Asia Literary Review No. 25, Winter 2012

No. 25, Autumn 2012

No. 25, Autumn 2012 Publisher Ilyas Khan Managing Editor Duncan Jepson Editor in Chief Martin Alexander Literary Editor Kelly Falconer Features Editor Kathleen Hwang Consulting Editor Peter Koenig Office Manager Canny Au Design and Production Steffan Leyshon-Jones Proofs Shirley Lee Main Cover Image Crime and Corruption © Harry Harrison Back Cover Image Paco Larrañaga in handcuffs. From the documentary Give Up Tomorrow, courtesy of Michael Collins and Marty Syjuco.

The Asia Literary Review is published by Print Work Limited 2401, Winsome House, 73 Wyndham Street, Central, Hong Kong asialiteraryreview.com Subscriptions: subs@asialiteraryreview.com Submissions: subm@asialiteraryreview.com Editor: editor@asialiteraryreview.com Editorial: (852) 2167 8947 Advertising: (852) 2167 8910/8980 Translation of The Wind’s Voice printed with kind permission of Mai Jia and Brian Holton.

Extract from Delhi Durbar printed with kind permission from Hachette, India.

Translation of Private Eyes printed courtesy of the Grayhawk Literary Agency.

Extract from Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves Reloaded printed with kind permission from Campfire Books.

Adaptation of Smaller and Smaller Circles printed with kind permission of Jacaranda Literary Agency and the University of the Philippines Press.

Adaptation of To the People, Food Is Heaven © 2012 by Audra Ang, with kind permission of Lyons Press, www.lyonspress.com.

Images in ‘Give Up Tomorrow’ printed courtesy of Michael Collins and Marty Syjuco.

Images in ‘The Colour of Money’ printed courtesy of Zhang Bingjian.

Typeset in Adobe Garamond Pro Printed by Chan Sheung Kee Book Co., Ltd. ISBN: 978-988-16596-2-0 Individual contents ©2012 the contributors/Print Work Limited This compilation ©2012 Print Work Limited

Contents From the Editor

7

Fiction A Day in the Life of Curly Jones, Lawyer

9

John Burdett

Delhi Durbar

31

Krishan Partap Singh

Eyes of Karma

61

Tew Bunnag

Smaller and Smaller Circles

75

F. H. Batacan

Private Eyes

109

Chi Wei-Jan translated by Anna Holmwood

Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves Reloaded

119

Poulomi Mukherjee illustrated by Amit Tayal

I’m Praising Him Right Now

135

Prosper Anyalechi translated by Dreux Richard

The Wind’s Voice

161

Mai Jia translated by Brian Holton

Poetry Rules for Citizens

30

Life Sentence

40

Jeet Thayil

3

When They Fought for Free-doom!

50

Gopilal Acharya

Silent Cooking and Noisy Munching

58

Chattai

59

What She Said to Her Girlfriend

60

Sivakami Velliangiri

Public Cremation

73

John Barger

Love Poem

101

Reid Mitchell

Yodok 15

126

Dreams of Men

128

JĂŠanpaul Ferro

Y

134

A Concise History of China in English

151

Changming Yuan

Spoken Word

176

Ma Yan translated by Catherine Platt

Non-Fiction China: A Way Out of Corruption

25

He Jiahong translated by James McMath

Interview: Jeet Thayil

41

Martin Alexander

How a Maoist Is Made

45

Shashi Warrier

Pakistan: A Culture of Corruption?

Farrukh Saleem 4

53

India: Decades in Convolution

87

Dilip D’Souza

Give Up Tomorrow

94

Luis H. Francia

The Miserable Mrs Marcos

103

Carla Camille L. Mendoza

North Korea: Absolute Power and Absolute Corruption

129

Jang Jin-sung translated by Shirley Lee

Interview: Wang Xiaofang

147

Shu-Ching Jean Chen

Mortal Taste

153

Audra Ang

Images The Colour of Money

22

Zhang Bingjian

Reviews Joseph Anton by Salman Rushdie

179

Alisha Haridasani

Hanging Devils by He Jiahong

183

Kelly Falconer

Bonded Labor by Siddharth Kara

186

Kathleen Hwang

In Memoriam Remembering a Friend of the Review – Gore Vidal

189

Ilyas Khan

Contributors

191 5

From the Editor It is not power that corrupts but fear. Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it and fear of the scourge of power corrupts those who are subject to it.

Aung San Suu Kyi, Freedom from Fear

C

orruption, though our cover may suggest otherwise, is no laughing matter – at least not for its victims. Harry Harrison’s cartoon exposes the grinning faces of those in power who benefit from corruption, but between these covers we offer a glimpse of the incalculable damage it causes across our region. Zhang Bingjian’s expanding collection of portraits (‘The Colour of Money’) showcases the number officials convicted in China, and we are introduced elsewhere to countless victims and the circumstances that force them into complicity.

Those who benefit seem to enjoy increasing impunity and are even admired as role models. Is corruption now the exception? Or the rule?

Several of our writers differentiate between individual and systemic corruption. Every society has its criminal elements, but when institutional corruption dominates, many of those who would otherwise be inclined to abide by the law may cease to respect it. In the worst cases, we are reminded of what Sir Hersch Lauterpacht described in his opening speech to the Nuremburg Tribunal in 1945 as: ‘dictators and gangsters masquerading as a state’.

We explore these issues in their different manifestations across Asia, but it’s not all grim reading. Some of our poets convey a yearning for the ideal, and a tender sense of that imperceptible transition from the simplicity of 7

From the Editor

innocence to the complexity of experience. The ideal of unimpeachable integrity is essential to the way we define our humanity and measure the depths of our corruption.

But vice is often more interesting than virtue: we open this issue with John Burdett’s long-lunching lawyer, meet a priest whose forensic skills uncover a macabre – and thankfully fictional – series of murders, follow an inexperienced but keen Taiwanese detective, and see Tokyo’s seedy nightlife through the eyes of immigrant Nigerian touts surviving on their wits.

The thin end of criminality’s wedge affects us all. As our contributor Dilip D’Souza suggests, few of us have never broken a law. Sometimes, otherwise minor transgressions can turn into a nightmare, as it did for Paco Larrañaga, the subject of Michael Collins’s award-winning documentary Give Up Tomorrow.

The makers of the film recorded hundreds of hours of footage; however, the shape of the documentary didn’t emerge until late in the process. We’ve had a similar experience. We invited writers to tell us about crime and corruption and asked them not to pull any punches. Several shied away, often to avoid compromising their positions; others delivered complex and compelling commentary. At least one has written under an assumed name.

On page 50 we welcome our first Bhutanese writer, Gopilal Acharya, who was longlisted for the 2009 Man Asian Prize for Literature. We also include an interview with Jeet Thayil, whose poetry we feature and whose debut novel, Narcopolis, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize this year.

As we go to press, his inclusion on the longlist for the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature has been announced.

On a final and very different note, this issue concludes with a tribute to the late Gore Vidal, an old friend of our publisher, Ilyas Khan. Vidal encouraged him to bring Asian voices to the attention of Western audiences, and was one of the first subscribers to the Asia Literary Review.

Martin Alexander

8

A Day in the Life of Curly Jones, Lawyer John Burdett I

E

very morning after the paracetamol, the coffee and the pain au chocolat at the Hong Kong Club, Curly Jones, partner in the law firm of Magnus, Gray and Ping, sat back, gazed at the ceiling and pondered the precarious nature of life in general and his in particular. Hercules Ma’s group in conveyancing were planning his downfall and had formed an alliance with Samson Wong’s gang in litigation. Both Ma and Wong had to watch their backs, however, because neither was going to produce as much profit this month as Curly confidently expected to make. Curly’s best pal Jerry Johnson had decided to take his real estate company public using, naturally, Magnus, Gray and Ping to do all the fixing for that golden commercial event, the Initial Public Offering. Big bucks for the firm, thanks to Curly. Admittedly, it was a one-off and Curly’s record had been pretty dismal for most of the year, but an IPO was a big one-off, a matter that not only generated tons of billable hours, but also brought glamour and prestige to the firm. For the moment, at least, Curly was bullet proof.

Regrettably, this was not always the case. Most of the time Curly, professionally speaking, was on life support. He argued, whenever his future was discussed, as it often was, that, as the last gweilo partner in Magnus, Gray and Ping, he was more necessary than ever. In Hong Kong, he urged, there remained enough of the old school of wealthy red-faced long-lunchers who expected to deal with – well, a wealthy red-faced long-luncher, when they suffered the expensive need for legal assistance. As the gweilo rainmaker it was his indispensable job to supply the gweilo client with vintage anaesthetic prior to delivery of the firm’s bills, if not at the Club itself then at one of the 9

A Day in the Life of Curly Jones, Lawyer

hysterically overpriced French, Italian or Japanese restaurants downtown, where only the hysterically overpaid could afford to eat.

It was, naturally, an argument with a limited shelf life. As the longlunchers retired or died off from liver-related ailments, he felt as if he were a losing player in a game of Go. Little by little he found his territory surrounded by hostile forces in control of the likes of Hercules Ma and Samson Wong. Not that Curly took his war personally. He knew that Ma and Wong lacked sufficient emotional development to dislike him. They only wanted his shares. All of them.

Curly was finishing his breakfast with a fourth coffee and a third paracetamol when his mobile phone bleeped. He checked the window to see if it was a Commercially Important Caller: it was. Indeed, it was the CIC of the month, none other than Jerry Johnson, the long-term pal who was, albeit unknowingly, saving his professional life this year. JJ wanted lunch that very day. Curly already had a lunch appointment – Curly always had a lunch appointment – but protocol determined that you did not refuse to lunch or be lunched by a man you were about to bill for the best part of a million HKD, so Curly used his exquisitely honed, top-of-therange and sparingly used: ‘Absolutely delighted Jerry, absa-bloody-lutely DELIGHTED, nothing would give me greater pleasure. Where shall we go?’ Curly looked around at the deeply familiar surroundings of the Club.

‘The Club?’

Normally Jerry Johnson loved to be taken to the Club, which had inexplicably (or, depending on which side of JJ you were working from, all too inevitably) rejected his application to join on more than one occasion.

Today, however, he sounded tense and subdued. ‘No, I think not, my friend.’

‘Oh?’ Curly said.

‘I think somewhere discreet, on the other side of the harbour.’

Curly knew doom when it spoke through his mobile phone. JJ was pulling out of his decision to take his firm public. In a flash he saw forced retirement followed by chronic alcoholism in tandem with a squalid lifestyle in a well-known corner of Bangkok; he was aware that for decades now work had been his only protection against those twin vices that, like boiling Himalayan rapids, permanently threatened the fragile kayak of his existence. Nevertheless, a pro to the last, his voice was caressing rather than paranoid when he said: ‘Nothing wrong I hope, Jerry?’

10

John Burdett

‘Not with the IPO, if that’s what you mean,’ JJ replied, with just a hint of bitterness.

Having mastered the free-fall of absolute despair, Curly now had to control a spasm of soaring euphoria that was urging upon him a nearirresistible fit of giggles.

‘Well, then, my dear friend, you name the time and place and Curly Jones will find a way to sort it all for you,’ Curly said in his best bedside manner, then hiccupped.

Now Curly was taken aback by what sounded very like a sob from JJ ‘I hope so, Curly, by God I hope so,’ he said.

II Four hours later Curly sat cradling a Bloody Mary in a cigar-coloured leather armchair at the hyper-exclusive Dynasty-Zen restaurant in Kowloon and wondered what JJ’s problem could possibly be. Basically, if it wasn’t business it was a woman. When it came to romance both Curly and Jerry Johnson managed an unusually high turnover, but the similarity was superficial. Curly went through lots of girlfriends because he was jelly; Johnson because he was a cad. The girls themselves understood this and invariably forgave Curly, often taking advantage of what he called his speech impediment – he was unable to say no – to steal him back from the rival at the end of what was supposed to have been a farewell supper. JJ’s exes, on the other hand, typically went through a phase of planning his demise both professional and corporeal, until he found a way to pay them off through an intermediary.

Curly had arrived early because Johnson, no doubt in order to distinguish himself from lesser gangsters, always arrived on time. Today, though, he was late. When he strolled in with his usual big smile and glad hand at the ready, Curly saw instantly that he was putting on an act. The props and posture were identical to those used when he had just skewered a business rival and bedded his woman, but Curly’s professional eye penetrated to the reality: it was JJ who was being skewered and screwed this time. Nevertheless, he allowed Johnson to go through his usual performance of ordering masses of foie gras, a huge steak and almost no vegetables, while Curly went for 11

A Day in the Life of Curly Jones, Lawyer

Caesar salad and spring chicken. JJ asked Curly to choose the wine and they were nine tenths of the way through the first bottle of Cheval Blanc before Johnson’s act collapsed. At first Curly thought his friend was having a heart attack (mind the IPO was his first worried thought), for JJ was leaning heavily on one elbow whilst wiping his brow with his napkin.

‘They’ve kidnapped her, Curly,’ he whispered.

Curly blinked. It was his only gambit. As JJ’s close friend he was expected to know to whom the her referred, but he didn’t. On the other hand, he had a pretty good idea who they were and, from a professional standpoint, that was what mattered. Then it clicked.

‘Crikey, Jerry,’ Curly said.

Johnson’s last socially significant act before leaving London all those years ago had been to impregnate the wife he was deserting. But he was not all bad. He hadn’t really wanted to leave her, or the UK. He’d done so in the way of a scuba diver who was on his last mouthful of air two hundred feet down: panic and despair had sent him to the other side of the world, not callous ambition. Thereafter he had punished himself by never fathering another child. His first ten years in Hong Kong had been too financially precarious for him to offer support, but once he had found his feet by becoming an honorary member of a certain ancient Chinese lodge, he had done all in his power to compensate, sending his daughter violins and pianos galore when he was told she was musical, car after car when she passed her driving test, a flat in the trendiest block in the trendiest part of the city when she left home, and big fat cheques to her mother. But so complete had been the poisoning of his daughter’s mind by his ex-wife that not until last year had the young woman – she must be in her early twenties, Curly calculated – consented to meet JJ on one of his trips to London. And now Curly thought he had the gravamen of the matter: only weeks ago she had finally allowed her doting father to fly her out to Hong Kong – in a firstclass seat, naturally. Johnson’s war chest had finally prevailed over the fury of a mother scorned and – Daisy, that was her name – had decided to set up a super-trendy hairdressing salon in Hong Kong, franchise it with her father’s backing and take it to London, New York, and then the world. That was the plan.

Kidnapped? Curly’s able mind tossed that thought around even as his tongue tossed around the last of the Cheval Blanc before swallowing it.

12

John Burdett

The impediment to further questioning arose from the intense secrecy surrounding JJ’s business associate. Of course, everyone knew it was a branch of the 14K Triad Society, but one didn’t utter that name aloud in a public place. Sensing, once again, that there could yet be a risk to the IPO, Curly thought up a detour. He took his napkin and laid it on the table next to the now empty bottle of wine.

‘This represents all the plots of land which you own and everyone wants to invest in.’

‘Right,’ Johnson nodded, appreciating Curly’s tact even in the throes of his anguish.

Now Curly took up his empty wine glass and placed it in the middle of the napkin: ‘And this represents the people you have backing you?’

Johnson nodded. Then, with a sigh, he knocked it over with his knife.

The 14K knocked over by a rival triad gang? Curly was not an expert, but so far as he knew the 14K were the biggest, roughest, wealthiest . . . Ah! Now he remembered. A little-noticed item on page two of the South China Morning Post only a week or so ago. It was believed that the Sun Yee On Triad had achieved the impossible: somehow they had muscled the 14K to the point of encroaching on their territory.

Curly ordered another bottle of Cheval Blanc. When the two men’s glasses were full again, he looked his friend in the eye. He was only superficially cynical. Deep down he had already made the calculation that Hercules Ma and Samson Wong would heave his backside out of the firm sooner rather than later. So long as he was careful and stopped ordering expensive wines, he would easily be wealthy enough to buy a small condominium in Bangkok and spend the rest of his life getting drunk and laid over there. Very likely the absence of stress would compensate for the lifestyle and he’d live longer than if he stayed in Hong Kong. To hell with the IPO, he was going to be honest here.

‘You know I can’t help with that, Jerry. How can I? I’m not acquainted with any of the players. That’s deep China stuff. You’re the only gweilo I know who’s ever got close to them – I’d be like a babe in arms. I’m sorry old chap, really, very, very sorry. If you need a shoulder to cry on, I’m your man.

If there’s anything peripheral I can do –’ ‘There is,’ Johnson said with sudden intensity, ‘And it’s not peripheral.’

Curly resorted to another blink. Johnson took a designer pen out of his 13

A Day in the Life of Curly Jones, Lawyer

jacket pocket, one of his business cards out of another, then wrote a single word on the back of the card and passed it to Curly.

Curly looked at the single word Johnson had written and frowned. ‘Ping?’

Johnson put a finger to his lips and took back the card. Now Curly’s brain was moving into top gear, an unusual event during or after lunch. In the meantime, Johnson bunched the fingers of his right hand in such a way as to make as if he were holding something that extended from them and moved his arm in a manner that struck Curly as so effeminate he wondered if Johnson was going through some kind of radical change. Then Johnson pointed to the tablecloth and invited Curly to read his lips. White. OK. Now Curly felt himself go into shock. Johnson seemed to be insinuating that Josiah Ping, third of the founding fathers of Magnus, Gray and Ping was, and probably always had been, a White Paper Fan, which was the technical name for a chief finance officer in a Chinese triad.

‘Bugger me,’ Curly said.

III In a cab on his way back to Hong Kong island, Curly reviewed the strange turn Jerry Johnson’s case had taken. Josiah Ping a White Paper Fan in the Sun Yee On? Certainly, neither Buster Magnus nor Preston Gray nor Ping himself had been perfect role models, which might explain the way Curly himself had turned out. Buster had wielded the long lunch without mercy when that instrument of business promotion had been in its heyday and dessert included a visit to the ‘villas’ on Kowloon side. When, in his youthful innocence, Curly had asked Buster what a ‘villa’ was, Magnus had replied: ‘One of those wonderful places where you bring your own and pay corkage.’

Sometimes, depending on how well lunch went, Buster Magnus would take a client and as many as half a dozen girls to the villas, as a signature feature of his charm offensive.

Preston Gray was the opposite, a guilt-ridden introvert. Gaunt and full of twitches, he looked every bit the misanthrope he was – except on his monthly jaunts to Manila where he could be found in the Mabini area wearing a blinding yellow shirt covered in mangoes and pineapples, with his arms around his favourite boys – and grinning broadly.

14

John Burdett

So Magnus had brought in the clients, Gray had done the law part and Ping . . . Josiah Ping, naturally, had dealt with the Chinese side. The enigmatic Ping, whose English was better and more cultured than Curly’s, often gave the appearance of doing nothing at all for months on end; then a case of gigantic value and fiendish complexity involving fraud for billions – and oodles of blood-curdling violence as a nice little earner in its own right – would materialize from somewhere in Mong Kok or from over the Chinese border and Josiah Ping would live off it with his army of Chinese assistants for years at a time. Now Magnus and Gray were both deceased – Magnus from a massive coronary, Gray from a mysterious illness everyone assumed was AIDS – and Ping had abandoned Hong Kong, his wife and family for a new life in Hawaii with his three concubines, all of whom had dumped him and sued for palimony as soon as they acquired American citizenship. Naturally, no one knew exactly where in Hawaii Ping lived or how to contact him, or even if he was still in Hawaii – except Doris.

Doris Lau was the only member of the original firm who was still there.

From her office without windows she organized everything that was not about law, in particular secretaries, accountants, cleaning staff, runners and messenger boys of all kinds. Unlike the partners themselves she was indispensable and knew it. In her dark brain resided the secrets of nigh-on forty years of dubious practice and there was not a one of them she could not blackmail if she chose. Instead, she commanded a very modest salary on which she paid minuscule tax, and an unlimited expense account on which she paid none at all. It was rumoured that Doris never had to pay for anything in her private life, or that of her aged mother, her three brothers and their families – all of whom were layabouts. Even the education of her half-dozen nieces and nephews was somehow charged to the firm.

Curly knew it would do no good at all to call Doris on the internal line, or even on her mobile. To charm Doris one had to descend to her kingdom where she had reigned during the whole of the two-and-a-half decades he had spent at the firm. As far as he was aware she had not wavered in her dress, or in any other personal item during that time. She wore black trousers with a man’s black brogues, a white short-sleeve shirt with a single pocket where she kept two ballpoint pens, one black the other red; her hair was cropped and the expressions on her face varied from surly to very surly with strategic eruptions of black rage. She kept her staff in line with Cantonese 15

A Day in the Life of Curly Jones, Lawyer

expletives that had the power to make articled clerks burst into tears. Worst of all was her habit of chain-smoking cheroots whilst leaning back on her executive chair with her feet on her desk. Sometimes her office was so smoky she risked invisibility. Such was the case now when Curly gingerly knocked, waited for her irritable waieee and entered.

Curly succumbed to a fit of coughing before adjusting to the smoke.

From long experience he knew the Cantonese bush telegraph to be the most efficient in the world and he was sure that Doris had an inkling of the motive behind his visit. He didn’t wait for her to invite him to sit, because she never invited anyone to sit, so he drew up a chair and found himself face-to-face with the soles of her shoes.

‘Doris, I need a favour.’

‘What favour?’

‘I need a contact number for Josiah Ping.’

‘Cannot.’

‘Doris, we’ve known each other a long time. I happen to know what a load you carry.’

‘What load?’

‘At least twelve human beings depend on you. You love your family more than you love your own life.’

‘Bullshit. Family is family. I’m Chinese.’

‘But you are particularly fond of your twenty-two-year-old niece Maimai, is it not so?’ Doris’s eyes flickered like flint. ‘Imagine, just for a moment, if someone were to kidnap her – how would you feel?’

By the way Doris stared at him Curly was not sure if he’d just signed his own death warrant. He decided that discretion was the better part of valour and remained silent while she processed his request.

‘OK. We do it this way. I call Ping tonight. If he wants to speak with you, I tell you tomorrow.’

‘It’s kind of urgent, Doris. How about you call me tonight, after you speak to him?’

‘I need a new desk,’ Doris said. ‘You know how old this damn desk is?’

Doris lifted a foot and let it land on the desk with a thump.

‘You shall have it,’ Curly said, and, aware the interview was over, rose and left.

16

John Burdett



In his office under the ferocious air-conditioning vent the effects of the second bottle of Cheval Blanc he had shared with Johnson began to wear off, leaving him to wrestle with the problem of what to do with the evening.

The only hard fact he knew about Hawaii was that it sat so close to the wrong side of the international dateline that the people there lived in a kind of perpetual yesterday. If you were not careful you found yourself calling them in the early hours of their morning or – worse – vice versa. If he were to negotiate with Josiah Ping in the case of the abduction of Johnson’s daughter, he’d better go to bed early for once. He therefore resolved to cancel his supper with Marcia, with whom he was negotiating a third fling.

When he logged onto his inbox, though, he found a message from her: So much looking forward to tonight, luv xxx M. Now he remembered the postcoital bliss of laying his head on her ample bosom while he slipped his hand between her still more ample thighs and imagined he was eighteen months old again; he changed his mind and messaged back: Me too luv, can’t wait, will Va Bene do? A few seconds later she replied: Ummmmmm. 7.30 for 8?

Curly smiled and typed Done.

IV The evening went exactly as he feared it might. Both liver and libido met the twin challenges of another bottle of red and Marcia’s voluptuous curves; having acquitted himself well enough to put a groan in her throat and a smile on her lips, he discreetly withdrew so he could arrange their bodies for his favourite bit. However, no sooner had he laid his head on her left breast and slipped his hand all the way up until it was contiguous with the Mystery itself, when his mobile rang. Marcia’s expression morphed from bliss to irritation when she saw he was going to answer it. Business luv, he mimed as he pressed the green glyph.

‘Do I have the pleasure of speaking to Curly Jones?’ Josiah Ping said.

Curly had forgotten just how polished Ping’s English was. The Chinese lawyer had learned his British charm at the feet of Buster Magnus, as had Curly himself, but Ping’s grasp of the infinite levels of hypocrisy of which 17

A Day in the Life of Curly Jones, Lawyer

the human mind is capable was so much more evolved than Curly’s. Now, with Ping’s plummy vowels ringing in his ears along with the unassailable confidence that lay behind them, conjoined with post-coital clarity – and finding himself at the same time experiencing that shift in the bon vivant’s cycle from alcoholic euphoria to alcoholic depression – Curly finally saw with graveyard certainty how cleverly Ping had set everything up. ‘Yes, Josiah, it’s me,’ he said in a sad voice.

‘D’you know, I can’t tell you how absa-bloody-lutely delighted I am to hear your voice, old boy.’

‘Likewise,’ Curly lied.

‘Look, sorry to be a bore, but would you mind calling me on Skype? It’s so much more fun to talk to an old friend and colleague face-to-face, eh?’

‘Certainly,’ Curly said. Ping gave him his Skype details and Curly closed the phone. He turned to Marcia with a blazing fury in his eyes, which quickly passed. ‘Put three Chinese together you get two conspiracies,’ he muttered, quoting an ancient adage, and shuffled, slope-shouldered into the room he used as an office. He knew Ping wanted to use Skype so he could read Curly’s expressions – and intimidate him with the amazing display of wealth that Curly would see behind and around Ping as soon as he had him on his monitor. A vast desk, priceless artefacts from Sung and Ming dynasties, French windows opening onto an infinite lawn: money everywhere. And Ping himself, older and sleeker, his white hair pulled back in a queue, a cream silk dressing gown, eyes like dart points, unlimited intelligence in that high and slender brow. It was as if the move to America had liberated the mandarin within. Thin lips half smiled when he said: ‘Isn’t this the most amazing coincidence?’

‘Amazing,’ Curly said.

‘What a fantastic opportunity for us to be able to work together again and put an end to this dreadful nonsense. Of course, the first priority is for the poor girl to be restored to her father ASAP, what?’

‘Oh, yes.’

‘No damage done as yet; my instructions are she was only abducted this morning. Now, I’m not going to tell you by what strange concatenation of unpredictable events I came to be the intermediary here, and you wouldn’t expect me to, you’re far too shrewd a player for that?’

‘Sure,’ Curly said.

18

John Burdett

‘So, to cut a long yarn to its bare bones, what it amounts to I’m afraid is –’ ‘Jerry Johnson and the 14K underestimated you. Your boys were slowly degrading the value of the land, intimidating the shopkeepers and bar owners and generally muscling in to make the 14K lose face, prior to taking over redevelopment with all those juicy labour and cement contracts. So the 14K thought up the brilliant idea of using Johnson as the front man to take the whole land bank public and out of your grasp, then, at the right moment, sell the shares, grab the dough and leave your people with a small dribble of protection money. But they didn’t bargain for your kidnapping Johnson’s kid – I think you were the one who read Johnson well enough to be sure he’d give up everything for her – she’s the only soul he’s got and he’s a sentimental Brit deep down. Without him the 14K can’t go through with the IPO. The Securities Commission wouldn’t let known gangsters on the board of a public company.’

Was it possible that Ping’s mask slipped just for a second, revealing an angry dragon? Not that it made any difference.

‘Just tell me one thing,’ Curly continued. ‘You worked all this out with Hercules Ma and Samson Wong, didn’t you? The whole package, which includes kicking me out of the firm, because Johnson was my last chance – I don’t have any more rabbits to pull out of the hat.’

‘Ah, Curly, old man, you might be taking this all a tad too personally, don’t you think? Really old boy, conspiracy theories are the first sign of paranoia you know.’

‘I’ll fix it with Johnson,’ Curly said in a weary voice. ‘The IPO will be cancelled. Make sure he gets the girl back – fully intact – not a hair on her head damaged – right now, or there’ll be war in Mong Kok.’ ‘Jolly good show,’ Ping said, ‘I told them what a stand-up fellow you are.

Marvellous to chat with you again. Bye for now.’

Curly’s monitor died and took with it the last of his resistance. The bravado he’d experienced under the influence of the Cheval Blanc, when he’d seen himself living happily ever after in Bangkok, now appeared quite ridiculous.

He knew very well the reason he was attractive to women was because as soon as they were told how rich and successful, clever and important, glamorous and exotic he was, they ceased to see him at all; instead, they saw a grand illusion formed of wine-soaked suppers, cocktail parties, yachts, smoke and mirrors. Once reduced to just another bald middle-aged womaniser with a serious alcohol habit and a big gut . . . well, he thought, looking into a mirror 19

A Day in the Life of Curly Jones, Lawyer

in the bathroom where he’d escaped to weep, as they used to teach in law school: res ipsa loquitur, the matter spoke for itself.

He’d forgotten to lock the door and Marcia came to rescue him as he sobbed his heart out sitting on the toilet. ‘Marcee, love,’ he wailed, ‘let’s go away, you and I – this place is killing us, isn’t it? It’s too unreal, one’s whole life slips away in fast-forward, it seems exciting and wonderful, but when you look back, what did you actually do that had any meaning at all?’

‘Where?’ Marcia asked, her eyes narrowing.

‘Thailand, the land of smiles, Buddhism, real people with real human issues.’

‘Not Bangkok. I’m not living with you in Bangkok.’

‘No – one of the beaches. I have the dough and I know how to buy land there without being defrauded.’ He was recovering quickly. ‘I need to stabilise, and you’re the only one with the magic potion. I don’t think I could even dream of doing it with anyone else.’

‘Retire early to a tropical beach – I’ve always wanted that,’ Marcia said in a dreamy voice. ‘Drama-intensive sunsets, beautiful tan young men teaching one to windsurf, piña coladas and parties on the sand with roast suckling pig – or is that the Philippines?’ They stared into each other’s moist eyes and shared grins. ‘You know, it might actually work,’ she said. ‘‘Course it will. Absa-jolly-lutely,’ Curly said.

‘PACT!’ They slapped high-fives. Curly went to the fridge to find a bottle of champagne. He felt as if a huge weight had been taken from his shoulders.

A few twists of the wire, dexterous use of the thumbs and the bubbly was in the glasses. It was amazing how thrilled they both were at the promise of escape. Then his phone rang. He wasn’t going to answer it at a moment like this. No way.

But, on second thoughts, the caller was being unusually persistent and as it could be something to do with the Johnson case, he thought he’d better press the green button.

‘Curly Jones? It’s Tommy Stratford.’

‘Tommy Stratford,’ Curly repeated with a knowing nod at Marcia.

‘Look, I know what a busy fellow you are these days, but I just rang on the off-chance you might be able to fit me in. You remember that clothing brand I started about seven years back? It has been doing rather well lately and all sorts of sages and wise men have been whispering in my ear that a lot of lovely lolly stands to be made by taking it public at the right 20

John Burdett

time – fashions never last, you know, and timing is everything in business, but I don’t need to tell you that, do I?’ ‘You want me to take your company public? An IPO?’ Curly stared at Marcia, his face an anguished question mark.

She took the phone from his shaking hand. ‘Hi, Tommy, this is Marcia, Marcia Bates.’

‘Marcia, darling, how the hell are you? Do I conclude that you and Curly form an item once again? That’s great news.’

‘Look, Tommy, the answer to the question you just asked Curly –’ ‘Ah ha?’

‘Is yes. He’d be delighted. He’s been having fantasies of settling down on a beach in Thailand – I’m so glad you’ve called to talk him out of it.’

‘Curly living on a beach? That’s the funniest thing I’ve heard this year,’ Tommy Stratford said with a chortle.

Curly took the phone. ‘Lunch tomorrow?’

‘Perfect. The Club?’

‘The Club,’ Curly said.

He rubbed his hands together. Now, all he needed to do was make a short call to Jerry Johnson to let him know he was sorted, that he’d get his kid back – and better leave the territory on the next plane since he’d royally screwed the 14K. After that: bubbly all round.

At the end of the day, you had to love Hong Kong.

John Burdett has published seven novels, including five in his Bangkok series, the latest being Vulture Peak, published by Constable and Robinson in November 2012.

21

Some of the 1600 portraits of convicted officials in Zhang Bingjian’s Beijing studio.

22

The Colour of Money Zhang Bingjian

H

all of Fame, a series of portraits commissioned by filmmaker and contemporary artist Zhang Bingjian, acknowledges that corruption is often the path to fame and fortune. To date, over 1600 have been completed, each depicting a Chinese official convicted of corruption and painted in the distinctive pink of the Chinese 100-yuan note. The colour is not the red of revolution – that’s long gone – but neither is it the blush of shame.

Zhang says the question he is asked the most is, ‘How can you ever finish this piece? It’s impossible; there are too many.’ But to him, the number is no longer important. ‘The work is witness to what is happening in China now. It’s like a documentary. Corruption is deeply rooted in society.’ He says the work is for the future because ‘we forget things too fast’.

To protect the project Zhang focusses only on officials who have been tried and convicted. So far it has not been banned – articles about his portraits have appeared in Chinese media including Xinhua and Global Times, as well as on BBC and CBS. Still, no mainland gallery has agreed to host his exhibit.

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Chinese officials convicted of corruption from Zhang Bingjian’s collection, the Hall of Fame.

24

China: A Way Out of Corruption He Jiahong translated by James McMath

H

ow much corruption is there in China today? This is a difficult question to answer properly. But we can start with the two methods for assessing the state of corruption in a country or region: the objective method and the subjective method.

The objective method assesses the severity of corruption according to the number of cases against greedy officials prosecuted in a given country or region. Every year, Chinese procurators investigate around 30,000 corruption and bribery cases involving some 40,000 people. I’d say that’s more than a few. However, those that are investigated make up only a portion of the total. Today, the government faces the difficulty of uncovering and proving corruption, and of meting out due punishment. It is generally accepted that about half of corrupt officials are not uncovered; about half of the uncovered officials are not investigated and about half of the investigated officials are not punished. If we take these three judgments to be broadly reliable, the result is that the percentage of corrupt officials receiving punishment stands at a mere 12.5 per cent.

The subjective method involves surveying and interviewing citizens of a country and/or those who engage with that country, and then judging the severity of corruption based on people’s feelings and experiences. On Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI), China’s ranking has improved with the increase in the number of countries surveyed.

In 1995 China was second-to-last among forty-one participants; in 2011, it stood in seventy-fifth place among a total of 183 countries. Admittedly, 25

China: A Way Out of Corruption

China isn’t the most corrupt nation: both Russia and India are ranked higher, not to mention Somalia or North Korea. But China’s point score has been hovering around 3.5 for some time, far from the 9.5 given to New Zealand, which emerges as least corrupt on the CPI, and some distance from the five-or six-point ‘pass’ mark as well. Moreover, some Chinese don’t think China really deserves to be so far up on the list.

No matter how you evaluate it, China’s corruption problem is severe, and anti-corruption efforts are crucially needed. As far as the will of the people is concerned, resisting this evil is a necessity.

In the process of opening up and reforming, it is reasonable that some of our comrades should be the first to become wealthy, leading to an acceptable and perhaps inevitable disparity between the wealthy and the poor. However, it’s acceptable only if this wealth was obtained legitimately, through hard work and aptitude. But at present, wealth is flowing rapidly into the households of those who give and take bribes, producing the millionaires of corruption – freak children born of the intercourse between power and money. This injustice is crushing the hearts of the people.

Anti-corruption measures are also necessary to the ruling party, because severe corruption will lead to the collapse of government. The people have learnt the lessons of history; there is no need to say more on this count.

But to figure out how to fight corruption, we must analyse the quality and distinctive features of the problem in China.

Present-day China’s corruption is institutional and societal rather than individual in nature. Individual corruption, caused by a person’s inferior character or ethical standard, occurs occasionally and can exist any place regardless of how robust the political or social system is. It applies to murderers, thieves, rapists, common criminals and the like. Institutional corruption, on the other hand, is recurring and is brought about by defects in the political or social system: not only will the inherently evil be corrupt, but an otherwise typically neutral person will be too. Just as we are naturally endowed with a capacity for both virtue and vice, most people in society belong to this neutral category. Hence, it is easy for defective societies to produce conspiracies of corruption, nests of nepotism, milieus of malfeasance.

Societal corruption is omnipresent and is created by the social environment and cultural traditions. It is inevitably connected with systemic corruption, but in China it no longer applies only to government officials. It 26

He Jiahong

has spread to all sectors of society – social organizations, businesses, schools, hospitals and other institutions. When corruption is individual in nature, the severe punishment of the guilty is the usual, fundamental deterrent.

‘Killing one to warn a hundred’ can be relatively effective at times, but not as a deterrent against institutional and social corruption. In this instance, to use another truism: if you ‘kill them in the morning’ they’ll be ‘committing crimes come night’. We need more comprehensive measures to correct our social institutions and reform the social environment. Severe punishment is not as effective as stringent investigation, and stringent investigation cannot compare with taking strict precautions.

The experience of a number of countries around the world shows that requiring officials to publicly report their assets is one such effective measure.

But China won’t sign up to this, no matter how many times transparency is called for. Chinese bureaucrats have had an ‘internal’ wealth-reporting system for the last seventeen years; however, this is essentially pretence, with the results kept secret from the public. And only bureaucrats at a certain level are required to make an annual report of their assets. These are submitted to the various ‘Organization Departments’, where a chosen few have the power to review these forms, but in actuality rarely glance at them: the vast majority of forms end up no better than rubbish. The fact that huge numbers of officials prosecuted for corruption had nevertheless duly completed and handed in these forms makes a mockery of the process.

If financial reports are not made public they are useless as a deterrent. And many officials oppose the open reporting of their finances, claiming that they have ‘property inappropriate for reporting’.

To counter this, I propose a policy offering ‘conditional deferment of investigation’ in return for the introduction of public reporting. I have also taken the liberty of designing a roadmap out of corruption.

First, the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress should pass a resolution: public officials who honestly report all of their household wealth within a prescribed period, and who do not commit further crimes, will have their reported property recognized as legal and will not be investigated. After this initial report, any new property must be accounted for annually.

Second, the government should establish a Clean Government and Poverty Assistance Foundation and encourage public officials, anonymously 27

China: A Way Out of Corruption

or otherwise, to donate excess property to the foundation before the initial report. There will be no enquiry as to the source of the donation.

Third, national leaders should take the initiative by reporting their own household finances. Public officials above the level of division chief must report. Public officials at section-chief level or below may report voluntarily, and former bureaucrats who have moved abroad may also participate. All these reports should be made public online, and available to all citizens for review.

Fourth, a centralized anti-corruption agency should be set up, similar to the Independent Commission Against Corruption in Hong Kong.

The agency should be composed of offices at the national, provincial and municipal levels, based on the currently existing anti-corruption offices such as the Bureau of Anti-Embezzlement and Bribery, the Department of Anti-Dereliction of Duty and Infringement on Human Rights, and the Department of Occupational Crime Prevention under the procuratorial system, as well as on the Case Investigation Department under the disciplinary inspection and supervision system, and the National Bureau of Corruption Prevention. The national office should be part of the Supreme People’s Procuratorate, and the provincial and municipal divisions should report directly to the national office, rather than to the local procuratorates.

Fifth, regulations should be put in place to ensure clean government and improve the capacity for handling anti-corruption cases. The anticorruption agency should be authorized to use technology and databases to conduct investigations; for instance, they should have access to a realestate database, a stock-transaction database, and a database of sales of automobiles and other valuable objects.

Sixth, the anti-corruption agency should check officials’ public financial reports through two means: audits on a random selection of 10 per cent of individuals; and examinations of claims made by citizens against officials.

Any official who does not provide truthful reports should be subject to criminal investigation, with the results made public.

Seventh, enduring and effective anti-corruption measures should be put in place, ensuring strict prevention of corruption, stringent investigation into suspicious behaviour, and severe punishment of misdeeds. The privileges of public officials should be gradually cut back, to increase the democratic nature and transparency of government decision-making, and 28

He Jiahong

to construct an upright officialdom where affairs are handled according to the rule of law.

All institutional innovations are designed and advanced by people.

I oppose violent revolution as a method of creating new systems, and would be loath to see more turmoil and internal strife. Hence, I can only hope that those in power are able, with open hearts and great courage, to create a better social system for future generations of Chinese people. Some say I’m a raving fool and others that I don’t understand politics. My response is: both are true. My personal motto is, ‘Be foolish when you should be foolish, and smart when you should be smart.’ I don’t understand politics because I hope to keep away from political struggles.

I use my knowledge of law to illustrate my dreams in fiction. My next novel, tentatively titled Non-Guilty Corrupt Officials, is set in a city in Guangdong which, though it starts as China’s most corrupt, becomes its cleanest. I hope that this story, beginning as fiction, will turn into reality.

29

Jeet Thayil

Rules for Citizens 1. Let us govern those who undertake the telling of stories.

2. Censorship is good governance. Self-censorship is an attribute of the highest civilization.

3. If an actor speaks of God, he will be chastised. He will be refused an encore. If he repeats the speech, he will have his licence revoked.

4. Let us govern those who undertake praise of the next world, since what they say is neither true nor useful to us.

5. Our best recourse is to be warlike.

6. We do not deny that storytellers are good at their job and give people what they like to hear. But the better they are, the less we wish our children and men to hear them.

7. We shall refute their attempts to be wise. We shall scoff when they repeat their vile allegation, Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent.

8. We will do away with the dirges of famous men and leave them for women, and not the best among women either.

9. Let us abolish those fearful and terrific names, Cocytos, the River of Lamentations, Styx, the River of Fear, Ganga, the River of Death in Life, Lethe, the River of Bliss, Tigris, the River of Affliction.

10. We shall disallow travel and the mingling of songs.

30

Delhi Durbar Krishan Partap Singh

T

he tale that follows is neither a personal confession nor an apology – for which it could very easily be mistaken – but something much more substantial. It is an explanation or, to be more precise, an elucidation of the excesses, committed, within my knowledge, by men of power.

As it turned out, it took only a handful of days for the great altruistic hopes of our forefathers to be trampled upon by the naked greed and self-interest of the few, among whose number, I concede, I must be counted. It all happened so stealthily that everything we once held sacred as a nation became a memory without any sort of public outrage or mourning in this so-called largest democracy in the world. And I witnessed the unfolding act of our disgrace from a front-row seat. This truth marks the highest point as well as the deepest regret of my life; the paradox irrevocably entwined in my memory.

I had returned to India confronting a dilemma of destiny, and voluntarily choosing to be Indian once again. The dark blue passport would be my umbilical partner till death. Unlike many of my generation and class, I had never, in my youth, been convinced that if I were to have a great future it would by definition preclude returning to my motherland.

Living abroad for most of my early adulthood only helped me further cement a bond with my country. I understood more deeply what it meant to be Indian, away from India. The irony is not lost on me – it proved to be a sort of Nehruvian passage of illumination, shining its torch on the darkest depths of myself. My return turned out to be more than just an end of a journey; it became the beginning of another more enlightening one – my re-acquaintance with Delhi.

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Delhi Durbar

Prior to my abrupt homecoming I had spent a fairly enjoyable and professionally satisfying few years in Dubai, working as a private banker with a multinational bank. After graduating from business school in the United States and working four years on Wall Street I had, with some encouragement from my father, strayed from the beaten path. I was hired by an exclusive and relatively anonymous Swiss private bank for their Dubai branch office. Officially, I was supposed to be targeting the affluent nonresident Indian community of the Gulf. But the specific reason I had been hired was to use my contacts to prospect for the ultra-rich of India who had ample surreptitious reserves of foreign exchange to invest; the government of India being, or pretending to be, oblivious of this fact.

Indian foreign-exchange regulations, still unnecessarily schizophrenic about a run on the controlled rupee, did not allow the rich to invest their fortunes freely abroad. Laws, obviously, had not and did not stop these worthies from getting to the promised land of Western real estate and capital markets, even if the result was ultimately to their detriment. In a hard-to-miss historical irony, the money increasingly found its way back into India disguised as welcome foreign investment, the India story coming full circle with the investment needs of our clients mirroring global capital flows. And financial consultants, or account executives or, if you prefer, private bankers like me, knew nothing better than how to cater to their every need. It was a tricky dance, especially if you met the client in India, because then you had to approach the subject obliquely and could only get to the point after the client’s suspicions were fully assuaged and trust built. The signing of the account-opening documents – always in Dubai or somewhere else outside India – was the other hurdle. Only then did the actual investing begin.

I had been given carte blanche by my superiors, with no one overseeing me, mainly because of the money that flooded in thanks to my labours. As long as the stigma of terror funds did not taint the bank’s image, my Swiss bosses had no interest in knowing the antecedents of my clients; that was a problem only the regulated American banks were forced to surmount. Even when other governments got tough with the Swiss for their banking secrecy, the Indian government, whatever it might say for public consumption, could be relied upon never to delve too seriously into the secret wealth of its elite citizenry. Too many skeletons lurked in those Alpine cupboards. If 32

Krishan Partap Singh

hawala dealers, bullion traders and dodgy exporters often were conduits for feeding the pipeline at the source, it was with me that the money trail ended – after a decent bit of laundering at various dhobi ghats in the most scenic parts of the world, of course. For the right fee we provided a full array of services for our precious clients.

International private banking was a perfect fit for my talents, and my lineage. I proved to be a natural when it came to the delicate art of client servicing. Yes, I admit, it was not dissimilar to being a whore in an expensive suit. You just had to remember that the client was always right. I was – undoubtedly – their seducer, but there were no innocent victims to be found here. Very little of the money I handled over the years had been earned through above-aboard means. But that was no concern of mine.

They gave me the money to make them wealthier – or, at the very least, to maintain their net worth – and that is exactly what I religiously went about doing. I kept my morals and my conscience (such as they were) locked away – a small rule of business I had imbibed from my father – and concentrated on meeting my targets for assets to be gathered and commissions to be produced from the ensuing investment of these assets. Numbers ruled supreme; they were all I had to worry about.

Life was relatively simple, quite black and white, really; that is until I was abruptly summoned back to good old Delhi a week after my thirtyfourth birthday.

My father, Sardar Gurcharan Singh Sidhu, to give it to you straight, had made it his life’s work to bring some of the efficiency and procedures of a commodities market to those behind-the-scenes activities in the nation’s capital that are generally clubbed under the heading of ‘governmental corruption’ – an accomplishment that had earned him his place as one of the most influential public servants of his generation. But he was neither a politician nor a bureaucrat; he was really a hybrid of the two. He made his place in the space between these two worlds and took advantage of the mistrust and lack of communication between them.

My father knew more about the intricacies of administration than most politicians and was better versed in the uncertainties of politics than most bureaucrats. He played one against the other and, using this advantage, made sure every decision of the particular department or ministry that he 33

Delhi Durbar

happened to be attached to had his stamp on it. Three decades of statecraft had honed his instincts and allowed him to perfect this role.

Father had grown up in Chandigarh and had gone on to study law from there, but he hadn’t really practised for very long as he’d found his true calling fairly early in life. Starting off as a private secretary to a cabinet minister in Punjab – the father of one of his closest friends – he first learned the secret of harnessing borrowed political power for the purpose of bringing the bureaucracy to heel. My father became steadily more powerful. His modus operandi was to attach himself to influential politicians using any means necessary and then quickly go about making himself indispensable. While his basic strategy didn’t change very much, his realm of power expanded.

He spent the first quarter of his career in Chandigarh and then moved on to bigger and better things in Delhi.

In both cities, he became so renowned for his special talents that each new government found it could not do without him. In all his career, he never once suffered the inevitable eviction from office and influence that other political appointees suffered after becoming the orphaned legacy of previous regimes. He graduated from the role of private secretary to more senior roles that provided him with the garb of exalted titles like ‘Officer on Special Duty’ and ‘Adviser to the Government’. The longevity of his almost continuous service made him a singularity. The politicians could not live without him; the bureaucracy hated and feared him in equal measure.

Most of my friends had seen my father in a government position for so long they’d just assumed he was a career civil servant; I hadn’t bothered to correct their mistaken impressions. He wielded considerable power and yet the common man didn’t know his name or recognize his face. Talk about democracy at work.

And what exactly was it that he did so well?

In each ministry that he worked – and he had served in more than most bureaucrats – he unerringly identified the areas in the ministry that could produce the kind of deals that would net the maximum amount of cash, for the powers-that-be and himself, with minimum risk of disclosure at the time or, more importantly, later, when the opposition inevitably came to power.

You could say he was a sort of financial consultant, too – maximum reward for minimum risk. Like father, like son. He didn’t exactly hide what 34

Krishan Partap Singh

he did from me or my brother. Quite the contrary. Father shared the fine details of how he’d masterfully plotted and crafted each transaction as if it were an exalted art form. Perhaps, in a messed up sort of way, it was.

He could make the levers of power move when they seemed frustratingly intractable to others, the rich and powerful included, because he knew how the matrix of government reacted to even the slightest stimuli and for that reason his services were highly prized, and highly priced.

I was brought up in this environment of moral ambiguity, so I dearly hope that will be taken into account when I am judged by the big boss in the sky for my part in subsequent events, of which I was a key and more or less voluntary participant.

I was taught to take everything I could by any means possible without feeling any sense of remorse. This necessarily coloured the way I saw the world, a world where the strong stomp on everyone below them and doing good is for the naive; for bleeding-heart idealists who die the worst kind of death, one of heart-aching disillusionment.

I had been accidentally groomed to meet the requirements of the economic miracle that hit India in the early nineties, where the needs of the individual finally began to be addressed and seen as important, even necessary. Capitalism started seeping into our very marrow and the socialistic gangrene was cut away, having only found a place in history as a well-intentioned failure. Nehru’s dream was finally dead and I think I helped deliver its death knell. I had been summoned back to Delhi to fulfil the destiny for which I always subconsciously knew I was meant – to be a wheeler-dealer in the capital of sleaze, corruption and hypocrisy.

Sardar Gurcharan Singh Sidhu – mera baap – had just gone through another round of shamming retirement, which he enacted whenever a change of government took place, as he waited for someone in the new order to pay obeisance and go through the motions of convincing him that his talents were badly required by the establishment, yet again. This time he had been approached by the head honcho himself, the prime minister.

Prime Minister Paresh Yadav, the current overlord of more or less the entire cow belt with his backward-caste-plus-Muslim voting coalition, had appointed my father as his senior domestic adviser. His job, as you may imagine, was as always: to fill the prime-ministerial coffers as quickly as possible. Yadav was heading a third front coalition government, sans the 35

Delhi Durbar

Congress or the BJP, and he knew better than anyone, having brought down more than one government in the past, how brittle they tended to be.

Five months after Father’s ascension to the summit of power, I received a call that changed my life forever.

I had just arrived back at Dubai airport after a business trip to Beirut.

But I never made it out of the airport.

You see, Father was dead. It was up to me to take over the family business.

My period of apprenticeship was over.

Indira Gandhi International Airport is the first warning sign to any visitor arriving from abroad to run back home, for they will soon enter a city and country that lives in many different centuries at once and those used to the certainties and niceties of modernity, particularly the sanitized tranquillity of Dubai, may not survive contact with this reality. ‘Beware,’ the airport seems to say with its manifestation of barely controlled chaos, ‘you have no idea what you are getting yourself into’. I should have listened.

The physical and mental landscape of the capital had changed in the years since I had last resided in Delhi; the great economic miracle was at work, or at least Delhi believed it to be. I had regularly visited during the intervening period, of course, but then you really don’t get the full blast of the transformation in snatched visits in which meetings with clients take precedence. Now I was back for good.

My father had been aboard a helicopter with the pilot and an aide, when it had developed ‘technical difficulties’ and crashed in the middle of farmland in western Uttar Pradesh. His body was unrecognizable. He was said to have been on his way back from Bareilly, but nobody could ascertain what he had gone there to do. There was some unsubstantiated talk that foul play may have been involved, but that was to be expected considering Father’s profile as a power broker. Unfortunately, aviation accidents had become part and parcel of the narrative of Indian public life; figures far more illustrious than Father had been lost in the air.

On a personal level, it was naturally a brutal blow to the family. Mother, obviously, took it the worst. I arrived home to a house spread with white sheets and Mother’s sisters forming an anxious coterie around her. She looked dry-eyed and composed, but when she saw me she broke down all over again. My elder brother, Manbir, was flying in as well, from London 36

Krishan Partap Singh

where he worked as an advertising man and kept an arm’s length from the family business. He was the good brother, but a bit on the dour side. I think he envied the connection I had always shared with Father. He didn’t let it show but I could tell it bugged the hell out of him. Nor did I particularly care: it was his problem.

After the initial shock of Father’s death had passed I reacted emotionlessly.

No tears or overflowing grief for me; Father would not have approved.

I repressed my grave sense of loss at the passing of the most important man in my life and carried on with a stiff upper lip. Fate had decreed it, he was gone, and with him all his secrets – a fact that lay at the centre of the turmoil about to ensue.

Funeral rites were completed in a rush when Manbir arrived. At the cremation, even I was surprised at the dizzying array of political personalities who attended despite the excruciating summer heat. Every member of cabinet was present, apart from the PM, who was away touring Europe. Present too were the vice president of India and the ex-chief of army staff, the formidable General Dayal, who watched me balefully as I helped my older brother perform the final rites. The general and I shared a long and strained history, so I was sure his attendance hadn’t been a voluntary act. Looking at the large gathering I couldn’t help wondering if those present had come to pay their respects, or to look for assurances that their dark deeds would not be revealed to the world by Father’s heirs, namely me.

To my brother’s great irritation, even though I was the younger sibling, I was treated like the belle of the ball. I am ashamed to admit it but, even with my father’s body lying a few feet away, I was having a memorably good time. I’m sure Father would have been proud. His legacy had seamlessly passed into my hands.

Actually, I was already well entrenched in Father’s affairs as my private banking expertise had been increasingly used in recent years to cater more to his clients than mine, all done off the books and with my employers unaware of my freelancing. I knew much and they were well aware of the knowledge I possessed. But the period immediately following the funeral was a dicey one, because there was a lot of unfinished business to be dealt with before I could truly become my own man. And the unfinished business, as it turned out, had a mind of its own.

37

Delhi Durbar

Father’s appointment as adviser had sent shock waves through the corridors of power. Nobody had been fooled about his role as Senior Domestic Adviser. In this last appointment he had achieved his most cherished ambition: to avail himself of the powers of the prime minister’s office, armed with which he had been in a position to bend every sinew of government to his will. He had been in office for only a few months but that had been more than enough time for him to use the long arm of the PMO to the benefit of all stakeholders, particularly the PM and his family. Deals had been inked, percentages agreed upon and the illicit monies deployed in appropriate areas of the economy where they could come back laundered and smelling like daisies. Sitting in Dubai, I had been handling less and less of these funds as opportunities in India grew with the increasing sophistication of the economy. In fact, my main business was to reroute the money back to the homeland through Mauritius or Singapore after the requisite lag. That was the reason why Father, a couple of days before his demise, had already asked me to move back to Delhi as soon as I could. Alas, the father-and-son team had not been fated to be.

Over the next few weeks I got busy with the umpteen necessary things that must be done when a person passes on, some legal and some not. One of them was clearing out Father’s South Block office. Nobody had asked me to do it but I thought it the right thing to do. I entered his office half expecting him to be there, appearing Houdini-like out of thin air. Father had always seemed so indestructible to me that it would be a long while before I would fully comprehend his loss. I imagined him sitting erect behind his desk with his sharp features, his grand wazir’s beard and his proud turban.

I hadn’t worn a turban since cutting my own impressively long hair just before setting off for university. Often, looking at my father, I had felt a tinge of regret at having relinquished some of my heritage. Though we may not have had much in common when it came to our appearance, there was a strong bond that always held us together. You could say greed had ruled us both and ruled our relationship. Love was present, of course, but largely in the form of a secondary emotion.

It had taken me about a month to finish the housekeeping of my father’s affairs and provide the results to the PM. I had not dealt directly with Paresh Yadav yet, and had been taking my orders over the telephone from his son, Shitij, a less than charming character about whom I shall have more to say 38

Krishan Partap Singh

later. When someone like my father, the wizard behind the political funding machinery of a bigwig like the prime minister, abruptly exits from the scene – as he certainly did – there is an unavoidable amount of pilferage that takes place. Baser instincts were involved in all these dealings, and it was to be expected that those who could, would take advantage of a situation where no documents or legal tenders stated the exchange of government acquiescence for monetary payment. Since the interests in this case involved the prime minister, the leakage was of a lesser order, though it did still touch the 20 per cent mark. Father had not made a list of where he had deployed all the in-coming funds; at least, I could not find one, for understandable reasons of security. No doubt he had the crucial information in his head and wasn’t bothered about what would ensue if something happened to him – with Father you could never tell which explanation fit the truth.

The money was normally allocated to the companies of friendly industrialists looking to take on easy money, or else it went to the old favourite – real estate. Both types of investments were made in the name of a front organization or person who was unlikely to reveal the true ownership of the assets under their stewardship if the middleman, say my father, was not there to hold them to the bargain they had struck. The prime minister had trusted Father to such an extent that he was largely oblivious of the identity of more than half of these assets. If I’d not had some idea of my father’s maze of investments, the losses to Mr Yadav’s bottom line would have been much more damaging. He was still none too happy that he had lost 20 per cent of his recently ill-gotten wealth.

And this state of mind on his part is where our problem started.

Extract from Delhi Durbar, the second book of ‘The Raisina Series’, published by Hachette, India.

39

Jeet Thayil

Life Sentence Let’s say you’re not opposed to the ghost In principle, you understand her neediness – And let’s say she’s distracted, or busy, She’s busy looking for a way back in, But the shore appears distant, Not to mention impossible to attain, A far-off place where her former friends No longer speak her name, which is lost, And no word she hears is audible Through the static and the clatter; So let’s say you forget to speak her name, You do not repeat her lovely name Because your talk is of meat and money, And let’s say you’re not crazy or bitter, It’s just that you don’t want to hear her say, Why, why didn’t you look after me?

40

© B asso C an n ar sa

Interview: Jeet Thayil Martin Alexander

J

eet Thayil is a performance poet, songwriter and guitarist. He has published four collections of poetry and edited The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets (2008). His debut novel, Narcopolis, was shortlisted for the 2012 Man Booker Prize and – breaking news – longlisted for The DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. Notorious for his selfconfessed former addiction to heroin and alcohol, and famous for his youthful good looks, he currently lives in New Delhi.

One of the many striking things about Narcopolis is its cornucopia of narratives, voices and forms. What in your reading influenced you in constructing the novel?

I’ve always admired novels that try to encompass an entire universe within their pages. Of course, it is an impossible quest, doomed to failure, but 41

Interview: Jeet Thayil

the failure is a success in its way. I’ve admired the Russian novelists of the nineteenth century for exactly this quality, for the anarchic variety of voices and forms, and for the absolute freedom they allowed themselves. ‘If nothing is true, everything is permitted.’ The Russians took no prisoners.

Each of Dostoyevsky’s novels was written as if it were his last, as if he’d never write again, so that he had to put everything into it. As a strategy, it is far removed from the way novels are written today. At least not as we know it.

Dimple, in his/her observant ambivalence, sits at the centre of the novel.

She’s extraordinary, as is Mr Lee – who surprises us with the China narrative and his incongruous but entirely believable closeness to Dimple. How did these characters and their relationship come to you?

I knew China would be a part of the book. I didn’t know how big a part until I started to write the section that came to be titled ‘Story of the Pipe’.

It is an unexpected Russian-style digression into China, but the title tells the reader why it is there and how it feeds off and into the main narrative.

I grew up in Hong Kong, and lived there for most of the seventies. It is difficult to live in close proximity to the Chinese without being affected by how encompassing and far-reaching the culture is. This happens to Dimple, too. Her connection with Mr Lee becomes familial, and one of the two defining relationships of her life.

The book subverts many of the conventions of writing. Was this deliberately iconoclastic, and was the experience exhilarating or terrifying, or both? When did you know that your approach was working?

It wasn’t deliberately iconoclastic; it was deliberately literary. The literary novel has a long tradition of formal innovation. But I don’t think I did anything new. I allowed myself to approximate other kinds of literary or artistic endeavour: the poem, the song, the proverb, the list, the line drawing, a description of an imaginary book or movie. I’m often full of doubt; but there was a moment early on when I knew the story was worth following as far as it led. It was after I wrote the chapter titled ‘A Walk on Shuklaji Street’ that I felt I’d opened an arterial vein. The poet says poems are never finished; they are abandoned. I think that may be true of a certain kind of novel as well.

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Martin Alexander

You’re a poet, so it’s not surprising that Narcopolis is full of poetry. That’s probably inevitable, but how did you come to make that transition from short-form work to something so huge and sprawling?

I’ve always written prose. It’s just that I didn’t have the ambition or the discipline or the resources to finish a long-form piece. Every time I’d attempted a novel I’d given up at some point, frustrated by how slender and unsuccessful my efforts had been. In 2004 I gave up drugs and regular employment and became a full-time writer; I ran out of excuses.

Do you think poets bring a special quality to the novel?

There is a long list of poets who turned to prose – for example, Roberto Bolaño, Denis Johnson, V. S. Naipaul, Michael Ondaatje. Of course, Naipaul may not agree with that description, but he did write poems very early in his career. I suppose the discipline of poetry teaches you economy if not parsimony, and the power of compression, and it shows you the portmanteau possibility of words.

Narcopolis seems to dissect the politics of Indian society. Do you see it as a political work?

I am always disappointed when people refer to Narcopolis as a drug novel.

The drugs are a frame, or a hook on which to hang a tale about Indian society.

How did people in India respond to the novel’s depiction of the country and its cultures and people?

With a notable lack of enthusiasm.

Few if any Indian reviewers would have foreseen the Man Booker nomination and I understand that the Indian publishers you submitted it to rejected the manuscript. Has it been more warmly – or heatedly – received since then? What does that say about the literary establishment in India?

There has been an about-turn in the tone of the Indian media after the favourable reviews from the West. It tells us that India’s literary establishment – though that may be a misnomer, let’s call it the world of Indian book journalism – is as colonial as it has ever been: we still need white men to tell us what is worthwhile about our own culture.

43

Interview: Jeet Thayil

You’ve reached a sudden prominence through the Man Booker shortlist, though you were sceptical of your chances when we last spoke. On the day of the announcement, what were your thoughts on the whole experience, and on the judges’ final choice?

Just another day at the office. I’m glad to get back to real life and real work, though it was an interesting carousel while it lasted.

You told me that you’d brought the draft of your new novel with you to Hong Kong. Can you tell us a little about it? Is it related in any way to Narcopolis?

I’m working on a novel with the working title of The Book of Chocolate Saints. Chocolate here is skin colour, not a food group. The central character is Newton Xavier, who appears for a chapter in Narcopolis, though it is a long chapter and he owns it and people have asked why he disappears; well, it is this book that he disappears into.

The word ‘narcopolis’ inevitably resonates in the reader with the unspoken echo of ‘necropolis’. How much is your novel a city of the dead, and how do the two words resonate for you?

For me, Narcopolis is a city of the dead and a city of intoxication. I thought it was an apt title because under it, like a secret title, is the word ‘necropolis’; the book exists, then, as a kind of memorial on which certain names are carved in stone.

44

How a Maoist Is Made Shashi Warrier

T

he strike came without warning, early in the new day, when the policemen were off guard in their trucks and on the way to their camp after a hard night’s work. First came the twin explosions, then the loud, irregular rattle of small-arms fire, the stench of burning flesh and rubber and diesel, and piteous calls for help from those in pain. Vastly outnumbered and outgunned, the police fought back as best they could, but more than seventy of them died that morning.

That was April 2010 in Dantewada, a part of Orissa where Maoists were on the prowl, and where the police should have been on the alert. But they didn’t deserve to die like this, far from their homes and families, shot to death soon after dawn, victims of an uncommon degree of barbarity.

A little context. Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh acknowledged in 2006 that India’s biggest security problem was not the Pakistani-sponsored secessionist militants in Kashmir, or other secessionists in the north-east, but the armed Maoist groups spread out over large parts of the country.

They had common cause, effective recruitment and training programmes, and a wide network of supporters. The government feared them so much that it applied the anti-sedition laws against people they suspected might be, well, non-violent sympathisers, including Dr Binayak Sen, who has been much in the news over his campaign to abolish the crime of sedition.

The reason is clear: the Maoist groups – there are several of them, with slightly differing objectives and names, all with armed wings – and their sympathisers, represent the enemy within.

45

How a Maoist Is Made

In 2009 and after some years of thought, Dr Singh’s government began what they called the Integrated Action Programme (IAP) to drive the Maoists out of the areas they operated in; or in the language of the administration, the districts they ‘infested’. The IAP had two prongs: one, investing in development in Maoist-dominated areas and offering the population work and infrastructure, thus enabling them to join the mainstream; and the other, equipping law enforcement to deal with guerrilla warfare in the forests.

The Dantewada attack came the year after, and seemed to provide proof that the programme wasn’t working. Afterwards, of course, there was a lull in attacks, but it’s not clear whether this was a strategic retreat, or because Maoist ranks were becoming depleted.

The rationale behind the IAP – that grinding poverty leads to disgruntlement, thence to Maoism or other forms of armed protest – is backed by considerable evidence. The worst affected areas in the country are, by the usual indicators of human development – per capita income, literacy and energy use, for instance – its poorest. By other indicators though – forests, mineral resources and natural wealth – they happen to be among its richest.

But the IAP fails to address some simple questions. How did these areas come to suffer such neglect? Why are the most blessed areas of this country home to its poorest people?

There are no simple answers, but a significant factor is this: amidst the ignorance and poverty of the population, it’s easy for the most venal and least accountable of politicians and bureaucrats to thrive, usually in the company of equally venal businessmen and contractors. Imagine what it must have been in the years before cable TV and 24/7 news channels, before the Internet reached out so far, before all the activist groups sprouted, before the Right to Information Act. Consider Prasad (a pseudonym), a plumber settled in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, and originally from Narayanpatna, Orissa. Around his home in Orissa were forests of the mahua tree: its fruit provides the juice from which the local liquor of the same name is made. His parents were tribals and bonded labourers, uprooted from their home by the police some decades ago, part of a group evicted to make way for a small distillery. They lost their homes and livelihoods and got nothing in return; they also lost their pride, and didn’t last long without it. Prasad, however, survived, as did his brother, and they were brought up by a relative in another tribal village not far away.

46

Shashi Warrier

At fourteen, Prasad moved to the city, got himself apprenticed to a plumber and worked twelve-hour days for a meagre livelihood. His brother stayed in the forests. Prasad did well at his trade, began to prosper in a small way, moved to another state a thousand miles away, learned the local language, and hopes to marry soon. His brother, whom he hasn’t seen for some years, writes occasionally: a postcard saying he is well, with no return address. The one time his brother visited Prasad, he came unannounced, stayed a few hours and left, telling Prasad that he was well and was with close friends, but asking him not to tell anyone of his visit. He was thin and hungry, his clothes were none too clean, his hair hadn’t been oiled for years and his straggly moustache and beard made him look ancient. When Prasad cooked him a meal, he ate as if he hadn’t seen that kind of food for a long, long time. When Prasad insisted on embracing the younger man, he felt a knife in his brother’s pocket.

Prasad is afraid to ask the question any man would like to ask a muchloved younger brother: ‘What do you do now?’ He is afraid the answer will be: ‘I am a rebel, and the police are searching for me. If they find me, they will put me in prison.’ You can hear the pain in his voice when he speaks of his younger brother; you hear him mourn the little boy with whom he’d walked hand-in-hand all day long to get to an uncle’s house in a faraway village when there was nowhere else to go.

Ask Prasad why his parents hadn’t complained to the courts in the first place, or to someone in the government, and he laughs. It was the police, working for government officials, who in turn were paid off by the contractors, who threw them out of their homes. The police wouldn’t file a First Information Report, the initial document required for reporting a crime. A legal battle was beyond the resources of the evicted families; they had to work all day simply to put food on the table. Going to the courts or the higher authorities would have meant starvation, for the bureaucracy does not understand hunger, or its urgency. Even so, his illiterate father had tried all that and died in penury, cheated by touts, derided by the authorities, shamed beyond tolerance.

Ask him what he feels for the government and Prasad laughs again.

‘What use is the government?’ he asks. ‘Some years ago, in Koraput, near Narayanpatna, they jailed a blind man in his forties for two years on charges of being a Maoist. How can you trust a system that stupid?’

47

How a Maoist Is Made

Ask him if he sympathises with the Maoists in his hometown and he replies evasively: ‘What are they doing? What will more killing do?’ He pauses. ‘They are taking revenge, but revenge is useless. Revenge doesn’t make you free.’ He, too, has felt the urge for revenge, but he’s moved beyond it. You can sense, deep within him, the worm of envy for his brother who at least is trying to avenge the wrongs done to their parents.

He knows what his brother must have been through. He knows what it takes to be a member of the People’s Liberation Guerrilla Army (PLGA), the armed wing of the (Maoist) Communist Party of India. It requires three kinds of proof of commitment.

First, you have to give up your past: your family, your friends, your job or your education – the Maoists try to catch the young – and anything else that might tie you to society. The more you give up, the deeper your commitment: if you’re from a wealthy upper caste family and have dropped out of medical school to join the revolution, you’re thought much more committed than if you’re from a poor, lower caste family and had to drop out of school at fourteen to work twelve hours a day in the fields.

Second, you have to go through a sort of trial by ordeal, in which you inflict serious, ritual pain on yourself. Recanted Maoists talk of cutting off a finger, or holding camphor in the palm of the hand and setting it alight. The ability to withstand pain is essential to a life in the forests, perpetually on the run from the paramilitary, to carrying your life in a fifteen-kilo bundle on your back, when relaxing over a hot meal is a rarity, and suspicion a way of life.

Third, you have to burn your bridges, usually by participating in a violent crime. You have to be part of a group that does a bit of extortion, armed robbery or even, on rare occasions, commits a murder. For most, this would mark the point of no return.

This third tie is less binding than it used to be. Many state governments have announced that Maoists returning to society will be rehabilitated, not punished. Life may not be as good as it would have been if you hadn’t crossed over in the first place; there’s no question of going back to medical school.

But at least you don’t go to prison, and you might get a loan or a bit of land to ensure a more conventional future. Even so, it remains a tie.

Once you prove yourself, you become part of the PLGA organization, which becomes your family, your home and your country. Your life belongs to the PLGA. And of course, everyone who isn’t with you is against you.

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Shashi Warrier

‘I can’t live like that,’ Prasad says. ‘I can’t live hating everyone who doesn’t agree with me.’ Few can. Ninety-nine survivors out of a hundred want to get on with their lives. Most of them drift to cities where, uneducated and unable to join the mainstream, they do menial work or drift into petty crime.

About the time Dr Singh confessed that the Maoists were a bigger threat than the Kashmiri separatists, one of the country’s many intelligence agencies estimated that the PLGA and its associates numbered perhaps 20,000, with sympathisers multiplying that number many times. It’s impossible to calculate the atrocities that created those 20,000 Maoist rebels. It’s also impossible to find those responsible.

What might be possible, though, is to rehabilitate the victims, offering them some measure of recompense for their losses, thus preventing retaliatory barbarity in the future. But the consequences of treating people shoddily emerge years, or decades, into the future – too far ahead to concern the political leadership, whose vision never stretches beyond the next election.

Dr Singh’s IAP, for all the development money it pumps into Maoist ‘infested’ areas, does nothing towards such rehabilitation. Dr Singh’s government doesn’t even acknowledge the reasons for the ‘infestation’ in the first place. Instead, urged on by companies like Vedanta and POSCO, it encourages the continuing displacement and exploitation of some of the oldest tribal communities in the country.

It may also be that the luxury of choice no longer exists. With a billionand-a-quarter people to feed, and with roughly a quarter of those people going to bed hungry every day, it’s increasingly clear that there’s little space in India for the preservation of forests and old ways of life. Malthus saw it coming back in 1798. The question is, why don’t we?

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Gopilal Acharya

When They Fought for Free-doom!

Darkness is here again!

Let us end this cloak-and-dagger talk.

“Yes, they were shot point-blank.”

Embers are red. Summer was bad.

We grew some maize.

Let’s quickly finish our meal (A roasted corn cob and a bowl of thin black tea.)

Silence. Darkness.

We should not be talking now.

Our walls grow ears in the dark.

Tonight is unbelievably silent except for the buzzing mosquitoes – Bloody opportunists! – waiting for a killing suck.

Darkness brought them as it brings our enemies to our fields and the silence shall not last for long.

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Gopilal Acharya

What shall we do?

Our soil is failing us our spirit is turning brittle.

It was no good. Those speeches made and the meetings attended.

Those cutlasses sharpened and the sound and the fury raised.

We believed we were fighting for a cause.

All bastions of freedom How do you say that? Free-doom?

It is all over now.

We had our free-doom – Absolutely free when we were happily dispossessed, disowned.

Tonight we live in silence and obedience.

We have stopped talking.

We have learnt to live and partly live.

There is a curfew tonight.

I look through the peephole into the darkness.

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Poetry

Those black guards with their guns slung over their shoulders are working our fields with bullets.

This night, sung by mosquitoes, drummed by bullets – do I hear the thunder?

It’s going to rain again.

Embers are long dead.

The night is soot-dark, celebrated by mosquitoes gunshots and the rain.

Oh Lord! Have mercy on all who shall appear to thee tonight, for tomorrow we shall attend their funeral.

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Pakistan: A Culture of Corruption?

Farrukh Saleem

P

resident Asif Ali Zardari, the current president of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, is accused of having accumulated billions of dollars beyond his known sources of income. Likewise, Pakistan’s Prime Minister Raja Pervaiz Ashraf is widely known as ‘Raja Rental’ for his involvement in a multi-million dollar scheme to ‘hire’ temporary power plants to make up for power shortages while he was minister of energy. Pakistan’s Supreme Court has ordered the National Accountability Bureau to investigate Ashraf ’s personal financial gain from the deals.

Makhdoom Shahabuddin, now federal minister for the textile industry, is accused of approving the import of large quantities of ephedrine, a chemical used in the manufacture of methamphetamine, while he was minister of health, and of taking kickbacks from the transaction. The Anti-Narcotics Force has frozen twenty-two of his bank accounts and he is currently on bail awaiting trial.

Down the food chain, Pakistani milkmen routinely adulterate their milk with detergents, urea, boric acid, starch, hypochlorite and salts. In a recent national survey on the perception of corruption, our land revenue officers were ranked as the most corrupt, followed by the police, taxation department, the judiciary and the electricity distribution sector. The military and education sectors came in as the least corrupt, in ninth and tenth places.

In Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index (CPI), why is Pakistan at number 134 out of 182 countries? The group’s Pakistan 53

Pakistan: A Culture of Corruption?

branch claims that, according to its surveys, ‘49 per cent of Pakistanis have paid a bribe to an official in the government or the private sector during the last twelve months’.

Why is it that Pakistani leaders behave as they do? Why is it that our milkmen behave as they do? Why is it that milkmen – or leaders – in New Zealand, Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Canada – all in the top ten in the CPI – behave differently?

Do we really have a culture of corruption?

This is a question for ethonomics, a field of inquiry that studies the actual prioritization of values within a particular value system. Ronald Inglehart, a political scientist at the University of Michigan and the director of the World Values Survey, along with Christian Welzel, professor of political culture research at the Leuphana University of Lüneburg, jointly developed the Inglehart-Welzel Cultural Map of the World, which sheds light on the answers to this question.

The map divides countries according to two sets of criteria: traditional versus secular or rational values, and survival versus self-expression values.

Pakistan, Bangladesh, Algeria, Tanzania, Zimbabwe and Nigeria fall into the traditional and survival categories – and rate in the bottom half of countries on the CPI. Traditional communities engender respect for religion, deference to authority and strong family ties. They also inculcate high levels of national pride. In survival communities, the state fails to provide physical and economic security, and its citizens may lack basics like food, shelter and clothing.

In contrast, the map groups countries such as Sweden, Norway, Denmark, New Zealand and Canada into the secular or rational and selfexpression categories. Secular communities do not emphasize religion, family or authority. Self-expression communities have the luxury of taking physical and economic survival for granted. They seek a high quality of life and participation in decision-making, and display tolerance for diversity and concern for environmental protection.

The variation in the perception of corruption between these two types of communities can be explained, according to Wayne Sandholtz and Rein Taagepera of the University of California, by cultural factors. They conclude that ‘a strong survival orientation contributes to higher levels of corruption’. To be sure, we Pakistanis are still a survival-oriented society, 54

Farrukh Saleem

more concerned with physical and economic security than with issues relating to morality.

Pakistan’s political structure of patronage breeds and sustains corruption.

Of the 84.4 million registered voters, around 60 million live in rural areas, where the state has little reach. The state does not protect voters’ lives or property, and does not provide personal or economic security. The state does not provide any benefits to citizens who live in rural Pakistan. In fact, most rural Pakistanis view the state’s coercive apparatus, both the police and the judiciary, as hostile entities.

These 60 million rural citizens seek protection of life, limb and property.

They would like to have economic security. The electorate will vote for politicians who may provide – or promise to provide – these things. As for matters of corruption, morality and the character of political candidates, questions about Supreme Court decisions and drone attacks by the CIA – all of these come much further down the list of priorities for the rural population.

In this type of democracy, who wins elections? It is the ‘machine politician’– a candidate who can provide the 60 million voters with what the state has failed to provide: the hope of physical and economic security.

This candidate represents the meeting point of supply and demand in Pakistan’s democratic system.

The term ‘machine politics’ was coined by Mughees Ahmed in his book, Social System Influences Political System. His principal argument involves a ‘class system of machine politics’ that has nothing to do with national issues or even local issues. Instead, it is based on a patron-client relationship between the politician and the voter. Machine politics is all about getting elected, capturing state resources and redistributing them through a system of patronage.

In the online journal Fair Observer, contributor D. Morgan described Pakistan’s machine politics: National and regional power brokers, usually in the form of the large political parties, award favours – cash, jobs and influence – to their supporters in return for votes. This means that most of the money that should be going into education, renewing decrepit infrastructure . . . and invested in electricity generation is actually wasted through patronage. While this allows the large parties to create the illusion 55

Pakistan: A Culture of Corruption?

of popular support in the short term, it beggars the country over the longer term. Supporters and functionaries of the PPP or the PML-N, the two largest parties, are able to amass personal fortunes . . . for themselves and their relatives, while the country as a whole goes to hell in a handcart.

The other two major sources of corruption are the entrenched legal and economic sectors. The state regularly fails to dispense justice in a timely manner and the patwari – the local government officer who maintains records of land ownership – and the police constable are the beneficiaries. Land records are hand-written and the courts, where three out of four cases pertain to land disputes, are run by overburdened judges. Cases can be likened to Charles Dickens’s ‘Jarndyce and Jarndyce’, with verdicts and final judgments often made years later, heard only by subsequent generations of the family who made the original claim. To avoid this prolonged, costly and tedious process, it is more practical and efficient to purchase a resolution from the land officer, who can simply change the record in his notebook. If anyone objects, a constable or two can be hired to enforce the decision.

On top of all that, crony capitalism and rent-seeking have infested Pakistan’s industrial and banking sectors. We have a cement cartel, a sugar cartel, a steel cartel, a ‘rental power’ cartel, a liquefied petroleum gas cartel and a banking cartel, whereby politicians and their cronies accumulate profits without any productive contribution to society. They simply manipulate the political environment to enable economic activity in their area of interest.

James Robinson and Daron Acemoglu explain in the preface to their book Why Nations Fail that: Egypt is poor precisely because it has been ruled by a narrow elite that have organized society for their own benefit at the expense of the vast mass of people. Political power has been narrowly concentrated and has been used to create great wealth for those who possess it, such as the $70 billion fortune apparently accumulated by ex-president Mubarak. The losers have been the Egyptian people, as they only too well understand.

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Farrukh Saleem

This description could aptly be applied to Pakistan. Our elite loot our people, and our laws protect the looters.

In Pakistan we indulge in corruption, but at the same time we discuss it. At present, our survival values may trump values of self-expression, but the two co-exist nonetheless. Therefore there is hope. Inglehart, through his World Values Survey, also studied intergenerational variance of values in advanced industrial societies, concluding that their value systems underwent drastic changes over time.

Corruption is endemic in Pakistan now, but its more potent enemies – popular demand for government transparency, rule of law, an investigative uncensored media and freedom of information – are now emerging to challenge the status quo. In a key victory in March 2012 the media managed to extract a commitment from President Zardari to uphold freedom of information. And while the state of Pakistan is bent upon keeping transparency at bay, societal pressures are bent upon establishing the rule of law.

Times change, values change, people change. Perhaps it will be this generation rather than the next that will see a change for the good, and come to expect accountability, rather than merely hope for it.

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Sivakami Velliangiri

Silent Cooking and Noisy Munching When I came to my husband’s hometown I saw for the first time old women with gagged mouths cooking for the gods, in silence.

Their breath did not pollute the offerings, nor their spittle desecrate the dishes only their arms swayed and perhaps their eyeballs.

I thought how unlike the witches of Macbeth they looked, for these women moved about with grace their mind fine tuned to the Dhivya Prasadam.

Not any woman can cook for the gods.

One must be chaste and pure, like unadulterated ghee boil like jaggery and rise like milk. In short, it takes thirty years to graduate.

So for thirty years I have done my silent cooking made manna with words and said simply in my heart of hearts, eat god eat line by line, crunchy words, palatable punctuations tangy rhythms moulded with meaning, and thoughts weaned in silence but spoken as poems.

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Sivakami Velliangiri

Chattai The first time grandma wore a blouse, she felt she had tarnished her brown skin.

All the men folk knew of the thin bare shoulders.

She ran to the temple and confessed that she had merely obeyed the Maharani’s orders.

Sure she had lost her native natural gloss when she carried rice pots on her head (the anthapura boasted a female barber who shaved off armpits and whatever).

The Maharani bade her women wear blouses even to the temple. What my grandma missed was the breeze on her skin. What she acquired was a certain coy feeling and a sense of hiding which was akin to sin.

The anthapura was the harem of an Indian palace.

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Poetry

What She Said to Her Girlfriend Though my lord has given me a palace in every city to match the seasonal mood with interiors like an Inside Outside magazine and furniture that speaks of star war design I wish he had also thought of a poison apple tree at the back door of the house where I could whisper and confess to it all he had done to me the previous night.

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Eyes of Karma Tew Bunnag

T

he first drops that hit the corrugated iron roof sounded like fat, lazy splashes, but soon they were pelting down as furious as bullets. Phra Sumon sat cross-legged on the floor of the little hut with eyes closed – a picture of monastic stillness that contrasted with the watery onslaught. But his mind was far from still, and the beads of sweat forming on his forehead slid down the contours of his angular features and dropped from his chin onto the orange robe that cloaked his brown, athletic body. In the insistent beat of the downpour he kept hearing a mantra that dragged him back, yet again, into the wreckage of his past.

An hour earlier, before the storm clouds had begun to release their heavy load, Phra Sumon had made his way in the blue light of dawn down the narrow path to the main hall of the temple. There was no need to go on the alms round that morning as an important lady from Bangkok was coming to make merit at the temple, and the abbot had chosen Phra Sumon to be one of the monks to whom she would offer food and gifts.

When he entered by the side door he saw that the benefactor was already seated in front of the altar with several companions: two females and one male. They had their backs to him and he barely glanced at them, but just before climbing onto the teak dais where the monks sat he noticed that the man in the group had turned to look at him.

Phra Sumon, being the most junior monk, took a position furthest from the statue of Buddha. It was the first time the abbot had asked him to attend such a ceremony and he was pleased to be included. They rarely had visitors from the outside, certainly not from as far away as Bangkok. Why would 61

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anyone think of coming to such a remote temple when there were all the other fancy ones near the capital?

During the chanting Phra Sumon held the ceremonial fan in front of his face to screen the guests from his vision while he intoned the familiar stanzas. It was when he put it down beside him that he felt her eyes: a physical sensation, like a hot stab against his cheek. He stopped himself from looking up. The abbot had joked that with his good looks he was bound to attract attention and therefore it was even more important for him to adhere to the precepts. Phra Sumon was determined to maintain his discipline. But when, after serving the others, the lady was sliding the tray of food towards him he could no longer control himself. His gaze drifted up to meet that of the merit maker from Bangkok, and in that instant he almost gasped out loud.

She raised her palms together in reverence before moving back soundlessly to her seat. He kept his eyes firmly down as he ate. After the meal she had knelt in front of him once more to make the offerings and before he could check himself he looked up again. This time there was an intense exchange between them. Her dark eyes widened and the corners softened into an expression of utter sadness.

Minutes later he slipped off the dais and went out through the side door.

As he took the path up the slope, he caught sight of a large white van parked by the outer wall of the temple compound, and next to it a blue Mercedes limousine. Three men were standing around chatting and smoking.

By the time he was back in his hut he was so agitated he could hardly sit down. A couple of exchanged glances with a beautiful woman was all it had taken to shatter the peace he had known in recent months. It was not just her beauty. There was no doubt in his mind that this was she, the very person who had been the cause of his becoming a monk in this ghostforsaken temple near the Burmese border.

Throughout the morning, as the rain drummed down, the memories came rushing back as they had done in the first months, like a torrent breaking through a fragile sluice gate, and the images floated up like detritus freed from the slimy bottom of a dark canal.

‘So few young people are ordained these days. Either you’ve the makings of a saint or you’ve done something bad. Or both. Anyway, karma has brought you here . . .’ These were the abbot’s words of admonition to Sumon and 62

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the others who had been ordained with him that afternoon. In his talk the abbot kept emphasizing that karma meant action and its consequences. It was not, as was popularly believed, fate or destiny preordained by some external force. He said that karma from their former lives would return to them in their meditations, in dreams, in hallucinations, and that the proper way to cleanse their past was through prayer, meditation and study.

Phra Sumon, as he was now called after his ordination, did not catch the finer points but he could not deny that the abbot was correct in pointing out that these visitations were there as a result of their own actions, no one else’s. At least this was true in his case.

‘You stupid fucker! You may be lucky. But I’m a dead man.’ These were Pi Pok’s last words to him, crackling over the mobile as he and Ai Kay, Pi Pok’s brother, raced through Pattaya, looking for a way out of the mess that he, Sumon, had created for the three of them. Four days later he had arrived at the temple and asked to be ordained. Going there had been a snap decision.

He had heard of the place from a fellow soldier and somehow it had stuck in his mind. He could think of nowhere else to hide.

In those first months he had slipped into the timeless stream of monastic life with the gratitude and zeal of someone who had escaped the inevitable.

Here he was anonymous. No one could touch him.

The abbot was right. Events that had been locked in the far recesses of his mind began to re-emerge. As the days and nights stretched out in silence, punctuated by the shrill call of birds from the jungle covering the surrounding mountains, images, sounds, smells and voices from the past returned in no particular order, with a startling vividness. While sweeping the leaves in the yard, an elusive sensation might transport him back to a specific moment of his childhood so that suddenly he was a fourteen-yearold boxer, kicking and punching the bag, and driven by dreams of being a champion. Another time he was a small boy with spindly legs running along a dusty track, willing a kite to lift itself into the air. One evening as he lay on his thin mattress waiting for sleep, he could see his mother on her deathbed and feel her bony fingers on his wrist. She opened her bloodshot eyes and stared, her look boring into him, and he sat up in shock and realized that he had not properly registered her death.

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Once a month he had a personal interview with the abbot. In their second meeting Phra Sumon spoke about what was happening to him.

‘Let it all go. If someone’s done you harm, forgive them, and forgive yourself the wrong you’ve done.’ This was the abbot’s terse advice before sending him back to his hut.

He found it easy to forgive and let go of the harm done to him: his drunken father who had used the belt on him so many times, the vicious trainer in the gym by the canal, the competitors who’d beaten him to a pulp in the ring, the members of a rival gang who’d broken his arm with an iron bar, the brutal sergeants during his military service. He felt no residue of bitterness towards any of them.

But it was hard to forgive himself. Up till then he had never spent time reflecting on his actions or justifying them. He had never suffered any remorse. It was not part of his makeup or the culture of casual violence that he had known. Before his military call-up he’d belonged to a gang who made their beer money running drugs for the dealers, going from the warehouses in the port area up to the fancy bars and expensive nightclubs. If some rich kid died from an overdose it was hardly their fault. Necessity and the thrill of the chase dictated their actions. This was how it was in the slums. There were girls he had known who thought nothing of selling their flesh to be able to buy what they craved. Nobody judged them for this.

However, in the unrelenting solitude that now enveloped him, certain acts that he had performed began to emerge from the shadows and to confront him like the fierce accusations of a wounded victim.

With no escape or diversion and so much time to ponder the pain he had inflicted, Phra Sumon felt ashamed for the things he had done. He used the practices given him by the abbot to come to terms with the misdeeds and to purify his heart. But there was one incident, from just before he joined the army, that kept resurfacing, like a stain that could not be washed away by any amount of prayer or meditation; the man coming down from Yaba who’d chased them through the market with a machete and whom he had tripped and then kicked in the head, and whose ribs he had stamped on till the man was screaming in pain. They learned later that he had died, probably from internal injuries. At the time his companions had praised him for his toughness and he had been buoyed by their admiration. But now as he came face to face with the karma of having 64

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caused someone’s death, the word shame barely described the dark feelings that overcame him.

The next interview took place at the end of the cold season. Almost a year had passed since his arrival and he had developed a friendly relationship with the abbot. He came right out and asked, ‘Does bad karma get cancelled out by not committing another bad act?’

The abbot looked at him quizzically for a long moment; it seemed he was peering into the depths of the young man’s heart. Then he laughed. ‘What is it that you’ve done and not done? Tell me.’

Phra Sumon wanted to. He had come to trust the old man. Instead, he merely said, ‘I was only wondering if it worked like that.’

The abbot laughed again. ‘Only you can know,’ he said.

Three years earlier, as he’d turned twenty-four, Sumon had left the army with nowhere to live, no job and no money. His father was dead and his uncle no longer willing to share the little shack by the railway tracks. Sumon did not want to go back to the old neighbourhood. The gang had dispersed – some were in jail – and he wanted a fresh start. He had made friends with Ai Kay; from his first day in the military till his last, Sumon had been his protector. So it was natural that he should accept an offer from Ai Kay’s elder brother, Pi Pok, to work in his garage. When they were on leave Ai Kay had taken Sumon home and Pi Pok had taken an instant liking to him. They had both been boxers in their youth and shared the same unrealized dreams of becoming champions.

Sumon had learned how to fix engines when he was in the army so the work was no problem. He had a room above the garage, which was in a small scruffy lane in the Laadprao district of Bangkok. Ai Kay and Pi Pok lived next door.

It did not take Sumon long to figure out that mending cars was not the only business in Pi Pok’s garage. For a start there was not much mechanical work to be done. Taxis and pickups came in to be fixed or have their tyres changed. The earnings were meagre, yet Pi Pok dressed like a pimp and wore heavy gold rings. The two-storey house the brothers lived in was nothing to look at from the outside, but walking into it was like entering a shopping mall piled high with luxury goods: there were sound systems, touch-screen TVs, computers and a kitchen fitted out with the latest appliances.

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Sumon asked no questions. He was grateful to have a roof over his head and a salary. But he kept his eyes open. He watched discreetly as various well-dressed men drove up in their flashy cars and were taken by Pi Pok through to his office. He was convinced that Pi Pok was a drug dealer but it did not bother him.

From the beginning the brothers treated him with ease and generosity.

This, Sumon guessed, was because of the way he had helped Ai Kay during their time in the military. They bought him clothes and a motorbike to get around on. They liked to eat well, and would take him along whenever they went out to a restaurant. They’d also take him to the high-class massage parlours that lined Rachadapisek, and pay for his pleasure. One evening, as they were playing pool, Pi Pok said, ‘Hey, Mon, you’ve been with us a while now and you’re not stupid. Do you want to know what we really do?’

Sumon, surprised by Pi Pok’s directness, shrugged in reply. Later that same evening Pi Pok showed him the arsenal of weapons in the storeroom and told him of his work as a professional hit man. Sumon was not shocked.

He was glad the brothers liked him enough to take him into their confidence.

After that, they took him along to a forest near Lopburi for target practice.

On these trips Pi Pok talked about his work in tones that could have been applied to any other business. He spoke of how he had landed his first job as a policeman, and of the way his career had progressed from then on.

One evening he came to Sumon’s room and told him there could be jobs for him if he wanted them. He explained that he himself wanted to stick to the important hits, but that he needed an assistant to handle the rest.

‘Ai Kay hasn’t got it in him. He hasn’t the calm or the discipline. You have. But there’s no going back. Remember that. And if you’re good you’ll have your own garage one day. Like me.’ He laughed.

Sumon lost no sleep over it. The next day he announced that he was in.

Pi Pok looked pleased. ‘That’s great. But be patient. I’ll give you a gig soon.’

One afternoon two weeks later he saw Pi Pok pacing and talking on his mobile phone. When he had finished he walked over to Sumon and rolled his eyes.

‘Those rich motherfuckers think they can get anything done whenever they please, with no decent warning. Well, they can think again.’

Towards evening a BMW drew up and parked outside the garage. Sumon caught a brief glimpse of the passenger, a tall man with thick, straight grey 66

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hair. He was wearing a dark, slim-fitting suit. Pi Pok greeted him and as usual escorted the man to the office. After the meeting was over and the man had driven off, Pi Pok said, ‘They won’t take no for an answer. I’ll have to do it.’

The garage was closed for the following two days and nights while the three of them went to work respraying a small van, tuning its engine applying labels and stickers on the side until finally it looked like a specialdelivery vehicle belonging to a Japanese company. On the third morning Pi Pok went out and returned with a bag that contained starched, light blue company uniforms with matching baseball caps complete with their company logo. Later that day, he and Ai Kay drove off in the pickup to check out the route and the location.

The job was straightforward enough. A well-known financier wanted his young ex-wife and her lover dead. The lover was a society figure, and the exwife a minor royal, a Khunying. Not that the brothers cared about that. But it was an important job and Pi Pok had said he would do it himself.

‘Don’t worry,’ he added, encouragingly. ‘Your time will come.’

But the night before the hit was to take place disaster struck. A motorbike crashed into the side of Pi Pok’s car as he was driving back from picking up take-away pizzas. His hand was injured and, once it had been bandaged, he could barely bend his trigger finger. But the job could not be postponed.

After they’d discussed it Pi Pok said, ‘You’ve got to do it, Mon. There’s no choice.’

He went through the details until he was sure Sumon had them clear in his mind’s eye. There were photos, which showed a middle-aged man with well-fed good looks and a woman whose sad expression did not detract from her beauty. The location was a discreet resort just outside Pattaya where the lovers had booked a bungalow on the beach. Pi Pok then showed Sumon how to attach the silencer to the weapon he had chosen for him.

‘Be cool. Remember what they used to tell us in the ring. Don’t make eye contact,’ he said with a wink as they parted that morning.

The bored guard at the entrance barely examined their false IDs before raising the barrier. The beach shimmered in the midday heat, and beyond the shoreline the sunlight danced on the surface of the green sea. Ai Kay parked facing the exit. There were three other vehicles in the far corner of the compound. As Sumon got out he held the parcel against his midriff 67

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with his left hand and the weapon behind it with his right just as they had rehearsed. Then he walked unhurriedly down the path towards the bungalow. There was no one around. He could smell the mix of salt and seaweed in the air. He felt calm and detached. As he approached the door of the bungalow, he bent and put the parcel down on the path. To his surprise he saw that the door was slightly open, invitingly.

The plan had been to shoot the person who answered the knock and proceed inside. Now he was uncertain. He nudged the door very gently with his right foot and stood tensed, ready to fire. The room was empty. An oldfashioned fan was swirling in the middle of the ceiling. He noted a small kitchen area to his right, a sliding window immediately ahead with smoky glass looking out to the sea. He then heard a woman’s voice, singing. He took three careful paces forward. To his left the room opened to a bedroom.

In the corner by the wall there was a door, with light shining through it – natural daylight that slanted onto the pillows of the bed. He entered this space and heard the woman’s voice again, clearer now, and caught the words of a love song. Suddenly the light was blocked and a naked woman appeared.

She was slender and her skin was the shade of the sand. Her hair was wet and slicked back. Water glistened on her firm high breasts, her dark nipples, and the thick triangle of curls below. As soon as their eyes met she pulled up the towel she was holding to cover her nakedness.

What Phra Sumon wanted to tell the abbot was that it was not a conscious choice. His finger was on the trigger ready to pull. But something prevented him from taking the final action. It was the way she looked at him. There was no fear, only what struck him to be a deep, resigned sadness.

They stood there like statues separated by the length of the bed, connected through their eyes. He suddenly felt dizzy and unsettled from the emotions rising in his chest. He turned and ran.

They’d driven off in silence. It was when they reached the seafront in Pattaya that the mobile buzzed. As he listened, Ai Kay kept turning to him with the expression of a haunted man. Sumon knew it was Pi Pok on the other end. He was surprised how fast bad news travelled. Ai Kay handed the phone over to him.

Pi Pok was shouting. ‘Do you realize what you’ve done?’ He had explained that there was no margin for error. ‘If you fuck up you can kiss your life goodbye. No one can afford to be associated with you. Understand?’

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

He did not recount any of this to the abbot. But from the day of that interview Phra Sumon felt as if a weight he’d been carrying had been lifted from his back. The price was that the memory of the woman he knew only as Khunying, once released, began to fill him with a longing that kept him awake through the steamy nights. Her eyes haunted him and he ached to possess the naked body that floated towards him in the darkness. He would hear the love song she’d been singing as the wind blew through the bamboo thickets. His mind invented absurd scenarios in which the two of them would be together.

Gradually, worn out by the seasons, her ethereal presence faded and he was left with the imprint of a look he knew he would carry with him for ever: the look of a woman whose life he had spared; the look that would remind him of the karma he had not created – the absence of harm that would redeem him of his previous act of violence. During the following months he came to enjoy a calm he had never known in his short, dislocated life. He was grateful to be in the monastery under the guidance of the wise abbot, separated from the world of conflict and crime, cleansing his past karma with practice and service, devoting his life to the art of being peaceful.

Then came her visit to the temple.

The rain was subsiding. Through the small window he could see the sky beginning to clear. It was now late morning and he guessed that the party of visitors had left. The initial shock of seeing her again and the feelings this provoked had left him exhausted. But he was calmer now and beginning to consider the situation in a philosophical light. He concluded that it had to be the mysterious, unfathomable force of karma that had brought her precisely to that particular temple, in the middle of nowhere, so that their eyes could meet again. It had to be fate that had led Khunying back to him.

But this seemed to contradict what the abbot had been teaching. How was it possible to know for sure?

These thoughts were playing in his mind when he heard a hard tap on the door of his hut. He opened the door to see the abbot with an umbrella in his hand. The old man had never visited him before. He was surprised to see him, but delighted. He wanted to tell him everything now.

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They sat opposite one another and the abbot cleared his throat several times, nervously, before speaking. ‘I’ve come to like you. You’ve been a diligent student,’ he began. ‘So this is difficult for me. But these people who have come today . . . they’ve told me about your past, the things you’ve done.’

Here he paused. The muscles around his mouth were quivering slightly. He no longer looked like a wise teacher but someone frightened and under pressure. ‘It’s not about forgiveness. We’ve all done bad things. But sooner or later the police will be after you. We can’t protect you.’ He paused again.

‘It’s better that you go from here right away.’

Phra Sumon, confused by what he was hearing, was about to say, ‘But I have nowhere else.’

As though anticipating this, the abbot continued, ‘It’s all been arranged.

They will take you. Get your things ready as soon as you can. They are waiting.’ With that he stood up. At the door he turned and looked tenderly at Phra Sumon and nodded. Then he was gone.

Sumon had his back to the driver and the big man with the military haircut.

Opposite him on the other side of the plastic pull-out table sat the tall man with the grey hair who had been at the ceremony. Sumon now recalled, too late, that it had been this man who had arrived at the garage in a BMW to see Pi Pok. Leaning against his shoulder, apparently asleep, was a tough-looking younger man wearing dark glasses. They had been heading towards the border for some time. Through the tinted window he watched hilly countryside and villages he did not recognise pass by as in a dream, wondering where exactly they were taking him. He tried, with little success, to block out what grey hair was saying. The man, who had the formal manner of a schoolmaster, seemed unable to stop talking.

‘You should have got rid of him,’ he’d said, referring to Ai Kay, whom they had eventually traced to Khao Lak in the south. ‘Never leave any trace.

Didn’t your Pi Pok teach you that? It took us two years. But you see, we found you in the end. Everything would have been different if you’d done the job properly. I still don’t understand what happened. Did you fall for her? Was that it? She’s a real beauty, that’s for sure . . . Anyway, I work for her now. That’s the way it goes.’

At that point Sumon turned to look at him.

‘It’s a scenic spot that no one comes to,’ said grey hair as they climbed out.

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They had parked under some tamarind trees and were now making their way slowly on foot down a steep rough path that had been cut through the thick jungle. Sumon presumed they were heading towards the river, whose course they had been following for twenty minutes. When they slid open the doors of the van it occurred to him that this was the moment to make a run for it. But he knew it would be useless. They would track him down in the end. Maybe once they reached the river he would dive in, swim across to Burma and disappear into the jungle.

Through the thick foliage he glimpsed a stretch of muddy green water and for a split second the sight evoked a pleasant memory: he was on a thin wooden boat with his mother paddling close to the bank; she was picking watercress, humming as she did so.

As they descended, Sumon’s heart was thumping hard against his chest.

The driver was in front of him. The others were behind. The sweat that clung to his back felt cold as a sheet of ice. He was thankful that grey hair was too concentrated on manoeuvring himself down the path to keep up his banter. He wanted silence. He wanted to hold back the speed at which it was all happening. It seemed a blink between the birdcall at dawn that had awakened him, the meeting in the hall, the rainstorm, the abbot’s words and now, in the brightness of the early afternoon, these slippery steps that were leading to his execution.

The path ended abruptly at a clearing surrounded by tall trees stretching up to the sky. To the left there was a waterfall about thirty feet high that tumbled onto huge reddish brown rocks, some covered with moss. It created pools of clear water which caught the sunlight before flowing down to a wider expanse that broadened out into the distance. It was truly a place of beauty. They stood for a while admiring the scene, as if they were tourists.

The sound of the cascade made it hard for Sumon to catch the words being addressed to him.

Grey hair shouted, repeating, ‘Do you want to pray or something, venerable Luang Pi?’ He was surprised to be addressed as a monk. There was no irony in the man’s voice, just a note of weariness. Sumon stepped onto a flat rock and walked over to the edge. He saw his image in the clear green water below him.

But he hardly recognized himself. He had changed. He put his palms together at chest height. But before he could pray an absurd thought came into his 71

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head. It was about karma. He wanted to tell the abbot that he felt he now understood what it meant.

Three shots.

Sumon’s knees buckled and he fell slowly forward into the pool. He saw his reflection melt into the eyes that had led him to his death.

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Public Cremation Pashupatinath Temple, Kathmandu No promise of grey in your hair, now basted with damp hay. Your face fleshy, healthy.

You were young, rich. Hard to tell if you were good.

Nobody is crying. Where is your mother?

They, your cousins and uncles, dip your smooth feet in grey bilge, the smog-trickle of Bagmati River.

A crowd leans toward the death spectacle over a bridge that pigeons sail under.

Upriver, a woman washes her feet, carefully.

They wrap your dark penis in cloth. Each touches your hair. All part of the ceremony.

Nobody minds when a tourist cuts in to snap a pic of your face. Monkeys slide down a temple roof. Boys hock a loogie over the ghat.

Nepali pop shrieks on a cheap radio.

They find a note in your pocket and examine it.

They lay a torch at your throat. Ashes and butterflies issue forth. Sadhus – the dead ones, cohorts of ghosts, stoned gods, thinking as stones think – walk about as if lost. Your thighs are ash, your robe butterflies. Your toes boil.

That which was dark and alchemical turns to flies, butterflies, your thick hair smoke 73

Poetry

and your eyes butterflies. Your foot is yellow and your thigh bone surfaces. Hand open, palm charred. Your ribs are revealed.

When two monkeys begin humping in the ford, the crowd laughs loudly and without malice.

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Smaller and Smaller Circles F. H. Batacan

S

ome days I just can’t seem to focus. It’s hard to concentrate on what’s going on around me, on what I’m doing.

It’s been getting worse lately. Sometimes I feel overwhelmed from the moment I wake up in the morning, as though something bad is going to happen.

I can’t breathe right; my hands and feet are cold. My head hurts.

I feel like everything I do from sunup to sundown is just to keep this bad thing from happening. And every day I have to do more and more. It is exhausting.

Nothing that I do is ever enough.

I feel like I’m always being watched.

I hate being watched. 

Emil is running after his slum kids, panting in the noonday sun, loosening the high collar of his shirt as he goes.

The children urge him on, their voices shrill with agitation.

‘Not much further, Father Emil! Over here! This way, just a little more.’

His fear grows with each step. It tastes like rust, feels gritty like dirt in his mouth.

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The stench from the sea of garbage around them is overpowering. It rained last night and, now that the sun is out, the dump is steaming. Awful vapours rise lazily with the heat: wet paper and rot and excrement mixing in a soup of odours around them, above them.

You’d think by now you’d be used to this, he tells himself, but you’re not.

One never gets used to this.

At last they come to a small space about five feet in diameter, where the garbage has been cleared away to expose the older, compost-like layer beneath.

‘There!’ One of the children points.

Even before he looks in the direction indicated by the thin forefinger, he detects it, a new note of putrescence amongst all the putrescences mingling in the unwholesome air.

A small, thin, pale hand protrudes from beneath the garbage.

‘Mother of God,’ he mutters under his breath. He turns to the children.

‘Quick, get me a long stick.’

Three children immediately come forward, offering him the digging sticks they use to poke through the garbage. He takes one and walks grimly towards their discovery.

He is about to begin when suddenly a flash of concern stabs through the grey, slow-moving haze of fear. He stops, turns around and tells the children to leave.

‘No, Father Emil,’ they say, first one voice, then many voices. ‘We’ll stay with you,’ and in their faces a kind of quiet determination and sympathy so grown-up it startles him.

Secretly he is glad of the company. He does not repeat the order, and turns, face set, to the business at hand.

All right. Here we go then.

He begins to root through great clumps of garbage, and slowly the thing begins to emerge. He tries not to look at it yet – although he already knows what it is. He won’t look until he has more or less cleared away the refuse above and around it.

When he is done, the body of a child has emerged. It is a boy about eight to ten years old, though it is difficult for Emil to tell the age accurately.

Even at fourteen or fifteen most of these kids are small, very small, owing to malnutrition and disease.

It is lying face down in the muck, and completely naked.

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The smell of it, now the dominant note in the vile broth of rot-smells, it hangs heavy and horrible in the air.

Flies like fat, shiny blue-black beads, buzz insistently around the body.

Emil cannot see any marks or wounds on the back, or on the back of the head. Afraid to touch the corpse, he slides one end of the stick underneath the body, just beneath the chest, and uses it as a lever to turn the body over.

The deadweight almost breaks the stick in two.

And then he sees it.

The sudden silence among the children is odd. In fact, the whole world seems to Emil to have fallen silent. The neighbourhood sounds and the traffic noise from the highway have faded to a strange low rumble in his ears.

The front of the child’s body seems to be moving, and it takes the priest a few seconds to comprehend that there are maggots in it, thousands of them.

And gaping wounds – no, holes – in the chest and stomach.

Emil realizes the heart has been removed, the child eviscerated. The genitals are missing.

He looks at the face. Please God let the face remind me this used to be a human being. Another few seconds and he realizes the face is gone, as though it has been scraped off, leaving a mess of jellied eyeball and bone protruding here and there through muscle. Hard to make sense of what is missing, what is left.

Purple-brown scabs on the child’s knees; tangible memories, perhaps, of an afternoon’s rough play.

The spell breaks abruptly; the children run terrified and screaming from the clearing, leaping goat-like over the garbage.

Emil turns, staggering away from the body, and throws up until his stomach feels completely empty. It does not seem enough; he still feels sick, and forces his throat to constrict several times to no avail.

Through the tears that stream from his eyes, he sees that three of the older children have remained. They come towards him now, wordlessly take him by the hand, and lead him out quietly, gently, through the garbage. 

It rained last night. Heavy rain from a blood-red sky, crashing down for three, four hours without stopping.

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I like the rain. Sunny days and their heat make me listless, sluggish, depressed.

Isn’t that strange? Shouldn’t it be the other way around?

But when it rains I feel powerful.

The rain sends everyone running for cover. But while they scurry like rats for the nearest shelter, afraid of the wet and the thunder and the lightning, I come alive.

The rain makes it easier to do the things I have to do.



‘Horrible weather.’

Gus Saenz looks up. Water is running in rivulets off Jerome’s wet umbrella; the weather outside is foul. Between the beating of the rain on the roof and the steady thumping of the rock-and-roll music blaring from the stereo, Saenz has not heard the other man come into the room.

Jerome folds up the umbrella, props it against the wall in a corner beside the door, looks around.

‘Where’s Tato?’

Tato Ampil is Saenz’s young autopsy assistant, a med-school dropout who’d decided in his fourth year that he really wanted to be a musician of some sort, although after nearly two years he hasn’t quite figured out what sort, yet.

‘You just missed him,’ Saenz says. His surgical mask muffles his warm, deep voice. ‘Hot date.’

‘Lucky guy. At least he’s someplace warm.’

The air-conditioned room is inhospitably cold; colder, of course, because of the weather outside. The high-ceilinged laboratory is a study in white: white walls, white floors, white ceiling. Almost all the equipment and furnishing is shiny stainless steel, from the shelves suspended from sturdy brackets fixed to the walls, to the two gurneys pushed to one corner.

Mounted on the wall opposite the door is a large whiteboard about four feet high by six feet wide. Close by stands a do-it-yourself Ikea work 78

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station incorporating a computer table, bookshelves and cabinets in honeycoloured wood.

A spanking-new computer sits in the middle of the station, with a monster twenty-seven-inch monitor. Saenz bought it with grant money from a Japanese foundation. It is used, among other things, to construct threedimensional skull-photo superimpositions, which help in the identification of the dead – a tedious task for forensic anthropologists before advances in computer technology made it simpler.

Gray’s Anatomy, works by Boas, Coon, Lacan, Malinowski, Darwin’s The Origin of Species, Landsteiner’s Specificity of Serological Reactions, Coleman and Swenson’s DNA in the Courtroom: A Trial Watcher’s Guide, share the bookshelves with a complete set of Asterix comics, yellowing reams of classical guitar scores. Glossy, full-colour volumes on the works of Magritte, de Chirico, Modigliani. The catalogue from the 1995 Monet exhibition at the Chicago Art Institute. Classic Italian Cooking.

On shelves in other corners of the room are odds and ends of equipment and supplies Saenz uses in his work. Plaster casts of skulls and teeth with paper tags dangling from them on bits of string. Sealed specimen jars of several sizes, with or without sundry discoloured bits of unpleasantness floating in them.

Most visitors find it unsettling to talk to the priest in plain sight of this collection. The jars demand attention and usually get it, no matter how strong the outsider’s resolve to ignore them.

Depending on what type of case he happens to be handling, Saenz will often wrap his long fingers around a particular jar, prop it up on his chest and stare into its contents, meditating over vein and muscle and membrane for hours on end.

On a small table, Telesforo, Saenz’s prized, tempered ceramic model of a human torso with removable, vividly coloured polyurethane organs, stands upright on its cut-off thighs. A New York Mets baseball cap perches rakishly atop the headless torso. He, too, was purchased with grant money, from Stoubmann’s in Baltimore, a firm specializing in anatomical casts used mainly by medical schools.

A clothesline stretches across another wall, garlanded with strips of photographic negative processed by Saenz himself in the small darkroom off to one side of the laboratory.

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Large – almost life-size – glass-framed reproductions of four of Leonardo da Vinci’s anatomical studies provide relief against the white walls: the organs of the thorax; the heart and the main arteries; profile studies of a skull facing left; the principal female organs.

The smell of formaldehyde and other chemicals permeates the room.

But today the odours of must and decay – usually faint and virtually undetectable beneath the otherwise clinical scent – are strong and assertive.

Jerome looks at Saenz, listens briefly to the music, and rolls his eyes.

‘R.E.M.’ He pauses to identify the song, then groans. ‘Crush with Eyeliner?’

Saenz smiles, and the crows’ feet fan out from the corners of his eyes, the eyes of a man who smiles often. ‘Ah, there’s hope for you yet.’

Gus Saenz is tall, a little over six feet – the metal autopsy table where he works has been adjusted so that he won’t have to bend too far over it – and with the wiry muscularity that comes with, as Jerome often says, zero body fat. He has angular mestizo features on tawny skin, hair worn slightly long and parted in the middle, greying at the temples. ‘Rock star hair,’ Jerome often teases him.

Nothing about him, not the way he looks nor the clothes he wears – in the outside world, that is, when he is not wearing the surgical green scrubs he always wears for post-mortems – indicates that he is a priest.

Jerome adjusts the volume control knob until he is satisfied. Even after nearly two decades, he has yet to get used to Saenz performing autopsies to very loud music.

‘You’re too old for this.’

The stereo system is surrounded by stacks of CDs and cassette tapes: András Schiff and Glenn Gould playing Bach partitas, Julian Bream and Manuel Barrueco on the guitar. A large collection of Gregorian chant recordings from way before Gregorian chants became hip. And, oddly enough, the Clash, The Doors, Jimi Hendrix, the Sex Pistols, the Grateful Dead. R.E.M. is a recent addition to his post-mortem repertoire.

Saenz raises his head; under the surgical mask the usual roguish grin.

‘Don’t knock it. It’s the closest either of us will ever get to sex.’

Jerome feigns shock with open mouth and bug eyes. ‘Reprobate.’

‘Why, thank you. Coffee in the pot if you want it.’

The younger priest shakes crystal droplets of water from his wet hair, and moves on to one corner of the room to pour himself some coffee.

Father Jerome Lucero is about five feet nine, of a physical type usually 80

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described as ‘compact’ or ‘solid’. Beefy arms, broad shoulders tapering down into a slim waist and hips. Wavy hair tamed in a severe crew cut; wide, dark eyes. He has an intensity, a seriousness about him that makes him seem older than his thirty-seven years.

Only the keenest observer would note that he walks with a limp.

He sips the coffee, then makes a face. ‘Ooh, that’s bad.’

The older priest pulls his mask down beneath his chin, his hand encased in a blood-stained surgical glove. ‘Cost-cutting.’

Jerome notices that the older priest is lisping a little. ‘How’s that tooth?’

It is the other man’s turn to grimace. ‘Don’t talk to me about it.’

Jerome laughs quietly. Saenz has an impacted tooth in the left side of his mouth that has been due for extraction for several months; it has now nearly rotted through. But whenever the subject of dental work comes up, he is instantly transformed from open-minded, logical man of science to fearful, petulant child.

The older priest scowls at Jerome’s amusement. ‘Vos vestros servate, meos mihi linquite mores.’

Jerome nods in mock solemnity. ‘Yes. Well. I’m quite certain Petrarch wasn’t talking about tooth decay. You realize, of course, that putting it off could be bad for your heart?’

‘I’ll tell you what’s bad for my heart. Pain and terror. That’s what’s bad for my heart.’ Saenz straightens up with a slight groan. He hunches his shoulders to relieve the tension in the muscles, and then relaxes them again before surveying his work, now in the final stages. ‘Looks like number six to me.’

Jerome walks over to the metal table where the remains of a child’s body lie. Its back rests on a rubber block, which pushes the chest up and out for better examination.

‘Viscera gone?’

‘Pretty much. Heart missing. Face peeled off.’

‘Neat bladework.’ Jerome bends at the waist, tilting his head to one side to look obliquely into the chest cavity, from which Saenz has removed the entire chest plate – sternum and ribs – with an electric saw. ‘Skull?’

Saenz nods. ‘Heavy blow. From the fracture lines, it looks like – ’ ‘It came from the right.’ Jerome straightens up. ‘About how old?’

‘My guess, about twelve or thirteen.’

Jerome picks up a pair of surgical gloves from the stainless steel trolley 81

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and pulls them on, the rubber snapping against the skin on the underside of his wrists. A faint dusting of powder puffs out.

‘Genitals removed. Face flayed like the others?’ He glances up at Saenz, who moves forward to pull back the chest flap of skin and soft tissue – the upper part of the Y-shaped incision made in the torso during autopsy – obstructing Jerome’s view of the ruined face.

The younger priest nods, leans forward and runs the tip of his forefinger in a line beneath the child’s exposed chin bone.

‘Clean horizontal slit under the chin from ear to ear. What do we know about the knife?’

‘Again, very likely a small blade, about six inches long, no more than an inch wide. Something easy to handle for close, detailed work. Very sharp, no serration. And we’ve got the same grooves on the chin bone.’

Saenz peels off his gloves and walks to a drafting table in another corner of the room. The table is a cast-off from the university’s mass communi-cations department; it was originally used by film students for drawing cartoons. In the centre of it is a translucent disc of hard, movable plastic, with a light bulb underneath. He flips on the switch and slides two sets of photographic negatives onto the plate, motioning for the other man to look.

Jerome crosses the room, stripping his own gloves off as he goes and dropping them into a bucket reserved for medical waste. He squints into the magnifying glass Saenz holds over the first set of negatives – black-andwhite photos of thin, scratchy marks gouged through flesh and into the child’s chin bone.

‘They’re a bit difficult to see with the flesh still clinging to the bone, but they’re there if you look closely.’

Unlike this child, the other victims had only been examined by Saenz months after they were killed. By then much of the flesh that had remained after the flaying had decomposed, revealing far more of the bone surface, and any instrument marks that had been made on it.

The younger priest stares down through the glass for a few moments.

‘Long marks, and deep. Think it was the same blade?’

‘No, the blade notches on the ribs are thicker.’ Saenz moves the magnifying glass over the second set and waits while Jerome examines them. This second set of negatives was taken from the sternum and some of the ribs exposed after evisceration.

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‘Could have been the tip.’

Saenz frowns and shakes his head. ‘Still too thick. No, I don’t think it was even a blade at all.’ He switches off the light as Jerome moves back towards the body. ‘Ask me about the teeth.’

‘Father Gus, what about the teeth?’

‘Pitting.’

‘A mouth-breather. Just like the others.’

They had concluded that three of the five victims had been children of poor families. Their front teeth had minute pits, invisible to the naked eye.

This showed that they had breathed often through their mouths – a sign of chronic respiratory disease.

‘Soft diet.’

Their families could rarely afford meat or fish, so the children were raised on diets short on protein, long on carbohydrates and other soft, mushy, insubstantial food. The lack of protein also partly explained how small they were.

‘Sexual assault?’

‘Nope.’

Jerome nods. ‘Not one of those freaks who gets lucky while the victim’s dying. The excision of the genitals . . . I still can’t account for that. Some sexual conflict in there somewhere.’ He thrusts his hands deep into the pockets of his jeans. ‘Time of death?’

‘When he was found, he was a mass of maggots. The weather’s been humid and wet. I wouldn’t put it at more than three days. Four at most, but highly unlikely.’

Saenz walks over to his desk and puts on his reading glasses, then picks up a clipboard and squints down at a document typed in smudgy carbon on a sheet of onionskin. ‘Like the others, there was very little blood found around the body.’

‘Suggesting . . .’

‘That he killed them elsewhere. Wherever he does it, there’s going to be a lot of blood. So it must be fairly well hidden. Or at least somewhere easy to clean, easy to flush out – a bathroom, a garage, possibly a vehicle. He would’ve had to change clothes, too, before he dumped the bodies.’

Jerome runs a hand over his face and holds it over his mouth for a few seconds before walking to the large whiteboard near the work station.

‘SIX’ is the heading of a new column on the extreme right of the board.

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Down the leftmost column a series of categories delineate rows: age, sex, approximate date of death, mutilations.

‘Today is a Tuesday,’ Jerome says. He picks up a marker, stares at the blank space at the end of the date-of-death row, and starts tapping the board, as though counting.

‘Saturday.’ Saenz has been watching him; after years of working together, he knows exactly what Jerome is trying to figure out.

The younger man turns and nods, as the answer he has arrived at in his mind is confirmed. He turns to the whiteboard again and writes: SAT. JULY 7 in the space.

By their rough calculations, all the other victims had been killed on the Saturday immediately preceding the day their bodies were found – always the first Saturday of every month.

‘It’s him.’

Emil sits by himself in Father Saenz’s faculty office.

In the chill of the room he can feel acutely the wetness of the socks inside his shoes, of the legs of his trousers from the knees down. He clutches his arms around his chest, keeping his fingers tucked into his armpits.

A typhoon is raging outside – the branches of trees whip back and forth with every shift in the direction of the wind. The rain lashes against the windowpanes. Occasionally, a plain or flowered or patterned umbrella bobs up and down just outside the glass – someone caught in the fury.

The door opens and the two priests walk in.

‘Emil, I’m sorry you’ve had to wait so long,’ Saenz says, moving forward with both hands extended to grasp the parish priest’s in a warm handshake.

‘It’s OK, Father Saenz. Father Lucero.’ The three men sit down, and Emil begins wringing his hands this way and that, as though trying to calm himself before asking questions. ‘Is it one of our boys?’

Saenz pauses a moment. ‘We don’t know yet. But it’s definitely the same series of mutilations.’

‘My God.’ Emil crosses himself. ‘Why is he doing this?’

Jerome stands, pulls up the blinds to let more grey daylight into the room. If I knew the answer to that question, he says to himself, I’d be sleeping a hell of a lot better. He keeps his eyes focused on some vague spot outside, looking but not really seeing, hesitating before responding.

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For a moment the room is still and silent save for the sound of the wind and rain.

Saenz clasps his hands together on his desk.

‘We don’t know yet,’ says Jerome. ‘Honestly, we may never know. But you can help. You can tell your parishioners to keep an eye out, tell us what they’ve seen – God forbid – or heard. And tell the kids to look out for one another, not to stay out too late.’

This is how it happens in Jerome’s dreams.

Always it begins with him standing in the dark, in the rain. He is alone, dressed as if for sleep in loose-fitting shorts and a T-shirt, rubber slippers on his feet. Always it is very cold.

And then he hears it, a child’s voice screaming for help.

He will start running, first this way, then that, slipping in the mud and the slime, losing first one slipper, then the other, leaving deep, gouged tracks where his feet slide. Dirt lodges deep under his toenails, and under his fingernails when he claws the mud to regain his balance. He runs until his heart can pump no more and his lungs give out and his legs ache, shouting for the child.

Tell me where you are, talk to me. I’ll find you.

And then he realizes his voice is no longer his own. It is small, a child’s voice.

Again he stumbles in the mud and the garbage, legs failing him, arms failing him, and then the hand on his shoulder, rough and hard, shoving him down. He can smell the muck, warm, moist and sweet with rot as his face is pushed into it.

Then he turns; he tries to turn and he can almost see the man’s face, and then the hot breath on his cheek and words, words he can’t understand, spoken in a whisper that seems like a thick slow churning of blood in his ears, the man’s spittle landing like tiny shards on his face.

Always the rock first, and then the blade, sharp and slim and cold.

And then he’s awake. Sitting up in bed. Bathed in sweat. He shakes his head to clear his mind, and waits in the stillness for his laboured breathing to return to normal. For his heart to stop pounding in his chest.

He untangles his legs from the blanket, swings them over the edge of the bed and feels in the dark with his feet for his rubber slippers. He goes into the bathroom, switches on the light.

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Jerome reaches for the tap. Cool water rushing. He bends forward and splashes it on his face.

When he is done, he looks into the small mirror on the medicine cabinet above the sink. His eyes seem to have lost their whites. They are round and deep and dark, black holes full of unanswered questions. His face, still dripping water, is pale and thin, paler and thinner than it has been since this whole ugly business began.

Adapted from Smaller and Smaller Circles, published by the University of Philippines Press.

86

India: Decades in Convolution Dilip D’Souza

Two Decades Ago llow me to introduce you to Madhukar Sarpotdar. On 11 January 1993, when Bombay was reeling after weeks of fatal rioting, an army detachment apprehended Sarpotdar in one of the worst hit areas of the city.

He was in a jeep, along with nine other men including his son and someone called Anil Parab. Also in the jeep were several swords, sticks and two guns, one of them unlicensed: at the time, even carrying the licensed one in a riothit area was a violation of the law.

The army turned Sarpotdar and his pals over to the police. A huge crowd subsequently gathered outside the station and demanded his release. When the police backed down and let him go, he addressed the crowd and told them not to leave a single Muslim house in the area intact. Muslim residents reported that the policemen who were listening applauded, and made no attempt to stop the crowd from looting and burning several houses. The mob also stabbed several Muslims.

At a press conference held later, a reporter asked the police commissioner if the Anil Parab in the jeep was the hitman of the same name, known to work for Dubai’s infamous terrorist Dawood Ibrahim. The commissioner offered no comment, which was an answer in itself.

Why am I telling you about Sarpotdar? Because I think he helped set, even twenty years ago, a context for themes of corruption and justice that we Indians are grappling with today.

But for now, fast forward two months, to 12 March 1993. Bomb blasts went off across the city that day, killing some 250 people. Soon after, the

A

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India: Decades in Convolution

film star Sanjay Dutt was arrested for buying arms from men suspected of involvement in the bombings. On 19 April 1993 Sharad Pawar, chief minister of Maharashtra state, of which Bombay is the capital, said to the State Assembly: ‘The suspect who named Sanjay Dutt had, during the interrogation, revealed several other names including that of Madhukar Sarpotdar.’

Over the next several years, Dutt was jailed, tried, convicted and sentenced for illegal possession of weapons.

Sarpotdar?

Nothing. In fact, he was even elected to Parliament, becoming, to my disgust, my MP. When he died in 2009 he had not spent a day in jail for his crimes.

So there’s the late Madhukar Sarpotdar for you.

Nearly twenty years after these events, and some years since he moved on to the Great Riot in the Sky, Sarpotdar remains emblematic of our Indian attitudes towards crime and punishment. The man was clearly intent on mayhem with his shady companions and their deadly weapons that January day. He was caught by the one institution most Indians still retain respect for – the army – and only a couple of months later bomb-blast suspects dropped his name while being interrogated. How much more evidence was needed to at least try this man and punish him for his various offences, exactly as others were tried and punished?

Yet nothing close to punishment happened to him.

Why, you ask?

Well, it’s a long story whose short version might read like this: Sarpotdar belonged to the Shiv Sena party, whose leaders have never faced any kind of justice for their various misdeeds over the years. Part of that has to do with political expediency. Part also has to do with how successful the party has been in defining itself in terms of Maharashtrian identity and pride. Whether that is valid is another issue altogether. My point here is that any mention of action against members of the Shiv Sena is immediately perceived to be a slur on Maharashtrian pride. A significant number of Maharashtrians see it that way, and this means there is widespread resentment at any such mention.

This view is now so entrenched in the Maharashtrian mindset that members of the party regularly insist that if any action is taken against 88

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the men at the top, Bombay will go up in flames. With a long history of vandalism and rioting to demonstrate that it’s not an empty threat, it’s something governments take seriously. The city didn’t quite go up in flames after Sarpotdar’s arrest, but he escaped the law nevertheless.

And that leaves us with a variant of the old conundrum in any effort to deliver justice. As Gerald Seymour wrote back in 1975: ‘One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.’ And when you’re faced with such a conundrum, what happens to justice? What happens to our own individual notions of justice?

One Decade Ago Our own individual notions become distorted and we justify them with convoluted arguments.

For my money, one of the finest of those convolutions unfolded in the early 2000s, a decade after Sarpotdar’s shenanigans.

The fledgling online news magazine Tehelka had made something of a name for itself with a sting operation exposing match-fixing in cricket. But it really came to prominence a few months after that, when another sting operation exposed the rot in the way India’s defence establishment purchased arms. The role of shady arms dealers and their political partners in these purchases, various accounts led us to believe, was ‘well-known’. The daddy of them all was probably the infamous scandal in the 1980s involving the Swedish arms manufacturer Bofors, in which Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi himself was named.

What made the Tehelka piece noteworthy was that they had proof: they caught politicians – on camera – taking bribes for approving arms deals.

One of those politicians was Bangaru Laxman, president of the Bharatiya Janata Party, the main cog in the coalition that was governing the country.

In unambiguous footage and language, Laxman accepted a wad of cash and stuffed it into his desk drawer. The clip aired again and again on TV. A quick summary of the immediate fallout: the BJP-led government set up a judicial commission to inquire into the scandal. (Under Indian law, while such commissions may seem to be courts, they actually have no judicial power and governments can legally ignore their findings.) The defence minister, George Fernandes, resigned; however, while the inquiry was still underway he returned to office with a ringing endorsement from his prime 89

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minister, A. B. Vajpayee. And the inquiry itself ? The judge conducting it suddenly resigned, effectively shutting it down.

Another inquiry was then announced, this one into the antecedents and operations of Tehelka. This is practically an ancient tradition itself: harassing those who shine a light on corruption. The resulting pressure on the magazine’s investors and staff effectively shut it down. (A year or two later it was resurrected, this time as a weekly print magazine.)

As you might expect, plenty of journalists with ideological or other leanings towards Vajpayee’s government began writing and speaking about this sting. Uninterested in the corruption it had peeled open for public view, they gloated instead over Tehelka’s woes. Allow them their gloating, of course. But in trying to explain away what the country had seen on TV, they also went through some staggering convolutions.

One such journalist, Arvind Lavakare, wrote a piece for another online magazine in March 2011: Now look at the treacherous “testimony” against Bangaru Laxman, BJP president. Although it did not, once again, prove any wrongdoing, it cast an incalculable damage on the man’s reputation. Consider that one sequence in the publicised Tehelka transcript that ran as follows: Tehelka: Rupees or dollars?

Laxman: Dollars. You can give in dollars.

The above “quote” of Laxman was given an eight-column headline in The Asian Age, but with the exclamation mark (!) after “Dollars.”

The observant would have wondered why, if Laxman had reportedly wanted dollars as offered by Tehelka, did he accept payment in rupees? . . .

The mystery lies in that exclamation (!). What Laxman in all probability said was “Dollars??” with an exclamation of shock in his tone, and “You can give dollars??” with another exclamatory tone.

But Tehelka must have just clipped away the exclamation marks in its transcripts while the audio in its tapes was just too damned garbled to reveal the exclamatory tone.

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Over a decade later, these lines still astonish me. Lavakare did not even suggest that Laxman had refused to take the money, that he had been framed or that he was innocent. No, Lavakare explicitly acknowledges Laxman’s money grasping when he asks why ‘did (Laxman) accept payment in rupees?’ He rustles up a theory involving Laxman’s ‘exclamatory tone’ that even Lavakare confesses he could not discern because the tape ‘was just too damned garbled’.

So we have an attempt to rescue Laxman’s integrity based on an irrelevant detail in a ‘garbled’ audio recording. The fact that he took a bribe is not even up for discussion. I imagine Laxman himself muttering: ‘With friends like these . . .’

I ask again: in the face of such convolutions, what happens to justice?

Today It’s a good question to ask, because justice has been on a lot of Indian minds in recent months – justice related to corruption. And I would argue that people evading the law, for whatever reason, are as corrupt as people giving or taking bribes.

A man called Anna Hazare is responsible for this heightened consciousness about corruption, through his efforts to give us legislation that will set up a national corruption ombudsman called a ‘Lokpal’.

I’m not convinced this is the solution to corruption, but his relentless pursuit of that goal – even the fact that it remains distant – has at least made a large number of Indians talk, even rage, about corruption. I’m not convinced that such talk, such rage, constitutes the answer to corruption either. But it’s what we have, right now.

The fundamentally worrying aspect here is simply stated: the assumption that corruption starts and ends with our politicians, our bureaucrats. Yet Hazare’s movement has been couched in such language. There’s a vast and abiding scorn for the political process, for officialdom, that Hazare’s team and its myriad supporters have exploited liberally. I don’t want to suggest that the scorn is undeserved. But something about focusing it on that one target alone is disturbing. It allows the rest of us to forget our innumerable daily misdemeanours, to pretend we possess a virtue that separates us from the truly corrupt.

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I like to think this begins with red lights and one-way streets: I drive my son to school at 6 a.m., and in that entire five-kilometre journey there is not one traffic signal that is observed, except in the breach. Nobody, and I mean nobody, stops for a red light. Not even me. In some sense, a green light signals the most dangerous time to go, because you cannot assume that yahoos who should be stopped at their red lights will actually stop. Instead, they shoot through the intersection at even greater speeds than normal.

On the one-way street where we live, there is no time of day – morning, afternoon, night – when cars are not seen driving the wrong way.

Why are simple laws such as these so hard for so many of us to follow?

Why do we instead attempt to rationalize the way we break them with convoluted arguments? Yes, as I said, I’m guilty too. My rationalization for deciding to bulldoze through red lights is that I’m afraid, if I slow to a stop, that I’ll be rear-ended by a speeding bozo who has no intention of either slowing or stopping.

The 6 a.m. lawbreakers will say, casually, ‘But we only need to observe signals in the daytime. Not at night.’ As if all of us do indeed observe red lights in the daytime; as if this were something enshrined in the Indian constitution. The wrong-way jockeys will say, just as casually, ‘But my home is just there, two buildings down! Why should I go right around?’ They will also say, not so casually, ‘Who are you, the police? Is this your father’s road?’

Some offer this wisdom: ‘But there was no cop there!’ No cop: therefore, when I break the law, I don’t break the law. It’s almost philosophical.

And so it goes.

The law, you see, is for someone else. Never for me.

With simple laws treated so casually, it is no stretch to flout others; a little at a time to start with and then more and more freely. Eventually we have coffin scams and arms dealer scams and 2G spectrum scams and Commonwealth Games scams: money to the tune of many billions of dollars stolen in scandals that are familiar to most Indians today. It is also no stretch to stall any punitive action against rioters because they’re our brand of rioters. After all, we’ve grown used to the idea of laws being for other people. Eventually you have a list of massacres for which nobody is punished according to our established laws; this is exactly our Indian reality today.

Eventually, too, some of those unpunished guilty become lawmakers themselves.

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Example: Sarpotdar, of course. And almost Laxman, if a hidden camera had not sent him into oblivion.

It is easy to lament our Indian condition: it’s a disease plenty of us are prone to catching, even to building our professions on. It is much harder to propose a way out of our miasma. Yet there are times when our situation seems so rank that simply commenting on it is no longer satisfying or useful.

Corruption is so widespread and entrenched that simply pointing it out, or even putting a few big names on trial, does nothing to lift us from the morass.

I suspect these were the thoughts that motivated Anna Hazare and his supporters. Yet it must be clear by now that I don’t think even their movement will rid us Indians of corruption.

What will?

An end to convoluted excuses: yours for sure, but especially mine.

Nothing less.

93

Among the accused in the dock, Paco Larra単aga asks in vain to be heard.

94

Give Up Tomorrow Luis H. Francia

I

n 1995 in the Philippines’ Cebu Island capital of Cebu City, a seventeenyear-old Filipino by the name of Francisco Osmeña Larrañaga, otherwise known as Paco, appeared on the National Bureau of Investigation’s list of juvenile delinquents. The teenager, who had a swagger about him and a temper, had been involved in a car-park scuffle, little more than a display of youthful bravado and arrogance of the sort that happens everywhere.

Two years later, on 16 July 1997, Marijoy and Jacqueline Chiong, Cebuana sisters in their early twenties, failed to return home after work. On 18 July the blindfolded, battered and handcuffed body of a young woman was found in a local ravine. She had been raped. The Cebu police and the Chiong family initially declared it wasn’t one of the missing. However, a few days later, and under pressure to resolve the case, the police identified the body as Marijoy’s by slicing skin from the corpse’s fingers and comparing it with the prints on Marijoy’s voter ID card – a determination independent forensic investigators would later question. The Chiong family endorsed this revised finding.

Using an affidavit secured from a market vendor who lived near the ravine, the police formulated a theory that a gang of drug addicts was responsible.

Apparently, the affidavit, written in English – a language the vendor didn’t speak – stated that she’d heard a group of men that night shouting, ‘Run, run!’, which she’d assumed had caused the distraught woman to fall into the ravine – an assertion the vendor was later to deny.

Two months later, Paco and six other young men were arrested and accused of the murder. Thus began the Kafkaesque odyssey of a young man 95

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who, along with his six co-accused ( Josman Aznar, Rowen Adlawen, Ariel Balansag, Alberto Caño, James Anthony Uy and James Andrew Uy), was denied a fair trial in a court presided over by a judge, Martin Ocampo, who had a habit of nodding off on the bench and who clearly favoured the prosecution. Despite only flimsy and circumstantial evidence against them, despite a well-documented alibi in Paco’s case and despite judicial misconduct, all seven were convicted and sentenced to two consecutive life sentences. At the time of writing, they have been in prison for fifteen years.

The prize-winning documentary, Give Up Tomorrow, examines this case and Paco’s role in it, laying out the facts and circumstances in sober and methodical fashion. Directed by Michael Collins and produced by Marty Syjuco, the documentary is neither strident nor disinterested. It simply marshals evidence so convincingly that the viewer cannot help but conclude that Paco and his co-accused have suffered a grave miscarriage of justice.

Syjuco is not an objective observer – his brother is married to Paco’s older sister, Mimi, a relationship declared early on, and which explains the focus on just one of the seven accused. The documentary builds systematically on a wealth of sources, including trial records, media reports and interviews with journalists, prosecutors, defence lawyers, family members of both the accused and the victims, and with Paco himself. In light of so much material, the viewer is left puzzled – and aghast – that the case ever made it to court.

Human rights organizations including Amnesty International, Fair Trials International and the United Nations Human Rights Commission arrived at the same conclusion; as did a number of local and Spanish journalists; as did the Spanish government itself. Paco is a Spanish citizen through his father’s nationality, and the family eventually called upon Spain to help them secure Paco’s extradition and transfer to a Spanish prison. They had hoped he would be released soon after arriving in Spain, just as they had hoped each absurd episode of their nightmare in the Philippines would be the last.

The trial in Cebu unfolded amidst tabloid frenzy, inciting the public and the Chiong family to bay for blood. Larrañaga and most of the other accused were either Spanish or Chinese mestizos (Paco is both), and in a country where mixed blood often characterizes the privileged class this stoked the fire of public resentment. Paco’s father, Manuel, is a former jai alai player and a Spanish Basque; his mother, Margot, belongs to the politically powerful 96

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Osmeña clan, and is of Chinese ancestry. Sergio Osmeña, the patriarch, was president of the Philippines from 1944 to just before the country gained its independence from the United States in 1946.

Paco’s arrest was apparently based on his inclusion on the NBI list, which the police had used to trawl for suspects. At the time of the murder, Paco was attending the Center for Culinary Arts in Quezon City, Metro Manila. He provided ample Upper: The Chiongs react to the verdict with dismay. evidence that he was there Mrs Chiong holds a picture of her daughters. on the day and night of the Lower: Media frenzy. crime. On 16 July 1997 he had attended class, gone out later that night with his classmates to a local restaurant and bar, and sat for an exam the next morning. Thirty-five witnesses (classmates and teachers) attested to this, and photographs were produced of the group and Paco at the bar.

But the press (and the court) ignored this evidence and focused instead on the lurid details of the crime. Teddy Boy Locsin, a well-known journalist and lawyer who later became a three-term congressman for the wealthy district of Makati, was televised standing beside the grave of the victim and cupping his hands. ‘This,’ he says, ‘was the amount of semen found in the victim.’ He then describes the accused as, ‘These animals [who] were not born drugged; they made themselves into drug addicts.’ Referring to Paco’s statement that he did not know the Uy brothers prior to their arrest, Locsin notes with contempt: ‘As a Spanish-blooded mestizo, he would never mix with Chinks like the Uys.’ He gratuitously describes the Uys as ‘bananas – yellow on the outside, white on the inside’.

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In the dock, Paco Larrañaga is handcuffed to another of the accused.

Also weighing in was President Joseph Estrada, whom the victims’ mother, Thelma, and her husband, Dionisio, met in July 1998 – a meeting arranged by Thelma’s sister, Cheryl Jimenea, Estrada’s social secretary. Erap, as he is popularly known, was a film star in the 1950s, when he made a name for himself as a fictional crime fighter. It was a role he reprised when, as vice president under President Fidel Ramos, he was named the government’s anti-crime czar. President Estrada instructed four law enforcement agencies to help solve the Chiong case, and intensified the pressure to convict the accused. (The anti-crime Erap was later forced from office – in January 2001 – charged with plundering the public purse. He was convicted in 2007 and sentenced to forty years in prison. He served barely a month before receiving a pardon from his successor, President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, now charged with corruption herself.)

The murder trial ended on 11 February 1999 and on 5 May Judge Ocampo found the seven defendants guilty. The sentence of two consecutive terms of life imprisonment failed to appease the Chiongs, who clamoured for the death penalty. President Estrada endorsed their opinion and said the men deserved to die. The judge refused to apply the death penalty (still on the books then), saying there was insufficient evidence that the corpse was 98

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in fact that of Marijoy – an incredible statement that in effect undermined the entire case. Ocampo pointed out belatedly that no facial photos had been taken of the dead woman. This raised more questions: Who was the victim, if not Marijoy? Who might be lying in her grave? Might she and her sister still be alive? The body of Jacqueline has never been found.

Judge Ocampo had barred most of the pro-Paco eyewitness testimony, complaining that everyone was saying the same thing, as though corroboration were irrelevant. He denied a request by the defence to exhume the body to verify that it was indeed Marijoy’s. Judge Ocampo also refused Paco’s repeated request to take the stand, a violation of his constitutional right to speak on his own behalf.

Five months later, Judge Ocampo shot and killed himself in a hotel room. According to the film’s director, Ocampo ‘had a reputation as a judge who couldn’t be bought. But evidence of political pressure was everywhere’.

The defence appealed to the Supreme Court and, after deliberating for four years, the justices in 2004 not only let the guilty convictions stand but also imposed the death penalty through lethal injection. (In another sordid twist to the tale, the chief justice, Hilario Davide, Jr, was related by marriage to Thelma Chiong, yet failed to recuse himself.)

Paco now sits in Martutene Prison, near the city of San Sebastián, Spain, where he was sent following the abolition of the death penalty by President Arroyo in 2006 and as a result of a new prisoner-exchange treaty with Madrid that allowed the transfer. The difference between Bilibid Prison in the Philippines and Martutene is, according to Collins, ‘night and day’. There are, for instance, no gangs; at Bilibid – with an original capacity of 8,700, its actual inmate population is more than 20,000 – twelve gangs effectively rule inmate life. Paco and the others had to become members of one, Batang Cebu (Boys of Cebu), for their own protection. In Spain, Paco is granted periodic stays outside on parole. The painful irony is that the parole board will release him permanently only if he admits guilt, which Paco declares he won’t, asking, ‘How can I admit something I didn’t do?’

It is Paco who, on death row at Bilibid, coined the phrase ‘Give Up Tomorrow’. By this he meant that, were he to give up hope of a reprieve, it would not be today. He’d put off giving in to despair till the morrow. He’d repeat this process the next day; it became a question then of when to give 99

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up, focusing only on the timing. He also made three resolutions: ‘I won’t kill myself, I won’t kill anyone else, and I won’t look for trouble.’ Sound strategy for a life of captivity at Bilibid.

Before the trial began, one promising avenue of investigation seemed to have been disregarded and overlooked: the possible links between the disappearance of the girls and the rift between their father and Peter Lim, the man he worked for and who has long been suspected of being a drug lord. Chiong and Lim had fallen out. Chiong was scheduled to testify before the Congressional Committee on Dangerous Drugs about Lim’s alleged drug trafficking but, shortly before the set date, Marijoy and Jacqueline disappeared. The girls’ father subsequently refused to testify. Were the disappearances simply a coincidence or a not-too-subtle warning to the Chiongs? (Much later Paco’s family, also fearful of Lim’s power, asked that his name be bleeped out of the film when it was shown in the Philippines.)

Leo Lastimosa, one of the few journalists in Cebu who took a neutral tone in his reporting, did point out the tantalizing link to Lim but, as he notes in the film, ‘nobody was interested’. After seeing the film in Cebu City earlier this year, Lastimosa wrote that ‘most importantly the movie has to be seen by those who have hidden knowledge about the case, so they can help answer the questions as to what really happened to the Chiongs’. Lastimosa said he was convinced of Paco’s innocence when Paco refused to admit guilt to secure his release in Spain.

Perhaps the Lim connection was something no one dared touch. The fact that two of the police investigating team had moonlighted as Lim’s bodyguards raises further questions.

Towards the end of Give Up Tomorrow, Mrs Chiong, on learning of Paco’s imminent transfer to Spain, threatens to kill him. ‘I will die thinking of Spain making a fool of me. If Paco comes home I will kill him.’ We are left to wonder why this woman is so intent on pinning the blame for her daughters’ disappearance on the men now behind bars, even when an overwhelming weight of evidence points to their innocence.

An exclusive audio interview with Michael Collins, the director of Give Up Tomorrow, is available on our website.

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Reid Mitchell

Love Poem Thieves in every town, not thieves in every place.

Several bluewalled houses, a stretch of road unmolested.

Some cowbirds shame their families, constructing their own nests.

A woman bore triplets one of whom turned honest – the one kept away most often from her bruised white breasts.

The moon steals light, not the stars, who are no doubt dishonest in their own solar systems under different universal laws.

Thieves in our very blood rob the lungs of oxygen only to be waylaid themselves as their caravans flee down arteries, pumped by half-complicit hearts.

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Of course, hearts are always corrupt – Even yours, you most honest woman who ever trusted her mouth to my tongue to touch and taste.

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The Miserable Mrs Marcos Carla Camille L. Mendoza

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he first child of a second wife will always have issues. And when a girl too beautiful and too smart spends the formative years of her life sleeping on a cardboard mat by the family Cadillac, habitually deprived of Lady’s Choice sandwich-spread on her morning pan de sal and amidst many a drama of hapless parenting, expect that something in her head will be seriously messed up.

Imelda Marcos’s father, Vicente López Romualdez, was the humble grandchild of a blue-blooded friar from Spain. Her mother, Remedios Trinidad, grew up impeccably sheltered in a respectable convent that enjoyed the patronage of Manila’s elite. Remedios dabbled in music, literature and the opera. She had beauty, poise and brains. A woman of her calibre was golden during the old days – she could have been big, could have married a much, much better man. Unfortunately she was a penniless convent girl who had brown skin. Perhaps seeing her own assets go to waste motivated Remedios to drive her daughter Imelda’s beauty pageant career.

Imelda never accepted failure. When she lost the competition for Miss Manila, she blushed, cried and cajoled until the mayor crowned her the Muse of Manila, a previously non-existent title. She also was not one to waste time. After a failed romance with Ninoy Aquino, who dumped her for being too bold and too tall, she quickly dismissed him – the one who got away – as a fling. Then rose-tinted Ferdie came along. He readily embraced Catholicism to exchange marital vows with his shy young bride – and cleverly exploited the media to his advantage. These Asian Kennedys knew how to work together from the start.

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For an aspiring president of the Philippines it is far more important to know how to sing than to be able to run a country, and for this, Imelda’s singing and provincial upbringing were assets to Ferdie. She was every ounce a geisha on the way to Malacañang: her food measured to maintain her weight; daily agendas filled with cleverly organized events to promote the campaign. However, we must remember that, to begin with, something was very wrong up in her head, and the stress of playing politician’s wife slowly took its toll. Eventually a nervous breakdown bought her a ticket to New York, and a year spent in therapy. But certain moments in history can disappear like liquid through a sieve, and when in 1965 Ferdie made it to the palace, beating Diosdado Macapagal by evangelizing the people with his passion for infrastructure and tourism, Imelda was back in Manila in her high hair and her puffed-up sleeves. Perhaps the American psychiatrist moonlighted as a fashion consultant, extolling the virtues of shoulder pads and high heels.

Imelda came back convinced that a distinctive identity was the key to success, and that art and culture were its vital components. She thought a cultural centre would be the ideal vehicle through which to cultivate this among her people, to say nothing of being a perfect excuse to invite the Reagans over for the ribbon-cutting ceremony. The Cultural Center of the Philippines would be erected to elevate the identity of the ordinary Filipino.

During her husband’s political campaign, Imelda’s maidservant habit of removing her shoes before entering homes and her overall probinsyana vibe did bring her closer to the masses, but it also meant she was never invited to parties at the exclusive Forbes Park. And since she was never accepted by Filipino high society, she decided to host a shindig of her own, welcoming pregnant, daster-clad mothers and tsinelas-shuffling fathers to the Cultural Center. However, it didn’t quite work out as she’d planned. Notice the landscape: the long walk from the car park to the entrance. You’d need a car and a driver to enter it properly. The majesty of the new Cultural Center stood in stark contrast to the poverty of the ordinary Filipinos.

One could frown at the building of a cultural centre at a time when we didn’t even have a culture; nevertheless, we should be thankful to Imelda because every first-world artist, writer, dancer and thinker came to know of Philippine arts and culture due to its association with the former First 104

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Lady, even if it had begun as an international joke. Genuine appreciation can begin with laughter. The grandest pantheons may be rooted in glitter.

When it comes to marriage, it often happens that one chooses a partner who measures up to oneself. Imelda wasn’t alone with her issues: only a crazy man would marry a crazy woman. Their union was shared insanity, their devotion to each other’s blurred vision its most telling form. Crazy people do crazy things.

Imelda was once content to stand behind her husband, but suddenly she relished standing beside him. There is no telling if Ferdie were thrilled or dismayed. No man likes to stand at a mere 5’5”, especially beside a towering Imelda at a God-given height of 5’8” (or 6’ with heels, escalating to 6’5” with her bouffant hair) and no amount of pomade on Ferdie’s fake black top could make him stand any taller. So he engaged in bodybuilding to make himself look bigger, reportedly popping pills to achieve quicker results.

Apparently he was not satisfied with mere physical power, and declared Martial Law to show he could flex the muscles of the state, if not his own.

Ferdie cancelled all checks and balances. He cancelled the military and the media, too. Perhaps in his perception of reality this was essential for the Filipinisation of the Philippines. Perhaps Martial Law was just one man with one plan and a heavy dose of arts and culture.

Perhaps he reasoned that democracy wasn’t for everyone, particularly those who didn’t know what to do with it. How could a people without a firm sense of identity or self-knowledge understand how to harness power to progress?

Well-formed biceps and pectorals can be pleasing features of the male anatomy but seemed a bit startling on the ageing Ferdie, who at sixty continued to get physical, swallowing his magic potions, destroying his kidneys and loosening his grip on the New Society. His power began to slip away – into the hands of the CIA, the military, his cronies and Imelda herself. And that was when it all started to go wrong.

Martial Law was a time when you could live in Forbes Park and be a mother to a colegiala leftist daughter enrolled at the University of the Philippines, Diliman, who at any time might be arrested and shipped off to a very different sort of life at Fort Bonifacio, never to be seen again.

You would not complain or search for her. Nobody ever cried for a dead communist, even if she had been gracious and beautiful and only eighteen.

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Incidentally, Martial Law was a great time for writing. It was the perfect constraint to struggle against. Each printed article made the rebellious writers giddy, and sent them in – or got them out – of prison. Droplets in the political wave they were, their good cause crashing against an obdurate wall.

Not that Imelda didn’t do her share of good deeds. Clad in her pink terno she once sat with Gaddafi, quoting the Quran, expressing her support for peace among Muslims and Christians. Gaddafi was impressed, reportedly smitten with Madame, deeming her too intelligent for a woman, pleading for her conversion to Islam. Thus, weapons funding for the Mindanao insurgents was stopped and Madame was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Her illusions of grandeur had always been criminal, but with each accomplishment they became more magnificent. The day arrived when she started considering herself Filipina royalty. Perhaps she believed rubbing shoulders with truly titled couples and royal families from other countries elevated her to a similar status. Rumour has it that she tried to set up her daughter, Imee, with Britain’s Prince Charles; that she had the audacity to wear a crown to Buckingham Palace, where she was asked to remove it. She resisted, loath to demean her precious stones; in the end she had no choice but to turn her tiara into a choker.

Europe was beautiful. Europe was lovely. Imelda fell in love, and then it struck her: ‘I could do this at home!’ Her extravagance rose to the point of becoming a national disgrace. When you attended Imelda’s parties, you’d go home with a Rolex. If you were a foreign VIP, you’d be housed in European splendour.

There is a memorable scene in the fanboy life of the controversial Manila tour guide and performing activist, Carlos Celdran. As he describes it: TV host Daphne Oseña: Oh, Madame! Have you met Carlos Celdran?

He does a tour in the Coconut Palace about you!

Madame: Oh, hello, Carlos, let’s pretend we have exchanged respective pleasantries. Listen, here’s a little information to add to your tour. They say Filipinos can’t build pretty houses because they have only coconut and bamboo. So, Mrs Marcos resorted to making a palace out of only (hand-carved, hand-crafted and laminated) coconut and bamboo. Mrs Marcos wanted to show that there is no excuse for being ugly.

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Along with this obsession with beauty came an obsession with celebrity.

In the seventies, the Philippines became the world’s third most prolific movie producer, churning out more than 300 movies a year. You may remember major films branded with the titanic names of Oliver Stone, Lino Brocka and Chuck Norris. Even the admirable politician Juan Ponce Enrile might have watched The Year of Living Dangerously. International films were shot in the Philippines, a testament to the world’s faith in the country’s safety and security. Imelda, ever the social butterfly, began to attend prestigious film festivals all around the world. Today we condemn the government for not paying much attention or providing funding to local artists. Today, without a tiny Imelda inside our heads, we Filipinos hardly have the guts to tell the rest of the world how amazing we are. Back then, we had a cheerleader, someone who was sure we could do anything at home as well as it was done elsewhere.

Hence a Manila Film Center was born. Unfortunately, while it was being built, a sudden, heavy rain shower brought down the scaffolding, trapping dozens of workmen underneath. An unknown number were feared buried in quick-drying cement. One would think that a meticulous search would have been carried out, at least to console the grieving families, but no. Imelda ordered that construction should continue. The launch of the Manila International Film Festival was looming and Imelda, that most theatrical of actresses, didn’t want to disappoint her important guests. The show must go on.

Such excesses eventually brought the Filipino people out to the broad avenue, EDSA, to perform a class war masked as a revolution and a miracle.

And then Ninoy Aquino, returning home from self-imposed exile in America, was shot dead – in broad daylight – as he emerged from a plane at Manila airport. Who could have arranged such a thing?

When you live in an invisible country floating on the edge of the Pacific and run by an ailing president and his party-loving wife, a country where ignorance is endemic and people can survive on gossip, just how much of what you think you know is true? Twenty-six years ago, as he boarded the helicopter to flee Malacañang, legend has it that Ferdie misheard the pilot name his hometown, ‘Paoay’, as their destination. Actually, they were headed for Hawaii.

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Currently sitting on the throne is Noynoy, the son of the Philippines’ true queen, Corazon Aquino, Ninoy’s widow who was elected president in his stead. Noynoy is striving to strengthen the economy of a country that has been a disgrace for decades. Yet alongside the challenge of managing the country, he is also on a desperate quest to find a bride before his term ends in 2016. If he fails, who will inherit the throne?

Imelda lives on, and though it’s hard to believe, she is back in politics.

Her title now? Congresswoman. She celebrates her birthdays at the Sofitel, where tears stream down her face but fail to wash away her woes – or her sins. Her audience includes friends and foes alike.

From this fairy tale we can conclude that Fortune is perennially drunk, and favours anyone who dances along in a frock, whether rich, bad, pretty, corrupt, indifferent, or simply blessed with incomprehensible luck. The favoured get to declare their happily-ever-afters to generations and generations of children wanting a story at bedtime.

With no less a personage than Pope Paul VI, Imelda shared this profoundly personal insight: ‘God is love. I have loved. Therefore, I will go to heaven.’

You know you’ve made it when you can write your own ending.

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Private Eyes Chi Wei-Jan translated by Anna Holmwood

A

fter I left my teaching job I faded out of my marriage, which really existed in name only, and sold the flat in Xindian. I distanced myself from the theatre circle where I’d made a sort of name for myself and began refusing invitations to drink and play mahjong with the lecherous pigs I had come to call my friends. Once packed, my meagre belongings were barely enough to fill a small van, and so I passed through the gloomy Xinhai tunnel to set up shop as a private investigator in Wulong Street, a godforsaken place of unmarked graves that not even the birds would deign to shit on.

I hung out a sign and had some business cards printed, one side embossed with my name in Chinese and the other with ‘Wu Chen, Private Investigator’ in English. The more I played with them the prouder I felt, and before long I’d used up two boxes, not because there was a stream of people requesting them or because I was on the streets handing them out to motorists stopped at traffic lights, but because I’d shuffle them like cards while waiting for clients, or flick them like martial-arts weapons across the room. Otherwise, they were mostly used as toothpicks.

I had let the idea of becoming a private investigator brew for six months before acting on it, much like a prisoner planning his escape. I was waiting for the right moment to tell my friends and family. As expected, the objections came swarming at me like hornets whose nest I had disturbed. I tried to swat them away in vain.

But I deserved it and, anyway, I was used to mass condemnation.

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The moon hung high and bright, and there I stood, alone in the wilderness, my flowing white robe fluttering in the wind as those philistines crouched in the bushes, clutching their swords. When the moment arrived their blades pierced my heart and there they left me, lying in a pool of my own blood. I’d had no weapon to defend myself, only a puny torch.

OK, that was an exaggeration. I’ve spent years in the theatre so I’ll admit to having a penchant for creating movies in my head, ones with chillingly bloody scenes that take place in majestic landscapes and follow the trials of a bumbling young hero.

This time, however, I was determined to play the hero and play him well: a lonely, cracked boat on a vast ocean letting in more water than it can hold back.

For the most part life is completely mediocre. Scream and howl at tempests, or choose to retire quietly from the public eye? I’d chosen the latter. Never again would I let myself be suffocated and squeezed so that the blood no longer pumped in my chest. Never again would I wait, so full of expectation, only to end up empty-handed, or seesaw back and forth in indecision. I was saying goodbye to the old me, the sissy; I was throwing off the shackles and cutting myself free from the world to live life as I wanted to live it.

Drop out? Quit the complex entanglements of life? Was I crazy?

My ageing mother was the last to find out and she took it the worst. ‘You can’t resign! You can’t take early retirement! Don’t be so reckless!’

I mumbled my explanations while she, in response, shouted until her throat hurt, all the while beating at her chest. My mother’s performances were first rate; my talent for theatrics must have been passed down in the womb. Then the tears arrived. She threatened to drag me to the university president’s office and plead for him to take me back. She would have kneeled at his feet if she’d had to!

‘There’s no point,’ I told her. The head of the faculty, the dean of the college and even the president of the university himself had all received my letter of resignation with trembling hands as if it were a gift bestowed from heaven. All three levels of bureaucracy had accepted it, and made the necessary arrangements before the day was through. Never in all my ten years of teaching had I witnessed such a stunning act of bureaucratic efficiency.

True, they did make a few lacklustre attempts at persuading me to stay, but 110

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they practically formed a guard of honour to escort me off the premises to the accompaniment of fireworks and drums. Of course, I’m exaggerating.

I realize that I may not be the easiest guy to get along with but I’m not so awful that people would be popping champagne corks at my heels as I left.

How the three of them regarded my impromptu departure I never did find out, but I was embellishing the moment in order to kill off any last remains of hope my mother might be harbouring.

It worked. Her crooked body crumbled and she steadied herself against the door frame, her gaze darting between her much admired imported Italian floor tiles and Father’s portrait hanging in the living room. She looked suddenly much older, but I turned and left before she could start up again. As I went, I threw one last remark behind me: ‘I’ll keep sending the monthly payments.’

My family were comparatively easy to handle, but the friends I’d been hanging out with since university proved more difficult. When I’d first announced my intention of retiring they hadn’t taken me seriously. I was just letting off steam, they’d said. It was only when they realized the decision was serious that they’d started making up excuses to take me out for beers so they could lecture me. For a while they took turns, as if it were some complex military manoeuvre and throughout, the only arse to be plonked on the oily bar stool was mine. They formed a chorus, but in reality they were just a bunch of married, middle-aged Taiwanese men singing the blues.

‘It’s just a mid-life crisis. Make good with your “little guy” and you’ll get through it.’

‘Writer’s block? Whatever you do, don’t confuse your writing with real life.’

‘Get yourself a woman, a bit of rough and tumble in bed. Or better yet, date one of your female students, then let the authorities find out and fire you.’

And the worst one? ‘You’ve grown tired of teaching, huh? Don’t put so much effort in.’

As God is my witness, I never put any effort into my teaching.

It wasn’t that simple.

Their words of wisdom only ever lasted the time it took to slug down two rounds of drinks. By the third round their cheeks would flush the colour of 111

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pigs’ liver and they’d forget the reason for our meeting: me. Their sad attempts at psychological support made me recall an old saying: a friend’s misfortune brings greater happiness than news of an enemy’s defeat. I felt honoured that my personal crisis helped my best buddies find a new lease of life, even if it were only for one phlegmy glob of a smoke-filled alcoholic night.

I’m stubborn, though, and wasn’t inclined to listen to what my friends, family or colleagues had to say on the subject. After my wife left to visit relatives in Canada and never came back, I’d swung between poles of despair and elation; from quiet sadness to optimistic gratitude; from ‘it’s all over’ to ‘I can do anything’; until the momentum slowed and my pendulum came to a stop somewhere in the middle. It was as if I were learning to breathe for the first time – breathe in, breathe out – until I found some stability and could consider my next move. In the days that followed, the thought of leaving it all behind me drip-dripped until the ceiling caved in and it came flooding over me.

‘I’ve quit!’ I announced to my friends and family. I was determined, and didn’t leave any room for reconsideration.

I only wanted to say goodbye, to tell them to take care.

I looked out towards my unknown future and burned the proverbial bridges behind me.

The dice were cast. Three sixes! Three ones! I was either going to heaven or straight to hell.

I moved to a concrete cave where day was indistinguishable from night.

It may have been practical, but God was it murky. Alley 197 off Wulong Street is a dead end, in much the same way that an appendix is a blindended tube attached to the caecum. Around fifty families were squeezed into that narrow alley, but I rarely saw any interaction between them. It was dingy and empty during the day, and only a few shards of light descended from the small square of sky above. There were no street lamps, so when night fell the darkness was dense and overwhelmed the dim glow from dirty windows facing the alley. It was difficult to see your own fingers in front of your face. This was why I had moved here: apart from the cheap rent, it was well hidden. Even so, I needed to attract business, and had chosen a place with its own front door. The landlord had erected an awning and iron bars to keep thieves away, and when I’d viewed the property the landlord told me 112

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in no uncertain terms that the awning was not to be removed, that if I wasn’t happy with it I should find somewhere else.

So I’d hung my sign – a rectangular wooden plank with my address and ‘Private Detective’ carved on it – from a nearby stone post outside the main door of an older four-storey apartment block.

That small sign attracted a lot of attention – my formerly reclusive neighbours took to standing outside, staring at my door and gossiping amongst themselves. Clearly my arrival had prompted the re-establishment of their long-abandoned ‘neighbourhood watch’. Grannies and grandpas just awake after their afternoon naps, young guys riding their scooters, beautiful young women clacking their heels on the tarmac, precociously naughty children; nearly all the neighbours took turns at loitering. They didn’t even have the courtesy to avert their gazes when I went in or out.

The sixth shop to the left of the intersection, Gabi Café, became my temporary office away from home.

Every afternoon at half past three they had a happy hour, with a buy-oneget-one-free deal, and there I’d sit on one of their beige plastic chairs, smoking a Mellow Seven while looking out on the monstrosity of a city they call Taipei, which – despite everything – I couldn’t bear to leave.

A bus stopped while the driver bought betel nuts. The scooters revved their engines rhythmically at the red light. One of the riders fished peanuts out of a plastic bag dangling from the hand-grip to his right and, like a worker at an assembly line, cracked the shells, sucked out the contents, and tossed the shells into another bag hanging from the other hand-grip. A cyclist rode nonchalantly against the traffic, one hand steering, the other clutching a mobile phone. A grandpa and his grandson crossed the road when the light was red, as if taking a leisurely afternoon stroll, or as if they were walking from kitchen to living room in the privacy of their own home. A three-wheeler loaded with recycling teetered as its rider pedalled slowly and with determination, oblivious to the commotion around him. He looked like a contemporary artist putting on a performance: his was the aesthetic of slow motion, a protest against a modern life that worshipped speed. Either that or he had a death wish.

There I sat, near the intersection of Heping East Road and Fuyang Street, once known as the ‘Roundabout’, long since torn down and replaced by a sixlane thoroughfare that resembled an entanglement of copulating pythons.

113

Private Eyes

The streets looked like covered walkways under the incessant flickering of the seven sets of traffic lights, and the covered walkways in turn looked like streets. It was a disaster scene, with vehicles competing against pedestrians in a mass evacuation. My ears and eyes were hammered by the activity around me and my body shook with the rumble of engines. I was waiting for an accident, for a fight between enraged drivers, for a vehicle unable to brake in time. A crash. Maybe even a tragic death. To my surprise and even disappointment, however, there had been nothing. Nothing in the whole month since I had taken up residence in Gabi Café.

There, surrounded by swirling dust, exhaust fumes and a fishy pong, I slurped my drink.

‘The name is Chen, Wu Chen,’ I repeated to myself.

James Bond drank his martini shaken, not stirred. Me? Tea, a little sugar, no ice. But this was where I eventually got my first case.

It was rather deflating to discover that Mrs Lin had learned of my existence and daily schedule from neighbourhood gossip. Not only that, but before making contact, she’d tailed me for three days to make sure I wasn’t a weirdo or a sex maniac. And for those three days I had been completely unaware that she’d been following me.

‘You . . . run a credit investigation agency?’ She leaned forward as if to check whether I was paying attention.

‘Private investigation, not credit investigation,’ I said, regaining my focus.

‘There’s a difference?’

It was friendly curiosity without the slightest hostility; I liked her straight away.

‘Credit investigation is done by companies; I’m a one-man gang. A wellconnected credit investigation agency has access to police files and they get their information by paying bribes. It’s a sort of pay-as-you go system, you could say. I work alone and don’t have anyone on the inside. Credit investigation agencies make use of the latest technology to snoop on people, take pictures, tape them, even track them with GPS. It’s enough to make a Cold War spy envious. Me, I’m anti-technology. I don’t even use a tape recorder. I rely solely on my eyes and my ears. And my feet.’

I used the jargon to suss her out, calling myself a ‘one-man gang’, making myself out to be tough and in the know, alluding to the collusion between 114

Chi Wei-Jan

the government and business, adopting mainland words, referring to Cold War spies. But she didn’t say anything; not a trace of emotion showed on her face. Instead, she stared back at me as if she were a biologist examining an alien life form. Turned out she was more reserved than I’d thought. This was not a good sign; I liked her even more now and worried that it might make me lose my objectivity.

‘What service do you provide that a credit investigation agency can’t?’

‘Look at it another way. I can’t give you what they offer. All I can say is, I’m not in this for the money. For the most part I just want to help people.’

‘What else are you in it for?’

‘The rest is personal. Besides, do you know how much those credit agencies charge?’

‘I checked online. It’s outrageous.’

‘It’s legal larceny, that’s what it is. For a missing person, it’s fifty thousand to start, as is evidence of infidelity. Then you’re talking a hundred and fifty thousand for catching a cheating spouse in the act, two hundred thousand to save a marriage, and two hundred thousand to get out of one. What does it mean? It means that the poor can only pray that there are no traces of the previous night’s secrets on their underwear drying in the sun.’

‘Do you always talk like this?’

‘I do my best.’

‘I just thought they were too expensive. My problem isn’t a big one.

Actually it might not be a problem at all. It could just be my overactive imagination. So I thought I’d find someone who wasn’t too professional.’

I nearly spluttered out a mouthful of tea.

‘Professional is a filthy word. It somehow lacks humanity. Credit investigation agencies treat you like a sucker with more money to spend than sense.

I’m a private investigator, so your secrets are safe with me. You can trust me.

What I’m saying is, I won’t treat you like a mere “client”.’

‘Nor as a friend.’

‘Nor as a friend. Put it this way: what I can promise you are my sincerest efforts. But I’ll still have to charge you.’

‘Of course.’

‘So tell me, what’s troubling you?’

She didn’t reply; just sat there with a melancholy look in her eyes.

‘It’s OK, you can tell me, even if it’s nothing.’

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Private Eyes

‘My family life is pretty straightforward. The three of us – my husband, my daughter and me – we have a pretty good life together. When things are going OK you don’t tend to analyse them much, do you? But when something goes wrong, that’s when you can start getting carried away and question everything.

‘About three or four weeks ago, I began to notice that my daughter was giving my husband dirty looks, as if he were her mortal enemy. There was hate in her eyes and she refused to speak to him. He tried to talk to her but she just tossed her head, stormed off to her bedroom and slammed the door. I asked him what was wrong, but he looked helpless and said he didn’t know. So I asked my daughter. She either wouldn’t stop crying or else she called me the world’s biggest idiot and told me to get out of her room.

I was worried sick. It felt as if our family was falling apart. So I thought back and realized that the change had been abrupt. It was on the night of May twenty-third, actually. Before that, everything was normal. Something must have happened that day to cause all this.’

‘Hold on a second. How old is your daughter? Does she treat you differently from her father?’

‘I know what you’re thinking. I’ve wondered the same thing. She’s in her final year at junior high and is under tremendous pressure at school.

She’s a teenager, so it’s normal for her to have mood swings. She thinks the height of happiness is a red-bean ice cream and that the sky will fall in every time she has an argument with her best friend. I’m used to that.

But this is something different. It’s not just that she refuses to speak to her father; she shuts herself up in her room even if he’s just in the house. She eats her dinner in there. She talks to me as long as I don’t ask her what’s wrong. She still tells me what’s annoying her at school and which teacher she hates. But recently she’s started giving me these long, tight hugs before she leaves the house and whispers, “I’m fine.” I don’t think she means her schoolwork; it must be something else. I’m going crazy just thinking about it.’

‘You’ve probably already thought of the worst possibility.’

‘Yes, I have, and I’ll kill him if it’s true!’ Sharp lines appeared on her otherwise gentle face. ‘But it’s not very likely. It can’t be. I’ve known him for almost twenty years and we’ve been married for sixteen. I would know if he’d done something as dirty, as disgusting as that to his own daughter.

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But I keep thinking about what she’d shouted at me: “You’re the world’s biggest idiot!” Could I really be that blind? I started watching him secretly, searching for clues in his eyes. I check his computer when he’s out, to see what kind of websites he’s been visiting. But I haven’t found a thing. No unusual emails either. Most are from his tree buddies.’

‘His what?’

‘He’s a plant fanatic and most of his web searches are related to trees and flowers. Most of his friends share his passion. He meets them online. His tree buddies.’

‘Do you have a lot of plants at home?’

‘Well, we live on the top floor, which meant we could build a room on the roof for his plants. They’re his most treasured possessions, and he’s made the room up there airtight. It feels like a greenhouse.’

‘I murder plants. They don’t survive a week in my care. I either smother them with love and kill them by overwatering them, or I ignore them and they die of thirst.’

This was unnecessary detail. She frowned and gave me a look of mild annoyance, which made me feel a little embarrassed. Perhaps she could tell I wasn’t just talking about plants.

‘I started going to bed after my husband and getting up before him.

Before getting into bed I’d lean a book against the bedroom door so that it would make a noise if he got up and left the room. But that wasn’t enough to put my mind at ease. I’ve spent the last few nights sleeping on the sofa near my daughter’s bedroom. I daren’t even close my eyes properly.’

‘Have you thought of installing a surveillance camera?’

‘Yes, I’ve thought of everything, but I refuse to lower myself to spying on my own family with a hidden camera. Besides, I’m sure that if anything did happen it must have taken place outside our home. They both leave early, one for school and the other for work, and they don’t get home until the evening, by which time I’m already home.’

‘Did your daughter come home later than usual on May twenty-third?’

‘No. Sometimes she and her friends go to a local fast food place after school for a Coke, but she never stays out too long. She’s always home for dinner. That day was the same as usual.’

‘The best thing would be to ask your husband. Get the truth out of him.’ She must have tried this already or she wouldn’t be sitting here in 117

Private Eyes

front of me. Stupid suggestions are a routine part of the early stages in an investigation; I had to make them.

‘Sometimes he seems as if he’s about to say something but then stops.

Then sometimes he just shrugs and says she’s a teenager, it will pass. That’s why I came to you. I want you to help me find the truth.’

‘Do you mind if I ask you a personal question?’

She gave me a guarded look, as if she knew what I was about to ask.

‘How would you describe your sex life?’

She was quiet for some time before answering, ‘Normal until this.’

It is necessary to ask questions about a client’s personal life when establishing the basics of a case, but this was the first time I had ever asked a woman I’d never met before about her sex life. No matter how professional I was about it, there could be no doubt that I was deriving a certain voyeuristic pleasure from it.

‘OK,’ I said, ‘I’ll take your case.’

Extract from Private Eyes, published in Chinese by Ink, Taiwan.

118

Extract from Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves Reloaded, published

by Campfire Books, India.

Jéanpaul Ferro

Yodok 15

Men and women in the snowy fields picking cabbage with your naked hands, faces stricken riding your colourless uniforms your naked souls gone a long time ago nothing to eat today or tomorrow – who are you then?

You know the warm-coated guards shoot prisoners with their rifles in the absolute controlled area

surrounded by electrified wire minefields snare pits

inside:

1. factionalist elements 2. reactionaries 3. anti-revolutionaries 4. capitalists 5. landowners 6. pro-Japanese 7. pro-American 8. pro-Chinese 126

Jéanpaul Ferro

9. religionists 10. traitors to the nation –

they will never leave once they have set foot inside the walls of Yodok 15 or Onsong 13 or Hoeyong-ri 22

and the world does nothing.

Yodok 15, Onsong 13 and Hoeyong-ri 22 are names of concentration camps in North Korea.

127

Poetry

Dreams of Men

The sky in North Korea always leads to China dark during the day, bright plutonium yellow at night dogs sell human body parts along the country roads here humans cut off other humans’ legs in the camps there is neither a half full nor a half empty glass there is neither a half full nor a half empty soul everyone knows the day they are going to die in North Korea there is torture and a life sentence in the political prisons for when you are caught (it does not matter for what) you have a 5-foot-by-5-foot underground cell you are hit, you are raped, you are tortured you creep, you crawl, and you cower you are crushed, you are experimented on you are rushed off your feet by freezing water you are poisoned, starved, gassed, you are cut up you are told your dead children’s names over and over.

I smashed my fingertips so they would kill me, but they laughed at me for three and a half years instead I huddled in the corner all night and tried to dream – dream of my fingertips touching the wet sands of the ocean dream of the bright garden stars rising out in the backyard dream of your hips with cinnamon and parsley dream of your body rising sunward like a blue sunflower dream of flying south over the distant mountain tops to die together in a beautiful peace.

128

North Korea: Absolute Power and Absolute Corruption Jang Jin-sung translated by Shirley Lee

S

ystemic flaws and inherent corruption have prevented North Korea from fulfilling the promise of its juche ideology of self-reliance. Following the collapse of its strongest ally, the Soviet Union, these flaws became more apparent. Without Soviet support, corruption – once the fiefdom of the elite – began to filter down to all levels of society. A catastrophic effect of this was the failure of North Korea’s official rationing system. This occurred in 1994 as a result of political instability brought about by President Kim Il-sung’s death, economic free-fall after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, and the consequent breakdown of law and order. The people had depended on the rationing system, and its failure fatally undermined their loyalty to the party.

All North Koreans were divided into classes and granted rations according to their loyalty to the Kim family and the regime. According to their class, people were entitled to receive ‘everyday rations’, ‘three-day rations’, ‘weekly rations’ or ‘monthly rations’. When the government stopped the general distribution of rations in 1994 , mass starvation decimated the population. It is widely thought that up to two million – and perhaps more – died in the famine, though there is no way of confirming the number of deaths.

At the same time, monthly rations were abolished. The provision of weekly rations to mid-ranking officials was delegated to each department 129

North Korea: Absolute Power and Absolute Corruption

that employed these officials. Consequently, only the groups entitled to everyday rations and three-day rations – the most privileged members of society – continued to receive regular food supplies.

An everyday ration was calculated according to the number of calories required daily for one person, multiplied by the number of members in a family. These were provided to central party secretaries, departmental directors and deputies, ministers, military personnel ranked commander and above, and those working in close proximity to the ruling Kim, such as his bodyguards. Three-day rations were for central party deputies, managers and deputy ministers. The most coveted ‘ration’, though, was a gift from Kim Jong-il, often including foreign luxury goods not otherwise obtainable on the domestic market.

The collapse of rationing in 1994 saw a corresponding expansion of the black market, which compelled North Koreans to obtain goods according to the forces of supply and demand. Foreign goods, even luxury items, began to circulate, making the Kims’ system of ‘loyalty gifts’ obsolete. The obeisant and privileged classes began to be rewarded instead with valuable foreign currency, which in turn led to the beginning of financial corruption in North Korea.

Black markets began to appear overnight, and their unregulated business offered a new avenue for corruption.

On 1 July 2000 the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) announced its ‘ 7.1 Policy’, through which the value of goods would be officially determined ‘according to market forces’. This was an effort to regain control of the economy and reassert the authority of the dictatorship.

Before this, there had been no notion of inflation, given that the regime determined the value of goods. However, since the planned economy had collapsed, the regime had no option but to turn a blind eye to the black markets.

The 7.1 Policy was ineffective; it only exposed the widening disparity between the official ‘market’ prices and actual values. While the policy remains in force, the gap between values is exploited. And because the framework is patchy, there are economic loopholes exploited by those with money or power.

The situation is aggravated by the fact that the regime has not been consistent in adhering to its own economic regulations and has often changed 130

Jang Jin-sung

its line. North Koreans have lost confidence in the law and in other frameworks set up by the regime, and have come to rely on the abuse of political privileges and the use of illegal markets for basic subsistence. The North Korean people have adapted quickly to this new order and their fundamental worldview has started to shift. In the past, North Koreans knew only the value of loyalty as it related to the rigid system of rewards. However, North Koreans are now growing accustomed to the ‘new’ system of market forces, of supply and demand, and are coming to understand that goods have value outside what is dictated by the regime.

This transformation goes hand in hand with an increasing awareness of the idea of fending for oneself, rather than working for the collective good. The disparity between the people’s revised mindset and the official line creates a vacuum that corruption has readily filled. As goods become valuable, the traditional system of fealty to the regime and reward from the regime becomes redundant, and society spirals into economic anarchy, especially as individual survival cannot be assured within the sanctioned framework.

The future of the current regime requires the continued deification of the Kim family and its dispensation of political privileges; thus, corruption is sustained, at least to the extent that it benefits the elite. To maintain political, if not economic, stability, the dictator must allow power to trickle down to his relatives and close associates: the power structure in the DPRK is held together by personal relationships rather than by an abstract or legal framework. In other words, the abuse of power, such as granting positions to family members, is the rule rather than the exception. This form of corruption is no longer restricted to the higher echelons, In the past, a loyal citizen could aspire to become a privileged member of the ruling Workers’ Party, to obtain a better job or to acquire the right to live within Pyongyang’s city limits. These were the incentives to remain loyal to the state. Recently, however, financial wealth has become both the basis of power and the method of reward, because money guarantees a comfortable life, and political loyalty alone does not. It is significant that today North Korea’s elite perceives the acquisition of personal wealth as a better route to power than mere loyalty to the regime.

The absence of an independent media in the DPRK ensures that corruption, in all its forms, goes unreported. The media follow the diktat of 131

North Korea: Absolute Power and Absolute Corruption

the Party’s propaganda department, and this is their raison d’être. Lack of press freedom actively facilitates North Korea’s endemic corruption.

There is an entity called ‘Channel 3’ which purportedly monitors corruption; in reality this is another means by which the Party’s propaganda machine retains far-reaching control over society. Channel 3 serves a regime that not only prohibits press freedom, but also silences any sentiment perceived to be negative. Corruption thrives in an atmosphere where it is permissible to express no opinion other than that endorsed by the Party.

Corruption also thrives in other forms and at different levels in North Korean society. It occurs on the individual level when officials abuse their public power for private gain, or conduct personal activities in the name of the state. The most common such abuse is the arrangement of job transfers, promotions or foreign postings, usually in exchange for a bribe. Bribery is the most common form of corruption; nearly all punishments and purges in the higher echelons are the direct consequence of bribery cases gone wrong.

Embezzlement is also very common, with the proceeds routed abroad.

After the collapse of the state’s planned economy and the consequent depletion of its resources, government departments were stripped of the civic duties and responsibilities for which they were established. This fuelled the growth of corruption at a systemic level. Officials began seeking every opportunity to earn money, including foreign currency, in the name of the state department they worked for. These officials at least have an excuse for their illegal activities: they are trying to feed their employees.

Yet with each government department merely looking after its own, civil servants come to resemble organized criminal gangs, and have no incentive to act in the public interest.

The DPRK continues to be run by carrot-and-stick policies, with loyalty to the regime the standard of virtue. This results in severe socio-economic disparities between the shrinking ‘loyal’ classes and the overwhelming majority deemed ‘corrupt’, which includes those judged ‘guilty’ because of their family background. In any event, all laws become irrelevant in the face of the omnipotent divinity of the Kim household. The laws of North Korea are corrupt in that they are executed according to double standards; and the law is invalidated altogether when it concerns Kim or his orders.

Perhaps most insidious of all is the fact that the corruption of North Korea is not contained within its borders; it also affects the international 132

Jang Jin-sung

community. North Korea continues to be a major exporter of drugs such as heroin and amphetamines; it is a leader in the field of human trafficking and one of the world’s largest manufacturers of counterfeit banknotes.

The country’s laws do not protect ordinary North Koreans, who are therefore vulnerable both to becoming victims of crime and succumbing to its temptations. The fundamental corruption of the DPRK regime denies North Koreans a framework that would allow them to sustain their livelihoods within the law. It is therefore not surprising that in order to survive, many people have no choice but to engage fully with the world of crime and corruption that surrounds them.

133

Changming Yuan

Y You love ‘Y’, not because it’s the first letter In your family name, but because it’s like A horn, which the water buffalo in your Native village used to fight against injustice Or, because it’s like a twig, where a crow Can come down to perch, a cicada can sing Towards the setting sun as loud as it wants to More important, it’s like a real reed deeply rooted On the bank of the Nile, something you can bend Into a whistle or hit a drum with; in pronouncing it You can get all the answers you need. Besides You can make it into a heart-felt catapult And shoot at a snakehead or sparrow, as long As it is within the range of your boyhood

134

I’m Praising Him Right Now Prosper Anyalechi translated by Dreux Richard

I

n Roppongi we have saints. Self-proclaimed street prophets – insanity (pardon me, I mean fervour) was how my people survived the missionaries. I tolerate all claims of divine sight, lest I dig the moat I drown in.

What I see: blinding lights, plainclothes police. People don’t come here for God. People come here to find people. Look, don’t touch. Touch, don’t hold. Hold, but put it back when you’re done, please. Roppongi ni irasshai.

But Kevin – OK guy. Mascot. I saw him once at the airport when I came from Nigeria. Not going anywhere. Just watching the planes leave. Other people, other sightings, over time. His longing made him human to us. A scratch on the surface so that the surface – deluded joy overflowing – could seem beautiful. Beautiful.

The plainclothes who arrested Kevin, we call him Newspepa. Because: ‘Newspepa? Newspepa?’ Says he’s a reporter, will buy you dinner. Some go with him, give bad information, think if he remembers their face, he’ll never arrest them. I’m too wise. The basis of my survival here: a Japanese can never tell it – one black face from another. All of us and none of us is safe.

Newspepa is zealous. Always the first plainclothes to arrive in the evening. Comes on foot from a shrine – prays before work. I begin my evening watching him from behind the shrine’s torii, then shadow him on his way. If I’m fortunate, other plainclothes will be waiting to meet him, and I’ll know who’s working the street.

Last night began inauspicious. The late-summer sky brightened the evening. I enjoyed the beauty of backlight on the east-facing shrine.

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I’m Praising Him Right Now

Newspepa began his prayers. I watched him with the same calm, same joy I feel towards the rising sun when it beckons the end of my worknight.

Then I heard footsteps approaching quickly behind me – Kevin already walking by. If tension arises when I’m watching the police, I go to my phone, instinctive. I withdrew it from my pocket, held it to my ear.

Newspepa began to turn. Kevin wrapped his arms around him. Newspepa struggled. Kevin was bigger. Newspepa’s feet slipped and he landed on his back, Kevin on top. Kevin pushed his chin against Newspepa’s head. I could see Kevin was speaking, but so softly I couldn’t hear. He stayed this way a long time, then began laughing with his whole body, Newspepa struggling again. Kevin released him and ran, still laughing, out through the shrine’s back gate.

Newspepa didn’t follow – stayed on the ground a moment, then rose up, looked at the shrine. Was he thinking to finish his prayers? He left through the torii. I watched from behind its far post – he was agitated, walking fast, didn’t see me.

The phone still against my ear, I dialled.

A familiar voice: ‘Who tonight?’

‘No good,’ I said.

‘Urgent?’

‘When I see you, I explain.’

What I did next you’ll think is strange. Before I took the taxi back to Gaien-Higashi, I approached the shrine – wanted to know what kami lives there. The signs were in Japanese I couldn’t read. I thought maybe I should pray, but maybe that would invite the god Kevin had just affronted. Better not offer praise under unfamiliar signs. It would recall every mistake I’ve made in this country – marriage included – and the losses that followed.

Here, faith is a necessity, but shouldn’t blind or numb you.

Kevin had come out of jail the night before. I’d wondered how his fanaticism had adapted to incarceration. Later I learned he’d been a model prisoner: no outbursts, no proselytizing, asked the guards about their kids – so much goodwill they let him lead morning calisthenics. If he’d said as much when I saw him then, I would have thought it fiction.

I was outside the police station, tapping a song with my shoes on the sidewalk.

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Prosper Anyalechi

‘No good touting,’ he said. ‘I could go back to jail.’

‘The police forget your face,’ I said. ‘Already forgotten.’

‘I don’t want to be accepted by these people.’

‘They never accept you.’

‘By these people.’ He waved his hand over the sidewalk.

‘Your people, Kevin.’ But I understood. Rebuffed by a customer, you never feel rejected. It’s a job, and the customers don’t know you. But for example most of these clubs employ security guards – Eastern European guys. Not good people: they assault a customer if he doesn’t pay, try to make it with the girls. When you go to the club you’re working for, they behave as if they’re your friends. This leaves debris in your heart – to be accepted by people beneath the dignity of your spirit.

‘Your job is dealing just with police?’ Kevin said.

‘I’m reporting to Tony.’

‘Never inside the clubs?’

‘Only special operations.’

‘Let me work.’

‘You’re not suited.’

‘How?’ ‘You are not calm. Your head is two ways all the time: hot and hotter. I have a cool head. That is my qualification.’

‘In the centre, I’m cold. I have peace.’

‘I’m not talking about peace. Never talking about peace.’

‘Tomorrow teach me.’

‘One favour. Because you’re new from jail.’

‘A silver trumpet sounds for you,’ said Kevin. He made the sign of the cross.

‘Leave God out,’ I said. ‘He got you enough trouble.’ Kevin’s prison sentence was longer because, while running from the police, he had thrown his Bible behind him. It gashed an officer’s brow.

‘Something came out of nowhere,’ said the officer, according to a witness.

Last night, after the shrine, I went looking for Kevin. I found him in Don Quijote, the variety store. He was trying sunglasses, electric yellow, with Donald Duck stickers.

He said: ‘Maybe I buy this for my son.’

I slapped him, open-handed; had a damp spot on my hand from his lips.

137

I’m Praising Him Right Now

‘You start your first night like this?’ I asked. ‘All night, the police will come.’

Kevin showed me his shopping bag. Imitating my voice from the night before, ‘They have already forgotten my face.’ He turned to a store employee nearby. ‘Where’s the toilet?’

When Kevin came back he was wearing different clothes: a gag t-shirt (‘SOME OF MY BEST FRIENDS ARE WHITE’), flip-flops, pink swimming trunks.

‘Where did you put the bag?’

‘Upstairs, household goods, laundry bin.’

‘You made foolishness tonight.’

‘I’m only following orders – as a Christian soldier.’

‘Is that your sense of humour?’

‘The Lord wanted me to forgive.’

‘By tackling him?’

‘I didn’t mean for him to fall. I needed to hold him still so he would listen.’

I recalled the image from the shrine: both on the ground, face to face, Kevin on top. His chin on Newspepa’s head. Lips moving, mouth opening.

The soft speech, sudden laughter.

‘What did you say to Newspepa?’

‘I said, “Jesus forgives you, brother. He wishes you will have eternal piece, you will prepare for the rapture so you don’t suffer tribulation.” Prayers for his family. Daniel seven twenty-five.’

‘Why did you laugh?’

‘Holy laughter came.’

‘You were in tongues?’

‘I had the Ghost.’

‘You have guaranteed tonight someone will be arrested. A matter of who.’

‘One Peter four-twelve,’ Kevin said. ‘ “A trial by fire is occurring among you. Do not be astonished.” ’ On the way out he shoplifted the yellow sunglasses for his son. To the cashier he continued: ‘ “Rejoice in how you have shared.” ’ From the top of the Mori Tower I drew Kevin a map of what mattered: the koban police would emerge from before gathering for raids or crackdowns, 138

Prosper Anyalechi

the blocks where Nigerian-owned clubs were clustered and the routes police took to approach them. I wanted him to feel overwhelmed, as I had once felt, by the winking lights in the sprawl.

The truth is, I am trapped here. I’ll never make enough money to become someone else. I could go home to Nigeria, but nothing there is better. At least there’s comfort knowing my cage is a city so vast it crosses all horizons.

Kevin splayed his fingers against the glass, like a frog’s. ‘Souls,’ he said.

‘That’s giving a lot of credit.’

He chose a prayer. I chose not to hear it.

We went to Club Véloce, then delivered a bribe on its behalf. The off-duty officer accepting it warned us that an African had assaulted a plainclothes, and told us that if we were smart, we’d go home for the night.

As Kevin handed over the cash, I felt anew the deadening process that had accompanied my learning the job – how everyone had clammy hands, always grasping at whatever might pass through the nearby air.

Kevin wasn’t bothered. He glad-handed crooks and played minstrel for unabashed xenophobes. To a policeman who spit on his back as he passed, Kevin said, ‘Hallelujah!’ Then turned to me and explained: ‘From the top of that tower where you took me: a glider – no fuel – could take you anywhere.

Far away.’

It sounded distinctly like a prayer.

To understand why I helped Kevin learn, and why I got lost in his sense of humour, understand this: his mania is inspiring. One time a Muslim tout asked Kevin what it might cost to make him switch religions. A joke, but the next night Kevin delivered a typed legal contract: ‘Proposal to Incorporate a Christian-to-Muslim Financial-Spiritual Conversion Company, Inc.’ Necessary venture capital: ‘All tea in China. India also maybe.’ Signed, ‘Attorney Mr Honourable Kevin Jesus, Escrow.’ Gave it to the Muslim.

‘When ready,’ Kevin said, and pointed at the sky, ‘call my people.’

Kevin came to Japan five years ago with two families already: in Nigeria, in Taiwan. He searched for factory work. Soon we saw him on the street.

He began touting. He professed his fanatical Christianity straight away – difficult for us to believe: beyond three families, he was eager to learn to exploit customers. Towards criminal cleverness and Christ – equal veneration. Everyone assumed he was trying to find the best Christian 139

I’m Praising Him Right Now

church for a wife and visa. But even after he married, had children, nothing changed. Every night bringing a Bible to work. A Japanese man suffered a heart attack in the hostess club nearby. Kevin was first on the scene. He read from the Book of Acts and laid on hands. The man turned out to be Christian, came back to thank Kevin for saving him – never mind the paramedics. He offered 10,000 yen. Kevin took it, said, ‘More.’ The man fumbled with his wallet. Kevin said ‘Now. Quickly.’ I could not detect regret on the man’s face as he handed over more money.

We could not simply conclude Kevin was crazy. He had a golden touch for people, and was brilliant as a tout. One night he approached some sailors and said, in a perfect American redneck accent, ‘Howdy, pardners! Watta ya say we rope us some tight little calves?’ Sailors, they never spend money, but these were in the club for six hours after that; before they went home they took the girls shopping. Most of us could play innocent. Kevin could also play the fool, could play bigshot, could play eccentric immigrant genius. To put his bizarre Christianity in perspective: he enjoys that costume, but has a closet full of others.

Some ways saner than the lot of us: touts save money to try at club management, but Kevin always responded to proposed joint ventures with the question, ‘What do you think they want you to have?’ If he was crazy it was because permission existed for his kind of crazy; there was no such permission for us to truly thrive. The animated atmosphere Kevin’s presence encouraged was restorative. He must have known how badly we needed restoring.

I was divorcing my wife then. If there had been children to take, she would have taken them. In pursuing their retrieval I would have had a mission to despise and cherish, or at the very least to live by. It happened her father had refused to meet me for all nine years of our marriage. Her mother was dead, and I might have felt isolated if the father hadn’t unearthed a hurtful American word for dark-skinned men to call me by when he phoned us. My anger kept me company, and its leaven: if I’d been born in Japan – light in skin, but the very same person I am – he would meet me, know me, love me.

Which doesn’t mean I deserved sympathy. I lived – we all lived – for the rare night when a black man, usually an American sailor, was assaulted by a Japanese man in a club we could get to quickly. I sought those brawls intending to ruin scalps, eyes and crotches.

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

Police presume our lack of sophistication. We have strategies.

By ten o’clock we heard that Newspepa and some other plainclothes were going to clubs and chatting with bartenders. If police are desperate to show force, a clean club – nothing at stake – will provoke a raid. These clubs have customers. The raid will drag out.

Fix Bar, on the sixth floor of the Murayama building, would take the raid. It has a cheap old lift we can lock and pretend isn’t working. For half an hour before, touts on the street focused their efforts to draw people to Fix Bar. It’s not a hostess club, so there’s no cover charge. Customers are easy to come by. When we had put maybe a hundred inside, Kevin and I went to trigger the raid.

A plainclothes across the street. Kevin went to stand in front of him.

I waited for the traffic light, then ran into the intersection.

I flailed my arms. ‘Next time I see you,’ I yelled in Japanese, ‘I’ll break your teeth.’

Kevin stepped to the edge of the sidewalk and leaned over the railing.

‘A duck walks into a bar,’ he screamed in English.

‘No. Japanese. In Japanese.’ I stomped, paced, feigned furious – possibly violent.

‘A duck walks into a bar.’

‘No.’ ‘A duck walks into a bar!’

Work is work. But it occurred to me that we – two black immigrants in a homogeneous nation – were baiting a plainclothes into calling a raid on a nightclub owned by another black immigrant (who owned it through a Japanese front – a gibbering ojii-san from the nursing home next to his apartment). How had I managed to take myself seriously to begin with?

‘And says what?’ I yelled. ‘ “Got any grapes?” ’ ‘ “No grapes.” ’ ‘The same bar, the next day: “Got any grapes?” ’ ‘ “No grapes!” ’ The traffic light had turned green.

‘The next day: “Got any grapes?” ’ ‘ “Listen, duck – ask me for grapes one more time and I nail your dick to the floor.” ’ 141

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‘Next day. “Got any nails? Also – got any hammers?” ’ Cars streaming past on both sides. Horns blaring. Plainclothes reached into his breast pocket – maybe his radio. I waited for a break in traffic and sprinted back to the club.

I hoped Kevin would behave as instructed: wait until I’m in the building, turn to the plainclothes, call me ‘moron’ in Japanese. Go calmly to the crosswalk, cross, enter. Meet in the bar.

I told the bartender turn up the music – if it’s not loud enough we have to wait for the plainclothes to try every floor. Even loud, it takes a few minutes. Kevin arrived, went behind the bar. I sipped a glass of soda water, waiting.

The manager watched the security camera and saw the plainclothes go in the lift. He signalled. When the plainclothes entered I waited so he saw me, then pretended to answer my phone.

I called Tony: ‘Ten minutes maybe.’

The plainclothes sat at the bar in front of Kevin. They talked some before the plainclothes asked what we had argued about. Kevin explained it was nothing, but said he’d been losing his temper sometimes since his visa problems arose. Then he said, ‘Most the people working here are afraid about the same.’

Soon the plainclothes excused himself, stepped into the hallway. I listened through the door. His signal was only a pulse of static through his radio, but I knew he had ordered the raid. I went out, joined him. He was putting his radio away. Startled, he dropped it.

‘Hey, man,’ I said, trying Kevin’s American accent. ‘Where is the pussy fest?’

He put the radio on its clip. Said nothing.

‘Oh – no speak English? I flew in from Hollywood. Do you know Alabama?’

He pressed the button for the lift and turned to face it.

‘Japan and America, man. Atomic bomb. Can’t we all get along?’

The lift arrived. Doors opened. He stepped inside. Turned to face me.

A very forced smile. Doors closed.

I counted to five, held the lift key. Turned it in the lock. The lift stopped two floors down. I turned again, heard it start. Turned again – stop. I 142

Prosper Anyalechi

counted again. I made it to forty-five before I heard a clang – probably the plainclothes slamming the (broken) emergency phone.

I heard, ‘So get me out.’ Then, ‘It’s not funny,’ and, in commanding English: ‘FUCK YOU SHITTING FUCK.’ I turned the key again. I let him finish his trip.

I didn’t risk antics when the uniforms arrived. I trapped them near the ground floor and told Kevin to leave. He was down the stairs. I reactivated the lift, followed him.

During a raid, police attention goes elsewhere. I used this opportunity to show Kevin the job: places where plainclothes park their cars, how to identify a police vehicle – stickers on license plate, special parking pass, notebook and pen on dashboard, radio on passenger seat, driver’s side door unlocked. Or sloppy parking committed with impunity. We wrote makes, models, plates and compared them with my running list. We debated a BMW motorcycle – police model, but unmarked – until he opened the side satchel, found three containers of Viagra, prompted me to concede: a policeman’s bike.

I demonstrated proper technique for monitoring the station: spots where the wall between building and street does not impede noise. Heard talk about the raid through radios, complaints about having to check every customer’s papers. No illegals found. I heard a voice I recognized: ‘If the lift stalls, I’m jumping.’

The basement bar next door to the station was hosting a gokon party.

Pretty men and women. Well-dressed. Employed, presumably. Strangers all, browsing for marriage, not altogether wanting it. One couple agreed: the party – a bust; coffee at the café inside the Mercedes dealership – let’s do that instead. Easy, I thought: designate time and place – fate will meet you there.

Kevin, never content not speaking, was somehow quiet now, too, contemplating the partygoers.

‘Can you sell Viagra on the street?’

You could, I told him. But it wouldn’t do them any good.

Loose ends needed tying. It didn’t take long: Kevin was stopped by the plainclothes from the bar; I took a few more steps so I could run for help if needed, then stepped into the entranceway of a basement Turkish bath.

The plainclothes wanted to see Kevin’s Alien Registration Card.

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‘You’re legal,’ the plainclothes said, holding the card at arm’s length, as if it might read differently from a distance.

‘Yes,’ said Kevin.

‘You said you had visa problems.’

‘My Japanese is poor. You misunderstood.’

‘In English, then: you said you had visa problems.’

‘I was saying I was nervous. Just now I’m out of prison. Can’t I lose my visa?’

The plainclothes sneered, flicked the card at Kevin. ‘You’d have known by now,’ he said. ‘No one at the bar was illegal.’

‘Oh.’ ‘You just happened to go on break when I left?’

‘It’s not where I work. Now, I’m looking for a job. I was waiting there for the manager. I can’t tout now. I won’t let you put me inside again.’

‘You think so?’

Kevin lifted his left foot, the toe of his left shoe grazing the ground, scraping slowly backward. I had never seen Kevin in backward motion; the posture didn’t suit him. Before my eyes he shrank, like a stone falling into a well.

‘Got any grapes?’ said the plainclothes.

A familiar voice behind me. ‘I know you.’ Newspepa.

‘We never met,’ said Kevin. His weight shifted. The first plainclothes saw it, seemed coiled for chase.

‘You’ve been on TV!’ said Newspepa. ‘What’s your nickname? Tiny?

I’ve seen you play a character, who is it – gay black man, lives in a rented bathtub? Do you do stand-up, too? Do you have a partner? A black man and a Japanese –’ ‘Idiot – it’s this one,’ said the first plainclothes.

‘Who?’ ‘The one I called in.’

‘Oh. Get his papers.’

‘I did. Legal.’

‘Take him in?’

‘We’d better.’

Kevin was already turned around, pointed down the street. I dropped to my knees in front of the cops, threw my arms wide, palms up. Two 144

Prosper Anyalechi

distractions sprang to mind: song, confession. I enumerated sins to the tune of ‘He Touched Me’. Oh, how a heavy burden shackled me, and I’d not been to church. I’d bet (and lost) on football. I’d stolen hotel bath towels, and – yes, Lord – I walked out of Don Quijote wearing Donald Duck sunglasses, unpaid. Mastermind of email scam. Drink spiking, bill padding, whoring my Filipina waitresses. I smuggled counterfeit brand-name clothes into Japan from Hong Kong. I sham-married for permanent residency, divorced as soon as I got it. I was whatever kind of villain my persecutors wanted.

I realized with alarm: I hadn’t intended to recite stereotypes, or to notice their cartoon quality as I recited them. I was borne to them by instinct – if I thought about blame and who I was, clichés emerged to deflect me.

I tell you so you don’t have to learn it yourself: no pain is more hollow than realizing you’ve forgotten what’s yours to answer for.

It was this thought and the subsequent failed attempts – in my mind – to steer the lyrical content of my spectacle towards the sincere that made the whole thing feel out-of-body. I watched myself. The way one looks at a museum exhibit about a beleaguered tribe who inhabited an unfortunate era, or whose neediness was often mocked by the nearby land of plenty.

Without realizing it, I started singing in Igbo. I could hardly believe it then, but it won’t surprise you now: I was weeping.

They took me in. Not an arrest. Time off the street to gather myself. Served me tea and rice crackers. The plainclothes from Fix Bar was the new station translator; he asked if he should learn Igbo if he meant to police this neighbourhood. He asked about my family. I told him my ex-wife’s fertility struggles hadn’t bothered me. But the doctor’s description of in vitro had shaken me by making clear that life and wealth are indistinguishable in the first world. In Nigeria, I once followed distant shrieks to find a woman giving birth in a latrine. I stayed with her. She spoke when it was over, holding her underweight infant. ‘I didn’t want,’ was all she said, no object in her sentence.

I told the police translator: knowing the yen price of procreation ended my desire for the person proposing we pay it. I divorced, married my next wife in Nigeria. No regrets except having decided – during the divorce, to cope – that recognizing unhappiness as an impermanent, universal force would exempt me from truly experiencing it.

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‘My daughter married an American,’ said the translator. ‘He sells condos.

They live in Michigan. I went to their wedding. English is the only thing I understand about English speakers. Hugging –’ he wrapped his arms around an imaginary American ‘– I don’t understand. And the homeless everywhere you go. Or eating yourself to death.’

Having monitored the police station so long, having never imagined seeing (or wanting to see) its inside, I felt compelled to develop impressions, sufficient vividness to carry forever. But the details weren’t like that – on and off sniffles, coffee mugs on metal desks, yawns and vibrating mobile phones.

Most men here were office cops, sprouted under heat lamps and fluorescent lighting. Desk-bound, pale, half asleep. I had been naive to think persecutors were exempt from persecuting themselves. I was privileged to be squeezed between forces with which I was rarely complicit. Entering the station, I had crossed a threshold. But if I was inside of anything, it was crude, inadequate shelter – you could die when it collapsed, or freeze to death outside.

146

Interview: Wang Xiaofang Shu-Ching Jean Chen

C

orruption is widely acknowledged as a serious, and endemic issue in China. Yet only occasionally – when big cases such as that of former Chongqing Party Secretary Bo Xilai, or news of the extraordinary wealth accumulated by the family of Premier Wen Jiabao, come to light – is the public provided with a glimpse into the rarefied world of corrupt, elite officials. Only an insider could divulge the best-kept secrets of China’s power-centred bureaucracy. That’s why the thirteen novels of former official Wang Xiaofang have caused such a stir since the first, The Deadly Vortex, was published in 2003. His bestselling book, The Beijing Representative, has sold more than one million copies.

Wang has first-hand experience of corruption on a grand scale. In the late 1990s he served as private secretary to Shenyang Deputy Mayor Ma Xiangdong, who was convicted in 2001 of squandering over US$3.6 million 147

Interview: Wang Xiaofang

of public money in the casinos of Macau, and executed by lethal injection.

Wang was also investigated. He was cleared of wrongdoing but decided an official’s life was not for him and took up writing instead.

Wang was in Hong Kong recently to promote The Civil Servant’s Notebook, his first work to be translated and published in English. This was his first public appearance outside mainland China. Unlike the characters in his book, who reveal their innermost thoughts with surprising candour, Wang was restrained, a bit nervous and unsure of how much he could share with a foreign audience. This was understandable, especially since the period leading up to the November 2012 Communist Party Congress is considered especially ‘sensitive’ – in other words, a time to avoid provocative statements – and he is currently under an implicit publishing ban.

Nevertheless, Wang shared the following insights into his work.

How closely does The Civil Servant’s Notebook reflect your own experience as a civil servant in Shenyang?

Fiction is the portrayal of life through imaginary characters. I can only say I drew my inspiration from real life. My characters are portraits of typical people; they portray not only their appearances and their actions, but also their souls.

Do you think the kind of interpersonal relations, infighting and corruption you write about are widespread in China’s civil service?

I reveal the details of the official-centred system in which bureaucrats wield absolute power. The Chinese have inherited a bureaucratic system that has evolved through the centuries; pandering to power is a habit that is hard to kick and has attained a status akin to indigenous religion. It’s very difficult to convert the faithful.

Why are your works of political fiction so popular among Chinese readers?

I pour my life and my soul into my books. My works have been well received because they take the pulse of our times. They are based on real stories that could only happen in China. They strike at the heart of reality in Chinese society; that is, the worship of absolute power as a result of the bureaucratdominated system.

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Shu-Ching Jean Chen

Do you hope to affect the culture of government officials by exposing its current flaws?

The Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa said, ‘Literature is fire. It doesn’t follow the conventions, doesn’t cave in; the reason for a writer’s existence is to protest, to oppose, to critique.’ I think critical writers are the conscience of society. I question the value of any writer or artist who can ignore the dark forces around him. If writers and artists refused to speak out against the darkness around them, literature and art would be silenced, and then the whole world would be silenced. God would be silenced too.

You have already written additional novels that you cannot get published at present, despite the success of your previous work. Why is this? How does the censorship system work?

The publishers have their own criteria to evaluate a book’s political risk.

Most of my books have been published; a few are pending publication because of the current political environment.

Have you seen any improvements in official culture since you started writing?

In China the history of bureaucracy is too long, the intrigue too deep, the behind-the-scenes story too dark, the manipulation too varied. As long as the system as a whole does not change, it will be very difficult to resolve endemic corruption.

I think there are two kinds of corrupt elements. The first kind would behave properly if the system had checks and balances. The second would be corrupt even under a good system. The majority in China today are the former. In The Civil Servant’s Notebook, the corrupt official Peng Guoliang is the first kind.

Before he is executed, a reporter visits him and he describes himself as a victim of the system. I have expressed this idea in several of my books.

Cleaning up corruption cannot rely on personal discipline alone. No one is made of special material. Unless the system is reformed, there will be one corrupt element after another.

How do you view the Bo Xilai case?

The Bo Xilai incident is another warning of the urgent imperative to reform the political system.

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You said you have a sense of being ‘chosen’ to expose corruption. How did you come to adopt this belief?

Since the day I started to write fiction, I have submerged myself in fiction.

Literature is my religion, my belief and my spiritual home. The way religion saves its followers, literature has saved me.

How do you feel about your contemporary, Mo Yan, receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature? Do you think his style is unique and outstanding among Chinese writers?

The well-known Chinese critic Zhu Dake has stated that the Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez has had the strongest influence on all contemporary Chinese writers, but few would be willing to acknowledge their debt to his linguistic style. He points out that, for many Chinese writers, not only does Márquez present an insurmountable barrier, he is also a deeply hidden secret. Mo Yan’s magical novels about his hometown, Gaomi, reflect the signature style of Márquez.

The basic principle of art is creativity. That’s why I invented my own style, with multiple perspectives and a complex, non-linear narrative. The biggest risk in writing fiction comes from self-imposed limitations within your own mind. In China, the mainstream is dominated by convention. Because of our dated literary concepts and lack of insight, even if a great novel ahead of its time appeared in the market, we probably wouldn’t recognize it.

The Civil Servant’s Notebook is published by Penguin.

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Changming Yuan

A Concise History of China in English 1. Ancient China They used to drink tea Wear silk Eat from china Think in terms of Zen And practise Confucianism Only – is it true?

2. Semi-Colonial China Wearing cheongsam These poor coolies arrived here On sampans Always ready to kowtow To a tycoon Who lived in Shangri-La Eating dim sum Drinking oolong Playing mahjong Gambling in a casino every day Though reluctant to give cumshaw

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3. Mandarin China Led by dao A yin Running dog Wearing qipao Is fighting against a yang Paper tiger With wushu After getting brainwashed Through maotai Like a taikongnaut At a fengshui spot Dominated by qi

152

Mortal Taste

Audra Ang

Of man,s first disobedience, and the fruit Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste Brought death into the world, and all our woe . . .

I

John Milton, Paradise Lost

once offered to cut off my arm in exchange for a tour of an illegal noodlemaking operation.

I reached this peak of desperation in 2007 while on assignment in the southern port of Xiamen, where I was trying to capture the clandestine nature of China’s countless unregulated manufacturers – many of them out to make a quick buck regardless of public health – who lay at the heart of recurring problems with food and drug safety. Regular mass poisonings or horror stories about money-saving measures in the manufacture of edible products or medications reminded the world that counterfeit goods can extend beyond pirated DVDs and designer knockoffs.

Despite continued crackdowns, the nation had many tiny mom-andpop operations struggling to find a foothold in a long, ill-defined and often anonymous chain of suppliers trying to turn quick profits. Overall, the risk of getting caught was small, but the payoff had big potential. Most of them sold to consumers within the immediate vicinity; others made components of products that ended up in much larger markets, including overseas.

It was blisteringly hot. Han and I had been walking and driving for two days around villages on the edges of Xiamen, a hilly mix of banana and coconut trees and the chimney stacks of cement and car factories. A 153

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jumble of metal workshops, car showrooms and vegetable fields lined the alternately muddy and dusty roads. I needed a lead, a way into the story of the challenges facing the regulation of food production in China.

We knew illegal operations existed, but because they were unlicensed they would be next to impossible to uncover on our own. Everyone we approached said they had seen those kinds of setups or had heard of them, yet no one would or could give us usable information on how to find one, for fear of getting someone – or themselves – in trouble.

It was mid-afternoon in an industrial village jammed with small warehouses, workshops, residences and cheap restaurants. We walked by shops selling strong-smelling chemicals or packed with rows of workers hunched over sewing machines. We got countless run-arounds and even the slip from a neighbourhood tofu maker doing brisk business at a makeshift stand in a small alleyway. When I greeted her, she told us to come back later for a ‘real’ look at how she made a living, then shut down her stall and disappeared. I hadn’t been so gullible as to believe she would return; however, I didn’t feel aggressive enough to pursue her.

An unpaved road on the outer rim of the area was lined with rows of squat, concrete buildings. Everything looked shuttered, and the place seemed deserted. Just when we were about to slink back to our taxi in defeat, a little girl with a stray noodle on her head appeared from one alley and turned down another.

I did a double-take and motioned frantically to Han. We followed her, transfixed by that noodle. Her mother was standing next to the open door of a run-down building. Peering inside, we saw four workers sitting on tiny footstools grabbing handfuls of white noodles from washtubs and stuffing them into plastic bags placed on the wet, flour-caked floor. A mangy dog wandered through the makeshift workshop.

Jackpot.

The woman’s guarded manner exploded into angry panic when Han started snapping photos of the premises after we’d said a quick hello. I hated this part of the job. The husband – a portly, shirtless man with a terrifying five-inch scar on his belly – emerged from the building and began to shout at us. The couple demanded that we erase the pictures and leave the premises.

Han grudgingly deleted his work as I explained that we were reporters.

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workshop, and understand what things were like for small producers.

Manufacturing in China is a complicated situation, I said. ‘Maybe you could tell me your story?’

‘No!’ the woman answered fiercely. ‘We don’t want people to know about what we do.’ She and her husband were suspicious. There was no way reporters could have stumbled across them by accident, they said. Journalists were bad enough, but they worried that we were health inspectors or officials from Beijing. I argued and pleaded and tried to stay calm. If I lost this opportunity, I would lose the story.

The couple rang their friends for advice. I invited them to the waiting taxi and asked our driver to show them his running meter as proof that we had been driving around all day in a fruitless search. They still didn’t believe we had found them by chance. I told them that the noodle on their daughter’s head had led us to them. They looked at me as if I were crazy.

The discussion moved back and forth, up and down. During a lull, the couple finally admitted their setup was illegal and could be shut down if anyone found out about it. They spoke of high costs and low profits, of having to struggle daily to make ends meet.

Slowly the wife opened up. I let her talk, fearful that questions might rile her. In a mix of her local dialect and Mandarin, she told me how her family, which had moved from the neighbouring province of Guangdong, slept in a room above the workshop and barely managed to eke out enough money to pay 1,000 yuan (US $155) a month for rent.

It was a rare glimpse, albeit reluctantly given, into the other side of the problem, in which producers, too, struggled to scrape together a living. It didn’t justify the means, but it humanized the otherwise faceless supply chain and showed a different angle of the product safety issue. For some, it wasn’t about making a profit; it was about making ends meet. The situation also underscored why it was virtually impossible to regulate these operations – people worked out of their homes.

‘Life is so hard. We earn eight mao per jin of noodles’ – about one cent per pound – ‘that we sell, but we spend one point four yuan’ – eighteen cents – ‘per jin on raw materials,’ the woman said. ‘Doing this kind of business is really difficult.’

‘I don’t know how to make anything else,’ her husband added with a touch of resignation.

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After half an hour of negotiations under a blazing sun for a quick glimpse of their workshop, I offered to cut off my right arm as a token of our goodwill.

I have no idea why; perhaps the heat had got to me. I stammered through the proposal in a rush of words, waving my left arm to emphasize the point.

Again, they looked at me as if I had escaped from a mental institution.

Han stifled a laugh. Shortly after, however, the couple relented, perhaps realizing it was the only way they were going to get rid of us. Five minutes and no photos, they warned.

In the end, I got two minutes, and Han stayed outside. But it was enough to take in the dimness of the room, the hum of the rickety machines oozing dough, heat fans drying noodles, flies buzzing around piles of finished product, workers sweating as they kept their heads low in stifling heat while filling bags. One picked his nose and used the same hand to pack a bag.

I had the start of a story.

In 2007 the world lost its faith in Chinese-made goods, putting at risk the country’s position as a global factory. The product safety problems, long a troubling issue within the country and of sporadic concern internationally, exploded into the headlines after tests revealed an unpalatable array of deadly toxins and dangerously high levels of chemicals in exports ranging from frozen fish to juice and tyres. The discoveries didn’t come all at once but, with governments becoming hyper-vigilant, awareness of the problem soared.

Kidney failure in dogs and cats in North America and South Africa, fatal in some instances, triggered the crisis, leading to the discovery of melamine – an inexpensive coal-derived additive – in Chinese-manufactured wheat, corn and rice gluten, standard ingredients in pet feed.

The mildly toxic chemical, which has no nutritional value and is prohibited in any form in American food, is used in the manufacture of plastics and fertilizers and is rich in nitrogen. Food-quality tests for protein measure nitrogen levels. The sellers of the gluten were tracked back to China, where it’s common to enhance feed with melamine. One of the companies avoided inspections, according to American regulators, partly because it listed the gluten as a non-food item.

A couple of months after the melamine story broke, import bans and health alerts were issued in Asia, Africa, and North and South America 156

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against toothpaste made in China following reports that diethylene glycol, a potentially deadly thickening agent in antifreeze, had been used as a lowcost sweetener. In Panama, at least 138 people had died or been disabled in 2006 after consuming cough syrup laced with the chemical. Experts traced the medicine to a Chinese company not certified to sell pharmaceutical ingredients.

New Zealand launched an urgent investigation after children’s clothes imported from China were found to contain dangerous levels of formaldehyde, an embalming fluid. Mattel recalled millions of Chinese-made items including dolls, cars, and action figures. Some were contaminated with lead paint and others came with small magnets that children might detach and swallow. American safety officials said the drastic measure was to prevent potential injuries; none were reported.

But the recalls kept coming. The resulting international furore brought China’s long-running problems with domestic product safety under renewed scrutiny. In 2007 one of the country’s quality watchdogs said almost 20 per cent of products made for consumption within the country were found to be substandard. Canned and preserved fruit and dried fish were the most problematic because of excessive bacteria and additives.

The government initially played down the crisis. But then gradually, perhaps grudgingly, officials began to focus efforts on burnishing the country’s reputation and staunching economic losses. The 2008 Beijing Olympics were only months away, and the last thing the government needed was the spectre of top athletes poisoned by Chinese food and products.

Zheng Xiaoyu, former head of China’s Food and Drug Administration, became a symbol of its wide-ranging problems and was executed for, among other offences, taking bribes to approve substandard medicines including an antibiotic blamed for causing at least ten deaths in the country.

The appointment of its top problem-solver, Vice Premier Wu Yi, to head a cabinet-level panel overseeing a four-month initiative to overhaul safety controls and enforcement and to clamp down on the small, illegal enterprises that had thrived under the radar for years, underscored the seriousness with which the government took the issue.

A stern-looking sixty-nine-year-old known as the ‘Iron Lady’, Wu had shepherded China’s difficult entry into the World Trade Organization and taken over as health minister during the SARS epidemic. A month into the 157

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campaign, which she declared a ‘special war to uphold the health, life and interests of the people, and to uphold the reputation of Chinese products and its national image’, she set out to make random inspections of shops and restaurants in the eastern province of Zhejiang.

It was an extraordinary, unprecedented, step in a country where no move by top leaders goes unscripted. State media didn’t accompany her. She went with no itinerary and told no one in advance, ordering her driver to stop at her whim. In the sticky September heat, she examined business licenses and employee health certificates at a two-table dumpling shop, scrutinizing the kitchen and refrigerator to see whether ingredients were fresh. She gave it her seal of approval. At her next stop, she condemned a chain restaurant for not having the required employee health certificates.

The campaign – the fastest moving and most extensive unleashed since the SARS epidemic – resulted in an avalanche of activity. Authorities announced the closures of hundreds of thousands of unlicensed food producers and retailers, many of them with fewer than ten employees, for selling fake or low-quality products. In some cases inspectors found formaldehyde, illegal dyes or industrial wax in the production and processing of candy, pickles, crackers and seafood.

Teams of inspectors fanned out across the country, and labels showing that the quality of export food products had been checked became mandatory. Drug advertisements by celebrities were banned, as were five kinds of pesticides. Rigorous inspections delayed toy shipments. Along with the crackdown came a propaganda effort, with state television debuting a weeklong series defending Chinese goods with a ninety-minute episode titled ‘Believe in “Made in China” ’. The government also planned to unveil its first food-safety law to address the weak points in food production, processing, delivery, storage and sales.

But while state officials went into public relations overdrive, local authorities and individual companies remained sensitive about any kind of attention from the foreign press. There were almost daily public announcements from various levels of government, but several of China’s quality watchdogs told us that foreign media were not welcome at their press briefings. They never gave a reason, but I’m sure they didn’t want to face questions they couldn’t or wouldn’t answer.

While the food safety scandals created a watershed in crisis and safety 158

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management, the question remained as to how permanent the changes would be, and how much of it would actually alleviate ongoing problems not just with exports but also with domestic food products. Some obstacles: the country’s convoluted bureaucracy, the tendency of local leaders to ignore edicts from the top, and the lack of traditional consumer watchdogs such as a free press and independent civic groups that could monitor the situation.

The most distinctive feature of the country’s central food-safety regulatory system was that there wasn’t one. Although there was a state Food and Drug Administration, responsibility was divided among at least six agencies, including those that handled health, agriculture and commerce.

Lines of command were murky, and different bodies oversaw different laws.

Rampant corruption added to the problem. Officials could be bribed and, instead of shutting down illegal operations, many regulators imposed fines so they could collect more money in the future.

As a result, eating in China was a little like playing Russian roulette: you never knew when you would be hit with something lethal. There were regular reports of mass poisonings at schools, restaurants and wedding banquets. The list was long and alarming: beans treated with banned pesticides, cooking oil recycled from gutters, soy sauce made with an amino acid-based liquid distilled from human hair and animal fur, egg yolks tinged with cancer-causing red dye, watermelons exploding after being boosted by growth accelerators, and pork passed off as beef after being soaked in a detergent additive.

One of the most widespread and distressing scandals was a cost-cutting scheme to boost infant milk formula that fell short of official standards on protein content with nitrogen-rich melamine, the same chemical that had killed North American and South African pets. Six babies died, and more than three hundred thousand became ill as a result.

When the contamination came to light in September 2008, rumours spread that the government had prevented the news from breaking until after the August Olympic Games had ended. It was yet another example of officials’ attempts to obfuscate and orchestrate even as they were trying to get to grips with the problem.

Dairy farmers and the middlemen involved in the scam conspired to increase profits by watering down milk and milk products before they sold them, and by fooling inspectors testing for protein content by adding melamine. Once the news started spreading and the outcry swelled, the 159

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government kicked into high gear, shaping the message to show how serious it was about product safety by meting out death sentences and other heavierthan-anticipated punishments to offenders. A dairy farmer and a milk salesman were executed.

The melamine formula scandal echoed what had happened in Anhui province in 2004, when hundreds of infants suffered, and at least a dozen died, from malnutrition after drinking substandard formula made mostly from flour, starch and sugar. The formula had been on the market for at least two years before the link was made, so actual numbers are probably higher.

It was mostly poor families that bought the fake milk powder, in village grocery stores on the outskirts of Fuyang. The children’s limbs withered and their heads swelled: signs of edema, a build-up of fluid symptomatic of malnutrition. Investigators later found thousands of boxes of counterfeit formula nationwide.

Despite official efforts, these appalling abuses have persisted as authorities struggle to keep the food supply healthy. In 2011 alone, violations ranged from expired buns repackaged after having been mixed with food colouring and sweeteners, to pork tainted with clenbuterol, a banned drug that produces leaner meat by speeding up the conversion of fat to muscle but which can also trigger muscle tremors and heart palpitations in humans.

‘To the people, food is heaven,’ President Hu Jintao earnestly told the crowds around him during a visit to a product quality-inspection facility that year. ‘For food, safety is all-important.’

Adapted from To the People, Food Is Heaven by Audra Ang, published by Lyons Press.

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The Wind’s Voice Mai Jia translated by Brian Holton

Waiting, waiting, waiting, Like a hen on a griddle.

A

little earlier that afternoon, Commander Zhang’s car had driven up to the guest house, turned around a couple of times and headed, not for the west wing, but for the east one. It stopped, and the Commander came bustling round to open the rear door and obsequiously bow someone out.

This someone was dressed in a long, old-fashioned scholar’s gown, its broad flapping sleeves turned back to show their contrasting silk lining, which gave him an antique, even a classical, look. He was in his thirties, with a small head, pale skin, a likeable face, and something indefinably feminine about his every movement. Commander Zhang was old enough to be his father, yet he deferred to this man. And though he was out of uniform, the little tuft of a moustache on his upper lip could not disguise who and what he really was – he was a Jap. He was indeed Japanese, and his name was Koehara Ryusen. Unlike most of the other Japanese in China, he had grown up in the Japanese settlement in Shanghai, and after a long time in intelligence work he had no difficulty with Chinese: he could even understand pretty well the famously obscure dialects of Shanghai and its hinterland. He had been translator to General Matsui Iwane, commander in chief of the Imperial Japanese Army’s Shanghai Expeditionary Force. A year before he had taken on the 161

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job of head of covert operations training; he was also in charge of counterintelligence in eastern China. As such, he was not only one of the Black Hands who willingly did General Matsui’s bidding, he was also responsible for the covert operations run by the outfit Chief Wang Tianxiang worked for. He had just come back from Shanghai with handwritten orders from General Matsui to take charge of this vital case.

From upstairs, Wang saw his new boss arrive, and rushed down to wait for him at the door. They exchanged greetings, and Koehara asked, ‘Why keep them here? It looks to me as if anyone could come and go just as they please.’ The modesty, the goodwill, the kind and gentle voice didn’t disguise the fact that his intention had been reproof, nor was it the tone that might have been expected from an officer of the invading army.

Commander Zhang rushed to reply. ‘Chief Wang said it would draw the snakes from their holes.’

To which Wang added, ‘That’s right, Commandant Koehara. I chose this place with the idea of entrapping their comrades: it’s one big net.’ He swept out his arms as though to encompass half of the villa’s grounds.

Koehara watched him, but said nothing.

‘I felt that if we confined them too tightly, so no one at all could come or go,’ Wang explained, ‘we’d lose the chance of arresting more Reds.

I deliberately left one end of the net open so they’d feel there was a loophole, if they were prepared to take the chance and use it. If someone tries to make contact at any time, openly or secretly, we’ve got them covered.

We have listening devices in all their rooms and can hear everything they say; if they go out to eat, or for anything else, my people will tail them.

I put men in the canteen, too. The moment one of them tries to leave the building, they’ll be watched by at least two people. Absolutely no problem.’

Commander Zhang was grovelling: ‘No need to worry, Commandant Koehara. “A strong general has nothing but strong soldiers,” as they say.

Every soldier at your command is a professional.’

Koehara spoke in an official tone of voice. ‘Commander Zhang, Chief Wang is one of your people, isn’t he? So why is he “at my command”?’

Zhang’s intention may have been to toady up to Koehara, but the Jap had turned the tables on him, and Zhang could only simper, and say, ‘We’re all loyal Japanese Imperial Army men here – I didn’t mean to imply anything.’

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Wang came closer, and spoke with some warmth. ‘Yes, yes, our Commander Zhang is a real Imperial Army loyalist.’

Zhang had tried to suck up to the other two, but neither man was actually happy to hear that kind of thing.

By this time they were at the door.

The east wing was clearly higher than the west wing, not only because that side of the hill was higher, but also because there were three steps up to it.

Side on, the two wings looked identical: both faced south, both were aligned east-west. Both were two and a half storeys high, with red roofs and white walls with through-bands and cinctures of grey tile. The only difference was that there was a garage on one side of the east wing.

Though the two wings were similar from the outside, inside they were different as Heaven and Earth. It seemed as though the owner had run into some unforeseen financial problems during the construction, hadn’t been able to afford to make both wings equally elegant and reduced the size of the west wing, finishing the thing off with little care.

But the truth – according to those involved in the building and running of Ermine House – was that work had only begun on the east wing when the west wing was nearly complete. The reason for that was a chance remark by a Fengshui master. A northerner passing through Hangzhou, the master had happened, during the course of his stroll around West Lake, to walk into the building site that would become Ermine House. The west wing had been topped out and they were in the middle of doing the fittings and fixtures, but there was enough in place to let him see dragon and phoenix energies in play through the whole area. As though under some strange influence, the master walked three times around the site, surveying it in meticulous detail with his geomantic compass and, before leaving, he uttered these words: ‘Both dragon and phoenix, both good luck and bad: how the water of ill fortune babbles as it enters from the east!’

The owner of Ermine House heard about this, and pressed as many people as he could into scouring the city for this Fengshui master, whose diagnosis had been so profound and so mysterious. Though it seemed as if they were looking for a needle in a haystack, the man was in fact found – and that, too, smacked more than a little of second sight. The owner lavished the master with hospitality, and consulted him at length over a sumptuous 163

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banquet in Lou Wai Lou, the finest of Hangzhou’s famous restaurants. He finally agreed to do another survey. When it was done, he planted himself on the site of what was to become the east wing, and sat there all night listening to the wind and watching the dark turn to dawn. The verdict was that the owner should build another wing there to neutralize the calamity that would otherwise surely come from the east. The wing had to be tall enough to block the force of that energy, which was why the east wing stood on higher ground and was also a taller structure. For the same reason, its foundations couldn’t be shallow, so from the side the two wings were very different. And since its function was to block negative energy, the size of the rooms was of no importance; the interior was perfectly ordinary, barely functional, and served little purpose.

That was the real story.

Chief Wang led Koehara and the Commander up the stairs. On the upper floor the first room was Wang’s, and a second had been kept for Koehara. Next door was a bathroom, divided into a lavatory at the back and a bathroom at the front. Further along, the third bedroom was much bigger than the other two because, being at the end, it could incorporate all the width of the corridor. These three rooms had originally been where the previous owner’s staff had lived, so they were well adapted to their new purpose as guestrooms, and needed no remodelling: in fact, only Koehara’s had been altered. A large fixed ornamental screen divided the room in two, creating an inner space with a bed and an outer space furnished with tables and chairs, where guests could be entertained.

Wang knew that Koehara loved to lie in bed reading in the evenings, so his room was the only one with a standard lamp, and a pretty one it was, too, borrowed from the general’s quarters in the hostel outside. There was also an electric fan, since the season was moving from spring into summer and could turn hot at any time. Fruit had been set out, along with flowers from a late-blossoming white plum tree from deep in the mountains, and from a red one almost in bud – white and red setting each other off like mirror images – and these gave liveliness and a romantic prettiness to an otherwise drab interior.

As Koehara walked into the room, the white plum blossom immediately caught his eye, and he went straight to it. Pointing at the flowers, each of 164

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them standing proudly on a bare fork of the branch, he said, with a sigh of admiration: ‘See – how poetic it is! They open all by themselves, with no green leaves to set them off, like some great verse that wakes us up to our feelings!’

Commander Zhang, with his old-fashioned classical education, knew many poems by heart and normally couldn’t resist quoting them, but this time, as he was preparing a line or two, and before he could open his mouth, into the room came the sound of a woman’s voice, furiously shouting: ‘I demand to see Commander Zhang!’

It was Gu Xiaomeng.

Even filtered through the telephone and the loudspeaker, she was clearly in a rage: her shrill, imperious voice seemed to shake the very air in the room.

As Chief Wang had said, the powerful listening devices made everything clearly audible.

Koehara moved away from the flowers and turned his attention to the voices coming through the speaker: Bai Xiaonian: Why do you want to see Commander Zhang?

Gu Xiaomeng: Why?! It’s me who should be asking you that question!

Why are you doing this?

Bai: There’s nothing to be said. The situation is perfectly clear.

Gu: I’m not a Red! Bai: That’s not for you to say. They all say that.

Gu: Oh, bollocks! Bai Xiaonian, don’t you dare doubt me! Just you wait and see . . .

Koehara listened with great interest to the tapping of Gu Xiaomeng’s high heels as she stormed off, and only when the sound had faded away did he raise his head to ask the Commander, ‘Who is that? And how is it that she has such a big mouth?’

The Commander asked, ‘You’ve heard of Gu Minzhang? Rich businessman, in the arms trade?’

Koehara thought for a moment. ‘Is he the one who gave Chairman Wang Jingwei an aeroplane last year?’

‘Yes, that’s him’, said the Commander. ‘She’s his daughter, and has her father behind her. She knows it, too. She’s a holy terror.’

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Koehara nodded his understanding, and went over to examine the listening equipment. It was set out on a rectangular bench and consisted of a pair of amplifiers, a loudspeaker, two sets of headphones, a telephone handset, a set of switches, including sound-activated ones, and many other miscellaneous devices. There were two pairs of German binoculars hanging on the opposite wall. Koehara took a pair, went to the west window and trained them on the west wing, muttering, ‘She’s in the middle room upstairs, isn’t she? . . . Hmmm . . . looks young, pretty . . . her name? . . . Gu Xiaomeng . . . she’s still angry, though . . . that’s quite a temper she has . . . ’ Commander Zhang took the other pair and stood at Koehara’s side, observing. This is what he saw: Gu Xiaomeng sitting fuming on her bed; Li Ningyu half-heartedly combing her hair; Jin Shenghuo nervously pacing, looking worried; Wu Zhiguo sitting on the sofa smoking.

He could see them all so clearly that he could make out the mole on the curve of Jin Shenghuo’s eyebrow, and the smoke curling up from Wu Zhiguo’s cigarette. That was the moment when he belatedly understood why Chief Wang had arranged the rooms the way he had, forcing Gu and Li to share.

This way, all the rooms were open to observation. There was another room, but Wang hadn’t used it because it would have been out of sight. The pair watched the rooms for a while, until Koehara put down his binoculars and clapped the Commander on the shoulder: ‘Come on, we’ll go over and have a look at them. I don’t suppose any of them is in any hurry to meet you, though.’

And off they went.

The room had the sour stink of death, corruption and fear, as though the previous year’s bloodbath was happening all over again. Chief Wang led Koehara and the Commander briskly in, as Bai Xiaonian met them at the conference room door. Perhaps because she had just been quarrelling with Gu Xiaomeng, she seemed disturbed and distracted, and her greeting was a little disjointed: having shaken Koehara’s hand, she went to shake the Commander’s. It was obvious that she wasn’t entirely herself.

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Commander Zhang glared at her. ‘What’s wrong with you, woman?

Have these damned Reds made you stupid?’

Bai’s hand shrank back and she stammered, ‘I . . . no . . . I didn’t . . .’

The Commander interrupted her. ‘Go and call them down for the meeting.’

The meeting was gloomy, sombre as a requiem mass, with every eye downcast and no one daring to accuse anyone else for fear of compromising their innocence or revealing their secrets.

WU JIN LI GU STOP WHICH ONE TRAITOR QUERY STOP. Who was the Red? Was it the senior civil servant, Signals Bureau Chief Wu Zhiguo? Or the oldest of them, Military Security Chief Jin Shenghuo?

The young and pretty code-breaker, Gu Xiaomeng? Or Coding Room Chief Li Ningyu, too picky, and overqualified for her age and rank? Who? One or two? Or three? New-fangled revolutionaries or old-fashioned bandits?

Anti-Chiang Kai-shek commies or pro-Chiang Kai-shek commies? But why call the Reds ‘bandits’? Did they intercept intelligence signals, or did they murder people for their possessions? Did they sell themselves for glory and honour, or were they in fear of their lives? Did they go wrong with one first incautious step, or had they been living and working undercover for years?

Was everything proven beyond reasonable doubt? Or was nothing certain and everything suspicious? Was it the serious offenders on Death Row, or the petty criminals who just did their time and got it over with? Would the so-called bandits give themselves up, or would others turn them in?

WU JIN LI GU STOP WHICH ONE TRAITOR QUERY STOP Fuck me! What’s that? It’s a bombshell! It’s a piece of piss? A mole! A trap!

A plot! A nightmare! . . . Like being stripped naked . . . like being kidnapped by pirates . . . like seeing a ghost . . . taking the wrong medicine . . . growing a tail . . . being scared out of your wits . . . being on the rack . . . Fuck me!

Complete cock-up, nobody knowing what to do, what to say . . . anything you say is wrong, anything you do is wrong! Calling someone a bitch’s bastard is wrong, and so is not doing that . . . crying’s wrong . . . laughing’s wrong . . . standing’s wrong, and so is sitting . . . leaving’s wrong and so is staying . . . looking’s wrong, and so is shutting your eyes . . . wrong . . . everything’s wrong, and nothing’s not wrong . . . no way of knowing what to do . . . no way out . . .

Commander Zhang invited Koehara to sit at the head of the table, but he declined and sat down to the left, while politely motioning for everyone else 167

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to be seated. As they settled down, Bai Xiaonian came gingerly up behind the Commander, passed him the piece of paper in her hand and whispered something in his ear. He read it, smiled and passed it to Koehara. ‘Look, Sir, this is the cipher telegram I put together for them.’

Koehara scanned it quickly, then slowly and carefully read it out: This cipher telegram’s a lure, But it’s true we have a traitor.

Think whatever you like, Because no one knows for sure.

The top spot in all the Army, A spy hiding there: could it be true?

The four of you, Wu, Jin, Li, and Gu – Which one could be the Commie?

This code – I’m absolutely gonna crack ’er: So turn yourself in, or peach on another.

This is the one and only game in town – You’ll be really sorry if you turn me down.

Commander Zhang applauded as Koehara came to the end, and said to the four suspects: ‘Worthy of the master code-breaker, that he is, eh? It’s wordfor-word exactly the same as my original cleartext. Decoding that cipher isn’t the end, though, because there is another layer of encryption: that was a silly little poem I made while I was waiting for Commandant Koehara to honour us with his presence, just to settle everyone down. The real cipher –’ ‘– is here,’ Koehara continued. ‘WU JIN LI GU STOP WHICH ONE TRAITOR QUERY STOP. Isn’t that right, Commander Zhang?’

‘Yes, Sir. That’s the cipher I want you all to break. It’s fine if you do it off your own bat but if you don’t want to, it won’t be a problem, because Commandant Koehara is a proper connoisseur, a real old hand at the game. As I told you this morning, General Matsui is taking a close personal interest, and has sent the Commandant over specially.’

‘Oh, come now: “connoisseur” is a bit strong. But I do dearly love to crack a code.’ Koehara and Zhang were doing the old double-act routine.

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‘And because I love it so, Commander Zhang asked me to drop in this afternoon; I’ll be on standby until we’re done.’

Commander Zhang opened an official-looking file and produced some papers. He said, ‘You might need some supplementary material, so I’ll tell you what we’ve got. Here’s a telegram. Please read it for us, Director Jin.’ Jin Shenghuo took the paper and read in a feeble voice: ‘Signal source Nanjing: reliable intelligence reports CP leader Zhou Enlai’s delegate codename K to attend meeting, Balustrade Inn, Phoenix Hills, Hangzhou, eleven p.m. twenty-ninth inst., to liaise with leaders of anti-Japanese resistance organizations in this province and plan anti-Japanese, anti-Wang Jingwei actions. This –’ Commander Zhang interrupted. ‘Thank you, Director. This isn’t the first time you’ve read that, is it?’

Jin Shenghuo nodded his silent assent.

Jin Shenghuo had first read the signal a little after three in the afternoon the day before. It had come in at 2:30 p.m., while Gu Xiaomeng was on duty in the cryptography room. Jin Shenghuo had noted the ‘Top Secret – Internal Eyes Only’ classification stamped on the file and immediately began decoding it, but the result of all her work was only gibberish. Astonished, she rushed in a panic to Li Ningyu for advice. Li was the most experienced cryptographer there, so the others went to her if they were having trouble with a decrypt. She took a good look at the ciphertext and then at the gibberish Gu had derived from it, and decided that it contained a doubly encrypted message.

Of course, all telegrams are encrypted. Whether it’s ABCD or 1234, any unencoded telegram represents these letters or numbers with the 5-bit codes of the International Telegraph Alphabet, which are then decoded into the corresponding letters or numbers at the receiving end. In a coded telegram, what the ABCD or 1234 code groups represent could be absolutely anything.

There may, at the lower end, be thousands of possibilities; at the upper end it could be tens, hundreds, thousands of millions . . . it’s impossible to compute how many. So how do we find what the code groups might represent? The secret lies in the codebook – if you haven’t got the codebook, then a cipher telegram is useless to you. The message will look like gibberish, and no one will be able to make sense of it. But if the codebook is available, anyone engaged in cryptographic work should be able to decode the ciphertext. If 169

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you simply looked up the groups one by one in the codebook, as you would look up a word in the dictionary, it’d be easy to work out the plaintext.

However, if it happens that there is a very important telegram to be sent, a more experienced operator may add an extra layer of security in case the codebook has fallen into enemy hands. The extra layer is intended to mislead the enemy, but because there is only one extra layer, the level of security is not necessarily very high. For instance, we might take numbers one to nine, or the twenty-four letters of the Latin alphabet, and transpose each of them one place, so that 0 equals 1, 1 stands for 2, et cetera. Equally, if 0 stands for 3, then 1 equals 4, and so on. Though this might seem simple, it can work well – witness how Gu Xiaomeng was stumped by her ciphertext. Imagine a telegram or any other signal being intercepted by a third party who possesses the code – whether by having stolen the book or deciphering the text – and then imagine the transcript going to a novice like Gu who is unable to see through this simple transposition. In such an example, a very low level of encryption may be extremely effective, and might even give the enemy the mistaken impression that the other side is using a new code altogether.

It has to be said that it can be very easy to give such a misleading impression to a third party, precisely because they are a third party. This can confuse any situation. As far as Li Ningyu was concerned, she knew the codebook had not been changed, so she wasn’t going into it blind; she also had experience of similar situations and was flexible enough and quick-witted enough to strip away the deception. She cracked the code in no time at all.

Once the ciphertext was decoded, Gu Xiaomeng, in accord with standard operating procedure, should have reported first to her director, Jin Shenghuo, and then to Commander Zhang. That is to say, before the signal came into Commander Zhang’s hands, it should have passed through three other pairs of hands: Jin, Li and Gu. The three had already admitted as much at the meeting.

Commander Zhang raised the next issue with them: from the time the ciphertext had been decoded until the events of the previous evening, had any of them told anyone else about what was in the telegram? In fact, in the first moments of the developing crisis, the Commander had phoned to ask each of them the same question, tactfully and indirectly. Now, as he raised the issue again, there was no sign of tact: the harshness of his tone and the 170

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sternness of his expression emphasised his demand that they tell the truth and nothing but the truth, with neither prevarication nor deceit.

Military Security Chief Jin Shenghuo swore he’d told no one.

Gu Xiaomeng could prove that she hadn’t told anyone.

Li Ningyu was the only one to look embarrassed: she looked straight at Wu Zhiguo and said, ‘I’m sorry, Mr Wu, but I can’t beat about the bush.’

Meaning?

She said that she had divulged the contents to Bureau Chief Wu. None of them had altered what they’d said in their statements the night before. Their tone was more confident, that was all.

To their surprise and before Li’s voice had died away, Bureau Chief Wu clattered to his feet as if he were spring-loaded, roaring at her, ‘When the fuck did you tell me about that?’

The Commander ordered Li to explain herself in front of them all: how, when, where, and why she had told Wu; and whether there had been any witnesses.

She said that on the afternoon of the day before, immediately after they had decoded the signal and as Gu was in her office transcribing the plaintext before passing it to her boss, Bureau Chief Wu suddenly appeared, wanting to inspect some documents. Because the signal was ‘Top Secret – Internal Eyes Only’, Gu had slipped it under another paper as he came in.

Li Ningyu now said, ‘Maybe this just piqued Chief Wu’s curiosity. He asked Miss Gu what the signal was that she was transcribing, and if it were terribly hush-hush.

‘Gu answered him, half-joking, and said, “Off you go now – I’m copying a very important telegram!”

‘Mr Wu was joking, too, when he said, “Oh, I’m not leaving yet –can’t you even give me a quick look?” ‘ “Only the very top people have clearance for this. You’ll have to wait till you’re at the top – in your dreams!” ‘ “It’s no dream, girl – I’m on my way!” They were just fooling around, the two of them, and it wasn’t important, it was just a joke. After he’d consulted his documents, Mr Wu said he wanted a word with me, so we went to my office – ’ ‘What a load of shit!’ Wu was on his feet again. ‘When was I ever in your office?’

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‘Sit down and let her speak, you!’ ordered the Commander. ‘You’ll get your chance!’

Li carried on, her voice calm, and her enunciation clear. ‘We went to my office, and he asked me if we’d intercepted a signal that was very important to the higher-ups. I said we had. He asked what was in it. I said I couldn’t tell him. He asked if it was about hiring and firing – the personnel side – so I said it wasn’t. He asked me over and over what it was about, and even though I knew it was against regulations to tell him I also thought, him being on the anti-Communist side of things, he’d hear about it sooner or later – so I told him.’

Wu was about to start shouting again, but one look from the Commander put a stop to that.

The Commander then asked Gu Xiaomeng whether Li Ningyu had been telling the truth. She confirmed that what Li had said was true, that Mr Wu had come into the office, that he’d questioned her about the contents of the telegram, that she had refused him, half-joking and half in earnest, and that Li had gone off with Mr Wu. As to what happened after they’d left her office, and whether they had in fact gone to Li’s room, she shook her head. ‘I can’t say for sure. I can’t see around corners, can I? I was in no state to worry about them: I had an urgent telegram to transcribe, hadn’t I? Of course, if I’d known this was going to happen, then I suppose I might have paid more attention . . .’

The Commander saw that Gu was getting on her high horse, so he yelled, ‘That will do. I know all that!’ Then he turned straight to Li Ningyu. ‘You said he was in your office: did anyone else see him there?’

‘I don’t know,’ she answered. ‘There was no one else in my office, but I wasn’t paying a lot of attention to whether anyone was going down the corridor.’

‘Now you tell us,’ the Commander said as he turned to Wu. ‘You say you didn’t go to her office, but do you have any witnesses?’

Wu was stumped. He had no witness. All he had was bluster and swearing, and he’d been betting all he had on forcing them to believe he hadn’t gone to her office. The Commander was not a patient listener. He banged on the table to make Wu shut up.

‘She says you went in, you say you didn’t – who am I to believe?

Unsupported oral testimony isn’t admissible: it’s of no use to you now.’

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He paused, then filled in the silence. ‘There’s not much more to be said.

Really, what’s wrong with going to her office? We know what’s wrong about the signal – but that’s not where the difficulty is. Right, Commandant? I suppose you’ll pretty much have all this worked out by now, won’t you?’

Koehara smiled and nodded.

‘Here’s another difficulty’, the Commander went on, taking a packet of Progress cigarettes and handing it to Koehara. ‘Look: Wang Tianxiang took these from a Communist Party member, and what’s inside is very interesting indeed.’

There were a dozen cigarettes left, and when Koehara shook the packet the last one that rolled out was all wrinkled. He picked it up, and with barely a glance at it, as though he already knew its every secret, he began to tap it lightly until he could pull out a tightly rolled slip of paper.

Someone had emptied the packet, inserted a cigarette containing a message, and then put the others back in.

Koehara gave a grunt of surprise, then said, ‘Very interesting the contents are, too.’ He unrolled the slip of paper and in a clear voice read out: ‘TIGER IMMEDIATE. AGENT 201 CONTACT LOST. CANCEL CONFERENCE. MOLE. URGENT.’ To Commander Zhang he said, ‘Another secret message, then.’

The Commander was complacent. ‘I can crack this one. TIGER is the Communist Party’s chief bandit in Hangzhou – the local leader. We’ve been on his trail for two months but he’s cunning, and he’s given us the slip more than once.’

‘How could he not give you the slip when he has a mole on the inside?’ said Koehara. ‘A halfwit could get away!’

‘Right!’ The Commander was nodding enthusiastically. ‘Now, 201, that’s Zhou Enlai: it’s the code they use in the CP Base Area in the north-west at Yan’an, where they have allocated numbers to a few of their top people. And the so-called “conference” has to be the meeting at the Balustrade Inn on the twenty-ninth.’

Koehara laughed, then exclaimed ‘Good old mole!’ then he looked up with an expression of sinister benevolence, and softly inquired of the four, ‘So who’s the mole then? Wu, Jin, Li or Gu? Who’s the Red, eh?’ His voice was smooth and slimy.

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The Wind’s Voice



The drama had played itself out thus far – part comic and part tragic – long before they had woken up to the reality of it. It was a nightmare in which they had to keep company with the Devil, though none of them could be quite sure exactly who the Devil was, nor could any of them work out if they themselves were actually a scapegoat for the Devil himself. At first, out of caution, no one raised their voice, and each watched the others in silence, desperately seeking the smallest clue in the faces of their companions.

Commander Zhang didn’t like the silence. He wanted to order them either to turn themselves in or inform on someone else. He coaxed them with fine words and he hectored them harshly, but not one of them turned himself in, and neither did any of them offer to inform on any of the others.

Some were, in fact, thinking about coming clean. Wu Zhiguo, for instance, was stubborn, and would have liked to stick to his statement that Li Ningyu was the mole, but once he had woken into this nightmare, he’d been so stunned and stupefied that it had been nearly impossible for him to recover himself: he bit the words back, and stayed silent.

They would have to wait. A time would come when their fears were sufficiently allayed, and then . . . What came, in the end, was an unexpected visitor, at an untimely moment. The very pitter-patter of the footsteps tapped out that it was urgent.

It was a fat staff officer, who whispered one single word in Commander Zhang’s ear. The Commander jumped out of his seat, slapped the table and shouted, ‘All right, don’t talk! Fine! If any of you lot want to talk, talk to Commandant Koehara, because I don’t have time to listen!’ As he went out, he said, ‘I’ll tell you something. I believe that one of you is the mole, so don’t any of you think you can leave this place until and unless you’ve given me a name. If you want to get out of here, tell me who the mole is!’

Koehara stood up, but made no move to go. All smiles, he cannily told them, ‘I trust Commander Zhang, and I believe what he just said. I believe another thing too, which is that you can’t all be moles. Some of you, maybe even most of you, are blameless. Innocent or guilty? Who knows? We don’t.

Only you know. So, you’ve heard what they say – if you bell the tiger, you’ll have to take it off by yourself. This is the only way we know – bringing you all together where we can see you, where we can watch you. I don’t really 174

Mai Jia

care if you feel wronged or humiliated. You’ll just have to put up with that for now. There is no other way. I think you all understand it’s better, at a time like this, that we target all of you, and that we can’t afford to feel sorry for you, even if you’re innocent. Why not? Because misplaced sympathy could lead to a much worse mistake, and I’m not willing to take responsibility for that. Of course, if want to leave, just give us the mole – it’s as easy as that.

Turn somebody in or make your own confession, I don’t really mind which.

This will be all over the minute we have the mole.’

Commander Zhang had been standing in the doorway listening, and he chose this moment to stride back in, rapping on the table as he told them, ‘Remember, before the twenty-ninth! Any time before that and you might stand a chance. After that, the only thing that will be left for you is regret.’

Koehara added, ‘Yes, yes, you must remember that. Before the twentyninth! After that, there’s no way we can help you, whatever you tell us. So, what is your fate to be?’ He took out a sealed envelope and patted it. ‘Here it is. General Matsui gave it to me this morning. As to what’s in it – to tell you the truth, even I don’t know.’ He smiled. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, this is another kind of confidential signal. I might burn it unread, in which case its contents would be a mystery for ever, or I might read it, and its contents might seal your fate. Whether I burn it or read it is entirely in your hands – but if one day soon you put me in a position where I must read it, there will be nothing more you can do, nothing more Commander Zhang can do, and nothing more I can do. You absolutely must not play games here: from now on, you’re playing with your life.’

Extract from The Wind’s Voice, published in Chinese by the Readers Press/ Gansu People’s Fine Art Press.

175

Ma Yan translated by Catherine Platt

Spoken Word I open my mouth and speak and it means something. but someone is watching my mouth ears moving up and down vigilant, a large grey wolf.

A breath of wind stirs his ears like the plucking of strings, a musical sense sets his ears moving.

Moving left, moving right a playful fan fluttering.

So I open my mouth to speak – and close it – and open it again.

My tonsils shift, my uvula shakes – a shame nobody understands I don’t understand myself.

Sometimes I actually sing 176

Ma Yan

a burbling kind of song, sometimes with a melody like a popular tune on the radio, but sometimes tuneless like a wailing ghost.

Nobody hears me sing.

Understanding isn’t what I mean so I sing secretly, sing when no one is there on moonless nights, to empty streets I sing, and if someone comes by I stop.

Even a cough has meaning issued from the mouth – the loud hack of an old man the thin yelp of a puppy.

So, speaking, I say, I cough once to show I’m in earnest.

But the thing about speaking, there is this problem with it, which is, in fact, the speaking – it’s the speaking aloud.

His eyes flickering dimly the grey wolf slinks away, his ears upright now unmoving, his receding back 177

Poetry

monumental as if carved from stone, his pointed ears sharp against the sky.

I don’t make a sound not a breath, silent, looking left, looking right.

I try a small gulp – no response, – no one speaks to me.

Fine, I will sing then.

I won’t say a word.

178

Alisha Haridasani

F

rom 14 February 1989 onwards, Salman Rushdie did not receive his post directly. Instead, every letter or invitation went to his agency, where it was screened and tested for explosives before a member of his protection team would pick it up and take it to him. When a cleaner, plumber or farmer happened by one of his various temporary houses, Rushdie had to hide behind kitchen counters, in bathrooms, in the garage. Visiting his son Zafar, then just ten years old, involved a process known as ‘dry-cleaning’ to ensure he was not being followed, and consisted of driving ‘as weirdly as possible’.

Thus was the life of the author in hiding, from the moment Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa calling for Rushdie’s assassination for writing The Satanic Verses, which managed to turn the mundane acts of Rushdie’s life into security threats, and profound events into surreal occurrences.

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Review: Joseph Anton

Joseph Anton, a portmanteau of Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekhov, was the alias Rushdie chose to hide behind while living under the threat of the fatwa. The memoir looks at the author’s life through the lens of hindsight in order to paint a clear picture of a time that was both messy and blurry, its confusion compounded by the constant noise of fiery voices speaking for or against him from all corners of the globe. Readers are given a glimpse into Rushdie’s pre-fatwa life: the dynamics of his family, his childhood migration from Bombay to London, his years of education at Rugby and Cambridge, his struggles as an aspiring writer, his loves, his insecurities, the way he was catapulted to success after writing Midnight’s Children. Then comes the period in the shadow of the fatwa during which everything he knew, or at least thought he knew, was turned upside down.

The story is delivered in true Rushdie fashion, skipping back and forth between the main narrative, flashbacks, and cryptic foreshadowing that any Rushdie aficionado would expect. Inevitably and necessarily, Joseph Anton explores the themes of liberty, religion and secularism. Rushdie’s battle against numerous oppressors over a work of literature is a microcosm of what was happening on a global scale, when echoes of the struggle between tyranny and freedom could be heard everywhere. While Rushdie was resisting calls to withdraw The Satanic Verses and pushing for a lifting of the fatwa, dozens – or perhaps hundreds – of Chinese citizens were crushed in Tiananmen Square, the Berlin Wall crumbled, Ayatollah Khomeini died (though his fatwa lived on) and Nelson Mandela was released from prison.

Rushdie’s struggles, however, were complicated by the unexpected violence and controversy triggered by The Satanic Verses: bookshops were bombed and fatal riots exploded around the world. The lives of British and American hostages in Lebanon were at stake while the lives of the people closest to Rushdie were in constant danger. Many people felt the author should simply withdraw the book and apologise, instead of letting the consequences of publication snowball out of control.

But he had done nothing that warranted an apology. As John Stuart Mill, an ardent supporter of free speech, put it, an author’s right to publish an ‘opinion that corn-dealers are starvers of the poor’ should be protected, whereas the same opinion would merit punishment when ‘delivered orally to an excited mob assembled before the house of a corn-dealer’ because it then becomes ‘a positive instigation to some mischievous act.’ Though The 180

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Satanic Verses may have been seen as blasphemy, it was Rushdie’s opponents who were exciting an already agitated mob before the house of the author.

Their reactions and the harm caused to Rushdie and others were far more damaging than the book itself.

Rushdie responded to the criticism against him in his speech, Is Nothing Sacred?, delivered at the annual memorial lecture for Herbert Read in 1990.

He described literature as ‘the stage upon which the great debates of society can be conducted’. A book is one voice, among many others, about the times we live in. It can be controversial, blasphemous or outrageous but it should not be silenced because, as Rushdie pointed out, ‘Wherever in the world the little room of literature has been closed, sooner or later the walls have come tumbling down.’

Joseph Anton sheds as much light on Rushdie’s personal life, his mindset and his intelligence as it does on the global context of the fatwa. He provides elaborate details about the characters in his life, the feelings he was experiencing and the memories he held on to (amid a lot of name dropping). At times the reader cannot help but feel like Padma in Midnight’s Children, begging Rushdie to return to ‘the world of linear narrative, the universe of what-happened-next’. However, these details are what anchor his life in reality, and give context to the impact of the fatwa, reminding the reader that the man buried under the controversy had once led a ‘normal life’.

The intricate detail also gives the reader glimpses of where Rushdie finds his inspiration and the chrysalises from which his ideas emerge. For example, description of his first wife Clarissa is immediately reminiscent of Pamela Lovelace in The Satanic Verses. His childhood experiences at Rugby and his relationship with his father correlate with the life of Saladin Chamcha, also in The Satanic Verses. We see where Haroun and the Sea of Stories started and where he met Shalimar the Clown. It is through Joseph Anton that the reader begins to realize just how much of himself Rushdie pours into his works.

Another important element of the book is that it is written in the third person; to Rushdie the entire debacle felt so surreal that it almost seemed as though it were happening to someone else. For a long time, he found himself viewing his own life through the headlines, which treated him not as an individual but as the face of the issue itself: ‘He was the person in the 181

Review: Joseph Anton

eye of the storm, no longer the Salman his friends knew but the Rushdie who was the author of Satanic Verses,’ he explains.

Joseph Anton is a remarkable book about a man caught in the middle of a global battlefield, whose love for literature and faith in freedom gave him the hope and courage to pull through his trying experience. There is also a historical undercurrent to the book; the attack on Salman Rushdie was just the beginning of a string of similar events that continue to this day. In fact, the release of his book in September this year coincided with new riots in the Muslim world ignited by the publication of an anti-Islamic video.

Hence, the conversation continues.

Joseph Anton is published by Random House.

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Kelly Falconer

T

he subtitle of this book is ‘Hong Jun Investigates’, and it’s one of four in a series starring the same protagonist, a lawyer who has returned to Beijing after spending several years studying and working in America. It is the mid-1990s, and his status is assured in a post-Maoist society respectful of his foreign education and fascinated by his experience of the West, specifically America.

An idealist, Hong Jun sets up his own practice to deal with criminal cases for ordinary citizens, rather than with more lucrative commercial work. The tale begins with Hong Jun’s back story, but it soon takes off on a narrative archetypical of Western crime fiction: on a slow day at the office, 183

Review: Hanging Devils

a client walks in with the promise of a huge case paying loads of money, and everything follows from there. In Hanging Devils the client, Jianzhong, has a brother, Jianguo, who has been in prison for ten years for a murder he didn’t commit, or so says Jianzhong. The case interests Hong Jun in part because of the slightly sleazy brother, Jianzhong, who is an unashamedly wealthy product of the new get-rich-quick China, where corruption is the name of the game. Jianzhong is a suitable foil for our incorruptible and upstanding lawyer, Hong Jun, who wonders why Jianguo signed a confession of guilt instead of protesting his innocence.

The murder took place ten years before, on a state farm in the north-eastern region of China near Harbin. Hong Jun travels back and forth between the sophisticated city of Beijing and the frozen northern farmland, and back and forth in time between 1984 and 1994. The contrasts provide a sense of the cultural and political changes taking place at the time. The tensions between old and new, between political ambition and the rule of law, and between desire and restraint heighten the suspense and intrigue. The humanity of each character, even the guilty ones, is portrayed sympathetically, and this makes the outcome more complex. The victim, Li Hongmei, a beautiful, kind-hearted young girl, was a neighbour’s daughter with whom Jianguo had been in love. She had politely rejected him in favour of someone else, a boy she had been seeing in secret. Jianguo did the gentlemanly thing and stepped aside, not without a broken heart, but after her death rumours spread that he had killed her in revenge.

Hong Jun had been the type of child who ‘loved puzzles and mathematics problems, the harder the better’ and he now relishes the challenge of proving the identity of the real killer: ‘A crime had been committed, and someone had to be punished. It was all about balance and harmony.’ There are several suspects. One is the boyfriend, Xiao Xiong, who ‘was allegedly connected with the democracy movement back then’ and could have killed Hongmei ‘if she was a witness to, or an unwitting collaborator in his activities . . .

He had means, motive and opportunity’ and disappeared after the murder, never to be seen again. But was Xiong running from guilt, or to hide from local government officials who had been skulking around the farm hoping to smoke him out?

Ten years later these same officials have risen to positions of higher authority – one of them is the chief of the Criminal Investigation Unit; the 184

Kelly Falconer

other is now party secretary. Their official roles require them to welcome important visitors to the town and they accord Hong Jun considerable respect. Hong Jun duly uses his status to persuade the officials to help him; nevertheless, he maintains his air of unimpeachable moral probity while slowly unravelling a cover-up, a miscarriage of justice and a wrongful conviction.

The author, like his main character, was educated and worked in America before moving back to China, where he is professor of law at Beijing’s prestigious People’s University. Although fluent in English, he writes his novels in Chinese. The spot-on, classic-crime tone and highly charged atmosphere has benefitted from translator Duncan Hewitt’s background as a journalist working in China.

I asked Professor He if he had read much Western crime fiction when he was studying law in Chicago. ‘I didn’t have time,’ he said. ‘It took me one year, rather than three, to complete my degree (a doctorate in law).’ As a child of the Cultural Revolution, ‘I didn’t have modern fiction available when I was growing up, but we did have Arthur Conan Doyle, which I read a lot of.’

The influence is clear, but He’s style could easily be compared to other crime writers such as Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and J. M. Cain – classic, but with an enjoyably modern, Chinese twist. He had wanted to write a novel with a detective as the main character but at that time in China there was no such thing. The first detective agency, says Professor He, opened its doors in 1992, was shut down a year later and resurfaced under the alternative title ‘investigation service’.

Professor He’s research interests include comparative criminal justice systems, criminal investigation and criminal procedures; his expertise makes his novels all the more believable and thought-provoking. When asked recently about corruption in China, the professor remarked on the number of university courses available now that conflate politics and law, which he insists should be separate. ‘With politics,’ says Professor He, ‘it’s win or lose; with law, it’s right or wrong. In China,’ he adds, ‘the political struggle does not only mean win or lose, but also life or death.’

Hanging Devils is published by Penguin.

185

Kathleen Hwang

C

heap labour is a key component of competitiveness for companies striving to make a profit in today’s global market. Yet, as Siddharth Kara points out in Bonded Labor, it is too often an excuse for exploitation.

When a US or European company cuts a deal with a South Asian company to buy tea or carpets, for instance, how much does it know about the people at the lowest level of the supply chain, about the hands that picked the tea leaves or painstakingly knotted the carpet?

Kara takes us to the fields, quarries, huts and kilns of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal for a direct look at the face of modern-day slavery.

He describes malnourished women picking tea leaves in oppressive heat and given little water and no food for fourteen-hour shifts; and scrawny children hunched for long hours over looms in dimly lit shacks. He recounts 186

Kathleen Hwang

the tales of men, women and children so poor they have no alternative but to bond themselves to those who own the land and the resources around them. They surrender their freedom for food and shelter because they have no reasonable alternative.

Kara calculates that there are 18 to 20.5 million bonded labourers in the world, with at least 84 per cent of these in South Asia. Their plight begins with the acceptance of an advance payment, or the provision of food and shelter, for which they sign over their labour for a season, or a year, or a lifetime. They are often recruited by go-betweens who keep records of their debts, which in many cases seem only to grow, never diminish. Illiterate and unschooled, the workers rarely challenge their overseers, especially as doing so may result in eviction or violence against them, or their families.

In addition to producing saleable goods, bonded labourers help build modern infrastructure and facilities for the upper and middle classes of their societies – while themselves living on construction sites or roadsides without proper shelter, toilet facilities, clean water or adequate food. These construction workers are generally trafficked from poor rural areas, and lured by the promise of opportunity in the cities. Kara quotes an Indian woman named Rashmi, interviewed at a huge construction site in the new urban township of Navi Mumbai, where her entire family was working as bonded labourers: We are treated like cockroaches . . . We are like dogs in the street scrounging for food and shelter. They promise us wages, but we have been here five months with no wages and barely enough food to eat.

I feel no human dignity. Every week I go to Taloje Creek and pray for the day my life will end.

Bonded workers live at the bottom of society; almost all belong to ‘untouchable’ castes or minority groups. Kara outlines the history of the caste system that has persisted in South Asia for centuries, the slave trade that thrived in colonial times, and the system of bonded labour that arose as an alternative to slavery when it was generally outlawed in the nineteenth century. He points out that the exploitative bonded-labour system is now illegal in India, Pakistan and Nepal, yet persists with impunity. He describes India’s laws and policies aimed at eradicating bonded labour as ‘passionate and intelligent’ but adds that ‘laws – even if perfectly designed – only go so 187

Review: Bonded Labor

far as the will to enforce them.’ Bonded labour, he says, ‘is a form of slavery that is perpetuated by custom, corruption, greed and social apathy.’

Kara spent eleven years investigating the exploitation of South Asia’s underclasses. Bonded Labor builds on the meticulous research he used for his first book, Sex Trafficking, which is considered one of the most authoritative studies on the sex trade. He includes this unscrupulous business in his statistics for bonded labour, since its victims are often deprived of liberty and forced to work to pay off ‘debts’ incurred for their transport and basic sustenance.

In 2011 bonded labour produced an estimated US$17.6 billion in profits worldwide. Yet despite this huge figure, Kara points out that the system is inefficient and unproductive for everyone except the exploiters. Total output is less than it would be if free and fair market forces prevailed: workers paid decent wages are more productive than those who are undernourished and unmotivated. The system encourages human rights abuses and flouting of the law, and reinforces the outmoded notion that low-caste groups are not entitled to protections and opportunities that other citizens take for granted.

Kara concludes his book with recommendations for legal, economic and educational reforms that would render bonded labour obsolete.

This book is a valuable resource for policy makers, human-rights activists, legal experts and academics, as well as for businesses with supply chains in developing countries. It deserves attention, and should inspire the eradication of the insidious crime of enslavement.

Bonded Labor is published by Columbia University Press.

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Ilyas Khan and Gore Vidal with the manuscript of the new introduction to his 1965 revision of The City and the Pillar.

London, 2010.

Remembering a Friend of the Review – Gore Vidal Ilyas Khan

M

y friend Gore Vidal, who died this summer, was a writer whose acerbic wit, perhaps exemplified in his autobiography, Palimpsest, will be celebrated for a very long time. Vidal really did know everyone who was anyone after the Second World War, and he is rightly celebrated as the greatest essayist of his times. ‘The last of the greatest American Generation has died’, ran one typical obituary header, and his literary executor (and our mutual friend) Jay Parini wrote in the Daily Telegraph that ‘few doubt he was a great American essayist, a worthy successor to Emerson and Twain in this neglected genre’.

189

Remembering a Friend of the Review – Gore Vidal

Vidal was in many ways the epitome of the learned man; an enthusiastic autodidact, his conversations would range in topic from the classics of Western literature to the concepts of Eastern philosophy. He could entertain for hours with tales about each and every American president. He would speak of Kennedy with ambiguous warmth, of Nixon with special and comic scorn, Bush Senior with puzzled amusement, Bush Junior with absolute and abiding distaste, and Clinton with surprising commendation. I remember one late evening especially: it was after he had spoken in Westminster about the importance of Cuba. Still on form in the early hours, he dexterously and captivatingly analysed the Roman Republic with a flourish suitable to any Cambridge don.

When I took over the Asia Literary Review, he provided me with advice and guidance as relevant as it was peremptory. It went something like this: ‘You’ll know when you lose interest, and when that day arrives you’d better close up shop or, if you can’t sell it, give the magazine away.’

Delivered with his usual pomp and majesty, the pronouncement came at the end of yet another memorable evening, this one spent on the terrace of his home in the Hollywood hills and on the back end of continuous rounds of whiskey that had begun some ten hours earlier. I felt privileged and lucky to spend time like this with Vidal, with each occasion surpassing the last.

I grew to admire him, and to hold a deep affection for him, too. The last time I saw him I’d sat down on one of his overstuffed armchairs. Next to me was the typescript for A Streetcar Named Desire. Vidal had known Tennessee Williams well, and the script, complete with handwritten edits, had been a gift to Vidal from Williams. Most of Vidal’s house was given over to books, and treasures such as this were overflowing from the shelves.

It has taken me a long time to get over the breathless and at times embarrassingly cloying adolescent intellectual crush that accompanied my initial meetings with Vidal. I knew, and have witnessed, his ability to reduce people to shivering wrecks with a few hard-hitting words, an aspect of his character highlighted in a number of column inches published about him. However, his support for the Review during its launch period, and his warmth towards me, and my wife, Mara, reserved a place for him in my heart. I miss him.

190

Contributors GOPILAL ACHARYA was born in Gelephu, Bhutan, in 1978, and educated in Bhutan and Sweden. He is the author of Bhutanese Folk Tales (from the east and the south) and Dancing to Death (an anthology of poems). His debut novel, With a Stone in My Heart, was longlisted for the 2009 Man Asian Literary Prize.

His poems have appeared in a number of international anthologies including The Quest, Blossoms and Rustling Breeze.

AUDRA ANG grew up in Singapore and was a Beijing-based correspondent for The Associated Press from 2002 through 2009. In between meals of ‘saliva chicken’ and ‘fragrant and spicy potato shreds’, she covered disasters, disease and dissent while chronicling the breakneck changes that were convulsing China.

Ang also reported from North Korea, Mongolia, Pakistan and Afghanistan. She is the author of To the People, Food is Heaven.

PROSPER ANYALECHI is a nightlife worker in Tokyo’s Roppongi neighbourhood. He earned his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering at Enugu State University of Science and Technology in Nigeria. His poetry has been published in a number of underground expatriate publications in Tokyo. He lives in Saitama with his wife and two children.

JOHN WALL BARGER is a Canadian poet living in Hong Kong. His poems have appeared in many literary journals and anthologies, including The Best Canadian Poetry 2008 and The Montreal Prize Global Poetry Anthology. His second collection, Hummingbird, was published in spring 2012.

F. H. BATACAN is a Filipino journalist and crime-fiction writer. She worked for nearly a decade in the Philippine intelligence community before moving into broadcast journalism. Her first novel, Smaller and Smaller Circles, won the Grand Prize for the English Novel in the 1999 Palanca Awards, as well as the Manila Critics Circle National Book Award and the Madrigal-Gonzalez Best First Book Award. She has just finished a collection of short stories and is working on her second novel.

TEW BUNNAG was born in Bangkok and educated in the UK, where he studied Chinese and economics at Cambridge University. His fiction deals with modern life in Thailand and explores the tension between traditional values and the rise of aggressive consumerism. He draws on his experiences working for the Human Development Foundation – an NGO based in Bangkok’s largest slum – of which he is a board member.

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ASIA LITERARY REVIEW

JOHN BURDETT has spent more than half his life in South East Asia, where he first worked as a lawyer in government and private practice in Hong Kong. After retiring from law he fulfilled a lifelong ambition to write novels.

Burdett is the bestselling author of Bangkok 8 and its sequels, Bangkok Tattoo, Bangkok Haunts and The Godfather of Kathmandu. His most recent novel in this series, Vulture Peak, was released in January 2012. He now divides his time between Bangkok and south-west France.

SHU-CHING JEAN CHEN is a contributing writer for Forbes Asia. She also writes regular news analyses for the Business Times in Singapore. She was formerly managing editor of CFO, published by The Economist Group, and a staff writer at Forbes. A native of Taiwan, she has covered China for more than a decade.

CHI WEI-JAN is a Taiwanese essayist and playwright. A university professor, he holds a PhD in English literature from the University of Iowa. Private Eyes, his first novel, was a publishing sensation when it came out in 2011, winning almost every major literary award in Taiwan that year. His plays include MIT: Mad in Taiwan, The Mahjong Game Trilogy, and One Bed, Four Players.

JÉANPAUL FERRO is a novelist and poet. He has been nominated eight times for a Pushcart Prize, his work has been featured on NPR, Columbia Review, Connecticut Review, Contemporary American Voices, Hawaii Review, and others.

His published works include All the Good Promises; Becoming X; You Know Too Much about Flying Saucers; Hemispheres; Essendo Morti, nominated for the 2010 Griffin Prize in Poetry; and Jazz, nominated for both the 2012 Griffin Prize in Poetry and the 2012 Kingsley Tufts Prize in Poetry.

LUIS H. FRANCIA is the author of the memoir, Eye of the Fish: A Personal Archipelago, and of A History of the Philippines: From Indios Bravos to Filipinos.

His poetry collections include The Beauty of Ghosts, Museum of Absences and The Arctic Archipelago and Other Poems. He writes an online column for the Philippine Daily Inquirer and teaches at New York University, Hunter College and the City University of Hong Kong.

ALISHA HARIDASANI was raised in Hong Kong before setting off to pursue a BA in journalism and psychology at City University, London. She has worked for Business Traveller Asia-Pacific magazine and is currently working as a freelance journalist in Hong Kong, where she covers a wide range of topics including her favourites: art and culture. You can follow her blog on www.olooblog.com.

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Contributors

HARRY HARRISON always wanted to be a freelance cartoonist when he grew up but now realizes that just growing up would be something of an achievement. While he waits for this to happen, he is a cartoonist for the South China Morning Post and works as a book illustrator.

HE JIAHONG is a professor of law at People’s University in Beijing, and director of law at the Evidence Research Institute. He previously worked as deputy director of the Department for Anti-Dereliction of Duty and Infringement on Human Rights. In 2008 he published a series of essays, An Amnesty for Corrupt Officials, which stirred widespread debate. He has written five crime thrillers including Hanging Devils, recently published in English by Penguin.

ANNA HOLMWOOD translates literature from Chinese and Swedish to English. She was awarded a British Centre for Literary Translation mentorship award in 2010 and has since translated two novels and countless short stories for publication. In 2012 she co-founded the Emerging Translators’ Network to support early career translators. She also works as a literary agent specialising in promoting Chinese literature abroad.

BRIAN HOLTON is a prize-winning translator and poet who took up teaching to fund his translation habit, but has now retired to work full-time on translating Chinese literature. He has translated fifteen books of poetry, and published translations, poems and short stories in his native Scots and in English. He is best known as the principal translator of the poet Yang Lian.

JANG JIN-SUNG worked as a writer for the Workers’ Party and earned special recognition from Kim Jong-il for his poetry. In 2004 he defected to South Korea. He has since published a collection of poems, I Am Selling My Daughter for 100 Won, and a memoir describing his escape from North Korea, Crossing the Tumen River with Poetry in My Heart. He represented North Korea at the Cultural Olympiad in London in 2012 and is an Honorary Fellow of the Asia Pacific Writers’ and Translators’ Association.

SHIRLEY LEE is a composer and musician with a degree in classics and Persian from Oxford University. She has read at London 2012’s Poetry Parnassus, and at the Hong Kong and Orient-Occident International Literary Festivals. Her poetry and translations have been published in various journals and anthologies.

She is the editor of newfocusintl.com, which publishes primary-source information from and about the DPRK. She is working on two books and is a founding director of the Asia Pacific Writers’ and Translators’ Association.

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MA YAN was born in Chengdu in 1979 and graduated from Beijing University. A novelist, critic, editor and organizer of literary festivals and events, she also worked as editor of and contributor to Felicity Troup. Her poetry has been published in Today, Foreign Literature, Big River South North, Book City, Chinese Poetry Criticism, Southern Weekend, Shanghai Culture, Limits and In Chengdu.

Ma Yan committed suicide on 30 December 2010, in Shanghai.

JAMES MCMATH is a scholar and freelance translator of Chinese. He is based in Beijing, where he works for a legal NGO. His translations have mostly focused on early modern literature, though he periodically ventures into contemporary works on state and society as well. He is actively preoccupied with developing computational tools for the analysis of literary style.

MAI JIA is a former Chinese army cryptologist who became a novelist and scriptwriter. His work includes the spy novels Decoded, The Conspiracy and The Wind’s Voice. His screenplays for the TV series The Conspiracy and the film The Message (based on The Wind’s Voice) have been extremely influential, sparking the current craze for spy stories in China’s TV and film industry.

CARLA CAMILLE L. MENDOZA graduated from the University of Santo Tomas in Manila, and has worked as an operating-room nurse. She wrote and produced segments for Life and Style with Ricky Reyes on GMA News TV, assisted in the production of the 33rd Catholic Mass Media Awards, and wrote and produced two books for the UST Medical Alumni Association. She also wrote for the 2012 London Olympics on AKTV. She has recently been accepted into ABS-CBN’s workshop on scriptwriting for TV and film.

REID MITCHELL, from New Orleans, has spent much of his time in Hong Kong and China since Hurricane Katrina in 2005. A historian and novelist, he has taught at Jiangnan University in Wuxi and now teaches at Huaqiao University in Quanzhou. Mitchell’s poetry has been published in The Pedestal Magazine, Mascara Literary Review, Poetry Macao, Softblow, the Asia Literary Review and elsewhere.

POULOMI MUKHERJEE was born in Jamshedpur, India. Her first stories were published in The Statesman, a national daily newspaper. She worked as an advertising agency copywriter for a few years before becoming a travel writer, which allowed her to indulge her two passions: travelling and writing. Presently, she writes graphic novels, moonlights as an avid travel blogger, and is penning a travel book.

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CATHERINE PLATT, originally from the UK, has been based in China’s Sichuan Province since 2004 as a freelance editor, writer, translator and consultant to non-governmental organizations. Her translations of Chinese poetry and fiction have been published in MaLa, the Chengdu Bookworm Literary Review, Chengdoo Magazine and Unshod Quills, and in a forthcoming Anthology of Twentieth Century Chinese Literature to be published by Springer and Yilin Publishing Company.

DREUX RICHARD is an American writer, journalist and literary translator who lives in Tokyo. He covers Japan’s African community for the Japan Times. His work has also appeared, or is forthcoming, in Days Japan, Kyoto Journal and Metropolis.

FARRUKH SALEEM is the Sunday columnist for The News, Pakistan’s largest English-language daily. He writes on conflict dynamics, political economy and governance. His previous positions include national consultant for the World Bank’s Post Conflict Need Assessment, executive director at the Centre for Research and Security Studies, and contributor to the UN-sponsored Common Country Assessment.

KRISHAN PARTAP SINGH is a former banker who now lives and writes in New Delhi. He is the author of The Raisina Series, a trilogy of novels set in Lutyen’s Delhi, India’s seat of power. He can be reached at raisina.series@gmail.com

DILIP D’SOUZA trained in engineering at BITS Pilani, India and computer science at Brown University, USA. He worked in software in the US and India for over twenty years before realizing that writing was his passion. He has published four books and has won several awards for his writing, including the Newsweek and the Daily Beast Prize for South Asia Commentary. He lives in Bombay with his wife Vibha, children Surabhi and Sahir, and cats Cleo and Aziz.

AMIT TAYAL wanted to be an artist since he was nine years old. After a brief shot at accountancy and then animation, he found his niche as an illustrator at Campf ire Graphic Novels in New Delhi.

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JEET THAYIL is a poet, novelist, librettist and musician. His four poetry collections include These Errors Are Correct and English, and he is the editor of The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets. His libretto for the opera Babur in London toured internationally in 2012. He is one half of the contemporary music project Sridhar/Thayil. His debut novel Narcopolis was shortlisted for the 2012 Man Booker Prize. He lives in New Delhi.

SIVAKAMI VELLIANGIRI was included in Dr Srinivasa Iyengar’s History of Indian Writing in English and has published her poems in The Little Magazine, Indian Literature, Kavi, Parampara, Dance Macabre, and elsewhere. Her online chapbook, In My Midriff, was published by Lily Press. Hosted by the Prakriti Foundation she has read her poems at Chamiers, the Semester-at-Sea, and at Spaces. Her poem Kodaikanal won a second prize in the IBPC Poetry Contest.

She is passionate about taking poetry to the young.

SHASHI WARRIER is the author of the thrillers Night of the Krait, The Orphan Diaries and Sniper and the forthcoming Noordin’s Gift. He has also written Hangman’s Journal, a fictional biography of the last hangman of the kingdom of Travancore, and The Homecoming, a novel set in Kashmir. He has written two books for children, The Hidden Continent and Suzy’s Gift. He is currently working on another thriller set in Goa, as well as an account of his motorcycle trip around India.

CHANGMING YUAN is a four-time Pushcart Prize nominee and co-author of Chansons of a Chinaman and Three Poets. He grew up in a remote Chinese village and published several monographs before moving to North America.

Yuan has a PhD in English and teaches in Vancouver. His poetry has appeared in eighteen countries in 420 literary publications including Barrow Street, Best Canadian Poetry, BestNewPoemsOnline, London Magazine, Poetry Kanto, Poetry Salzburg, Taj Mahal Review and Yuan Yang.

ZHANG BINGJIANG was born in Shanghai in 1960 and graduated from Beijing Film Academy in 1982. He was awarded an MFA from the University of South Carolina in 1993 and now lives in Beijing, where he works with film and contemporary art. Zhang has directed and produced numerous films shown at major festivals internationally. His artwork has been displayed and collected widely in China and the US.

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