Monkey House Blues

by Dominic Stevenson

  It was almost a relief when the guards took me back to my cell. After lying on a bed for nearly seven months I had been exhausted by the last thirty-six hours, and my back ached from standing up in court the day before. Mum gave me a dried seahorse that she’d had since I was a kid to keep as a memento, and I put it in a small box beside my bed. There were many new books to read, but my back was so painful all I could do was lie in the foetal position on the bed until I fell asleep.

  As relations with my Chinese cellmates turned sour, my insides turned hard. Some kind of cabin fever crept into our cell life and my bowels decided to stop functioning, as if my body could not bear to operate under the circumstances. Sometimes several days would go by without success, just hours on the toilet trying to ignore the insults. The worse things got, the harder it was to go. The longer they held their noses, sneering unkindly, the more reluctant my bowels were to let go. A menacing succession of sighs accompanied every sit down, till my stomach ached as if it were filled with cement. I tried to wait until night-time but there was no night any more than there was day. The strip lights saw to that, turning our cell into a 24–7 film set from a scatological B-movie. After four or five days, the floodgates would open and I’d finally deliver a revolting stench that engulfed the cell for twenty minutes while I was bombarded with abuse. Liu would climb up to the window and hang off the bars to get fresh air, and I’d lie on my bed feeling pleased with myself. Purged.

  One morning, I’d forgotten to scrub the cell floor and Liu had to remind me. I stuck my head back into a book and ignored him, so he began his usual taunts and threats. I muttered ‘fuck off’ under my breath and he heard, springing to his feet and punching me in the face several times as I shielded myself with a book. Blood trickled down the side of my mouth and my cheeks swelled up into fleshy red bulges as I got down on my hands and knees to perform my duties. He looked triumphant at first, but after talking to Yen the smiles gave way to fear. Perhaps Yen had pointed out to him that if the guards saw my face he would be in serious trouble, and the ghoulish contraption that was situated outside our cell would be his bed for the night. I toyed with the idea of requesting a doctor’s visit, which would bring the captain round to our cell. But I didn’t want to get anybody in more trouble than they were already in; after all, in spite of everything we were all in this together. I tried to put myself in Liu’s position and consider how I would feel if I’d been in the cell for nearly three years without the slightest idea what the charge was against me or when I would go to court. I told myself that in other circumstances we’d be friends, and did my best to ignore my feelings of hatred and to pretend I was alone in the cell. From that day on, my cellmates became invisible. Days would go by without any eye contact whatsoever. I did my cleaning chores without prompting and absorbed myself in writing letters and poems and reading books. My former friends no longer existed as I buried myself in my own solitary confinement. I was determined not to allow them into my world.

  One day, the door-hatch opened and I got to my feet, but it wasn’t for me this time. Yen had a meeting with his lawyer. He was back in the cell within 20 minutes and changing clothes to go to court. I’d had a week between meeting my lawyer and my court appearance, while he had about ten minutes. There was no mirror in the cell, so he asked Liu if he looked all right for his big day in court. Liu inspected him and picked a couple of pieces of fluff off his jumper. They looked like a gay couple preparing for an important job interview.

  A few weeks later, Yen was moved to another part of the jail to do his sentence. He’d ended up with a three-and-a-half-year stretch and was in pretty good spirits about it. The captain had told him what to expect and his prediction had been correct. Within hours, a skinny new guy of about 40 was moved into our cell. He was gaunt, had bouts of stomach cramps and would lie on the floor in agony, screwing up the sheets around his belly, whimpering. I had no reason to dislike the man, but failed to be moved by his suffering. The prison doctor palmed him off with his 30 seconds of verbal quackery before handing over the usual ‘painkillers’. I wasn’t hopeful for him. Day in day out he lay on the floor squirming in misery, popping the useless pills, getting up only to try to eat his meals before curling up into a ball on the floor again. One night, Liu banged on the door requesting a doctor and took the opportunity to speak to me for the first time in weeks, pointing out that our cellmate was very ill. He was as shocked by my indifference to his friend’s tormented condition as I was unsurprised by the guards’ apathy to it as they slammed the hatch back in his face. Deep down I felt guilty: I began to question my own humanity, my inability to empathise with these people – or any people. I could cry for characters in books, but I felt nothing for the people living a few feet away, as if I’d been robbed of the most basic human instincts.

  Thoughts of my childhood at boarding school came back to haunt me in the form of an old contemporary from Singapore. He too had stood out for his Otherness, and we let him know it. He worked harder than us and was respectful of the housemaster and tutor, whom we hated. We called him a swot and a Chink and jeered at him for having a study that smelled like a Chinese takeaway. Now I was on the receiving end of a karmic boomerang that would cut me down to size. I began to scan my brain for unflattering memories of myself, convinced I was a terrible person who’d got his just deserts. I pieced together a grim trajectory of misdeeds that had brought me to this place, a misspent life and now a ghastly end in which I’d lost all compassion for myself or anyone else. My journey had come full circle: ghosts from the past flickered into view, mocking me, taunting me, and holding up a grubby mirror that showed me my life, and I didn’t much like what I saw.

  The cell door opened for the first time in five weeks. It was the captain, with good news. I was going to court in ten minutes, and was told to get all my belongings together.

  ‘Maybe you go home,’ Liu sneered jealously, in response to the guard who’d just muttered a few words through the hole in the door. I was sitting on the end of the bed in a purple tracksuit the police had brought me and a prison-issue padded jacket. Liu thought the fact the captain had told me to get all my belongings together could only mean one thing: I was going to be deported. He seemed pissed off at my good fortune, as if I was somehow the cause of his own bad luck. Even so, he began to start helping me pack, throwing my possessions into a blanket on the floor, which he tied up into a knapsack. A moment later, the door hatch opened once more. False alarm: I could leave my stuff behind, which meant I’d be coming back to the cell after my court appearance. Liu smiled as he translated the happy news, clearly relieved that we’d be seeing each other again. Would he miss me when I was gone? I shrugged my shoulders, feigning indifference, and waited for the door to open.

  A police minibus waited in the courtyard, and my right hand was handcuffed to a metal handrail on the empty seat in front of me while a couple of officers got in the front. I leaned forward, tapped one on the shoulder and held two fingers to my mouth, and he passed me a lit cigarette. It was my first cigarette for some time, and the smoke rushed to my head as the city crawled by the window outside. It was an ugly city, and seeing the neon signs in daylight just made it uglier: miles of dull plastic tubes trailing down the sides of grey buildings waiting for the night to bring them alive again. Street urchins in padded coats like mine were rifling through garbage cans at the side of the road. Liu had talked of his home town many times. He loved the place: it was the centre of his world, the epicentre of the Middle Kingdom, but it was also, for generations, the home of many Europeans and Americans, whose colonial parks had been off limits to ‘dogs and Chinese’. I thought of the tiny piece of opium I’d had in my briefs and tried to lie about: one and a half grams of ‘medicine’ given to me by an Afghan ‘doctor’. A chill ran down my spine. Of all the things to get caught with in this town, with its history. Jesus! They could throw away the key.

  I walked up the same stairway to a different, smaller courtroom. In front sat three judges in blue unifor
ms, with their hats on the desk in front of them, beneath a red star. There were a couple of people from the British embassy and a handful of Chinese I didn’t recognise. Mr Shen, the head man whom I’d come to know fairly well over the last couple of months, led the proceedings through a translator. The charge was read out and the sentence was pronounced: ‘Liang nianban.’ My eyes flashed across to the translator as he called out ‘two and a half years’. It was a fair result, I thought, and the woman from the embassy congratulated me on my relative good fortune. Mr Shen came over, and I shook his hand and smiled. It was an oddly surreal moment, but I knew things could have been much worse and didn’t feel any bitterness towards anybody. I knew that at one point I’d been on a charge that carried a minimum sentence of seven years, but I didn’t know who had been responsible for downgrading the charge to a maximum of seven. Maybe it was the judge Mr Shen, or perhaps Mr Song the prosecutor, or even the police. Either way somebody had decided to show leniency, and in China two and a half years is a slap on the wrist.

  Two guards ushered me back down the staircase to the cells below. There would be several hours to wait before I’d be going back to the jail as we had to wait for the other prisoners to go through the system. The guard on duty asked me how long I’d got. I held up two fingers and bent a third, and he smiled in recognition. An English song came on the radio: it was the cheesy love ballad ‘Just When I Needed You Most’. I’d brought along a poetry book by Robert Browning because it fitted in my padded-coat pocket. I opened on a random page and read a poem called ‘A Light Woman’. I was back in the mini cells that had given me chronic backache before. My knees touched the bars of the narrow cell, so I started doing pull-ups. After a while I asked to go to the toilet, and the guard opened my cell door and pointed down the corridor to the loo. An old man with grey hair satin the cell next door to mine, sobbing. When I came out of the loo, I noticed the door to the outside world was wide open. It was a clear, sunny day and the sky was a deep electric blue. I could see passers-by walking down the street beyond the fence surrounding the courthouse. I fantasised about escaping, running through the streets of Shanghai with sirens blazing behind me. With no money, passport or friends I wouldn’t last long. Walking back to my cell, I stopped outside the old man’s. His anguished cries distressed me. Turning to the guard, I held up my hands and wiggled my fingers to ask what the old man had got. He held his index finger up to his temple and pushed down his thumb with a throaty hiss. I looked back at the condemned man, tears streaming down his wrinkled cheeks, and thought of giving him the cigarette I still had from earlier. Instead I reached into my jacket and pulled out a packet of tissues and handed them to him. He nodded gratefully and wiped the snot and tears off his face. Then I went into my cell, pulled the door behind me and heard the click of the iron bars. Next door the old man went quiet as he waited for the end to come.

  Later that night, I sat on my bed and thought about the old man. I felt bad for not giving him my last cigarette. It seemed mean to have kept it for myself, and I started to believe that somehow if I had given it to him, he would have taken my addiction to his grave with him and I would have been rid of the vice I’d had since adolescence. Instead I’d take the habit off to jail with me, and he’d have a tissue to wipe away the tears on his way to the killing ground.

  Everyone told me I’d be transferred to Ti Lan Qiao any day now, but two weeks had passed since I’d been sentenced and I was still lying on my bed in the detention centre. My attention span had gone and I didn’t feel like reading books. I was on tenterhooks and sleeping badly, and every time there was any noise outside the cell I thought they’d come to take me to the prison. Liu appeared to be disappointed with my relatively light sentence. He’d made an estimate of around eight years when he’d seen my original indictment. He said that since I’d only have to do half my sentence, I’d be going home in less than a year, which, including the eight months I’d spent on remand, was less time than he’d already spent waiting to go to court.

  At around ten o’clock at night, there was a rattle on the other side of the door. Liu and our other cellmate, who seemed to be in better shape, rushed to look out as the hatch was opened.

  ‘Pachistan! Pachistan!’ cried Liu, standing aside to let his mate take a look.

  A new prisoner was outside, presumably a Pakistani. Then Liu’s face dropped.

  ‘Africa, Africa.’ They both turned with looks of utter disgust on their faces. Both were holding their noses as they repeated the unhappy news. ‘Africa, Africa.’

  They were still holding their noses when the poor guy was led in. He was in his late 30s, with short cropped hair. He’d been arrested at the airport with an American passport that the Chinese were saying was fake. He said he was from New York, but he sounded like he’d never left Africa. I told him not to worry about it because the Chinese would probably kick him out of the country as soon as they verified where he was from. Liu and his pal were still waving their hands around their noses to drive away the imagined pong. I felt vindicated by their behaviour. If this was how they treated a complete stranger on the grounds that he was black, they weren’t really worth the trouble I’d gone through to make them like me in the first place.

  The new arrival’s English was poor. He said he’d lived in America all his life, but he didn’t have even the mildest accent. I thought his story was nonsense, but didn’t blame him for sticking to it. Liu kept asking me to translate what he was saying, but I ignored him. When the guy eventually went to the loo, he got a torrent of abuse about the smell. I told him they were a couple of ignorant pricks and not to let them get him down. Chinese bigotry towards blacks was nothing new. Not long before my arrest, there had been riots in Beijing after a black student had gone out with a Chinese girl. The army had been brought in as hordes of irate Chinese went on the rampage, horrified at the thought of one of their kind cavorting with a ‘monkey’, as Liu called them. Later, a Chinese friend who should have known better explained the Chinese view to me, as if he spoke for the entire nation.

  ‘You know this.’ He was pushing his index finger in and out of his clenched fist to simulate intercourse.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘In China we say that African is chimpanzee and human together.’

  I heard this view of Africans echoed by many Chinese I met, and they all said it in a very matter-of-fact way. They weren’t trying to be rude or obnoxious; they seemed to actually believe it. The Chinese had always considered their country the centre of the world, the Middle Kingdom surrounded by barbarians. In fact, they considered China to be less a nation state than an empire, like Christendom or the Islamic world. The country had been on its knees for decades, but now, under Deng Xiaoping, it was on the rise once again, as was Chinese chauvinism.

  The next morning, I was chatting with the African when the door opened. The captain had come to say goodbye. We shook hands and I thanked him for his kindness over the last eight months. He was a good man with a bad job, but he’d made an effort to show some humanity to the people in his care, and I appreciated that. I shook Liu’s hand, too; it wasn’t a time for grudges; the guy hadn’t even been to court yet and who knows what he’d get when he did. But me, I was doing all right; the worst bit was probably over and things would likely be better in Ti Lan Qiao. I took one last look around the room that had incarcerated me for all this time. I’d become used to the smell of the place and the sound of a soap-opera title song echoing down the corridor from the guards’ TV at the same time every weekday. The song had become the soundtrack of my life, and I didn’t even know its title or the artist who sang it. The room had brought great sadness, but great hope, too. When everything is stripped away, it’s perfectly possible to get happy on the side. In fact, it’s essential for survival. I’d filled my head with books and exotic thoughts and fantasies to compensate for the banal reality of the situation. There had been many days when I’d found some kind of contentment, even happiness. My inner world had risen to the occasion and
lit up the gloomy predicament I’d put myself in. I thought of the endless days and nights I’d spent staring at the walls and ceiling, the hours I’d spent composing letters and poems, throwing my ball of rolled up socks at the walls and gazing at the moon through the crack in the window. Now it was all over. I was on my way to prison, and it felt like freedom.

  [6]

  The Foreigners’ Unit

  The drive from No. 1 Detention Centre to Shanghai Municipal Prison takes about 20 minutes, and I had a Public Security minibus all to myself. The handcuffs seemed unnecessary since I had no thoughts of escape and accepted the relatively light sentence handed down by the People’s Court. I’d spent eight months on remand and was assured I’d be released after half my sentence was completed. That meant I had less than a year to serve before I’d be free again, and I made the most of the drive to the prison, taking in the sights, sounds and smells of the city that I knew only from behind bars.