Most offenders were sent to the punishment wing for a short sharp shock, and on their return were quickly promoted to their new role of policing the wing. Within weeks, they’d be the ones beating up the new arrivals and would get to eat their meals on the number one table. The week after my arrival, a guy from the countryside came in to start a four-year sentence for theft. He was from Hunan Province, famous for its greasy food and being the birthplace of Chairman Mao. Hunan, as the foreigners nicknamed him, was from a peasant background and like so many of his countrymen had come to Shanghai to find work to support his family back at home. He looked scruffy compared to the Shanghainese lads, and his teeth had a greenish-yellow hue, as if he’d adopted Mao’s foul habit of cleaning his teeth with a finger and green-tea leaves. Under Mao, rural people had been favoured over town dwellers, whose education and individuality were causes for suspicion. But under Deng Xiaoping the tables had turned, and men like Hunan seemed a bit simple-minded and out of place in Ti Lan Qiao: like a country bumpkin from the West Country trying to cut it with the Chaps in Parkhurst. Needless to say, the Shanghai boys considered him a halfwit. A useful idiot whose hard work and obedience could be put to good use.
During his first week he was subjected to the usual abuse that most prisoners were expected to put up with. This involved having to sit on a mini chair about a foot high while being ‘interviewed’ by the top prisoners, who were sitting on normal-sized chairs. Generally, there would be at least one of the more thuggish inmates present who would intimidate the newcomer by kicking him and slapping his face and head while he was attempting to answer the questions. I felt sorry for Hunan, mainly because he was the first of many Chinese I was to see treated this way, but also because I felt guilty that I was not being treated similarly, even though I was frequently breaking the rules. A few days later he was being picked on again, and this time he was confined to his cell for days on end with his head against the wall. I was outraged at this, and every time I walked past the cell I’d throw in sweets and chicken legs to try and cheer him up. We became friends and for the next few weeks had some laughs together.
About six weeks later, I noticed Hunan abusing the latest batch of prisoners in much the same way as he’d been treated on his arrival. A few days afterwards, he was at the forefront of a mob that had decided to take another new prisoner into his cell and beat him up. I’d vaguely got to know the prisoner getting the hiding, and I guessed he knew how to look after himself. He was twice the size of most of the other inmates and wasn’t the type to be pushed around. A smack dealer from Shanghai, he’d been caught with sixty grams of heroin but had somehow ended up with a ten-year sentence that was lenient in a country with a mandatory death sentence for possession of more than fifty grams. Had he been from outside the city he would most likely have got the bullet, but there were often exceptions made for local people from the ‘right’ families. The only English word he seemed to know was Motorola, referring to his phone pager that he’d used on the outside to ply his trade. Such luxuries were rare in China at the time, and may have explained his elevated status in the criminal community and thus the relatively short sentence. After a few weeks, he was transferred to a work farm with a different kind of regime and seemed happy to be getting out of Ti Lan Qiao. As for Hunan, I took an intense dislike to him after that and we spent the next two years avoiding each other.
Not all prisoners were subjected to this kind of intimidation on arrival at the jail. After I’d been at Ti Lan Qiao a few months, a new prisoner arrived called Wang Jun. He was tall for a Chinese, with thin lips and a short-back-and-sides haircut. From the start he seemed to have a higher status than the other prisoners and was immediately promoted to the role of trustee. He’d been given an 11-year sentence for stabbing someone, but like most Chinese he would not elaborate on the details of his case. While the other prisoners he arrived with were going through the demeaning introduction process, Wang sat around looking bored. Rumour had it he was from a well-to-do family with Party connections, and both the inmates and guards treated him with a good deal of respect. When the prisoners went off to work, he was left to hang around on the wing with no particular role. When he got bored with sitting on his arse all day, minor tasks were assigned to him to give him something to do. We came to the conclusion that his main job was spying on us.
Gao Zhengguo, our number one prisoner, became a useful ally when I realised I could twist him round my little finger. He spoke a few words of very bad English, quite liked foreigners, and it became obvious within days that he fancied me. Strictly speaking Chinese were not allowed to talk to foreigners, but the number one and his mates could bend the rules to suit themselves. Gao made a point of watching me shower and telling me I was beautiful, and when I mentioned I’d studied shiatsu massage in Japan he asked me to be his personal masseur. I was quite happy to do this since I enjoyed it and it gave me status with the Chinese, who never crossed anyone who was mates with the number one prisoner. My cosy relationship with Gao would not last, but for my first few weeks in Ti Lan Qiao I could do pretty much as I pleased, and I made the most of it, lying in bed long after the wake-up call and crossing the red line to look out of the cell-block window. The red line was a faded stripe painted on the floor at the end of the corridor, and by crossing it you could make it to a window that looked across a courtyard to 3rd Brigade, where the Pakistanis were. Captain Xu warned me that I could be shot by the guards for crossing this line, as it could be seen as an escape attempt. No one had ever escaped from Ti Lan Qiao. The nearest thing to an escape had taken place months earlier, when a prisoner had failed to return from home leave after a long sentence. He had not even gone on the run, but had simply stayed at home with his family until the police arrived to take him back to jail; nonetheless, he received a three-year extension to his sentence.
Before my arrival the foreigners had campaigned long and hard to increase the frequency of the exercise periods, and eventually the guards had decided we’d be permitted to have a ninety-minute session once every ten days. This involved going downstairs after breakfast and running around a concrete yard while a guard watched over us. Sometimes we’d get a football game going with the Chinese that would get progressively more violent and often end in a fight. Usually I’d take the opportunity to catch a bit of natural sunlight and walk around the yard playing a harmonica. The guards would look down from their watchtowers with bemusement as I traipsed from one end of the yard to the other, blowing bluesy riffs into the air. If it rained the guards would refuse to go outside, so in the winter months these exercise periods were often cancelled and weeks would go by without our leaving the cell block. When this happened, tension grew on the wing and problems between Chinese and foreigners became more common, with Larry and Tommy invariably coming to blows.
Early in my stay at Ti Lan Qiao, I was asked to take part in the jail karaoke contest. I was stunned to hear such a thing even existed. I was still reeling from my time in the detention centre and it would have been unimaginable to entertain such an idea only weeks earlier. Some of the prisoners on our wing had heard me playing their favourite song, ‘Jambalaya (On the Bayou)’, on my guitar and had put me forward for the contest. Gareth was also taking part so the two of us got to go to the Cross Building, a relatively plush complex across from 8th Brigade. I was confident I’d impress the Chinese, but my self-assurance was misplaced when I realised quite how much my guitar-playing ability and voice had withered away after eight months doing neither. I’d been to dozens of karaoke bars in Japan and always had a good sing-song, but their karaoke machines were state of the art, with excellent microphones and sophisticated software that automatically gauged which key you were singing in and adjusted the machine accordingly. The Shanghai Municipal Prison karaoke machine was rather less hi-tech and didn’t even have lyric prompts to let you know when to start singing. I’d brought my guitar along, as I’ve always felt slightly uncomfortable singing without one, but I still managed to play in a different key fro
m the soundtrack. Even when I got the hang of it my voice was shot to bits, and I started coughing and spluttering my way through the Hank Williams tune, to the amusement of the Chinese, who were pretty good in comparison. Gareth, who was a better singer than me anyway, had had plenty of practice and did a decent rendition of another Chinese favourite, ‘Rivers of Babylon’, to great acclaim. I felt a complete fool, but it was still fun to get out of the cell block for an hour or so. To my horror, the event was filmed by a policeman with a video camera. Presumably the tape of this embarrassing episode is lying in a drawer somewhere in Shanghai jail to this day.
The karaoke competition was my first meeting with members of 9th Brigade, the women’s unit of the jail. A granite-faced female officer led a troupe of 12 girls into the hall to relative indifference on the part of the male prisoners. In a British jail the arrival would have no doubt been heralded with a cacophony of wolf whistles, but in Ti Lan Qiao they were largely ignored. Some of the girls were quite pretty, having been hand-picked to take part in the numerous events that involved visits from local dignitaries. The women’s brigade was widely believed to be worse than the men’s jail, partly because it had no views of the outside. It was situated in the very centre of the jail, and every window was shuttered like the detention centre I’d been in. Most of the prisoners would spend years without sunshine, and the discipline was said to be stricter than the men’s. Rumour had it there was a solitary foreign prisoner in the building, a German girl who’d been busted with five kilos of hash in Beijing. I can’t imagine what her experience of Ti Lan Qiao was like. I’d seen their building when walking to 8th Brigade on my arrival and was struck by how depressing it looked from the outside. There were around 500 inmates serving similar terms to the men for various crimes ranging from theft to murder. Some were prostitutes passing through on their way to reform workhouses for fallen women, while many were inside for drug offences. Like the men, the women had access to extra food from the prison shop, but were not allowed to buy bananas or salami sausages unless they were chopped up into small pieces. Presumably the authorities felt such foodstuffs would interrupt the women’s rehabilitation.
In October 1994, we were taken across the prison to another brigade for a Reduction Meeting. This was the most eagerly awaited occasion for all prisoners and perhaps the last opportunity Mark would have to be released before completing his sentence. He’d served four years of a four-and-a-half-year sentence, so if he was going to get any time off it would be today. Sentence reductions were loosely linked to merit points, though favoured prisoners seemed to get them regardless. As a foreigner Mark was not involved in the merit system, but had been led to believe he was eligible for early release anyway. Since I’d arrived in Ti Lan Qiao he’d spent much of his time in hospital with pneumonia, and I’d missed having him around to talk to. The hospital sounded like the punishment wing with beds, with many prisoners chained 24 hours a day. He’d become friends with an attractive nurse who worked there and actually preferred it to being on our wing on 8th Brigade.
As the first foreign prisoner to be sent to Ti Lan Qiao, Mark had spent his first year alone with only Chinese for friends. He spoke decent Mandarin and had actually had a much better time in the jail before any other foreigners turned up. Before, he had been left to his own devices and had managed to get by without too much hassle, but when the others arrived the atmosphere changed and relations with the Chinese soured. As a solitary foreigner in a jail of 5,000 inmates he’d been looked after and respected, but the petit feuds and threats of violence that came with the new prisoners had made the hospital seem like a pleasant break. Now we sat on our tiny plastic stools waiting to discover if today would be his last day in China. The judge began to read out the names of prisoners who would be getting time off their sentences. They stepped forward and thanked the judge. Within minutes it was all over, and Mark’s face dropped to the floor. Out of more than three hundred prisoners, some twenty-five reductions had been handed out, ranging from six months to a year. The lucky individuals received a certificate, but there was nothing for Mark.
I wasn’t expecting anything, and Mark was still just six months away from release, but others from our group were bitter. None of the foreigners had reached the halfway point of their sentences and, with the exception of me, had many years ahead of them. Even if they’d got a year each it would have given them something to look forward to, but not one single day off for any foreigners. Yet just as we got up to leave, Mark was called aside and left through another door. By the time we got back to 8th Brigade, he was packing his bags and was out of the door within minutes. I was sorry to see him go. He’d been a good mate to me in the little time we’d spent together and had been the only person who was vaguely neutral in the feuds between Tommy and the rest. From now on I’d have to tread carefully between the two groups and the bad blood that was never far from the surface.
Many inmates kept tiny insects as pets, which they carried everywhere in small plastic boxes that they made in the workshops. No bigger than a small matchbox, some had clear Perspex lids so the pets could be seen munching on the pieces of fruit they were fed. Some looked like very small crickets, while others had beetles. Occasionally they’d get them out and put them on the tabletops to hop about together, and no doubt a few cans of tinned pineapple were gambled on these races. I’d had many pets as a kid, so when Rosie and I got together it wasn’t long before we found our first furry friend.
We bought a chipmunk from a guy on the side of the road in Goa. It was our first family pet and we named him Cosmo. He was still a baby, at least we thought it was a he, and we were his mum and dad. I put him in the cigarette pocket of my baggy Balinese shirt and he curled up like a baby kangaroo in its mother’s pouch. Being hippies, we couldn’t countenance the idea of putting him in a cage, so our house became his adventure playground. We found some branches in the garden and roped them together to make elaborate climbing frames with banana-leaf slides. His paws were quite sharp, with tiny talons that enabled him to hang upside down in any piece of fabric and fall asleep. If we went out to a beach cafe, Cosmo would come along, bobbing up and down in my pocket as we rode our motorbikes through the paddy fields.
Before we’d met, Rosie had planned to go off on a trip to Kerala with her friend Nadia. Since we’d barely been out of each other’s sight since getting together, it was a good opportunity to give each other a bit of space. To shorten the time apart we decided to go on the first leg of the trip together, after which I’d return alone before meeting them back in Goa after their jaunt on the backwater riverboats down south. Hampi was a lengthy bus and train ride inland, and had a famous temple where visitors from Goa liked to visit to see the ‘real’ India. I’d spent many months travelling around different parts of India on previous visits to the country but had never been to Hampi before. It was famous for its ancient ruins and massive, erratic stone boulders that dotted the landscape, as well as its temples to the monkey god Hanuman and other Hindu deities.
It was still dark when it was time to leave, and Cosmo was nowhere to be found. We looked all over the house and shook his favourite sleeping spot – a large green blanket where he liked to hang upside down like a bat, snoozing. We’d made him a little house out of cardboard, sawdust and screwed-up balls of newspaper. We took it to pieces and tossed the contents across the floor in the hope that the little mite was kipping in the debris of the Times of India. Nothing.
Finally we gave up. Cosmo had left the building, and that was that. We were gutted, and felt our first attempt at parenthood had been a failure. With the bus departure looming, we took a taxi to Mapusa and boarded the bus to Hubballi, which was the nearest train station to Goa at the time. The bus trip was around six hours and wound through the hot, humid lowlands away from the cooling ocean breeze. After a couple of hours the bus started climbing into the hills and the temperature dropped, so we took out our travel blanket and laid it across our laps. Rosie flinched, and looked at me as she let out a t
icklish giggle and pulled back the blanket. Cosmo was lying in it with bleary eyes, looking rather annoyed at the intrusion into his sleeping patterns. We took some fruit out of our bag, and he sat up on his hind legs gnawing the piece of apple in his paws. Other passengers on the bus crowded round to see the tiny stowaway, but being a shy little fellow he scrambled up my arm and into my shirt pocket for another nap.
When we finally got to Hampi the Hindu festival was in full flow, and tens of thousands of pilgrims had descended on the small temple town. After checking into the hotel, Nadia produced a tab of acid with a print of the Buddha on the front, which we split three ways before heading into town. The temple was packed and the people swaying through its courtyards and walkways resembled a football crowd. Our feet barely touched the ground as the heaving masses carried us along with them in their trance-like ecstasy. Cosmo got squashed, too, and leapt out of my pocket onto the floor, and within a split second I heard a terrible squeal. I went into a squat to find the poor little critter, but the crowd would not let up and his squeal stopped. I was convinced he’d finally gone to that great chipmunk heaven in the sky when a woman screamed. Cosmo had his tail trapped under the woman’s foot and was desperately trying to claw his way up her leg. I yanked the lady’s foot out of the way and put him back in my front pocket, which I shielded with my hand until we could get away from the festival.
‘Maybe we should just find somewhere to let him go,’ said Rosie wisely. ‘I don’t think he’s going to live long in our care.’
‘He’s too young to fend for himself and wouldn’t last long without us,’ I said. ‘Looks like we’re going to have to stick together.’
Monkey House Blues Page 17
