Monkey House Blues

by Dominic Stevenson

  I wasn’t thinking about visits. Time was racing now, and even thoughts of Rosie were less frequent. I was getting into the rhythm of jail life and sort of liked the tempo of the place, which swam round my brain to the music of Howlin’ Wolf’s ‘Wang Dang Doodle’. Boarding school had been my dry run for prison, and I think I coped better with the latter. I’d got used to the monotony of it all, with its 24–7 routines that never changed. Such certainty can put your mind at ease, and lends itself to a Daoist ‘in the moment’ type of mindset. I was becoming institutionalised, and it felt good.

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  Peshwari Mangoes

  Before Mr Zhao’s reign as number one prisoner had prevented the foreigners from emptying their own shitbuckets, I had got to know my Pakistani friend Khalid better. We only had a couple of minutes to speak at the drains, but he’d often made a point of coming along to say hello. His work unit was involved in the most tedious job in the prison, which involved separating threads of cotton all day long. He also wore a uniform and spoke fluent Mandarin, since he’d done most of his time pretty much on his own on a straight Chinese wing. The Pakistanis had been unfortunate to have fallen between Chinese and foreigner status, and had been put through the system as sort of honorary Chinese, with few of the benefits that either party enjoyed. I felt sorry for them because they had a tougher time of it than we did and didn’t have the kinds of connections the locals had to get more interesting work. Like me, Khalid was ‘coming down from the mountain’, being in the home stretch of an eight-year sentence. He had the kind of chilled-out demeanour that people take on as the light at the end of the tunnel looms brighter, and I had enjoyed our meetings. We’d exchanged magazines and he’d given me a copy of the Koran to read.

  One day he’d given me a tiny piece of hash that he’d found in the hem of some clothing, years after his arrest. It was less than half a gram in weight and had the dry, grainy consistency of Xinjiang hash rather than the sticky texture of the stuff from his home country. When I’d got back to the wing, I’d begun to feel nervous having the contraband in my possession and decided to drop it down a hole between the floorboards where no one would find it. I never saw it again.

  One of the pleasures of prison life is the amount of time one has to reflect on the past. On the outside, life is far too hectic to spend hours thinking about former adventures, but for prisoners it’s a full-time occupation. I thought a great deal about Pakistan, the place that I had bought my hash and, as a result, brought disaster upon myself. I trawled my mind for clues as to how the foolish idea had come to me, and the surrounding circumstances that might have put me off the ill-fated mission. I thought about the days before I’d set off from Peshawar and how my illness had clouded my judgement as I lounged around on the roof gardens of guesthouses, smoking joints and drinking mango juice from old-fashioned dimpled pint glasses.

  The evening before I bought my hash, I’d sat in the garden of the guesthouse drinking mango juice with a couple from Madrid. It was their last night in the country and they were flying back home the following morning. Juan and Maria said they’d come to Pakistan to buy stones to make into rings and pendants to sell at the markets in Paris and Berlin. I suspected they were junkies whose dependency on the white poppies of Afghanistan was their real reason for beingin the country. Both had geranium-blue eyes with tiny pupils that struggled to peer out beneath their encroaching eyelids. Maria was prone to nodding off mid-sentence, leaving her partner to pick up where she left off before jerking back in her chair to smile in agreement with him. They showed me samples of their work that were made of beautifully crafted silver inlaid with semi-precious stones. She wore a scorpion necklace with green tourmaline eyes that peered out from a carved onyx head, while the body consisted of a row of rectangular slabs of garnet, their smooth surfaces like tiny bottles of red wine. Its tail was fashioned out of Maori jade with a minute faceted diamond on the tip, which caught the last rays of sunlight that crept over the hotel compound.

  ‘Go and see this guy,’ said Juan, handing me a name card. ‘He’ll look after you.’

  I took the card as the couple wandered back to their room, holding hands. They’d been together for 18 years and seemed very much in love. Their laid-back existence – drifting between Europe and the Hindu Kush, buying stones and working with their hands – seemed like a charmed life. It was the life Rosie and I had had, though neither of us had succumbed to the melancholic darkness of opiate addiction.

  The following day, I went looking for stones. The muezzin’s call rang out across the street from a battered megaphone as I stood outside the shop. A handsome young man with fluffy stubble on his chin quickly opened the door, ushering me away from the oppressive heat of the bazaar into a small room with a large, patterned carpet hanging from the wall and a few cushions in the corner.

  ‘Welcome, please, my name is Islam,’ he said with a convivial smile, his milky teeth gleaming like moonstones. ‘I will make some tea.’

  The curtain at the back of the shop fluttered as he came back with my tea. We sat across from each other, he with his long white jalaba and me in the baggy new trousers I’d bought in Saddar Bazaar the day before. I’d discarded my jeans within 24 hours of arriving in the city; it was 40 degrees and rising, so the heavy denim fabric had clung to my legs like dead skin. The flowing arabesque calico allowed the warm air to circulate round my legs and groin, and for the first time since arriving in the country I felt comfortable.

  I lit a cigarette and leaned back on a cushion, pretending to sip on the sickly-sweet tea that made my lips cringe. Islam unlocked a large safe at the back of the shop and produced a handful of large, white paper wraps, and I sat up inquisitively as he squatted down next to me and began opening them. The first contained maybe a hundred small cabochons of lapis lazuli, their azure, dome-like surfaces speckled with tiny golden nuggets. I took a handful of the small treasures into my palm and began sorting them by size and shape. The round stones reminded me of the blue mosque in Esfahan, a place I’d often wanted to visit and had seen many photos of, while the oval-shaped ones looked like the tiny eggs of some exotic mythological bird.

  Looking up, I noticed that Islam had opened the other wraps and laid them out on the carpet next to the brass teapot. In one there were two or three dozen pieces of the blue rock that had been tumbled into lovely smooth shapes. I’d seen this process in the stone-cutting shops in the back streets of Jaipur, where hundreds of pieces of amethyst were rolled around a barrel for days at a time, their purple, crystalline formations grinding incessantly until all their surfaces were immaculately smooth.

  ‘More tea?’ asked my host, unaware that I’d barely allowed the sugary fluid to touch my palate.

  ‘Water, please,’ I replied.

  He returned with a glass in one hand and a metallic filing tray in the other. A piece of black velvet covered its contents, and he peeled it back to reveal an exquisite array of lapis trinkets. There were carvings of elephants and monkeys, tiny plates and bowls like doll’s-house accessories, and a selection of bead necklaces. I sifted through the pile of beads with my fingers; their cool pastel surfaces had a prickly, jade-like sensation, and I was reminded of running my hand through vats of olives I’d picked in Andalucia some years before.

  As we talked I found myself absentmindedly fumbling with a string of the blue droplets, which I wound round my fingers as Arabs caress their worry beads. The custom has no equivalence I can think of in Western societies but is a feature of most Islamic states, and as I ran the cobalt spheres through my palms a peaceful sensation emanated from the stones, a fitting antidote to the stifling heat of the midday sun.

  Back at the guesthouse I showed the stones to the landlord, but he had other business on his mind. The police had been round with a warrant to search the Spanish couple’s room after they’d been arrested at Karachi Airport with a kilo of smack.

  All the prisoners I talked to had encountered ominous happenings prior to their arrest. Tommy had gone
out of his way to get busted by insisting on smoking hash openly on the train to Shanghai. A policeman on the train had asked him to put it out, and Tommy had got paranoid and got off the train in the middle of nowhere. Then he decided to take out the dope and leave it in the waiting room of the train station, but was seen doing it by a cleaning lady, who reported him. My own journey had been littered with bad omens, from the fact that I’d got hepatitis to the string of obstacles that had almost prevented me from getting to customs in the first place. It seemed silly to think about it now, but like my colleagues I’d gone to great lengths to make my own misfortune. The only rational conclusion to come to was that we’d subconsciously engineered our downfalls for obscure reasons that would eventually become apparent. In the meantime, I had to make sense of my fate by accepting that it was of my own doing and therefore the right thing to have happened. That the monasticism of prison life was something that I needed, even if I didn’t want it, and I realised that somewhere along the line I might as well get happy and enjoy it. This was helped no end by the news that Mr Zhao, our number one prisoner and arch-enemy of the foreigners, was on his way out after serving his sentence. Better still, he was to be replaced by my favourite Chinese friend, Chen Yong Ho.

  Chen was a proper Shanghai guy, from the right side of the river if not the tracks. He’d been in jail before, knew how to play the system and had risen swiftly through the ranks. He and his mates had been selling monosodium glutamate, the taste enhancer much moaned about by Westerners who think Chinese medicine is useful for serious illnesses. They’d been selling it by the ton and had been making a good profit until one of their gang had grassed them up. MSG was a government business, so the bootlegging scam had brought the full weight of the law down upon Chen and his pals, who got the rooster treatment. Chen ended up with 13 years, while his partner, who had grassed him up, hoping to receive leniency, got a suspended death sentence. The news that he was to be the new number one lifted our spirits no end as the wing returned to normal. Suddenly Chinese were allowed to talk to us again, and old friends began to apologise for the frosty relations that had characterised the months under Zhao’s xenophobic leadership. Tommy’s spell on easy street came to an end, too, as Chen quickly decided he was an idiot who couldn’t be trusted and removed the powers the former number one had bestowed upon him. My relations with the Scotsman improved, too, as he began to accept that I couldn’t take sides with him against the other members of our small group. Westarted to enjoy having a laugh with the Chinese again, taking the piss out of them and making fun of the guards, who also began to relax under the new regime, and by the time my last Christmas came about I was happy and contented.

  The New Year brought out the best in the Chinese. A carnivalesque atmosphere came over the wing as huge celebratory posters, wall hangings and fairy lights lit up the grey walls of the prison. The top brass from the warden’s office made rare appearances to check on the welfare of the staff and inmates, while the guards cracked a few smiles once in a while. Reform Through Labour speeches were suspended and replaced with Western movies and Chinese pop music. For a month the people united in an orgy of benign nationalism, drawing on their Daoist past to rise above their misfortunes and encouraging foreigners to do the same. The rat-a-tat-tat of firecrackers ricocheted down the streets beyond the prison walls to remind us all of our close proximity to the world outside. Prisoners in punishment cells were allowed out to mix with everyone else, and trustee prisoners visited their counterparts from other blocks. And then there was the food. Quotas from the jail’s shop were doubled, as were the family-visit allowances. Cabbage and rice was suddenly transformed into stir-fried prawns and sweet-and-sour pork. The daily rice rations went from small, brownish-grey husks to fat white grains with no stones in them. Dried mango, tangerines, and sunflower and melon seeds arrived on trucks in industrial quantities, wheeled around the prison by inmates with sack barrows. Families brought in Christmas hampers, which prisoners shared and swapped. The corridor became a festive food hall, with salamis hanging from the bars while the grey Formica tabletops were littered with seasonal fruits and jars of pickles as the aroma of steaming vats of pork bellies and chicken wings wafted through the air.

  The opulence of the festivities was a trade-off between the prisoners and their captors. After 11 months of the drudgery of everyday life, the New Year acted as a valve to let off steam. The state – notoriously cruel and unyielding – was rewarding its subjects with a rare show of benevolence. Of course, the same could be said of Christmas in the West, but the sheer scale and duration of the festivities in China seemed closer to some kind of sumptuous inversion of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

  Kang, a petty thief doing five years for stealing bicycles, gave me a fresh mango, my first since Pakistan. Mangoes held a hallowed – if comical – role in the Cultural Revolution. In 1968, Mao had been given seven of them as a gift from the Pakistani government, though it’s believed that he didn’t like to eat them himself. This was at the peak of the ‘Bombard the Headquarters’ campaign designed to weed out the ‘bad elements’ who were gaining too much power and thus needed to ‘learn from the masses’. Mao gave the mangoes to different worker-peasant cooperatives, an act widely viewed as a criticism of the Red Guards. The pieces of fruit quickly took on sacred significance and were paraded around the country. One of the mangoes was put into a glass cabinet in its own carriage and carried for weeks on a slow train around the countryside to be viewed by the people. Hundreds of thousands lined railway tracks for a glimpse of the sacred fruit. Another was kept in formaldehyde, while one of the communes kept theirs in a massive tank of water and allowed the workers to drink its Mao-infused contents. Before long even the embalmed mango began to go rotten, so waxwork replicas were produced in glass cases with a picture of Mao on the front. You can still buy ‘original’ replicas of these on the Internet today for $800.

  As well as being Shanghai’s main prison, Ti Lan Qiao served as a kind of sorting house where prisoners were brought to be processed before going off to other jails and labour camps. Because the Eastern cities were so overcrowded, some prisoners with very long sentences could exchange their Shanghai citizenship for a short sentence with privileges in far-off regions of the country. Some of the labour camps were in such remote areas that there were no walls or bars needed to keep the prisoners in, and they might end up getting a paid job, too. However, they could never come back to Shanghai and would have to spend the rest of their lives away from the city of their birth. This was an established system outside prison, too, and poor families living in Shanghai could get a resettlement package to go and live in places like Tibet and Xinjiang. For most Shanghainese it was a fate worse than death, but for many there was no other choice. If the government wanted to knock down a residential area to build a fancy hotel or a golf course, the inhabitants had little choice other than to relinquish their residency permits and take the government’s offer of a new home and work unit thousands of miles away. There were incentives, too. Colour TVs might be thrown into the bargain, or a larger living space than the resident had had in Shanghai. This is why today there are more Han Chinese in Tibet than there are Tibetans.

  In the summer, about a hundred transit prisoners turned up on our wing. Most of them had come from a labour camp and seemed to miss it. They said the work was hard in the labour camp, but their free time was much more relaxed. They could buy cigarettes, food, even beer, and there was plenty of fresh air; crucially, there was also almost no ideological reform. The relentless brainwashing that was considered the key to salvation in Ti Lan Qiao had not been part of the programme in their previous jail, and they loathed it now. Because the cells were already taken, the new arrivals slept on the wooden boards in the middle of the corridor or on makeshift mats. I enjoyed having new Chinese to chat to, but some of our senior prisoners felt their discipline was being undermined and fights broke out. After a couple of weeks, the inmates were split into groups and packed off in a huge police co
nvoy of buses and trucks to a prison train headed for the camps in the west of the country.

  After they left it was decided that it was too hot to stay in the cells any more, and some of the Chinese got to sleep on the landing where the inmates passing through had slept. Just as the wing was freezing in winter, it became unbearably hot in the summer. It took a while to warm up, but by August the concrete-and-steel structures turned into an inferno. Most Chinese slept three to a five-feet-by-seven-feet cell, so when it started to get really hot it made sense to open up the wing at night. There were large electric fans, too, translated into Mandarin as ‘electric wind’. Because there were not enough fans to go round, I shared one with Grumpy next door. Grumpy had been convicted of having sex with his ten-year-old daughter and kept a low profile on the wing. The fan was placed between our two cells, blowing fresh air all night. Chinese would shift our fan so I got his cool air, but I moved it back when I discovered what they were doing. I felt uncomfortable assuming the man was an evil paedophile; he could well have been innocent of the allegation, as I suspected were a number of other people I’d met. In a country where prisoners meet their lawyers ten minutes before they go to court, the actual hearings are little more than a formality. Add to that the widespread use of torture, which is always good for getting innocent people to admit to crimes, regardless of whether they committed them, and the mind boggles as to the number of innocent people there must be in the Chinese legal system. But even if he had been guilty, there’s something distasteful about the treatment of child-abusers in jail. I have noticed that the most unpleasant prisoners are usually at the forefront of this type of bullying. It’s as if they hope that tormenting such people will somehow make them feel better about their own crimes and failings. This is a feature of all prisons around the world, I guess, and I wanted no part of it. It came as little surprise to learn later that at least one of the fan-shifters was a convicted rapist.