Monkey House Blues

by Dominic Stevenson

  The top prisoners in Ti Lan Qiao had only two people in their cells, and I suspected from my first week in the prison that some inmates had close relationships. For example, Gao Zhengguo, the number one prisoner upon my arrival, had shared a cell with T’an Ji, the prettiest cellmate on the whole wing. T’an clearly had rather more yin than most other prisoners on the wing and had not been in the jail long enough to have a two-man cell, so I’d assumed from the start that they did more than share the same shitbucket.

  At the height of summer some of the Chinese prisoners slept outside their cells, as it was considered unsanitary to have three people lying in a five-feet-by-seven-feet space. One evening, it was not yet lights-out when I walked down the corridor to get some water, and Chinese lay around on mats in their boxer shorts. Many lay against each other or slouched in their friends’ laps. It was not a sight you would be likely to see in a British prison, where privacy could be easily achieved with the click of a cell door, but neither was there necessarily a sexual dimension to it. However, on this occasion I saw one of the more senior prisoners, Wu, being fondled by a younger inmate. He had his shorts down to his knees and his legs apart, and he watched me walk by without any show of interest. I was not even convinced this was a sexual act since Wu – a tough-guy gangster from Guangzhou – did not appear particularly aroused.

  I’d also experienced what Mishima called ‘forbidden colours’ in Ti Lan Qiao. A young lad from the punishment unit downstairs had a job cleaning the shower area. At the end of the room stood a large steel gate that divided the room into two and enabled trustees from downstairs to get hot water. I’d say ni hao to him from time to time, and I often noticed him looking across through the bars when I was having a wash. He spoke no English, but my Mandarin had improved and I was able to throw together a few rough sentences to make small talk. He always had a pleasant smile for me, and I could see him peering up from his mop as I threw warm water over my naked body. After finishing my shower one day, I decided to introduce myself and called him over to the bars. He peered down the stairs to check nobody was around and moved his mop and bucket closer, before holding out his hand to meet mine. His hand was clammy and limp, the closest thing to yin shui I would likely experience in prison. I held it for some moments as we gazed at each other, and a pulsating energy flooded through my veins into my dick and I was hard. His groin was pushed up against the bars as his grey flannel trousers bulged and our handgrip tightened. Then a door creaked open on his side of the gate and his hand shot to the head of his broomstick as he lurched back, plunging his mop back into the bucket of milky, chlorinated water. A bell rang out and a flood of Chinese began to pour back into the wing from the work area. Wenever touched again.

  [1][3]

  Going Home

  Captain Xu announced the foreigners would be having their photos taken, so we were marched off to a large greenhouse-style building on the other side of the jail. There were hundreds of plants in pots along a wall and a solitary chair had been placed in front of them, with an officer standing by with a camera on a tripod. Although I was told to come along, the purpose of the photo was designed more for the other foreigners, who had been away from home a lot longer than I had. With the exception of Gareth, whose wife visited regularly, family visits were few and far between, and the prison had decided it was time to give us an up-to-date picture to send home to our families.

  Captain Mai presided over the photo session, which Larry did his best to get out of on the grounds that it was little more than apropaganda exercise. He was probably right, but the rest of us were always up for an opportunity to get out of 8th Brigade and see anew part of the jail. We were a motley crew, and the years in jail had not been kind to any of us. I’d gone bald and Jürgen had gone grey, while Larry and Tommy looked older than their years. We all had agrey pallor from the lack of natural sunlight, and Gareth had put on weight. Larry’s health had deteriorated, and a knee injury had stopped him taking part in the few exercise periods available. With Mark gone he was the only vegetarian in the entire prison, and little effort was made to accommodate his dietary habits. While the rest of us got a meat dish once a week, Larry would be given a hard-boiled egg and cabbage. Mark had made a point of making friends with inmates from 3rd Brigade, where the food was prepared, and had seen to it that he and Larry got healthy meat substitutes like tofu and fruit. Now there was nobody to help him, and he looked increasingly haggard. He wrote reports to complain, but any report had to go through Captain Xu, his nemesis and the target of many rants. The people he needed on his side all hated him and so his condition deteriorated until the US consul stepped in to ask for help with his food requirements. The consul pointed out that his life would be better if he was less antagonistic towards the prison staff, who had no control over his attempts to appeal. If he wanted better treatment, he had to be more diplomatic and play the game. Of course the first step of reform was acknowledging one’s crime, and Larry was still trying to appeal his sentence on the grounds that he’d been blackmailed by gangsters. Given that the consular staff were aware of his record of drug busts in other Asian countries, it’s highly unlikely they believed his story any more than the Chinese did.

  The other foreigners were beginning to question their position within the jail’s educational hierarchy. Chinese inmates who played the game appeared to be getting sentence reductions – albeit minuscule ones – while they were not. McLoughlin had long since bought into the Chinese way of doing things, but due to his violent outbursts he found he was going one step forwards and two steps back. Gareth and the Germans began to wonder whether it was time to succumb to at least part of the Reform Through Labour programme to see if it actually made any difference. I was far from convinced, but I understood their predicament. They had nothing to lose and could conceivably have something to gain. Had this initiative been proposed by Captain Xu I would have treated it with contempt, but I’d come to believe that Captain Mai could be trusted to help the foreign group if they helped themselves. The question was whether Larry would do his part or whether he’d undermine the efforts of the others or, indeed, be undermined by them. It was a huge step, because the foreigners had been exempt from working for years, but now we were being brought into the Reform Through Education system, which in itself was related to work. The Chinese had been clever to introduce the educational part of the system first, but it later emerged as something of a Trojan Horse as labour was ultimately an important part of reform.

  My own time in Ti Lan Qiao was drawing to a close, but there was little cause for celebration. My colleagues were years away from release, so I kept a low profile and tried not to look too happy. There was little chance of me getting any reduction in my sentence but neither was it out of the question, so when we were called to a Reduction Meeting, friends joked that I might be leaving that day. The whole wing was herded into a large room where several judges sat in uniform on a podium. Names were read out and prisoners stepped forward to be congratulated. By the end, it turned out that all the foreigners except myself and Larry would be given some kind of reduction of between six and eight months. Nobody was exactly ecstatic with this outcome, but it was better than nothing. It meant that the guys who were almost four years into an eight-year stretch were coming up to their halfway point and they, too, would be ‘coming down from the mountain’ soon. Some Chinese friends also got a few months off, but with sentences well into double figures it was hardly noticeable. With little to look forward to but years of drudgery ahead, they plodded on, like Sisyphus rolling his ball upwards.

  ‘Within a few weeks, you’ll forget you were ever here,’ said Larry, who’d been through a similar routine several times and seemed to know what he was talking about.

  The foreigners wanted me to send some more books, and Larry was eager to point out that if I didn’t do it soon, I’d probably forget to do it altogether.

  ‘If you get half a chance, don’t forget to stick a trip under a postage stamp for me, will you?’
r />   ‘I’ll see what I can do.’

  The final weeks of a prison sentence can be unnerving. A huge weight is being lifted off your shoulders, while other burdens are only just making themselves known. Time, which has hitherto spun like a calendar in a Hollywood film, begins to grind to a halt, and the days linger where before they’d flashed by. The outside world – which in my mind had been perfection itself – starts to look less appealing. The light at the end of the tunnel comes into focus, revealing a humdrum world with all the pitfalls and pressures that were there before. It is no longer the Xanadu it appeared to be when you first got arrested. The illusion dissolves before you like a mirage in the desert as the release date approaches.

  An illuminating prison book had been circulating our wing, written by a guy called Bo Lozoff, entitled We’re All Doing Time: A Guide for Getting Free. Bo is an extraordinary man who has spent many years working in prisons with some of the most dangerous individuals on the planet. His message is that freedom – or lack of it – has little to do with walls and is, rather, a personal journey of enlightenment. It may sound like a banal observation, like money doesn’t buy happiness, but he backs it up with many examples, not least the number of people who return to prison after their release. Now the walls around me were coming down, and I began to question the nature of freedom and happiness. I realised that I’d had many happy times in prison and that at some of the saddest times in my life I’d been free. The worst part of my prison journey had been the early days in the detention centre. And yet I’d been blissfully happy to see the full moon appear through the slim band of the steel shutters on the window as I hung from the bars at night. I’d spent eight months lying on a dirty mattress, but my dreams had been splendid. The mornings were crushing, but the nights had filled me with hope. The move to the prison had vastly improved my physical life, but something had been lost in the process. In the detention centre my mind had been almost kaleidoscopic, overflowing with an energetic and boundless optimism. I’d found it very easy to convince myself that the future would be bright, even though there was little evidence to support this rose-tinted view. Now I was facing another hurdle. Freedom.

  My incarceration was the physical manifestation of another factor.

  I’d run out of road.

  Days before my arrest, I’d met a young couple on the bus between Kashgar and Urumchi in Xinjiang. It was a long journey through the desert, and we shared a room one night in a small village along the way. They were young and new to travelling, and every moment was savoured as they recalled their adventures to me. When it was my turn to speak I sounded jaded, even to myself. I must have sounded like the ageing hippies I’d met in Goa in the late 1980s, moaning about how it wasn’t as good as it had been in the ’70s. But if travelling had lost its allure, what the hell was I going to do with the rest of my life? I’d done much of my travelling on my own, and enjoyed it, most of the time. Years earlier I’d written in a notebook, ‘Aloneness is a precious gift, and loneliness its bastard offspring.’ Now the aloneness had given way to the loneliness.

  In Urumchi, I got food poisoning from a street stall. After the bland monotony of the food on the bus ride, the big city was a foodie’s mecca. Muslim men sat beside small charcoal fires cooking mutton threaded onto bicycle spokes, and I must’ve eaten ten of them. Years earlier, I’d got serious food poisoning in Bangladesh and had spent Christmas Day stranded in a guesthouse in Chittagong. Food poisoning can seriously zap your energy at the best of times; on top of hepatitis, it laid me up for a week. I took an excursion for a couple of days to the oasis town of Turfan. Its boulevards were festooned with grapevines that dangled in my face as I strolled around aimlessly. I fancied a drink, but my hepatitis had put an end to that. I was in the wine capital of China, drinking sodas and yogurt drinks. There were sand dunes on the edge of the town, but I didn’t have the energy to walk up them. I wanted to smoke, but my lungs leapt out of my ribcage after every puff. My greatest traveller’s asset – being able to get on with the locals wherever I was in the world – had deserted me, too. I was invited to take part in a pool game and nearly got beaten up for refusing to pay a gambling debt I’d never agreed to.

  I took a train from Urumchi in the far west of China to Lanzhou in the centre. The trains were all sold out for days to come, and I had no ticket but got on the train anyway: a 48-hour journey with no seat. I didn’t have the energy to stand up, so I squatted between the third-class carriages. Chinese in Mao suits looked disapprovingly at me on their way to the loos, while train officials charged me for the seat I never got. Kids hawked cigarettes and packet noodles through the bars of the windows and ran off with my change. The toilets went from unsanitary to unspeakable – even the cockroaches scrambled under the door to get out of the way. At one point I thought my guitar bag, which contained my hash, had been stolen, and I ran through the train looking for it. Alas, the one time in my life I needed to be robbed, I was ‘saved’ by a guard who’d put it on a rack above one of the bunk beds in the sleeper carriage.

  The train stopped in the middle of the night for what seemed like hours. A group of soldiers got off for a walkabout, so I joined them. It was freezing, but the air was fresh for the first time since I’d got on the godforsaken train. I walked along the embankment close by the carriages, beyond which was a steep ravine that fell into total darkness. I heard a passenger inside spit and then felt it on the back of my neck. I don’t think it was aimed at me; I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Everything was wrong. After eight years living in Asia, I’d never felt so bad. I’d reached the end of the line.

  So where do you go when you’ve run out of road? When the train line simply runs out of track? Well, each to his own, I guess, but prison was my solution to the crisis. Let’s face it: you don’t travel thousands of miles across three international borders with half a kilo of hash in your bag if you wish to stay out of jail. I was sick in mind and body, and I wanted out. I could have joined the Foreign Legion, but I’m not the army type. Uniforms don’t suit me, anyway. I could have got religion, but I’ve never really done religion. I’ve dabbled, sure. In fact, just before I left my hotel room to cross the border into China, I could hear the sniffer dogs barking at the Pakistan customs stop in Sost. I briefly made an Islamic prayer, prostrating myself three times, but it was fear that was driving me, not worship. No, I’d long since reconciled myself to the fact that somewhere deep inside I wanted to go down, and I was lucky enough to have been able to climb up again.

  And there was something epic about the trip I’d made that seemed to suggest the adventure was some kind of grand finale. After entering China from Sost and driving over the Khunjerab Pass, there was a wonderful drive back down the mountain along a dead-straight road into the desert. After the barren rock faces of the Indus Valley the road went flat, and as we approached the Chinese border a rosy-cheeked kid in a green uniform had stood to attention. Our driver gave him a carton of Marlboros, and the long descent began through hundreds of square miles of melon fields. Running parallel with the road was a sleek turquoise stream, no wider than a small car, which formed an electric-blue border between the tarmac road and the green melon fields. It had an artificial, neon-like quality to it, as if it had been transported from a kitschy Las Vegas hotel. And the mountains along the way reminded me of the Pinewood Studios set of the Himalayas in Michael Powell’s great Black Narcissus. And there were women everywhere, hunched over melon plants in colourful clothes with babies on their backs: a welcome sight after the dismal masculinity of northern Pakistan. My journey was reckless but often beautiful, with a cinematic backdrop of stunning scenery and striking landscapes. If you’re going to screw your life up, there are many worse places in the world to do it.

  Chinese friends were eager to spend time with me, as if my impending release imbued me with a sense of freedom that might rub off on them. I thought of the American prison song ‘Midnight Special’, which refers to the light from the interstate train that passed t
he jail at the same time every night. Folklore had it that prisoners who managed to clamber up the bars and allow the train to ‘shine a light’ on them would be going home soon. Now I’d been bathed in this light, and even prisoners I’d never had much to do with wanted to come up and say hello. My small hunchback friend was particularly sad to see me go and would miss the head massages I’d been giving him. He still had double figures of his sentence to go and did not mix well with the other prisoners. It would be harder for him than most others, and after several years inside he still hadn’t really settled down. Another friend named Li had become the wing’s star artist and was given commissions to paint propaganda paintings, which he was very good at. Gareth was also painting a lot, and we were all invited by Captain Mai to visit the prison art exhibition in the main building.

  As well as paintings, there were huge wooden carvings and stone sculptures that any Western art gallery would have been grateful to add to their collections. Local dignitaries visited the displays and many of the art works were for sale, though I doubted the artists would get much of a share of the takings. Many of the artefacts were reminiscent of the Maoist propaganda posters of heroic peasants and happy workers toiling for the motherland. The colours were garish and the characters always had rosy cheeks and proud smiles. I wondered how long the Communist Party could keep its grip on a society that was changing so fast. Next door in North Korea, the Kim dynasty had complete control of outside influences and had turned its nation into a kind of slave state. Meanwhile, China was developing so quickly it was hard to see how the rigid dogmatism of the Mao years could be perpetuated into the twenty-first century. People had food in their bellies for the first time in decades and contact with the outside world had never been greater, but the devastating crackdown of the Tiananmen protests had sent a clear message to those hoping for political freedom.