Eighth Brigade was one of ten massive concrete cell blocks surrounded by thirty-foot-high walls with gun turrets and razor wire. Each building had six floors with two parallel wings on each landing, which had about forty-five cells each. The cells were five by seven feet, with heavy-duty barred doors that were opened at 5.30 every morning and locked up between six and nine in the evening depending on the season. In the sweltering summer months, the doors were kept open longer and industrial fans were placed between every other cell to circulate the oppressively stagnant air. The whole place was built out of concrete and steel, and in the summer months became like a furnace that never really cooled down. In the winter it was unbelievably cold, and most people got frostbite on their earlobes, which cracked, turned blue and left ruby-red globules of blood like ear studs. We were given prison-issue padded grey jackets that kept out the worst of the cold, but the only warm place on the wing was the shower area, with its huge tanks of boiling water.
The washing area had another attraction. By standing on a water pipe, it was possible to climb up and see out of the window; but this was no ordinary window: it provided a tiny glimpse of the outside world. By looking across the outbuildings and over the prison wall, you could see people going about their daily business down below. It seemed strange that life was carrying on all around you, and less than 50 yards away. The window at the other end of the shower area had an even better view of the city, and you could see Shanghai’s famous tower that resembles a spaceship. Needless to say, looking out of these, or any other windows, for that matter, was forbidden. I’d been warned not to climb up on the pipes and look out when Chinese prisoners were around, but before long I was informed someone had written a report about my offence.
Report-writing was the bane of all prison life, and nothing could be done without writing about it first. If you had a complaint, you had to write a report. There was no point trying to talk to a guard unless you’d written one. Even the most trivial matters had to be put in writing. If you wanted a new tube of toothpaste, you had to write a report or you wouldn’t get it. Generally the reports would sit around in the guards’ office for days before they bothered to read them. Chinese prisoners had to write ‘thinking reports’, in which they were expected to inform the authorities of their general mental state and that of those around them. These reports were considered crucial to the reform of the prisoners and were expected to be self-critical, personal appraisals about the individual’s view of his crime and what he was doing to repent. They were also an opportunity to gain brownie points by grassing up any other prisoner who might, or might not, have shown ‘bad’ thinking. It was a report like this that had mentioned my crime of looking out of the shower window, and I was called to a meeting with one of my first Chinese friends, San Peiwa.
San Peiwa had decided to call himself John, and was one of the best English speakers in the brigade. He was an articulate, thoughtful, intelligent man in his early 30s, and was well respected by both prisoners and guards. I liked him immediately, and we spent many hours talking in my first weeks in the jail. John was from Sichuan Province, and had done nine and a half years of an eleven-year sentence for what I guess would be called manslaughter. As a teenager he’d been a soldier in the People’s Liberation Army, and was part of the ill-fated 1979 invasion of Vietnam, where he’d killed a Vietnamese civilian. Some years later he was summoned to Shanghai to stand trial in a war crimes tribunal, and, assuming it was some kind of formality to improve the frosty relations between the two countries, he went along. Unlike the rest of us, he’d never had to do time on remand in a detention centre; rather, he turned up in court of his own free will, having been told by his former commanding officer that there was nothing to worry about. At the end of his day in court he discovered that rather than taking the train back to his family in Chengdu, he was to start a decade-long prison sentence in the largest jail in China.
The years in prison had been kind to John, and he looked well, with a calm, laid-back demeanour and friendly smile. He was one of the very few Chinese I’ve met who knew anything about, or had any interest in, his country’s Daoist tradition, and we spent many hours talking about the respective philosophies of Laozi and Confucius. Like many Chinese, he was affectionately tactile and would run his fingers through my body hair while we talked. Chinese guys often held hands and walked around in a brotherly embrace, and there was none of the homophobic suspicion that makes so many Western men appear emotionally stranded from each other. They had more in common with men in the Islamic world than in the West.
John sat down next to me and began to explain what the problem was. Somebody had written a report about my climbing onto the water tank and looking out of the window. Because I was a new prisoner, John said, I would only receive a warning this time, but if it happened again he would have to beat me up. I was stunned.
‘But you’re my friend,’ I protested.
‘Yes, I like you, and I like the time we spend together, but you don’t understand Ti Lan Qiao. This is a Monkey House, and if the captain says you’re breaking the rules, we have to discipline you.’
‘“We”?’
‘Yes, him, him and me.’ He pointed to a couple of other guys sitting across the table.
‘So let me get this straight. If I look out of the washroom window again, you and those guys over there will take me into a cell and beat me up.’
‘That’s correct.’ He smiled. ‘Just don’t break the rules and we can be friends.’
I talked about the meeting to Gareth, who was typically cynical about the subject.
‘Don’t trust any of these bastards. Even the friendly ones will stab you in the back. I’m no racist, but these Chinks are a bunch of slimy, scheming, two-faced cunts.’
I knew Gareth was right when he said he wasn’t a racist; after all, his wife was half-Uighur. But prison rarely let you see the best in people and it could provoke these kinds of outbursts. For me, the Chinese guys were the best thing about Ti Lan Qiao, and I was becoming attached to my new friends. Even so, my conversation with John had made the situation crystal clear. If push came to shove, the Chinese – through no fault of their own – could not be fully trusted. They could never side with a foreigner against their own. To do so would be suicide, and after that most of my friendships with Chinese became more superficial, as both parties understood the limits and boundaries of the relationship. Ultimately we were from different planets, and there was no point pretending otherwise.
An exception to this rule would come in the form of a small, silver-toothed hunchback named Zhu Go Hua. His disability set him apart from the other inmates, and he seemed as bemused by the situation he found himself in as the foreigners. Shuffling around in a world of his own, he had no friends and cared less to make any. While most Chinese self-censored themselves in conversation with foreigners, Zhu Go Hua spoke his mind freely, oblivious to whether anyone else was listening. Within weeks I decided to nickname him Xiao Zhonguo (small or young Chinese), after my own nickname, Xiao Yinguo (small or young English), which had now been adopted by pretty much the whole wing. As well as his disability, Zhu suffered from chronic headaches and was often seen slumped in the corner with his head in his hands. I started to give him head massages whenever I saw him in one of these states, which he greatly appreciated, rubbing his head against my chest as I set my fingers to work on his throbbing brain.
My new friend was serving 15 years for manslaughter, having stabbed his former boss on a building site after an altercation over unpaid wages. He claimed that a mob of irate workers had attacked the man, killing him, and when the police arrived he was the only one caught with a knife. Because he spoke no English it was hard to work out the details of his case, and other foreigners had told me that Chinese rarely told the truth about their crimes. I didn’t really care what he had done anyway; he made me laugh, had a cheery smile and thought as little of the mindless reform indoctrination as the foreigners did.
Although all the brigades
were subject to the same Reform Through Education programmes, some were expected to take part in extra activities, like singing patriotic songs. The lifers’ block opposite us had to sing one of these songs every day before supper, and you could hear it booming across the prison, and probably beyond its walls. The song was a typically self-aggrandising Communist Party mantra, which repeated over and over the lines:
No Communist Party,
No New China.
Though we were forbidden to talk to anybody in the lifers’ block, there were daily opportunities to make contact during the slopping-out duties, known by the foreigners as ‘shitbuckets’. After lunch, a handful of Chinese would carry up to four buckets each down to one of the sewage holes in the courtyard below the brigade, and the foreigners, who specifically requested emptying their own, joined them. The smell was disgusting and made you want to heave, but every bucket’s contents looked identical due to the diet we all ate, which seemed to make it more tolerable. Some buckets had much more in them than others, and you could tell how many people there were in a cell from the amount of shit you chucked down the hole. The sewers often flooded and the waste would ooze out of the drains into giant puddles of poo, which unfortunate prisoners in wellington boots would wade into and unblock. The shitbuckets routine was supposed to be done in shifts, with each landing going separately, but they often overlapped because everyone was eager to get the nasty business over with as soon as possible, due to the vile effluvia that it created. This became a daily opportunity to get out of the cell block for a few minutes and made it possible to have a quick chat with some of the other prisoners from different brigades.
I got to know a couple of Pakistani guys who were doing eight years for traveller’s cheque scams. One of them, Khalid, a well-spoken middle-class Punjabi, became a friend, and we exchanged books and magazines, which we stuffed up our jumpers and passed through the bars. Khalid’s Chinese prison experience was a good deal different from our own, since Pakistanis were not given foreigner status and were expected to blend in with the locals, wearing the standard grey-striped uniform and working in the brigade workshops. The ground floor of his building, 3rd Brigade, was a huge jade-carving workshop where dozens of inmates sat with mini power tools that resembled electric toothbrushes fashioning everything from fire-breathing dragons to bamboo-chewing pandas to sell to the tourist trade. I’d bought many such trinkets myself, and like most naive tourists had imagined they’d been made by elderly craftsman with wispy beards and hand files. In fact, they were being made by prisoners earning less than £1.50 per month, a form of slavery long since outlawed by the international community.
In spite of their government’s proclamations about human-rights issues in China, American companies made the most of this illegal exploitation, and workers from the lifers’ brigade were often seen slaving long into the night making baseball caps for export to California. Each brigade specialised in a certain trade, and in the daytime the prison resembled a vast live-in factory. There was a whole brigade dedicated to engineering, where officers would get their cars fixed, while others specialised in woodwork, metalwork, textiles and so on. Our own brigade was sometimes called the intellectual wing and specialised in electronics. The workshops were always piled high with fridges, TVs, videos and anything else that needed fixing, and officers from other parts of the prison would frequently arrive with a radio or some other appliance under their arm.
It was strange to think we were part of the intellectual brigade, since many of the inmates couldn’t read or write their own language, but upstairs a number of highly articulate and well-spoken prisoners were given white-collar work like translating and copywriting. Many had spent more than a decade inside for criticising the government, though none wanted to elaborate on what this actually meant. Some were called liumeng, which meant ‘sexual hooligan’, and was a catch-all phrase that covered anything from sexual promiscuity to paedophilia. There was still a law that carried the death penalty for anyone caught having an affair with the wife of an officer of the People’s Liberation Army, and rumour had it that ‘unnatural’ (homosexual) activities carried a three-year prison term.
One of the friendliest English speakers the foreigners came into contact with was Mr Sun, a convicted rapist, and in any other situation a nasty piece of work. But in Ti Lan Qiao, Sun’s crime set him apart from the main Chinese prisoners and thus made him useful to the foreigners. The genius of the officers was to make disliked prisoners like Sun into trustees who could be relied upon to spy upon other prisoners, particularly the top flight of inmates who effectively ran the jail. The logic behind this clever system was that hated prisoners had no particular friends or allegiances within the general population and so needed protection from the guards. In return they would be the eyes and ears of the officers, and every inmate knew it. This worked in the foreigners’ favour when things were heavy with the Chinese, because unlike just about any other prisoner, Sun would not be afraid to side with a foreigner against his own. A thin, wiry man with a sickly smile, he looked like the archetypical snitch in countless prison movies, but to the foreigners he was a useful ally.
While inmates like Sun were the eyes and ears of the guards, the more thuggish prisoners were appropriated by the guards to keep the general population in line. A new arrival prone to fighting and rule-breaking would be severely punished, which usually meant being beaten up by a gang of prisoners and left for days cross-legged, staring at the cell wall with hands cuffed behind the back. Repeat offenders would be sent downstairs to the punishment wing, where they’d be regularly beaten and abused by the guards and trustees, sometimes with hands cuffed behind their backs and the much feared hood over their heads. This resembled a falconer’s hood with a couple of nostril holes and an opening for food. It strapped on the back of the head and left the prisoner in permanent darkness, while his friends had to hand-feed him. Larry had come back from his own stint in the punishment wing with horror stories of human-rights violations and brutality. The officer in charge of the landing was a drunk called Peng, who was known to arrive unannounced in the middle of the night and attack prisoners with his electric baton.
Of all the various punishments available to the guards, the most effective, perhaps, were the group punishments that invariably followed any kind of trouble. If there was a fight the whole wing would be punished, and every prisoner knew it. Consequently, the individual responsible would have to make a series of grovelling apologies to everyone on the wing for letting down his fellow inmates. This involved writing the obligatory report, followed by a self-criticism speech that both officers and prisoners would attend. Prisoners would be invited to quiz the wrongdoer on why he’d let down the brigade, and as everyone sat and listened, he’d have to stand up and be humiliated. The senior officer present would then inform the whole wing there’d be no TV for a week, or worse, that family visiting time would be curtailed for that month. Needless to say the prisoner would find himself deeply unpopular, and it would be many weeks before he could hold his head up on the wing. This self-policing system was remarkably effective, and meant that every prisoner had a vested interest in keeping his fellow inmates out of trouble. Subsequently, after a fight, the wing was never more peaceful, as every inmate was on high alert to prevent any kind of conflict from recurring.
I found this system fascinating. Chinese Communism, with its rituals of diary-writing and public confession, was acting in the way that the Church formally did, but had taken on a general, secularised form within the prison. The guards had adopted the idea of confession in much the same way as pre-modern Western societies used religion. Individuals were encouraged to feel guilty for breaking the rules, while their actions and consciences were determined by their social relationships to each other and the state, creating a uniquely Chinese form of power. And it wasn’t just prisoners who’d broken the rules who were required to write self-criticisms. All prisoners kept a diary that was continually updated to report any new developments in their inn
er worlds. An inmate who’d recently discovered a new fault that he, or a fellow prisoner, family member and so on, possessed was singled out for high praise. If it led to someone else being incriminated, they might be considered for a sentence reduction.
‘What are you writing about today?’
I was talking to a guy called Zhang, a fraudster from Singapore serving 12 years.
‘When I was a young boy, I stole a piece of fruit from a neighbour’s tree. Now I am writing to thank the cadres for their help.’
Zhang was an intelligent man in his 50s with wiry grey hair and plump red cheeks. He was considerably wealthier than most of the prisoners, spoke a little English and was usually friendly to foreigners. He was involved in importing plastics to Singapore from China and had been caught out by bribing the wrong person. Now he was trawling through his past, searching for past crimes to confess to.
‘Don’t you run out of crimes? After all, you’ve been writing these reports every week for many years now,’ I asked.
‘Oh, it’s not true,’ he said, smiling. ‘We just make them up.’
I wondered what my own ‘confessions’ would be about if I was forced to sit down week after week, year after year, recording every transgression. I wasn’t sure I’d have to resort to lying about mine.
With the exception of foreigners, every prisoner had two other numbers on their ID cards. If a prisoner went missing, the person with their number on their ID card would be held responsible; therefore all prisoners were responsible for knowing the exact whereabouts of two other prisoners, which made it easier for the guards to keep track of everyone. This was rarely necessary because with the exception of the number one and a couple of his cronies, no prisoners ever left the wing except for the once-a-month ninety-minute exercise period. The guards had no real work to do, because the minute details of everyone’s life – both in terms of their actions and their mental state – were constantly being recorded, not only by their colleagues, but by themselves, too.
Monkey House Blues Page 16
