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Chapter 1 The Sincere Sacrifice
When I picture my own leaving, it never looks like this: the sour-fish stink of a Florida panhandle port, dawn pushing its way through a greasy lid of clouds, the wind so full of diesel and salt and decay that my eyes water like I’m the one being left behind. But I’m here, backpack and two duffels at my feet, hands sunk so deep in Sun Yuxin’s coat that I’m almost hugging her from inside out. She’s wearing the same ridiculous knockoff Canada Goose as always, zipper broken at the hips where her stomach pushes it open like a swollen jaw. I can feel the shape of our baby through layers, heat and thumping and that extra, shocking solidity, like the weight of a bowling ball wrapped in nerves.
She tucks a strand of hair behind my ear, fingertips cold. “New,” she says. The pet name that somehow stuck after an ironic throwaway, because we are both so new, so raw at this, so doomed to be the last ones in history to ever believe in anything sincerely. “You must write. I don’t care how slow WiFi. I want three hundred words every day. In English, because I am forgetting English already. And, and—”
She presses her lips together. She’s always prettier angry or about to cry, the tension making her lips stark and her cheekbones harder. I want to take a picture so I’ll remember her looking at me, like she’s the only one who knows I’m about to fuck up in a way that breaks the world open, but she never lets me. “And you must not come back if you fail,” she finishes.
She always plays it as a joke, but in every joke is a death sentence. “I love you,” I say, because it’s all I have left to do, and I need her to know I’m not pretending, I don’t have the armor other people get born with.
Her eyes flick, hunting for irony, but I refuse to supply it. “Wo ai ni,” she whispers, Mandarin pinched through a voice not quite ready to believe itself.
I hear her stomach growl, a tiny captive tiger, and remember the whole fucking point: “Hey—” I break the hug just enough to get out the envelope. It’s the last time I’ll ever have a literal envelope full of cash in my hand. All my ‘welcome to America’ service tips from six months slinging shrimp, plus the bonus from Ma Guanyu for taking the trawler spot on no notice. I’d done the math: it would cover three months of rent in the panhandle and everything the midwife said she’d need if the baby came early. I want to say, ‘It’s not enough, you deserve more,’ but if I start with that I won’t be able to stop.
I push it into her hand. She looks at it, looks at me. “You think I am so bad with money,” she says, mock-offended, and sniffs. Then she pockets it anyway, clutching the fabric. “I will send pictures of how much noodle I buy. All noodle.”
She shivers against me. We are alone at the edge of the warehouse loading dock. Nobody else shows up for the Black Dragon until it’s ready to leave. The trawler, long as a city block and black-painted to hide its filth, groans at the pier forty feet below us. Its rust stripes run like infected veins, oozing red down to the water line. Overhead, gulls wheel, disappointed by how little this place has left to take.
“Three months, okay?” she says, softer now. “Three months, and then you come home, or at least to a hospital. You swear.”
“I swear,” I say, and I mean it. I mean it even though neither of us expects me to last.
She pulls my face down and kisses me. Her tongue tastes like Red Bull and menthol, her teeth are sharp with anxiety. She holds on so hard it hurts my jaw. I think she’s going to say something else, but she just holds me, face buried in my neck.
Below, a horn splits the air: the signal. I untangle from her. “I’ll write you tonight. I’ll write you right away. Even if it’s just ‘I love you I love you I love you’ three hundred times.”
She lets go last. “Three hundred and one,” she says, and smiles through something complicated and very old.
The trawler’s ladder is a strip of corroded steel welded into the dockside. I pick up my bags. She’s already texting as I walk away, not watching me leave—she’d told me once that the pain only starts when you look back, so don’t ever look back, just go until you’re gone. I try to follow her rule.
Halfway down, the ladder shifts under my weight, and rust grits into my palms. The deck is wet and oily; I nearly lose my footing stepping off. A crewman waits, squat and yellow-booted, his face arranged into a neutral that says he already hates me. He gestures to my bags, then at a cluster of similar sacks lined up along the gunwale like body bags for lost tourists. I drop them, and instantly miss their weight.
Above us, footsteps—someone else descending, slow and heavy, like a cartoon villain taking the stairs one at a time so you know the doom is real. Ma Guanyu is shorter than I expected, not much over five seven, but built thick and low-slung, like a man designed for moving refrigerators. He’s wearing a captain’s coat, old navy wool, the cuffs chewed out by acid or rats, a cigarette somehow dry between his lips even with the mist blowing in sideways. His face is a mask of tanned callus, scar puckered at the cheekbone, eyes nearly black. When he grins, all of his teeth show.
He looks at the crewman, says something sharp in Fujianese, then fixes on me. “Sinclair Nathan?”
“Yeah. Yes, sir. That’s me.”
He makes a noise in his throat, halfway between laugh and cough. “Last night you had trouble with the paperwork. Next time, bring someone smarter.”
I start to stammer a defense, but he waves it away. “Now you go down.” He points at a hatch. “Quartermaster will see your phone, your bags, your name. You don’t need phone for fish. No signal, anyway.” His English is jagged but clear, every syllable a little sneer.
I hesitate, looking up at the dock. Sun Yuxin is gone, probably already halfway home with her envelope. I want to believe she waited to see me disappear, but my heart has always been built for believing things that aren’t quite real.
Ma Guanyu makes a show of checking his wrist. “We go now, not later.” He lifts his hand—there’s a flash of silver. I don’t notice what it is until he’s right next to me, and then I realize: He’s holding out a little passport-sized folder. “Passport, please.”
I take it from my jacket, thumb-warmed and already a little smudged. He snatches it, flips through as if he’s memorizing every stamp, every embarrassing visa photo, then pockets it in his coat. “Now you are ready,” he says, and his mouth does a thing I won’t call a smile.
I shoulder my way down the hatch. The steps are slick, painted in the kind of military green that makes even new ships look like they’ve been rotting since Vietnam. At the bottom: a hallway, low ceiling, the smell of ancient oil and fresh bleach, and a parade of open-mouthed fish faces, eyes still glassy, arranged on stainless steel racks along the walls. Two more crew—both Fujianese, both younger than me but already hard from too many months at sea—sit on an overturned plastic crate playing poker with tiny, oil-spotted cards. They glance up, glance away.
Quartermaster’s office is a closet-sized room with a desk made from an old hatch cover. The quartermaster himself is a bald man with gold rings in both ears, chain-smoking over a laptop that looks two centuries old. He takes my bags, my phone, my wallet, anything that can’t be used to bleed or clean a fish. My clothes, I’m told, will be ‘washed and ready’ by the time I finish orientation. The next time I see my duffel it will smell like formaldehyde and smoke.
He hands me an ID tag: black dragon, red paint, my name spelled wrong. “Wear. You get in trouble without.”
There’s a shirt and set of bibs with the trawler’s emblem stenciled on them—both three sizes too big. I ask about my berth and he points with his cigarette. “Down. Take left at shit smell.” He grins with black-stained teeth.
The way to the sleeping quarters is a gauntlet of narrow halls, pipes overhead, deck plates cold enough to bite through socks. The other new hires are already lining up outside the bunks, a mess of shivering college dropouts, Vietnamese grandfathers, two ex-Mormons, and a guy from Alabama with ‘NATE’ tattooed across his knuckles, already trying to start a fist bump circle. I pass through them and find my assigned bunk. It’s a metal shelf, no pad, still sticky from whatever or whoever bled last shift. I sit. My body hums like a tuning fork with everything I want to say to Yuxin.
But I know if I check my phone, I’ll see the first wave of her messages—already three missed calls, a dozen WeChats, a selfie of her pouting on the dock, pink scarf twisted up to her eyes. I want to respond, but I can’t trust my hands not to betray me. I can’t trust myself not to beg her to come back, to call the whole thing off.
So I close my eyes, instead, and I do what I promised: I compose my first letter, three hundred words, even if it’s just the same phrase over and over.
It starts: “I love you. I love you. I love you. I’m sorry. I love you.”
Somewhere above, a winch screams. The engines fire. The trawler heaves away from the dock, and the last I see of land is a blur of wet concrete, the crumpled silhouette of a woman I’ll never deserve, not even for a second, not even if I live through all three months and bring back every dollar they promised.
I won’t look back, I remind myself, but my whole heart is nothing but looking back.
They called it a cold snap, but the real word was "punishment." Sometime in the night the air over the Gulf shifted and the rain came in hard, mean, pelting the trawler with needles that made your bones jerk even under layers. The only sound sharper than the rain was the crew's boots on the deck, running laps around my shivering ass as I tried to remember which rope was which, which bucket wasn't full of poison or something worse. Nobody had slept—not really. My bunkmate’s sleep apnea meant he made pig noises all night, then an hour before dawn a klaxon split the hull and everyone lurched out like rats leaving a bag of drowned kittens.
My first job: deck scrubber, which sounded like a joke but wasn’t. The surface of the trawler was layered in scales, fins, blood, bits of foam and muscle that turned to a new kind of snot underfoot whenever the hoses hit them. Every morning the deck had to be "clean" for the inspectors, though the inspectors would never set foot on the Black Dragon unless they were paid off first.
The boots-in-charge worked in pairs, scraping with steel squeegees, yelling at each other in Mandarin, laughing at my slow, clumsy rhythm. My arms felt like rubber after an hour. After two, they didn't feel like mine at all.
At six AM they let us eat. Some kind of rice porridge, gluey and gray, with a handful of dried fish flakes floating in it for protein. I slurped it down because my teeth wouldn’t stop chattering, and because I hadn’t eaten since the dock, and because not eating was worse than whatever flavorless punishment this was.
At six fifteen we went back out. Rain still falling, and now the nets started coming up.
Nobody told me what to do. I watched, tried to copy, immediately fell behind. The netline was studded with iron rings, slippery as sin, and when I missed the handoff from the guy ahead of me, the next guy yanked it so hard I lost grip and banged my face into the railing. It didn't even hurt at first. What hurt was the cold when my gloves filled up with rain and my fingers stopped working.
They screamed at me, at first. Then they just laughed, and took to calling me “Bait.” It sounded the same in Mandarin: BAIT! BAIT! They’d scream, then pass the net right over my head and leave me grabbing at nothing.
By the third haul, my blisters had popped, one on each palm, stinging every time I twisted the rope. I tried to hide it but the blood left pink streaks in the water sloshing around my boots. The stench was getting worse: a slick, low-tide sweetness layered with chemical tang from the nets. Every time a fish flopped onto the deck, the rain matted the scales down until they looked more like raw chicken than anything living. We sorted by size and species, chucking the useless ones into a separate bucket where they frothed and gasped until they stopped.
The senior crew got to wear the good gloves. They watched, barely intervening except to bark when I was about to do something stupid, like walk across a coiled line or stand too close to the hook crane.
I looked up and saw Ma Guanyu watching from the pilothouse, hands behind his back, smoke curling around his head. He wasn’t even pretending to work. He just stood there, face set, the king of shit mountain, and when his eyes met mine he lifted one hand, slow, and made a little wave like a parent to a drowning child.
I heard a snicker from one of the older crew. He said something in Mandarin and the others barked laughter. I pretended not to notice, but my face burned.
Then the net jammed. I grabbed the cable, tried to loosen it, slipped, and slammed shoulder-first into the steel frame of the winch. I cursed, loud and embarrassing, in English. One of the crew pushed past me and did it right, hands working like he’d been born with them attached to fishnets instead of arms. He grunted, looked at me with disgust. “Too soft,” he said, in English so perfect it hurt more than the impact. “Maybe you want to go home to your mommy?”
I wanted to scream, to tell them why I was here, what I was working for, how I could take any amount of shit if it meant sending Yuxin pictures of a future that didn’t taste like garbage. But I said nothing. I wiped my face with the back of my hand and kept hauling.
Hour after hour the routine repeated. The bodies blurred together; my own body became just another object, bruised and sore and bent. I bit down on my cheek whenever the pain got to be too much, and when that didn’t work, I sang “I love you I love you I love you” in my head, the words so automatic I started to hear them in Yuxin’s voice, like a ghost comforting me from somewhere warm.
Around four PM, they called a break. I stumbled to the rail and puked. The vomit hit the sea and disappeared, like everything else.
I wiped my mouth, spat, and looked out at the ocean. The rain had let up, but the sky was still gunmetal. No land in sight. Just the endless churn, broken only by the ugly black mass of our own ship.
I leaned on the rail, let my hands go numb in the wind, and tried not to cry.
When I turned, Ma Guanyu was there. He had come down from the pilothouse, still smoking, the coat draped over his massive shoulders like a superhero costume for villains. He looked me up and down. “You learn faster than most,” he said. “Most white boy cry by first morning.”
I tried to say something clever, but my teeth were still chattering. “Guess I’m stubborn.”
He nodded, then gestured at my hands. “Show me.”
I opened them, palms up. They looked worse than they felt: skin already shredded, nails torn. A little bit of fish scale stuck to my wrist, glittering like plastic.
“Next time, wrap,” he said. He tossed me a roll of ancient, sticky tape. “Crew always watch. If you fail, they get more food.” His mouth twisted. “You are small, but you work. You not quit.”
I thought of Yuxin, her voice that last morning, her ultimatum. “Not quitting,” I said.
He looked at me for a long time, as if measuring how much more I could take before the bones gave out.
“You last, maybe,” he said, voice soft as anything I'd heard since boarding. “Or you die. We see.”
He walked away, up to the bridge, never once looking back.
I taped my hands. I breathed. I went back to work. Every haul I thought of Yuxin, of the child punching at the inside of her coat, of how much they were counting on me to be different, to survive.
The night came cold and wet and hard, but I did not go down, not even when my knees started to give out, not even when the blood stopped flowing to my fingers and I could not feel the rope. I heard the crew talking, heard “Bait” and “Stupid” and “Soft” but also my own name, spoken with grudging recognition. I took it. It was the only thing I had left that no one else could touch.
By shift’s end, I was shaking so bad I could barely climb the ladder down to the bunks. My skin was raw, my muscles were jelly, and my head felt like a cracked egg. But I was still breathing, and nobody had taken that from me.
Back in my cell, I rolled into the top bunk and stared at the ceiling. The steel beams above were lined with condensation, each drop gathering until it fell, landing on my face every few seconds. I counted them: one, two, three.
With every drop, I pictured Yuxin. Her face, her hands, the way she’d looked at me when I left. I promised her I’d make it. I promised the baby.
One, two, three.
I’d make it.
Or I’d die trying.
By the end of my second day I was less a person than a bruise smeared across the floor of the universe. When the shift change finally came, I shambled back to my bunk and collapsed without even peeling off the foul rain gear. My skin stank of brine, blood, and the weird ammoniac tang that rose from the lower holds whenever the trawler slowed. I’d barely managed to wedge myself into the shelf-space mattress before sleep hit me like a bodybag.Sometime in the black between seconds, something furry brushed my leg. I jerked awake, panic fizzing—rat, I thought, rat, but when I propped up, all I saw was darkness and the faint orange glow of a safety lamp. No, not quite darkness: there was a shadow moving at the foot of the bunk, big and blocky, arms crossed and breathing slow.
“Sinclair,” it said, not a question.
It was the deck lead—the one everyone called cosmicx16. Nobody said it to his face, but the whole crew used the handle with a mixture of fear and mean awe. He looked like a human concrete block, barrel-shaped torso, arms too short for his body, skin pocked and red as though something had burned the humanity out of him long ago. He was the only other white guy on board, and he’d told me in the shuffle of night one that I’d never make it, not unless I learned to love humiliation.
“Shift’s up,” he said, and slapped my ankle hard enough to make my foot go numb. “Up.”
I must have looked like shit, because he smiled—not with joy, but with the slow, savoring pleasure of a kid tearing the legs off an insect to see how long it would wriggle. “Ma wants you on net detail. No breakfast until you’re through.”
I sat up, dizzy, everything coated in sweat and the piss stink that rose from the shared toilet cubby. My hands had stiffened into claws while I slept, fingers curled and leaking fluid from under the torn blisters. I cradled them, tried to get circulation back, willed myself not to cry.
Cosmicx16 moved in close, and I braced for more pain, but instead he pulled out a pack of American cigarettes—real, unopened, forbidden on deck but gold in the bunkrooms. He plucked one, lit it, and inhaled with a slow drag before sticking it between my lips. The taste was instant and glorious, the first good sensation I’d had since land.
He watched me smoke, then knocked the cigarette away with a flick of his knuckle. “Don’t forget,” he said. “They all think you’re soft. Ma thinks you might be useful.” He tilted his head. “But me, I want to see how much you break.”
It wasn’t a threat. It was just truth, delivered in a voice flat as the sea at midnight.
I dressed, hands shaking. The rain had stopped, but the cold hadn’t. Outside, the ocean was a thousand miles of wet black steel, nothing visible except the sodium glare of our own running lights smeared over the waves. I staggered across the deck, slipped once, fell into a slick of old blood and herring, got up before anyone could laugh.
The net detail was as bad as I’d feared: the ropes were heavier now, soaked and doubled by the catch, and the hooks that held the lines were so sharp that two of my fingers started bleeding just from touching them. Every time I fell behind, someone would bark my name—BAIT, BAIT, always BAIT—or shout at me in Mandarin, the tones rising and falling in ways I’d never grasp.
I worked until the horizon glowed yellow, then orange. When the bell sounded, cosmicx16 came to me again. He was grinning now, the kind of smile that said he’d just made money on a bet. “Locker,” he said, pointing down. “Go.”
I went.
The crew’s lockers were metal cabinets with holes punched in for ventilation, lined with black mold. I ducked into the only empty one, and only then did I realize: my phone was gone. The quartermaster had taken it, said it was policy, but now there was a phone taped to the wall inside the locker, screen cracked, Chinese characters scrolling across it like a bad fever dream.
At the bottom: a livestream link.
I didn’t need to guess. My whole body knew, before my mind did, what it would be.
I clicked it anyway. I was always going to click it.
Sun Yuxin’s face filled the screen. Not her old face, soft and bright from early dates or campus selfie mode, but her now-face: pale, drawn, circles deepening under her eyes. She was in our apartment, the blue polyester curtain visible behind her, same as always. She was wearing nothing but a men’s T-shirt—my T-shirt, the one with the dinosaur print, stretched tight over the mound of our baby. Her hair was messier than I’d ever seen, pulled back in a hasty knot.
The image jolted as the camera readjusted. And there, behind her, was a man.
Not just any man. He looked like me, if you peeled away everything weak and left only hunger and bone and muscle. His hands were on her hips. His face was cut off by the top of the frame, but his voice was audible: soft, low, Mandarin laced with words I could almost translate.
Yuxin looked at the screen, at me, and for a second her smile was real. The same smile as our first night together, when she’d said, “I could love you, but I won’t.”
Then she started to move. Her hips rode the stranger, slow at first, then faster, the curve of her stomach swaying. She arched her back, and for a second I saw the tension in her neck, the way she bit her lip to keep from making noise. When she finally moaned, it wasn’t my name. But a moment later, she said it anyway, in Mandarin: “Xin Ge. Xin Ge.” My name, as she called me when we were alone. Over and over, louder, eyes wide, like a dare.
The stranger’s hands crept up, cupping her belly. He leaned in close, said something into her ear. She nodded, still staring dead into the camera, into me.
My hands clamped onto the locker door. I wanted to look away. I didn’t.
The video blurred. When the image steadied, Yuxin was on her knees, sweat shining on her back. The man’s hand was on her head, pressing down, guiding her mouth out of view. The noises were wet, obscene, but underneath it all she was talking, rapid-fire Mandarin, giggling, moaning, then—just once—switching to English: “You see, New? You see?”
I didn’t know if she meant for me to watch, or if she’d forgotten I was alive.
I started crying. Not like a normal man, not silent and stoic, but blubbering, drool running down my chin, breath hitching so bad I had to bite my tongue to keep from howling. I wanted to close the browser, smash the phone, do anything to kill the connection.
But I watched. I watched the whole thing. I watched her come, then laugh, then come again, the way she always said she couldn’t with me, not really, not unless she faked it to make me feel better.
She looked into the camera, face spent and shining. “Miss you, New,” she said, lips forming the words perfect, unmistakable. “But it’s okay if you cry.”
The screen went black.
I sat in the locker, hugging my knees to my chest. I’d meant to last three months, to prove to her and to myself that I could survive any amount of hell if I kept my promise.
Instead, all I could do was sob.
After a while, I wiped my face, licked the salt from my lips, and crawled back onto the deck.
Nobody said a word, not even cosmicx16. They all knew. Maybe they’d all watched.
I worked the rest of the shift without thinking, a zombie with a heartbeat, bleeding into the ocean with every cast of the nets. The saltwater stung, but I didn’t notice it anymore.
Somewhere, the woman I loved was already making plans for the next man, the next livestream, the next reason for me to keep trying.
I was nothing but bait.
But I would not quit.
I would not quit.
I would not quit.
