Strange Stones: Dispatches from East and West (P.S.)

by Peter Hessler

  During one of my trips to Japan, I contacted Tadamasa Goto’s publicist, who said that his client wasn’t accepting interviews. So I got in touch with Tomohiko Suzuki, a journalist who has written for yakuza fanzines, which cover criminals as celebrities. Recently there had been rumors that Suzuki was channeling messages from Goto.

  We met at a Tokyo coffeehouse. Suzuki wore blue work clothes and heavy boots, because he had just returned from a charity event in a town called Minamisoma, which was still suffering from the effects of the tsunami. In recent weeks, yakuza had been donating aid, and Goto had pitched in by sponsoring the day’s event, which was called With All Due Respect. When I asked if any famous yakuza had attended, Suzuki named one and said, “He’s the guy who stabbed the cult member in front of the media.” I didn’t pursue the details; by now I understood that the blandly offhand tone of such statements was basically the point.

  Suzuki said that Adelstein’s status as a foreigner had protected him from Goto. People in law enforcement and diplomatic circles had told me that they still took the threats seriously, but Suzuki said that their caution wasn’t necessary anymore. “Those are the kinds of things that yakuza say all the time,” he said. “It’s kind of like saying ‘Hello’ for a yakuza.”

  A few months later, though, there were reports that Goto had become formally active again in organized crime. Not long after that, new laws went into effect that finally made it illegal to pay off yakuza. It was unclear how rigorously such regulations would be enforced, but they seemed to reflect a growing desire to control criminal groups. Suzuki hadn’t said anything about Goto’s plans during our meeting. He had visited the crime boss just a week earlier. “I didn’t notice anything wrong with him—he looked very healthy,” Suzuki said. “I think UCLA did a good job.”

  On the morning of my departure, Mochizuki drove Adelstein and me to Narita Airport. Adelstein had heard that somebody had recently smuggled a Marine-issued rifle through customs. “I have a contact in customs that I’ll talk to about it,” he said. “There might be a story.” Afterward, he planned to go to a press conference downtown, and he was dressed in black suit pants, a pin-striped shirt, and a black trench coat with a red silk lining. He wore his porkpie hat. We had been on the road for a few minutes before he realized that he had forgotten his shoes. He laughed hysterically at his bulky house slippers and said that he’d have to buy a pair of loafers at an airport shop.

  He was scheduled to undergo a chemotherapy treatment in about a week. At 7:25, he lit the day’s first clove cigarette, and he chain-smoked during the long drive to the airport. On the way, Mochizuki asked Adelstein if he’d like to go on a beach vacation with him. “We should do this before one of us has bad health,” the driver said. A couple of nights earlier, I had been in the car when Adelstein asked Mochizuki if he had ever killed a person. The driver paused, as if choosing his words carefully. “I’ve never killed anybody who wasn’t a yakuza,” he said at last, laughing.

  Stories tended to tumble out of Adelstein, full of crazy yakuza details, and today he told a new one. He said that during his period of obsessive research, he had conducted an affair with one of Goto’s mistresses. The gangster reportedly kept more than a dozen women in Tokyo and other cities, and Adelstein slept with one who gave him useful information. Eventually, he helped her escape Goto by introducing her to a gay salaryman who needed a wife and was about to be posted overseas. He said that the couple still shared an address in Europe and got along very well. I asked what the mistress was like.

  “We had this lovely conversation once in bed,” Adelstein said. “She said, ‘Do you love me?’ I said, ‘No, but I like you.’ She said, ‘I like you, too, you’re a lot of fun.’ Then she said, ‘Are you sleeping with me to get information about Goto?’ I said, ‘Pretty much. What about you?’ She said, ‘Well, I hate the motherfucker and every time I sleep with you it’s like I’m stabbing him in the face.’ She was into astronomy. Once we went to a planetarium in Sunshine City. I think that was the only time we ever went out in public together. That was our only date.” He continued, “It was nice. Another time I gave her a gift—I bought an expensive planetarium set that Sega makes. She cried.”

  He lit another cigarette. He had told me once that he didn’t expect to have a long life, but in Tokyo he always seemed happy and full of energy. And I liked the image from his story: the odd couple at the planetarium, the Japanese gangster’s mistress and the cross-eyed kid from Missouri, both of them staring up at the stars. I thought about that until we reached the airport and he went off to find some shoes.

  When You Grow Up

  Little Lu, Little Zhang, and Little Liu waited for me at the end of the bridge. They were ten, twelve, and fourteen years old, respectively, and they had come from the same village in northern Sichuan Province. They said that they had dropped out of school and migrated to the south because their families were too poor to afford the school fees. I had met them three days earlier in downtown Shenzhen, where they had tried to sell me pornographic video disks.

  They told me that at first they had worked for a man who hired children to sell pornography because they were too young to be sent to jail. He paid each child three hundred yuan a month, about thirty-six dollars. But the boys said that after a while they had gone freelance. Initially I had trouble believing this—it seemed impossible that children so young would be capable of handling an illegal business on their own. But during the month that I spent in Shenzhen, I visited them on a regular basis, and I never saw any sign of adult supervision. Eventually I came to believe that most of the things they told me were true. They claimed that twice they had been arrested and deported from the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone, but both times they had returned by climbing the chain-link fence that surrounded the city. They rented an apartment and cooked for themselves. They slept in one bed. They bought pornographic disks for four yuan and sold them for ten, or a little more than a dollar. They pooled their money and earned enough for each boy to send at least three hundred yuan per month to his family.

  I had promised to take them to lunch today. We found a Cantonese restaurant, where the boys sat down and immediately ordered iced coffee and hotpot, a combination that I had not enjoyed previously. After the hotpot arrived, the boys took every condiment container on the table and emptied them into the bowl. The hotpot oil bubbled around big clumps of salt, MSG, and hot pepper. They had done the same thing to fried chicken when I took them to KFC a few days earlier.

  Within two minutes they had finished the iced coffee.

  “I want a beer,” said Little Lu. He was the youngest of the trio, but nevertheless he was the leader. I told him that he was too young for beer and that we would have tea instead.

  They ate hungrily for a while and then Little Lu called for the waitress. I had never seen a ten-year-old speak to an adult with such authority.

  “Give me a beer,” he said.

  “Don’t give him a beer,” I said. “We’ll drink tea.”

  “I want a beer,” said Little Lu. The waitress seemed unsure who was in charge here.

  “No beer,” I said firmly.

  “You have to drink beer with hotpot,” said Little Lu. “We do that at my hometown.”

  “His father has a big alcohol tolerance,” said Little Zhang, pointing at Little Lu.

  This was one of the things that I believed to be true, although I didn’t want to pursue the subject right now. Instead, I asked about how they avoided getting caught by the police. Little Liu and Little Zhang said that they kept their hair very short so the cops had nothing to grab onto, and they avoided long-sleeved shirts for the same reason. Like the others, Little Lu was dressed in a tight short-sleeved shirt, but his hair was longer. It was parted carefully down the middle and he seemed vain about it. In the middle of the meal, he got up to use the bathroom; when he returned, his hair was slicked back. I had been watching him carefully and that was the only time that he was out of my sight. Almost immediately another waitress
came over.

  “Do you want Tsingtao or Yanjing?” she said.

  “Don’t bring us any beer.”

  “But he just ordered it!”

  “Don’t listen to him.”

  The boys finished the vegetables and meat in the hotpot, and then they slurped down the broth, which had acquired a bright chemical color from all the condiments. They still seemed famished. I asked what they wanted to be when they grew up.

  “A driver,” said Little Lu.

  “A security guard,” said Little Liu.

  Little Zhang smiled and said, “I want to go home.”

  Quartet

  The first accident wasn’t my fault. I had rented a Volkswagen Jetta and driven to my weekend home in Sancha, a village north of Beijing. I parked at the end of the road, where the pavement widens into an empty lot. It’s impossible to drive within Sancha; like virtually all Chinese villages, it was built before anybody had cars, and homes are linked by narrow footpaths.

  About an hour after I arrived, my neighbor asked me to move the car, because the villagers were about to mix cement in the lot. That day, Leslie, my wife, and I were both on our computers, trying to do some writing.

  “I can move it if you want,” my neighbor said. His name is Wei Ziqi, and he had recently completed a driving course and received his license. It was his proudest achievement—he was one of the first in the village to learn to drive. I handed him the keys and sat back down at my computer. Half an hour later, he returned and stood in the doorway silently. I asked if everything was all right.

  “There’s a problem with the car,” he said slowly. He was smiling, but it was a tight Chinese grin of embarrassment, the kind of expression that makes your pulse quicken.

  “What kind of problem?” I said.

  “I think you should come see it.”

  In the lot, a couple of villagers were staring at the car; they were grinning, too. The front bumper had been knocked completely off. It lay on the road, leaving the Jetta’s grill gaping, like a child who’s lost three teeth and can’t stop smiling. Why did everybody look so goddam happy?

  “I forgot about the front end,” Wei Ziqi said.

  “What do you mean?” I said.

  “I’m not used to driving something with a front end,” he said. “During my course we only drove Liberation trucks. They’re flat in front.”

  I had parked the Jetta parallel to a wall, and he had backed up and turned the wheel sharply, not realizing that the front end would swing in the opposite direction. I knelt down and inspected the bumper—it was hopelessly bent.

  “How much do you think it’s going to cost?” he said.

  “I have no idea,” I said. “I’ve never done something like this before.”

  He got some wire and tied the bumper to the front end. He offered repeatedly to pay for it, but I told him not to worry; I’d deal with the rental company. The next day, I set off to return the car.

  Driving is something that I take very seriously. When I turned sixteen, I was told that handling an automobile is a privilege and a responsibility, and I still get nervous thinking about the day that my mother drove me to the Wilkes Boulevard United Methodist Church, in Columbia, Missouri, to take my first driving exam. The state’s Division of Motor Vehicles rented office space in the building, and the exam began and ended in the church parking lot. In mid-Missouri, it was widely known that when it came to judging sixteen-year-old males the DMV was even tougher than the Methodists. They failed boys for not checking the blind spot, for running yellow lights, for tiny adjustments on parallel parking. There were rumors that any boy who was visibly confident would flunk—if you believed that you were predestined for a license, then the folks at the Wilkes Boulevard United Methodist Church would prove you wrong. I took the exam in my family’s Dodge Caravan, and afterward the examiner gave me a stern speech. It began with the statement “You’re lucky we don’t professionally evaluate you” and ended with “I hope I don’t see you in the hospital someday.” Between these remarks, the man acknowledged that I had passed by the barest of margins, which was all that mattered. There was no purgatory at the DMV. You either failed or you passed, and success meant that as long as you avoided trouble and kept up the paperwork, you’d never have to take another driving exam in the state of Missouri.

  After moving to Beijing, I was surprised that my Missouri license had some currency in the People’s Republic. The country was in the early stages of an auto boom; Beijing alone was registering almost a thousand new drivers every day. All Chinese applicants were required to have a medical checkup, take a written exam, enroll in a month-long technical course, and then pass two driving tests. But the process had been pared down for any foreigner who already had certification from his home country, and all I had to do was pass a special foreigner’s road test. The examiner was in his midforties, and he wore white cotton driving gloves with tobacco stains on the fingers. He lit up a Red Pagoda Mountain as soon as I got in the car. It was a Volkswagen Santana, the nation’s most popular passenger vehicle at the time.

  “Start the car,” the man said, and I turned the key. “Drive forward,” he said.

  We were north of the city, in a neighborhood that had been cleared of all traffic—no cars, no bikes, no pedestrians. It was the most peaceful street I’d ever seen in the capital, and I wish I could have savored it. But after fifty yards the examiner spoke again. “Pull over,” he said. “Turn off the car.”

  The Santana fell silent; the man filled out forms, his pen moving efficiently. He had barely burned through the tip of his Red Pagoda Mountain. “Is that all?” I said.

  “That’s it,” the man said. He asked me where I had learned Chinese, and we chatted for a while. One of the last things he said to me was, “You’re a very good driver.”

  That summer, I began renting cars from a company called Capital Motors. The car-rental industry was a new one; five years earlier, almost nobody in Beijing would have thought of hiring an automobile for a weekend trip. But now my local company had a fleet of about fifty vehicles, mostly Chinese-made Jettas and Santanas. Usually, I rented a Jetta, which cost twenty-five dollars per day and involved an enormous amount of paperwork. The most elaborate part of the process was a survey of the car’s exterior, led by an employee, who recorded dents and scratches on a diagram. This inspection often took a while—the Jetta is a small automobile, but the marks of Beijing traffic made the most of the limited canvas. After documenting the damage, the employee turned the key in the ignition and showed me the gas gauge. Sometimes it was half full; sometimes there was a quarter tank. Sometimes he studied it and announced: “Three-eighths.” It was my responsibility to return the car with exactly the same amount of fuel. One day, I decided to make a contribution to the fledgling industry.

  “You should rent cars with a full tank, and then require the customer to bring it back full,” I said. “That’s how rental companies do it in America.”

  “That would never work here,” said Mr. Wang, who usually handled my rental. He was a big man with thinning hair that flopped loosely over a wide forehead; he always seemed to be in a good mood. He sat with two other men in the Capital Motors front office, where they smoked cigarettes as if it were a competition. The room was so full of smoke that I could barely read the company evaluation sign that hung on the wall:

  CUSTOMER SATISFACTION RATING: 90%

  EFFICIENCY RATING: 97%

  APPROPRIATE SERVICE DICTION RATING: 98%

  SERVICE ATTITUDE RATING: 99%

  “That might work in America, but it wouldn’t work here,” Mr. Wang continued. “People in China would return the car empty.”

  “Then you charge them a lot extra to refill it,” I said. “Make it a standard rule. Charge extra if people don’t obey and they’ll learn to follow it.”

  “Chinese people would never do that!”

  “I’m sure they would,” I said.

  “You don’t understand Chinese people!” Mr. Wang said, laughing, an
d the other men nodded. As a foreigner, I often heard that statement, and it had a way of ending discussion. The Chinese people had invented the compass, silk, paper, gunpowder, the seismoscope; they had sailed to Africa in the fifteenth century; they had built the Great Wall; over the past decade they had expanded their economy at a rate never before seen in the developing world. They could return a rental car with exactly three-eighths of a tank of gas, but filling it was apparently beyond the realm of possibility. We had a couple more conversations about this, but finally I dropped the subject. It was impossible to argue with somebody as friendly as Mr. Wang.

  He seemed especially cheerful when I returned the Jetta with the ruined bumper. In the past, I had brought back cars with new dents; this was inevitable in a city with more than two million cars, most of them handled by rookies. But I had never done any serious damage, and Mr. Wang’s eyes grew wide when he saw the Jetta. “Waah!” the man said. “How did you do that?”

  “I didn’t,” I said. I described Wei Ziqi’s lack of experience with hooded cars, and Mr. Liu looked confused; the more I expanded on this topic, the blanker his expression became. At last, I abandoned the front end—I offered to pay for the bumper.

  “Mei wenti!” Mr. Wang said, smiling. “No problem! We have insurance! You just need to write an accident report. Do you have your chop?”

  I told Mr. Wang that my chop—an official stamp registered to one’s work unit, in my case, The New Yorker—was at home.

  “No problem! Just bring it next time.” He opened a drawer and pulled out a stack of papers; each was blank except for a red stamp. Mr. Wang rifled through the pile, selected a paper, and laid it in front of me. The chop read: “U.S.-China Tractor Association.”