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

by D. L. Kung

  Chen shook his head. ‘I’m terribly sorry, but he moved out of our jurisdiction into another. These days China is breaking down into a collection of fiefdoms. There’s very little control.’

  ‘I’ll have to report this,’ Claire bluffed. ‘If someone can’t produce an explanation soon, this might blow up into an incident for no reason.’

  ‘Really?’ Chen fought back a smile. ‘How will this incident proceed?’

  ‘If an American goes missing in China, and our government can’t get any satisfactory explanation, there are a number of international organizations that could raise an outcry.’

  ‘Miss Raymond, you must know from your own past reportage that there is nothing in particular the State Department or the Red Cross or goodness knows who else could do inside our borders without relying on the manpower of our own bureaucracy, which is barely controlled these days by the Party. Amnesty International? Don’t they have to prove Vic is being held before they add his name to hundreds on a list presented yearly to our indifferent leaders in Beijing? Human Rights Watch? That dear hardworking man I see quoted in the South China Morning Post every month? A public relations blitz in New York? Or maybe a congressional delegation—like those three people holding a hand-written sign in Tiananmen Square arguing with a sixteen-year old traffic cop? Really, let’s enjoy our lunch and talk of other things. I’m sure your man will turn up . . . in time.’

  Claire stared at Chen. She couldn’t recall ever meeting a Chinese official like this. He was incredibly candid, but the direct approach was getting her nowhere on the subject of Vic. She needed to know more about Chen, especially if he was hiding information from her.

  He caught her glance. ‘Oh, you’re looking at my ears.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t meant to stare—’

  ‘No, no, quite all right. It’s the usual story with an unusual ending. After so long in China, you must have heard many such tales. I was the son of intellectuals. My father was a Christian convert who taught me very young to love English writers—Shakespeare, Keats. Then he fell in love with the Communist movement. Whether he ever saw the Communists for what they were as men, I never had the chance to ask him. He died when I was nine.’

  ‘The Hundred Flowers movement?’

  ‘Yes. I was raised by my mother and aunt. We led a very precarious life. It was my resolution to succeed. I studied hard, joined the Communist Youth League. I was the very model of a major modern socialist.’ He smiled at his little Gilbert and Sullivan reference and she finally saw his teeth—beautifully even, white and entirely false.

  ‘I am not bad looking and, to tell you frankly, the Party is one of the most elitist organizations in the world. I fit their ideal of the future Chinese revolutionary man. Friends of my father who had not been accused of political deviationism protected me. As a teenager, I had language skills and I excelled in political study. I had every hope of going on to Tsinghua or Beijing University. When the Cultural Revolution arrived, I made sure my knowledge of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought would see me through any challenge.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I was wrong.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Have you ever heard of the January Storm?’ asked Chen. ‘I think not. Many years have passed, and Westerners have terribly, terribly short memories. Chinese do not.’

  He started to light a cigarette, and then hesitated. ‘Excuse me, do you mind?’ But he didn’t wait for her answer.

  ‘In 1966, I was a precocious junior Red Guard in Shanghai. I know how you reporters see us now. A big, historic country like China throwing itself into revolution, committing national suicide,’ Chen smiled to himself wryly. ‘But I remember quoting Thomas Jefferson’s letter to a friend on the event of the so-called Shay’s Rebellion. Jefferson said, ‘God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion”.’

  He pulled hard on the cigarette and blew the smoke high above their table. “Sweep Away All Monsters!” he laughed hollowly, with a graceful brush of his arm through the smoky plume. “Don’t Fear Sacrifice!”’

  He had distracted her from the subject of Vic.

  ‘By the end of 1966, in Shanghai, there was one faction, the Worker’s Red Militia, facing a rival upstart faction, the Worker’s Rebel Headquarters. You might call them the royalists versus the rebels. The Red Militia, of which I was a member, was collapsing in panic and defections. Some of my best friends were crossing to the other side. We planned a counterattack. We demanded wage rises and started strikes all over the city. Our bosses opened up the city’s bank accounts and tried to calm the workers with millions of yuan in wage increases, bonuses, and allowances.’

  Chen paused to reflect. ‘Don’t you think it is extraordinary that one of the world’s largest cities, over eleven million people, nearly destroyed itself in total anarchy? And America never knew?’

  Claire had to say something. ‘We were so far away. But some people knew. You had Americans in Beijing, Americans who had been blacklisted for a decade by the US government. They had relatives in the States. I think the word seeped back.’

  The last course arrived, a steaming soup of corn and shredded crab, scallions, and lacy slices of mushroom.

  ‘So. The greatest city in Asia was paralyzed,’ said Chen. I was afraid to go into the streets. A high wall encircled our office courtyard. We barricaded the top with concrete in which we imbedded broken pieces of glass. One never knew which faction controlled what. We had to be on our guard day and night in case of attack. All over the city it was the same. Factories closed, shipping halted, we were working in the dark. I do not speak now figuratively. There were power shortages daily.’

  Chen stared past Claire at the screen placed around their table. The cigarette pinched tight between his forefinger and thumb had burnt down to the filter. As Claire scrutinized his face, she realized that he was no longer seeing the restaurant, or hearing the diners competing with the clatter of the kitchen behind them. He was hearing the shouted slogans of political mayhem and the shrill screams of chaos coming through broken windows.

  ‘One afternoon in January, we heard that the rebels had managed to seize total control and were running the whole city themselves. Students were selling railway tickets. Volunteers were unloading the cargo coming up the Huangpu. The municipal government was gone. We were defeated, and the workers ended up returning our money for fear of their lives. One morning, as I sat in our headquarters talking to the older members of our unit, a group of rebel workers marched in and dragged us off.

  ‘We were taken to a mass meeting. Thirty of us were forced onto a platform and verbally struggled. They screamed and shouted at us. After a few minutes of watching them scream like animals, I lowered my head and saw paper money piling up around my feet. They were ridiculing our strategy.’

  ‘But you survived.’ She knew that some struggle sessions had ended in fatal beatings.

  ‘Because I was hardly more than a child. I was spared—sent down to the countryside, not far from here in fact.

  ‘Most Chinese don’t like to talk about it.’ Claire didn’t want to interrupt his flow. Perhaps it was a way of softening him up to tell her more about Vic’s whereabouts.

  Chen had broken out of his dream and now talked rapidly and angrily. ‘Because they don’t want to admit that we were all guilty, every single Chinese was guilty of standing aside for as long as he could, or joining the rabble as fast as he could. Either way, it ended up the same for all of us—a death in our hearts. I grew cynical at the re-education farm, reciting every day “Whatever the Enemy Opposes, We Should Uphold.” One day I mumbled, ‘Whatever the Enemy Opposes, We Should Oppose.’

  Claire smiled.

  ‘You can be sure nobody laughed. The farmers were afraid of my defiance, didn’t know what to do with me. So the party secretary of the village put me in a small pig shed. I slept with the pigs. I ate with the pigs. I defecated with the pigs for almost three years.’

  ‘How horrible f
or you.’

  ‘The only kindness turned out to be a curse. The local party secretary, who was nearly illiterate, made use of me to write revolutionary posters and to read him the newspapers from Guangzhou from time to time. This made some of the rustic village boys envy me. One rainy night after a rally, the more loutish of them decided they would make me not only live with the pigs, but look like a pig. They attacked my ears with scissors, to make them more pointed, they said. The secretary stopped the attack but not in time. I bandaged my ears the next dawn with newspapers stolen from the communal dining room. I was just eighteen.’

  Now he was raising her suspicions. Chinese rarely talked of such experiences, preferring to block out the past.

  ‘Why are you telling me all this?’ asked Claire.

  ‘You are curious,’ said Chen. ‘Americans think such things are not possible. But I remember very well.’

  ‘Are you still a Communist?’ asked Claire.

  ‘I don’t know. Deng tells us good Communists must turn capitalist now. Young men are making more money that my generation ever dreamed possible. Perhaps they are right to turn their backs on serving the people. Perhaps the people aren’t worth it, after all. They can be held in check with money or force, not “redemption from original sin,” as my father first learned. If there can be no real freedom, which is only anarchy, then at least make the world consistent and orderly. I have known chaos.’

  He quickly disposed of the bill with his signature and rose to his feet. ‘I’m sorry we can’t continue,’ he said, as he steered her toward the door. Claire tried to sound matter of fact as well.

  ‘I still have to go over to the Brainchild factory, as that’s the one lead I have to Vic. I’ll head up to Guangzhou this evening.’

  ‘You won’t find it necessary to interview Brainchild managers here, Miss Raymond,’ said Chen, lighting another cigarette on the steps leading down to the car. ‘They won’t be able to tell you anything more than Victor D’Amato arrived for his appointment over a week ago, toured the assembly line, interviewed some of the so-called typical workers about so-called typical working conditions. Afterward, he drank tea in the conference room with the Chinese joint-venture partners as a guest of the Ministry of Light Industry and the Guangdong Electronics Group, where he was no doubt bored rigid with production figures. He left Punyu that afternoon.’

  ‘How do you know that?’ Claire asked, fingering Chen’s card in her pocket.

  ‘It is very simple, Ms Raymond. Didn’t I say? I was present at the Brainchild meeting. I can safely assure you that I was the very last person to see Mr D’Amato before he drove off.’

  ***

  The taxi ride to Guangzhou was bumpy and filled with the stench of development on all sides. Oil spills and rain had slicked up the road and the day was wearing on. All the drivers hanging around Punyu had been willing to drive to the capital, but wanted the return journey paid in advance. She negotiated in a frustrated and ungenerous mood—and finally bullied one tongue-tied youth into a one-way fare. The driver was only able to set off after five when they took a road to Foshan, twenty kilometers short of Guangzhou, where he promptly stopped for dinner.

  Unbelievably, eighteenth century Foshan had been the largest city in the entire world, boasting over one million people. Now it was a third-rate tourist dump. Claire was in a hurry to rest and think.

  She wondered if Chen’s horrific account of his mutilation had more to do with Vic’s disappearance than he admitted. Was there something about his cynical vision that connected up with Vic? Why had he sounded as if his story of isolation and survival contained an implicit warning for her?

  ‘Because Americans think such things are not possible,’ he’d said. In her ears, it rang like a pointed condemnation of Vic’s innocence abroad.

  White sedans and limousines decked with red crepe paper and wilting flowers jammed the circular driveway of the White Swan Hotel A wedding reception was winding up. Dozens of couples—the men in new suits and the girls in frothy dresses of cheap laces and garish satins—poured out of the entrance as Claire’s car drove up. Their carefree laughter combined with the horn signals of boats navigating the Pearl River through the dusk.

  The White Swan was one of the earlier joint-venture hotels in Guangzhou, named after a legendary Chinese hero who had been carried away by a white swan. It stood on the edge of Shamian Island, the old colonial quarter, which still boasted a French-built cathedral. Claire found Shamian sad and decayed and, in the hot season, almost fetid. But there were always free rooms in its vastness and soon she was showering in a marble bathroom and turning down the air conditioning in her own temporary resting place.

  Somewhere in the lobby below, next to the ersatz Chinese pavilion nestled in the artificial lily pond by the ten-foot-high papier-mâché Buddhist mountain, a white piano tinkled. Claire ignored the hotel’s sushi bar, the grillroom, the restaurants Cantonese, Sichuanese, Beijing, and Hunanese, the bowling alley, bistro, tea lounge and three different cocktail bars.

  She ordered a hot bowl of porridgy jook in the coffee shop overlooking the lobby more to settle her thoughts than add fuel to that huge Shanghainese lunch with Chen.

  As she waited for her snack, she heard the piano churning out a humorous medley to the weather in Liberace-like renditions of ‘Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head,’ ‘Singing in the Rain,’ and ‘Stormy Weather.’

  After dinner, she went up to her room. The curtains of her bed were drawn and her bedspread turned down. A neighbor’s TV blasted CNN behind her headboard.

  She put on the hotel bathrobe and sunk down into the sheets. As she went to sleep, Chen’s face with its mutilated ears appeared before her, reciting, ‘I slept with the pigs.’

  Chapter Eight

  —Wednesday morning—

  Claire woke up to a fierce headache and the persistent clinking of breakfast trolleys rolling past her door. She ordered a juice and French toast and settled down to review her notes from all that Dr Liu had told her back in Hong Kong, followed by Fresnay’s articles on organ transplants. She memorized the name and phone number of the Guangzhou contact who’d directed Dr Liu to Father Fresnay and then flushed it down the toilet. Years ago, Jim had taught her to memorize and destroy anything that might incriminate a source inside the borders of China. He’d also taught her that the Chinese Foreign Ministry always told hotels to book journalists and spies into special hotel rooms wired ground floor to rooftop for monitoring.

  So the best thing to do on arrival was break the flushing mechanism on the toilet, complain, and move next door. Claire had skipped that ritual because she wasn’t staying long enough to incriminate anyone in conversation. Jim had also taught her how to read the provincial prefixes on military vehicle license plates, insignia on uniforms, and so much else. She was a better reporter for it, and she remained grateful.

  Cecilia had meanwhile scoured the office files on medicine in China. On Friday she’d found a South China Morning Post feature on a joint Guangdong-Hong Kong medical seminar at Hong Kong University. Dr Law Wai-Kong from Sun Yat-sen University of Medical Sciences had lectured on ‘Chinese advances in cadaveric transplant procedures.’ Cecilia had lined up an interview with Dr Law for Claire for ten this morning.

  Claire smiled with satisfaction. If requested, Cecilia Chao could have found an angel’s name in the Devil’s personnel files, smiling as she copied down the celestial phone number, ‘It’s my pleasure.’

  The assistant had highlighted anything corroborating Dr Liu’s nightmare experience. A Hong Kong doctor, Lam Siu-keung, had written in the British medical journal Lancet that almost all kidneys transplanted in China came without consent from prisoners executed for rape, burglary or political ‘crimes’ against the state. Fresnay’s collection of articles from the Journal of Chinese Organ Transplantation were in Chinese and would take Claire more time, but she translated as many of Cecilia’s selections as she could, taking notes in the cheap red-covered note book she always carried.


  Organs e.g. livers, should be removed within eight to ten minutes of heart arrest to be usable . . . Chinese donors and recipients were well matched in advance. How? Prisoners were put on a high-protein diet for six months before their execution to make sure their parts are tip-top . . . Most Chinese kidney donors were young, male and completely healthy, (like most prisoners?) China still dependent on Swiss company Sandoz for costly drugs to suppress rejection of new organ. China’s rate of transplant success was very high by international standards . . .

  ‘Bravo for the proletariat paradise backed by Swiss know-how,’ Claire murmured. She dressed and replaced the transplant folder next to the Brainchild folder in her pack, and pushing sudden tender thoughts about Xavier out of her mind, headed down to the lobby.

  Sun Yat-sen University of Medical Sciences was on Zhong Shan (Sun-Yat-sen) Two Road, distinct from Sun Yat-sen University south of the river, Sun Yat-sen Memorial north of the Children’s Park, and the Sun Yat-sen Library just at the junction where Sun Yat-sen Four Road gave way to Sun Yat-sen Five Road. For overthrowing the warlord scavengers of the Manchu Empire in 1911 with a rebellion seated in Guangzhou, Sun Yat-sen’s reward seemed to be a posthumous, if nominal, claim to half the city’s best real estate.

  The White Swan Hotel looked down from Shamian Island on the northern bank of the Pearl River across the muddy waters to the industrial southern bank. Claire’s taxi turned away from the river and drove off the island northwards into the heart of the crowded city, taking the Yanjiang Road. Claire remembered this road fondly as they passed what had been in 1972 the ‘People’s Hotel,’ where she had spent her first night in China. She recalled exiting on to Yanjiang Road her first morning in China and facing hundreds of silent, staring eyes craning to see their first redhead in the flesh.