“A soaking for her!” Neptune cried, and Nicole screamed as she was sprayed with cold water from a hose, which drenched her clothes and hair. Val worried that she might get scared or upset, but instead Nicole laughed out loud as she wrung her wet frock, and beamed with pride when she was awarded a certificate stating that she had passed the Crossing the Line test.

How did she become so brave? Val wondered. Perhaps it was because her confidence had not been beaten out of her by a cold father and a violent husband. Val hated herself for feeling anxious, but she couldn’t help worrying about the rest of the journey. How would she locate the train to Harbin when she spoke no Chinese? What if her mother was already dead when they arrived? At the same time, she felt proud of herself for getting so far, and she grinned when she imagined Tony discovering the theft of the check.

One day there was an eerie rumble as a squadron of planes flew overhead, like angry hornets, and Val felt their vibrations rippling through the displaced air.

“American warplanes,” a fellow passenger commented. “Heading for Vietnam.”

The US was supposed to have withdrawn from the conflict following the Paris Peace Accord but they still had a lot of troops there. Val peered after the planes, wondering how many of their occupants would return home, and how many Vietnamese they would kill. In Sydney, she often saw American soldiers on leave from the fighting. They tended to hang around the bars of the King’s Cross district, where there were prostitutes in micro-skirts and white patent go-go boots on every street corner.

Still there was no land in sight as the ship nudged into the East China Sea, until the day they were scheduled to dock, when suddenly a huge industrial port materialized from nowhere. Cranes teetered like long-legged insects above concrete platforms stacked with multicolored shipping containers. The water changed from dark blue to sludgy green as they drew closer, the ship’s horn sounding a bleak warning.

Val packed all their belongings ready to disembark. When she asked a sailor how to get to Peking, he told her to take a taxi to Tianjin station and catch a train. They were frequent, he said. Val did not have any Chinese currency, but the ship’s purser changed some Australian dollars for her, handing over a stack of colorful notes with Chairman Mao’s improbably round face on them.

Her taxi driver spoke no English, but she managed to make herself understood by drawing a picture of a train beside a rectangular building. The journey was short, and at Tianjin station, when she went to a ticket office and repeated “Peking” several times, the woman gave her two tickets and pointed to a platform. As they boarded the train, Val thought: so far, so good.