Monkey House Blues

by Dominic Stevenson

  There were a number of political prisoners in the intellectual wing upstairs from us, and many had life sentences. Even so, some were being fast-tracked for early release as their crimes no longer carried such severe punishments. Everybody knew that 45 years after Mao declared that his people had ‘stood up’, China was finally getting up off its knees. Without Mao it might have happened much more quickly, but either way there was no going back now. For many of my friends, the city they returned to would be barely recognisable as the one they’d left. From the shower-room window we could see the Shanghai skyline was in a constant state of flux, with hundreds of giant cranes giving birth to huge new buildings. I’d lived in the city for two and a half years and yet had spent less than two and half hours walking its streets. When my time came to leave I would be escorted to the airport and sent on my way, but I’d be back some day. I’d asked the judge Mr Shen if I would be permitted to return to China, and he’d assured me I’d be welcome. I was already looking forward to my next visit and sensed that I was going to miss the country once I’d left. China had changed my life; there was no doubt about that. Whether it was for the better remained to be seen, but it would never be the same.

  I wondered what had become of Liu. Was he still in that dire room in the detention centre, waiting to go to court? Had he even been charged yet? We’d gone from best mates to arch-enemies, but now the resentment had faded and I felt more sorrow than anger. What were his wife and son going through? Never knowing when he would be home. All I knew was that he hadn’t come to Ti Lan Qiao, because otherwise I’d probably have run into him at some point. Our old cellmate Yen would be released within a couple of years and go back to his wife and kid. By then his executed brother would be a distant memory, rarely mentioned outside close family. The bitterness I’d felt towards him and Liu seemed silly now. A friend in Kyoto had written to me to say how lucky I had been to have cellmates at all. He’d spent 13 months in solitary confinement in Japan for a minor dope bust. It had driven him crazy and he’d never really recovered. I’d shut myself off from my cellmates, but they were still there and they kept me sane. Many of China’s most famous dissidents had endured years on end in solitary confinement for ‘crimes’ we encourage in the West, such as exercising freedom of speech. Ti Lan Qiao was like a holiday camp compared with what they’d had to cope with. I was acutely aware of how fortunate I’d been. Many of my Chinese friends had been tortured with electric batons and grisly beatings, while I’d always been treated with respect. I’d been lucky that my case did not involve anybody else, though even my friends could still not truly believe me when I told them that. They didn’t understand my crime, and in two and a half years in prison I never met – or even heard about – a single Chinese convicted of a marijuana offence. There were loads of heroin dealers, and many of them were executed, but we never saw a Chinese dope dealer, and the foreigners often speculated whether the weed, which grew on the side of the road throughout the country, was even illegal.

  Our number one, Chen Yong Ho, made my last weeks a pleasure, and we spent many hours together. I wondered how his wife and kid would cope without him for so many years, since his time to servealso ran into double figures. He had a calmly Daoist attitude to the situation, while acknowledging his marriage might not survive the years ahead. Like most Chinese I met, he was not one to indulge in self-pity but rather accepted whatever life had to offer. Another prisoner told me this was Chen’s second time in prison, and he was furious that this had come to my notice. He never mentioned it again, and I never enquired further.

  My studies declined as the countdown drew nearer, and I played less guitar and stopped writing letters altogether: I would be out before they reached their destinations anyway. I spent hours staring out of the window at the lifers’ brigade opposite – a punishable offence, but now my minor transgressions were ignored, as they had been on my arrival. Lifers I’d got to know would smile and hold their fingers up, one fewer each day. They were as happy for me as I was sad for them. Most would be released one day, as even life sentences in China are usually completed in less than twenty-five years, but a huge chunk of their lives was being taken from them. They worked longer hours than our brigade did, too, often late into the night if orders from Japan and America were pending. I wondered what the golfers in California would say if they knew their hats were being made by slave labour.

  There was a major clear out of the death-row landing downstairs, and a human chain of condemned men handcuffed together were boarding a bus in the courtyard below. Along with us foreigners, they were the only people in the jail that were not issued with uniforms. Most would be staying a maximum of three months, so the prison saved itself the expense. Their heads had been shaved for the occasion, and a line of prison officers were herding them onto the bus. Some of the more loutish officers snarled at them and prodded them with sticks, but most were respectful, even sad. I asked Chen Yong Ho what he thought about it, and he said he did not agree with the death penalty. I asked Captain Mai the same question and he was non-committal, suggesting to me that he, too, did not agree.

  ‘But this is China,’ he said. Boy, if I had a dollar for every time I’d heard that phrase.

  It was March 1996, and my release date was the tenth of the month. I’d been arrested on 11 September 1993, a day of the month that would become enshrined in the collective memory of the world. Back then, 9/11 was a day like any other, but not for me. As Solzhenitsyn said in The Gulag Archipelago, ‘Arrest is an instantaneous, shattering thrust, expulsion, somersault from one state into another. The gate to our past life is slammed shut once and for all.’

  Now I was walking the corridors, sighing heavily; I was winding down, as if a spring inside me was slowly uncoiling. The door to my past life was reopening, but would the outside world be different? Would I be different? I’d found it necessary to wean myself off Rosie and move on. It had pained me, but it was for the best. From our letters, I got the impression she, too, had moved on. She had a new life, and perhaps a new man. We were destined to be the greatest of friends, but our idyllic love affair was probably over. I would leave prison a single man, and in this respect, at least, the gate to my past life was well and truly shut. In other words, the life ahead of me bore little resemblance to the dream world I’d filled every waking hour with throughout the early days of my incarceration. Since my arrest I’d cushioned myself from reality on every step of the journey. First I told myself the customs men who arrested me would give me a slap on the wrist and send me on my way. When this turned to dust I managed to convince myself I’d be released when I got to court, and finally I believed I’d only do half my sentence. At no point did I believe I’d lose the love of my life. Now I had to face the fact that I’d been wrong on every count, and freedom had a bitter taste.

  The other foreigners were similarly delusional; in fact, they were worse than me as the burden of their long sentences encouraged them to cling to a number of possible release dates that were largely fantasy. They, too, had hoped to get out at the court stage, only to discover their crimes carried sentences in excess of murder tariffs in their own countries. Then there was the appeal process: a wonderful daydream to entertain oneself with when you’re looking at 15 years behind bars, but basically worthless.

  ‘They’ll probably kick us out with Mark’ was the favourite when I first arrived. But Mark went after completing his sentence. And the rest of us stayed. The next hope was 1997, as the Hong Kong hand over loomed. This event would be a momentous occasion in Chinese history, but I was sceptical of the idea that it would be considered an opportunity to release a handful of dope smugglers. Still, I kept my own views to myself – the last thing they needed was to have their wishful balloons burst by me. My Chinese friends had no such illusions – they knew they’d have to do at least 90 per cent of their sentences, and in some ways they were happier with this knowledge. Misplaced hope can crush you time and time again, but for the Chinese there was only reality, which they accepte
d without complaint.

  A new batch of prisoners turned up. They sat on the tiny blue plastic stools that I’d seen so many times before, as senior prisoners clouted them round the head and shouted at them. They were being introduced to writing thinking reports, the ongoing sagas of how they’d come to ‘let down’ the People. One looked too young to be in prison and was terrified, but he’d get used to it after a while. I didn’t bother to ask what they were in for, and they probably wouldn’t have told me the truth anyway. They’d stepped into the tunnel just as I was coming out the other end, and we were worlds apart. They were looking through the ‘wrong’ end of the telescope, while my own view was out of focus.

  Captain Mai called a meeting to remind the foreigners about their obligations to the Reform Through Labour programme. He wanted them to work alongside the Chinese cutting bits of loose thread off cooking aprons. The garments were destined for Japan and had labels of the French designer Pierre Balmain sewn into them. Larry refused to touch them on the grounds that it was slave labour and illegal according to international law, but the other foreigners agreed to take part. It was a bitter pill to swallow and there was little evidence that work was related to sentence reductions, but if it got the officers off their backs it was worth it. I was spared the task because I was about to be released anyway, so I sat with Larry chatting about his intransigency to the authorities and how it might affect his health and hope of parole. I told him I thought he was crazy and that things would likely get worse if he split from the foreign work group. He had little to gain and much to lose, but he was a stubborn bastard with too much pride, which is rarely good.

  ‘The Chinese are going to fuck you over sooner or later, Larry. You could die in this place and nobody will ever know.’

  I wasn’t joking. His health was very poor, and he was well into his 50s, with haggard skin and a constant stream of minor ailments. He looked ten years older at least and could barely walk the five yards to his cell. He’d been hospitalised and had spent a lengthy spell in the young offenders’ punishment unit for going on hunger strike. He was almost old enough to be a grandfather to his fellow inmates. Now he was taking on the Chinese again, and it could only end in disaster. I pointed out that had he been Chinese, he’d have been beaten so badly he’d have shaped up long ago. He’d have been hog-tied, doused in water and given electric shocks until he begged for forgiveness. Or else he’d have died of ‘natural’ causes. Regardless of whether his stance was morally correct, he looked like an arrogant American waving his passport in the hope of preferential treatment. His was the petulance of the privileged, and the Chinese were having none of it.

  While the other foreigners were being reformed through labour, I was starting to pack up my possessions. There wasn’t much, but even in prison it’s possible to acquire all sorts of junk, from soy-sauce bottles to a selection of notebooks. One of the first things I’d done on my arrival in Ti Lan Qiao was to write out the classic Daoist text the Dao De Jing. The book was very short, but I’d spent so many hours consulting the Sage in the I Ching that when I eventually found a copy of the original text I decided the best way to acquaint myself with it was to write it out by hand. It’s not the sort of thing that I’d ever have considered doing before or since, but in jail it seemed like a therapeutic pastime. I also had two large diaries, one of which had a record of my favourite quotes from the dozens of books I’d read. In the detention centre I’d started out making pencil marks in the margins of my books, but after sentencing I had access to a great selection of other people’s books so I made a point of writing down my favourite lines. I also had a record of every I Ching session since my arrest and was struck by the frequency with which the hexagrams pointed towards Chapter 36, ‘The Darkening of the Light’.

  I had a postman’s sack-sized pile of letters received from friends and family, which I decided to edit down. It was tough deciding which ones to keep, but I couldn’t be too sentimental about it. Some friends had written multiple letters, for which I was hugely grateful, and I had many from kind strangers associated with the charity Prisoners Abroad. Another letter was from a friend in Spain who was living in a small town in the mountains near Granada. She’d suggested I come and stay if I fancied getting out of England after my release. I kept the letter.

  One of my prized possessions was a postcard of a temple in Nara, the ancient capital of Japan. It was no ordinary postcard; it had been sent to me in a letter from my friend Freddy in Kyoto. He’d been to see Bob Dylan at a Buddhist festival in Nara, and being a good hustler had managed to get backstage and meet the great man. He told Bob I was in jail in China and asked could he send me a message, so Bob scribbled ‘Hi Don, Best Wishes Bob Dylan’ on the back. Apart from misspelling the last letter of my name, I was elated at the thought that for a few seconds, at least, I’d been in the thoughts of one of my great heroes.

  Jürgen and I would miss playing guitar together. We’d spent hundreds of hours sitting at the end of the landing, with me strumming the rhythm and him playing the lead. When you play so much with someone, you get a rapport going and are able to second-guess each other’s next move. After a while, the two styles fuse into something else entirely and the music begins to take on a life of its own. Now he’d have to go back to playing on his own and tapping his foot to keep the rhythm. Music was his life, and he did little else but sit in his cell playing the blues. I think he’d found a kind of happiness that insulated him from his surroundings and harsh predicament.

  Ludwig would pass his time banging away on his noisy typewriter, which drove Gareth crazy. He never talked about what he was writing and was an intensely private person. He was younger than Jürgen and had gone off travelling for a few months only to find his brief adventure turn into a protracted nightmare. He wasn’t a hustler, and I couldn’t imagine buying dope from him. I got the impression his smuggling trip was out of character, a brief diversion for which he’d paid a heavy price. I felt sorry for him, but it wouldn’t be long before he, too, would be ‘coming down from the mountain’. For him the worst was over, and he’d leave prison a wiser, and still young, man.

  Gareth had become something of a linguist: he spoke passable Chinese and was in the process of learning Spanish from a Teach Yourself book and cassette course. He spent a lot of time painting, too, and had a talent for it. While my relationship with Rosie had withered over the years, his with his wife had blossomed, and she was living in Shanghai and visiting every month. His journey from rural Wales to Xinjiang had ended in disaster, but the future looked bright for him and his wife. He was a man who knew what he wanted from life and would find happiness soon enough. Prison isn’t the worst thing that can befall a person; if you’re wise enough to use the time well, it might even be a blessing.

  For Tommy, it was a long, hard road ahead. His stretch was still in double figures, and he’d regressed into an infantile hoodlum with too much time on his hands. Unable to concentrate for more than five minutes, study was of little use to him, while his estrangement from the foreign group had cut him off from any grounding influences. His response had been to become a sort of honorary Chinese: volunteering for menial work assignments, learning patriotic songs and kissing the backsides of the guards. Had he been a real Chinese, his antics would have been met with so much violence that his temper would have been quashed long ago. Instead he was lost between two worlds and was respected by neither. And yet he was often good company and was expert at making the Chinese laugh with amusing impersonations of prisoners and staff alike. He had a childish enthusiasm for new ideas, only to toss them aside as his attention span faded. He bought a guitar but never played it, took an Open University writing course but never followed it through. Finally he decided to become a model prisoner, before punching someone in the face. There was a nice guy in there somewhere, but the petulant thug trumped his best intentions every time.

  Captain Mai held a meeting on 9 March in which he praised the foreigners – minus Larry – for their contribution t
o the Reform Through Labour programme. By showing their willingness to work, they were one step closer to a sentence reduction that would speed up their release dates. He also said that I’d be going home the following morning and had to be packed and ready to leave at short notice. Now it was official, my Chinese friends stopped by to congratulate me on the happy news, and I tried not to look too pleased with myself in front of those with very long sentences ahead of them. The consul had booked me a flight back to London with a stopover in Bangkok, as it cost the same as a direct flight and I felt Thailand would be a good place to unwind before seeing my family again. I’d spent a lot of time in Bangkok over the years, and it felt as much like home as anywhere else in Asia. England, on the other hand, felt like a distant place that I had no great desire to live in ever again. I’d left on a one-way ticket eleven years earlier, with no plans to go back. Now I was returning with a one-way ticket, but at least a stopover in one of my old haunts would break the back of the culture shock ahead.

  Winter was still lingering, and a chilly breeze blew through 8th Brigade as my cell door clicked shut for the last time. It was a sound I’d come to quite like, signifying the end of another day and the start of the dream world in which there were no walls, bars or concrete. The night-watch team patrolled at ten-minute intervals, slouching down the corridor and writing up their reports on prisoners’ bowel movements. I’d boxed up a selection of my favourite books and dedicated the rest to the Shanghai Municipal Prison library, so for once I had nothing to read. In 24 hours, I’d be sipping a cool beer on the Khao San Road and eating fried snappers in my favourite street market. Rosie was in Vietnam but would meet me in Thailand in a week or so, and we’d fly back to England together. What the future held for us was anyone’s guess, but it didn’t seem to matter much any more. The spell had been broken.