Monkey House Blues

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Monkey House Blues Page 9

by Dominic Stevenson


  I paid 50 rupees for the shave and head massage and wandered aimlessly on my own around the town, killing time until the taxi was ready to take me back to Peshawar. The border town was famous for its gun shops and so it came as little surprise that arms were the main commodity on sale. The shops had almost no visible security arrangements and were little more than shacks, with men and boys sitting in workshops at the rear, polishing barrels and filing down pieces of metal.

  There were no women to see in the town, just hundreds of menlounging around without much to do. I started to feel uncomfortable as shop owners began to hustle me into buying guns, as if I couldsimply put a shotgun in my bag and drive across the border. I started to dislike the town and looked forward to meeting up with my cabdriver and getting out. Pariah dogs patrolled the alleyways, growling menacingly at me, while gunshots rang out from rooftops, giving the town an almost tangible air of violence. The place was like a Wild West town without the saloons or horses, and I found the atmosphere oppressive. But most of all I hated the complete absence of women. Of course, they were there, shuttered off behind compound walls running the households and bringing up the children, but there was not so much as a chador in sight. I felt as if I’d landed in some macho, post-apocalyptic dystopia where half the human race had disappeared. The men looked bored and frustrated, marooned in their stifling masculinity. I began to see some correlation between the lack of women and the surfeit of guns, as if the men had traded their womenfolk for weaponry and now had to live out their days as overgrown schoolboys playing soldiers.

  A shop owner succeeded in coaxing me into his store for no other reason than that his was identical to all the others and I felt I ought to have a look at one. A pot of tea dutifully appeared from behind a black curtain that hung at the back of the shop, and I sat down on a cushion, listening to the shopkeeper’s spiel. For three hundred rupees, I could go up onto the roof of the house and fire one magazine from a Kalashnikov. For a thousand rupees, I could fire a bazooka at a battered cave entrance on the edge of the town. I declined both offers, feeling there were better ways of spending my money, and walked out, leaving the shop owner standing in the doorway cursing. I’d travelled all over Asia and had often been off the beaten path, but this town gave me the creeps.

  The taxi drove quickly to the border and I reclaimed my passport at the Khyber Agency. Back at the guesthouse, I lay on my bed and lit a cigarette beneath the whirling blades of the ceiling fan. My mind drifted back to China, whose border was just two days away, and how Chairman Mao, standing on the steps above Tiananmen Square in 1949, had proclaimed that ‘women hold up half the sky’.

  The next morning, I woke early and went to the bus depot to buy a ticket up to the Chinese border in the north. It was time to move on.

  [5]

  Going to Court

  Chinese New Year came with a bang. A million bangs, in fact, as the area around the detention centre was submerged in a deafening torrent of firecrackers. Through the slit at the top of the window, we took turns looking up at the sky above. It looked like a war zone, with tracer rockets flaring across the sky followed by massive booms. The Chinese loved fireworks, especially firecrackers, used as part of an ancient custom to ward off evil spirits. In recent weeks, my relationship with Liu and Yen had slowly disintegrated. It was inevitable, I suppose; there was nothing left to say to each other, so we didn’t even try. But tonight we could at least share in the festivities, and my cellmates had decided to make an effort to be nice for the first time in a while. Both of their wives had sent in food from the prison shop, which they shared with me, and the captain let me buy some packets of noodles, melon seeds and tangerines. Liu was having his third New Year in jail on remand with no knowledge of when he might get to court or see a lawyer. He wasn’t even sure what he was being charged with. The captain decided that he’d let all three of us into his office for a smoke, and Liu took the rare opportunity to enquire about his case. As usual there was nothing to report, since the captain was basically just a screw with no information on prisoners’ cases, but he did have a photo that Liu’s wife had handed in with his Christmas food hamper. It was of his wife and young son, and he burst into tears the second he saw it. I felt sorry for him. Although we’d grown apart, there were still times when a sliver of camaraderie remained, and the New Year had shown me a side of the Chinese I’d not seen before.

  The festive season brought about major improvements in the kitchen, too, as the cabbage and rice were replaced with a new and much improved menu. The dry, stony rice was replaced with fluffy, glutinous kernels, while various dishes involving such delicacies as chickens’ feet and heads came through the hole in the door. Yen and Liu sat gnawing on the claws for hours, sucking the soggy eyes out of the birds’ heads, while I got a variation on the tofu menu. There was even an old black-and-white TV passed from cell to cell for a couple of hours a day, and I got to see my first Chinese propaganda movie, a sprawling epic about an industrious peasant’s trials and tribulations during the calamitous Great Leap Forward. Afterwards, I brought up the familiar discussion about Chairman Mao and got the standard Party verdict:

  ‘He made some mistakes.’

  ‘Seventy per cent good, thirty bad.’

  I’d lost count of how many times I’d heard these words. When I told them I thought Mao was a disgusting tyrant, they gave the other favourite response: ‘You don’t understand China.’ This seemed a reasonable enough point to make, except it was only partly true. The majority of mainland Chinese are not well informed regarding their country’s recent history. When Deng Xiaoping and his cronies reassessed Mao’s dictatorship, they kept in mind that the Party’s fortunes were inextricably linked to the deceased despot. To reveal the truth about the rise of the Communist Party in China would have undermined the movement that Deng presided over. Even today, the central myths of the revolution – and Mao’s glorious part in them – go relatively unchallenged. Of course, the people who had questioned the myths were dispersed swiftly to the Chinese gulag (laogai), so it wasn’t surprising that most people were happy to repeat the official version of events.

  But if Liu and Yen were unsure about where their country had been, they knew exactly where it was going. The Party was more than happy to spread the good news – even the country’s critics acknowledged the inevitability of China becoming the largest economy in the world. Liu often liked to remind me of this and also of the pioneering achievements of the nation’s diaspora, the countless millions who’d been leaving the Middle Kingdom for new lives around the globe for thousands of years. When I was pissed off with him, I decided to wind him up on the subject.

  ‘The Chinese are very successful in the West, yes?’

  ‘Not really,’ I said, ‘they run the laundries and work on the railroads.’ I was thinking about the stereotypes in films and TV shows like Thoroughly Modern Millie and Kung Fu.

  ‘But they do many other things too, don’t they?’ He looked hopeful.

  ‘No. They just dig holes and wash clothes.’

  It was my silly way of getting my own back for the bullying I got. Sometimes I’d attempt to build bridges by expressing an interest in pre-Communist China. I had some poems and folk tales from the book Xiao-Lian had given me, with corresponding pages in Mandarin, and asked Liu what he thought of them. He said the characters belonged to some arcane form of Chinese that nobody understood any more. Perhaps it was like reading Chaucer, or else he was just embarrassed to admit his limited vocabulary.

  When I’d first arrived in China, Beijing was in the midst of Olympic fever. It was 1993, but the Chinese had already decided that the 2000 Games would be hosted by their nation and that foreign tourists would help foot the bill. Consequently, the capital city was levying an Olympic tax that extended to hotel rooms, which made the once cheap accommodation a struggle for backpackers. Vast billboards embossed with the Olympic logo and portraits of President Deng Xiaoping were strewn across the city, proclaiming China’s entry into the inter
national community. No one I spoke to had the slightest doubt that their country would host the games, which ultimately went to Australia. The once beautiful city had long since been disfigured by Soviet-style architecture, with its colossal granite state buildings and boulevards like aeroplane runways. There’s something unsettling about cities that are designed to facilitate the movement of tanks and heavy artillery through their streets, and Beijing was still haunted by the ghosts of Tiananmen Square, in which thousands had lost their lives while many more ‘disappeared’ into the labyrinth of prisons and work camps. Apart from taxis and police vehicles I saw few private vehicles on the roads, yet top-of-the-range Mercedes-Benzs with their blacked-out windows sped through the streets as emblems of the two-tiered society that was Communism’s legacy. Mao had succeeded in airbrushing the middle classes from the Middle Kingdom, leaving in their wake a state-controlled mafia of officials whose grip on the power and wealth of the nation was absolute.

  Across from the dreary concrete box that was my hotel, a few restaurants served Western food and catered for the tourists passing through the city. I made a point of sitting with some Pakistanis who I rightly believed would sell me some hash, and within minutes we sat smoking at the table, oblivious to the State Security vans that chugged up and down the streets.

  ‘The Chinese don’t care about hash,’ said one of the Pakistanis, slurping on a bottle of Tsingtao beer. ‘They don’t smoke it and they don’t care what we do. We never offer it to Chinese and they leave us alone. The police don’t speak English, let alone Urdu, and anyway, they’d rather not get involved with foreign devils.’

  Friends who’d visited the country before me had told me the same thing: that tourists were off-limits even to officials in China, who looked bewildered if you went near them. The Pakistanis were traders from Lahore who had come overland through the Khunjerab Pass along the Karakoram Highway, a trip I’d often thought of making myself. Though they were Muslim, they drank with the determination of errant public schoolboys, as I had in my teens, getting plastered on Woodpecker cider on Sunday afternoons and crunching packets of Extra Strong Mints to disguise the toxic fumes on my breath. Amongst them was an Afghan man, and we got into a lengthy conversation about his reason for being in China. His story was a familiar one, shared by millions of his countrymen who have been sent packing from their beleaguered land. His family were staying in one of the sprawling refugee towns around Peshawar that have served as a base for fleeing civilians after decades of invasions and despotic feudalist tyrannies. He’d left the relative safety of the North-West Frontier Province to find work and had ended up in Beijing in a stateless limbo, unable to get back to his adopted country or return to his civil war-stricken homeland. He had no idea how long the Chinese would allow him to stay, but in the meantime he’d found a niche for himself selling dope to tourists while anaesthetising himself with the cure-all potion that his religion forbade. Though I was unaware of it at the time, the conversation would act as a catalyst for my own adventures, and Peshawar, with its itinerant population of war-weary exiles, would be the town that changed my life.

  I found my own refuge in the jade markets of the capital city, where I spent many hours haggling with the street vendors over tiny pieces of the milky-green stone that had enchanted the Chinese for thousands of years. Many of the stalls in the antique markets appeared to be full of family heirlooms, and I felt mildly voyeuristic pawing over trinkets that had probably been sold by the poor to keep pace with the skyrocketing prices of the new China. Every stall had old copies of Mao’s Little Red Book, but now they looked less like the tyrannical musings of a despotic ideologue than quaint relics from an era that the young could not remember and the old chose to forget. I picked up a copy that stood out with its scarlet cover and gold star stamped on the front. Inside were glossy pictures of the Great Helmsman greeting peasants, commanding soldiers, rubbing shoulders with heads of state and standing on a hill with a red sunset behind creating a pink halo effect around his head. In the last of the pictures, he wore a long, flowing tunic that reminded me of a childhood image I’d had of Jesus with a shepherd’s staff, but the lambs were replaced by the angelic faces of adoring children who gazed up expectantly towards the fatherly figure, with copies of the book I was holding in their hands.

  At sunset, I made my way to one of the city’s main tourist attractions, the Temple of Heaven, a beautiful complex of Daoist buildings constructed by a Ming Dynasty emperor in AD 1420. As was often the case with my visits to shrines, the grounds around the temple held more interest for me than the building itself. An elderly couple were standing next to a tree, taking turns to rub their backs against a protruding stump. I sat on the grass near the tree and watched as their faces contorted pleasantly as they moved from side to side, wedging the stump between their shoulder blades. After a minute they wandered off, and I got up to take a closer look at the therapeutic tree. A round swelling about three inches wide stuck out of the trunk: its curved growth reminded me of the head of a walking stick my grandfather had when I was a child; its contours blended from one shade of brown to another as if it had been worked on a lathe and polished.

  Turning round, I saw two tiny old women with minute rounded feet that I took to be the result of childhood foot-binding. They hobbled towards me like ageing ballerinas and motioned me to take my turn against the tree, allowing its healing lump to slither across my vertebrae, as countless others had done for decades. A giddy sensation tiptoed down my spine and made me chuckle as the women burst out into toothless grins. More elderly people gathered to practise t’ai chi, the supreme boxing exercise the Chinese had performed for thousands of years. Loudspeakers from the Temple of Heaven played classical harp music that rippled across the gardens as hundreds of silhouetted bodies glided between the trees. I sat on the grass marvelling at the sights and sounds around me, absorbing the atmosphere of this magical place, feeling privileged to witness the timeless ritual before me. I took a jade tortoise I’d bought at the market out of my pocket and rubbed its curved shell and belly between my fingers, its leathery back patterned with tiny bottle-green tombstones, its head peering quizzically at the world from the safety of its mobile home. An old man with a hunchback came over to the tree with a cricket in a square wicker basket dangling from his wrist. He hung the insect from a branch, closed his eyes and groaned as he kneaded his back muscles against the massage tree, as the forlorn cricket droned in the background. This was the China of my dreams.

  It was almost pitch dark now, and I began to feel tired and hungry. I wandered out of the temple grounds and found a small noodle shop, where everyone stared at me. Everyone, that is, except a girl who sat opposite crying into her soup bowl, her lips quivering as the noodles slithered through her chopsticks back into the bowl. I wanted to talk to her and find out what the problem was when a man walked in and led her away. Her half-eaten noodles were taken away as mine arrived, and I sank a bottle of Tsingtao beer while trying to outstare the other customers, who gawped at me across the room. Most of them cast their eyes down into their soup bowls, looking mildly embarrassed, as if I were sitting naked in front of them. A young girl of maybe four with rosy-red cheeks and hair in bunches stood glaring at me, her mouth agape as if she’d seen a ghost as a mixture of fear and wonder came over her tiny face. Her mother called out to her, but she was entranced, paralysed before me like a living doll. I winked at her to break the spell and her face lit up into a cherubic grin, revealing her gapped teeth as she giggled and ran back to her mum.

  The next morning I took a minibus to the Great Wall. The long, straight road was lined by poplar trees, punctuated every hundred yards or so by watermelon stalls that spilled onto the asphalt. The road was not particularly busy and it seemed like a ridiculously competitive business, with few of the vendors having any customers at all. Stallholders squatted next to pyramid-shaped piles of the dark-green footballs, waving slices at the passing tourists, as their kids sat munching on the succulent wedges, which drib
bled down their chins.

  I’d half expected to be disappointed by the fabled wall, which is said to be the only man-made landmark visible from space. Its main role, to keep the barbarians out of the Middle Kingdom, had been a failure from the start, but foreigners were fascinated by the sheer manpower that its creation had involved, seeing it as emblematic of the Chinese worker-ant ethos. I thought of the hundreds of thousands who’d lost their lives building something so useless, but at least it was still around as a tourist attraction. Architecturally, Mao’s legacy bequeathed little to future generations and robbed them of much. Ironically, Mao had been a great admirer of the Qin emperor who in the third century bc had united the warring states and started building the Great Wall. He’d also given the country its name in the West, where Qin is spelled Chin. Like Mao, he was a megalomaniac disposed towards genocide, and his subjects paid a grim price. Where Mao used Marxism to advance his personal power, Qin had used Confucianism, which he banned, burning its books and burying its scholars alive. He was also responsible for the Terracotta Army, which I had visited in Xian, and the huge mausoleum became his shrine when he eventually died of mercury poisoning, given to him by his physicians as an elixir of everlasting life.

  Many of Mao’s more hare-brained schemes resonate with the Qin emperor. Like his forebear, Mao was fond of mobilising vast numbers of people to carry out largely meaningless tasks. Just as Qin hadordered hundreds of thousands to leave their villages to build the Great Wall, Mao had the masses toil for years on canal-building and other gigantic planning enterprises that rarely served any realpractical purpose. These tasks were usually cloaked in the dogma of ‘ideological purification’, and those ordered to do the work were known as ‘volunteers’. Yet not all the epic plans Mao made were wasted; the railroad that I travelled from Urumchi in Xinjiang to Shanghai is are markable feat of engineering. The number of tunnels along the route is staggering, and it is, in some ways, an achievement on a par with the Great Wall itself.

 

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