Monkey House Blues
Page 28
The gritty desert wind stung my eyes and made them stream as I hit a hundred miles an hour, creating rainbow prisms on the tips of my lashes. I pushed down the tinted visor on my helmet and the hills around me glowed with a cool green hue as the sun bounced off them into the valley below. I felt the rush of air between my legs and up the sleeves of my leather jacket, circulating round my body as the bike leaned in and out of the bends all the way north to Madrid.
Postscript
Many years have passed since I boarded the plane at Shanghai airport for the last time. I sent a parcel of books back from London, which was warmly received by the foreigners’ unit. I also sent Larry an LSD trip under a postage stamp as promised. When he was eventually released, he wrote to say how much he’d enjoyed it. The foreign unit at Ti Lan Qiao prison was closed shortly after I left, and all the prisoners were moved to a new jail called Qing Pu, about 45 minutes’ drive from Shanghai. By all accounts it was an improvement for the foreigners, with much better facilities and exercise opportunities. Ti Lan Qiao was horrendously overcrowded, with some wings sleeping more than three to a cell, and the only exercise areas were concrete courtyards. At Qing Pu, there were large open areas with a football pitch, green lawns and flowerbeds. It was a twenty-first-century prison designed for future expansion to house the ever-proliferating number of criminals and political prisoners. It must have been a relief for Captain Xu, who’d always considered the foreigners a disruptive influence on his wing.
After three years the Germans, Ludwig and Jürgen, were released, while Gareth left some months later after serving seven and a half years of his eight-and-a-half-year stretch. Tommy and Larry ended up doing twelve and a half of their fifteen years, and I heard from Larry on his release. He’d been out for little more a year before getting arrested yet again, flying into Japan, and landed another six-year term. Having done two years in Korea, two in Hong Kong and twelve and a half in China, I would have thought he’d have decided he wasn’t really cut out for dope smuggling. With his poor health, I wonder if he’ll survive this latest stretch. If he does, this will surely be his final scam (though I wouldn’t bet on it).
Mark and I have remained friends, and we have a drink from time to time in London. Jürgen wrote to me on his release and, the last I heard, was playing in blues bands in Germany. I haven’t heard from the others, and my contact address has long since been out of date.
Not long after I got out, I got a letter from a Chinese friend who’d been released shortly after me. He was a tailor and was interested in starting an import–export business together. I tried calling him but was unable to get through, and I’ve had no contact with any other old friends. Only one of the boxes of books and diaries I gave to the consul made it back to the UK, and unfortunately the missing box contained many of my most valuable diaries, including one that had a number of contact addresses hidden in its cover.
Rosie and I split up. It was inevitable, I suppose, and in truth we’d split up the day I got arrested, though it wasn’t something I could accept at the time. We’d made a half-hearted attempt to rekindle the relationship in Bangkok a week after I got out, but my old world had moved on without me. I drifted for a long time and briefly returned to scamming to make a buck before giving it up for good. I was probably better at doing the time than the crime and, had I continued, I’d have probably ended up like Larry, on his world tour of foreign jails.
Drugs proved to be the downfall of a number of good friends of mine from Kyoto. One committed suicide after a lengthy spell in solitary confinement in a Japanese prison, while another died in a Kyoto detention centre under what can only be called ‘suspicious’ circumstances. An old drinking buddy, Jerry, died of a heroin overdose in a Bangkok guesthouse, while others served time in American prisons and a psychiatric hospital. It’s no exaggeration to say that our druggy lives – which seemed so innocent back then – proved disastrous for all of us, though in retrospect I was one of the lucky ones.
My love affair with Asia remains to this day, and I sometimes think I’d like to live there again. The jaded cynicism that accompanied my fall has gone, and the thrill of travel has returned for good, I hope. On a recent trip to Iran, I was struck by the parallels between the cult of Khomeini and Mao’s Communist version. To be fair to the late ayatollah, his ascetic life was a far cry from Mao’s debauched one, but the rigid separation of public and private domains is very noticeable in both countries. Both countries are post-revolutionary societies. An Iranian friend took me to her old high school in Tehran, named the School of Revolutionary Flowers. I imagine there are a thousand schools in China with the same name. In spite of the propaganda, Iran is a noticeably freer country than China, and Iranians are very eager to criticise their government and are not overly concerned about who hears them. Yet Chinese are still cagey about speaking their mind in public, and the vast gulag of prisons and work farms are home to many who have fallen foul of this ‘unspoken’ law.
A recent visit to Vietnam reminded me of what the Chinese Communists robbed from their people. If Esfahan is the jewel of the Middle East, cities like Hoi-an are the pearls of the Orient. The wonders of Chinese Daoism are alive and well in Vietnam, whose Communist rulers were not afflicted with the deranged philistinism of Mao and his followers. Nevertheless, China remains high on my list of countries to revisit, and hopefully the words of my case judge Mr Shen that I ‘would be welcome’ will prove to be true when I eventually make my way back to the Middle Kingdom. It’s unlikely that when I return to Shanghai I’ll run into any old friends, but I’d dearly love it to be so. To share a cold beer with old friends on the Bund would be the icing on the cake and the perfect end to my China odyssey. I also look forward to walking the streets of Shanghai, a city I lived in for two and a half years but only saw from inside a concrete box. Now I see it on TV and it looks like a science-fiction town.
My views on crime and punishment have hardened. The Chinese system is far too harsh, but in Britain it’s gone too far the other way. The law no longer protects the innocent, and ‘career’ criminals are free to make other people’s lives a misery. Every week I see dangerous people leave UK courts with shorter sentences than I served for half a kilo of dope. Much of the country has become a no-go area for the weak and the elderly. The UK penal system has also broken down, and many leave with worse drug habits than they had on arrival. I’m grateful to the Chineseprison system to have provided a respite from all drugs, even tobacco, and believe British jails could learn something from the Chinese.
China continues to grow at a staggering rate, though democratic reform has been suppressed and the country is still a totalitarian state in which dissent is met with brutality and oppression. While the elites have engaged in an orgy of hypercapitalism, the old Communist system has been the lot for ‘the masses’. The country continues to execute far more people than any other country in the world, and in 2008 introduced execution vans: mobile killing machines manned by ‘surgeons’ who remove essential organs, which are put on sale by the government.
In 1999, three years after I left China, the Communists outlawed the practice of Falun Gong, the qigong-based religion teaching ‘truthfulness, compassion and forbearance’ whose growing membership unnerved the Party. This has resulted in a monstrous rise in the use of torture, violence and unimaginable cruelty not seen since the darkest days of the Cultural Revolution, and the imprisonment of millions of Chinese in work farms, labour camps and ‘re-education’ centres of various kinds. Reports by all the main human-rights organisations make grim reading, suggesting that the country has gone backwards since my time there. Two years later, the events of September 2001 provided a convenient cover for even more oppression of dissenting minorities, particularly Muslim Uighurs and Tibetans, now labelled ‘terrorists’. For many living in the Middle Kingdom, the darkest days of the twentieth century have continued into the twenty-first and, if anything, have intensified.
These oppressive campaigns have proved a boon to the prison
industry, as huge swathes of people are put to work in factories across China for no pay, contrary to international law. Neighbouring countries within China’s sphere of influence, like Burma and North Korea, have also become little more than slave states and continue to be legitimised and supported by the Chinese Communist Party. Meanwhile, Chinese leaders are feted by Western governments, which can no longer afford to stand up to the country as it takes centre stage in the new economic world order.
It’s very much my hope that readers of this book will not allow my own comparatively frivolous experiences in China’s prison system to blind them to the desperate and ongoing tragedy befalling millions of innocent people in this part of the world. And this book is dedicated to their struggle.