by D. L. Kung
‘And went into a partnership with your American friend MacGinnes that eventually put MacGinnes in 100 percent control of your joint venture with Mr Wong, Brainman.’
‘Brainchild, Robert, c’mon, c’mon.’ She cursed under her breath. Some little old lady had just jammed three huge, cheap carrier bags into the back of her legs and walked away to collect more baggage.
‘Exactly. Now listen very carefully.’ She’d never heard Fresnay so excited.
‘The years 1985 and 1986 are very significant. Those were the years that certain local Chinese officials were permitted to go into commercial ventures to boost earnings and become self-sufficient. The place known as Cha Ling disappeared from the postal directory intentionally, I’m reckoning, because somebody wanted their correspondence channeled through another office, a commercial office.’
‘The mail of a whole village diverted to a company? Why?’
‘Well, given the page on which Cha Ling appears in the old directory, the reason is very plain to me. Cha Ling is not a village—’
‘What? I can’t hear you, Robert! Shout!’
‘I said it’s not on any map because no one outside the government is supposed to know where it is—even in China. Your “Tea Mountain” is a labor camp, one of Guangdong’s 150 or more prison camps. A prison, woman!’
‘It can’t be, Robert. If MacGinnes is investing in a foreign prison, he’s breaking US law. He’d be caught in the inspections authorized by Congress.’
There was a long silence at Fresnay’s end of the line. For a second, Claire feared they’d been disconnected.
Then he said very deliberately and loudly, ‘But that’s it, Claire. That’s what Vic found out. If MacGinnes bought one hundred per cent of Cha Ling through a Hong Kong entity, it’s no longer an arm of the Chinese government. It’s merely administered for his Hong Kong company by local Chinese cadres. It’s off the map in every sense of the word. Nobody can say what goes on there except MacGinnes, your wonderful paragon of Western capitalism and reform.’
‘But Robert, if what you say is true, if he owns it all, then MacGinnes isn’t actually doing illegal business with the Chinese gulag.’
‘That’s right, Claire—’
‘MacGinnes is the gulag.’
Chapter Fourteen
—late Saturday afternoon—
There wasn’t time to think, much less plan. Claire caught up with her Dutch trekkers on the concrete veranda ringed by gaping locals. The usual touts, drivers, delivery boys and families jostled each other aside to wave and shout for the arrivals’ attention or custom. The same Chinese security officer sat as before at his little card table, ready to book taxis and spy on gullible newcomers.
Claire’s bag strap dug deep into her shoulder. As before, her one chance of getting from the jetty into Punyu undetected by Chen Jiafang and his web of informants was to arouse no curiosity in anyone.
She wiped her forehead and walked up to the taller of the two Dutch men. ‘May I go into town with you? I know Punyu a little bit, and we can share the taxi fare?’
‘Sure,’ he grinned. ‘We think we will stay for only one night, then we proceed to Foshan and Guangzhou.’ The smaller youth and the blonde took no persuading in Dutch. Claire thought of long-ago student days when she’d traveled around Mexico, trusting days of easy meetings and partings with other wanderers sharing advice, train seats and bus station benches.
To Claire’s amusement, their leader Joop was studying Chinese. He would not be denied his chance to book the taxi for their foursome with the help of his Party-approved Mandarin textbook, a dictionary, and in the end, much more dependable sign language and map. Claire gave him some of her yuan and offered to babysit his rucksack. She kept her head down.
On the road into Punyu, Joop gushed about Chinese culture and history distilled from an eclectic reading list back in Utrecht. His interest in Asia had begun with some articles on refugee Moluccans and darted from there to a splash through the mysteries of Tibetan reincarnation to a shallow wade through Chinese homeopathic nutrition to a dip into Tantric yoga illustrated in a poorly printed Indian text.
‘What do I mean when I say I want to see the real China?’ Joop mused from the front seat. His two companions—both of them in need of a good bath—dozed on either side of Claire. Their sunburnt faces rested against the sides of the bumping taxi.
‘I seek the unchanging China that lies beneath decades of Western Marxism. The answer lies in the countryside—the unchanging countryside, the China of ancient dynasties.’
‘Hope you find it, Joop.’ She let him drone on.
They passed a large factory just breaking for the day. The girls straggled in twos and threes from their assembly line floor to a canteen across the parking lot. That’s how Cecilia had started and the sudden reminder of Cecilia—possibly locked up for years beyond Claire’s reach—was unbearable.
Joop was busy traveling back in time: ‘Did you know that during the Tang Dynasty, women did not bind their feet? That came much later. That was a time for great freedom for women. They fought in battle. Some became great warriors of their day.’
The taxi reached the road forking off to Punyu.
‘Joop,’ she interrupted, ‘where are you spending tonight?’
‘Anywhere authentically Chinese. We understand there is one large hotel for businessmen, which we want to avoid. A Chinese guy on the ferry talked of a small hostel on the western side of the town for farmers.’
Claire nodded. ‘Sounds good. I’ll check in, make my rounds and meet you there at dinnertime.’
Her plan was jelling; she would trace Cecilia by starting at her last known point of call, P. C. Wong’s office. She couldn’t hope that Cecilia was still there but it might confirm Fresnay’s news somehow.
She also had only a few more hours of daylight to find the Brainchild factory. She didn’t know what she might see there, but last week Chen Jiafang had been anxious to send her off in the other direction. It was another stone to turn over.
Most important, she had to find a sympathetic driver by nightfall and get to Cha Ling. She didn’t expect such a person would be found in the tight-knit mayhem of the Punyu Hotel’s parking lot. Those men were a dangerous web of informers, relatives, and moneychangers, a nest of tattlers to the last man.
No, her candidate had to be someone eking his way around the dubious margins of local society. He’d be an adventurer spawned in the underclass of malcontents and misfits buzzing around the ill-gotten gains of Punyu.
In short, she needed a scoundrel.
By the time Joop’s driver had navigated the one-lane suburban streets, the Dutchman had sadly accepted that his destination was not a throwback to more romantic times. Instead of rustic cottages, they saw new two-story villas flanked by motorbikes, children’s tricycles and, here and there, a Japanese compact.
At least he’d spotted a motorbike rental shop.
‘That is the means by which we shall depart from the beaten path,’ he proposed. His friends seemed cheered, or at least aroused from their naps, by the idea.
The Lucky Inn Hotel turned out to be a one-story, clean-looking concrete block with a small courtyard shaded by gnarled trees on the outskirts of the factory zone.
A quiet girl in a white jacket emerged from a back room into the small but clean reception area. She laid her broom aside, and matter-of-factly wrote out the room tariff on a tiny slip of white paper. She gathered their money into a rubber band and placed it carefully into a metal cash box underneath the counter. She handed each of them a room key strung through with green string and the room number painted in green on the key itself.
Then, saying simply, ‘Jey go been,’ with a gesture to a corridor off the side of the little lobby, she escorted each to a separate room. She returned within a few minutes rolling a noisy cart down the corridor, stopping outside their open doors to give each a tea tray for their room laden with hot water thermos and tea mug.
Finally alone, Claire
aired out her room which smelt of moldy carpet and sandalwood soap. She drank in the quiet. It was the sort of place she never had time or the excuse to visit while on assignment. The hostel had no business center for sending telexes to New York, no long-distance dialing for calls back to the bureau, no fax for Cecilia to relay clips and maps through, no disco, no breakfast café, no hair salon, no executive gym, no bellboy dressed in a shabby Ming costume, no piano lounge, and no locally produced Wella shampoo packets.
She loved the Lucky Inn Hostel.
She stretched out on the narrow bed for five minutes and closed her eyes. She was thrown back in memory to her first trip to China when she had stayed in a string of inns like this one. The People’s Republic had been waking up from the exhaustion of the Cultural Revolution, but all Claire had been aware of was the eerie silence in the streets, fields, courtyards and parks where she strolled in the evenings.
Was China better then? Not when Party documents disclosed that the century’s greatest incidence of cannibalism had taken place in Guangxi that very same summer of Claire’s first visit. Not when Mao’s tab for liberation racked up more than 40 million victims. Only then, China’s miseries were hidden from foreign view.
Still, in the years before China opened up to greed, Claire sensed, there had also been pockets of privacy, decency and modesty that lay under assault from the modernizing fever of the ‘reforming’ south. It was easy to laugh at Joop’s search for the real China. He wasn’t going to find it in Punyu—that was for sure.
Claire’s eyes—dusty from the drive across the delta fields—start to tear up. She turned her face deeper into the pillow with a surging ache. She too, long ago, had arrived, with chubbier cheeks, cork-soled platform shoes and a collection of Mexican blouses to explore an older world of wisdom, charm, and tranquility.
Now she wasn’t even middle-aged, but already wiser and more raw-boned; she was still hoping to find that resting place. She had felt it briefly in Xavier’s embrace on quiet rainy nights, but by morning it had faded. In his own way, Vic had hoped to leave behind his ineptitude, insecurities and suburban gaucheness for a new life as a man of the world.
Fresnay had come and gained all the expertise on China one could, but had somehow lost the spark of real faith that could inspire any converts.
And MacGinnes, the Vietnam vet turned export mogul? He’d come to make money, to modernize China, and to prove the worth of Western management and investment. Had the haphazard evolution of Deng’s China forced his evangelical energy down some strange twisting moral canyon that lost its way?
When had MacGinnes decided that a partnership with the Chinese prison system was a step forward? When had he put equity into the camp and not just taken products out? On what fatal day had his partners handed him complete ownership to realize his dream? When had his personal mission to bring China out of feudal underdevelopment become so deranged that to fulfill his vision, he turned prison warden?
‘Claire! Claire!’
She splashed water on her face from the thermos before opening the door to Joop.
‘We’re going into town to eat noodles near the bike shop. Leave your backpack. You won’t need it,’ he chided.
She picked up her pack with its hidden gun. ‘You never know, Joop, you never know.’
They walked the fifteen-minute stretch of tarmac road, Joop holding forth in Dutch on the merits of small-scale farming.
Claire was starving but couldn’t waste valuable time on food. She waved them good-bye at a crossroad of the main street leading to Wong’s building. No one noticed a group of backpackers in Punyu on a day’s jaunt around town.
P. C. Wong’s office address was in the red notebook exactly as she’d written it down in the registry reading room and passed on to Cecilia. The building was easy to find, a three-story block of red brick in the town center right next to the county seat.
A couple of black sedans waited at the side of building. In the shade of the small rear entrance, two drivers sat on the steps, their dark cotton jackets unbuttoned over white undershirts, their faces deep in their rice bowl. Official cars meant officials inside.
Claire ostentatiously opened her red notebook as if consulting a guidebook and trudged into the back courtyard, never glancing at the men. She was just a guay po tourist making a shortcut to the front.
She peeked into the front courtyard. A small kiosk guarded the front gate but securing perimeters in Punyu, a prosaic hive of profiteers, was a second priority. A young watchman chatted into his telephone as he gazed from behind his designer sunglasses out at the passing bicycles and a few children kicking a badminton cock into the air with the back of their feet.
A second guard stood on the sidewalk in front of the gate, armed with a pistol. It was too far to make out the insignia on his shoulder, but Claire guessed it was the People’s Armed Police. He looked thirteen, but had to be at least eighteen. She decided to take a chance. These weren’t hardened army vets or savvy old Party hounds, just kids grabbed off the paddy fields and given a uniform.
She slipped around the corner and into the building. On her right there was a small reception window, an old-fashioned arrangement for greeting and directing visitors, but the desk was unmanned. Punyu was changing fast with the times; a brassy Hong Kong–style office directory hung on the wall opposite.
The office names told a story being replayed all over the ‘new’ China. Deng Xiaoping’s ‘pay your own way’ reforms had even reached tiny Punyu. The county’s judicial arm was transforming into a commercial institution.
‘Ministry of Security, County Seat of Punyu,’ read the characters for two full floors. There were various sub-offices for the county’s penal operations and a special division for women’s work. Judging by the smelly racket coming up from the basement floor, there was also a busy canteen.
Somebody wearing slippers shuffled down the concrete corridor one floor above, passing the top of the stairs. Claire fell back out of sight, then hurriedly searched the company names. Only when she gave up her search did the shining logo of Brainchild catch her eye—on an even more expensive bronze plate screwed into the opposite wall.
‘Brainchild International, China Ltd.’ it read, followed by smaller letters reading ‘Brainchild Singapore Export and Import Co. Pte, China Ltd.’ and finally, Brainchild Medical Exports, Ltd.’
Medical exports?
Claire suddenly thought of Dr Liu’s account of that horrific ride in the prison van.
. . .There were to be no mistakes, no infections, no rejections. One of them joked there was only one place to be sure of ‘really healthy specimens,’ Club Med, he called it . . . ’
The Brainchild offices lay right up the stairs from where Claire stood. Underneath the bronze plaque hung a slightly pathetic placard of white wood with the characters for ‘Huan Ji Electrical Co.’ painted in red.
Someone was coming. She darted back out the front door, and slipped quietly along the sliver of shade on the building’s side to the back. She felt a hand on her shoulder. It was one of the drivers. His breath stank of soy sauce. Rice stuck in his crooked teeth.
‘Tsuo ba,’ Get going, he ordered her out the gate. ‘Tsuo ba.’ Partly shoving, partly escorting her to make up for his language gap, he’d clearly taken her for a meddlesome backpacker lost in Ministry of Justice’s backyard.
She nodded her apologies and thanks in English, and as they reached the crude cement stiles of the back gate, she turned to say an innocent good-bye.
But something about this man was familiar. As she locked eyes with him once more, she realized the same thought had occurred to him. They’d met before, although he’d shown her no particular courtesy.
He was Chen Jiafang’s driver. His eyes widened as he saw wisps of her red hair peeking from underneath her cap, and he uttered a little, ‘oh.’ His grip tightened.
She wrenched herself free and rushed out the gate and down the alley. Still holding his rice bowl and chopsticks, he shouted and followed
her. She hurried along a row of small shops and dodged into one selling paper goods and flimsy toys, using a back door to escape onto another small lane.
She had to get away fast. Within five minutes Chen would be hunting her down.
Joop and pals had just finished eating and gone to the motorbike shop a few streets away. Chen wouldn’t inquire into a group of Dutch tourists and she prayed that he wouldn’t link backpackers hiring a car from the ferry station to the Lucky Inn with her. She was only a block from the shop when Joop raced past her on a little Honda, taking it for a test run.
‘Hello,’ he shouted and she waved happily back, swallowing her fear and composing her face. ‘We have eaten a wonderful meal of prawns and noodles,’ he reported. ‘I have spoken to a fellow who suggests we meet later at the disco of the leading hotel so that he can show us some of the local life.’
Claire rented herself a rusty mud-covered bike and set off with them. If Chen’s driver, or worse Chen himself, was on her heels, a few wobbles were the least of her problems.
They putted their way in the direction of the ferry docks. The road thinned out as they left Punyu, running past fresh factory sites and container loading docks. Brainchild’s final assembly line would logically be somewhere along this route, so that the finished computers could join the camisoles, T-shirts, running shoes, and stuffed toys heading for Hong Kong.
Everywhere you looked you saw energy and activity. How had MacGinnes duped the American consulate in Guangdong and the Hong Kong–based inspectors for US Customs checking for exports from China’s gulag?
Father Fresnay had figured it out. Cha Ling was no longer a camp on any inspection lists. MacGinnes wasn’t a customer; he owned a labor camp outright and just turned it into his own ‘foreign-invested business,’ with complacent Chinese front men as partners.
Did the prisoners or the jiu ye—ex-prisoners assigned for life to the same prison they had served long sentences in—know they were no longer working in a prison? Did any of them realize their jailers were Woodland Hills suits? Were they cursing the Communist Party for a life of misery when any morning they chose they could just walk out the gate as free men?
