by Rita Pomade
The boatyard kept promising a starting date and then ignoring it, but this gave us plenty of time to design and redesign our craft to our exact needs. The time spent plotting our dream yacht was the happiest for the three of us. I loved the idea that we could pick the model we wanted. Many of the yachts people asked for looked like modified cruise ships with wide bellies and big behinds — great as houseboats but uncomfortable for sailing. We decided on a 45-foot Peterson ketch, with its streamlined shape and narrow rear end. The Peterson was built to slice through the waves in a smooth ride. Its graceful shape appealed to my eye. The fiberglass exterior would be easy to clean, and the teak deck and interior defied water damage.
We arrived in Taiwan just as the furniture industry died, and carpenters now turned to the boatyards for work. Each interior was a work of art. We decided our finishing touches would include galley and bathroom counters carved from the dark green marble we had admired on our trip to Taroko Gorge in Hualien. Its marble mountain had tunnels with small tables and seats carved into the stone. Windows cut through the marble looked out on mountain peaks dotted with red-roofed shrines. The scene was so pleasing that I wanted to capture some of its hobbit-like feel for the yacht. To go with the green marble, we chose deep red, water resistant velvety upholstery from a sample book the shipyard lent us. I visualized how luxurious they would look against the teak cabinets and polished teak floors.
With the boatyard picked and the yacht designed, I had more time to hang out with my students and work on my acting assignments. Jonah had completed his final exams, sent from Quebec to the American School in Taipei. Now seventeen and a high school graduate, he turned his full attention to teaching English to his new friends. We continued with our Mandarin classes because I refused to admit defeat. I loved the music of the language, even with my tin ear. I believe Jonah continued with me because we had found a delicious curried chicken and rice wagon just outside the Daily News Mandarin School, and it was our habit to eat there after class.
Bernard had nothing to do until construction started and decided to make a trip to France where he had money waiting for him. I suggested he take a side trip to Montreal before he returned, so he could check up on how Stefan was faring. Reading between the lines of Stefan’s sporadic correspondence, I felt he might be regretting his decision to remain behind. I wanted to make sure he was okay.
After Bernard left, Jonah went daily to the boatyard on his own to learn about construction and put pressure on the owner to start building our yacht. He took on the responsibility without being asked, and thrived on the challenges it presented. It gave me some reassurance, knowing that the following year he’d be entering Middlebury College in the United States, a country he hardly knew.
On August 4, 1980, the shell of our long-awaited yacht emerged from empty space, taking its shape from nothing more than some buckets of liquid plastic that hardened to form its skin. It seemed unreal and somewhat frightening to see this hollow stretch of plastic, looking more like a fragile canoe than a sea worthy vessel, cradled in its scaffolding. I was both stunned and in awe. A few days before there was nothing but space, and out of this nothing came something that gelled and cooled and took a shape that would eventually become my home and life support for who knew how many years. I’d gotten so used to waiting I had to adjust to the fact our dream would soon be a reality. I also had to adjust to how thin the skin was that separated my home from the sea.
Chapter 6
OUR NEW REALITY
To be one with life is to be like a drop of rain that flows into the stream and goes with the flow.
— NATIVE AMERICAN
“You look ten years younger with your husband gone,” shouted the Tai Tai, matriarch of the Shin Hsing clan, through the open office door. It was the first time the wife of the builder addressed me in all the time I had been visiting the Shin Hsing yard. Our main contact was with her eldest and favoured son, Kenwood, his Western name taken off a sewing machine label. Now I made sure to greet her with a smile and a wave each time I passed her doorway.
“Miss Rita,” she called out a few days later, and beckoned me into her office. “You need Chinese name. Good luck. When you born?”
I gave her the information she asked for, and after some calculation she announced, “Shi Lin I.”
“Shi Lin I?”
“Good name,” she said. “Means wise lady.”
She then asked about Bernard and calculated a name for him.
“Pong Pai Song,” she declared. “Big Bear in the Pine Woods.”
She handed me several scraps of paper with our new names and ordered me to “Get chop.”
The chop, a small, rectangular stone or piece of wood with one’s name carved into the bottom for stamping, was the glue that held the Taiwanese business world together. Contracts were signed with a chop. Artists signed their paintings with a chop. It was placed on cheques and all important documents. For Mother’s Day, Jonah took a good part of his earnings to buy me a jade chop. Jade, highly valued in Taiwan, was meant to bring good fortune, and I was touched that he had thought to give me this gift. Much later, after the yacht was completed, I invited his friends aboard for lunch, and as a farewell celebration. After they left, I discovered the chop was missing.
The loss of the chop rattled me. It brought home that the yacht had marked us as privileged. Considering the years we had worked to acquire our boat, I hadn’t thought of us as such. But I now understood that even to have been able to have this goal, both for the chance to pursue it, and the very act of opting out of the mainstream to enjoy it, singled us out that way.
I had asked Jonah how he felt about the theft. “Mom, it’s not a big deal,” he said. “It’s just part of the experience.” But for me it was a big deal. Even today when I think of the theft, I feel the loss.
In Bernard’s absence, Jonah had developed a good eye for detail and took seriously the various facets of yacht construction. Still, I was anxious for Bernard’s return. We were partners in this enterprise, and if a bad decision was made, I wanted us to share the responsibility. I hoped his visit to France would defuse some of the tension he’d been carrying since our arrival in Taiwan, but it was wishful thinking. He returned more wound up than before he’d left, and seemed to resent the pleasure Jonah and I had taken in the yacht’s emergence. When Jonah tried to explain something that happened at the boatyard, Bernard snapped at him: “What’s it your business? It’s not your boat.”
Jonah stopped going to the yard. “He has no interest in sailing,” Bernard later said. Jonah was damned either way, and I fared no better. We had become target practice for the arrows he couldn’t sling at the yard.
Out for a beer one evening with a small group of dreamers also building in Taiwan, one of them asked if I had ever sailed. “No,” I replied. “And I wouldn’t sail with just anyone. I feel safe with Bernard.”
“What kind of bullshit is that?” Bernard spat out.
All conversation stopped. I cringed inside. I was too choked up to say anything and stared into space pretending I wasn’t there. I wanted to kill him.
“What was that all about?” I hissed when we were finally alone. I could hardly contain my fury. “You humiliated me.”
Bernard shrugged and looked away. “You always exaggerate.”
“What do you mean I always exaggerate?” I was livid.
“Don’t start a fight.” He turned his back to me and headed towards the door. “I’m going for a walk,” he said, and slammed the door as he walked out.
I couldn’t figure out what was going on. What did I do? Why this sudden shift from trusted partner to adversary?
I brought up that conversation years later.
“I remember that evening,” he said. “I didn’t have the confidence in me that you had. I was starting to realize that I had dragged you and Jonah into this, not having a clue about what I was doing. I was scared shitless, and thought you were making fun of me.” His reply shook me. So much misunderstandi
ng left unresolved over so many years.
Why hadn’t we talked more? Why couldn’t he tell me? I had mistaken his silence for strength.
“But I wasn’t dragged into it,” I said. “It was a shared dream. Somewhere along the way you lost sight that I was as much responsible for that adventure as you were.”
From the day he returned to Taiwan to the completion of the yacht, Bernard was at the yard from early morning to late evening watching every detail of the boat’s construction. I told myself that his lashing out against Jonah and me was due to the strain of the building. I was sure his good will and acknowledgement of our partnership would return once the yacht was completed.
We worked together on the layout and finishing touches on the décor — a front and aft cabin, each with a bathroom (or head to be nautically correct), a user-friendly galley with the green marble counter top that we had decided on earlier; red, yellow, and orange striped curtains on the portholes to match the red microfiber upholstery on the berths, settees and pillows; a small table that pulled out from under the double berth in the aft cabin so I could write , and a chart table for Bernard in the salon. Our ideas for the finished product were completely in sync, and it brought us closer whenever we worked on them.
We, or I should say Bernard, decided on the name Santa Rita; that is, after he informed me the yacht would be registered in his name.
“What!” I blurted out. “How could you? We worked together on this.”
I felt used, deceived. So many confused thoughts ran through my head. I wondered if he thought I might steal the yacht from him. Or that the boat was just his. Maybe it’s an ego thing. Okay, I was bigger than that. Or was I?
“Why?” I asked.
“It doesn’t matter. It’s not important. We both know it’s our boat.”
He must have seen the bewildered look on my face.
“Look,” he said, “you’re so much a part of this journey that I want the boat to carry your name.”
I didn’t fight for equal ownership. Like so many women, who think they are independent until they’re in a relationship, I felt stuck in a submissive role. I focused on the adventure and tried not to think about the legalities. I had to trust Bernard would never cheat me. Until that moment, I had no reason to think otherwise. I let myself be seduced by the name Santa Rita. I couldn’t afford to nurse the feeling that I had been used. I had invested too much of myself in this adventure. I also found comfort in the fact I could relate to the attributes of this particular saint.
Santa Rita, the Spanish saint of all things impossible, is the one you went to when there were obstacles to overcome — your child is dying, your husband is abusive and/or philandering, you’re widowed and penniless, or you have a wound that doesn’t heal. You want something so badly that you sacrifice everything for it. That aspect of her power spoke to me. I had sacrificed everything to make this adventure happen. But she’s more. She’s the protective saint of women, who gives them the power to endure and become stronger. In time, that is who she was to become for me. But for now she was the saint of a seemingly impossible dream.
One of Jonah’s friends owned a gallery in downtown Taipei and invited us to an opening by the Taiwanese painter, Earthstone Jo. He was sure we’d like the work, and he was right. I honed in on a large watercolour of an emaciated man seated before a plate with nothing on it but the skeleton of a fish. It was impossible to tell if the man was sated or hadn’t had enough to eat. The ambiguity of the portrait held my attention. I felt an affinity for the man, and decided his gentle repose was what I needed for the journey. I bought the watercolour and had it framed to hang in the salon of the yacht. It greeted me every time I came down the galley stairs. I saw this man who looked beyond the fish bones as a fellow traveller on this temporary road we each pave for ourselves.
A week before we launched the Santa Rita, I invited my ex-student, calligraphy teacher and now good friend, Alice, to a restaurant to thank her for her friendship. So much of what I knew about Taiwanese life I had learned from her. She had taken me to a Taoist temple, where we burned incense, and then from a cylindrical box she asked me to select a stick that would hold my fortune. I drew a stick with the number one. A temple priest then read the meaning from a corresponding slip of paper. “Very auspicious,” he said in Mandarin, or at least that’s what Alice said he said, and I saw that as a positive sign for our journey. She also introduced me to traditional food I would never have eaten, and listened to me struggling through my limited Mandarin with a straight face. I wanted to do something special for her, and I knew she loved to eat.
“Let me order,” I said. I had taken her to a western style restaurant, and she didn’t understand the menu. My intent was to share with her a good memory from my culture.
“We’ll have two steaks, medium rare,” I said.
When the food came, I dug in. I looked over at Alice who was staring at her plate, pushing the peas around with her fork.
“What’s the matter?” I asked.
“I can’t eat this,” she said. “It’s too big and bloody.”
I cut her meat into tiny pieces and mixed it with the peas and potatoes. She took a few bites and scattered the rest around her plate. I realized too late I should have taken her to a good Chinese restaurant where everything was cut in bite size portions to be eaten with chopsticks. I had never seen a knife at a setting in a local restaurant, and wondered if Alice had ever used a knife and fork at the table.
In spite of the disastrous farewell meal, Alice invited us to her wedding, our last social event before leaving Taipei. Alice’s family had been converted to Catholicism by a French missionary several years before. Buried inside a billowing white wedding dress, her delicate face obscured by a multi-layered veil, she stood before the priest.
“We are five sisters, and we were all christened Mary,” she confided to me during one of my calligraphy lessons. “I wanted my own name so I became Alice.”
I knew that Alice was still a Buddhist at heart and felt that this was “dress-up” or maybe “just playing it safe.” The evening before the fiasco of my surprise western dinner, she had taken me to a Buddhist temple to pray for my safety at sea. Over the months of our friendship, we had gone to many temples, but never to a church.
After the ceremony, Alice changed into a red cheongsam, slit up the sides to above her knees. It looked as though it had been sewn onto her, and was more flattering on her trim frame than the wedding dress. She showed us to one of the many tables that filled the reception hall, and ladled out the first course into our bowls — turtle soup with the shells floating in the tureen. We couldn’t eat it. The next course was snake and sea cucumber. We also gave that dish a pass. There were a number of odd looking dishes that followed, but Bernard, Jonah and I didn’t have an appetite for any of them.
Finally, when dessert came, we gorged. The eight treasures rice pudding consisted of sticky rice with bits of candied fruit, all ingredients we could more or less recognize. I remembered that Alice ate only the dessert in the fancy western restaurant I took her to. When I mentioned my observation to her, she laughed in recognition.
It’s all a matter of conditioning. Some cultures eat monkey. The thought of it makes me want to cry. My Taiwanese students wanted to take me out for dog on my last day of teaching, a delicacy that made me want to wretch. I have rat recipes from Mallorca and Hong Kong that I will never try. And I know that grubs are a staple in parts of Africa, while dung beetle was offered to me in northern Mexico. I eat beef. That would be shocking in parts of India. The turtle and snake were not a part of my diet growing up, so I couldn’t eat them at the wedding. While travelling, I never have a problem slipping into the habits and mores of the countries I visit, but food that’s off the radar in my culture takes awhile — if ever.
Before leaving Taiwan, I wanted a statue of the goddess Matsu to take with us. She was the Taiwanese goddess that protected fishermen and sailors, and had over five hundred temples on the island ded
icated to her, even though the Taiwanese were more inclined towards farming than fishing. But the island had been inundated many times during the typhoon season, and the people believed Matsu was the reason they were still there.
I already had a scrolled water brush painting of Matsu that I had originally hung in the bedroom in our apartment in Shilin, and a little painted carved statue of her on my bedside table. When our landlord, Mr. Feng, came for the rent, I proudly showed him my wall hanging of Matsu.
“No Matsu in the bedroom,” he said. “People do bad things there that Matsu shouldn’t see.”
He wouldn’t leave until I removed her from the bedroom wall and tacked her up in the living room. He didn’t notice the small, beautifully carved, wooden one by the bed. That Matsu stayed with me in the bedroom. I found her solid, ample body mother-like and comforting, and didn’t think she’d take offense.
From his small, insular world, Mr. Feng had strong views about everything. I had seen an interesting play performed on Taiwanese TV. I didn’t understand the Mandarin, but it was so well acted I could follow the story. I mentioned to Mr. Feng how much I enjoyed the production.
“It’s a classic,” he said, “very old. We have a tradition of fine theatre. When your people evolve, you will also create great works.”
I smiled politely. I didn’t try to enlighten Mr. Feng on the history of western theatre. I knew from previous conversations that he wasn’t open to any discussion that contradicted his view of the world. But it was interesting to note his perception of the West.
I mentioned to the Tai Tai at the Shin Hsing Boatyard that I wanted a Matsu for the Santa Rita. I thought it would please her.
“Good idea,” she said. “We go together to find a Matsu. All Matsu not the same. Some good. Some bad.”
She took Bernard and me to an antique store with a plethora of plaster statues. She held each Matsu for a moment and finally selected one.
“Very good,” she said. “Very spiritual.”