‘Look, I gave my luggage to you people for safe keeping, and you knew full well I had a boat to catch at midday – where’s my fucking bag!’
The last syllables were delivered with such force the clerk nearly jumped out of his skin. Other tourists who were checking into the hotel turned their heads disapprovingly. I was making a scene. A friendly Western bystander tried to help, but I shrugged off his well-intentioned efforts and lit another cigarette off the one I was smoking. Deciding there wasn’t much else I could do, I sat down on the sofa that I’d slept on earlier and ran my sweaty hands through my hair, when suddenly the bellhop appeared. He had a gleeful look in his eyes, a smile on his face and was holding my rucksack in his arms with the guitar bag strapped over his shoulder. I grabbed both from him and stormed out of the door without saying a word of thanks. Within seconds, a cab drew up and I threw my luggage onto the back seat. Behind me, a pleasant-looking Chinese lady who bore a striking resemblance to my mother attempted to sell me some postcards. I swung round and told her to fuck off as I slammed the cab door behind me and ordered the driver to take me to the port. Looking out of the back window of the cab, I could see the poor woman looking bewildered as the cab pulled way. Further back, the bellhop was standing in the doorway of the hotel with a concerned look on his face. I turned around again and didn’t look back.
Shanghai’s port area had a desolate air about it. Enormous cranes like gigantic Meccano creations could be seen on the horizon picking up huge containers and plonking them unceremoniously onto waiting ships. From a distance the docks seemed to have been abandoned, and I wondered whether the cab that had just left me on the quay with my luggage in my hands had got the wrong place. Aware of the diminishing time, I walked quickly towards the entrance to the Japan-ferry terminal and glanced nonchalantly at a few customs officers milling about in the doorway. The sight of uniforms had ceased to represent any kind of authority to me in China. There was nothing intimidating about their standardised dress and their role seemed more managerial than repressive. I strolled into their domain oblivious to any sense of danger, as if I had some kind of diplomatic immunity.
Ahead of me, I saw a family being searched. It was bad news. These were respectable, well-dressed Japanese people who’d probably been visiting relatives working on the mainland. The officers were rummaging through their stuff as if they’d been tipped off about some impending terrorist outrage planned for that very day by a gang matching their description. Meanwhile I stood in the customs hall like an ice cube in a sauna, only vaguely conscious that my world was evaporating. A man in a blue suit drew me aside to a beige-coloured Formica table. He immediately opened the top of my rucksack and within seconds found the bag of dope. I smiled and tried to look uninterested as he began to unravel the layers of cling film, and when he turned to ask what the packets contained I pointed to my mouth, implying it was some kind of foodstuff.
He held the sticky piece of hash in his hand and lifted it up to his nose. I got the impression he had no idea what he was holding, as a perplexed frown fell across his face. He grunted to a colleague who was inspecting another passenger across the hall, and the man sauntered over and held the hash up to his nose.
‘Dama?’ he asked. I had heard this expression many times in Kashgar and knew it was the Chinese name for marijuana.
‘Yes, that’s right. Is there a problem?’ I tried to look genuinely surprised that they should be asking me about the substance.
‘In China, this is forbidden.’
‘But it grows wild all over the country, how can it be illegal?’
A small crowd of officers surrounded me, and I was ushered into a side room and told to sit on the sofa. In front of me, the contents of my rucksack and guitar case were laid out onto a large table, and I was asked to remove my clothes. I continued to try to look puzzled with the situation, smiling at the officers and pretending I was oblivious to the law I was supposed to have broken. After a few minutes, a film crew arrived with a video camera and I was allowed to put my clothes backon. I’d seen Westerners paraded on the news in Bangkok and Singapore having been busted with large amounts of heroin and wondered how my 400-gram dope bust could be considered newsworthy. There must have been 15 to 20 uniforms in the room, while a crowd was building up around the door. I lit a cigarette and took a can of Coke out of my bag. Three officers were trying to look inside my guitar, and I offered to loosen the strings so they could get their hands inside without breaking it. Having circled me a few times, the cameraman put the camera on a tripod and asked the officers to lay the dope out in front of me so they could get a full live-action mug shot.
An English-speaking officer started to ask me where I’d bought the stuff from, and I said I’d bought it from a guy in Kashgar market. I continued to feign ignorance, talking about how I’d seen the plant growing all over the country. If I’d known it was illegal, why had I not hidden it? I had no answer to this question myself; my failure to repackage the hash before leaving the hotel was such a monumental error I was unable to comprehend what was going on. I started to feel detached from the reality of what was happening, as if I were watching the proceedings through the video camera that was recording my every move. A great foghorn blew through the building as the ferry prepared to leave for Japan, and I asked, half jokingly, if I could get on the boat before it left. My interrogator shook his head and smirked. I lit another cigarette and cast my eyes down to the floor. The film crew started to pack up and the uniforms started to drift out of the room. I sat on the sofa in a trance-like daze, inhaling deeply.
‘What will happen to me?’ I asked the English-speaking customs man.
‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘They won’t shoot you.’
After customs had finished with me, I was taken up to a room in the same building by three plain-clothed police officers. The good cop/bad cop routine began to unfold between one of the men and a woman. She was fairly attractive, almost sympathetic, whereas he was aggressive, with a sinister ice-cold veneer to his cratered, pizza-like complexion. His gaunt face, bad teeth and sunken cheeks betrayed the classic symptoms of amphetamine abuse, especially shabu, the euphoric strain of Methedrine popular in Japan that would later turn up in the West as Ice. The policewoman spoke basic English and acted as a translator. I repeated my story about buying the hashish from a Chinese-looking stranger in Kashgar market whose name I’d somehow forgotten. There was no real opposition to this version of events, but the process was unbelievably slow and tedious, with hours going by and very little being said.
Like the customs officers before them, the police were convinced I had an accomplice. They invented scenarios in which my partner(s) and I had split up before boarding the ship, and said I’d be treated with leniency if only I told them the truth. What they could not understand was that I was acting alone. The truth was inconceivable. Having lived in Japan for some years and visited the surrounding countries, I understood the problem they had accepting this. There is very little freelance crime in the Far East. Wayward teenagers are inducted into gangs at a young age, and later into larger organisations like the yakuza or the Triads. Additionally, such independent enterprises would be considered foolish since the solo criminal would not have the benefit of the cosy relationship between the authorities and the gang bosses that helps to maintain the status quo in countries like Japan. Two years later, I would still have trouble convincing trusted Chinese friends that I’d entered and left the country alone, so entrenched was the notion of crime as a group activity.
The interview lasted several hours and I had one overriding thought all the time. I’d bought a small lump of opium from an Afghan guy in Peshawar, with which I’d been spicing up my spliffs from time to time. There remained about a gram of the piece in cling film, wrapped up in tissue in my briefs with a small quantity of leftover hash I’d planned to smoke on the boat – a daft idea, but hey, so was everything else. I asked to go to the bathroom, which they accepted, but the third officer was despatched alon
g with me and watched me like a hawk. I put my fingers inside the zip and started rummaging around while taking a piss, as the cop leaned forwards like a pervert in a public toilet. I could just about feel the two lumps, but the cop tapped me on the shoulder and grunted to get a move on. Realising it was not the moment to dispose of the additional contraband, I was led back to the interview room, where I was informed I was being taken to Shanghai No. 1 Detention Centre.
I was hustled down the stairs with my rucksack on my back and my guitar in my hand, and marched across a large car park to an unmarked police car. After putting my luggage in the boot, I was handcuffed and prodded into the back seat. The policewoman sat beside me as the driving officer put a magnetic flashing light on the roof and switched on the siren. If I’d suspected my interrogator was a speed freak before, I was convinced now. He drove like a maniac through the bustling streets of Shanghai, screeching at the other cars, running red lights, cursing the pedestrians in his way. I felt I was playing a part in a surreal Chinese version of Starsky and Hutch. My mind was racing too; I couldn’t take in the sights, sounds and smells around me, but I sensed my life was sliding out of view. I was going to jail.
[2]
Into the Dragon
Shanghai No. 1 Detention Centre is situated in the middle of the city and serves as both a police station and a remand prison. Like the many other police interrogation and holding centres in China, it is a feared and dreaded place. A large police compound with its own jail, it is the first and sometimes the last destination of many of the city’s newly arrested inhabitants. I say the last because some convicted prisoners get to serve their sentences in these awful places. Remand prisoners are never allowed visitors, and their families often spend months tracking them down. Hapless miscreants from far-flung corners of China can spend years in these places while being presumed dead in their home towns. Once the families are aware of the fate of their loved ones, they’re able to send monthly food packages from the jail shop, but are forbidden any contact by mail.
Most of the prisoners arrive in a state of abject terror, well aware that only absolute submission to the awesome powers of the police will save them from being crushed by the repressive state apparatus. Since torture is de rigueur in Chinese police custody, and lawyers are distant figures you may or may not meet hours before your court appearance, the average detainee arrives resembling a trussed turkey. Hog-tied, petrified and dumb. Those considered dangerous wear heavy shackles, as do those destined for death row. All the prisoners squat; few have the defiant swagger of the classic Western criminal, from the tough-guy celluloid incarnations of James Cagney to the belligerent strut of the Kray brothers. Instead they walk respectfully, solemnly and, above all, humbly.
My own walk was somewhere in between, I’d guess. I was not obliged to squat like a Chinese prisoner, but neither did I put on any airs; the shock of the moment precludes such grandstanding. Before my first interview, I was taken to a small room to be searched. There was a single chair bolted to the floor in the centre of the room, which they told me to sit on. The chair was made of wood with leather straps at the wrists and ankles. At no point were these restraints applied to me, but their presence was a constant reminder of the countless prisoners who’d come before me. Although at the time I had not read the numerous Amnesty International reports on these contraptions, it did not require much imagination to guess their popular usage by the Chinese police during interrogations.
A couple of police officers started to examine my luggage as a small crowd of uniforms gathered in the doorway. It was difficult to tell the difference between the People’s Liberation Army and the police. They had a similar shade of olive-green uniforms and members of both resembled the bored teenagers seen hanging around the bus shelters of small English towns. Few were equipped with boots and tended to wear shabby plimsolls with their toes protruding. They all had Second World War-era rifles, but you got the impression they were not yet trusted with carrying live ammunition. The guards seemed to have no particular responsibilities other than drinking green tea and chain-smoking cigarettes. A constant stream of uniforms with Nescafé jars of tea took turns to look at me, with those at the back of the queue yelling for those at the front to get a move on.
Outside, the sun had set and it was getting dark. I sat watching my belongings being strewn across the cell floor; the door was open and I could see the whites of eyes bobbing eagerly in and out of the darkness. It seemed like every cop in Shanghai had come to see what was going on. I felt like a fallen celebrity. Yet they were affable enough and many were smiling at the exciting discovery, and had their superiors not been around, I believe they would have been eager to shake my hand.
I was gnawing what was left of my fingernails, still harbouring thoughts that I’d be sitting in a hotel room in a couple of hours telling fellow travellers about my lucky escape from the Public Security Bureau. It was a fantasy, but at such times dreams trump reality: the best-case scenario seems the most likely, however improbable.
In another twist of the good cop/bad cop routine, a new batch of officers arrived to take over. If the first lot had resembled the ramshackle urchins of Shanghai’s answer to Dad’s Army, these were the Green Berets. Immaculately dressed, with pistols and shoulder badges, they glared at me disapprovingly and told me to strip. Each item of clothing was inspected closely and passed to another officer, who did the same: digging for strands of fabric and dirt from the recesses of my pockets and holding them up to the light. It was as if they thought I was a spy and were looking for a microfilm, and within seconds I was down to my underpants. At first it seemed I would not be asked to make a complete strip as they motioned for me to sit down, but after a couple of minutes I was told to stand again and remove them. I did so and carefully slid my pants, and the small tissue-wrapped lumps hidden in them, to my ankles, hoping the contents would not be noticed. One of the officers flicked his truncheon at the sagging briefs and asked me (via a translator) to step out of them altogether. As I did so, the small package fell onto the floor in front of the officer in charge, who began to unravel its contents. He held the lumps up to his nose, sniffing suspiciously while comparing the two pieces.
‘This is dama,’ I said, using the Chinese name for marijuana.
‘Dama?’
‘Yes, for smoking on the ship.’
‘And this?’ he said, pointing at the opium.
‘That’s dama too, just a different quality.’
‘Why didn’t you tell us about this?’ he replied, as if I’d personally let him down with my omission.
‘I’m sorry, I forgot I had it.’
‘Do you have any more doping?’ he asked, meaning drugs.
‘No, I don’t.’
And then I knew I was really in the shit!
Marijuana has never been considered a major social problem in China, and its abundance on the side of countless railway tracks around the country confirmed this for me. Its mild sedative qualities have doubtless been integrated into the myriad medicinal potions in the country’s 5,000-year-old history of traditional medicine. Opium, on the other hand, though widely used as a painkiller, has been a constant threat to Chinese civilisation for hundreds of years and was seen as a sinister tool of Western imperialism. Prior to the Communist victory of 1949, the epidemic had been so widespread that thousands of ‘hole in the wall’ injection points had sprung up all over Manchuria where addicts would drop a coin through the hole and get a shot in the arm. After the founding of the People’s Republic, Mao Zedong’s Communist Party had made the eradication of opium’s pernicious influence on Chinese society a priority, identifying its proliferation during the later stages of the Qing dynasty (1644–1912) as a key element in the West’s strategy to colonise China.
He was right, of course. The attempt by the (principally British) colonial powers to turn the inhabitants of the world’s most populous country into junkies in order to secure favourable trading rights by shipping in vast quantities of cheap Indian op
ium from other parts of the Empire was one of the most scandalous episodes in Britain’s imperial adventures in Asia. Although I had no intention of selling or giving it away, I realised I’d tipped the scales out of my own favour. Was I in fact a neocolonialist myself, plundering the Orient for my own gain? Perhaps. But in the meantime I tried to tell myself there was little chance they’d ever discover my opium was anything other than a different strain of marijuana. While I was thinking this through, another officer took the laces out of my shoes and the belt off my jeans. It occurred to me that I was considered a suicide risk, though nothing could have been further from my mind. The day’s events had sent a massive shot of adrenalin through my veins. I was petrified and electrified, but I was too excited to be depressed.
Since my arrest at eleven that morning, I’d been kidding myself that the authorities would not bother to hold me for very long. I’d never heard of foreigners being given custodial sentences in China; on the contrary, I’d heard of people being held for short periods of time before being deported. I decided the best thing to do was to be diplomatic and convince the authorities I was ignorant of their rules and regulations, which was pretty much true. I’d been giving them a cock-and-bull story about how I’d bought the hash from a ‘Chinese-looking’ man in Kashgar market, but after a few hours of this I began to wonder whether I was digging myself into a deeper hole than I needed to be in. What’s more, they were clearly having trouble believing me, and as I sat with another interrogator going over the story yet again, it occurred to me the true story (with a few modifications) was better than the story I was telling them.
It was pitch dark in the courtyard now, and most of the crowd that had gathered outside the interview room had gone away. I was asked to follow another policeman across the yard to what I assumed would be a cell for the night. I had to hold up my jeans and drag my feet as I was led into a much larger room on the other side of the compound. This room was like a mini courtroom, with a small stage and three very important-looking police officers sitting solemnly staring at me. The room had two doors: the first a sturdy lockable one, while the other, inside door was about four inches thick and made of light cardboard and felt, which seemed to be largely for the purpose of soundproofing the room. There was a blood-red carpet on the floor, at least two inches thick, and in the centre was another solid wooden chair bolted to the floor with wrist and ankle straps. To the left side of me, a dozen or so police officers sat both in uniform and plain clothes. They looked like a jury, and I wondered whether my case had been fast-tracked and I was to be arrested, tried and convicted all in one day.
Monkey House Blues Page 3
