The Wardens of Punyu (The Handover Mysteries, Volume I)

by D. L. Kung

  She put on a recording of Janacek’s Moravian dances, and pulled a large atlas down from her bookshelves. She still hadn’t finished reading her new biography of Mary McCarthy and the Truman tome waited, as patient as a doorstopper next to her rubber tree. Settling into the weather beaten rattan loveseat in the corner, she looked up Punyu.

  Oddly, there seemed to be no such place.

  After a second, she realized her mistake and, ranging up and down the column of ‘p’s,’ found Panyu. In Hong Kong, everyone was using the Cantonese dialect pronunciation. Official Chinese maps were published in the national dialect of Mandarin, not Cantonese.

  Panyu lay up one of the smaller tributaries of the Pearl River, southwest of the capital of the Guangdong province, Guangzhou, or Canton. In traveling time, it would be hard to say which was faster: to go all the way up to Guangzhou and then drive south, or to ferry directly to a small port on the river, Lin Hua Shan, and drive inland. Distances on Chinese maps could be deceptive. Lately, the Guangdong authorities had completed some fast and reliable expressways, but traditional Chinese roads could mean crawling at no more than thirty miles an hour.

  Claire sipped some green tea from her celadon mug and pondered the Lin Hua Shan route. She hadn’t used it before, but she reckoned the backdoor approach would be the more discreet choice for a journalist crossing into China without a reporting visa. Security at the major transportation hubs in China was getting more professional. A tiny little port like Lin Hua Shan was unlikely to be very alert.

  Any journalist known for covering China, especially one with critical faculties intact, was taking a chance entering China without a journalist’s visa issued by the Foreign Ministry. She held a tourist visa in case of breaking stories. Another Tiananmen or earthquake or the long-anticipated death of paramount leader Deng Xiaoping were all good reasons why foreign journalists couldn’t afford to sit around in Hong Kong waiting for inept Chinese bureaucrats to issue journalists’ permits.

  The ‘ept,’ she joked to herself, were instructed to make sure no decent reporter got into the mainland at all.

  She hardly liked risking her professional neck for Vic. She had a pretty hands-off but cordial relationship with the New China News Agency. They monitored the comings and goings of China reporters like herself. So far she hadn’t pissed them off, and they had complied with her requests on the rare formal occasions she needed them.

  Things had tightened up as the handover of Hong Kong by the British to the mainland Communists loomed. One false move by an American in this climate, and the Chinese would be forced by internal political rivalries to be tough, even vindictive—particularly with Washington pressing them on human rights and copyright protection. It wasn’t worth her career to get caught, but she couldn’t inform them she was racing the Hong Kong police in a hunt for a lost journalist. They would tell her to stay in Hong Kong while the official machine handled her inquiry through the customary channels.

  Damn Vic! He must have known he was putting her into a thankless position by disappearing without her knowledge like this. Why so secret? Why?

  She ran through the story possibilities: smuggling, fraud, tax evasion, copyright infringement, or arms deals. He could be up to anything.

  The one possibility she still ruled out was murder.

  Chapter Six

  —Tuesday morning—

  There were some blessed mornings in Hong Kong when the humidity fell below eighty percent, the fog cleared off the Peak, and the harbor water shone deep blue under an azure sky.

  This wasn’t one of those mornings.

  The rain fought hard with strong winds sending the thicket of twenty-foot bamboo trees thrashing again and again against the side of her apartment building. Claire pulled on pressed khakis, a white cotton long-sleeved shirt and a lightweight sweater, a rainproof windbreaker, comfortable walking loafers and a leather backpack. She tied her hair into a neat French braid down the back. The trick would be to look professional enough to gain access, if needed, to an official’s office, but not to call too much attention to herself going through customs and immigration.

  Her stomach in knots, she skipped breakfast to grab taxi squeezed into a slot in the traffic bogged down in the pounding gales of water—heavy, relentless and warm. By eight they’d crossed the Harbour Tunnel and snaked bumper-to-bumper in a line of Toyota taxis, their brake lights a stream of red lights stretching toward the China ferry terminal. A vast, vulgar gold-plated building, the terminal was crammed with thousands of commuting young men. Armed with a simple ID card and a pad of re-entry visas issued as casually as monthly rail passes, their ride into Communist China was no more eventful than a commute on the Staten Island Ferry. Most were floor managers for Hong Kong–owned factories in Guangdong crammed with a vast surplus of semi-skilled and unskilled labor. Whatever Beijing, London, or Washington said about the future of Hong Kong, it was obvious to the men heading for another day on the production floor that Hong Kong and southern China were already tightly glued together by the sweat of these Cantonese cousins.

  Claire always stuck out in a Chinese crowd. She spotted a pair of American women in the queue to board the jetfoil. A few other guay pos would make her presence less conspicuous. She checked them out as they clambered down into the small craft rocking wildly in the churning water. They were too matter-of-fact about the whole boarding process and too lacking in curiosity to be tourists. Besides, Claire could not imagine any tourist brochure advertising Lin Hua Shan. Finally and most definitively, they couldn’t be American tourists because they weren’t wearing fanny packs hooked on to their belts. Maybe Linhuashan was the kind of undiscovered entry point to China that a student might recommend to another backpacker on a budget. But these ladies weren’t backpackers.

  She fell in behind them, keen to keep her head down and not trigger any official suspicions. The two women certainly didn’t look thrilled with each other’s company. Nor did they show any interest in Claire. Their carefully manicured nails, heavy jewelry and chic, if casual dress contrasted unfavorably with their raw, stress-laden faces.

  Ah, yes. They were fashion buyers from the States over to inspect their vendors’ quality control—the least glamorous end of the garment trade. They spent days checking waist-high piles of flimsy silks drowned in the roar of hundreds of industrial sewing machines. They argued and cajoled floor managers from Mongkok, commuters themselves from Hong Kong, in frantic garbles of Cantonese, Mandarin, and English. Claire didn’t envy them a life of correcting samples stitched by teenage farm girls.

  The buyers brought MacGinnes back to mind.

  She had over an hour and forty minutes on the jetfoil to kill. The clips in the files she’d picked up from Vic’s desk didn’t say where Brainchild’s Guangdong factories were, but in a small town, it wasn’t going to be hard to find out. She’d considered calling MacGinnes before she left. His own factory might have given her a warm, orchestrated welcome. But her reporter’s instinct told her that a private reconnoiter was wiser. If she didn’t learn everything on this trip, she could always go again as his official guest.

  What was certain was that Vic hadn’t told MacGinnes he was heading back to Guangdong. Otherwise, MacGinnes would have known last Friday.

  She read the Guangdong electronics file by the dim cabin lights; she was surprised to see that the first thing in it was a personal reminder from Vic’s mother back in New Jersey not to let his spirits fall too low.

  ‘You’re a star with us,’ wrote Mrs D’Amato.

  ‘Twinkle, twinkle,’ muttered Claire.

  The next entry in the file, which should have been about Guangdong, was Vic’s own bank statement. He’d taken to using any file at hand as a substitute briefcase. The statement showed the usual deposits for salary and housing allowance, but Claire was surprised to see how low his account had dropped. A single deposit, a neat $2,000, had been added to the account only a week before the holiday began. Then she remembered Vic’s birthday a month before. Maybe V
ic’s mom wanted to give him more than moral support to weather his stint under Claire’s ‘tyranny.’

  The first actual news clipping about the electronics sector was a recent one, but not recent enough to give any idea of Vic’s preoccupation with Guangdong. Vic had probably carried the useful stories with him. So what was the big deal about visiting Guangdong on his own time? Why hadn’t he mentioned it?

  The MacGinnes bio file looked more complete, but Claire noticed that all the dates were scrambled. Vic had really read up on this MacGinnes guy. She sifted through the notes Vic had thrust, half crumpled, into the file. They were legible, if sketchy, records of MacGinnes’s answers to obvious questions.

  ‘assembly shift to guangdong—pretty much transferred the whole shebang by ‘87. . . labor pool better terms—wage levels, even with rise of 100% in five years, better/guang or that matter down in malaysia or indo. I wld leave to jap. . . skills/quality control over manuf? v to house them, feed them. . . ‘compare with workers remunerations in hong kong? we pay hong kong dollars for weekends and overtime, so most want to work a fourteen hour day, seven days a week. If they don’t want to work overtime, there are always more to take their place . . . an employers’ market.’

  Vic had vigorously underlined those last two words, ‘employers’ market.’ and added two exclamation points. Why?

  MacGinnes had continued, ‘ . . . about $200 a month. And they’re more reliable on quality than five years ago. We’ve invested there and intend to stay.’ After this, Vic had noted in a different pen, ‘LIE.’

  The notes continued.

  Worker pop? 400 Punyu. 1000’s+ linked to his. . . via suppliers in area . . . factors, the reliable and consistent . . . quality in our computers and the wage . . . keep costs of delivery and supply down.

  There was more along these lines, but what interested Claire were Vic’s marginal notes. The question marks, exclamation points, and little comments showed that Vic didn’t take MacGinnes’ answers at face value. Why not? What did he know about MacGinnes? Maybe he’d made that second follow-up appointment in order to grill the American later with the results of his trip.

  Claire spent another forty minutes searching the file for more clues, but she couldn’t find anything in the clippings that contradicted MacGinnes’ statements or backed up Vic’s notes. She filled out her arrival card for Chinese immigration in a hurry and shoved the pen and the bundle of paper back into the bottom of her backpack. Considering the risks of coming into China without the right visa, it hadn’t been very bright to bring the clips along. It was essential she not be searched, questioned or stopped before finding Vic

  The jetfoil pulled up at a rickety wooden dock, ‘Lin Hua Shan’ written in Chinese and Roman letters in red paint peeling off the wooden sign. Claire was in the front of the boat and stayed seated while dozens of young Cantonese picked up overnight cases, umbrellas and briefcases and rested them on their seats, impatient to disembark.

  By the time she stood up, the craft looked like an abandoned fun park littered with empty noodle cartons, discarded plastic bags of curry-flavored potato chips and prawn crackers, and a half-dozen racing tip sheets featuring pornographic cartoons.

  Another working morning in the Pearl River Delta had begun.

  Now she needed a car and driver. As she entered the ferry terminal, she saw four unimposing wooden podiums manned by young mainland immigration officers unceremoniously positioned in the middle of the concrete room. Beyond was a decrepit baggage carousel that had broken down; the passengers’ baggage was being dumped in an unsorted pile against a wall.

  ‘My kind of checkpoint,’ she chuckled to herself.

  She got into the line for foreigners, positioning herself right behind the two buyers. She was the next to be taken when a taller than average Hong Kong Chinese bumped into her from behind. When she shrugged him off, he blamed his clumsy bag of duty-free, suggesting by sign language that she carry it through customs for him as an apologetic joke. A young woman officer came over and shooed him away, smiling apologetically at Claire. Claire shivered at this brush with unwanted attention. She shouldn’t get careless. If she got into trouble, everything she did from here on in could be treated as a little oversight, if she was lucky, or a disastrous diplomatic flap, depending on the state of Sino-American relations next week. Had she studied Chinese for over ten years to get blacklisted because some overeager reporter played at Hardy Boys without telling her?

  She didn’t stop to change money at the two small windows of the Bank of China. She kept a small supply of the common Chinese ‘peoples’ money,’ or renminbi, on hand at home and at the bureau.

  More important was her $5,000 in Hong Kong dollars, virtually the only currency a savvy Chinese in a border port like this would accept. More than twenty percent of Hong Kong’s official currency issue had long ago migrated across the Hong Kong–Guangdong border, never to return. Nothing but Hong Kong money would be taken for anything but the most perfunctory, official services.

  Claire flowed along with the throng exiting the terminal. The skies were overcast but for the moment, the rain clouds held back. Outside was a cement veranda, separated from an enormous parking lot by a few temporary railings. A few dozen Chinese, some drivers, some girlfriends, and a couple dozen gawkers hung around.

  A Chinese People’s Armed Police officer sat at a small table with a little cardboard sign, reading ‘Transpor.’ He’d give her an official driver, who would report anything remotely unusual to the PAP as a matter of routine. Anybody who wasn’t being met was automatically suspicious. She was stranded—the two fashion buyers had quickly piled into a chauffeured sedan and ridden off.

  She needed to find an alternative, and fast, before the boatload thinned out and she was left sticking out. Claire was feeling desperate. Looking beyond the ‘Transpor’ desk, she spotted a small yellow van waiting. On the side was painted ‘Fenwick, China Ltd.,’ She’d heard of Fenwick, one of the garment vendors to popular cheap clothing lines in New York. Items for the Gap, the Limited, and Victoria’s Secret—many of these companies merged the beginning of their production lines in the factories of Guangdong, a light-year or two from their carefully honed individual brands.

  Claire took a deep breath and walked boldly to the van, pretending she was expected. She could feel the People’s Armed Policeman’s eyes boring into her back. She greeted the van in an offhand slur of Mandarin, ‘I’m here to see the factory. Mr Li sent me.’

  If there was one thing Claire could count on in any company the size of Fenwick, it was that their Hong Kong office had a Mr Li in it. Every office in the colony and for that matter, every office in the entire Middle Kingdom, had a Mr Li.

  At that moment, it didn’t matter to her how many. She only needed one.

  ‘Ho-a, OK.’ the driver nodded, flicking cigarette ash onto the tarmac. He acted friendly, trusting, and totally indifferent. Happily for her, the corporate bowels of Fenwick included an unwitting Mr Li.

  The driver reached around behind his seat and slid the side door of the van open for her to step over piles of freshly sewn baseball jackets in plastic bags lying on the van’s floor. They sat in silence for a minute or so, then he started the van, wheeled it right up to the security desk Claire had just passed, and murmured to the guard, pointing back at the van. Had she misread him? Was he turning her in? He started to dial at a pay phone just inside the terminal. Was he checking with the factory to see if Claire was expected?

  She held her breath, ready with some fast talk in case she was about to be exposed. But he was simply asking after another passenger. Locating the straggler, he took from him a manila envelope. Without so much as glancing at Claire, he hopped back into the driver’s seat. Without a word, he restarted the engine and drove out of the parking lot, heading down a newly paved two-lane highway. After about ten minutes, he wheeled into a large factory’s parking lot and before Claire had time to ask herself what he was doing, had handed over the package to a guard at the fac
tory gate.

  It was apparently one of those thousands of favors on which China depends every day, and to her relief, they continued on in the direction of Punyu.

  For the first time since she’d locked her front door behind her that morning, Claire relaxed. Loosening her hair a little, she let the moist semi-tropical breeze calm her nerves. She’d entered China without raising an eyebrow.

  She was a journalist on the loose without the supervision of the New China News Agency, an official dang-wei host unit, an unctuous handler, or anyone in China’s vast bureaucracy expected to fill in a page with tedious details on her doings. It’d been twenty years since her first visit to China, with its constant surveillance, Maoist rhetoric, Cultural Revolution zeal and misery, and myriad ways of monitoring a billion lives. Nevertheless, Claire knew that many of those measures remained in place, despite modern appearances, to be invoked as soon as someone in authority willed it so.

  Along the way, the signs of Guangdong’s boom times had cropped up everywhere. Two-story factories lined both sides of the road. Some were encircled with delivery vans and stacks of shipping containers, others were still in various stages of construction. You could almost smell the new capitalist money and excitement throbbing underneath the unfinished landscape of scaffolding, cranes, open gutters and temporary boardwalks.

  Gleaming white villas stood back from the highway, surrounded by newly plowed fields. The farmers were getting richer, faster here than anywhere else in China. They no longer vacationed in Hong Kong, oh, no. Their package tours were taking them to Bali and Bangkok, San Francisco and Vancouver. Any day soon, they’d be taking in Paris and Rome. Junior was studying agricultural science at U.C. Irvine. His little sister was an Avon lady hawking whitening creams door to door. Mom and Dad had toured Tokyo.