No Enemies at Sea

To be honest, the night I was assigned the escort duty, I dug out my old English textbook and studied it until well past midnight.

I’ve been a guide at the Dongji Island memorial for three years now. My script I could recite in my sleep, but my English was only what remained from high school. There’s a panel in the museum about October 1942, about a great ship called the Lisbon Maru that sank in these waters, about hundreds of foreign soldiers in the sea, and every sampan in the village put out to rescue them. Before, when I told the story, I only told it. Tomorrow would be different—our visitor was an eighty-one-year-old Englishwoman, Mrs. Grey. Her father, Henry Grey, was one of the men pulled from the sea that night.

It wasn’t failing as a translator I was afraid of. I was afraid that something so enormous would come out thin, filtered through my half-baked English.

The next morning, the boat docked at Miaozihu pier. Mrs. Grey came ashore carrying an old tin box, her hair snow-white, her back perfectly straight. Grandpa Shen had been standing at the pier for over an hour already. He’s ninety-two. The villagers had urged him to wait sitting down, but he refused.

“Miss,” he spoke first, “ask her if she’s hungry. Come to the house first and have a hot meal.”

I translated. Mrs. Grey smiled and said no, she wasn’t hungry. She wanted to see the sea first.

“The sea?” Grandpa paused for a moment, then nodded. “Good. See the sea. The sea is beautiful.”

The two of them stood at the edge of the pier. A ninety-two-year-old fisherman and an eighty-one-year-old lady from London, with me between them—and more than eighty years.

Mrs. Grey spoke first, slowly, and I caught her words one by one.

“My father never talked much about that time. But every October, he would take out a sheet of paper and draw an island. He drew it for decades—enough to fill a box.”

She opened the tin box. Inside was a stack of pencil drawings of an island: the earliest ones crude, the island just a triangle; later ones finer and finer—a bay appeared, then houses, then a pier. On the back of the last one, a line of wobbly letters.

I could read those letters: Dongji. Mrs. Grey said her father didn’t know Chinese; those two sounds were all he could write in his whole life.

I translated for Grandpa. He leaned in close to look, his rough fingers hovering over the paper, not daring to touch it.

“This is Miaozihu,” he said. “Even the bay is right. He remembered it true.”

“Does he remember that night?” I asked.

“He remembers.” Grandpa gazed at the sea, his words as if hauled up from somewhere very deep. “I was seven that year. In the middle of the night, there was a boom on the water, and the roof beams shook. My father was already outside, tying the rope to the sampan.”

“My mother grabbed him, crying. There was fire burning on the sea, gunshots coming in waves. My father said only one thing—”

Grandpa paused, as if those words had been kept warm in his chest for eighty years and came out still hot.

“He said: there are no enemies at sea, only people in the water.”

“The sampans were small—seven or eight per trip was the most you could manage. He and the strong men of the village went back and forth, back and forth. He lost a shoe in the water and didn’t rest until dawn. The men in the water clung to the gunwales and wouldn’t let go, their fingernails digging into the planks. Some we pulled up couldn’t speak, just shook; some were holding onto a piece of broken plank, already stiff. Afterwards the village counted: three hundred and eighty-some rescued in one night.”

When I translated “stiff,” my throat tightened, but I translated it as it was. Mrs. Grey closed her eyes for a moment.

“My father was among them,” she said softly. “He wrote later: that night, there was fire on the sea, and out of the firelight came a small boat, and the people on it reached out their hands to me without asking who I was. He remembered that hand all his life.”

“Afterwards, the Japanese came to the island searching for the men.” Grandpa went on. “The whole village hid them in the caves. The men kept watch, the women carried food—two meals a day, sweet potato and dried fish, though we skimped on our own children. My mother took apart my cotton jacket and stayed up all night making it smaller, for one of the youngest soldiers. The soldier couldn’t speak a word of Chinese. He held the jacket to his chest and bowed to my mother all the way to the ground.”

“Weren’t you afraid?” Mrs. Grey asked. “The Japanese shot people.”

“Afraid.” Grandpa answered without hesitation. “My father’s hands shook badly. But he said, at the tiller you mustn’t shake—if you shake, the boat goes off course, and then one more man sinks.”

“There were three the searchers never found. The village hid them for a while, then passed them along to the rear. All these decades, no one in the village ever told this story unasked. Saving lives isn’t for telling. It’s for doing.”

The sea breeze carried over the smell of drying fish. Grandpa’s cat strolled up and rubbed against the hem of Mrs. Grey’s trousers. She bent down and stroked it, then straightened.

“My father never came back here,” she said. “But he often told people: in the East China Sea there is an island, and on that island, people didn’t ask his name, or where he came from. He said it was the darkest night of his life, and also the brightest.”

I asked Grandpa: back then, saving people—what did he hope for?

Grandpa waved his hand. “Hope for what. When fishing folk go out to sea and see someone in the water, you pull them out. It’s just what you do. The sea doesn’t care what clothes you wear or what language you speak. Once you’re in the water, you’re a life.”

Before leaving, Mrs. Grey finally got to use the Chinese phrase she’d practiced the whole way over. She looked at Grandpa and said, syllable by syllable: “Xièxie.”

Grandpa didn’t say “you’re welcome.” He lifted his chin toward the sea: “Tell your father to rest easy. The island is still here, and the sea is still here. Her coming is the debt repaid.”

I translated it over, and halfway through, my voice trembled a little.

Mrs. Grey’s eyes reddened, and then she smiled. She gently pushed the tin box into my arms: “Let these drawings stay on the island. Every boat he drew was headed for the shore.”

At dusk I saw her onto the boat. As it pulled away, she waved to the pier from the deck; Grandpa waved toward the sea from the pier. They were waving in the same direction.

On my way home I thought: my half-baked English hadn’t thinned that story after all—some things never needed translating in the first place.

That night, I opened my English book again. This time not out of fear of translating badly, but because I wanted more people to understand that night: the sampan in the firelight, the hand reaching out, and those words:

There are no enemies at sea.

(This story is based on true events. All names are pseudonyms.)