Transpacificism Billy

Transpacificism
Billy

Longing flights over dark swaths of black ocean. Waves crash between distant shores. A speck of light sails through the clouds. I am between: not here nor there, not this continent, nor that. The plane engines roar to a numbing buzz. My heart weighs down. Anchor.

Waiting to land,
for daylight,
Land.

Blacking out the plane’s drone, silence echoes in empty heart chambers. Suspended in moments above the world, existing between time and space, a forced cell of contemplation. As I begin, anxiety thrives like an overgrown weed, ravenously consuming every blank canvas of thought. I will land back soon; I will pick up whatever pieces are left.

My mom crossed at 27, Manila–Vancouver. My dad was 2, LA–Rome. I, 3, Munich–Manila. I repeat tradition, a stitch in a family pattern. I hail from a tribe of sea-crossing peoples.

Grounded,
Back on land I drive to the beach searching. Eyes glaze west across the horizon.
You are there. I am here. A billion fish swim between us.

~

We met on a cloudless Halloween night on the cobblestone streets of Lijiang, Yunnan Province, China. Returning from the bar to our hotel, my classmates and I came across a circle of people, a guitar and a lone jack-o-lantern. We joined, small bottles of baijiu circulated, sharing cheap grain liquor. It tastes like one chemical away from gasoline. A constellation of burnt orange cigarette tips give way to gray swirls of smoke, spiraling out into darkness. An indifferent moon radiates wishful thoughts.

I am tipsy and he looks well on his way. He sits across the circle. I down a beer someone handed me. Anything but baijiu. A cigar makes its way to my mouth. I puff and cough, trying to play it off casually, but my coughing fit conquers.
The man I’d been eyeing for the last half-hour appears to my left.
“Try this. You’ll like it better, it’s American.” Two fingers nudge a Marlboro in my direction.
Drinks drunk and drunk we were. Ice broken; Intentions emboldened.
My Chinese isn’t great, but not complete shit either. It would have to do because his English was shit. He’d slept through that class, he explained. I am infatuated.

Feng-Lei is a traveling piano man, playing at bars in different towns, drifting 4-5-6-months at a time. He tells his story with ease. His life appears a romantic wandering through China’s most beautiful scenery: to live, experience just enough before moving on. Scenic towns draw in tourists that at night grow restless and thirsty. He finds work either playing at bars or tutoring piano, sometimes both.
“What are you doing tomorrow?” he asks. The clock neared midnight.
“Leaving.” I explain that I’m on a field trip, every day we moved further north; a night here, a weekend there. In the brows of his eyes I catch a tinge of disappointment. Either my Chinese was shit and he didn’t understand or he understood and was unhappy. Truthfully it was probably somewhere between the two.
“Why not stay?” he asks in earnest.

Possibility lingers above me, a sudden bright halo, motionless in the frigid air. Possibility snuck into my mind, warmed up, settled in, it rooted and renamed itself: Destiny. It was over, etched into stone. I’d come back, I’d find a way.

“I’ll be back.” A drunken promise held up by hope alone.

The next day I boarded the bus to the mountains. It was November. Each stop brought us deeper into winter.

~

For me, life until college was a closeted existence subject to the rules of conservative military bases. College brought freedom, life’s gates swung open. ‘Emancipate’ tattooed to my left arm meant never looking back. I could now commit to fighting with others. I organized protests and campaigns against Injustice as if the world would collapse if for one minute I stood still. I ran in circles of caffeine and nicotine.
My trip across the sea forced restless peace onto me. Life slowed out. For the first time in two years the world was not on my shoulders.

~

One week later as our class headed back from the mountains, I made my move. Having written furiously in my diary about the necessity of bold moves in life, contemplating whether I should see him again, and knowing I would, I spoke with the driver. I fabricated an excuse and stepped off in Lijiang. I called Feng-Lei. He answered. My nerves ate me alive. I practiced things to say while waiting.

He showed up!

Life is but a mere function of courage. Fate favors the bold. A chapter of my diary triumphantly validated.

In the sobriety of daylight he was even more handsome. His cheekbones gave rise to slight shadow valleys. His eyes were easy, sweet; untouched by malice. We walked to the guesthouse where he lived. He beamed humility. Wise and thoughtful, more life under his belt than I could claim. His serenity exuded strength. He was a rock; steady, solid. I, a flimsy canoe forever too far from shore, ever-clinging amidst typhoon waves.
I spoke more than I should. I hungered to know everything about him—all at once. I craved for him to know me, consume me.
He was content knowing I had enough to eat and was happy.

Silence breathed faintly between us.

I had planned to stay one night with Feng-Lei, but a daily routine formed instead.
Mornings:
Me: Begging for him to stay, lay, delay the day.
I thought our bed an island, a mock battlefield—pillows thrown, sheets stripped, limbs locked and heavy breathing. This game ended in romping. Coffee, chocolate, Chopin and cigarettes follow. I guess at objects, learning nouns; I speak with hands, acquiring verbs. Hours spent trying to decipher each other, sketching out things I didn’t know how to explain. Communication charades. He accuses my written Chinese of sloppiness; I say a big word in English. We frustrate each other. Translating texts, miscalculating cultures, stumbling closer in love, an innocent trial and error of understanding. Words fail, we sigh.
But words can be shit, useless, expensive ornaments with little function. Instead, our eyes dare deeply, wading in silent sonatas.

Out of bed: the world absorbs us. We cook breakfast with his housemates in the communal kitchen.
Me: Lost in conversation.
When I think I know what they are discussing he asks me a question and I remark something unrelated. Make a mistake, understand more, get over it. My survival motto. Back to his room we plan the day. We hike with his friends or go on a mission to buy something I forgot. We get my ears pierced for a dollar behind a jewelry shop. Little adventures occupy daylight hours.

Night: Arm-in-arm, whispers. Around his friends we secretly beg for nightfall. The setting sun and his departing friends break our imprisonment like a raincloud’s relief; a downpour of liberation opens to a place where only we exist. Across from each other at a restaurant my foot saunters over to his. Slightly. Nothing susceptible, closeness just too close, undetectable to the common eye. Our game is wrought with covert smiles. We eat with silent satisfaction, unnoticed, two friends enjoying noodles as the crowds murmured by.
Home: we turn the outside world OFF. Embrace with urgency; the day has been long in longing. Alone in our room, our island where our seas meet. Neither China nor the US, but a space where we are safe. We describe dreams and desires, families, friends, lovers and losses. Where we had been, where we wanted to go.

“Do you miss it,” he asks. I pause. Sitting alone in my head, my magnet mind drifts back across the sea. The life I left behind assembles: familiar faces smiling, favorite places, holidays missed, rallies to be organized. These thoughts probe accusingly, craving acknowledgement, wanting to break through my Lijiang daze. I yearn to show him my side, care for him like he cares for me; watch him gape at the vastness of the west Texas desert, awe at the towering redwoods.
“Yes.” I answer. Someday we’ll see everything together.”
“You are brave to travel out here alone,” he says, a sentence slurred-to-kiss.

I make a Big Deal out of leaving bed. Over-dramatic protest to start the day. On our island I struggle valiantly against thieving pirates, Reality and Time. I dare challenge The Sun Himself as he dumps molten buckets of daylight, drowning the world in burning brightness. Under my blanket I feign sleep. Peeking beneath warm castle covers, Feng-Lei slips out and sits at his piano.
His face is serious.

It begins softly. The first sensation of a warm summer shower, the first note hitting like the first splat of rain. It pours, every note blossoming into meadows of bursting spring. A new world soars around me; music paints landscapes of purples and pinks.

And then,
he sang:

A flash of twinkling stars
trace our passing years
yet the center of my world
still is you

One year after another,
time flies, a blink of the eye.
The only thing that will never change,
is constant change itself

Something drops inside me, awoken.
A seed sprung, vines grow into veins, channels where trains rush to every corner of myself, racing each other to spread the electric pinning needles.

Grasping the lyrics for the first time then, and now 4 years later, is to feel a song aged into drenching accuracy. Back beneath the sheets. Creeping morning sunbeams swishing brightness through beige curtains. Lucky light dancing on his face as I examine every contour. Since that day the song unraveled, folding permanently into the fabric of my life, the tissue of my scars.
We sing together. At night walking home, the stars await their anthem. The cosmos above, his voice, icy air, clasped hands. In the morning as I lay half-asleep the poem seethes into my dreams, lyrics crossing whisper bridges. Mornings rise leisurely, then crescendo faster in a maddening rush of desire.
Dreams are beautiful, yes, but time awake is life lived drunk on dreams, possibilities born beneath the sheets and hatched under warm arms. Our secrets are safe in our shielded island fortress.

~

Reality crept up. Each time it raised its ugly pragmatic head I swept it away. I’ll leave tomorrow,
tomorrow, tomorrow… Until I’m 7 days into a research project I haven’t started. I leave Feng-Lei for responsibility. After a couple weeks I complete my research in Kunming and hurry back to write my paper. We live together again. He accompanies me to a coffee shop everyday while I write. Finished, I again train back to Kunming and present my research. I say goodbye to classmates. On the last night while classmates celebrated the closing of a China chapter together, I boarded the night train to Lijiang. One more time.

~

We met at the train station the next morning, a gray 7am. “Have you eaten, are you hungry?”
We eat breakfast, slurping noodles as parents drop off preschoolers.

Once behind closed doors, we enter our world. The bed again became an island. We romp, stopping only for food, cigarettes. At one point we attempt a movie. English-Chinese subtitles. Not Halfway through we begin again. Our bodies beg for each other and we indulge. We nap entangled, exhausted, craving closeness like last breaths of air. With instant noodles, coffee and chocolate, there is no reason to leave this room, the realm of Feng-Lei and I. The day passes outside untouched by us.

Around evening, a Thought tiptoed in and once inside materialized—A black cloud now lingers in the room. I breathe in. Painful knowing stings the pit of my stomach. The countdown had begun. As the sun sets, the sting swells into a rash of chaotic calculations. Numbers scatter my mind. Two hour flight from Lijiang to Kunming. 11pm arrival. 4 hours to pack. 5am flight to LA.
We taxi to the airport and I clutch his hand. I send Prayers to Father Time, but every thought morphs into an ugly reminder that our minutes are running out. Our last kiss, last greasy fried chicken dinner, last song.
We rehearse our plans in chorus at the gate.
“I’ll get a scholarship and come back,” I promise him.
“I’ll get a visa and see you in America,” he promises me.

~

Feng-Lei and I both moved on differently. I sought him, while in the States and when I returned to China on scholarship as promised. He rebuked me.
Soon after arriving again in China, wasted, 2 empty bottles of baijiu later, I received his e-mail. He wouldn’t tell me where he lived or his phone number. Even for a quick visit. Even just to hear his voice. He is an only son, his parent’s single investment for the future. He is bound to marry a woman, have children, pass on the family name, live an honorable life.

“Baobei, you are the one that I love. But I cannot be with you. You don’t understand what life is like for me. I have to make something for myself. It’s easy for you. You travel the world, you come back when you want and you are free to live and love. That is not my life.”

His words struck a cold punch to the gut. Dreams deflated, reduced to rubble. Back home I was a fighter. But here, where our island once thrived I was helpless to his words. I am reduced to a closed chapter of time, a novel foreign lover—ignorant always, incapable of understanding.

Transpacificism: A desire to be on The Other side, but once there, to miss The Coast you left. Not here, nor there. A limbo-state, haunted by screaming multitudes of yet imagined Possibility.

I want to believe that I am still bold, that it’s genetic. My parents wouldn’t have met had they not been bold. I am breathing validation—risks made and chances taken. A living, breathing, daydreamer of a son. When my mom decided to stay in the US without documents, when she chose to follow her faith against the advice of the world, she did so with an ocean of what she knew behind her and the Possibility of a new horizon ahead. I owe my life to risk, chance, and the elusive promise of the Pacific.

Given the chance, I will fly across that dark ocean again.

~

Billy is a Bavarian-born Filipino-American writer living in Los Angeles, California. Shoot him a line at: billywritesthings@gmail.com.

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Christian Bossu-Picat is a French photographer who has been living in Mauritius since 1986. He has published work on the Indian Ocean region for the European Union and the Commission de L’Océan Indien (COI) for tourist and artisanal advertising uses.

Aside from working as hotel photographer across the Indian Ocean Islands (Mauritius, Seychelles, Reunion Island and the Maldives), he also engages in aerial photography and publishes books on tourism and local gastronomy.

Christian is a winner of the ‘Fondation Marcel Bleustein-Blanchet pour la Vocation’.