by Adam Brookes
Mangan’s phone rang. The guide was waiting. They’ve set up roadblocks two miles out of town, the guide warned. Before you hit them, look for a torch at a turnoff. Mangan wondered how they would know they were going to hit the roadblocks before they hit them. They drove on in the dark.
Suddenly there it was, the torch, jiggling up and down at every passing car. Harvey spotted it. He pushed his sunglasses up on to his head and reached for the camera bag.
They pulled over, the driver complaining. Here?
The guide was a stooped, toothless old man in a black waterproof and rubber boots. Harvey grinned and Mangan did the talking, struggling to understand the old man’s sibilant southern speech. He took out the agreed-upon cash, but the man waved it away. Afterwards.
“Through the fields.” The man gestured. “We’ll skirt the roadblocks, but it’ll be wet.”
The three of them set off in the darkness. Across the fields Mangan saw the flickering lights of police vehicles blocking the road. Their guide moved quickly through the high grass. Mangan stumbled, his trousers soaked and clinging, mud weighing on his shoes.
“Is he one of them?” Harvey’s Australian stage whisper, famously audible from half a mile.
“No. He lives on the edge of the town.”
“How did you find him?”
Mangan had spent hours calling at random, attaching five digits to the area code and hoping. Most of his respondents were indignant. Those people! they’d complained. Sitting in the streets, chanting! Disrupting traffic! But this old man had been intrigued more than angry. They seem harmless enough, he’d said. Mangan asked if he would guide them into the town. Discreetly. For a sum.
The town was called Jinyi. Golden Rill. Mangan had looked at a satellite image. Flat gray sprawl around a cement works, a river. The guide took them to the river’s bank, a path lined by dimly lit brick shanties. A dog barked. The river smelled of garbage and shit.
They went under a bridge and up stone steps into the street, Harvey first. Mangan saw him smoothly pulling off the backpack and reaching in for the little camera. He liked watching Harvey start to work, the sudden tension in him when the image presented itself.
And what an image. Under the light from the streetlamps the Followers were sitting in rows, hundreds of them, cross-legged, their hands describing graceful arcs in front of them. A cassette player sat on an upturned crate, playing a rhythmic, undulating, repetitive chant punctuated with bells, turned up so loud it was distorting. They mouthed along to it, their eyes closed.
The guide tapped Mangan on the arm, then gestured, his eyes blank.
“That’s her, the organizer. I’ll go now.” He took the cash and disappeared into the dark.
Mangan saw her coming towards him, waving. She was forty years old perhaps, wearing a black jacket with a high collar, jeans and knee-length black boots. She was no more than five feet tall. From behind a fringe, she had a look that contrived at innocence, childishness.
“You must be Mr. Mangan. I didn’t think you would make it in. You must be very good at, well, evading.”
She was speaking English. Her accent was South China, clipped, heavily layered with America, trying for playfulness amid the tension. Mangan shook a minute, limp hand. She introduced herself as Shannon.
“I don’t think we have very long,” he said.
“Well, whoever, you can talk to them. Get your pictures. This is important for us. The police will come in the morning, we think.” They stood outside a shuttered bakery.
“You’re not from here,” Mangan said.
“Originally, yes, but Long Island now. I came back because the movement needs people who can speak for it, help organize.” She gestured to the seated, chanting rows.
Harvey was on one knee, the camera balanced on his thigh, working up a sequence of an elderly woman with a face like parchment, her bird-like hands fluttering and circling. She wore a purple rain jacket and mouthed silently.
“What are they chanting?” Mangan said.
“The Three Principles. Humanity, understanding, rebirth. You could call it a mantra. The Master tells us that to perfect ourselves and enlighten ourselves we must meditate on the Principles.”
“Is the Master coming here?”
“Well, that is why we’re here. He was born here.”
And, Mangan knew, now lived in Scottsdale, Arizona, in a gated community.
“What are you hoping to achieve?”
She looked at him and folded her arms. The chanting had stopped, and now just the occasional chime came from the cassette player. The Followers sat silent and motionless under the streetlights.
“Do not speak to us as if we were some hopeless cause, Mr. Mangan. We are changing China. We are not political, but we are part of an awakening that will see China return to her core beliefs, transmuted for a new era.”
Mangan knew it word for word. He had heard it from them in grimy backrooms in Beijing, on Tiananmen Square as they were dragged away by the buzzcut plainclothes men, in cold villages up north, the condensation running down the windows as whole families sat on the kang studying the Master’s texts.
“But you understand why the Party sees you as a political threat, surely?”
“No. We are peaceful. We are not against the Communist Party. Do you know how many of us they have locked up now? Do you?” She looked at him, working up her righteous fury. “Three million of us, at least.”
Mangan doubted the number was anything like that big, but kept silent. There had been, he knew, thousands of them in re-education camps. He’d seen some on a ghoulish press tour outside Shanghai. He remembered the reek of disinfectant as the camp staff waved them through, saying, you see? It’s all quite humane. They’d entered a dining hall with a concrete floor where a hundred Followers sat on plastic chairs and stared fixedly at a television playing cartoons. When the press corps, cameras, microphones, white people in rustling, garish gear, shuffled in, their eyes didn’t leave the screen. Mangan had been shocked and repulsed.
Harvey looked over his shoulder and winked. Mangan made his way over and Harvey handed him a microphone. The old woman in the purple jacket seemed to be looking past him. Mangan leaned towards her and went into Chinese.
“Can you tell me why you are here?”
“We have come to do the Master’s bidding.” Her hands trembled, Mangan saw.
“And what is that?”
“We must meditate on the Three Principles and resist oppression. My husband was taken away, so I have come here with the others.”
“Is your husband a Follower of the Master?”
“Yes. They took him away. I can’t see him.” Her words began to speed up, her voice turning shrill. “They sent me a letter. He said he renounced his beliefs and that he thanked the state for freeing him. But they tortured him to say that.” Now tears spilled down her cheeks.
Mangan had seen it often, the blankness turning to uncontrolled emotion in seconds. Shannon raised her eyebrows. You see?
The chanting had started up again.
Harvey looked about, exhaled. “I’ve got enough of that. What else?”
They filmed more interviews. Shannon hovered, then brought tea from a red thermos. Harvey paused and sipped from a steaming cup, and, for safety, took the memory card from the camera and backed up all the pictures on a slender laptop.
At three in the morning the first siren sounded, a whoop from a police car starting from the darkness and moving at speed down the main street towards them. Olive-green trucks, five or six of them, lumbered behind. Some of the Followers began to stand up, walking quickly away, ducking down alleyways. Shannon was on her mobile phone. The trucks came to a halt with a compressed air hiss. Green uniforms in riot helmets, with batons, jumped from the tailgates.
Harvey and Mangan ran for a nearby doorway and crouched in shadow. Harvey filmed. The uniforms—they were wujing, paramilitary police—jogged down the street and into the crowd in columns. They were, to start with, methodical
. A sergeant yelled for everyone to stay where they were, and then walked over to the cassette player, which was still playing the weird, distorted chimes. He looked down at it for a minute, then dealt it an almighty kick, sending it bouncing across the street, broken plastic skittering off it.
Most of the Followers seemed to understand it was all over, and stood sullenly. The wujing pinned their arms and walked them to the trucks. They dragged those who refused to walk. Mangan watched them drag the old woman in the purple waterproof. One of her shoes had come off. She was still mouthing her chants. Mangan thought she was crying.
Harvey lowered the camera, shuffled backward into the shadow, and looked about him.
“I think we need to move,” he said.
Mangan gingerly stuck his head out into the street, searching for a way out. Nothing, just uniforms, blinding headlights. He ducked back into the doorway. Harvey ejected a second memory card from the camera, handed it to Mangan.
“That’s the good stuff, so stick it where they won’t find it,” he said.
Mangan worked quickly, tearing off a strip of gaffer tape with his teeth, reaching into his trousers and strapping the memory card to his thigh. He turned to the door behind them. It was wooden; the entrance to an apartment block? He rattled it. It was loose, but on a spring latch. Harvey reached into his pack, pulled out the stiff plastic card he used to white-balance the camera, and jammed it into the crack between door and jamb, jiggling it in and out, looking for the latch. Mangan watched. Implacable, confident Harvey. Then a snick and the door swung open. Harvey opened his mouth wide in a clown grin.
“Sometimes you amaze me,” said Mangan.
“I amaze myself.”
Six flights of concrete stairs brought them to a fire door and the roof. They stayed low, crawled to the edge and looked down on the street.
The scene was chaotic. Wujing ran at random down the street, grabbing Followers by their clothes and hair. Some worked with their batons, not hard, but not gently either. Mangan saw a young man with a ponytail, kneeling, his forehead split open, wiping blood from his eyes. Mangan tapped Harvey on the shoulder and pointed. Harvey framed and focused just as a wujing put his boot in the young man’s back and he went down. Harvey lingered, let it play out. The boy tried to stand, hands raised in submission, but the wujing kept on putting him down, then changed his mind, grabbed the boy by his collar and forced him towards the trucks.
Harvey licked his lips, took a breath. “That’s strong.”
Then he stopped, looking over Mangan’s shoulder, and winced. Mangan turned. The door on to the roof had opened and a tall man in a light-gray suit and open-necked shirt was coming through it, with two wujing behind him.
“Stop, please.” In English.
Mangan’s stomach turned over.
“You stay, please.”
He was young, with neat parted hair. No buzzcut, this one. Very un-thuggish. Lean, athletic, but slender hands.
“Who are you, please?” The tone not impolite.
Mangan stayed in English. “We are from Beijing.”
The man actually smiled. “I see, from Beijing. And why are you here, please?”
Mangan said, “We are journalists.” A little too fast.
“Journalists!” As if all were clear, silly me. “So you must come with us, please.”
Mangan shook his head. “No, we mustn’t. We are entitled to report, to report freely in China.”
The man nodded. “I’m very sorry.”
“Can I see your identification?” Mangan went into Chinese.
“No. Sorry. I am from the State Security Bureau. Please come with us.” Another smile and a shrug.
State Security? Mangan looked at Harvey, who raised his eyebrows.
“Are you detaining us?” said Mangan. Juliu, meaning: are you prepared to make this official?
“I hope we won’t need to do that, but you will come with us now. Please.”
Mangan, for his own self-respect, held on a bit longer.
“We do not have to come with you.”
“It will get more complicated.” The man’s gaze was quite level, and he had his hands in his pockets now. The two wujing—both big ones, Mangan noticed—shifted behind him.
Harvey got up and picked up his pack, signaling: let’s get it over with.
Mangan stood too, relieved Harvey had made the move and not him. Grey Suit cocked his head to one side and gestured to the stairwell. They went back down into the street and to a black car.
The driver was the same species, different genus. Wiry, dark, a mustache, leather jacket. Still, bloodshot eyes. He smiled as he opened the rear door. They got in, holding their packs. The car smelled of cigarette smoke. Mangan tried the window but it wouldn’t open. The driver started the engine, then paused and turned around to look straight at them. Here we all are, then, his look said. Grey Suit touched him on the arm and gestured. The driver faced the front and pulled away.
They sat alone on plastic chairs in the Anquanju, the local State Security bureau, a whitewashed office with barred windows, for twenty minutes before anyone spoke to them. Mangan looked for cameras but couldn’t see any. He took the SIM cards out of their mobile phones. Harvey had a pocketknife. Mangan laid the cards on the table and sliced them up, crumbled the plastic and scattered it on the floor. He went through his notebook, tearing out the relevant pages—phone numbers, names—and solemnly put them in his mouth, chewing until the paper was mush. He stuck some more gaffer around the card strapped to his thigh. Harvey smirked and they waited. The sun was coming up.
When the door opened it was Grey Suit. With him was the taxi driver who had driven them to Jinyi, terrified. Grey Suit held the door open, gestured towards Harvey and Mangan, then looked quizzically at the driver. Them? The driver nodded.
Mangan stood up.
“He had nothing to do with it. He doesn’t know us.”
Grey Suit looked amused and made a calming gesture with his palms. “I know.”
“Then bloody well let him go.”
Grey Suit raised his eyebrows, then turned and closed the door. A few minutes later he was back, with a uniform, and a large green file.
“Please give me your mobile phones for a moment.” They handed over the phones.
Grey Suit slipped the backs off to find the SIM cards gone. A wry look and a shake of the head. He handed the phones to the uniform, who left the room.
For a while it was just ID, addresses and contact details. But then came a search through the bags. Grey Suit took the camera.
“I’ll need all the footage, I’m afraid.”
Harvey gestured. “Still in the camera.”
“Show me, please.” Harvey turned the machine on and rewound. The digital flicker showed the ponytailed boy with blood in his eyes, then the interviews and the rows of chanting Followers in the shadows.
“Is everything you filmed here?”
Harvey nodded.
“Please give me the memory card.”
“You have no right to confiscate our footage,” said Mangan.
Grey Suit sighed and ran his hands through his neatly parted hair.
“Please,” he said. “I would rather you hand it to me than you force me to take it.”
Harvey sighed and ejected the memory card and handed it to him. Grey Suit regarded him, pursed his lips and nodded. Then, from the green file, he drew out two sheets of paper, on each a few typed sentences. He pushed them across the table towards Mangan.
“You’ll have to sign these.”
Mangan squinted at the characters. It was the usual, a confession of sorts, and a get out of jail card: I, Philip Mangan, freelance journalist, holder of an accreditation from a reputable but crumbling British newspaper, indentured to a small television news agency, was in Jinyi illegally, filmed illegally, interviewed illegally and in general consorted with people who were entirely illegal. He translated the gist for Harvey. Grey Suit waited, arms folded. They signed. The forms went back into the
green folder.
Business done, Grey Suit wanted to talk.
“What do you think of these people?” He appeared interested, his Mandarin deliberately slow and clear, little trace of Jiangxi in it. “You’ve got some experience with them, I think.”
Mangan didn’t know what to say. “It’s important to report what they do.”
“Yes, yes. But, we call them a cult. Xiejiao. An evil cult. Are we right, do you think?” Grey Suit appeared capable of earnestness.
“I don’t understand why you—you the Communist Party, I mean—see them as a threat,” said Mangan. “They seem naive, childish.” He could feel Harvey’s eyes on him.
“Naive. I must say I hadn’t thought of them like that.” Grey Suit paused. “I’m sure you’ve read some Chinese history.”
“Yes, some.”
“We’ve seen these movements before, yes? They get dangerous. Demagogues spouting religion. Peasants who think they’re divine, hurling themselves on bayonets. Villages burning.”
Mangan shrugged.
“Those old ladies in the street tonight? I don’t see that, I don’t see some fiery rebellion. This isn’t the nineteenth century.”
Grey Suit looked at him, weighing what he was saying. Then he reached out as if to shake hands, but stopped midway, and in a strange, operatic gesture, quavered his hand from side to side.
“I think, Mr. Mangan, that we don’t know who they are. I think we don’t know.”
Harvey dozed for a while, leaning on the table, arms crossed. Mangan stared out of the window through the bars on to a concrete parking lot. The green wujing trucks from the previous night stood in lines. A dark, wiry kid hosed them down, spray dripping from the canvas, the drab olive metal suddenly gleaming.
And then, in the breezy morning light, Mangan watched uniforms walk a group of Followers—fifteen of them, perhaps—across the concrete. They were cuffed, had their faces down and shuffled. No laces? They were all young men. The uniforms walked them to a truck. A sergeant dropped the tailgate. Two uniforms hoisted each Follower up on to the bed of the truck, which revved its engine, sending a black billow across the lot, pulled out, and was gone.