Titanic: True Love Forever

April 10, 1912, Southampton, England. Ten forty-two. I'm standing here at the pier where the Titanic set sail. England in April is in the early season of spring, and the sun still carries the overcast chill of late winter, and this inhuman temperature is enough to chill me to the bone. I tucked my large, white, wavy blonde curls into a black men's fedora. I'd gotten it back from a bar where I'd sparred with an immigrant from the U.S. The guy's family were all immigrants, two-thirds of the great wave of nineteenth-century European immigrants exported to the U.S., who'd come back to the U.K. after they'd looted enough of the American continent to come back to the U.K., maybe to see and reminisce about their homeland or to take away their own relatives and friends here. Throughout the decades and up to the time of the war, immigrants continued to pour out of the corrupt European ruling class countries, swarming into the staterooms of cruise ships sailing to the American continent just to see the Statue of Liberty in the United States. God knows what freedom the Statue of Liberty represented, I just knew that no one would ever send me money from America for even half of a lower class ticket, yet I would stand around like a fool in Southampton Harbor in 1912, just to find a man I would be almost impossible to find. Or was he not old enough to be called a man, boy? Twenty, the age of boyishness and youthfulness. The male's dark brown tunic was still too big and ill-fitting for me, having been stripped from a homeless man who had died under the bridge. The old tunic was of no discernible material, and the smell of cheap goods hit me as I crouched alone on a strange beach, washing my coat and staring off into the distant mist, perhaps it was just a too-long dream of time and space. One day, or maybe the next you can open your eyes and wake up, and then I'll still be living in the time you should be in. It's almost five months into this off-beat journey of time and space poverty, wandering around as a vagabond in a country that's only 240,000 square kilometers in size, but where the sun used to never set. Before I had a plane crash, I happened to be ready to return home from a trip to London, England, and my knowledge of the UK was limited to the fact that there were many roads in London, many pubs on the side of the road, and a lot of water in the UK. There's also the fact that the full name of the UK is very long and tests the average person's memory. When I was conscious again, I opened my tired eyelids, and the snowflakes in the sky froze my lax pupils. I thought it was a hallucination, that what I saw as a sky of snow was just the overly bright moonlight of the night, and reached out to touch it, only to find that the color of my fingers was almost merging with this rich, glistening whiteness. Then I heard someone humming, a voice so slender it was on the verge of breaking in the air, on and off. I turned my head to find it was a woman with a withered description, holding me in her arms, a tattered blanket wrapped around me. We snuggled together, close and strange against each other, an inexplicable scene. I'm not in a hospital yet I'm in the arms of a strange foreign woman. Hell knows how I got back to the streets of England in late 1911 and turned into some kind of slum tramp. Wrapped up in the only old blanket she had by a woman dying of consumption, I ended up saving her from death. The woman asked me, "What's your name." I was speechless for a moment, wondering if she would accept a Chinese name. "I'm Mary Robert, hello." She already looked haggard and pale, her dirty hair plastered to her pale, leathery, wrinkled face, the last days of her life as fragile and curly as a withered grapevine. My lips twitched, and at last, too, the words popped out, "Hello." "Have you seen a man? Not ...... or a boy." She gasped slowly, the white mist like the death breath of an English winter, taking away bit by bit all the colors of your body's functions that belong to warmth. "His name is Jack Dawson and he has beautiful eyes, if you see him, please tell him I'm looking for him ...... No, maybe if he lives well." The woman's voice slowed, so light it was like an early morning mist, "He's talented ...... he'll live happily ever after." By the time I could move, it was too late to return the blanket to her. No one knew where she had come from, just as no one knew where the body of this blonde girl I was ghost-possessing had come from. There are so many homeless people these days, I sigh in boredom. Jack Dawson? It seems to be a popular name, like Tom John, a few of which turn up everywhere. The hero of the Titanic was also named Jack Dawson. It wasn't until I read about Titanic, the luxury liner launched for sea trials in Belfast Harbor that I suddenly realized maybe it wasn't a coincidence. And the sketchy portrait of the woman holding it in her hand at the end, the more I look at it, the more it looks like a young Leonardo ...... It took me a month to get used to a world that had regressed a hundred years, and when I realized that this body had nothing but dizziness caused by malnutrition, I began to press my muscles and bones again; I might not be able to be as good as I had been when I was at the top of my game, but being able to dance again made me feel hopeful about the world. Then the rest of the three months were spent practicing my body, making ends meet, and wandering in all sorts of directions. I debated whether or not to look for Jack Dawson and warn him not to go on the Titanic, but how was I going to convince him that a luxury liner destined for the Statue of Liberty, a ship of dreams that would never sink, would end up in the Atlantic Ocean more than 3,000 meters below? Forget it, I should be thinking about the rest of my life. As a so-called inferior person who suddenly came to the early twentieth century, even a black family without any background, I thought I could earn a ticket to the United States by some efforts, at least there will give some opportunities to those who are willing to work hard, there is no problem to live, of course, the ship I took will never be called Titanic. I do not have the ability to save the Titanic, can I run to London to drag out Harland and Wolff, or run to the White Star Line to find Bruce Ismay, grabbed them by the collar of this group of cannibalistic capitalist aristocrats shook vigorously and shouted: "I'm from the twenty-first century, the Titanic is doomed to crash into an iceberg and finally sank to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, you more than two thousand passengers back to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, less than a third? less than one-third of you?" Well, if I dare to do that, you'll see me at the bottom of the Atlantic every other day. This group of sane people would absolutely throw me, a lunatic too poor to afford a boat ticket, out on an Atlantic iceberg to dance with the seagulls. That's why I shouldn't have rushed madly to the port of Southampton at the last minute, bouncing up and down against the cold winds of the English Channel in this hellhole six hundred kilometers from Belfast Harbor. God knows when I managed to get here, it was less than two bells before the Titanic sailed, and I had to spend those two bells crammed into a busy marina with a roadside bar looking for a guy who probably didn't exist. Blacksmiths, carpenters, musicians, merchants, aristocrats with their vintage cars, beggars and rich people intertwined into the only cheerful music here. I swear I've never run so fast, with the crumpled, merely palm-sized sketch head in my hand, shouting as hard as I could from all the bars around the harbor, "Jack Dawson, Jack Dawson!" Pushing through pub after pub of early twentieth-century England, ending up almost violently kicking the door open, in English, Chinese, broken Swedish or Italian, interspersed with some rudimentary German, I had never yelled a man's name out in so many languages before. I was afraid that some of the people who knew Jack wouldn't understand my American English, and God knows my English was post-taught in the first place, using the kk phonetic symbols, but there was no such thing as an orthodox Cockney accent. I hated myself for contributing more than one movie ticket to Titanic, I could recite the plot backwards and forwards, and I used a dozen tissues. So I could react to the news of Titanic's sailing and see who Jack Dawson was. Of course, the hand this deserved to be crumpled up into a ball and thrown into the cold sea portrait is also a vital presence. This man was my idol at one point in time, and before I got hooked on Pirates of the Caribbean, the poster of him in a suit on Titanic was on the wall above my bed. If I could go back, I'd tear all his posters to shreds and stomp them into the trash. Jack Dawson. Jack Dawson-- Jack! Dawson ...... Where the hell are you hiding you son of a b***h. As I recall from the movie Jack didn't dash out of the bar until the boat was about to leave and ran straight onto the boat. And I had to find him before he ran out of the bar, or else it would have been too late to wait until he sprinted out of the bar, and a man's footwork isn't even the same as a woman's, and by then the Titanic was already about to sail, and even if he heard someone screaming desperately he wouldn't have been able to shake anyone off. America, Hometown, Statue of Liberty, Immigration Admissions, New Opportunities, The Starting Point of Your Dreams ...... A thirty-dollar expensive enough to make you want to scream for a third class ticket. If I were Jack Dawson and ran out on a crazy strange woman trying to stop me, I'd slap you to death. Do you think every day you have a chance to win a ticket on the Titanic? Even if it's a f*****g sinking ship you're going to go on it on a fluke, and even if it sinks you might be able to grab a door panel and swim to America like a polar bear, which is what humans do until they regret it. I walked out of the last bar I could find, the rotting smell of homeless people's old clothes mingling with the coldness of the harbor to create an atmosphere called loneliness. A green cruise liner pulls in front of me, dragging my dull eyes past me at an even pace. The near-noon sun squeezes through the color of the pre-ten o'clock haze in the air with a stubborn gesture, and for some reason I've been ignoring this Jack-less background image, and now I see it. You can't notice it at first glance because your eyes start out looking straight ahead. The eye first unconsciously sees the rays of light that have just crushed the fog; the sky is a rich milky white, with a greenish-gray haze floating in mid-air, and the sunlight looks moribund in this weather. Slowly my eyes penetrated the green postal carts, laden with mail, the gentlemen in round black hats or the old women with sackcloth on their heads, the young girls with brown hair, the middle-aged men with cheap cigarettes in their mouths. Then I saw the gangway high above the ship, connecting the hulls and reaching out into the harbor, and under the intricate cables was the crew shouting sharply, "Line up this way, please come this way." Car horns blared through the marina and the fog of people coming and going everywhere gave me a trance-like feeling of complete unreality. Suddenly a loud and massive honk sounded like the ocean tides bursting, and I took a slow step forward as countless people surged forward desperately next to me, all seemingly attracted to the sound. My eyes finally made contact with the huge black shadow, black as the night, gold lettering flying across the brand new black hull - TITANIC. The first cylindrical smokestack finally spewed out a thick black mist of gas, and it was as if I could hear the engines inside the massive 40,000-ton ship, in the main engine room, begin to start. Hundreds of coal furnaces fed tons and tons of coal in to the shouts of the workers, finally burned, started, and ready to set sail. And now, here it is, not a wreck on the cold ocean floor, but a ship that is truly, in the truest sense, the largest vehicle of this age, of this world. I'm the king of the world. I was inexplicably reminded of Jack's famous quote, but unfortunately the ship was going to sink after five days of existence at sea.