The heat brought many prisoners out in a rash, and the jail sold bottles of alcohol-based after shave to splash on their skin. It smelled like a mixture of menthol, tiger balm and Brut 33, and it worked well. It was a pinkish liquid in a glass bottle that left a cool, dry sensation, as well as drowning out the inevitable body odour of so many perspiring men. Most of the foreigners wet-shaved their heads in the summer, which seemed to perplex the Chinese, who thought it uncouth, I think. The guys on death row and the lifers’ block had shaved heads, so I suppose the practice had unsettling connotations for them. Instead, a group of prisoners would get out the clippers and give everyone a crew cut once every three months. Elderly men were allowed to grow beards if they wanted, and there was an aged Korean guy in the lifers’ block who’d been in the jail at least 20 years who reminded me of paintings of the great Daoist sage Laozi.
Summer was the watermelon season, and they arrived by the truckload. They were ridiculously cheap, and the foreigners always bought at least six each. The Chinese taught us how to make watermelon salad out of the rind. This involved scraping the hard, dark-green layer off first before thinly shredding the yellowish pulp, which is then soaked in salt. It was a laborious job with a blunt knife, and after ten minutes in the salt there wasn’t much left. We then washed the salt off and added light soy sauce, sesame oil and sugar; it produced a tasty crunchy salad that I’d happily buy in a restaurant.
Our new number one, Chen, made the most of my shiatsu skills. I was happy to oblige. He was a good bloke and had always been a friend to me. As head prisoner he had a lot of admin to do, consisting mainly of doing the guards’ paperwork for them. Reports had to be written about the prisoners’ progress towards their reform and the hierarchy of trustees who ran the place. Mr Sun, the convicted rapist, was still the ‘eyes and ears’ of the guards as head of the shadow surveillance team. His job was to organise the monitoring of all the prisoners, regardless of rank, so it was important for him and the number one to synchronise their reports before handing them over to the guards. Some of Chen’s flunkies were leftovers from Mr Zhao’s time as number one, but they couldn’t have been nicer under the new leadership. Even one particular prisoner I’d never got along with, and with whom I’d had a showdown after I’d found him in my cell, was civil towards me. Zhu Go Hua, the hunchback, was allowed to be my mate again, and I massaged his head when he had migraines.
A young new prisoner called Qian turned up. He was 21 but he looked 14, with a weedy physique and thick glasses. He looked like a school kid who’d wandered into the jail by mistake. His English was excellent since he’d worked as a clerk in a foreigners’ hotel, and was a good deal brighter than most of the guys on our wing. He’d been caught with his hand in the hotel till and got an eight-year stretch. In the first week, he cried a lot and the top prisoners took him under their wing. Being more intelligent than most, he learned the rules quickly and was moved up to group leader of the latest batch of new arrivals. As the best English speaker on the wing, he was sometimes drafted in to translate for the foreigners. Before long, he was eating on the number one’s table and became a trustee.
My Mandarin was very basic – though I managed to make myself understood most of the time – but it was good to have someone around whom I could speak to in normal English. I asked Qian for Chinese lessons, but as usual it was against the rules. It was easy to forget that officially there was supposed to be no communication between the Chinese and us. We all lived in the same corridor, but were supposed to ignore each other. Under Mr Zhao this rule had been strictly enforced, but even though things had improved drastically, being seen by a guard talking to a foreigner was risky and a punishable offence.
Every few months, there was a bed-airing day when we’d take our futons and pillows up to the roof. The view from the top of the building was a treat, as was the fresh air. We had a bird’s-eye view of the iconic Shanghai tower we’d nicknamed the ‘spaceship building’. The roof was surrounded by a small concrete wall and a large mesh fence. Our building was higher than some of the other brigades’, and we could see the roofs of other buildings. One of the brigade roofs was covered in plants and vegetables and looked like a giant rectangular oasis, while the kitchen brigade had huge drums of cooking oil and steaming chimneys. The terrace was the size of a football pitch, with heavy-duty ropes hung across upon which we draped our futons and pillows. The Chinese had a uniform way of folding their bedding and hanging it, while the foreigners did their own thing. If the weather was nice we were allowed to relax and catch a few sunrays, and when we went back to the cell block the bedding had halved in weight. The dust these days generated would cause an allergic reaction in me, and my nose would run constantly for an hour or so afterwards. Captain Mai noticed the discomfort it caused me and bought me some ‘joint-venture’ antihistamine pills. Joint venture meant a combination of Chinese and Western medicine, manufactured by Western businesses joining forces with their Chinese counterparts. Mai said he always bought joint-venture goods because the Chinese stuff was useless, which I entirely agreed with.
He also took me to the dentist when I had toothache, generally caused by chipping my teeth while biting on stony rice. A news story turned up in the China Daily about a gang who’d just been sent down for putting a ton of small stones in their rice to bring up the weight. They got long sentences, which I was not sorry to hear about.
The trip to the dentist with Mai was an eye-opener. There must have been a hundred guys waiting to go in, but Mai queue-barged and got me in the chair in ten minutes. There were two dentists working side by side with a chair each, so you could hear the guy next door groaning as the dentists chatted. The dentists wore guard uniforms with white coats over the top and left the door wide open so the people waiting could watch. There was no anaesthetic, and the place ran on an ‘if in doubt, pull it out’ basis. I’d been terrified about the impending visit, but the toothache got worse and Mai said he’d make sure they did a good job. Jürgen had been not long before me to have a wisdom tooth out. He came back looking like the Elephant Man, with a bulge in his jaw the size of a tennis ball, but he’d lived to tell the tale. Now I was in the chair with a hundred convicts ogling me, so I had to put on a brave face. Fortunately, it wasn’t as bad as I was expecting. The tooth was dead, and the dentist yanked it out without too much pain.
Being in a dentist’s chair reminded me of my first ever encounter with a Far Eastern white-coat years earlier in Japan. I had a lingering dose of non-specific urethritis from my escapades in Thailand and booked myself into a clinic as soon as I got my first pay-cheque from the karaoke bar where I worked. The surgery was pristine, with pretty girls fussing over me and lulling me into a state of security before the doctor pulled a curtain around the area and asked me to lie down on a bed. He then put on a pair of surgical gloves – which I’d come to associate with airport customs officials – and rammed two fingers inside me before squeezing the prostate gland. I’d never felt such agony in my life and remember letting out a high-pitched squeal as the doctor continued with a smile on his face. The pretty girls’ faces dropped as the curtain was opened and they looked at me writhing on the bed. I was in a state of shock when I handed the doctor a 10,000-yen note for his services and walked back to my guesthouse, but the more I thought of it, the more convinced I was that I’d been sexually abused by this man. I considered going back and confronting the pervert, who I imagined had wanked himself off afterwards, but I knew I would never be able to back up my claim. As an Amnesty International member, I often get grisly reports of tortures involving such practices – often involving sharp, heated or electrical implements of one kind or another – and they always upset me more than any other equally hideous reports.
On the way back from the dentist, we walked past a group of convicts awaiting execution. They were hog-tied and chained to each other as an open-sided truck stood by. They were to be paraded through the city as an example to the others, roosters for the chop, and a police film cr
ew were on hand to record the occasion for the evening news. I asked Captain Mai what he thought about it, and he looked uneasy and told me to move along. The condemned men stood in line as guards and soldiers began prodding them onto the truck for their last drive around the city. I lingered in the doorway of 8th Brigade, watching the doomed men as Mai checked me in, and my dreaded trip to the dentist found a new perspective.
Rosie had mentioned in a recent letter she might have a chance to come and visit. She was working as a tour guide in Vietnam and had a few days spare. Mai announced out of the blue that the big day had come, so I threw on the best T-shirt I could find and we left for the reception area. Captain Jinn was a senior officer in charge of foreigners’ visits and was waiting for us at the bottom of the staircase. Jinn was loathed by the foreigners, though I never had much to do with him. Larry wrote him endless letters about legal issues, which I imagine Jinn threw in the bin, while Gareth understandably detested his racist attitude towards his half-Uighur wife.
We walked into one of the more civilised prison reception rooms, and there sat Rosie with the British vice consul. She looked lovely in her pastel-coloured hemp dungarees from the Golden Triangle, with a big grin on her face. We hugged and had a quick kiss before Jinn told me to sit on the opposite side of the table. Prison visits can have a surreal quality to them. With so much to say in such a short space of time, it becomes hard to think of anything to say at all. Instead there were long silences, interspersed with a few giggles and resigned smiles. I had a large bushy beard, which I’d been planning to shave off before her visit, but for some reason I hadn’t bothered. Perhaps I wanted her to see the new me: unattached, independent and oblivious to the notion of looking good for someone else. We talked about mutual friends and goodwill messages passed on from family members as I made my way through her packet of Camel Lights. She looked happy and said I looked well under the circumstances, and we both knew the worst of our ordeal was over. I was ‘coming down from the mountain’, and felt confident enough not to bother asking what was going on in her private life. It didn’t seem to make much difference any more; our life together had been torn in half, and there was no saying whether we had a future together when I was released. Either way, we were the best of friends and no amount of time apart would ever change that.
Jinn looked at his watch and it was all over. In some ways, it was a relief. Rosie said my sister was thinking of visiting if I wanted, but I said I’d rather she didn’t. I’d be out in a while and visits slowed down the passing of time. We kissed goodbye, and I nodded to Mai that I wanted to get going. I turned in the door to see Rosie’s beautiful face looking back at mine, then turned back and walked quickly back to 8th Brigade.
Later that day, our number one prisoner and my good friend Chen asked how my visit had gone, and did I think we’d marry when I was released. For the first time since my arrest I said I had no idea what the future held. Our love had become like the decayed tooth in Yukio Mishima’s The Temple of the Golden Pavilion. Just as the student of Zen Buddhism destroys the temple that, to him, has become like a decayed tooth, a throbbing pain that always wants to make itself known, ceaselessly nudging and cajoling him into recognising its existence, I realised I was better off without my past. So I let it go, and it let me go. The following day I shaved off my beard.
[1][1]
One-Way Ticket
Captain Xu announced that a major event was to take place in the prison, and the foreigners were asked to take part. These occasions were more for the benefit of the guards and local dignitaries than they were for the prisoners, and some high-ranking Communist Party cadres would be invited. Our jail band, the Reformers, had played at other events and we always got a great response from the audience, singing our favourite songs and larking around for the other prisoners, but this time it was just Jürgen and me doing Johnny Cash’s ‘Folsom Prison Blues’. It was also one of the few occasions to see the girls from the song-and-dance troupe, the small crew of women from 9th Brigade. The members of the dance group were amongst the prettiest in the jail and put on entertaining shows that they were rigorously trained for. I was reminded of the lengths to which the state in Communist countries like North Korea goes in putting on public exhibitions as propaganda exercises, with their immaculately choreographed, dazzling displays of colour, so at odds with the real-life conditions of most of the population.
The show took place in the Great Hall of the Prisoner, a huge concrete block the size of a large cinema, with around a thousand seats. I’d played guitars in pubs and bars before, but this was Hammersmith Odeon. Waiting to go on stage we could see the audience consisted of convicts at the back and sides, with a large contingent of uniforms and civilians in the choice seats in the middle. Warden Lai was there, schmoozing the guests with his immaculately Brylcreemed Elvis quiff and full police uniform. We ran through Johnny’s famous jailhouse tune from the live At Folsom Prison album, and it occurred to me how well behaved the inmates were. In the film of Cash’s 1968 shows there were no civilians, whereas here were Shanghai’s hardest criminals mixing with the local Communist Party cadres and citizens. There was a feeling that in spite of their crimes, the prisoners were still part of a community.
Captain Mai waited in the wings while Jürgen and I strummed our songs, and he congratulated us warmly afterwards. We were growing to like Mai more and more. He wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer, but he was a good soul and he took genuine pleasure in seeing us play. He even let us hang around for a while after our performance, and we found ourselves backstage with the dance troupe from the women’s brigade. One of the girls reminded me of a girl I’d known when I’d first arrived in Asia ten years earlier, and her memory stayed with me as I lay on my cell floor that night.
I’d flown to Bangkok on a one-way ticket in 1985. An old school friend, Philip, was doing a gap-year tour of Thailand, Burma and India, so I joined him for the first leg with no particular plans beyond that. We’d met at a Thames riverboat party a few weeks earlier, on the day I’d been fired from my job as a runner for a Soho TV-commercial production company, and when he told me of his plans I knew it was my cue to get out of the UK. I had enough money to pay for the flight and survive for a few weeks until I could get a job. I had no idea what I might do there, but it seemed like a good idea at the time, and I had no desire to get another job in England, where I’d become increasingly bored and restless. My earliest childhood memories were of a wooden globe I had in my bedroom. I would spin the ball around, close my eyes and prod my finger onto a random spot. Wherever my finger landed would be a place I would one day visit. Usually I’d end up in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, but sometimes I hit land and I’d look the place up in apicture atlas to find out more about it. I didn’t really care where I went, but I knew from a young age I wanted to leave England. Now I was 20 years old and the dream was becoming a reality.
I went through my father’s old copies of National Geographic magazine looking for anything I could find about Thailand, or, as my grandfather pronounced it, ‘Thighland’. Glossy photos of Buddhas, pagodas and elephants adorned every page. There were pictures of the country’s much-loved king in his various guises, from ice-cool sax player in a zoot suit to wizened statesman. According to the text, Thailand had capitalised on its close relations with the Western world and brought great prosperity to its people at the same time as neighbouring countries had floundered under the impoverishing influence of ‘Red’ China. Wealth distribution had been slowed down by corruption and economic mismanagement, while democracy and human rights were more of a luxury than a birthright, but the nation was flourishing under a ‘benign’ military junta presided over by its compassionate monarch. I went to Norwich library and found more books about the country, including the seminal Lonely Planet traveller’s guide, Southeast Asia on a Shoestring. I was happy to see how cheap Thailand was compared to the UK and that there was the possibility of getting work teaching English. If all else failed I could get an onward flig
ht to Australia, where school friends were living and working, so I pieced together a plan to get out of England for good and make a new life somewhere else. I couldn’t wait to get on the plane.
I assumed my first night in Bangkok would be spent in a hotel or guesthouse, but on arrival Philip informed me we’d be staying with friends. The motorised rickshaw rattled through the streets of the capital as we sat sweating in the back with my rucksack at our feet. The driver lit a cigarette at some traffic lights and took a slug of cough medicine-like liquid from a bottle of Lipovitan vitamin drink, allegedly a pick-me-up as well as a health drink. I thought the driver was wasting his time taking vitamins. It was dark, but the air was hot and clammy, while the carbon monoxide fumes from the thousands of unrestricted vehicles were almost tangible. Some tuk tuk drivers had scarves or surgical masks wrapped round their mouths to keep the worst of the toxic vapours at bay, but they were fighting a losing battle against their noxious surroundings.
The tuk tuk pulled up outside an apartment block adjacent to the Nana Hotel in one of the city’s more affluent suburbs. I handed the driver a note and Philip led the way up a flight of steps to a green door with a peephole that resembled a cell door. Seconds later the door sprang open, revealing a one-room apartment with a sleepy Thai girl standing in the entrance.
‘This is Miaow. This is her place.’
We shook hands as she yawned and apologised for the mess, but she had no reason to: the place was clean and tidy, if a little cluttered with clothes and bedding. On the windowsill sat the biggest bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label I’d ever seen, with a sunken handle so you could carry it like a suitcase. Around the walls were pictures of Caucasian men with beautiful Thai girls on their arms. Philip thrust an ice-cold bottle of Kloster beer in my hand and winked. I noticed there was only one bed in the room, which took up most of the space.
Monkey House Blues Page 21
