HONG KONG: The Endless Ferryboat Ride

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The passenger on the Hong Kong-Macao ferry last week was as weather-beaten, ageless and nondescript as a chunk of driftwood. Like the driftwood, he seemed doomed to float from shore to shore on the China Sea forever. He had no passport. His name, he said, is Michael Patrick O'Brien, but he readily admitted: "Back home in Washington and Oregon, they call me Steven Stanley Regan." He never knew his father; his mother was Hungarian; the only identification he possesses is a Red Cross certificate which calls him "a stateless Irishman."

Up to last month, not even Michael himself could plot with any certainty the course he had sailed over the last 40-odd years to reach the Portuguese outpost of Macao. It had included hitches in both the U.S. Army & Navy, a job as a bartender in Shanghai's notorious Blood Alley, a spell in a Japanese prison camp, numberless scrapes with the law, occasional berths as ship's officer on vessels hard up for mariners, and long years as a soldier of fortune in oriental ports. When he hit Macao three weeks ago, Portuguese authorities took one look and told him to get out of town within a week. Michael bowed to their authority and boarded the ferry Lee Hong to Hong Kong.

When the ferry landed at Hong Kong, 40 miles away, British officials refused to let him get off because his papers were not in order. Back went Michael to Macao, then back to Hong Kong: this week he was still traveling back & forth, like the Flying Dutchman. The ferry line lets him ride free. A friend has sent him money to buy food on the boat. The Lee Hong's captain knows him quite well by now and often invites him to share breakfast. "But," says Captain William Layfield, "he can't stay here forever."

Michael O'Brien is not worried. "I'll stay aboard just so long," he says. "Then, if nothing happens, I'll go over the side."