The Sea Hands People to People

Drying fish must be done with the sun. Before dawn had fully broken, I carried the bamboo racks out to the courtyard, sliced the yellow croakers one thin piece at a time, spread them flat, and salted them. The moment the grains of salt touched the flesh, that briny fish smell rushed up into my nose—and on that smell, this old life of mine, ninety-some years along, ran back eighty years.

A few days ago, my granddaughter showed me a movie on her phone. A foreign film, about that big ship from back then. Halfway through, I told her to turn it off. No need to watch. I was there.

“A-Shui! There’s a visitor at the dock!”

My granddaughter was shouting from down the slope. My hand jerked, and the knife nearly bit my finger.

The visitor was a tall foreign woman, hair all white, eyes blue, hugging a wooden box to her chest so tightly, like a hen sheltering from the wind. The young interpreter said her name was Anna, she’d come from England, made this journey on purpose. Her grandfather, all those years ago, had gone into the water off our very shores.

Into the water.

The moment those words were out, my ears rang with a boom, and that morning eighty years ago came back to me whole.

I was fourteen, out at sea with my father hauling crab pots. The sky had been fine, when suddenly came a muffled boom, like someone stamping their foot up in the heavens. We looked up: a great ship listing in the eastern sea, black smoke pouring from it. Later we learned it was a big Japanese ship, the Lisbon Maru, carrying nearly two thousand captured foreign soldiers, the hold doors nailed shut. It was the soldiers themselves who broke through and leapt into the sea.

And even as they swam, they were shot at.

Then the sea turned black. Not from darkness—a layer of black oil spread over the surface, mixed with planks, scraps of cloth, and heads. At first I thought it was driftwood floating on the waves; rowing closer, I saw they were foreign men, soaked white as linen, clinging to boards and knocking against each other in the swells, like a handful of beans scattered on the water.

My father laid the oar across the boat: “Man or ghost, we pull them out first!”

Our sampan was barely a dozen feet long; that ship stood stories high. But that day, the little sampan became the big one—the great ship sank inch by inch beneath the sea, and our sampan plunged into the waves again and again. Machine-gun fire stitched lines of spray across the water. Father pressed me down into the bottom of the boat and hunched over the oar himself, murmuring, “The Bodhisattva is watching. The Bodhisattva is watching.”

One boat, eight men a trip. Deliver them to the island, pour them out, plunge back in. The men we pulled up shivered like yellow croakers fresh from the water, gripping my hand the moment they boarded, chattering foreign words I couldn’t understand a syllable of—but tears, tears I understood.

We fished for a day and a night. Every boat on the island that could move went out—my father, my great-uncles, even the mute great-grandfather with his lame legs. Someone later counted it up: three hundred and eighty-four.

Three hundred and eighty-four lives, snatched one by one from the sea’s greedy mouth by a few dozen little sampans.

For days after, every door in the village stood open. The foreigners slept in the ancestral hall and the fish warehouses; our mothers cooked sweet potato porridge, carried it in bucket after bucket, and taught them hand over hand how to use chopsticks, like teaching their own children. Father always said one thing: on the sea there is no enemy. When the sea hands a person into your hands, you catch him.

Three badly wounded men were hidden in Turtle Cave in the hills behind the village. The job of bringing them food fell to me—I was small, and quick on my legs. The youngest of them, they called him Jack, had a wounded arm. Every time I came, he gave me a thumbs-up, and once he taught me a word: friend.

He said friend meant—“friend.” I tried to say it, my tongue tied itself in a knot, and he laughed, and laughing hurt his wound, and hurting he laughed anyway.

Later the air grew dangerous—the Japanese came to search the island. The three men were moved to the mainland by night. Before he left, Jack twisted a brass button off the cuff of his uniform, pressed it into my palm, clasped my hand and shook it, and gave me one more thumbs-up.

I strung that button on a red cord. And it hung there—eighty years.

“A-Shui? A-Shui?”

The interpreter’s voice pulled me back. I reached up and touched my face—the old tears were already running down to my chin.

Anna opened the wooden box. An old photograph, corners worn smooth and round: a young man in uniform, grinning something simple and sweet. And the first thing I saw—the cuff of his sleeve, missing one brass button.

She said her grandfather had lived to be eighty-nine, a man of few words all his life, who would give only half an answer if pressed about the war at sea. But every year, in the first days of October, he would go stand by the shore and look east. His family asked what he was looking at. He never said. Only after he was gone, sorting through his things, did they find a small notebook, and on its last page, a line of writing.

The interpreter read it out, word by word:

“The fishermen of China pulled me from the sea. They had little enough to eat themselves, yet they set the porridge before me. The brass button from my uniform I left with a Chinese boy. When I can no longer make the journey myself, someone will surely go and look at it for me.”

The courtyard fell silent. The tide swelled below the slope—wash, wash—wave after wave, like someone answering.

I lifted the red cord from around my neck. The brass button, polished by eighty years of my fingers, shone like the sun just risen from the sea. I placed it in Anna’s palm and closed her fingers around it.

“Return it to its owner,” I said. “It was your grandfather’s.”

She clutched the button—this white-haired lady—and slowly her eyes turned red. She pushed the photograph across to me, and through the interpreter said: keep the photo. That way, both families remain.

The tide was right as we saw her to the boat, and the sun spread the sea into one great sheet of gold. On the water, my granddaughter suddenly asked me: Grandpa, that ship was so big—how did it sink?

I thought for a moment: it was carrying guns and cannons. The sea doesn’t take those.

And our sampan?

The sampan is small, I said. But what it carried was the human heart. And the human heart—no wave can sink that.

The boat sputtered away into the distance. I went back to the courtyard and returned to salting my fish. The grains of salt fell, the briny smell rose again. This time, I did not run back eighty years.

Everything from eighty years ago is safe and sound. The waves handed people to people—and people, in their hearts, kept each other for a lifetime.

—This story is adapted from true events. All names are pseudonyms.