About the Author
Dominic Stevenson is a writer, musician and videographer. He spent 11 years living and travelling in Asia before settling in the UK, where he works in video. He continues to travel widely.
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Epub ISBN: 9781845968854
Version 1. 0
www.mainstreampublishing.com
Copyright © Dominic Stevenson, 2010
All rights reserved
The moral right of the author has been asserted
First published in Great Britain in 2010 by
MAINSTREAM PUBLISHING COMPANY
(EDINBURGH) LTD
7 Albany Street
Edinburgh EH1 3UG
ISBN 9781845965662
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any other means without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for insertion in a magazine, newspaper or broadcast
This book is a work of non-fiction based on the life, experiences and recollections of the author. In some cases names of people have been changed to protect the privacy of others. The author has stated to the publishers that, except in such minor respects not affecting the substantial accuracy of the work, the contents of this book are true
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Acknowledgements
With thanks to the following for their help in bringing this book to print: Andrea Neville, Robert H. Stevenson, Richard D. Stevenson, Neelia Clabburn, Elspeth Barker, George Szirtes, Stephen Foster, David Holzer, Mark Baber, Sasha Otterburn, Kelvin O’Mard, David Ackles, Bill Campbell and Karyn Millar.
Contents
Prologue
1 The Poisoned Yangtze
2 Into the Dragon
3 Killing the Rooster
4 The Company of Men
5 Going to Court
6 The Foreigners’ Unit
7 Some Kind of Eden
8 The Monkey House Rules
9 Coming Down From the Mountain
10 Peshwari Mangoes
11 One-Way Ticket
12 Sex and Drugs and Mao Zedong
13 Going Home
Epilogue: The Road to Madrid
Postscript
‘The Darkening of the Light’
In this clouded view we forget that all changes are like streams, which travel a long way underground before they come to the surface.
A Guide to the I Ching, Carol K. Anthony
Prologue
Not for the first time, Wang sat on the floor, hands cuffed behind his back, staring at the wall. With his shaven head and grey flannel uniform he resembled a wretched Buddha, moving only to reposition his cramped legs from beneath his rigid torso. He’d already had a good kicking from our top prisoner, Mr Zhao, and his crew, but this time the guards were involved, which meant the inmate being handcuffed first. Several prisoners had reported having personal belongings stolen, and a search had revealed a stash of the missing items under Wang’s bed. Quite what these missing objects were was a mystery; the Chinese were forbidden any kind of personal effects anyway. The assumption was that Wang had been thieving food from other prisoners, probably some tinned pineapple or dried fish that their families had brought in on visiting days.
I stood on the landing chatting to Larry as the Chinese sat around playing cards and chewing sunflower seeds. Small mountains of sticky husks piled up on the corners of their tables as they slapped cards onto the Formica surfaces as if they were swatting invisible flies. The relative peace of the wing was broken as three guards appeared from round the corner, and the Chinese bolted upright in their seats, hands clasped in front of them. Captain Xu, looking like a man with a job to do for once, led the way, his eyes staring ahead, with Jin and Zhu close behind, glaring dutifully at the back of his head. The Chinese inmates trailed their progress down the block like automated mannequins before they stopped outside Wang’s cell. The prisoner glanced sideways, momentarily catching the green uniforms out of the corner of his eye. Xu laid a disconcerting hand on his shoulder and Wang hoisted his contorted frame off the wooden pallet of the cell floor, using his damp forehead for balance as he levered himself into an upright position. The four men walked back down the corridor, Wang’s head hanging like a condemned man’s, and as they filed past, the Chinese sifted through their pockets for more sunflower seeds and continued their card games.
The guards’ office consisted of two cells knocked into one and was situated next to the foreigners’ sitting area. The door clicked shut as we sat and looked at each other. Nobody doubted what would happen next. Wang would be gagged with a wet flannel while a second set of handcuffs was put round his ankles and tied to the existing pair round his wrists. A jug of drinking water would be poured over him for added effect and he’d lie on his stomach like the hog-tied pigs I’d seen at the markets in Guangzhou, staring into space, their petrified eyes glazed over like jellied eight-balls as they awaited their fate. But Wang knew what punishment to expect; after all, it had only been a matter of weeks since his last visit to the guards’ office.
Someone tried to alleviate the tension by cracking a bad joke. Nobody laughed. A disgruntled card player at the other end of the wing began yelling at his mates, waving a greasy chicken’s claw in the air like a bloodthirsty preacher, pointing accusingly at his opponents at the table. Another guy hawked a lump of phlegm into the front of his mouth, swilling the grisly globule around before lobbing the yellow slime into a stainless steel spittoon beneath the cell block window.
A caustic crackle began to radiate from inside the guards’ room, the sound punctuated by harsh thuds followed by high-pitched squeals. I looked at Larry, who plunged his head down into a book he was pretending to be interested in. Jürgen appeared from his cell and sat down next to Ludwig, who put his headphones on and began to gnaw on the end of a pencil. Gareth looked over towards me and, shaking his head, turned up his radio, hoping to drown out the hideous din of a convulsing human being eight feet away, but the radio waves picked up the electrical pulse of the cattle prods, amplifying the ghastly hum that ricocheted down the cell block like an epileptic rattlesnake. He looked up, turned off the radio and walked over to the window, where prisoners from 10th Brigade were pouring their night soil into the sewers below.
Moments later, the officers’ door sprung open and Wang staggered out, flanked by two guards, their faces flushed by the adrenalin rush of their grisly work. The Chinese sat solemnly as the officers led him back to his cell, hands cuffed behind his back. Wang’s face was caked in snot and tears. Pink tracks streamed down his cheeks, which twitched with muscular spasms; his eyelids drooped downwards, zombie-like, and his lashes flickered across his pupils. The three men reached Wang’s cell as the Chinese cast their eyes down towards their feet shuffling beneath the tables. The prisoner stepped inside as the steel door clanged shut behind him, and the guards turned on their heels and marched back to their office.
A lone cockroach scuttled across the corridor outside the office in a bid to make it to the other side, before Officer Zhu’s boot crushed it into the concrete floor. Within seconds, the officers’ flunky Mr Yin appeared with a bucke
t and mopped up the smear of mucus and carapace. Someone grunted before tossing a nine of spades onto the table, and others followed suit as a packet of dried mango segments was passed around. The stench of slop from 10th Brigade wafted upwards from the courtyard downstairs and filled the air with an oppressive stink.
I twisted a piece of paper between my sweaty fingers, popped the imaginary cigarette into my mouth and took a lungful of make-believe smoke. Someone turned the radio back on and we got on with our work. A week later, Wang was moved to a work farm in Xinjiang. Wenever saw him again.
[1]
The Poisoned Yangtze
It was dusk as I arrived at the central railway station in Nanjing, the capital city of Jiangsu Province, and like in most Chinese railway stations, a rambling cardboard city of itinerant labourers had sprung up on the forecourt, turning the station into a giant open-air flophouse. They were the flotsam and jetsam of China’s rapid transition towards modernity, a vagabond army of involuntary trainspotters huddled under tarpaulin sheets. Their kids rummaged through piles of garbage: a pack of feral munchkins with tiny feet sore and blistered from the cruel work. It was embarrassing for the government to admit there were some 110 million of these people drifting around the country looking for work, and so this official estimate was likely to be conservative. Though the mass exodus of Chinese from the countryside to the vast urban sprawls of the nation’s cities had created an endless source of cheap labour for the local factory owners, the limited accommodation had encouraged makeshift shanty towns to spring up, often outside train stations. Having left their poverty-stricken villages with nothing, many were unable to return even if they wanted to. Those unable to find work or accommodation often ended up being arrested for vagrancy and were put into police-owned factories not unlike prisons. Later I would discover that Chinese police officers could put people in these places for three years without even taking them to court.
My hotel room was much fancier than I’d grown accustomed to while travelling in China. I’d generally paid a couple of dollars for a dormitory bed, but since few hotels were allowed to give rooms to tourists, the ones that did tended to be the larger four-star establishments. I was using the room to repackage the hashish I had brought across China from the Hindu Kush and needed complete privacy. I slumped on the bed as the fan blades cut the air above. I was paranoid about my impending mission, and money was low after an epic trek from the mountains of Pakistan to the east coast of China. The last phase of the trip, though comparatively short in distance, had the most obstacles, with the Japanese port of Kobe the final destination. Japanese customs checks were likely to be rigorous, and the best way to avoid detection would be to swallow the hash on the two-day boat ride. First I had the unenviable task of wrapping the dope into individual pellets, a laborious 12-hour job that I was not looking forward to. My room reminded me of a Japanese love hotel, with its large mirrors on the walls and garish furnishings. It was expensive, too, but the receptionist had let me put it on a Visa card, so I could worry about that later.
The next morning, I set to work dismantling my guitar bag. The hash had been rolled into squares, vacuum-packed and slid into the lining of the leather bag. The seams had been sewn together by the wife of an Afghan tribesman above a shop in Peshawar, and I cut through the stitches with a penknife and pulled out the leathery sheets. The hash was perfect for the job, and the summer heat made the bendy sheets easy to roll between my fingers into four-gram pieces.
Five years earlier, I’d sat in a New Delhi hotel room in the middle of a sweltering Indian summer with three hundred grams of charas in front of me. Unlike hashish, which is pressed pollen and consequently has a pliable, plasticine quality when warm, charas is made by rubbing the heads of marijuana plants until the clammy resin begins to stick to the palms of the hands, after which it is collected and rolled into(usually) ten-gram sticks. It often has a woody, peaty texture that does not like to be reconstituted, and working the stuff into bite-sized pieces was arduous. I’d bought this particular batch from an Indian sadhu (holyman) at short notice, and it was poor quality. The long bus ride from Manikaran, high up above the Kulu Valley in India’s northern Himachal Pradesh province, had been uneventful and relatively pleasurable under the circumstances. I’d packed the dope inside a hollowed-out pineapple amongst a bag of fruit in the hold of the bus and felt relaxed with the many police checkpoints on the way down. Wrapping the stuff was more problematic, but I eventually developed a system that involved cutting a tube of cling film into four-inch sections, securing one of the rolls between my knees and stretching the plastic around the hash, while turning the edges inwards. Done properly, the plastic clings tightly to the dope for days inside the body and passes through without any problem.
It was widely believed to be the safest way of transporting smallish quantities of hash before the arrival of X-ray machines. Of course it wasn’t foolproof, and if the shit hit the fan there was no way you could deny having it. At least with a suitcase you could plead ignorance and claim to have been duped. As far as I know, no jury has ever acquitted someone with a gutful of hash. What made this method appealing to many people like myself was the low risk factor in the country of departure. You could eat the pellets in your hotel room and forget about them till you arrived at the other end. In the ’60s and ’70s, very few people got locked up in places like India and Morocco, and if they did, a modest bribe was usually enough to secure a swift release. By the ’80s, massive pressures (not to mention ‘foreign-aid’ enticements) were put on the governments of drug-producing countries to join the West’s War on Drugs. International borders became much harder to penetrate, while prison sentences were often longer in the countries where you bought the dope than in the countries where the contraband was headed. At the time of writing, India, for example, is handing out mandatory ten-year sentences for possession of more than ten grams of hashish – an amount that is unlikely to lead to court action in most European countries. Not only were the sentences harsher, but also legal representation was often non-existent, while jail conditions were sometimes medieval and corruption was rife. However, international borders are not as they used to be, as the threat of terrorism has eclipsed even the drugs trade. By the mid-’80s, Asian and South American prisons had begun to see many Westerners being held on various drug charges, and a ‘home’ bust with access to family, legal representation and decent living conditions was far preferable to being stuck in some dungeon halfway across the world. The discomfort of swallowing and unwrapping hashish became a small price to pay for avoiding that fate.
Although I liked the outlaw factor, I had no great love for the dope business. Some of my mates loved it, but I concentrated on market trading, English teaching, bar work and busking. Living in Japan in the ’80s there was plenty of money to be made legitimately, and I enjoyed working for a living, though it could nonetheless be routine and boring. Various foreign friends had been held for long periods of time in solitary confinement for minor hash offences, while Japanese friends had had their lives ruined for years by their intimidating police force. I saw dope smuggling as a way of testing my karma and getting away from the humdrum world of work. It was the last-chance saloon where you stood to lose everything with one roll of the dice, and it made me feel some kind of affinity with the outlaws of my favourite folk songs. I got a buzz from the knowledge that it could all come crashing down at any moment, though with hindsight it was pure foolishness.
The guitar-bag scam had made the endless police checkpoints that litter the journey along the Indus Valley and over the Khunjerab Pass into China relatively hassle-free. I’d lost count of the times officials had looked at the instrument while I grinned and made air guitar gestures before being waved on. Now I was sitting on my bed after several thousand miles, marvelling at the quality of the much sought-after Afghan hash and rolling the sticky strips into torpedoes.
Pakistan is one of the best places in the world to buy hash, and it’s pretty hard to find a poor-qualit
y smoke in the entire country. The exported version known as red seal or ‘paki black’ is another story. The middlemen who shift vast quantities of the stuff around the world mix it with various other materials, creating a cheap, user-friendly product that bears little resemblance to what you can buy on any street corner inside the country. I’d been assured by the Afghan trader I’d bought mine from that it was top-quality produce from the Afghan hash mecca of Mazar I Sharif, the main city of northern Afghanistan. I suspected he told all his customers this, which was exactly what they wanted to hear. The hills around Mazar are said to be one of the oldest hash-growing regions in the world and were a major stopover point for travellers on the hippy trails of the ’60s and ’70s.
After the Russians invaded Afghanistan in 1979, millions of refugees fled to the border towns of Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province. Peshawar became the main base for the CIA’s proxy war with the superpower to Afghanistan’s north, and it was here that America first began its unholy alliance with the renegade Saudi warrior Osama bin Laden, arming and training his fighters against the Soviets. By the time I got to Pakistan, in 1993, the invaders had long gone and the country had descended into its now familiar quagmire of feuding warlords and endless civil war. Still, Peshawar had prospered and was now the base for various mujahideen groups vying for control of the country’s lucrative opium trade.
I worked on the pellets all day, stretching the cling film tight to keep every piece perfectly sealed, and by six o’clock in the evening had 108 torpedoes to swallow on the boat. Although I didn’t consider China’s borders to be a serious hurdle, I planned to take the precaution of packing the pieces in foreign food parcels that I’d seen on sale in foreign food or Friendship Stores. These shops were found in all the major Chinese cities and were comparatively expensive. They catered for Westerners and wealthy Chinese and sold things like mini Mars Bars and Milky Ways. I decided that as soon as I got to Shanghai I’d buy a couple of packets of chocolate bars, open the packages individually, remove the chocolate and put two or three pieces of hash in each one before supergluing them up again. It seemed unlikely that any Chinese customs man would know what a Mars Bar was, and it was common practice for passengers to take their own food onto the ferries. The only potential problem was getting the bag of dope to Shanghai. I’d wandered around Nanjing looking for a Friendship Store but had run out of time, and after so many train journeys in China I had no reason to think this one would be any different. I found an obscure inside pocket in my rucksack and decided it would do for the relatively short journey to Shanghai, and with the hash finally wrapped I rolled a large joint with some of the leftovers and drifted into a deep sleep.
Monkey House Blues Page 1
