Shanghaied

A taxi picked me up outside the house at half past eight in the evening, and the next morning I woke up in Shanghai.

There is a technical term for that: To be shanghaied properly is to be drugged, or beaten, or simply got drunk enough, and then carried aboard a ship you never agreed to board. You wake at sea. The coast is gone. The word comes from the American Pacific ports in the middle of the nineteenth century, San Francisco and Portland and Astoria, where the Gold Rush had emptied every vessel of its crew, because no sailor stays at sea when there is gold in the hills. Captains still needed men. So they paid boarding house keepers a flat rate per body delivered, and the boarding house keepers, who were called crimps, delivered.

Shanghai lent its name to the practice because it was the far end of the world. The voyage was months. You could not walk back from it, and you could not jump ship halfway and expect to see home again. Being sent to Shanghai meant being sent somewhere you could not undo.

My own version differed in a few particulars. I paid China Eastern, rather than being sold to them, which reverses the direction of the money entirely. Nobody drugged me, although the cabin lights went down somewhere over Siberia and the effect was much the same. The voyage was ten hours rather than four months.

The crimps took men who did not want to go. I have wanted to go for a while. Same city, same long night, same business of waking up somewhere the previous day had not prepared you for. The only difference is consent.

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