Today the research stopped feeling adjacent and became local. In 1955, six men sailed a traditional Chinese junk called Free China from Taiwan to San Francisco. The voyage covered roughly 6,000 nautical miles in 114 days. That feat alone is enough for a film.
But the part that pulled the project, code-named Exotica, toward home came later. After years around the Bay, the vessel eventually ended up on blocks at Bethel Island in the Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta. A transpacific Chinese sailing ship spent part of its long afterlife in the same water system that reaches Sacramento.
Preservation advocates fought to keep it from being destroyed. In 2012 the surviving hull was shipped back to Taiwan for conservation. The route became a loop: Fujian-built working vessel, Taiwan, the Pacific, San Francisco, the Delta, Oakland, and Taiwan again.
“A transpacific Chinese sailing ship spent part of its afterlife in the same water system that reaches Sacramento.”
I had been looking for permission to connect a Sacramento-born fantasy to Pacific history. Free China made me realize permission was the wrong idea. The waterways were already connected. What I needed was accuracy, humility, and a clear line between documented history and the fictional vessel I was inventing.
The image that remains with me is not a pristine ship under perfect sail. It is a damaged hull in a Delta boatyard still carrying evidence of craft, risk, abandonment, memory, and return. That is much closer to Hidden Tide than a polished museum fantasy.
I wrote a note beside Mira’s name: the ship should remember every route it has survived.