Quan on the sea
Adrift, rescued, immigrated: Quan did not ride a skateboard to work.
Circa 1999, I worked for a small web company in the city, at the age of 17. The team consisted of a typical agency demographic, full of sub-30 designers and programmers who worked long hours, lived in share houses, and rode skateboards to work. Unfortunately for me, I couldn’t drive, lived at home, and commuted four hours a day on all available forms of public transport. Within the team, I was the underage anomaly, often working side by side with a small Vietnamese man aged in his 40's, who lay at the other end of the age scale. For the sake of this story, he will be named Quan.
Quan sat on the small open-topped wooden fishing boat, a single petrol driven outboard on the rear, its fuel lines running through the oily bilge slopping between the ribs of the hand crafted boat. Jugs of water were carefully guarded in the tiny ‘captains quarters’, which was a very small cuddy where the captain and his closest friend resided. They took turns watching and listening to the outboard, as it burnt through the fuel reserves.
Every 9 hours the captain and his friend would grab the least seasick looking passenger, and have him help refuel the boat. Jugs of fuel were strapped to the gunwales in an attempt to balance the boat, which would be untied and passed to the stern, through crying children and seasick mothers. Each fuel canister had to be carefully poured into the tank, through a handmade strainer. The strainer was a an old sock, which after two weeks at sea would be the t-shirt of the closest passenger. By the end of the refuelling, the sock strainer would be thrown overboard, caked in fuel contaminates.
If the captain didn’t time the refuelling properly, the boat would stop dead in its tracks. Sputtering, the engine would falter, and the sounds of people would emerge. Whimpering. Crying. Moaning. The engine was so loud and monotonous, that whenever it stopped, ears would ring painfully in the middle of the warm, blue ocean. With the engine stopped, the forward motion of the boat which helped stabilise the motion of the sea, ceased. The boat would begin to be blown side on to the wind and swell, and before long the entire expedition would hinge on the brink of disaster. The safety of the group was entirely left up to those scrambling to get enough fuel into the lines, to at least restart the engine, and turn the boat head-on into the swell and regain a calmer motion.
Seasickness is one of the few temporal illnesses that genuinely make you wish everything (including ones life), would end immediately. The swell slammed amidships, dropping the leeward rail almost into the water. The oily bilge water would jump up and slop across peoples salt sores. The captain and his motley volunteer would spill fuel across their feet as they attempted to strain a clean litre through the sock, in order to get the engine running as soon as possible. With a litre in the tank, the captain would reach down and start pumping the fuel bulb. As the line tensioned, he’d hop back to the outboard and began pulling the starter chord in rapid succession. Eventually the engine would sputter to life, and he’d yank the huge tiller hard to port until the boat was in a more stable position, yelling for someone to help hold the boat steady while he returned to refuelling.
Each day, every passenger would receive one cup of water, and half a cup of white rice. Quan’s wife was suffering a great deal. He would hold her all day, except during refuelling duty, and sacrifice some of his own fresh water to keep her hydrated. The sun was beyond bearable, as everyone moved and searched endlessly for objects to shade themselves with. Shortly after sunrise, till an hour before sundown, the reflection from the water made the one thing which helped seasickness impossible — staring at the horizon to calm the inner ear.
On rare nights, nature would give the boat and its passengers a rest. Clouds would vanish, the wind would take an earth girdling rest, and the ocean would flatten to a morphing reflection of the night sky. The engine would continue to batter the senses, but the motion would quieten, and sickened bodies would finally take rest.
One quiet day, 17 days into a voyage of unknown length, the engine uncharacteristically stopped. For 17 days the engine had run, almost without skipping a beat outside of mis-timed refuelling exercises. For anyone that knew anything about engines, it was quite a feat — a 20 year old Suzuki outboard powering a 36ft hand made wooden fishing boat, had been transforming billions of tiny explosions into forward motion for the last 400 hours.
Quan knew about engines, and he knew marine engines operated in the worst of all conditions. When they’d all snuck onto the boat late at night, he stared at the small, hopeless engine, and wondered where the real, ocean going diesel engine was located. He knew the distance to Australian territorial waters was long. He knew a recreational fishing engine was not going to be able to cope with up to a month of nonstop passage in heavy conditions. There was no diesel engine. No backup outboard existed. This was it; here they lay, afloat, his suffering wife on his lap, a worn outboard dunking in and out of the ocean on the stern. The rice and water reserves rapidly dwindled, the wind once again pushed them side-on to the incessant wind and swell.
After seven days adrift, a white Australian customs plane flew overhead. The captain turned the handheld radio on, and switched to channel 16. Loudly the unit came alive, speaking English, demanding identification. Not a single person aboard spoke English. The captain pressed transmit and started yelling Vietnamese. Nothing. The plane circled, swooped, and disappeared over the horizon. Two days later, a navy vessel appeared.
Quan sat at the front of the lecture hall of a large university, in Victoria, Australia. He held a voice recorder on his lap, and stared intently at the lecturer, carefully watching his face and body language to help interpret a language he barely understood a word of. The subject was computer science, and this was his first year. Later that night, Quan and his wife sat on the floor of their one bedroom apartment in the western suburbs, playing and replaying the recorded lecture. Together they scribbled along the sides of the text books in Vietnamese, an English dictionary nearby, its edges creased and worn.
On Thursday nights Quan and his wife would go to mandatory English classes. On Friday and Saturday, Quan would take his only two full days off from university, to work as an assistant to a local car mechanic. After four years, Quan graduated from university, and had his first child. Two years later, he finally convinced a tech company to give him a job as a programmer.
I sat intently listening to his story behind a beige cubicle wall, the office speaker system was playing ‘The Best of Burt Bacharach’.
Quan did not ride a skateboard to work.
