‘Abdul Malik?’
‘No, Dominic.’
‘Abdul Malik?’
‘No, Do-Mi-Nic.’
‘Yes, Ab-Dul Mal-Ick?’
‘OK, fine, Abdul Malick it is.’
Japan was trickier, but I never gave them a surname so it was just Jack and Bob and Sally and so on. The secret was to keep it simple, because you knew they’d bring it up later and everything had to match up. Some days there would be shouting and cries from down the corridor, when it became obvious that the locals were not sharing my relatively civil interrogations. I felt mildly guilty at being given an easy ride by the police, but my story was fairly straightforward and verifiable. I had been to see the Temple of Heaven, the Great Wall and the Terracotta Warriors; consequently, I fell into the classification of dumb tourist rather than international drug baron. I didn’t have to tell too many lies, and when I did they were only slight variations on the truth. Best of all – with the exception of a few brief spells with the odd backpacker – I’d spent all my time alone in China. In spite of what the police imagined, there were no accomplices. I was what I said I was: a stupid tourist with hepatitis and a bit of dope.
The illness that had plagued me on my travels along the Silk Road brought me unexpected benefits now. After a few days, I succeeded in getting a pot of ink and a dipping fountain-pen head on a stick into the cell. I wrote a poem called ‘The Dragon’ on the back of a cardboard toothpaste box for something to do. Then I asked the police to give me some of their writing paper so I could keep a diary. It was then decided that for health reasons nothing should be allowed to leave the room, that our cell was effectively quarantined. Consequently I would be able to keep the pen for the duration of my stay. This pleased my fellow inmates (or Liu at least; Yen could not write); however, they were less happy to be sharing a cell with a sick person. Speculation immediately started about whether I had the ‘foreigners’ disease’, AIDS.
A blood test and reassurance by the doctor eventually put their minds at rest, but things took a turn for the worse when the doctor said I should not exercise. This deprived me of my one source of relief from the boredom of lying on my bed. I had spent my first few days pacing the floor endlessly, much to the annoyance of my cellmates, who complained that I was making them feel dizzy. I already felt like a wild bird in a cage; the doctor’s latest order was the wing-clip I’d been dreading.
Unable to walk about, I devised a new game to amuse myself, which involved rolling a few socks into a ball and throwing them at the wall. The cell was not dissimilar to a small squash court and the sock-ball had as much bounce as a red dot ball. I would catch it and throw it back as quickly as possible. For the next few weeks, I would spend more hours doing this than I’d spent playing racket sports in my entire life. This, of course, was how Steve McQueen had amused himself in the POW classic The Great Escape, but sooner or later my increasingly sulky living partners decided this too was unacceptable, and my languid existence became virtually bedridden.
As I began to settle into the routine of the jail, the captain told me I had a visitor from the British consulate. The room the meeting took place in was the most comfortable I’d been in yet. There was a sofa in the corner and the windows were not barred. Seated in the centre of the room was a casually dressed man who introduced himself as the junior vice consul, Jim Short. He told me he had already seen duty in several international postings around the world, and I guessed he was about 40 years old. After enquiring about my health, he pointed out that as a representative of the British government it was his duty to ensure I was not being treated worse than the local villains, which struck me as odd in a country not famed for its human rights. What would the British government have to say if I were sent to a labour camp for three years without a trial, I wondered. He also pointed out that I had yet to be formally charged, which made me feel a little better.
We started with small talk on the day-to-day trivia of his diplomat’s life before getting down to the more sombre issue of my own situation. I asked if there was any chance of a smoke, and Inspector Wong, who I’d met on the first night, offered me one of his. The main question on my mind concerned other foreigners who’d been arrested on dope charges. What kinds of sentences had they received? Short’s reply was both shocking and reassuring:
‘One got four years, a couple walked free and, er . . . one got fifteen years.’
‘Fifteen years? For heroin, right?’
‘No, hashish.’
My mind started to reel at the thought of what such a sentence would do to my life, not to mention Rosie and my family. Even four years felt like an eternity, and I quickly enquired about the ones who’d got away.
It turned out they were the sons of the guy who’d got the 15 years. The police had decided to throw the book at their father and let them go. I asked about the guy who’d got the four-year term, how much dope had he had?
‘About eight kilos, I think.’
‘So what could I expect to get for less than half a kilo?’
‘It’s impossible to say. They may just kick you out of the country.’
This was music to my ears. I began to imagine myself waving goodbye to Inspector Wong and co. as I headed off in a cab to the airport after the short sharp shock of incarceration in a Chinese prison.
‘But don’t get your hopes up,’ he said, sensing my brief elation at the prospect of imminent release. ‘There’s a long way to go yet.’
Inspector Wong, who’d been glancing at his watch for the duration of the meeting, finally muttered something to the translator and the visit was over. Mr Short asked me if I’d like the Foreign Office in London to inform my relatives of my situation, adding that he recommended I give him permission to do so. I thought for a moment before agreeing it would be a good idea, since there was no way of knowing how long I’d be here and Rosie would start worrying, having not heard from me. I shook the consul’s hand and tried, unsuccessfully, to get some cigarettes off Wong to take back to my cell. Walking back to the cell block, I had the misfortune of seeing the cop who’d made no secret of his distaste for me on the night of my arrest. He sneered at me and made a comment that amused Wong.
Inside the building, I noticed for the first time what the conditions were like in some of the other cells. In one there were more than a dozen shaven heads peering back at me like Buddhist gargoyles. Another was full of what appeared to be teenagers folding napkins, while the third was so full it reminded me of the scene in the Marx Brothers’ A Night at the Opera when the waiter opens the door of a cupboard-sized cabin and 25 people fall out. It occurred to me how lucky I was to have only two cellmates in a similar-sized room, and I wondered what my own roommates had done to warrant such favouritism.
The day after the consul visit, I was back in the police interrogation room, where I was officially arrested. It had been ten days since my detainment, and by law the police must arrest suspects within ten days. I’d assumed I’d been arrested at customs, but it turned out I’d only been detained. I asked the interpreter, Alan, about other foreigners he knew of in Shanghai. Particularly the one who’d got fifteen years.
‘He was from Liverpool. An American also got 15 years,’ he smiled.
I tried to dig more, but he was vague, as he hadn’t personally dealt with all the cases. It was depressing and so I changed the subject. I asked him about the Cultural Revolution, but he said he’d been too young to know much. His boss, who must have been about 50, remembered it well.
‘Did you wave a Little Red Book?’
He laughed and nodded.
‘Were you a Red Guard?’
He looked down at his desk, as Alan butted in.
‘It was a long time ago,’ he said, bringing the conversation to a close.
After the police investigation had finished, weeks would go by between consul visits. During my time in the cell, I tried to keep myself busy as best I could. I was invited to take part in the daily card game after Liu had made some papier-mâch
é playing cards out of newspaper and rice gruel. Now we had a pen it was possible to draw the numbers and suit icons on the cards, whereas before small bits of relevant newsprint were glued to the front to identify the cards. Card-playing was forbidden due to the probability that it would lead to gambling – a ubiquitous Chinese vice – so we played close to the wall adjacent to the door to keep out of view of the peephole. The games would invariably end in an argument, with Liu calling Yen a dumb country bumpkin who didn’t understand the rules. It was an absurdly daft game that made snap look like bridge, and I soon got bored.
Over the weeks, the relatively tranquil relations between the three of us slowly deteriorated. Liu decided to stop his English classes, and before long days went by without my having so much as eye contact with the two people living just feet away from me. Although he no longer wanted to study with me, he hung onto the phrase book I’d lent him and continued studying English by rote. He’d sit cross-legged with the book in his lap, mumbling under his breath like the Koranic students in the madrasas of Peshawar. It occurred to me that even if these guys were my best friends, we’d still have fallen out with each other by now, and I tried to stay positive and not allow resentment to build up between us.
The situation worsened one sunny day when Yen decided to block out the miniscule ray of natural sunlight that occasionally crept into our cell by hanging his freshly washed bedding over the window. I was furious and protested, but the washing had to take priority. In retrospect, they were probably right; in wintertime there were few opportunities to launder the bedding and even less time to dry it, but I’d become almost obsessed with catching what sunlight I could in the increasingly gloomy environment by positioning myself on the floor at an angle to catch the rays. After long periods of time with bad food and no natural sunlight, the skin turns an ashen grey and any ray of light is welcome. I also felt that Yen and Liu were jealous that I was lapping up the little sun that came into the cell. Of course, they could have done the same, but it hadn’t occurred to them, and if they couldn’t have it, neither could I.
As the chasm between the Chinese and myself widened I became depressed and lonely, and even a brief connection with the smallest natural phenomenon took on supernatural significance. Having made a stand about them hanging out their washing, I made a point of not doing the same with mine, thus reinforcing their prejudice towards ‘dirty foreigners’.
The freezing winter put an end to the mosquito problem, but for months we were bedridden. The bath had a thin layer of ice on it now, and we slept in thick socks and padded jackets to keep out the cold. Though we no longer spoke, to their credit Liu and Yen continued to share any treats they got hold of with me. They’d get tangerines their wives had bought from the prison shop, strips of dried mango and small candies like the Fruit Salad variety I’d eaten as a kid. Even on the worst days we shared what we had, even if they were thrown across the room disdainfully.
As my external world took a darker turn, I became increasingly absorbed in books and writing. Along with the phrase book the police had allowed me to hang onto, I’d had the good fortune to be arrested with a couple of excellent books, which had been returned to me after the first couple of weeks of my incarceration. The first was Robinson Crusoe. Although I’d been an avid reader for many years, books took on a whole new significance in my present surroundings. I found I was constantly underlining sentences that seemed to strike a chord with my own situation. It seemed that the books I read had been written explicitly with me in mind, and I was easily transported to the places they were set. As a free man I’d sometimes found it hard to concentrate on novels, and my past was littered with unfinished books. Now I found the world on the page was more real than my own; in fact, there seemed to be a correlation between the characters and my own life, as I found myself identifying with them more and more. I began to imagine myself on Crusoe’s island, diving for seafood and hunting wild boar. I could taste the coconut milk and guavas described in the book, as well as feeling the loneliness that the protagonist endures. Crusoe’s predicament reminded me of how lucky I was to have cellmates, even if we didn’t like each other. A friend of mine spent 13 months in solitary confinement on remand in Japan with no connection to anyone at all. He’d done jail time in other countries, but had never experienced such cruelty before. He told me the fear of insanity was worse than any cellmate could be and that long-term solitary could destroy a person completely. I tried to remind myself of these wise words when Yen and Liu were getting me down.
The second book I happened to have in my possession when I was arrested was Yukio Mishima’s extraordinary The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, in which a stuttering, inarticulate student of Zen Buddhism becomes obsessed with the most beautiful thing in his world: Kyoto’s magnificent Golden Temple. Unable to attain the beauty and purity that the temple symbolises, the tormented student destroys it, burning it to the ground. I’d been to the rebuilt temple on several occasions while living in Kyoto on and off since 1985, but I’d never heard of the tale behind the original building’s tragic demise. Mishima, one of Japan’s greatest writers, is widely respected by foreigners, though less so by my Japanese friends, who often seemed mildly embarrassed by his association with right-wing politics. In 1971, the writer committed hara-kiri after a failed coup attempt in which he and a small group of followers took an army general hostage and tried to instigate an uprising at a Tokyo barracks. Standing in full military regalia on the balcony, haranguing the troops with a megaphone about the loss of Japan’s imperial past, Mishima was considered by many to be an anachronistic crackpot, out of touch with modern Japan. When his calls to reinstate the emperor and his godlike pre-war status fell on deaf ears, he performed the classic Japanese act of humility and ripped open his abdomen with a knife, before his assistant decapitated him with a sword.
The 1956 novel is particularly interesting in its depiction of the changing face of Japan’s religion and what Mishima saw as its corrupt hierarchy. I’d often been surprised how commonplace it was to see Buddhist monks in the more upmarket bars in Gion (Kyoto’s largest nightlife district), often outrageously drunk, cavorting with hostesses and geisha girls. There seemed few earthly pleasures these custodians of the nation’s faith were expected to abstain from, but I liked the way they reconciled the placid, meditative monastic life with a goodnight on the town, and made some friends among them. Kyoto even had a Rastafarian monk who played reggae music at a local radiostation and was a friend of the legendary Jamaican record producer Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry.
The Chinese were not permitted to have books, but did get the odd newspaper and comic that they enjoyed. I was allowed books simply because I was a foreigner, and it struck me as appalling that they were not otherwise permitted in such a place. If prisoners were expected to educate themselves, it seemed natural to at least allow educational reading matter into the prison. In truth, the powers that be had no interest in education, but rather wanted to break the inmates through boredom and ideological brainwashing. Each cell had a copy of the rules painted on the walls, which the Chinese were expected to know by heart. Among the rules was a reminder that all inmates were expected to inform the authorities of any crime they knew about, particularly regarding their own families. This kind of paranoid self-policing has become associated with Stalin’s Russia or Mao’s Cultural Revolution, but in 1993 the idea of shopping your own family members was still being actively encouraged by the authorities. Later I would learn much more about Chinese-style surveillance, but for now I was unaware and assumed the paperwork I saw Liu and Yen write was to do with their legal cases.
Yet before that long winter, there were some rays of light. One day, after I had been officially arrested, the cell door opened and a guard called me out and walked me down the corridor to the captain’s office. There was good news: I had a visit later that morning, and he asked me if I’d like to have a shave. I jumped at the chance and was led to a spare cell where a guy stood with a pair of clippers, shaving t
he heads of other prisoners. The clippers took off about 95 per cent of my growth and left me with a little stubble, but I looked less like a caveman now and would hopefully look attractive to Rosie. She’d written to say she was coming with my dad at some point soon, but I had no idea quite when it would be.
The guards led me out of the main block and across a courtyard towards the building where I’d previously met Jim Short, the British vice consul. I walked into the room and my dad was sitting on a sofa with Rosie, who jumped up to give me a hug, before stepping back to give my dad his turn. Dad was never much of a hugger, but he did his awkward best. He was wearing a tie and jumper as always, being from a generation where a man without a tie is only half dressed. Inspector Wong had come along for the visit, but left to smoke outside after a couple of minutes, and I lit up one of Rosie’s Camel Lights. She brought news from friends and family, while my dad wanted to know more about my case. Since there were no lawyers involved I had no answers for him, and he put his hands together and pushed them towards his lips, staring into space while pondering the situation.
We asked a guard to take a picture of the three of us – which later proved to be out of focus – and he obliged after clicking the wrong button several times, much to Dad’s amusement. There was a good-sized pile of books, too, but I’d have plenty of time to look at them later, and anyway, there was so much to say in the little time we had.
Unfortunately, at times like these it’s hard to think of anything to say at all. Nervous laughs punctuated the silence as I smoked another ‘ghastly weed’, as my father called them. Rosie and I spent most of our time gazing into each other’s eyes while holding hands. We were grateful to the Chinese for allowing us to have such a ‘hands on’ visit, and yet there might be something to be said for speaking through glass like you see in the movies. Being able to touch and even kiss makes the eventual parting even worse, and one could argue that contact-free visits are cruel to be kind.
Monkey House Blues Page 6
