OUT OF EDEN WALK

The Yellow Sea slid by at 11 knots, and it really was yellow in dawn light. The big ferryboat unspooled a ribbon of hammered gold in its wake, and impossibly white gulls sheared this way and that off the taffrail. I was leaving China after more than two years of walking across that country. I was steaming between Dalian and Yantai ports before bearing eastward to Korea. I was no longer traveling afoot.

Yantai used to be called Chefoo. It was an unequal treaty port forced on the Chinese and a summer station for the U.S. Asiatic Fleet between the world wars. Thousands of American “China sailors” were based there, sometimes for years. Once, there were more than 50 lace factories in operation, and scores of international firms traded in historic Chefoo. A big YMCA offered basketball and tennis courts. There were fancy rich-men’s clubs and a red-light district. Some American sailors adopted Chinese ways, and a few married locally. A port historian showed me a poem written by one swabbie to his Chinese girlfriend in the 1920s. The meter was pinched from Poe’s “Annabel Lee,” and it went: “It was many a year ago / In Chefoo by the sea / That a waitress there was whom you may know / By the name of Anna Foo Li…”

The historian walked me down to warehouses rotting at dockside. On bleached concrete pilings was hidden a few scratchings. “Can you read?” the historian said, grinning. But I couldn’t. It was graffiti made by the long-gone Americans, as unintelligible as runes left by Vikings.

(Panorama photo with walking partner Frank Geng.)