Nicole Brodeur / Times Staff Columnist
Stowaways honor U.S. as we whine

"You want to know what the can looks like?" the shipyard security guard asks me, and I blink the rain from my eyes and nod.

No, you don't, his eyes tell me.

He begins anyway: "It's a 40-foot can . . ."

How wide? I ask. Can I stretch my arms across it?

Once, he says. Maybe twice.

"A seagoing boxcar is all they are," the other guard tells me. On the radio here at Seattle's Harbor Island Terminal 18, Willie Nelson warbles "On the Road Again," and it seems a little too jaunty for this place and time.

Just days before, a container holding 18 Chinese nationals, three of them dead, was set on the dock not far from here.

When the survivors emerged in America, their bodies were closed up against the daylight, like pupils. They were dehydrated, malnourished. They had traveled - in the dark, in the debt of their passage, and in the company of death - for at least two weeks.

All to be in America, the land of the free and the home of people like John Rocker.

"The biggest thing I don't like about New York are the foreigners," the Atlanta Braves pitcher told Sports Illustrated last month, in an article that has solidified his status as The Racist with the Rocket Arm.

"You can walk an entire block in Times Square and not hear anybody speaking English," Rocker told writer Jeff Pearlman. "Asians and Koreans and Vietnamese and Indians and Russians and Spanish people and everything up there. How the hell did they get in this country?"

Now we know, John-Boy, and it should be enough to shut you and every other American whiner up for a very long time.

We live in an Era of Entitlement. We are a people of unparalleled wealth who can't imagine life without a cell phone. News stories tell us how a net worth of $1 million just isn't that much anymore.

So we need to look hard at Tuesday's front-page photo. We need to peer inside the "can" - the interior of a cargo container that a desperate collection of Chinese men entered, hoping to become one of us.

They gambled that three weeks of voluntary bondage in a dark, airless box would bring them to a new life.

For three of them, it became a coffin.

"Just picture yourself in a 40-foot tin can," security guard Pat Morgan told me. "There's nothing in it but some clothing items. They had some food and water, but . . . apparently, they ran out."

Those who survived found themselves in a country where some 25-year-old punk like Rocker calls them names in a national magazine. A country where, not far from where they first stepped on American soil, other cargo containers burst with goods that we sniff over at Costco every weekend.

I stepped out of the guard shack and scanned the shipyard. Out there somewhere, that "can" still sits, a shell of a crime scene, still reeking of the lives lost and the lives risked for what too many of us take for granted.

"On the road again," Willie warbled behind me. "Goin' places that I've never been. Seein' things that I may never see again . . ."

Such an American song. Too bad the people who appreciate it most are from a land far away. And while they can't understand the words, they probably know them better than any of us.

Nicole Brodeur's column appears Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday in The Times. Her phone number is 206-464-2334. Her e-mail address is nbrodeur@seattletimes.com. She recommends the Museum of African-American History in Detroit.

Copyright © 2000 The Seattle Times Company

Copyright © 2000 The Seattle Times Company