April 10, 1912, Southampton, England.

It's ten forty-two.

I'm standing here, in the dock of the Titanic.

April was the beginning of spring in Britain, the sun still tinged with the chill of late winter, and the impersonal temperature was enough to make me shiver.

I tucked my white wavy blond hair into a black men's yobby hat. This is what I came back from drinking in a bar with an immigrant from the United States, whose family were immigrants, and the great migration of Europe in the nineteenth century, two-thirds of whom were exported to the United States, who would return to England after looting the American continent, perhaps to visit and remember their homeland, or to take their relatives and friends here.

In these decades, until war broke out, immigrants would pour out of the decaying countries of the European ruling class and swarm into the steerage of cruise ships bound for the American continent, just to see the Statue of Liberty in the United States.

God knows what liberty the Statue of Liberty stands for, I only know that no one from the United States will send me even half the money for a lower class ticket, but I will stand like a fool in Southampton Harbor in 1912, just to find a man I am almost impossible to find.

Or is he not old enough to call a man, boy? Twenty years old, especially with childish and youthful age.

The men's dark brown coat is still too big and too ill-fitting for me, and I pulled it off a dead tramp under a bridge. Old coat can not see what material, a smell of cheap goods came, when I was lonely squatting in the strange sea, washing the coat while looking at the distant mist daze, perhaps this is just a too long time and space dream.

One day, or the next second you can open your eyes and wake up, and then I still live in the time you should be in.

This trip of time and space is almost five months, in this area of only 240,000 square kilometers, but once the sun never set in the country, running around as a homeless.

Before the plane crash, I just finished traveling in London, England, and prepared to return home. My understanding of Britain was only limited to the many roads in London, the many roadside bars, and the lot of water in Britain.

There is also the full name of the United Kingdom, which tests the memory of ordinary people.

Wait until I have consciousness again, open my tired eyelids, and the snow freezes my lax pupils. I thought it was an illusion, that the snow I saw was only the over-bright moonlight of the night, and I reached out to touch it, only to find that the color of my fingers almost merged with this rich radiance.

Then I heard someone humming, a voice so thin it was about to break in the air, here and there. I turned to see a haggard woman holding me, a worn blanket wrapped around me.

We snuggled together, intimate and strange leaning on each other, inexplicable scenes. I'm not in a hospital and I'm in the arms of a strange foreign woman.

God knows how I ended up back on the streets of England in late 1911, some ghetto bum. I was wrapped in her only old blanket by a dying woman with consumption, and I had to save her.

The woman asked me, "What's your name?"

I am at a loss for words, I do not know if she accepts Chinese names.

"I'm Mary Robert. Hello." She looked haggard and old, her dirty hair clinging to her pale and wrinkled face, and the last days of her life were like withered vines, fragile curls.

I moved my lips and finally said, "Hello."

"Have you seen a man? Nooooo. And a boy." She gasped slowly, the white mist like the death breath of an English winter, bit by bit robbing your body of all the functional colors that belonged to warmth.

"His name is Jack Dawson, and he has beautiful eyes, if you see him, please tell him I'm looking for him... No, maybe he'll just live." The woman's voice trailed off, as light as the morning mist. "He's brilliant... He will live happily ever after."

By the time I could move, it was too late to return the blanket to her. No one knows where she came from, just like no one knows where the body of this blonde girl I possessed came from.

There are so many homeless people these days, I sighed with boredom.

Jack Dawson?

Looks like it's a popular name, like Tom and John. You get a few here and there. The hero of Titanic was also named Jack Dawson.

It wasn't until I saw the news that the Titanic, a luxury liner, had been launched for sea trials in Belfast Harbor that I suddenly realized maybe it wasn't a coincidence. And the sketched portrait that the woman finally held in her hand, the more I looked at it, the more it looked like a young Leonardo...

It took me a month to adjust to a world that had been set back a hundred years, and when I found out that this body, in addition to the dizziness caused by malnutrition, I began to press my bones again, maybe not as hard as my previous peak, but to be able to dance again made me feel hopeful about the world.

Then the remaining three months in the body training, eating, wandering all kinds of bumps. I hesitate to find Jack Dawson and warn him not to go on the Titanic, but how am I supposed to convince him that the luxury liner destined for the Statue of Liberty, the unsinkable dream ship, will end up in the Atlantic Ocean more than 3,000 meters below?

You know what? I should be thinking about the rest of my life. As a so-called inferior person who suddenly came to the early 20th century, or even a black man without any background, I think I can earn a ticket to the United States with some efforts. At least there will be some opportunities for those who are willing to work hard and there will be no problem to survive. Of course, the ship I will take will never be called titanic.

I can't save the Titanic. Can I run to London and drag out Harland Wolff, or run to the White Star Line and find Bruce Ismay, shake them by the collar and shout: "I come from the 21st century, when the Titanic was destined to hit an iceberg and sink to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, and less than a third of your 2,000-plus crew came back?"

Good. If I do this, you'll find me at the bottom of the Atlantic the next day. These sane people are gonna throw me, a lunatic who's too poor to afford a ferry ticket, onto an Atlantic iceberg dancing with seagulls.

So I shouldn't have rushed frantically to Southampton harbour at the last minute, jumping up and down into the cold winds of the English Channel, six hundred kilometres from Belfast Harbour. God knows when I finally got here, less than two hours before the Titanic set sail, and I had to spend those two hours cramping into busy piers and roadside bars looking for a guy who probably didn't exist.

Blacksmiths, carpenters, musicians, merchants, aristocratic cars, beggars and rich people are the only cheerful music here. I swore I'd never run so fast, holding the crumpled sketch head, barely the size of my hand, and Shouting, "Jack Dawson, Jack Dawson, Jack Dawson!" from all the bars around the harbor.

Pushing through one early twentieth-century English pub after another, eventually almost violently kicking the door down, in English, Chinese, broken Swedish or Italian, with some unfamiliar German, I had never shouted someone's name out in so many languages. I'm afraid some people who know Jack won't understand my American English, which God knows I learned later in life, using the kk phonetic alphabet, but not a proper British Cockney accent.

I'm starting to hate myself for contributing tickets to the Titanic, and not just one, but a plot that I can recite backwards and a dozen tissues. So when I read about the Titanic, I knew who Jack Dawson was. Of course, the picture of the hand that deserves to be crumpled up and thrown into the cold sea is also a vital presence.

This guy was my boyfriend for a while, and before I became obsessed with Pirates of the Caribbean, his Titanic poster in a suit was on my bedside wall.

If I could go back, I'd tear all his posters to shreds and stomp on them in a trash can.

Jack Dawson.

Jack Dawson --

Jack! Dawson... I don't know where you're hiding, you son of a bitch.

I remember in the movie Jack rushed out of the bar just as the boat was about to leave and ran straight on board. And I had to get to him before he got out of the bar, or he wouldn't be able to get out of the bar in time, because a man and a woman's feet are not the same thing, and the Titanic was about to open, and he wouldn't dump someone even if he heard them screaming at him.

America, home, Statue of Liberty, Immigration Admission, new opportunities, dream spots... A screaming $30 third-class ticket.

If I were Jack Dawson, I'd smack you in the face if some crazy strange woman tried to stop me.

Do you think every day you have a chance to win a ticket to the Titanic? Even if it's a fucking sinking ship you have to take the chance that you can get on it, and even if it goes down you might as well grab a door and swim to America like a polar bear, which is what humans do until they regret it.

I walked out of the last bar I could find, and the rotting smell of the hobo's old clothes mingled with the cold of the harbor in an atmosphere called loneliness. A green cruise car passed in front of me, dragging my dull eyes past at an even speed.

The near-noon sun had a stubborn way of pushing the haze out of the air before ten, and I didn't know why I had been ignoring this background picture without Jack, and now I saw it.

You can't notice it at first glance because your eyes are straight at first. At first the eye unconsciously saw the light which had just crushed the mist. The sky was a rich milky white, and the air was filled with a livid mist. The sun seemed to be dying in this weather.

My eyes slowly passed through the green mail wagons carrying passengers, the gentlemen in domed black hats or the old women with sackcloth on their heads, the young girls with brown hair, the middle-aged men with cheap cigarettes. Then I saw the gangway, high above, connecting the hull of the ship to the harbor, and under the complex cable, the crew hurriedly called out, "Line this way, please come this way."

The honking of car horns echoed through the dock, and the mist of people coming and going filled the air, giving me a completely unreal sense of trance. Suddenly there was a loud, loud whistle that burst like a tidal wave. I took a slow step forward, and countless people were rushing along beside me, as if attracted by the sound. My eyes finally came upon that great black figure, the black hull as long as night, and the golden lettering flying above the new black hull.

The chimney of the first cylinder finally belched out a thick black mist of gas, and I could hear the engine start in the main hold of the 40,000 ton ship. Hundreds of coal furnaces in the shouts of the workers will be a ton of coal into, finally burning, starting, ready.

And here it was, not a wreck on the icy bottom of the ocean, but a truly, truly, the largest vehicle of its time, the world.

i'm the kingthe world.

I'm the king of the world.

I remember what Jack said, but the King of the world was only at sea for five days.