Monkey House Blues

by Dominic Stevenson

  I enjoyed sightseeing in China, though generally I’m not that bothered. Traipsing around tourist attractions has never held much attraction for me; I’d sooner find a street cafe and watch people go about their daily lives. My visit to the terracotta warriors in Xian was a typical example, in which three different sights on the day of my visit managed to eclipse the ancient clay tombs. On the minibus to the shrine, I saw a fight. We were driving along a street in town, and out of the corner of my eye I saw a commotion going on down a side street. A man was attacking another man with a meat cleaver, and I could see blood splurging out of his neck. It only lasted a flash as we drove past, but I’ll never forget the sight. After visiting the famous shrine, I had to go to the train station to buy a ticket. I got caught short and made it to the nearest public toilet beside the station. As soon as I walked in the door, the stink hit me: the acrid stench of ammonia. I jerked back out of the door for fresh air, but I was bursting and couldn’t wait, and taking a deep breath I ran into the dreadful place and did my business. There were hundreds of concrete stalls with holes in them and a dividing wall at shoulder height: you could chat to your neighbour, and many people were doing just that. I’ll never forget that loo.

  Opposite the station were dozens of noodle shops, and being a noodle aficionado I took my time to wander and find the best one. The men who made them were acrobats: throwing them over their heads, between their legs and slapping the doughy strands against stainless steel boards. I sat marvelling at the sight, thinking how much more interesting it was than the dreary Terracotta Army. Perhaps I’m a philistine, but to this day I remember the noodle-makers as if it were yesterday, as I do the man with the meat cleaver and the ghastly public toilet. The Terracotta Army has long since faded away.

  After the relative high of New Year, the winter turned mean, and we spent our days in bed trying to stay warm. My mum sent a parcel of books from friends and family so there didn’t seem much point in trying to communicate with my cellmates at all. They played cards and chatted amongst themselves and I immersed myself in books. I read Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables in three days and Moby Dick in four, as well as various historical tomes by James Michener about South Africa, Iberia and Israel. I wondered why I’d been sent so many Michener epics and thought of friends scanning their shelves for books they probably would never read, but I enjoyed them nonetheless. I particularly liked Milan Kundera on living in a Communist state, though the books were too short and soon came to an end. The boozy ruminations of Charles Bukowski were fun, but barely kept me busy for an afternoon. I tried reading The Lord of the Rings, but abandoned it after the first volume of the chunky trilogy left me cold. What do people see in that book?

  Of particular interest was Colin Thubron’s Behind The Wall, in which the travel writer visits Shanghai Municipal Prison at Ti Lan Qiao, a place that I could well end up knowing intimately. Liu said that if I was sentenced that was where I would go, since that was where the other foreigners were. I tried to picture what it would be like. My references were movies like Birdman of Alcatraz, Midnight Express and Papillon. Would there be a Mr Big like Grouty in Porridge? Would the warden be a bastard who wanted to see me get a longer sentence? Would I have to take care not to drop my soap in the shower? Could I escape? The celluloid clichés of incarceration ran around my brain, but after six months in jail I’d yet to see anything that I’d ever watched in a movie.

  My mother sent me a copy of the guide to the I Ching, and it became a constant companion. I fashioned a set of hexagrams out of paper and consulted the ‘Sage’ on all matters that came into my mind. The book had some sixty-four chapters, but one recurred with uncanny regularity: Chapter 36, ‘The Darkening of the Light’. The book advised me that ‘the light has sunk into the earth’ and that the light is always threatened when we engage in looking at a difficult situation from the viewpoint of our ego or childish heart. I’d read many spiritual books and they all spoke of the need to dissolve one’s ego, but putting it into practice is something else. Every time Chapter 36 appeared, I took it to be about coming to terms with my surroundings. ‘Discontent with slow progress, we lose our inner independence,’ said the Sage. I decided that it was crucial not to look forwards or backwards if at all possible. Yearning for things I couldn’t have only made me unhappy, and allowing my mind to dwell on the past or the future would only make it worse. I needed to get happy, and I couldn’t rely on anybody other than myself to achieve it. After all, it was only a state of mind, and I discovered that I could indeed be happy, and that just as many ‘free’ people are unhappy. I could liberate my mind in this or any other situation.

  After six months in jail, I got called out of the cell to meet my lawyer, a tall, sinewy-looking man called Xue, and his assistant, who spoke half-decent English. Choosing myself a lawyer had been a tough decision to make. My predecessors had all opted for an English-speaking private lawyer and had paid for the privilege. When I heard about some of the sentences his clients had ended up with, I decided to take a different path and asked the judge who was presiding over my case, Mr Shen, to choose a lawyer to represent me. This was the probably one of the smartest moves of my life.

  ‘Don’t you want to have the same lawyer as the other foreign prisoners?’ Shen was surprised by my request.

  ‘No thanks. As the judge in this case, I have absolute faith in you to find the best person to help me defend myself. I’m sure you know many good lawyers, Mr Shen.’

  There was no doubt in my mind I was doing the right thing. I’d lived in the Far East for years and was well aware of the power these people had. Even in countries like Japan, acquittals were virtually non-existent. If the police sent you to court, it was all over. The best you could do was ingratiate yourself with the court by showing you had total respect for the system. By requesting that the judge dealing with my case select a lawyer for me, I was showing my high opinion of his judgement and the system as a whole. I reasoned that by doing so I would gain the respect of the court and thus be shown leniency in return. I’m quite sure that this decision saved me from a much harsher punishment.

  The meeting with Mr Xue and his English-speaking sidekick was brief. Xue was a nerdy kind of guy who seemed to know his stuff. He was tall and slim with a short back and sides and a parting. He wore a pinstriped suit and wire glasses. His assistant was a smooth, casually dressed man wearing a fashionable brown leather jacket and slicked-back hair. His English was reasonable, and he and Xue raised some good points I’d overlooked. We went through the details of my case and agreed that he would represent me as a naive tourist rather than a criminal. I hoped he might be a pal of Shen’s and that between them they’d do a deal that worked in my favour. At the end of our meeting, he informed me I’d be going to court the following week. Back in the cell, Yen and Liu wanted to know how things had gone, but I’d learned not to trust them any more. I was suspicious of the monthly reports they’d been writing to the police and thought it wise not to give them any more information than necessary. I’d made an effort to get along with them in the beginning, but now my days in the detention centre were numbered I didn’t care what they thought of me and closed myself off.

  I suspected from their letters that my mum and Rosie would come to the hearing, which meant I’d probably have a visit, too. The problem with having anything to look forward to in prison is that time suddenly slows right down. Ordinarily time flies, like those old movies where you see the pages of a calendar turning, seasons changing or newspapers running through a printing press. The days just melt into weeks, into months. But as soon as some impending date appears on the horizon, the process goes into slow motion, the days drag and a week feels like a month.

  I’d asked the captain for a shave before my day in court, and was taken into a spare cell where a couple of trustees stood waiting with a pair of clippers. The room had a hole in the ground for a loo, and I was reminded of the relative comfort of my own cell. I jumped the queue of inmates waiting to have their heads shave
d, and the guys made jokes about cutting my chest hair. It was strange to lose my beard, and I felt the icy chill on my fresh cheeks. Liu and Yen told me I looked handsome without the bushy growth, which was the first compliment I’d received in a while. I’d written a couple of hundred words that I planned to read out in court, explaining how dumb I’d been to break the law in China and how sorry I was for my foolish actions. When the Monday morning arrived, I’d barely slept the night before. I’d been reading my speech over and over, making small amendments and then changing them back again. When the door finally opened, my cellmates wished me luck as I was led along the familiar corridor and down the stairs to the waiting minibus. There were five or six other prisoners on the bus, and three guards. One of the inmates wore heavy manacles on his legs, which I found out later meant he might well be looking at a death sentence. I asked one of the guards for a cigarette and he gave me one, to the surprise of the other prisoners. It’d been six months since I’d last seen the streets of Shanghai, but I was more interested in looking at my fellow prisoners. Two young lads sat chatting, while a third was sitting at the back. There was tension between them, and the third boy looked petrified. Another guy spoke a little English and told me the three were all part of the same gang who’d been arrested for theft. They’d been to court already and were now coming back to hear their verdicts.

  The van pulled into a large car park in front of a huge Soviet-style concrete building with a red star embossed on the front. We were taken round the side and led through a small door into a corridor with tiny cells the size of telephone kiosks, and our handcuffs were removed before we were given one of the squalid cages each. Opposite, a guard sat listening to the radio, and I called him over and asked for a cigarette, but he didn’t smoke. The cell had a slim concrete shelf for a seat, which made my back ache, and I must have sat there for at least two hours before a couple of cops arrived to take me to the hearing. The paint was peeling off the wall, exposing the graffiti beneath, and I thought of the thousands who’d come before me. There must have been times when several prisoners were crammed into these tiny spaces, especially during political purges when people were rounded up simply to fill quotas. As we wound our way up a spiral staircase, it felt like the walk from a dressing room to a stage before a performance. The guard told me to wait a moment, and we stood in the wings for what felt like an eternity. I leaned forward and peered into the huge room, looking round to my left, where I saw Mum and Rosie smiling at me. I felt an overpowering sense of pride and shame at the sight of them: pride at the thought that two people who loved me had come across the world to stand by me in my hour of need, and shame that I’d dragged them through my own selfish drama. They both looked beautiful, Mum in a striking red dress and Rosie in her hippy hemp gear from Vietnam. Alongside them, there were a couple of faces I recognised from the British consul and a handful of Chinese journalists taking notes. At the back of the room, the ubiquitous film crew was hurriedly loading the camera onto a tripod to film my entrance. I was led to a wooden lectern in the middle of the room, as Shen and two other judges walked in from a side door and sat down opposite me. I recognised one of the other judges from a previous visit with Shen, but the third judge was an attractive girl of thirty-something I’d never met before. They all wore navy uniforms with white hats and gloves, which they took off with great ceremony as the proceedings began. To my left sat my lawyer, Mr Xue, with his assistants, and to his left was the prosecutor whom I’d come to call Stan Laurel due to his resemblance to Oliver Hardy’s associate. A translator stood between the two camps in front of a lectern similar to mine, except he had a chair to sit on. My lower back was throbbing and I wanted to ask for one, but thought it better to go without.

  The prosecution made a long-winded case about how I was the peddler of a pernicious substance, which was a grave crime in China, but he also made a point of saying that my case was less serious than some of the others that had been through the People’s Court. I thought that was pretty good of him; he even recommended the court show a degree of leniency in my case, which I appreciated. I’d liked him in our meetings at the detention centre, when he’d given me a few packs of Marlboros to take back to my cell. Now he was helping me out in the courtroom, and this guy was the prosecutor. Things were going well for me. When Xue’s turn came to make my defence, he was an efficient advocate, arguing that my time in detention was quite enough considering the small quantity of drugs I’d had, and he recommended I be released without a custodial sentence.

  We broke for lunch, and I waved to Mum and Rosie before being taken back to the cells. After about ten minutes, Shen turned up with a huge plate of seafood on rice and a pack of cigarettes. The meal was the first decent one I’d tasted in months, but I had no appetite and chain-smoked the cigarettes instead. I couldn’t believe the judge had taken time out of his lunch break to run an errand for a prisoner whose case he was presiding over. I can’t believe it would happen in Britain. I’d made an effort to like Shen, because if you like people they tend to like you, and nobody wants to ruin the lives of those they like. The fact that I’d asked him to get me a lawyer had flattered his ego, and I often told him how much I loved China and how sad I’d be if I was unable to return. He reassured me more than once that I’d be welcome to come back whenever I liked and talked of all the places I should visit. I’d convinced myself he was a good guy, joked with him and his assistants about my case, and flirted with his secretaries. Somewhere along the line we’d almost become friends, and here he was taking time out of his lunch break to see that I was OK and had everything I needed.

  My strategy seemed to be paying off, and I knew exactly who I had to thank. When I was a kid, my mother was masterful at dealing with officials in a position to make her life a misery. Traffic wardens would write her tickets only to screw them into a ball five minutes later as she flattered and flirted with them. She could charm the birds out of the trees, and people did her favours without even realising it. My father often noticed that I’d inherited this skill from her, and it was true. Since my arrest, I’d done my best to treat every customs man, police officer, prosecutor or judge as my mother had dealt with those traffic wardens 20 years earlier. Whether it would ultimately get the result I was hoping for remained to be seen.

  My back was killing me from standing up for hours on end after lying on a bed for six months. When the guards came to take me back upstairs, I struggled to walk up the steps. The second half of the day went much quicker than the first. The prosecution mentioned that the dope I had was of a particularly strong variety, which I felt quietly chuffed about. Why get busted with crap? Best of all, nobody mentioned the minuscule piece of opium, except in the opening statement. It looked like they were not going to make a fuss about it, which they could have done, even though it was unlikely I’d have been charged for that alone.

  When my turn came to stand up and say my bit, I was tongue-tied. I forgot the piece of paper I had in my pocket – stuttered – and then remembered it. But when I finally looked at the words I’d written, I no longer wanted to say them. They would have had to be translated anyway, a laborious business that would have rendered the words almost meaningless. Instead, I apologised to the court for breaking the law and said I’d been stupid rather than malicious. I wanted to turn round and look at my family, whose presence I could feel behind me, but the formality of the occasion demanded I look ahead deferentially towards the speakers. Most of the dialogue was in Chinese, and there were long gaps after each speaker. They insisted on reading out my full name – including my middle name – whenever I was mentioned, so every sentence dragged on for ages as the officials kept referring to their paperwork to get my name right.

  My spine groaned under the strain, and I cursed myself for not accepting the offer of a chair at the start of the day. Finally Mr Shen announced it was over, and I was led out of the courtroom. I got one last glance at Mum and Rosie, who were mouthing something to me that I couldn’t understand, but took to mea
n ‘I love you’. I also knew I’d be seeing them soon, as they’d surely have arranged a visit, so I walked back down the stairs with a spring in my step, feeling lucky to have had them beside me.

  In the cell downstairs I continued to stand, only this time I used the bars to yank myself up and take some of the weight off my coccyx. I still had most of the cigarettes that Shen had given me, which I hid in my underwear in case I was searched on my return to the detention centre. Back on the bus, the lads I’d come to court with were talking cheerfully amongst themselves. They’d got twelve years each but you’d have thought they’d got six months. The kid on the back seat who’d grassed them up got 18 months and was crying his heart out as they swore at him. The other guy with manacles on his legs wasn’t on the return trip at all.

  Yen and Liu were happy to share my latest packet of cigarettes, and this time I had a box of matches Shen had given me. I felt the day had gone pretty well and that Mr Xue had put across my defence well. There was no way of knowing what sentence I would get, but Xue’s suggestion that I should not do any additional jail time was the hoped-for outcome that filled my head that night. No date had been set for my return to court, but it was possible that I would be out within weeks and that the ordeal was coming to an end. After scrubbing the cell floor, I did a hundred sit-ups to loosen up my back and then fell into a deep sleep.

  Mum and Rosie were permitted an hour-and-a-half visit with Jackie Barlow, the latest British vice consul. Jackie was a friendly woman in her 50s with a long career in the diplomatic service and was new to China, after taking over from Jim Short. Mum had brought books, playing cards (that I was not permitted to have) and Bassett’s Hard Liquorice Sticks, a childhood favourite of mine. The visit took place in a kind of hospitality room with a sofa in it, and I was permitted to sit next to Rosie and Mum, chatting about their lives while trying to remain upbeat about my predicament. While Mum chatted to Jackie, I asked Rosie if she’d been faithful in my absence. She said no. ‘Why couldn’t you have lied?’ I said bitterly. But it didn’t really matter any more. Our lives had changed so much it was far from certain we’d ever be a couple again anyway. There was still no indication of what kind of sentence I was likely to receive, though obviously I hoped my lawyer would have his way and I’d be let off with just the time I’d already spent in detention. Mum was a huge inspiration, passing on messages from well-wishers back at home, some of whom I hardly remembered. It occurred to me how far I’d gone away from the world she inhabited. I’d been a lousy son in the preceding years, rarely bothering to write home or keep in touch, and yet here she was, crossing the world at great expense to support me when it really mattered. I held her hand and told her how sorry I was for all the trouble I’d caused.