quickly out of the door, holding a hand to his face. When they saw him go, the other three got up too and lumbered after him – not in a rush but not dawdling, either. As soon as they had gone, the woman with the pleasant face called to the guard, who entered quickly, closed the door and bolted it top and bottom.

  The woman put down the noodle soup and the beer and looked relieved. ‘Muslims,’ she said. ‘Very bad.’ The three had come in earlier; later two other men had taken the other table. The three had looked hard at the new arrivals, and when one of the two went to the toilet the three had followed him. There had been a sound of shouting, and the man’s companion had gone to the toilet too. More shouting and a ‘bad noise’. Then the three had reappeared and gone back to their table and beer. The other two had staggered out bleeding. One of them, evidently the worst hurt – perhaps stabbed, she thought – had zigzagged out into the street. His companion had stayed only long enough to pay for their beers, and I had seen him leave. He might now be calling the cops, she said, or perhaps calling his friends to come to Jimmie’s Happytime Eatery and ‘redecorate the joint’ – and maybe Jimmie, too.

  ‘You can take your time,’ the woman said. ‘I am Jimmie’s wife. You saw the guns in their shirts?’

  ‘Why didn’t you call the police?’

  ‘I don’t want shooting in here. It would make too much damage and maybe kill somebody.’

  Could Moro bosses wander about Zamboanga, bulging with illegal weapons like Sicilian Mafiosi? The Eatery’s guard was a young man. His peaked cap and blue uniform, emblazoned with ‘scrambled egg’ and decorative badges, gave him a half-and-half look, part bellboy, part American colonel. ‘You no shoot them?’ I asked.

  ‘Aawww …’ he said, swaying shyly from foot to foot. ‘They three tough men, have guns.’

  ‘I don’t blame you.’

  ‘Will you come back? In daytime better,’ said Jimmie’s wife.

  ‘Tomorrow, I hope.’

  *

  Next morning Commissioner Reyes’s answer reached Mr Banez, the alien control officer: I could stay. I went with Frank Manching to Banez’s office on the other side of the Flavorite Refreshment and Coffee Shop and confirmed what I had sensed before, that despite the threats of jail and deportation Mr Banez was a kindly man. He was delighted by the reply from Manila and, in a few minutes, stamped my passport and pronounced me free to proceed with a long, pumping handshake and wishes for good luck.

  Frank Manching said, ‘Good. Now, when I’ve found you a ship, I will phone Victor Chiongbian in Cebu City and tell him your arrival time. How’s that?’

  Back at the hotel’s reception desk, a hand slapped my arm and I swung round to find Jan, arms open as if he were about to deliver a song. ‘Eet’s your crazee friend,’ he cried. He had come with a cousin, a crop-headed soldier. I took them to the terrace and offered them drinks, but they refused politely. Jan told me he and the captain would take a pump boat back to the kumpit next morning and set out immediately from there for Cebu City.

  I said, ‘Well, take this for the boat fare,’ and pressed a hundred pesos on him – about ten pounds, a lot of money in the Philippines. He refused, shouting, ‘No, no,’ in genuine distress, but I made it a matter of my unhappiness and he reluctantly tucked it away.

  When I told Jan about my troubles with the Immigration Department and how they were resolved, he looked upset. ‘Haji come see you?’ he asked. Well, I said, on the kumpit the Haji had suggested I stay with him and that we would go to a nightclub, but once in Zamboanga he had vanished with hardly more than a nod. Again Jan became agitated.

  ‘No good, Haji. Yah, no good, no good.’

  ‘Never mind. Here is better. Crazy Jan, you came here. Much better than Haji’s house, more free.’

  ‘Yeah. More better.’ He got up. ‘Maybe we meet in Cebu Ceety. I contact William Lines offeece. You find me in kumpit harbour.’

  ‘Remember me to Carlos, Small-But-Terrible, Ernesto, Jalah and Captain Amin.’

  ‘Yah, yah. Also you remember Jan? You not forget Jan, the crazee one? You write, send book, yah?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘We all life friends now.’

  ‘Yes, Jan.’

  Even this wasn’t the end of Jan. A few minutes later when I walked to the William Lines office, I saw a jeep stalled in the street, and a man pushing it to restart it. His shirt had ridden up over his jeans and an automatic stuck out of his hip pocket. It was Jan’s soldier cousin. Jan’s voice rose in anguish from the driving seat. ‘Yah. Engine number three broken. First kumpit, then pump boat, now thees! Ooah!’ I put my shoulder to the back of the jeep and in a few yards the engine fired and it leaped forwards. Jan leaned out and waved, and was still gesturing as he careered around a corner into Pershing Plaza, brushing the skirts of three schoolgirls who screamed indignantly. Then he was gone.

  Thirty five

  My departure from Zamboanga for Cebu City bore no resemblance to my arrival; the half-drowned rat had had time to dry out. I was to have the l
uxury and the loneliness of a cabin once more.

  When I talked to Victor Chiongbian on Frank Manching’s telephone, his friendly voice assured me that he expected me on the motor vessel Jhuvel in two days’ time. He had received Kerry St Johnston’s telex message from Singapore explaining matters, and his father – the tycoon owner-founder of William Lines – was also looking forward to meeting me. ‘What is your short name?’ asked Victor. When I said, ‘Gavin,’ he said, ‘Well, call me Victor, please.’

  Now that Manching had booked me to Cebu, where I would be pressed to the bosom of the Chiongbian family and the biggest shipping line in the Philippines, I could toss aside all worries about the next two stages of my progress to China. As far as Manila, at least, I faced no problems. It was the first time I had enjoyed the luxury of being certain of the next two stages of my journey since my night departure from Turkey six months before. Two whole stages.

  *

  Frank Manching took me to the harbour. There one realizes what a seafaring people Filipinos are; the bustle of the port was greater than anything I’d seen since Singapore. Zamboanga is not a big city, but its port serves all the south-west of the Philippines. It is also beautiful and, despite my impatience, I was not overjoyed to leave this city of exotic flowers and trees and the heart-melting combination of blue sea and low white buildings. The terrace of the Lantaka Hotel was lapped by the sun-drenched strait that linked the Sulu to the Celebes Sea. I sympathized with Mr Banks, the elderly American tourist I had met there who told me he had been in Zamboanga for six weeks and couldn’t bring himself to leave.

  I liked Mr Banks. He said he had tried to take the ferry to Basilan Island but the police had stopped him at the jetty. ‘It has to do with pirates,’ he said. ‘Whatever you do, don’t try to go out to those islands, Several foreigners have disappeared there in recent months. Still, I suppose you only flew down from Manila for a day or two and will go straight back there.’ He blurted out the last sentence with an expression of sour condescension.

  ‘No, I came here by launch from Sandakan past Tawitawi and Jolo,’ I said.

  Mr Banks didn’t believe me. He knew I had to be lying or mocking him, and turned away insulted, abruptly ending our little game of one-upmanship. I wondered what he and Jan would have made of each other.

  *

  Zamboanga. Reading my notebook, I again visualize and pine for that obscure and sunbathed frontier of a religious war:

  Outside the harbour gates the tricycle drivers shout for custom like circus barkers; the atmosphere is more of a circus than a port. The tricycles are gaily painted, some with garden or mountain scenes, and each one has a name – Milbert, Clifford, My Lucky Baby or Jesus Christ. On the gates, there is written on a big wheel, like something from a fun fair, ‘Ciudad de Zamboanga. Bienvenidos.’

  The wharves are not long but there are several of them, and all are crowded with trucks and ships and kumpits. Bare-chested men load crates of Coca-Cola, ‘special brandy’ and sacks of corn grits into two- or three-deck kumpits bigger than the Allimpaya. They have names like Sweet Vilma, Luizmundi and Emily. Spectators stand around waving goodbye to passengers, exuberantly blocking the quays with motor scooters and jeeps – laughing, chattering, whistling, singing. ‘See that white steamer, the Almalyn?’ asked Manching. ‘She used to make Singapore. Not now. Only to Labuan these days.’

  Several large steamers, one called the Don Eusebio, alongside a warehouse with COMPANIA MARITIMA painted on it in tall letters. ‘A competitor of William Lines,’ said Manching.

  My passage is to be on the George and Peter Line’s m.v. Jhuvel. We board her, and I inspect my cabin, No. 2, which has four empty bunks and no washbasin. But it’s better than the coffinlike bunk of a small kumpit. On the back of the cabin door an advertisement says: ‘Be one of the faces at the festivities. Join the Loveboat Cruise to Kalibo, Ati-Atihan ’80, aboard Geopeter, George and Peter Line Inc.’

  With Manching I visit the wheelhouse and find again that I have to stoop. ‘This ship must have been bought from the Japanese,’ I say, and the captain shouts delightedly, ‘Aah! It ees, it ees!’ The captain’s name is Captain Maximo L. Clamohoy, Jr. He tells me that the Jhuvel is 691 tons, does approximately 11.5 knots and was built in Japan in 1954. She will stop once between Zamboanga and Cebu City, at Dumaguete on Negros Island fourteen and a half hours away.

  The chief officer, Edilberto (‘Eddie’) Manuel, is a plump smiling man in a flowered shirt and blue tracksuit trousers with a six-inch stripe of red and white. Apprentices move about the wheelhouse polishing brass work on the binnacle and telegraph. They jive gently as they move to the silent disco music all Filipinos carry in their heads morning, noon and night.

  Eddie was with the Geopeter for six years. He explains that the festival at Ati-Atihan is ‘the sort where people are dancing and playing and dirtying their faces’.

  ‘Painting their faces, you mean?’

  ‘Painting, yeah.’

  Eddie warns me about life in Cebu. ‘Many peoples smile,’ he says, ‘invite you, take you see this and that thing, but they are really, umm….’

  ‘Waiting to take the shirt from your back? Hustlers?’

  ‘Hustlers, yeah. Watch your wallet.’

  The ship’s decks are covered by folding beds or bedrolls with hardly any space between, so men and women of all ages are stretched out side by side. They are workers on the move between islands, students or holidaymakers. It is not cold at night, so many make do with nothing but a sheet or a coloured blanket to lie on and an overnight bag or bundle to serve as a pillow. Young men and young women lie together, their brown skins almost touching, but this doesn’t seem to create any problems; no one takes advantage of anyone else. Such a mess of humanity on the deck of a shipful of Arabs – imagine Al Anoud – would soon create a shambles of spit, dirty paper, bits of food, babies’ pee. Here people eat and drink from flasks or beercans, smoke, peel fruit – and then clear it all up. There is no squalor or smell. Once again I notice the extraordinary cleanness and almost finicky neatness of people in South-east Asia. Their clothes and bodies are always clean; they never stop scrubbing themselves. They don’t seem to sweat much, and even the men’s bodies are virtually hairless, which I suppose helps. They think Europeans smell of death. To me, Asians smell faintly of straw-green tea, a pleasant smell. In the eastern Mediterranean or the Red Sea a ship’s toilets are soon clogged and stinking, the floors awash with urine and vomit. How do they get so much of their shit on the seats and walls? On m.v. Jhuvel, at 11.00 p.m. off Zamboanga del Norte, with hundreds of passengers aboard, the toilets are immaculate.

  0600 hours the next morning. Coffee in my bare cabin. I join the chief officer for a view of the islands from the bridge. Soon I am called by the long-haired steward, Oscar Yap, for breakfast: a square, thin omelette with green leaves in it, a big grey fish and plain grey rice. No coffee or tea; I drink warm water. Grey fish is unappetizing, grey rice dries the mouth, and at 7.00 a.m. I can’t say that Royal Banana ketchup helps much.

  Music from the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind follows me about the ship from ubiquitous loudspeakers; it even sneaks ahead of me into the wheelhouse and chart room. From this vantage, the east flank of Negros Island unrolls like a shoreline of the Mediterranean. There is nothing tropical-looking about its higher slopes at all; they are high and dry, with only the outlines of trees on the uppermost ridges; their feet stand in a ruff of coconut trees from which a plume of smoke or two rises, signalling the odd house. It’s quite unlike the flowered greenness of Zamboanga.

  Nearer our first stop, Dumaguete, the coconut plantations thicken along the shore and reach up the mountainside. Men are fishing from outriggers, and an old Spanish-looking church and bell tower nestle in the trees. Two small boys on deck politely ask if I am getting off the ship at Dumaguete and, when I say I am going on to Cebu, they say they live there and volunteer their names: Bulbul Mendoza and Leil Belumba. We are leaving the world of Musa the Ayatollah, I
brahim (‘big steek’) and Ali-Get-Your-Gun. Filipino names are usually Spanish in the Christian regions – not in the southern Muslim islands of the Sulu, of course. On the bridge the work certificates of several of the ship’s engineer officers are framed on a bulkhead: Rezaldo J. Cagang, Romeo A. Badillon, Pedro A. Jaume, Jaime A. Labstida.

  Also on the bridge are a couple of beautiful girls who certainly have nothing to do with navigating the Jhuvel. When I ask one of them, ‘Are you a member of the crew?’ she gives me a flash of dark eyes and a coquettish smile: ‘Just travelling to Cebu and back for the ride.’ She has a sister-in-law in London. ‘So many Filipinos want to go there.’ She winked. ‘Me too.’

  Last night in the canteen the Filipinos I was drinking beer with asked eagerly, ‘Are there many Filipinos in England?’ Some, I said, but probably more in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf. ‘How can we get there?’ they wanted to know. But I had no answer to that. The conversation reminds me of a smear campaign in Britain some years ago aimed against well-to-do British families hiring Filipinos as domestic servants, cooks or nannies. The employers were equated with slave drivers, the Filipinos with cringing slaves. But the jobs represented a scintillating leap for the Filipinos, far from slavery; the slavery they know and flee from is here in the Philippines and, for many of them, no work of any kind.

  Coming into the tiny port of Dumaguete, Captain Max takes off the dressing gown and flower-patterned shirt he wears at sea and Chief Officer Eddie gets out of his tracksuit pants; they appear on the bridge in clean white bush jackets and big peaked caps loaded with yellow braid. We have thirty minutes in Negros.

  There are two wharves, lined with ships, launches and outriggers. No sooner is the gangway down than a mob of howling food vendors charge up it like a medieval army storming a castle. Girls and women tote baskets of mangoes, cakes, lemons, wrapped biscuits, peanuts, Coca-Cola. Eager young porters tumble into my cabin like puppies, crying. ‘Hey! Porter, surr?’ I wish I had some luggage for them to play with. Instead I go ashore with the chief officer, who walks across the quay to visit a friend on the bridge of a steamer called Don Joaquín. I walk past cycle-rickshaws, past wooden offices, shops, and, in ten minutes, find a café advertising ‘Shakes – mango, avocado, papaya’, and drink a San Miguel beer in the shade. Returning to the ship – Dumaguete is hardly big enough for a long walk – I meet a huge woman with a basket on her head coming down the gangway, her T-shirt, stretched almost to snapping point, carrying in bold letters the challenge ‘Hug Me!’ She squeezes by me and says, ‘Good morning,’ with great dignity. Even as one calculates the chances of getting one’s arms around her, her alderman’s voice cancels the invitation that bombinates from her bosom.