The idea that one is required to abase oneself and constantly repent belongs to a pre-modern religious age long abandoned in the West. But to the Chinese it had become quite normal. They didn’t do it because they believed in it, and they certainly didn’t do it because they liked it. It had been a feature of Chinese life since the formative years of Mao’s tyranny in the caves of Yan’an in the 1930s. Everybody willingly subjected themselves to it because they knew that they could be next. Even the top brass in the Communist Party and Red Army were purged successively until the dictator’s death in 1976. I’d seen people weep before his waxwork cadaver at the giant mausoleum in Tiananmen Square. Were they weeping for him? Or for the tens of millions of their countrymen who’d died as a result of his monstrous ego? Maybe they wanted to see him in the flesh, having been denied the dubious privilege during his notoriously secretive life, during which he rarely ventured out of his luxurious palaces. But his legacy had lived on in the form of thinking reports, and everybody had to write them. So the Chinese would do what they were told, otherwise the oppressive state apparatus would crush them underfoot like cockroaches on the hard stone floors of the prison block.
But to us it seemed like the first step on a slippery slope towards our loss of independence, not to mention self-respect. Nobody could see any sense in getting involved in it. Nobody except Tommy. It came as little surprise to the rest of us that he would volunteer to do it. It was well known that he’d been doing it for a long time off his own bat. Everybody was furious. ‘A chain is only as strong as its weakest link,’ said Gareth bitterly. He was right, but I could see Tommy’s rationale for doing it. The guy had 15 years, and the warders had told him that if he played the game he’d get his sentence reduced. As far as he was concerned, he was doing the sensible thing. I could see both sides of the argument, but was more sympathetic to the rest of the guys’ view that we were best off not getting involved in the system. Also, it was clear that Tommy’s separation from the group had taken its toll on his mind. He was becoming too Chinese for his own good. As usual, Larry was at the other end of the spectrum and refused point-blank to be a part of it. But, as I saw it, his 15-year term was destroying his mind, too. His health was poor, but he insisted on doing anything he could to stop the guards from helping him. His strategy for coping with the burden of his sentence had failed miserably, and in spite of his stubbornness he increasingly looked like a broken man. Jürgen and Ludwig were no more enthusiastic about the prospect of writing the self-criticism reports, but felt that if it got the Chinese off our backs it was worth the effort. Ultimately we didn’t have much choice, so we all swallowed our pride and began writing the same grovelling letters as the rest of the prisoners.
For me, it was no big deal to write a few hundred words of bullshit once in a while to placate the guards; in fact, I quite enjoyed it. Besides, I wouldn’t be getting any time off my sentence anyway, so it made no difference what I wrote about. My first report was about pandas and how I hoped the Chinese law protected their animal rights.
‘You don’t understand,’ said Mai, ‘you’re supposed to write about your crime.’
‘But I haven’t done anything wrong, and anyway, pandas are more important than foreigners carrying a bit of dope about.’
For the next report, I wrote how happy I was that the Chinese government were having a crackdown on Pakistani falcon smugglers who were stealing the birds from China to supply the lucrative trade in Saudi Arabia.
Captain Mai eventually stopped caring what I wrote, but I carried on doing the bare minimum because he had a job to do and we all had to play the game. He was also the only officer who seemed to care about our welfare, and once even bought me some medicine from outside the jail in his own time. In the world of Porridge he was our very own Mr Barraclough, and I appreciated his voluntary acts of kindness.
The reform meetings brought a bit of levity to the wing as Mr Zhao’s reign of oppression dragged on. Personally, I didn’t care about the lack of showers or the report-writing; what got to me was the breakdown of communications with my Chinese friends. Officially we were not supposed to mix, but as long as the number one didn’t mind, nobody said anything. Under Mr Zhao, all my friends ignored me. In fact, they would not even give me eye contact, even though we all lived on one corridor. I’d been sent to Coventry. I was invisible. An outcast. My friend San Peiwa, who had enough clout to override the number one’s orders, had been released, as had Mark, so it was just me and the four foreigners. I missed hanging out with the hunchback and the other characters I’d come to know, and though there were 75 guys in a tiny area, I became isolated for the first time since leaving the detention centre.
There was a violent undercurrent to the new regime, too, and Larry was often at the centre of it. His behaviour had been ignored most of the time before, but now the gloves were off and the guards were getting fed up with his attitude. Where most of us would make some kind of half-hearted effort to be civil with the guards, Larry would find some small point of principle to cause a fuss. He had many issues, both legal and medical, that brought him into contact with Captain Xu, which required a bit of humility and diplomacy on his part. Needless to say he wasn’t having any of it, and often ended up shouting and banging his fist on the table. A gang of Chinese prisoners would then drag him off down the corridor and into his cell with a punch in the mouth. It was frustrating to watch because I sympathised with him while realising that he was wasting his time. Prison officers had no powers outside of the day-to-day running of the jail, and it was shooting the messenger to pretend they did. Throwing a tantrum with a screw because you wanted to see a lawyer or doctor was entirely counterproductive, because you were alienating your one link to the outside world. Even if the officer was your best friend it was still pointless, because in China the idea that you would even contest your sentence was unthinkable, as it would be construed as questioning the system, which was always right. Larry’s case was hopeless, and the best he could hope for was a sentence reduction, which required a recommendation from the officer in charge. The more he complained, the more time he would serve.
The Chinese prisoners disliked him too, which was ironic because Larry would happily have put himself in the dock to protect their human rights. If he saw some prisoners assault a new arrival at the jail, he would make an official complaint in writing and demand an audience with the captain, who’d laugh at him. Afterwards, the prisoners handing out the beating would find something to report Larry for and so the cycle would continue until Larry was back in the guards’ office complaining or being reprimanded. Worse still, punishments were invariably applied to all the foreigners, so our group would be blamed for Larry’s tantrums. We didn’t mind because everyone respected Larry’s principles, even if they were counterproductive, and there was never any doubt that he would stand up for us in any dispute with the authorities.
I had an important advantage over the other foreigners: I’d been to boarding school before I went to prison. In fact I’d been to a number of them, from a young age, and there are many similarities between these two institutions: the single-sex environment, the separation from loved ones, the power structure. My early altercations with the bully Hunan had reminded me of school: how new boys were abused, only to become abusers themselves as they moved up the hierarchy. No doubt I had been both, though I never became a prefect and thus never managed to cause others too much misery. In Ti Lan Qiao, the top flight of prisoners were often bullies; indeed, it was part of their job description, and they would probably have lost their position if they’d failed to toe the line. The humiliation of newcomers was de rigueur – unless, of course, they were the relatives of Communist Party big shots. You were being hardened up for your own good. At boarding school, prefects would send you on long runs before breakfast, followed by a cold shower. In jail, it would be slaps around the head and sitting cross-legged in a cell for hours. The other foreigners didn’t have such a background, but it felt fairly normal to me.
> Another key feature of both these establishments is that you have to get used to living with a bunch of people whom you might not necessarily like. Day-school children might hate being at school and despise their fellow students, but come four o’clock they can go home to their friends and parents. Living with people 24–7 is a very different situation that requires a good deal of flexibility to navigate the power structure of same-sex environments. I generally loathed my many years at boarding school, but the experience certainly came in handy in jail. And yet regardless of whether the pupils liked it or not, there were always the school holidays to look forward to; meanwhile, prison was relentless, and there was always someone at the end of his tether for whatever reason. And this, presumably, was why guards and inmates celebrated events like Chinese New Year or female-inmate dance troupes. It was the nearest the state could get to emulating a family environment, which was crucial for letting off steam. Without it, Shanghai Municipal Prison would have been a very dangerous place indeed.
Even the lifers’ block got to let their hair down once in a while and were given ‘cooling’ parties where they’d sit in the sun outside for an hour or so every few weeks. I’d got to know some of them when emptying shitbuckets, and while they didn’t speak English, a smile and a handshake was enough to form some kind of a bond. They had a much harsher regime than we did and often worked in shifts round the clock to get out the orders of whatever they were making. One of the longest-serving prisoners had been a strongman for the Gang of Four, the counter-revolutionary movement led by Mao’s last wife, Jiang Qing. He was a mountain of a man, twice the size of the average Chinese, and had been in Ti Lan Qiao since the group had been put on trial shortly after Mao’s death in 1976. Like his boss and her cronies, he’d been given a suspended death sentence, but while she eventually committed suicide, having been released on health grounds in 1991, he’d survived. I estimated he’d probably be released in around 2001, after 25 years, though it’s possible he got out not long after Deng Xiaoping’s death in 1997. Had Madame Mao’s coup against Deng been successful, he could have ended up as mayor of Shanghai, or even warden of Ti Lan Qiao prison. Either way, he must have had some tales to tell.
We also got a cooling party, and unlike our exercise periods as a foreign group, the whole wing was allowed to sit in the courtyard lapping up the sunshine. I was the only foreigner who didn’t have any sunglasses, and the rare burst of sunshine made me squint. Years earlier I’d got conjunctivitis from a filthy towel in a Taipei hotel, and my eyes had never been the same. I think the disease had burned my retinas, and from then on I always kept a pair of sunglasses nearby. In prison I forgot all about them, as I’d never needed them until today, and I joined a small group of Chinese sitting in a spot shaded by the shadow of a guard’s watchtower.
It wasn’t the first time I’d been ‘blinded by the light’. Two years earlier, Rosie and I had gone sightseeing, something we rarely did. We’d taken the train from Delhi and I’d slept most the way.
‘Agra’s a dump!’ everyone said. ‘See the Taj and get out.’
The train pulled into the station in time for breakfast. A boy of maybe 13 stood on the platform spying on the passers-by. His face lit up with a smile as we approached, before averting his gaze towards an elderly couple who dutifully tossed a coin into the battered baked-bean can around his neck. The taxi driver slouched as he entered the fray of dusty traffic fumes. He never asked us where we were going; he didn’t have to. On the side of the road, an old man was selling paperweight concrete domes inlaid with mirrored tiles and multi-coloured agates from Rajasthan. I narrowed my eyes as we got out of the cab, having left my sunglasses back at the hotel. It was still dark when we’d left at 5 a.m. and they’d been the last thing on my mind, but as we approached the glorious marble palace it was invisible to me. My scrawny eyelids wrapped shut like roller blinds before the white-marble colossus, and I had to make a curve out of my hand like a golf cap to see through my scorched eyelashes.
‘Oh my God, isn’t that just beautiful,’ cooed an American woman to her husband, ‘and to think he built it just for her!’
There was no disputing that the Mughal treasure – built by a maharajah as testament to his unfailing love for his wife – was one of India’s finest, but the relentless midday sun beating on the vast slabs of white stone began to give me a headache. I crouched next to a fountain with my back to the giant mausoleum of love and read the blurb from the Lonely Planet guide, whose glossy illustrations reminded me of what I was missing. Through the warped prism of my sundried retinas, the Taj Mahal became more convincing in pictures than reality.
We went to eat at a nearby restaurant, intending to return for sunset. Walking back an hour or so later the sun was beginning to wane, and we decided to stop for a smoke after finding a small gateway leading to a garden where a concrete stairway traversed the side of the wall to a roof terrace. The sun collapsed over the garden wall, leaving a peachy hue between the two pillars either side of a doorway leading to the street below. Silver-tailed monkeys swung down from branches to see who the visitors were as the birds broke out in a twilight cacophony that echoed across the courtyard.
There were no other tourists in the garden, as if the famous monument next door had robbed it of its attraction, but this only added to its appeal for us as we sat smoking beneath a tree. If we wanted to see the Taj again before our train left we’d have to leave immediately, but the garden had begun to work its magic on us, and its enchanting spells of natural beauty overshadowed the world-famous shrine barely a stone’s throw away. The garden had come alive with its vibrant mix of plants, animals and birds, while the neighbouring building that everyone had come to see stood stone-dead in this dusty town: a colossal and beautiful corpse holding up the sky. By contrast, the garden needed no representation by men; it simply existed, as it had done for thousands of years before the Taj Mahal had been thought of. In a leafy corner stood an ivy-covered statue of the monkey god Hanuman, the weeds strangling its granite torso after years of neglect. We wondered if it had been built by some great monkey king in remembrance of a loved one.
Back at the station, the same boy we’d seen in the morning was hustling tourists on the platform and seemed to be doing good business. His angelic smile greeted us from a couple of carriages away, beaming under the glare of the canopy lights. As we got nearer we began to notice his feet bulged from beneath his baggy trousers, ballooning into hideously cartoonish spectacles with grotesque elephantine toes.
‘My friend,’ he called out, ‘you want photo?’
I pulled a camera out of my bag and snapped a close-up of his waifish smile. He seemed disappointed that I ignored his lucrative malformations, but his smile outshone the gloomy cards that fate had dealt him, and I had no appetite for tourist freak shows.
A whistle blew and the train started to hiss. A hand came down from the stairwell and hoisted me up into the carriage. He was a Sikh businessman from the Midlands on his way back home to England after visiting family and friends in the Punjab.
‘Well, what did you think of the Taj then?’ he said, stuffing stray hairs into his beard net.
‘I think it’s beautiful,’ I replied, not wanting to bore him with my story about the forgotten sunglasses.
‘You should see the Golden Temple in Amritsar,’ he said, referring to the holiest Sikh shrine. ‘I think you’d be impressed.’
‘Yes, I’d love to, but I’m leaving India in a few days,’ I said.
‘Me too, I can’t wait,’ he said, perking up. ‘This country’s too bloody hot, don’t you think?’
‘Yes, I suppose it is,’ I said as the train picked up speed.
Shanghai was hot, too, and the longer the summer went on the hotter it got, as the vast concrete buildings, courtyards and walls heated up. Even if the weather changed outside it took weeks to cool down in the jail, in much the same way as it had taken weeks to warm up after the winter. The prison seemed to be around three weeks behind the temperatu
re outside its walls, and when cooler winds blew as the seasons changed, you could still feel the summer heat oozing through the walls of the cells at night. And it wasn’t just the heat. Shanghai is one of the smoggiest cities in the world, and Ti Lan Qiao is slap-bang in the middle of the city: a steel and concrete island surrounded by fetid rivers and smoke-filled skies.
I wondered what Rosie was up to in South East Asia. She’d sent me photos of her travels, which I’d Blu-tacked round the back of my cell, out of general view. She was grinning between the animated trees of Angkor Wat, gazing at the sandstone peaks of Halong Bay and surfacing mischievously from a Vietcong tunnel shaft in Hue. She was seeing the places we’d talked of seeing together, and I was jealous. She’d even taken a PADI diving course now I was out of the way: something I’d always wanted to do, but which she’d never shown any enthusiasm for. Perhaps my dreams were rubbing off on her?
Gareth was missing his wife, too. He got a visit once a month like the Chinese, and he spoke in Mandarin under the beady eyes of Captain Jinn, whom he loathed. Jürgen and Ludwig got a visit from the German consul, Mrs Sievers, a kindly lady who clearly sympathised with them. There was bad news from back home: Jürgen’s dad had died. His family had already sent a letter, but he hadn’t received it since foreigners’ mail tended to get delayed in the bottleneck of the translators’ office. Larry had also had a visit and had taken the opportunity to rail against the guards for not posting his appeals for a retrial to the high court. I imagine the US consul thought he was living in cloud cuckoo land.
Monkey House Blues Page 19
