A Calamitous Chinese Killing Read online

  “And I’m not in a position to venture an opinion as I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he continued.

  “Unfortunately, tales of your latest Indian escapade made the newspapers here in Singapore.”

  This was true. The local press loved nothing better than a juicy story that had no Singaporean political implications.

  “They called you the ‘curry cop’,” continued Superintendent Ghen, thin eyebrows – did he pluck them? – drawn together in irritation.

  “And the ‘poppadum policeman’,” agreed Singh equably, not bothering to suppress a wide smile. He’d enjoyed the coverage, his wife had been offended which had added piquancy to the pleasure. He’d even come up with a few nicknames himself, the ‘dhal detective’ and the ‘sag sleuth’ but his wife had forbidden any anonymous calls to the papers with these suggestions. “Reuters picked up some of the coverage as well,” added Singh.

  “Why were you solving murders in India anyway? You’re supposed to be a Singapore cop!”

  “You wouldn’t let me come back to work after my Cambodian mishap,” pointed out Singh.

  “That was typical of you. We sent you to be an observer at the war crimes tribunal and next minute you’re chasing murderers across minefields.”

  “I went to India for a family wedding. It’s not my fault that my wife’s family is full of murderers!” Singh paused. “Although maybe I should have expected that…”

  “You don’t take the job seriously – that’s the problem with you.”

  “I catch killers. What more do you want?”

  “Sensitivity to surrounding issues,” retorted Chen. “You don’t care about stepping on toes with your big feet in your non-regulation shoes!”

  Singh glanced down at his feet and wiggled his toes inside his sneakers.

  “I run faster in these,” said Singh, a man who had not voluntarily broken into a trot in twenty years.

  Superintendent Chen began to massage his left arm and Singh wondered whether he was about to have a heart attack.

  “If we did things your way, there’d be a lot of murderers walking the streets of Singapore,” continued Singh. “Everyone sleeps better at night because the ‘curry cop’ is on the job!”

  “That’s not my view,” muttered his superior.

  Singh trained the point of his turban at the other man. It sounded like Chen had been overruled from above. But as far as Singh knew, he was even less popular further up the police hierarchy.

  “So…are you interested?” demanded Chen.

  “What’s the case?”

  “The murder of a young man.”

  Singh hauled himself to his feet. The time for baiting Superintendent Chen was over. There was a crime to solve. A murder. A young life truncated through the act of a fellow human being. Singh felt his senses heighten. He had a case. And the fact of the matter was that there was nothing the corpulent copper liked better than a juicy murder to solve. After all, pursuing justice was his only form of exercise.

  “I’ll get to the scene. Send me whoever is on duty and we can decide on staffing once I’ve had a look,” said Singh. He hauled himself to his feet, ready to get to work.

  Chen relapsed into a taciturn silence.

  “Have we identified the victim? Someone important, I assume?” asked Singh.

  “Why do you assume that?”

  “Because you’re sitting behind my desk and wondering whether it’s worth the risk of assigning the case to me.”

  Chen’s lip twitched, indicating a direct hit. “Things are not going to be as straightforward as you think.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The young man in question was killed three weeks ago.”

  “What? You know the first few hours are critical! The crime scene would have been totally contaminated. We won’t find physical evidence that will stand up in court.” Singh was livid. Was this what happened when he was on medical leave or moonlighting as a Mumbai private eye? The police department gave up on basic protocol?

  “Was it not obvious that it was murder?” he demanded.

  “Actually, the young man was badly beaten – no doubt as to cause of death.”

  “What are you people playing at? You know very well that most crimes are solved within the first forty-eight hours or not at all.”

  “We don’t have jurisdiction,” said Chen.

  Singh’s heart followed a downward trajectory until it was nestled next to his ample stomach and he slumped back into his chair. “What do you mean we don’t have jurisdiction?”

  “I’m afraid this was a bludgeoning in Beijing.”

  ♦

  As evening eased into twilight, the guards huddled around a fire smoking unflltered cigarettes. Luo Gan leaned on his hammer, lost in his own thoughts. It was difficult to fathom his route to this so-called correctional facility with rebellious intellectuals, petty thieves, corrupt officials and prostitutes. His lips twisted and it was difficult in the half-light to determine if it reflected amusement or despair.

  “You’re Professor Luo Gan, aren’t you?”

  The professor blinked and peered at his questioner. He realised it was the bespectacled intellectual who’d urged him to be less provocative earlier in the day.

  “I recognised you from the newspapers.”

  “Does it matter?” asked Luo Gan. “Here we are all the same.”

  “Just interested, that’s all. There are not many who are safe from the attentions of the security forces if someone with your profile can end up here.”

  Luo Gan blinked rapidly, trying to focus on the past, on a time when he had been a respected figure.

  “Why are you here?” asked the other man, lowering his voice until it was just a breath of sound, like the gentle rustle of willow in a light breeze.

  The professor considered the question objectively. There were so many potential answers. Some of them even had the virtue of being true. He decided on the simplest response.

  “Falun gong,” he answered even though it was a tiny part of the whole explanation.

  Luo Gan had been one of the earliest adherents of falun gong. Truthfulness, compassion and forbearance – the three pillars of the movement. It had seemed such a simple yet worthwhile pursuit, manifested in the simplicity of measured exercises and spiritual contemplation. Hardly, one would have thought, capable of controversy. It was something that gave shape and meaning to an otherwise ordinary life teaching at the University of Peking where he was just another professor bewildered by the present generation of students. And he wasn’t the only Party member who’d found peace and solace in the movement – his own boss was a devout falun gong pupil. The two of them had often gathered with like-minded officials and workers and performed the slow-moving qigong exercises on the campus at lunch hour.

  But in 1999 the Communist Party decided, some said that the edict was from Jiang Zemin himself, that the falun gong movement was too popular and had to be suppressed. With hindsight, the decision was not entirely surprising. Matters of the soul, spirit or faith lay outside the Marxist ideologies of materialism and atheism. And falun gong had a spiritual leader, which increased the sense of threat. The movement was outlawed for advocating superstition, creating disturbances and – the last and most serious accusation – jeopardising social stability. It was the same language that had been used during the crackdown at Tiananmen Square a decade earlier.

  The yard exercises stopped and Luo Gan did not make eye contact with his boss for two years. He continued his qigong exercises in the privacy of his home but he made sure the curtains were drawn.

  “Many here are falun gong,” agreed his companion. “You are brave to protest the edicts of the Party.”

  “Brave?” asked Luo Gan. “Or foolish?”

  The other man shrugged and then, sensing they had drawn the attention of the guards, returned to swinging his hammer. The professor followed suit, trying to answer his own question in his mind. Brave or foolish? Did it depend on the acti
on or the motive?

  He’d woken up that morning three weeks earlier as if it was one just like any other. But instead of going to the faculty office, Luo had dressed in a simple pair of drawstring trousers and white T-shirt and taken the train to Tiananmen Square. He stood all the way, swaying with the motion, lost in the cacophony of underground travel, oblivious to the chatter of other passengers, the music from the headphones wrapped around youthful heads and the whiff of garlic and chilli from a thousand breakfasts. As he emerged with the hordes of tourists from the provinces onto the huge grey rectangle, he’d noted the security men dotted around the square. The other visitors were oblivious, snapping photos in front of the Martyrs’ Memorial and the mausoleum that housed Mao’s remains. His countrymen gazed up in awe at the vast flagpole from which fluttered the Chinese flag – revolutionary red except for one large star and four small ones in bright yellow, symbolising the Party and the people. Four stars to represent the people was about right, Luo Gan remembered thinking to himself with a grimace. The Communist Party seemed only to have the interests of a tiny elite at heart.

  He’d wandered about, trying to find the perfect spot, hoping not to attract the attention of the security personnel until he was good and ready, when his eyes were drawn to the imposing portrait of Chairman Mao above the entrance to the Forbidden City. Luo hurried back underground and used the pedestrian underpass to cross to the other side of the vast thoroughfare. He heard a guide say in English, “The portrait is replaced with a new one every year or if it is damaged.” He wondered if that was true and whether Chinese tourists were ever told the same thing. He suspected not. It was better if they believed that Mao and his likeness were both impervious to weather or vandals. Luo Gan rode the waves of people carrying umbrellas in all colours – the sun was bright in the sky now – until he was directly under the portrait of Mao. He gazed up at the fleshy smug face, so different from the drawn tired visage he’d glimpsed in the mirror that morning as he brushed his teeth. He turned to face the crowds, none of whom seemed to notice him. He was just another tourist come to pay his respects to China’s glorious past. Among a billion people, it was hard to get noticed sometimes.

  Slowly, he began the steps of the qigong, focusing on the quiet centre of his own body. At first he was ignored. And then he heard a sudden intake of breath and then another. The crowds streaming towards the gates of the Forbidden City stopped and gathered in a semicircle around him instead. He heard the shouts of security guards urging the visitors to keep moving. They hadn’t seen him yet. He continued the slow gentle steps, feeling the peace flow through his body like a clear stream down a mountainside. He saw a few mobile phones held up and wondered whether any of the photographers would be brave enough to post pictures of his lonely dissent on the Internet. Luo Gan sensed rather than saw the security police force their way through the crowd. He was grabbed by two uniformed men and flung to the ground. One of them kicked him in a kidney, but he remained alert enough to hear the other warn him not to do it in front of witnesses. They hauled him back to his feet, handcuffed his hands behind his back and frogmarched him towards a police vehicle that had drawn up, sirens screaming, on the main road.

  “Will you let them do this?” he asked the crowd.

  The people, represented by the four stars on the flag, answered him in deed, quickly moving away, grabbing their children by the arms and turning towards the Forbidden City again. Some used their umbrellas as shields, shutting him from view, from memory. No one wanted to get involved, to get into trouble.

  From there to the correctional facility for ‘re-education through labour’ had not taken long.

  Luo Gan raised his hammer and smashed a rock into pieces. A shard flew up and cut his cheek and Luo Gan paused to wipe away the blood. Brave or foolish? The truth was that it really didn’t matter.

  Two

  Qing worked on the assembly line for thirteen hours a day with two breaks for meals at the factory canteen, usually a thin soup, rice and a dish of boiled vegetables soaked in soy sauce. She did the work mechanically, ensuring the covers were aligned with the bodies of the calculators, clipping them on and then sending them down the chain to the next woman whose job was to stack the finished product twenty in a box for export. Before her, on the assembly line, were dozens of women adding the component parts to the devices before they came to her. The women worked in silence; the factory floor supervisors disapproved of distracting chatter.

  She wore long overalls over her clothes and a pair of Nike shoes that a friend who worked at the shoe factory had obtained for her for a few yuan, a lot less than the foreigners would be paying in their shiny shops in New York and Singapore. Qing’s short curly hair, crimped in a salon, with one of her earliest pay cheques, was covered in a plastic cap as per company regulations. She was not sure why. Were the bosses worried that a consumer might discover dandruff in the depths of their ‘Made in China’ calculator?

  It was usually the fresh migrants from the distant provinces who found themselves trapped in the lowest form of employment, assembly line unskilled work. It didn’t take long for most of them to learn the ropes and make their escape – usually by developing more sought-after skills, more often by lying about possessing such skills. A factory worker Qing knew had impressed a potential employer at a job mart by speaking a few words of English.

  She’d laughed as she packed her things, ready to move up in the world to an office job. “You know, Qing, he did not understand what I said in English. And that is good because I have no idea what I said either – just a few words I picked up at the language centre!”

  In the new China, Qing had realised, it wasn’t the skills that mattered but how convincing one was in pretending to have them. She sometimes wondered if people with more important jobs, like surgeons and builders, adopted the same approach. A scary thought but not one she wasted much time on. It wasn’t her problem.

  As she clipped the covers on, Qing tried to decide what to do. She dreamed of getting a decent job, one that paid good money, perhaps as a filing clerk in an office in Beijing. A clerical job would almost double the wage she had here. Overtime might be paid on time and there would be only four to a dormitory unlike the stinking twelve at this factory. Bliss indeed. And she might have European bosses; everyone knew they were the best. The next were the Americans. Those from Hong Kong were bad, but the worst were the Chinese themselves. They didn’t care about the workers, their pay, the conditions – they were only interested in productivity, efficiency and preventing their employees from leaving for better positions by holding on to their wages and their papers as security.

  Despite this, Qing knew she was lucky. There were hardly any factories left in Beijing and she had found work at a small one well outside the 5th Ring Road, next to a manufacturer of local cars, around ten kilometres past the airport. If she had not found this small place, she would have ended up in Dongguan where life was even worse for the rural girls trying to make a living. In Beijing, at least, she was close to her aunt – not many factory girls had the comfort of a relative close by. And, there was every possibility that she would be able to better herself, improve her lot in life, without resorting to lying about her abilities to potential employers.

  Qing brushed her fringe out of her eyes with the back of her arm. She really needed to find some time and space to think, to decide what to do with what she knew and what she had seen. She would have to trade shifts and free up some time despite the risk of being caught and sacked. The factory was freezing, air conditioned to prevent damage to the electronics, so her fellow workers would have assumed that her sudden shudder was a product of the cold, not fear. But Qing had felt heavy feet in big boots dance on her grave for a moment.

  The bell rang to indicate the end of the shift. The women rose as one and the sudden cackling of human voices reminded her of the hen house at the farm where her mother still collected the eggs and her father worked their half-acre.

  Or at least, she assumed th
ey were still doing it, she hadn’t called home in a while.

  Feeling guilty, maybe even hoping for some comfort from home, she slipped out to the small bare earth yard and extricated her mobile phone from her pocket.

  She rang the number of her parents’ home and listened to the distant ring. The echo captured the emptiness of the thousands of miles between them.

  “Mama, this is Qing.”

  “Where have you been? We’ve been so worried.”

  “I’m fine, Mama. I was quite busy for a while and am also looking for a new job with improved conditions.”

  “How can you find steady employment if you are ready to throw away every job? If one does not plough, there will be no harvest.”

  “But I am still in Beijing.”

  “That is good – at least your aunt can keep an eye on you. I hope you visit her every week.”

  Qing decided not to mention that she had not seen her mother’s older sister for a while. The last time she had been to visit had thrown up her present conundrum.

  “Have you found a new job?”

  “Not yet. But there are other opportunities. Things will get better soon.” She wondered which of them she was trying to convince.

  “Surely you understand that we have great need here? To put your younger brother through middle school is not cheap. But he is a bright boy and deserves a chance.”

  “At this moment I don’t have much money, but I will send some as soon as I can.”

  “Your father is not well, he needs expensive medicine for his cough. The government clinics have all closed down and we must pay for everything. And can you believe the neighbours have a new colour television, such is the generosity of their two daughters who are migrants.”

  Her mother was getting to the crux of the matter. Farm families spent most of their time comparing possessions obtained through the toil of their faraway offspring. Success was measured in home extensions, electrical goods and extra helpings of meat at meal times. Qing knew that she had not delivered so far. She felt a stab of resentment at her mother’s demands and then suppressed a sigh. She could not blame her parents. It was the only way they knew. Neither of them had been further than fifty miles from the village of their birth. How to explain the big cities, the temptations, the opportunities, the traps? It was impossible.