Slow Boats to China

by Gavin Young

  Straight away William said, ‘Let’s beat it. I’ll take you to a disco, what do you say?’ He drove there fast. In a dark room, looking through a wide, high plate-glass window into a lighted room where twenty or thirty girls waited on benches like fish in a restaurant tank, he ordered two girls from the woman attendant – ‘Numbers three and fifteen’ – and we entered the disco. There he ordered whisky for me, Coca-Cola for himself and the girls. He shimmied around the floor and chatted to the girls for two hours, then, as abruptly as he had arrived, he handed out large tips, promised the girls he’d be back – their grateful eyes and his grin exchanged white signals in the gloom – and drove me home.

  Twenty-five ships: six container vessels, twelve container–passenger ships, six luxury liners and one luxury container–liner (my transport to Manila, the Doña Virginia, named after his wife) – a biggish fleet. ‘I handed it all over to Victor in 1965 to let him learn. I’ve seen friends of mine who keep on controlling their businesses late in life. Why did they send their sons to school? You find these sons – middle-aged men – still like children.’

  His office was on the first floor of the William Lines office building near the docks. The offices were not particularly grand, but the walls of William’s room were lined with framed photographs of distinguished people: Nehru, Averell Harriman, Imelda Marcos, the president’s wife. He sat before me at his desk, short sleeves revealing muscled arms, his face smooth, teeth perfect, wearing a silver Rolex and lightly tinted glasses, a former congressman, present shipping tycoon, grown from gangsterdom.

  ‘I was nearly a gangster before I was engaged. I was a nobody, and I didn’t like that. When I was courting my wife, her relatives tried to stop us, and I told her, “I’ll kill everyone in your house if you don’t marry me.” I decided to turn over a new leaf when war began in 1941 and we ran into the hills in Leyte to join Marcos and the guerrillas fighting the Japs. Then I went into my first venture; war or not, I had to make money to feed my family. I bought a banca – a sailing boat with outriggers – and sailed it from Leyte to Mindanao. Halfway, near Bohol Island, I encountered a Jap navy patrol boat. Three of us jumped into the sea for our lives, and two remained in the boat. We swam eight to ten hours in waters full of sharks before we hit the beach. I thought God had saved my life. I felt, Something big will come in my life. I felt, I will survive! The two who stayed in the banca were killed by the Japs.’

  William thumped the desk with his fist like a gospel preacher. ‘I tell you, Gavin, it was the turning point in my life. Like you surviving the Sulu Sea and the Moros in the kumpit. I survived Japs and sharks. I was twenty-nine. After that, everything I touched turned to gold. I made profits of two hundred and three hundred per cent. I’ll sum up my life: courage, my gambling spirit, imagination, hard work and, of course, luck given by God.

  ‘Even now I go on board my ships – oh, yes – without warning. Sometimes I have a tip; something is dirty, something is not correct on a ship, and I take the chief steward, or whoever is guilty, by the neck and bash him. I really slap him in front of the other officers and crew – goddamn it, I don’t mind.

  ‘Once I waited for a captain to return to his vessel. Two hours in the sun, waiting with the crew and officers. I said to them, “You wait here and see what I do to this captain who keeps the ship waiting two hours.”

  ‘When he comes he sees I am furious. I grab him by the throat. He’s pleading: “Sir, the crew will see. I’ll be humiliated.” Well, he was a small man. I said, “In future I don’t bother to hit you, I fire you away.”’

  It wasn’t the sort of behaviour I associated with a shipowner like John Swire, but it did sound very Filipino. William was genuinely concerned for the underdog. ‘I go always to the crew’s quarters first. I won’t have my crew living like pigs. If a ship is late or dirty, who is to lose? The public. Who is to blame? I am. That’s why I get mad. The public pays. It’s rough-and-tumble, but those officers I slapped are still with me. Who’s made their lives for them?’

  Later, Victor, a man who would never hit anyone whatever his size, said his father had once found one of his foremen idling. The foreman was much bigger than William, but William had beaten him up, then handed the foreman an axe and said, ‘Go on, hit me.’

  ‘I suppose I’ve always been a playboy, too,’ grinned William, walking me to his favourite coffee shop, the Red Carpet, his rendezvous every morning. At a table his friends – journalists, lawyers, company men – sat drinking coffee, and William introduced me, then pointed to them. ‘All businessmen, pimps and hustlers,’ he barked, and their hard masculine faces creased into affectionate smiles.

  *

  Next day, as I was talking to Victor in his office, Jan walked in, followed by other members of the crew of the Allimpaya. They had arrived that morning. Jan had shaved his little beard; moonfaced Jalah had cut his hair short; big Carlos had a sty on his mongoloid left eyelid and looked cast down by it. The captain, Amin, was there too, gold flashing in his mouth.

  Kind Victor immediately led them into his office as if they were pirate princes. He was excited by their appearance, and plied them with questions about their voyage, kumpit, cargo and charter rates. He had sent his own car to pick them up when he heard that the Allimpaya had been sighted at Cebu’s kumpit wharf, and now he ordered Coca-Cola all round. I realized then that the Chiongbians knew everything that went on in Cebu. The wild quartet had been driven to the office by a chauffeur with Muzak and the air conditioning going full blast, Jan reported across Victor’s boardroom table, and the reception had deeply impressed them. Jan’s ebullience was undiminished by the strange setting. He and the others looked very dark beside Victor.

  When I gave Carlos a hundred pesos to buy a pair of jeans – he had told me he needed some – he cheered up and put an arm across my shoulder, saying, ‘Zank you.’ I said, ‘Say hello to Small-But-Terrible.’

  ‘Yeah, yah. Okay.’

  Jalah said, ‘Don’t write your book until my letter comes. Eet weel be my life storee. Please put eet all in book.’ (Alas, Jalah’s letter has not arrived.)

  The captain said, ‘Thank you for coming with us.’

  ‘No, no. I am grateful for the ride. I thought in Sandakan you would not take me, in case we were caught by the Filipino navy.’

  Jan said, ‘We will be lonelee on the kumpit now.’

  They spoke in another language to Victor, who told me, ‘They are saying in Cebu language, “We had good fun on the kumpit.”’

  ‘We did,’ I said, and added, ‘I’m coming back to Zamboanga. Wait and see.’

  ‘We weel wait,’ said Jan. ‘We weel be lonelee.’

  The captain and Jalah shook my hand. Carlos kissed my cheek, as did Jan, who, before I could draw it away, kissed my hand too. Then they left.

  *

  Victor drove me to the Doña Virginia on the evening she sailed for Manila. Her sides were immense and white, rows of portholes gleaming in them like golden studs. She could carry fifteen hundred passengers, and was eighty per cent full year round. Containerized, too. On that warm night, with her lights blazing, she was like a luxury liner in a Hollywood film.

  Victor moved casually about the ship like a prince, shaking clutching hands, hailed on all sides. He left me on the bridge, which was wider than anything I’d seen since Patrick Vieljeux. As we cast off I saw him on the quayside mouthing, ‘See the boss.’ Following his finger, I saw a darkened car with his father, William, in it, nearly out of sight behind a barrier. Unseen, he had come to watch his beautiful flagship, his pride, the prize at the end of his struggles, after all the rough-and-tumble since those many hours in shark-and-Jap-filled waters. Under his adoring eyes, the Doña Virginia slid off into the dark strait, agleam, white and gold, while passengers on other lines stared at us from their rails. I waved at the shore, where the kumpit wharf lay in shadow. They wouldn’t see me from the Allimpaya even if they were looking my way, but that didn’t matter. We moved up the strait, the forward mast and rada
r mast barely clearing the modern bridge that joins Cebu Island and Mactan Island, Cebu City and Lapu-Lapu. But the stern mast had to be lowered by motor, and small boys on the bridge cheered as our lights slipped past, almost scraping the soles of their feet.

  Victor had given me a two-bed suite with a bath and shower attached. I had a sofa, two chairs, TV and – a godsend – good lights for reading in bed. I toured the ship. Passengers lay on two-tiered bunks on deck or wandered up and down bright neon-lit staircases and along the rails. Disco music throbbed until late at night. Before turning in, I shared a beer with a Filipino – the beer came in pitchers, not glasses, a gallon at a time, too much for one person – and he told me that yesterday three bombs had exploded in movie houses near Zamboanga. There were sixteen dead and many wounded. Moros? ‘Maybe some Christian group of terrorists,’ he said. He told me a story about an American and an Englishman who had sailed a yacht south a year or two before. Pirates had caught them, and the American escaped somehow, but the Briton was killed. ‘Somewhere near Zamboanga, those islands.’

  It was a luxury to have stewards again, and breakfast in the suite: fried egg, sausages, cheese, Nescafé, tomato ketchup and Red Devil Hot Sauce.

  Sitting in the sun, I watched the islands go by. Panay, long and wooded; Sibuyan, a pinhead. Small steamers, blue and orange sails, a white lighthouse in the Sibuyan Sea.

  A boy in deck class told me that he was heading for Saudi Arabia as an accountant. ‘Eet weel be hard. No cheeks, no beer, sand. Hard life. But the money ees good, so what can I do?’

  His friend said to me, ‘You look like Robert Mitchum.’ He had lively Oriental features and very short hair. ‘You must be Yul Brynner,’ I told him. General laughter.

  From the passage of the gap between Mindoro Island and Batangas, the south-western tip of Luzon, I stay more or less constantly on the bridge. Despite its size, it is not a place for a sufferer from claustrophobia; officers, apprentices and wives surge about, and rock music pumps out of the loudspeakers. Even the master, Captain George Geraldez, snaps his fingers while moving rhythmically about in jeans and a white sports shirt with his name on the pocket. He is short and plump, twenty-nine years with William Lines, and was voted ‘Outstanding Captain’ in 1975 and 1976 while master of m.v. Dumaguete City.

  The wheelhouse is white, with sea-green rails to the wings, sea-green metal decks, yellow masts and derricks. The big square containers on the foredeck are a brilliant orange. We pass smaller liners and freighters effortlessly. The Doña is queen of the seas; whatever vessel we pass, its crew and passengers stare at us and wave.

  Luzon, blue and lazy in the 10.00 a.m. sun. On the windscreen of the bridge a sign reads: SAFETY FIRST TAKE NO CHANCES. It is not easy sailing here. One night a tanker rammed the Don Juan, a luxury liner belonging to the Chiongbians’ rival, and sank her, drowning hundreds of passengers.

  *

  Approaching Manila Bay, Captain Geraldez came out onto the wing and pointed. ‘Bataan. Where many Filipinos died during the Japanese occupation.’

  To port, a great mountain ridge ran into the sea, forming a large wing to the bay, which is almost a sea of its own. Here the Americans sank the Spanish fleet before taking Manila and occupying the Philippine archipelago.

  ‘Corregidor Island.’ A crescent shape, a reminder of Second World War movies starring John Wayne. Just off our port bow, a round sea fortress stuck up out of the water: a concrete bunker island, rusted guns, a ruined bastion riddled with shell holes. Manila is a white cluster ahead, a few skyscraper shapes in haze, like the outline of Bombay, Karachi, Piraeus or almost any other big port.

  I took pictures of the captain’s niece and two elderly lady friends and, after the niece had photographed me and the others, we swapped snaps and names.

  The odd thing about a modern wheelhouse is that it resembles a space-age dentist’s surgery. The telegraph is something between an extremely sophisticated milk-shake dispenser and a giant pinball machine; you expect it to spew out either a banana split or a jackpot.

  The second officer is barking like a dog and has the apprentices in fits. Now he is dancing around the helmsman hanging on to the little tassle attached to the brass bell on the ceiling. An apprentice with bushy hair under his cap is quietly jiving to ‘Rock Around the Clock’.

  ‘Two hours of manoeuvring to get alongside,’ the captain says. The minuet begins.

  Captain: ‘Stop two engines.’

  Helmsman: ‘Stop two.’

  ‘Course 057.’

  ‘Dead slow ahead two.’

  ‘065.’

  ‘065, sir.’

  We turn into the anchorage of Manila harbour.

  ‘Starboard twenty.’

  We are at ‘Dead Slow’, but still moving quite fast.

  ‘Stop starb’d.’

  ‘Stop two engines.’

  There are eighteen ships in port, eight waiting at anchor.

  ‘Midships.’

  ‘Rudder midships, sir.’

  ‘Hard to starb’d…. Slow astern…. Slow ahead port…. Stop starb’d.’

  We inch around a red buoy.

  ‘Stop two engines.’

  A handsome white William Lines ship, the Cagayan de Oro, eases out of her berth ahead, working her way out of the tangle of shipping, and we hail her with two hoots on our siren.

  A pilot takes over the last part. He uses the bow thrusters – the propellers under the bow – which makes manoeuvring easier.

  ‘Thrust to port.’

  ‘Let go one anchor.’

  ‘Steady.’

  A gentle bump. A cluttered wharf and godowns, orange containers waiting, huge fork-lift trucks pumping petrol fumes, barriers to protect passengers from descending containers. William and Victor Chiongbian’s pride, the Doña Virginia, has docked in Manila.

  Thirty Seven

  I hadn’t escaped from the Tropic of Piracy by moving north. In Manila I read this story in a newspaper:

  PIRATES BOARD CONTAINER SHIP AND KILL CAPTAIN Barefoot pirates sneaked into a British container ship in Manila Bay today, shortly after midnight, grabbed two Chinese crewmen as hostages and then shot dead its captain after failing to rob the ship’s money…. The ship’s chief mate, Sin Tiu Chiu, 35, said Capt. Dyason had apparently awakened when the pirates entered his cabin, poked the pistol at his neck and demanded: ‘Money, money, where’s the money?’

  The captain never replied but tried to push the pistol away with his left hand but a man with a long gun fired at him with successive shots…. After the captain was shot, the pirates ordered Mr Sin … to open the vault where the ship’s money was kept, but were told only the captain knew the safe’s combination.

  As far as I know, those pirates have never been caught.

  ‘Money, money, where’s the money?’ has a Conradian ring about it; it is something like a hiss in the dark from the villainous Ricardo in Victory. An ironic touch was that Captain Dyason’s ship, the Oriental Ambassador, which had left Manila for Taiwan early in the morning, would not have been lying at anchor in Manila Bay that night at the mercy of the pirates but for his decision to shelter there from a typhoon. He wasn’t one to take risks. I see him as a prudent man; he had sought a safe haven and, having found sanctuary from nature, had slept soundly until he heard that voice in his ear and felt cold metal on his neck.

  I heard of another aspect of violence when I went to see a Filipino businessman, a friend of William Chiongbian. We had a drink at a table full of his cronies: journalists, an ex-congressman, a coconut baron, a lawyer and a judge. Conversation turned, as it tended to among such people, on the health of the president. Was Marcos dying of a kidney complaint? Recently he hadn’t looked his usual healthy self on TV, someone said.

  My friend talked of a recent epidemic of arson bombs in Manila, aimed primarily at Filipino businessmen of Chinese extraction. Some people thought that it was the work of hit men sent over by the powerful tongs, the Chinese secret societies of Hong Kong. At any rate, Hong Ko
ng police experts had come to Manila to investigate explosions and certain kidnappings that seemed to point that way.

  ‘Frankly, I want to get out of Manila and live in Cebu,’ a lawyer admitted. ‘See that?’ He pointed to a newspaper. ‘Two died here’ was the caption for a photograph showing police officers examining a hole in a stretch of tarmac. Someone had bombed a technical institute near Manila.

  ‘Most people carry guns now,’ my new friend said. ‘They cost three thousand to four thousand pesos’ – that is, at least two hundred pounds.

  The judge said, ‘A police special, that’s what we like here in Manila. A brand new .45.’

  *

  Violence and music, violent music. The garish jeepney buses thump and howl about the city like travelling jukeboxes, with small statues of silver horses on their hoods and kids swinging and jiving on their tailboards. There is little beauty in this city. American and Japanese bombs razed its elegant Spanish past to charcoal. No beauty in Roxas Boulevard, or in the business ghetto, Makati – only muddle.

  When I first came to Manila the year before, it was John Travolta time. The music of his film Saturday Night Fever bombarded me from taxis, buses, hotel elevators and shopping complexes; it was almost impossible to escape. When I went to interview President Marcos for the Observer, it even pursued me to his Malacanan Palace. In a waiting room there, small woolly mice scuttled about the floor and an old Bette Davis movie ranted and sobbed from a television set. The president was delayed, and after an hour’s wait I was introduced by guards to the presidential library, a magnificent chamber with twelve-foot-high doors and twenty-foot ceilings. It was an august place, but Muzak reigned here, too; twanging gusts of music from Saturday Night Fever enveloped me and the two Filipino lady librarians who were making tea. They lightly swung their hips to the music under a shelf full of grandly leather-bound speeches of the president. It had been John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever then, it was John Travolta in Grease now, and soon it would be John Travolta in Urban Cowboy, Apparently, John Travolta could make a life’s work out of making musicals for the delectation of Filipino youth. Year in, year out, these frisky Catholic youngsters with Jesus medals bouncing on their chests yearned for their next ‘fix’ of Travolta.