Apocalypse Hotel: A Novel (Modern Southeast Asian Literature) (11 page)

But I didn’t feel at home in school, either, among my fellow maritime students who seemed to spend all of their free time speculating which were the most attractive long-haul routes, the most attractive domestic routes, or the most attractive ports to work in. They would sneak into the sailor’s club to practice a few sentences of some foreign language they’d just learned or to ape the mannerisms of a sailor. The whole first year, I felt like some kind of reclusive artist, isolated from my assorted harebrained classmates. They admired me for the signs I made or the posters I painted for class. The hooligans respected my large frame and my black belt in karate, and basically just left me alone because of my morose manner. My classmates had no idea that I was mournful partly because of a young beauty queen in my class who would walk past me every day without even knowing I existed. This beauty was in another major, two years ahead of me. I had the fantasy that she was exactly the kind of ideal woman I’d placed in my paintings. She had a pure and maternal face that would never catch the dust of this world. Her beauty was my consolation for the environment in which I was living. Youth—and older people that refuse to grow up—often find it hard to live if they can’t create such an icon for themselves.

The beauty queen lived in the girls’ dorm and I lived in the boys’. We would pass each other many times throughout each busy day. But I didn’t dare to look at her. And she didn’t have any interest in looking at me. She didn’t lack for admirers, for people fussing over her, chasing after her. I even risked my life multiple times by standing high up on the roof looking down on the girls’ bathrooms—a few of them had had their roofs torn off—trying to see if any of the figures down below could be seen clearly or not.

Then I saw her perfect nude body in another place, in another situation. After the second-year finals were over a bunch of guys showed their goodwill by admitting me into their club, and then invited me over to one of their houses to celebrate. I was confused to see that the beauty queen that I worshiped was also there, eating meat and drinking booze like one of the guys, not caring about being the only girl in the group of men. After she’d eaten and drunk her fill, she announced that they’d entertained her and now it was her turn to entertain them. The guys followed her into the owner’s bedroom. All by herself, she contended naked with three young men and still had enough energy for two more. Me and another guy sat outside the room, waiting. More accurately, we sat watching their four forms moving into each other (without thought and with total energy), intertwining and clinging to each other. It was clear that it was the girl who was taking the initiative in the entertainment as she satisfied all three of them, but to me it still seemed like she was being forced down and tormented against her will. I couldn’t stand the scene: a beauty queen with the face of a virgin, having these three coarse guys moving up and down, in and out of her. I ran out of the room. The three guys finished. The fourth guy also finished. The four of them left the room and called me over, shouting that it was my turn now. I stepped into the room like a machine, carefully closing the door, not wanting to give those guys a free color TV for their own entertainment. She lay indecently spread-eagled on the bed, with an exhausted and satisfied smile. “You’re the last one, right? Oh, so handsome; why so quiet?” I imagined that she’d been attacked and tortured by the guys. I shuddered, tears welling in my eyes. Unable to hold it back, I burst out crying. I wept for the suffering of a virgin body. I wept for an innocent face that had suddenly become lascivious and unintentionally crafty.

She pulled my head down to kiss me, then immediately pushed it back away. My tears fell down onto her face. “Forget it, get out of here, go. I hate men’s tears. I loathe seeing men cry.” She burst into laughter, a cackling laugh, still not moving to sit up or get dressed. I opened the door, walked out of the room, and silently left for home.

Just a few days later, some girls in the same major as the girl called me a homosexual. I knew that the beautiful flower had given me this nickname. I had no idea if she’d told her friends the story of what I hadn’t done, or that I’d cried all over her, or both. But she’d told them for sure. No doubt she’d wanted to pay back the tallest and most handsome guy in the school for refusing to penetrate her.

After I left I wandered around and then sat down to watch the foreign boats that had just come into the harbor, the sailors disembarking and heading off to try and find girls. I watched a guy of indeterminate nationality, with a bushy beard and blue eyes, come ashore. He made an obscene gesture with his fingers, signaling for me to help him find a woman. Maybe my face looked like a pimp’s. I didn’t say anything back, just turned quietly around. I wandered through the dingy streets of the Chinese quarter. I wandered along the riverbank like a vulture. People in port cities all have something of the ocean’s waves and wind about them, and are all infected by a need for short-term gains and the lawlessness of sailors.

I spent a full month of summer vacation in Hanoi, sitting and painting the ancient, decrepit Chinese streets, painting my somber impressions of the port area. I painted the virginal faces that had been cracked and broken and smashed to pieces, that had been through hardships and fragmented into cubist art. At the end of summer I still couldn’t bring myself to return to school. I had no friends there. When I was there all I could think about was the beauty queen, now with hatred, now with desire.

Thế could rarely stand giving into anyone, especially not a wayward, melancholy young man. He tore into me, drove me straight down to Hải Phòng, and returned me to school. He guided me also into the tutelage of an old Chinese martial arts master. Soft, weak young men like me could only have their personalities repaired by the truest kind of martial arts. Looking back on it now, I think his educational philosophy was misguided. Great martial artists almost never get to use what they’ve practiced. The most skilled martial artists are like the deity Arjuna, who froze stock-still when he saw a bow, not understanding what that thing was.

But at that time Thế succeeded, to some extent. I gradually grew content with life at the school, like combustible material that had been next to a flame for a long time and only just caught. The daily martial arts exercises gave me a sense of self-confidence. Martial arts are not for the purpose of fighting, but to give people self-confidence; most importantly, they’re an outlet for the excess testosterone of amorous adolescent men. One evening I went out for a walk along the bank of the Lấp River, and as I was ambling along a girl came out from behind a tree and blocked the road. “Help me, please; if you help me you’ll be helping to feed my two children.” A thrill went through my whole body. I followed the girl back to her small rat’s nest of a flat. Two children of about seven and ten years old were grimacing and crying in hunger. The girl gave them some of the money that I’d given her as payment in advance, told them to go out into the alley and buy some food from a street vendor, and then bolted the door, turned around and came back.

That was how I became a man.

But I didn’t go straight back to my room afterward. I ran to the girls’ dormitory, and rushed into the beauty queen’s room. One of her friends told me that the beauty queen, Yên Thanh, was out visiting a girlfriend in a neighboring dormitory. I charged over there, and found the room number. Yên Thanh was indeed there, chatting with a friend in the room of the relatively deserted dormitory.

“Ah, the handsome gay guy! Who are you looking for here?”

“I’m here for Yên Thanh,” I said. At that point the girl’s boyfriend stepped into the room. She glanced at Yên Thanh and said, “Go ahead, the bottom bed belongs to a girl who’s just gone back home.” She and her boyfriend climbed up onto the top bed, and pulled the sheet up over themselves. Yên Thanh flashed her alluring virgin’s eyes into mine.

“So, gay guy, what brings you to me?”

“I love you; it’s as simple as that.”

“You love me? What will you do to prove it? Would you jump straight down from this third floor onto the ground for me?” Seizing her hand, I walked directly to the hallway, intending to carry out the jump immediately. The beauty queen quickly grabbed me. “Forget it, forget it, I’m just kidding; it’s just a stupid meaningless joke.”

We squeezed into the bottom bed belonging to the girl that had gone back to her village, then pulled the thin mosquito net down as if to hide us, as is the custom of those who don’t feel any shame. The boyfriend on the upper bunk called down to me, “Do you have
everything
? Here, take my extra.” He reached down and handed me one. About forty minutes later he handed down another “foreign sock,” like a helicopter dropping reinforcements to a besieged ally. When the students that had been out watching a concert noisily came back and climbed up into their mosquito net–shrouded beds, the guy on the upper bunk handed down two more “rain jackets.”

The beautiful flower was in a state of relaxed exhaustion. “Hey, gay guy, you’re not even a little bit gay, are you? Well, there are some things that people can only find out in bed.”

The situation in our battle of love had reversed 180 degrees. From this time forward Yên Thanh searched me out, hunted me down. She exorcised her carnal desire regularly and wildly. My schoolmates were jealous because I possessed the most beautiful girl at school. She graduated two years ahead of me and found a job working at the port. After two years I graduated and Thế secured me a job on a long-haul shipping vessel, where I worked temporarily as the assistant captain, a kind of on-the-job training, before I was promoted to captain. Thanks to the patronage of people from all the trade unions, everything happened smoothly and quickly. I had a handful of extended trips, up to five or six months at a time, during which I would grow homesick. I knew that Yên Thanh wasn’t capable of living even a month without a man. Surely she was now hot and steaming, searching out casual lovers. I wasn’t jealous, just impatient. I was the same way. In every port, I had to find sources of quick pleasure with girls of many skin colors. It didn’t mean that Yên Thanh and I weren’t waiting impatiently for my return or that we wouldn’t reunite passionately. The excited anticipation of my impending return would lead Yên Thanh to chase off all of her casual admirers. Many times my mind would drift to the many disasters that could strike us in the middle of the ocean, but I would shove those thoughts aside. Many people believed that they would meet with fatal accidents if their wives back at home didn’t remain faithful. But this superstition applied to wives, not to lovers, and Yên Thanh wasn’t my wife—not yet.

The reality is that we lived together like husband and wife but I hadn’t proposed. The valuable merchandise that we’d hidden from the eyes of the customs officers, or, if not, then shared with them, were turned into an apartment with all the modern conveniences. Yên Thanh managed that household for me. Meanwhile Thế was praying to heaven to help his poor girl-crazy brother, praying that I wouldn’t entrust all of my possessions to my lover’s care—especially a lover of such doubtful virtue. He sent Phũ and his two buddies down to Hải Phòng to stand by in case the Law of the Jungle was required to resolve the problem.

Yet, despite everything, they still respected my decisions. And I was satisfied with my private life. I didn’t complain about anything or give them any reason to take action on my behalf.

That trip was the most disastrous of my eight years on the ocean.

There were quiet skies and smooth sailing at first, and the ship sailed straight along its proper course. We weren’t crossing the ocean, just skirting the great S-shaped coastline of Vietnam, from the south to the north. Easy going. On the fourth day of the voyage we realized that we were no longer in our own territorial waters. In front of our eyes was Hainan (Hải Nam) Island.

I realized that the fault lay with the chief engineer. He’d come up into the helm to talk with me and had mistakenly left his battery-operated flashlight next to the ship’s compass. The compass’s needle had been pulled off course and had pointed us in the wrong direction. We turned the ship around. The assistant captain cursed the chief engineer incessantly, damning him as the cause for every disaster on the voyage. Thanks to him we’d sailed off course, and it would be difficult to fix the mistake. The engineer’s wife had brought another man into their house. His daughter had also brought a man into their house. Over here his wife’s bed, over there his daughter’s bed, the both of them built upon the fruits of his labor.

I went down to the chief engineer’s quarters. He was listening to a song filled with the emotions of an ocean voyager: “But I’ve traveled so far / To the edge of the clouds / I carry your body with my loneliness / Through these days of passing storms / The sea screams with rage in its wild tempest / How can you stay so calm?” I saw that his eyes were filled with tears.

I shuddered slightly. It felt somehow like fate itself. It felt like proof of the words of Thế and the others. Although I wasn’t married like the chief engineer, both of us had brought this cursed fate upon the ship.

The compass was totally useless. The ship had lost its bearing. We were heading in the wrong direction. The crew became scared and began to fight among themselves. After finishing his work, the chief engineer didn’t dare show his face; he just hid in his room, crying along with his depressing songs. The ship wandered lost for a day in the East Sea (a.k.a. the South China Sea) as it was tossed by a raging storm.

A wide and dazzling ray of sunlight had suddenly illuminated my mind then, piercing my hopelessness. That virgin face with its debauched smile appeared clearly in front of my eyes. My whole body shivered. Maybe my life was over. If the ship dropped anchor now, it would be torn apart and sink. Instead it was blown by the storm winds until it finally crashed straight into some submerged rocks. We abandoned ship, jumping into the life rafts. A mountainous wave capsized us and dumped us into the sea. Regaining consciousness I found myself alone and clinging to a plank of wood floating along the black surface of the ocean. I tried to swim until I ran out of energy and was overwhelmed by exhaustion, and then I abandoned myself to fate, and drifted with the currents.