River & Ocean 

Size: 297 x 210mm (A4)

Media & Material: Procreate, Apple Pencil, Pattern Brush 

Date: June 2024

Creator: Haoqing Yu ​​​​​​​​​​​​​

THE NIGHT TRAIN STOPPED AT THE EDGE OF THE OCEAN, THE engine steaming into the waves that lapped against the ironwheels. The ocean was humbled in front of the great steaming engine, its great noise was iron; the moonlight on the ocean gave the sea its place, made the water look like waves of rippling steel. There was a low mumble heard beneath the sound of the waves whose constant voice muted itself against the fine sand; the voices of the men came toward me. I could not see their faces smeared with soot, charcoal faces. Their voices moved past me, toward the ocean, yet I was not afraid, I knew them. They had worked all day on the railroad, but at night they built the great iron engine that brought them to the sea’s edge, pointed them home, the way west. They climbed down from the engine, faces black with soot, disguised, to dive into the ocean and swim home, but the moonlight hit the waves and made the surf like bones, white in their faces. Their swimming was useless, their strokes made in a desert of broken bones, of bone hitting bone, hollow noises to men who believed in home and hollow noises to men whose black faces held in their souls. But the engine waited in the iron night. And by morning the sun came up like the hot pulsating engine, the earth steams dry as I walk and kneel and wash my face with the earth’s breathing, and the Chinamen all rise around me, their faces clean and grim, rising like swiftly rising steam to walk farther into their forest. They go back to work, their eyes red with sea salt, their hands red from swimming with the broken bone sea. The black from the iron rails comes off in their hands.

--- Shawn Wong, Homebase: A Novel. 1979, p. 25-26

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Broken Bone Sea II