Life has fast deteriorated for Jane Sorensen during the only one and half a year since we first found and interviewed the half-Danish half-Thai descendant of the Danish boatswain Villy Sorensen who sailed on Thailand during the years 1964 to 1974.
In the previous article about Jane Sorensen, we learn about her life with her father and mother until she was 10 years old and one day his father did not – without any explanation as far as Jane is concerned – returned to live with her and her Mum.
When we first met Jane in the spring of 2022, her health was quite stable. Today, she hasn’t got much time left and she is well aware of that fact. She was hospitalized for 17 day at the public Chulalongkorn Hospital undergoing surgical treatment for colon cancer and she has been fitted with a colostomy bag while receiving chemotherapy. She is virtually skin and bones as we find her on the bed she has arranged for herself on some boxes and broken chairs behind the 7-eleven where she lived also the first time we met her.
Clutching her colostomy bag, she confesses that it is painful when there are bowel movements. She urinates normally but has to get up to go to the toilet which is 4 meters away. That hurts, too. She cannot wash herself except with a wet towel. When you know how bathing several times per day is essential to the feeling of cleanliness for a Thai, this is equally painful although on a different level.
We are here to share with her our joy of the progress we have made in the search for her father and potentially siblings in Denmark. Her eyes light up when we tell her how at first we were inspired by another half-Danish half-Thai person, who today lives in the USA, Coco Goetsche. She picked up our efforts which had dried out in the face of no progress.
Coco was born around to same time as Jane in Bangkok but under diametrically opposite economic circumstances. While Coco attended international school as a child living in Bangkok, Jane went to the local temple school. When Coco moved to live in the USA, Jane was getting a job at the local sailor’s bar, the famous Mosquito Bar the mentioning of which can call a fond smile on the lips of any seasoned sailor who has ever sailed on Bangkok in the 60’s, 70’s and early 80’s.
Inspired by Coco Goetsche, we got in touch with the Danish Sailors Union, Secretary General Gert Christensen, whom we had previously asked if he could help. Now he wrote back on 17 October 2023 informing us, that he had been in touch with another sailor, Per Sorensen, who remembered that he had sailed with boatswain Villy Sorensen on the ship Svendborg Maersk in 1981 and 1982. Villy had told him about how he nearly died as a crew member on the tanker Jakob Maersk which in January 1975 caught fire just outside the port of Leixoes in Portugal. Villy Sorensen was among the crew of seventeen at the time of the accident. Seven of them died. Villy survived his jump from the back of the ship 20 plus meters down into the burning oil spill from where he was picked up by a tug boat.
That was the year after he had been reassigned from the Bangkok route to the oil tanker and that was the reason why he didn’t return to Bangkok as usual.
Having recovered from the accident, Villy Sorensen went back work, eventually ending up on Svendborg Maersk where he met his buddy Per Sorensen who told Gert Christensen about him.
Now, we had so much information that we believed it would be possible to ask Maersk for help. We contacted the Press Division and asked for help and from there we were transferred to the historical documentation department, where the initial message was, that they had no records of Villy Sorensen. They did share with us a schedule of ports which the Svendborg Maersk had called on during 1981 and 1982. One of the voyages had come really close to Bangkok. Svendborg Maersk had sailed through the Panama Canal to Australia and from there up to Singapore. However, the ship did not go up the coast from there but turned around and went back to Europe the away it had come.
Villy didn’t jump ship to visit his daughter in Bangkok, but he told his buddy Per about her and how he had lost contact with her. We don’t know if he tried to send letters to her and her mother. The slum burned down a few years after he left them and any letters to the burned down houses would have been returned – if not just destroyed.
For Jane, hearing about how she had been missed by her father eight years after he left her was too much. She broke down in tears and cried in a mix of pain and happiness that she was not the only one who had missed him. He had also missed her!
Then Maersk came back with new information. They had found a crew list from Jakob Maersk in 1974, and there he was! His first name was correctly spelled Willy with a double W, his middle name was Christian and his last name Sorensen with a Danish oe. And next to his name was his birthdate: 13 November 1918. That information reached us exactly on that date in 2023. That would have been Willy’s 105 year birthday – had he been alive.
We couldn’t wait to bring all of these good tidings to Jane with Christmas coming up and all. And we were shocked and devastated by the state of health that we found her in. Only 58 years old, she looks much, much older.
We asked her if she would accept Coco’s offer to help find a room where she could live instead of on the floor behind the 7-eleven. But she refused. She was at home here. People would pass her by, the noise in the morning would wake her up, no, please. We asked about the hospital costs. That was taken care of. She had donated her body to the hospital. As she said “they can take anything they think somebody else may be able to use and burn the rest,” not realizing that they probably wouldn’t use anything from her worn-out tiny body.
Jane had found closure in the fact that her father had told his friends about her and therefore had missed her as she missed him. We told her we would continue our search for some siblings that may still be alive, but she said we shouldn’t.
“Don’t, it doesn’t matter to me any more,” she said, tears welling up in her eyes again.
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