The China Travels of Sci-Fi Writer Richard Mueller

The following is the China trip diary as written by Zoonauts author Richard Mueller

The China Travels: One
“Flying Over History…”
Written in Mid-Pacific Flight … October 9 2003

No matter how you plan, getting to the Los Angeles Airport is a study in maddening aggravation. My friend Carli who was driving me to LAX is the sweetest person ever put on God’s green earth, but after fighting our way on and off the 405 Freeway twice she was mumbling obscenities under her breath. Taking someone to an airport is a true test of friendship and it tested ours, but we came through it okay. At least I hope so. Her last sight of This Ole Traveler was of me gesturing to indicate that I was waiting with a multitude of others to get inspected, detected, rejected, etc. and thank you very much, Arlo Guthrie. After the first of many metal detectors, I found a pay phone and tried to call her cell to let her know that I was checked through safely, but her cell was turned off and they were calling my plane. I would have called her at home to leave a message but my cell phone—which would not work where I was going—was sitting useless back in my apartment. So much for modern conveniences.

I hate flying. I especially hate takeoffs. But I’d never flown in a 747 before and it was mercifully quick—rattle, judderjudderjudder, bang! and we were airborne. “In the event of a water landing…” Well, there is not a great deal of land between Los Angeles and Tokyo and the water we were to fly over has a median temperature of about 45 degrees. Unless we ditched next to a Navy hospital ship, survival would be a moot point.

I was flying all expenses paid on business to China. Many people had gone before me and some had not returned. I had thought about this long and hard before my flight. I’d said goodbye and left letters to the ones I love best, promising to come back alive or dead. I had never taken life for granted and I certainly wouldn’t at 30,000 feet. If you are reading this I either emailed it from China or got back and sent it out from home so not to worry. Besides, I’d been told in no uncertain terms by a bloody-mindedly stubborn friend to come home or else. She meant it and I did not want to disappoint her, so I promised I would.

My seatmate, a charming Filipina named Amparo was delighted when the seat between us went unclaimed. We had room to sprawl a bit and a place to put our junk, something else airlines don’t often give you (make up your own list.) So far so good, though after a few hours in an airline seat I have sworn that the next time I visit the Orient it will be by train. But first I have a very strange request to ask of the flight attendant: I’m hoping to find out when we pass the longitude of Midway Island.

In May of 1942, in response to a spectacular yet militarily insignificant raid on Tokyo and other Japanese cities by sixteen medium bombers flown off the deck of the carrier HORNET, Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku formulated a complex plan to redress the American threat to the Japanese Empire. Using hundreds of ships and aircraft and thousands of crack Imperial Marines, he would take the American outpost on Midway, westernmost of the Hawaiian Islands. This would draw the American fleet out of Pearl Harbor to the waters around Midway where it would be crushed by the superbly trained and much more numerous Japanese Navy. As we know, it didn’t work out that way.

Yamamoto’s plan was too complex and predicated on opposing the impulsive American Admiral William F. Halsey. But Halsey was in the hospital and the small American force, built around the carriers HORNET, ENTERPRISE and YORKTOWN, was commanded by Raymond Spruance, a pragmatic cruiser admiral. Due to inspired planning, courage, luck, skill and superhuman exertions on the part of the American sailors and airmen, Yamamoto lost his four magnificent fleet carriers for the loss of YORKTOWN, the destroyer HAMMANN and dozens of pilots who flew near suicidal missions to sink the Japanese flattops. When it was over the Japanese withdrew, never again to regain the upper hand.

A distant relative of mine was there, though I’m not sure of the connection between David Putnam and my family. I think he was a cousin of my aunt or some such—tenuous as these things go but we claimed him. David flew an SBD, a Douglas Dauntless dive bomber, though I don’t know if from Midway or from a carrier. But on the last day of the battle he took part in an attack on the large Japanese heavy cruiser MIKUMA, traveling in company with her sister ship MOGAMI. Hit by anti-aircraft fire, his plane blazing and nearly unmaneuverable, he chose to crash his Dauntless into the stern of the MIKUMA, destroying her after turrets and steering. MIKUMA rammed MOGAMI and sank later in the day, a blazing wreck. MOGAMI was out of action for a year.

Historians often walk battlefields to soak up the images of those who fought and died there. Short of diving to the sea floor, there’s often little a naval historian can do to find that experience. Midway, Jutland, Matapan, Tsushima and Trafalgar are just spots on the blue ocean. But we can feel the presence of history, even of that history passing 36,000 feet below us, and give pause.

We flew far to the north of Midway, closer to the Aleutians where diversionary attacks were launched to draw Spruance away to the north. It didn’t work. His attention was focused on a dot in the ocean three miles in diameter, where, on a long weekend in 1942, a few thousand men saved the world. And my attention is focused there as well.

I eat my teriyaki and sashimi and drink my Japanese beer as the plane drones on into the endless afternoon, staying ahead of oncoming night. Below the ghosts of ships and sailors still resonate as we fly toward Tokyo, children all of that incredible victory.

The China Travels: Two
“The Bund”
The S.S. Shanghai Scenery One … October 10 2003

I made it to Tokyo, where I met David, my partner in this venture, in Narita Airport. He was bubbly and wanted to talk about the book. I was tired and wanted quiet. As we walked toward Flight 9, the Shanghai connector, a Japanese policeman called David aside and began subjecting him to a full-body search. Smiling, I boarded and was asleep by the time he made it to the plane.

In Shanghai we were supposed to meet Shangri-La Publications, our publisher, Sheldon Gosline, and his wife Kim, but Sheldon had missed his flight in New York so Kim took charge and got us from Pu Dong Airport to the Shanghai Post and Telecommunications Hotel (Three stars—***—the hotel of excellent computer email but low water pressure.) The next day, after settling in and visiting our first publisher (we want to sell my book ZOONAUTS: THE SECRET OF ANIMALVILLE to the Chinese), and joined by Kim’s friend and silk business partner Mona, we went down to see The Bund, the former heart of the European exploitation of China.

Well, it’s eight at night and I’m writing this on the upper deck of the prosaically-named SHANGHAI SCENERY ONE was we cruise the Huang Po River. The Chinese don’t buy into Daylight Savings Time and it’s been dark for some hours. This luxury cruise of the Shanghai waterfront costs about eight dollars and would cost about five times as much as that back home if you could find anything that looked this good. For this ship cruises along The Bund, a collection of 52 historic buildings from the 1900-1940 period, beautifully restored and lit. This is a vision that the folks at Disney would kill to get, but this is real. We pass the spot where Japanese warships opened fire in 1937, kicking out one of the last barriers in the way to World War II; the banks where European interests did a pretty thorough job of running China’s resources for a century; and the parks used to have signs that said, “No Dogs or Chinese.” This was the fabled China Station of THE SAND PEBBLES, where the foreign gunboats were based. Fishing boats, cargo vessels and barge trains speed up and down the river, and a brisk wind tosses and mocks the lighted blimp trying to make headway against it. It is almost perfect.

Then we return to the hotel and our electronic keys don’t work. This will become a recurring theme.

The China Travels: Three
“Rolling Thunder”
The Shanghai Post and Telecommunications Hotel … October 11 2003

It’s Saturday evening, and what a day. We took a taxi to Pu Dong on the other side of the Huang Ho River to speak to a high school class. The average Shanghai driving experience (my guide Nadia Chen says that they don’t even rent cars to tourists) makes GRAND THEFT AUTO look like Coney Island Bumpercars. We came within an inch of chrome or flesh at least a dozen times a mile. Imagine THE FRENCH CONNECTION with everyone driving like Popeye Doyle, and the rest walking like Ratso Rizzo. Imagine the worst of Los Angeles on acid. As near as I can tell, there is no such thing as road rage, and they manage to get their cars (most of the taxis are VW Santana 2000s) into spaces I never thought a car could enter, often at 40 mph. Private cars are discouraged from clogging the roads by a $3000 registration fee, but there’s plenty enough traffic to go around. It’s like a very nervous ballet, involving busses, taxis, trucks, jitneys, pedicabs, pushcarts, motorbikes, bicycles and pedestrians, where few if any traffic laws are obeyed. There is, however one very draconian law that no one wants to break: hit a foreigner with your motor vehicle and it’s a mandatory life sentence. Wow. That’s one way to protect the tourists.

At Jianping High School we spoke about our book ZOONAUTS: THE SECRET OF ANIMALVILLE to a horde of high schoolers who had come in on a Saturday (!) to meet us, ask us questions, and give us each a splendid brass plaque. Then the staff took us to a fabulous, endless dinner which ended with a bit of alcohol-induced weirdness when David, who had been making rash promises of what our book would accomplish for Sino-American relations, suddenly started to spout his own rather strange historical-political theories which I will not go into here. Suffice it to say that they’re right up there with running into Elvis at the 7-11. Our Chinese hosts seemed to find him amusing, and kept teasing him to make him react. I’m relieved that they found him funny.

Next we sat in on a two-and-a-half hour meeting conducted almost completely in Chinese with a very large children’s book publishing firm. (We have another tomorrow. There are apparently no days off for Chinese business.) Not understanding a word of Chinese and having to look interested while Kim and Nadia spoke for us, I concentrated on our hosts’ body language, tone, inflections, pauses and expressions. I was able to watch their reactions change as they got interested. In the end they offered to draw up a formal proposal, which to a Chinese businessman is a very strong thing. Kim, from Shangri-La Publications, especially knows just what she’s doing. I was quite impressed.

CONTINUE to Part II
(Next we had ginger ale and donuts (?) with the senior V.P. of a top Chinese TV network. Again, I didn’t understand a word. Stories about most Chinese understanding English are a myth. I’ve met four, including a kid working at KFC, which shows you just how far an education goes here. Not so different from home, I guess.)



The word “Zoonauts” is the creation of Sheldon Lee Gosline and a trademark (TM) of Shangri-La Publications. Permission from Sheldon Lee Gosline is required for any commercial use of the word “Zoonauts”.

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