'I was rebellious':
former illegal immigrants speak about how China drove its people away half a century ago
When he was little, in the late 1940s, before everything in China heated up, Chan Hak Chi had two opportunities to go to Hong Kong, a destination so near yet so far, legally and safely.
Both did not work out.
"Then, after all, I had to smuggle myself, gambled on my life to be able to come to Hong Kong," said 75-year-old Chan, with grey, close-cropped hair - slightly squinting his eyes behind glasses as he recounted his youth in his hometown Guangzhou, China. He ran away nearly half a century ago.
The first time was when Chan was 3. His Thai Chinese grandfather asked the family to come over to Thailand, but Chan's father rejected the idea. Otherwise, Chan said, his family might travel to Hong Kong as an interchange or even stay in the city. His father soon passed away due to tuberculosis.
The second missed opportunity was just after Chan graduated from primary school in 1960, during the Great Famine in China when tens of millions died of starvation, his aunt in Hong Kong said she could sneak Chan into the city by "visiting relatives." Some of his classmates had done this and never returned.
His political indifference did not save him -- or millions of other Chinese youth -- from the Cultural Revolution that plunged the country into ten years of madness. When it started in 1966, Chan, who was graduating from high school, was told he no longer had to prepare for the university entrance exam because the State Council had called for a suspension of almost the entire schooling system. Encouraged by Mao, student mobs organised themselves into Red Guards, staging a bloody purge campaign on anyone deemed enemies: "bourgeois elements," the old culture, capitalists, and even their teachers and neighbours.
Chan described himself as a "xiaoyao pai," translated as "a fraction of bystanders," meaning people inactive in the movement. Chan said he just stayed home to fix radios or do woodworking.
"I still had hopes that after one or two years, the university exam would be resumed. I would still have the chance to go to university," he said, adding his mother had high expectations of him as he always did better in school than his other five siblings.
This time, Chan refused, partly because he was reluctant to leave behind his mother and the "well-equipped" campus of his new Guangzhou No.5 Middle School. For someone born in 1947, just two years before the founding of the PCR and nurtured under Mao Zedong's teaching his entire life, going to capitalist society was unthinkable. Then he started comparing himself to his Chinese classmates who had relatives abroad.
"During the Great Famine, our food was not enough. In PE lessons, because the students were hungry, they cancelled running, jumping, high jump and long jump from the curriculum. They taught us Tai Chi," he said, "but those returned overseas Chinese students, mostly they lived on campus...I still remember that on the side of the boy's dorm's airwalks always placed some huge baskets - round and around 1 metre tall and one metre wide. Inside was a lot of food, food mailed to them. It was canned food."
When he turned 15, Chan resigned from the China Young Pioneers, a mass children's group led by the Communist Party that almost all students had to join to pave the way for membership in the Communist Party. The red scarf around his neck, a symbol of glory, became a "burden," he said.
"The environment made me, maybe to put it like that, [come to] a change in my thinking, an awakening, or [you] can say I was rebellious."
Taken by Chan's classmate in 1965 before the Cultural Revolution. Chan: Second row on the right. (Photo courtesy: Chan Hak Chi)
Chan in 1967 .(Photo courtesy: Chan Hak Chi)
The sent-down youth
But then came the "going up to mountains and down to the countryside" movement, one of the most radical political experiments that rusticated approximately 17 million secondary-school graduates for "re-education" in rural areas between 1968 and 1980. In Chinese, they are called the "sent-down youth" or the "educated youth," or "zhiqing." Xi Jinping, China's President, was also one of them.
Behind the mobilisation of millions of young people to do hard labour in rural areas, historians say, was a mix of ideological, political and socio-economic motivations. This included the unsettling problem of the Red Guards, a paramilitary group of 11 million students who attacked, persecuted or killed tens of millions of teachers, intellectuals and other "class enemies" with Mao's support initially. But as the struggle got out of his hand, Mao hoped the sent-down movement would diffuse some of the fanaticism of the young people.
Another justification was the lack of jobs in urban areas to accommodate youngsters unable to go to school and find work. They were "three graduation years," the high schoolers who were supposed to graduate between 1966 to 1968, but the Cultural Revolution interrupted their education.
"There was no absolute necessity to send the young people to the countryside because they could have found work in the cities in the long term," said Professor Michel Bonnin, sinologist and author of The Lost Generation: The Rustication of China's Educated Youth (1968-1980).
In his research, he found the number of educated youth sent to the countryside was approximately the same as peasants hired in cities from 1968 to 1977.
Rural development and land-clearing might be one of the initial motivations, but it wouldn't take years, he said, and peasants should be better fits.
Instead, he said political and ideological reasons were the main driving force, as Mao was "fighting for his place in history" and couldn't accept economic development overriding the revolution.
"What was the most important for Mao Zedong during this period was the most important for China because he decided the fate of China. His main objective was to transform the young people into successors to the revolution, as he said. For that, he was afraid of the role of intellectual development, and he didn't trust intellectuals," he said.
"He thought the best way to keep the revolution alive was to force the young people to have practical education in the production."
Whatever the real reasons, the official narrative was a need to "re-educate" the youth s from toxic and un-communist thoughts.
"Deep down in our hearts, we thought villages were romantic," said Chinese writer Kam Hung, who has been researching sent-down youth since 2012. In 1968, she signed up voluntarily to leave school in Nanjing for rural Jiangsu province, where she stayed until the end of the movement in the late 1970s.
In their fantasy, she said, it was like the lyrics of the 1952 song "The Never-setting Sun Rises Over Grassland."
"In the blue, blue sky, clouds are flowing.
Underneath the white clouds, horses are running," she sang blithely.
Original lyrics in Chinese:
藍藍的天上白雲飄
白雲下面馬兒跑
"I indeed didn't know about the situation of Chinese villages, so at that time, I was stupid. Originally, I could stay to study high school, but I left with the students."
A charismatic, almost god-like leader, Mao eased his responsibility for the Great Leap Forward and the Great Famine by forcing party leaders to continue the revolutionary orientation, said Bonnin, which enabled him to send people to rural areas for years on such a scale.
"He just needed to say a few words or a few sentences, and people just followed. That was the way," he added.
The Communist Party used the army and regional administration to organise the sending of youth to ensure they missed no one. If parents refused to let their children go, Bonnin said, local street committee cadres would just come into the homes and stay there until the young people signed themselves off.
"It was a half enthusiasm and a half constraint, and it worked," he said.
Many, like Chan, had no choice but to see their college dreams squashed. Under China's household registration system, or “hukou” in Chinese, the zhiqing forever lost their urban residence status as they migrated to the countryside. Even if they went to cities, they would not be entitled to their state-provided services and welfare, suggesting their stay in villages could be "lifelong."
After cancelling Chan's urban registry for him at the office, Chan’s mother staggered home, then collapsed and burst into tears – Chan said the scene is still vivid in his mind after all these years.
Chan was scheduled to go to a commune in Boluo county in east-central Guangdong province. The night before his departure, his mother packed quietly and handed him a piece of paper with his aunt's address in Hong Kong and her number.
"You think of a way to smuggle yourself into Hong Kong and find your aunt," Chan recalled his mother saying. "She knew crossing the border bore incredible risks. It could take a life. She still asked me to go."
The next day, she didn't accompany him to the train station. In front of the house, she told Chan "not to worry about her."
Going to Hong Kong required planning and preparation, including gathering equipment, getting in touch with residents on the border for backup and finding compansions, so Chan went to the countryside first and looked for opportunities.
The countryside was no utopia. Most zhiqing endured heavy labour and many died of malnutrition, disease or accidents.
Under the labour voucher system, the community would grade their members' productivity and pay them accordingly after selling crops to the state. Those who weren't good at agricultural work would receive a lower score, meaning less food, and had to rely on the money from families.
Fuk Hing, who doesn't want her surname to be shown, 79, was the only one in her family who didn't go to the countryside because she was already married and given birth to two children.
She is the oldest sister in her family. In the late 1960s, five of her seven siblings went to separate villages as educated youths. Her parents, former owners of dried seafood shops and tobacco businesses, met the same fate as they fell into the "Black Category" who had to undergo "re-education." Other classes listed as black categories included landlords, right-wingers and counter-revolutionaries.
Fuk Hing's parents brought their two youngest kids with them as they left. They were around 60 years old, and her father always suffered from stomach pain, Fuk Hing said.
"That old, how could they farm? They were feeble...And bringing two children...you ask them to farm? It was really pathetic." she said.
A seamstress who earnt 43 yuan a month, Fuk Hing sent 20 yuan to support her parents and siblings.
"Going to Hong Kong was the only way out. If in Hong Kong, they could send money back to our parents and have their own money for living expenses. Also, they could be free, not need to be in the villages. It'd be officially the 'vast world.' If you don't have income, you can't have two meals. What do you do - you can only smuggle yourself into Hong Kong to find the way."
Hon Wai Tin, now 76, was sent to a farm in 1965, after graduating from junior secondary school, for his "landlord element" inherited from his grandparents and parents, he said. Later, he was packed off to the commune in Tanbuzhen, Guangdong Province, and officially became a peasant.
"We didn’t have vegetables for all years...Life was tough. We only ate a little rice. But there was a lot of taro in Taobuzhen,” Hon said. “Not to mention meat; there was no meat," he said.
He recalled they carried farm tools, marched and sang on the way to work in groups of 12 people.
Another zhiqing, Wong Tung Hon, 75, stayed in a commune in the Baoan province, now Shenzhen, to work in the oyster beds in 1968.
"When we were working, the trash floated over from Hong Kong – we treated it as treasure…Like wood boards, plastic buckets, and plastic bags. We picked them up and brought them back to use. You could see the comparison between the two societies," said Wong.
He is the author of "Weighing Anchor," a book of 23 personal stories of the educated youths, including his own, named after the code word used in Guangdong at that time for "smuggling into Hong Kong."
“If we don’t write it down, we are really afraid that it will be forgotten...So we should bear the responsibility; record the true picture," he said. “We said this in the hope that those in power can absorb the lesson from Mao, and treat its people well.”
“Don’t make its people flee again,” Wong added.
He wrote in his memoir that when he came home for visits, his parents were heartbroken to see his face tanned by the sun and legs covered in bruises from oyster shells. His mother gave him HK$5 and told him to leave.
Two years later, he crossed the border into Hong Kong in a boat with three people. He was 23 years old.
"It's simple. In the mainland, at that time, there was no freedom," Wong said.
In addition to the drudgery of work in the countryside, Hon said, the zhiqing were required to "criticise" themselves and others, a practice led by Mao to eliminate "bad" habits and thoughts. Once, he denounced a "landlord" next door for encouraging him to earn money from making shelves, a reason he made up under pressure.
"Wow. So I said her name. Immediately, the officials made her kneel...If I stayed silent, she needed not to kneel. But the people said, 'you're a zhiqing to receive re-education. You don't say something?' I said, 'what can I say? She is a good person,' " he said. “How embarrassed it made me feel!"
Considered a "bad element", Hon was also a target of bullying and discrimination. Friends drifted away from him, and leaders in the community forbade him of taking higher positions in his production team. What he hated the most, he said, was when commissioners randomly raided his home to search for "anti-communist substances." One time, they played and listened to his records on his newly bought gramophone when he was not home.
"The file would follow you the rest of your life...Your family's element, what you did, if you committed crimes etc. The hukou, the files followed you all along until you die," he said.
Meanwhile, Chan soon got promoted to work as a teacher at a village school. There he met his girlfriend Lee, who was also a zhiqing. They postponed their plan to flee to Hong Kong since life was not so bad, until Chan's mother passed away in 1972. By then, Chan already had a considerable sum of savings, but the urge to escape China with Lee was strong.
"I was thinking: 600 yuan - if I failed to go to Hong Kong, if I failed ten times, I would accept my fate. The 600 yuan was enough for me to smuggle myself ten times." Those who attempted to escape had to buy food for the hike and gear such as compasses and watches, which were luxurious in then poverty-stricken China. They also had to pay for transport to travel to towns near the border.
From the late 1960s to 1974, the Hong Kong colonial government had adopted an "open door" immigration on illegal entrants from China. They would face no repatriation and could get entry permits by reporting to authorities. In 1973, the number of undocumented entrants rose to 20,800 that year, with the majority zhiqing chasing a better living, escaping from the political turmoil and prosecution or reuniting with families.
Starting in late 1974, things got more difficult. The Hong Kong government enforced a "touch-base" policy, under which only Chinese immigrants who made it to urban areas were allowed to stay. Those caught in territorial waters or near the border by Hong Kong patrols would be deported.
There were three main routes to enter Hong Kong. Each had its own dangers: the west route, across Shenzhen Bay; the middle overland route and the east route, across Mirs Bay.
The lucky ones, like Hon and Wong, made it at their first attempt, but many tried multiple times. Wong said one of his classmates tried five times.
Wong took the west route from Shekou, Shenzhen, across the Shenzhen Bay, also called Deep Bay, and arrived in the New Territories. There were no sharks this way, but the oyster shells on the beach would cut their arms and legs as they crawled over them. It took Wong 40 minutes to arrive in Hong Kong, but he estimated swimmers might need eight to ten hours to cross the river.
Hon took the middle path, which required no swimming but climbing over the Wutong Mountain. In 1973, he evaded soldiers and their dogs on the China side and arrived in Sha Tau Kok.
Chan began his journey in Longgang in Shenzhen, then went over the mountains to the coast of Mirs Bay and swam toward the islands in Hong Kong where Sai Kung is today. There were sharks in the sea, and it demanded hours of swimming, battling wind and choppy water.
Many died on their way from drowning or shark attacks.
The New York Times reported in a week in 1972, two young men were attacked by sharks while swimming from China to Hong Kong. One died, and the other was badly injured.
Fuk Hing’s brother took the west route in November 1970. Among the four people who went on the journey, including her brother, only two survived: One made it to Hong Kong and the other was arrested by Chinese soldiers and went to jail. Unable to contact them, his brother's disappearance has been a mystery. He was 23 years old.
She guesses he was killed by sharks.
Fuk Hing and her husband supported her brother to leave China and approached people in Huizhou to provide him with food. Guilt and grief have eaten her up.
“I went crazy…I went crazy for thinking too much. For half a year I was never awake. A decent person loses her brother all of a sudden. If I didn’t help my brother to go, he wouldn’t die…How miserable I am as a sister? I forced my brother to death,” she said.
"Only the sky knows the answer to the question," said Wong when asked to estimate the number of deaths, but experts estimate it is in the ten of thousands.
Wong said the street he lived on in Guangzhou had around a hundred families out of which 20 people smuggled themselves to Hong Kong. Among them, one died. After discussing the numbers with others zhiqing, Wong came up with a death rate of around 7% and estimated as many as 30,000 lives might have been lost from 1969 to 1979.
A New York Times article said 91 bodies were recovered in Hong Kong waters in 1972.
No official count by the Chinese government is available.
Propaganda of the sent-down movement. (Credit: chineseposters.net)
Chan and his mother standing in front of their house in 1976 .(Photo courtesy: Chan Hak Chi)
Chan in 1968 . (Photo courtesy: Chan Hak Chi)
She has kept a photo of his brother on her phone, so she can always have a glimpse of the handsome, young face that she has missed for 52 years. But the pain will haunt them forever, she said, adding her siblings and she still shed tears when they mention his brother.
“I’ll never feel peace for the rest of my life,” she said.
Fuk Hing, her parents and children and her siblings eventually escaped to Hong Kong by boat or by swimming in the early 1970s.
Left: People's Daily with the headline "It is very necessary for educated youth to receive re-education from poor-middle peasants," a signal from the Party about the movement.
Right: Five youngsters from Beijing marched to Inner Mongolia to be residents of rural areas.
Up: Column written by "revolution leader," calling, "Listen to Chairman Mao, send children to villages.
(25/12/1968)
Left: "Educated youth going to villages. A showcase of pictures of youngsters doing labour and "being re-educated" by peasants. People's Daily 25/12/1968
Up: Submission of crops to the state in a commune
People's Daily 30/9/1968
The village is a vast world. There one can achieve great accomplishments.
- Mao Zedong.
Ready to go in 1973, when Chan was 26 and Lee 23, they contacted Chan’s sister-in-law in Longgang, Shenzhen, who said she would give them what they needed to swim across Mirs Bay once they arrived.
China was actively trying to stop people from leaving. It was common sense that those attempting to cross the border travelled with minimum baggage and stayed low-profile. If caught, they would stay in jail or detention for "betraying their country and selling out to the enemy" for months before being sent back to their communes. Sometimes they used fake IDs to pass checkpoints to go to provinces and counties on the border in China.
The first time, it failed. Some teens in Longgang spotted that Chan and Lee were not locals and reported them. His sister-in-law who was a resident helped them get away, but they had to return to Guangzhou.
So they gave it a second chance. The week before, some peasants came to Guangzhou to visit the couple. In a zoo, a peacock showed its feather in front of them and made a couple of "360-degree" turns. The two took it as a good omen, Chan said.
On July 10, 1993, Chan had Lee on his bike and started from the south of Guanzhou to Guangshan Highway, aiming for Longgang. Then a police open-top truck came their way. It carried a few convicts, with one labelled "principal offender of illegally crossing the border." Among the spectators, the two rode closer to the truck. It made a turn to open ground and faded from their sight.
A gunshot blast rent the air. Chan saw a flaccid body being dragged to a van afterwards. He didn’t know who was killed or why, but he guessed it was someone who had tried to flee to Hong Kong.
"My heart was distraught," Chan said.
After pasting Huizhou, they reached Longgang. They biked toward the mountains of Ping Shan and hid on the side of the highway, waiting for his sister-in-law's family to bring supplies: a compass, clock, swim ring, rope and food for two to three days. They began climbing the range of mountains to the coast.
To avoid bumping into villagers who might report them, they became nocturnal: trekking at night, creeping and resting during the day. Sweat trickled down their backs; their sore legs treaded on pathless bushes. Going downhill felt like a "bottomless pit," Chan said. Trees, leaves and branches tangled and twined, forming a natural blockage so dense that the couple paused every inch to cut and tear them apart.
So they changed their plan: instead of going down, they moved from one mountainside to another. It took them some extra days and eventually made them run out of food, so they dug wild sweet potatoes. When they finally arrived at the shore of Mirs Bay, it was already the fifth night, at 11:30 pm.
Chan and Lee practice swimming for the last time before they fled to Hong Kong, in July 1973, in a swimming pool in Guangzhou. (Photo courtesy: Chan Hak Chi)
To conceal themselves, “freedom swimmers,” as they are often called, usually got into the water at night and hoped to reach Hong Kong before sunrise. Though it was too late to start, Chan said, with no food for another day and the weather getting stormy, they decided it was now-or-never.
Chan put their belongings inside a plastic bag and secured the swim ring to the rope, which Chan used to pull Lee behind him as they swam to keep her with him, interwinding their destinies together.
Before they got in the water, they took out the ginseng that Lee's mom had given them as a farewell, split it into two then chewed and swallowed as she instructed for energy. She told them she would burn incense sticks to the Bodhisattva god to beg for their safety.
Chan and Lee practice swimming for their escape to Hong Kong.
(Photo courtesy: Chan Hak Chi)
Breathe, pat the arms twice and kick the legs twice - Chan started losing his rhythm as the saltwater burnt his eyes. He was overwhelmed by fear of losing his lover in the vast sea. "So I found something to talk to her...You refer to the lights in front of us and be the helm. You instruct me to turn left, turn right or go straight. You don't stop. Let me hear your voice," he said.
Lee shouted, and Chan swam desperately for the scattered brightness ahead to where they believed was Hong Kong.
His "wish for freedom overcame fear," he wrote in one of the passages he shared with me.
Not knowing how many hours had passed, they found themselves on Crooked Island off the coast of Plover Cove in Hong Kong’s New Territories, embraced by the first rays of sunlight. An elderly woman saw them and told them typhoon signal No. 9 was in force. They had unknowingly swum through Typhoon Dot.
The woman hosted them in her place until the marine police resumed duty after the typhoon. "We didn't even remember to say thanks. It was like a 100 m race. We sprinted to the pier...Saw a white boat: it said 'police marine' in Chinese and English," Chan said, describing the excitement when they reported to the police.
Bonnin, then 22, who came from France to Hong Kong in 1971 to learn Chinese as a young student, accidentally hosted freedom swimmers on the island of Tung Ping Chau when he and his friends were on holiday.
In 1973, one night, just before he closed the door, a young man showed up from nowhere and asked if he could stay for the night.
He was from "the other side," the young man said.
Bonnin was sceptical because the young man's clothes were dry. He explained that he put them in a plastic bag before going into the sea. They shook hands, and his freezing hands convinced Bonnin he had just come out from the water. The young man was an 18-year-old peasant from China, and he lost his friend while swimming. Hoping the friend had arrived too, Bonnin and others wandered around with lamps to search for him. They couldn't find him, so they went back to the house. Bonnin and his French friend stayed upstairs to chat with the young man, and their girlfriends were going to sleep downstairs.
Suddenly, a cry of terror from their girlfriends once again disrupted the quiet night. They saw a "ghostly face" behind the window at the back of the house, who turned out to be another young man. His voice trembled as he said, "help, help." Bonnin thought he was the first young man's friend who went missing, so he told him "His friend had arrived" and asked him to come over.
But the first young man said he didn't know the guy.
"At that time, I thought, 'what happened? Maybe tonight there is something special, and all the Chinese people from the mainland will come to our place. What would we do?' " said Bonnin.
The second freedom swimmer was from North Guangdong. The sons of a former landlord, he and his older brother couldn't stand their "bad class origin" and decided to flee the land. Only he made it - Chinese border police shot his brother in the leg and caught him. He walked for two weeks in the woods before reaching the beach to swim and was exhausted.
The encounters with two freedom swimmers the same night freaked out Bonnin and his friends. They went to the village leader for help.
The open-door policy was in force, so Chinese immigrants without a permit didn't have to worry about repatriation, the village leader told them. He added he wondered why no illegal immigrants knocked on his door that night because the weather was perfect for them to swim - then he figured out they all went to Bonnin's place.
The two young men reported themselves to the police for permission to stay, but the first one never found his friend.
Then a French youngster who took part in May 1968, a student-led movement in French that triggered mass, often-violent protests and nationwide strikes and celebrated communist leaders on some occasions, Bonnin drew parallels between the situation in China and France. "Marxism, revolution and the Vietnam War" were their "common language," he said.
"That's something that, of course, made me reflect a little because at that time... I've never been a Maoist...but still I was very leftist, and I thought that you should understand the problem of China, which was a poor country," he said.
"But then I thought, 'wow. If people are really risking their lives to leave China, there must be a good reason.' So I began to have more doubt about the Chinese Communist Party."
A fortuitous experience on Tung Ping Chau - so extraordinary that Bonnin recalled he wrote a letter to his parents about it - marked the beginning of his lifelong interest in the educated youth, the "lost generation" as he called them. For 50 years, he has been devoting himself to researching and teaching about zhiqing, Maoism and political and social issues in China. Bonnin, now 73, is a research director at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences, or EHESS in Paris. Before that, he taught at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
In 1976, three years after the escape, Chan and Lee visited the woman and her husband on Crooked Island with their 1-year-old daughter. They took a picture of Lee holding her baby and standing in front of the waters and mountains she and Chan overcame.
Then in 2014 and 2016, they made trips there again. The village and the house were left desolate, but they were able to go back to the shabby attic where the woman kept them for three days after they arrived. After all these years, the tide had gotten lower and the hill filled with trees, but the landscape stayed the same, Chan said.
Chan and Lee got married, had a family and built their life in Hong Kong. Both have retired now.
The couple visited Crooked Island over the years and traced back to the location where they began swimming.
(Photo courtesy: Chan Hak Chin)
For almost 50 years, even on typhoon days, Chan shows up in swim shorts and goggles near the pier in Whampoa. He stretches his legs and arms, does a couple of handstands and plunges into the water, treading alongside boats sailing in the Victoria Harbour.
The storm-tossed sea almost engulfed him and his wife, but it gave them freedom in the end.
"Since I was small, I loved the water. Especially when I swam across the border, I thought maybe the sea helped me. After coming here, though the work is hard, no matter how hard it is and the stress, once I jump into the sea, it's like all troubles are offset..."
"I am not afraid. I love the sea so much," he said.
"She entrusted her daughter to me. I was so stressed," Chan said.
"...Her life was more important than mine. I had nothing to worry about because my parents had passed away. But her parents were alive and in Guangzhou. She only let her mother know. Her father and brothers did not know she followed me to Hong Kong and take this perilous path."
Lightning was flashing over the sky. The waves that night were exceptionally tall - like a one-floor building, slammed in their faces and knocked them down. Lee was horrified and wanted to quit. Chan comforted her and said, "I am here." He later wrote down the experience and recalled he was scared as well. He grew up around the Pearl River but had never seen a sea that furious.
After several attempts to enter the water failed, the two were finally picked up by a wave and swept out into the water. Chan knotted the rope across his shoulder and asked Lee to grip the swim ring no matter what. They let go of each other's hands and began to swim.
