with Orientals depending on the mood of the next redneck you met.
It pained Mike to remember the sadness in his parents' eyes when they urged their children to not think about going to the bathroom until they got to the safety of their own house; just to avoid the uncertainty and impulsiveness of white shop owners. Growing up Asian in the fifties and sixties in the United States meant you weren't included, not by the whites nor the blacks.
But this changed dramatically for Mike from his first days at the University; Mike had been immersed in a culture that his ancestors in China would have never understood. The Grounds of the University of Virginia, as the faculty and students referred to the campus, were perhaps the most beautiful thing that Mike had ever seen when he arrived at the school in the fall of 1962.
A favorite memory of his last days on the Grounds was the signing off of radio stations in the early morning hours - alone in his room on the Lawn, the original student quarters designed by Mr. Jefferson in the early eighteen hundreds and continuously used by students ever since. Mike treasured the memory of the orange glow from the dying embers in his fireplace casting flickering shadows on his walls as he labored under the benevolent dictatorship of Professor Fred Morris, his teacher and friend. The memory was embedded in his mind as was the slow haunting refrain of "Dixie" floating over the air as the radio stations signed off, the drowsy ethereal nature of that tune played as it was meant to be played; not the jangling strident march that had been adopted by the Confederacy during the Civil War and segregationists thereafter. He could never understand how that sweet song could have been turned into such a vehicle of hate.
What Mike treasured most about Charlottesville was a sense of finally belonging. This sense of belonging was important to Mike particularly given the isolation he felt while growing up in segregated Washington, D.C. Mike was fighting his own subconscious war against a society that seemed to give aid and comfort to obnoxious racists, who would use whatever skills they had to put others "in their place." Here he could be himself, and not the stereotyped Chinese, meant to be placed in a corner and ignored as his father and other Chinese had been before him.
It was an auspicious moment when he was commissioned an Ensign in the United States Navy following graduation in 1966; a sense of finally arriving. After graduate school, Mike was assigned to the Special Projects Office at the Naval Construction Battalion Center. He considered himself to be downright lucky to have been further assigned to work with Bob McHugh on such an interesting engineering problem. He had heard about Bob McHugh and looked forward to learning a lot about oceanography from this warrior-scientist.
The only hesitation Mike felt as he drove to Annapolis was the nagging questions. What would he do if he accidently saw Corrine?
1967: Found
0800 Hours: Tuesday, October 4, 1967: Aboard the USS Marysville Somewhere Over the Hatteras Abyssal Plain, West of Bermuda
Captain George Vander, U.S.N., put his binoculars down and turned to what seemed to be his thousandth cup of hot black, acrid coffee. The latest link in his chain smoking habit hung from his lips and the bluish smoke lazily reached toward the overhead of the bridge.
"Mister Evans," Vander called without looking back. Immediately, a thin, bespectacled Lieutenant appeared from the shadows on the bridge of the USS Marysville and joined the Captain.
Frederick Evans, a Ph.D. from Caltech, had already established a reputation for geosciences measurement including his duty on the fateful March 20, 1967, flight of the P-3B Orion. Evans had been seconded to the Marysville especially for this mission to search for and locate the mysterious object.
"Mr. Evans, have you ever seen anything as dang fool as that Nematode contraption?"