The Not-Escape from China

I

The girl: I’d gotten used to seeing her every couple of days.  I liked her soft-spoken calmness.  Her English pronunciation was like wafting soap bubbles, mid-air, hanging there.  It was whole, melodic and considered.  I’d admired her writing too, the day she’d taught me to write Merry Christmas in Chinese calligraphy.  I followed her example as best I could, in black ink on red card.  She’d taught me to sing those Chinese songs, the dripping of water and the patience in them; the moon and the boat in that ‘Wan Wan’ song.  It reminded me of Noakhali.

But in the few weeks before leaving she was gone.  She hardly answered the phone, and on the rare occasions she had, she spoke in short answers, inevitably busy.  I’d thought to leave her alone on account of the love factor.  And I missed her a little.

The summer holidays were approaching, my exit to Dhaka planned.  I’d only been there six months previously for winter break, but this time was different.  I hoped to stay.

To the increased stillness of the girl balanced the hyperactivity of CB.  He was ringing daily, sending text messages.  He’d researched fares and schedules down to departure times; explaining how it’d be best to transit Kunming and which days would be suitable because they didn’t fly every day.  Like a cigarette, he offered his travel agent.

As he’d repeatedly ask what date I would go, I remained non-committal; at which he’d fill in the dates himself, the routes on his own.  ‘Yes, something like that,’ I used to say to his proposed itineraries.  He didn’t know that on my own I’d already bought the ticket, though with so many ‘somethings-like-that’ he must have suspected.  And when eventually I’d mentioned it and he’d ask dates, well, I’d get back to him because I had to check the ticket.

China: it spells gratitude for giving me the space for safety, away from Howard’s Australia, to wait out the 2007 December election.  To wait for Howard’s end.

I wrote last that China was a kind of Australian-Siberia; that they can do anything to anybody, anytime.  That is true enough but not a feature that distinguishes the country from Australia.  Australia is the same.  The difference rather was this: when it came to making problems, unlike Australia the Chinese, by and large, didn’t.  They had a greater level of human decency about them.

Of course now I would still recommend to any Australian facing the onslaught of Canberra’s bungling, that the best and only solution is to put another country’s security people between you and them.  It’s the only protection Australians are afforded, because domestically there is no incentive for the security boffins to be either proportionate or reasonable, as they act with impunity.  And yet, when they are forced to cooperate with another country, reasonable is something that at the very least they have to appear to be.  It’s my assumption.

It was better to face the ‘

Ramsay Street

takes on the world’ abject amateurism of Australia through a silk screen.

Whether I like it or not, without China I’d have died, for to desist in any manner, from painful experience I am certain, the Australian security sector requires not less than a corpse. They would have just kept it up until…. Ah, China!

So while CB’s little shenanigans were stressful, it was nothing compared to what Sydney had been.  There was so much less cruelty in it.

II

Before the departure should be the arrival, most of a year earlier.  It was a mistake.  It was a Godsend.  It was my life.  I’d stood there in Hong Kong airport with a boarding pass in my hand; they’d processed that in Paris.  The boarding pass to take me back to the great insecurity of Australian security: as I said I was fairly certain it had to end in a corpse.  So with reluctance I took a chance, I went to the Cathay Pacific counter to ask if I could cancel my Boarding Pass and reinstate my ticket.  They agreed.

With reluctance I cleared the Hong Kong immigration counter with my life suddenly off in a new direction, like one of those airport baggage trolleys with a faulty wheel.  Normally I would have jumped at the chance for another country, new adventures.  But it’d never before been that such a thing was so completely decided by a negative: that the going somewhere was the result of the not going somewhere else.

And I was scared.  I was terrified.  What little hurdles and games would they play in Hong Kong?  Would I die there?  It seems unlikely as I write this now, but then, after the torture months, after the momentary relief in Malta and the resumption, though for the most part in a more civilised fashion, in Norway, it wasn’t in my comprehension that Hong Kong would yield no harassment at all.

I stayed by myself in a hostel; that was frightening too.  I thought about what to do because it wasn’t only the heavy burden of the past months but a new future, some sort of living I had to organise.  I thought about jumping from buildings.  I sent e-mails in search of work.

The rationale had been that it was easy to find English teaching jobs in China; and that in Hong Kong it might be cheap enough to stay while I found one, on family money for I had none of my own.  I was spending it with guilt.  It was what had dissuaded me from seeking a life in France instead, not boarding the plane to Hong Kong in the first place.  Europe is expensive.

Of course I thought too about just buying a flight to Dhaka; but I was sure this would make problems because Howard was still there.  The chance of it being dangerous for me to try for Bangladesh at that time was high.  It’s silly to have to think about such things, but unfortunately the reality for Australians is: they do.  It was also impractical.  There was no money for a plane ticket really; there was no certain job in Bangladesh. 

Worse than that, I had to go to the Australian Consulate to renew my passport.  The old one was full so any country I went to that needed a visa needed a page to stamp it on.  It was terrifying to go there: There had been such animal behaviour from those dumb Australian bureaucrats I never wanted to see another one.  I still don’t; and to this day I will tell you the biggest curse of my life was to be born Australian, behind the racism curtain.  Without rights.  In prison conditions from birth.  Any other western nationality would have been better; that’s true for all Australians in actuality.  No human rights.

It’s easy to write now that nothing happened and I got my passport without problems; but there were the days of waiting, spending money that was not mine.  I knew they had the power to not issue a passport, and if they’d refused then it would have been Sydney I suppose, though I’d thought to try Taiwan where I could arrive on a small stamp that would fit into my full but unexpired passport; then stay illegally?  It’s not something I would do normally.  Taiwan too needed a plane ticket and it was on the American side of things, like Australia: what would happen there?

Of course they didn’t refuse: issued the passport, and there is the thought that if they had refused I could have potentially appealed that decision which would have shone a little light onto their unending life-invasion. 

I’d sent several applications to various places across China, and one on a whim in Azerbaijan.  Only one application got through.  There was a job, not too far from Hong Kong in a city called Zhanjiang, pronounced Jan-tsiang.  I wish I’d known that from the start, because Jan-tsiang is a name that strangely I’d heard before, in Sydney.  Had it been Jan-tsiang from the start I would never have gone there: I needed protection from Australia not a mere relocation of the same, no longer endurable bollocks.  But I was pronouncing Zhanjiang in a stupidly foreign way.  It’s no wonder it was difficult to get the bus ticket-sellers to understand.

Zhanjiang.  It was a mistake.  It was a Godsend. It was my life.

III

The day I’d arrived it’d been to the astonishment of the university administrators.  How had I been able to find the way with only an address?  How could I speak to people?  The Chinese don’t travel a great deal in general, I understand, and even when I’d headed off to a nearby town for a day they’d raised concerns.  Most Chinese I imagine are grateful for a package tour.

The trip down from Hong Kong, it hadn’t been too difficult, despite the language issues and my failure to comprehend the bus would take nine hours.  I’d thought it might be two or three.  From the bus station in Zhanjiang I’d shared a taxi to the university gate with a young lady who just barely spoke English; but it got me there.  And for these efforts with the university administrators I was ‘adventurous.’ The adjective probably fits, but how little of it they knew!

Within minutes of my arrival I’d made my first cultural mistake.  They’d overlooked it, thankfully.  My crime?  To my welcome dinner I wore shorts.  I have to say in my defence it’s slightly understandable since in Hong Kong shorts were plentiful, no problem.  Shorts roamed all across the city in Hong Kong; but on the mainland, and I learnt this on some later occasion, when the embarrassment of that first day finally found me, shorts are associated with sport.  They are what you might wear to the gym, not serious clothes, not for meeting all the university high-ups, even the local Communist Party official.  Still, I’d done that; we’d sat in that special room, with a lucky number like ‘888’ on its door, and eaten worms together.  The Zhanjiang specialty is sandworms.

Chinese universities prize foreign teachers.  There were many dinners; the administration always attentive and helpful.  The apartment was large and fine, though it was on the ninth floor of a building with no lift.  I’d heard that Mao Zedong thought not providing lifts a good way to keep the people fit.  If that’s true then Mao was right.  Before long I could run up those nine floors without losing my breath; the same work that high-altitude hill had done about two years earlier in La Paz, Bolivia.

Life rolled on and my recovery from 2007 started, very, very slowly.  I got to write that fifty page complaint, the going-through-the-motions thing, as any aware Australian knows there will be no joy in such a thing.  That complaint kick-started the cover-up process, as anticipated.  But I’d wanted to make the effort anyway, so I could live without the guilt of being silent, of not at least attempting to prevent the inevitable future torture of others; in vain of course, but it’s important not to be silent and I have no guilt there.

In China I was also able to document 2007, some of it.  For myself I wanted to do that.

In China for the first time since perhaps the Caribbean I felt safe.  On nights when sleep didn’t come, usually from flashbacks and nightmares, I’d even wander off down the hill to McDonalds, the only place that opened well before dawn.  Actually I think it never closed.  There I’d have a pre-breakfast breakfast before walking home again as the sun rose.  It must’ve been a two-kilometre round-trip. 

But that sense of safety changed too at the very end.  Things were so odd those last few nights, after the neighbours had left and the ninth floor had become entirely without a breath apart from mine.  Those last nights I slept with a knife under my pillow; something someone in Bolivia had told me they once did.  As always it wasn’t China which worried me, only Australia.  Those people are capable of anything and Dhaka was close now.

As I mentioned, on the Communist side I’d found a degree of decency; and my time with the girl, and her family, I’d enjoyed.  She talked Scandinavian thoughts sometimes, so I felt, and I liked that.  And we’d talked Bangladesh, Hatiya but of course, and in general terms about 2007.

I told her that I’d been writing it down, so as to capture details.  As things had been in the habit of going walkies from my e-mail, from the laptop too, I’d mentioned that I might leave a pen drive with her, for safekeeping.  It’d been a throw away thought; there were better ways than through her.

IV

The plan had a few little tricks to it.  The first was about money:  I had so little, only a splash of savings from China, but much better than when I’d first arrived in China.  I could last a few months at best I knew, without having a salary.  I didn’t know if it would even be possible to find a new job in Bangladesh, if I could stay; so I’d had to calculate on returning.  I signed a new contract with the university for the following year.  It’s something I really hate that I did, letting them down when I didn’t return, but there was no choice.  I’d also bought a return ticket, cheaper than two one-ways and better for getting the Bangladeshi visa.  I’d resigned myself to the possibility I’d never use the return portion, learnt to think of that economic loss as a symbol of success.

The second reason I had to sign a new contract with the university was because the Bangladeshi Consulate in Hong Kong would only issue a visa if I were resident in Hong Kong or China.  Without a new contract my residency would have ended and they’d be telling me to pick up a Bangladeshi visa in Canberra. 

There’s a funny thing: CB’s plans that missed the obvious.  His Kunming route was impossible for I needed a visa from Hong Kong.  I’d even explained it to him once, but his language and listening skills, or the moment had meant he hadn’t caught my meaning.  And the talk of schedule changes on the Kunming to Dhaka route continued.

My little secret flight went from HK, with a five day space allotted to the Bangladeshi Consulate to stamp my visa in.

‘Did you book your flight to Kunming yet, because there aren’t many seats left,’ CB’d say.

‘Something like that.’

Just here I wish to mention something amusing.  It happened on my way back from Hong Kong on another occasion; after posting the complaint to the Inspector-General of Security in Canberra.  The bus was late and I arrived at the Zhanjiang bus station after dark.  There was a guy on the bus who wanted to help me but I already knew the drill, so organised a motor cycle taxi to take me from there back to the campus where I was living.  We pulled out of the bus station and, well it’s embarrassing, there was a small contingent of People’s Liberation Army or Civic Guard or something, on motorcycles, that accompanied me.  They’d just been sitting there waiting until my motorbike taxi had passed them; and they’d followed.  I think there were four of them, two in front and two at the back, like what a minor dignitary might get.  You can say it was nothing, maybe you’d be right, but it seemed so obviously an escort that eventually I waved hello as they rode alongside us.  After that they left.

When I got back to the apartment, and I think it was already midnight, there was a call from CB.  ‘I was really worried about you,’ he said. 

‘Why would you worry when I’m getting a military escort?’ I thought.

In the days just before departure, to Dhaka, CB had finally plucked up the courage to ask the question, ‘what does ‘something like that’ mean?’ 

‘It means ‘no’,’ I said. Shock! Trying to remember the circumstances; all the statements I’d said ‘something like that’ to. 

In those last days too he said, ‘I want you to consider me a true friend.’  It’s mean but with all the stresses of the half-sentences, in-the-car, out-of-the-car, ‘aren’t you worried about being overrun,’ ironic given in Australia that’s what people will say about the Chinese too, from all of that I opened my mouth and it came: ‘give me a written application and I’ll consider it.’

There was a third statement I recall, a kind of ongoing refrain. ‘You’re going to escape from China,’ he said, not once but many times.  I kept saying ‘no, it’s not that,’ the truth, he kept pushing.  In the end with some annoyance I said, ‘those are your words, not mine!’  There seemed to be some importance to liking China.  And I can’t say I didn’t; but I could have like it much more had I arrived under different circumstances, and been able to explore it without little under-the-surface agendas.

V

I left in the afternoon; I’d tried to clean up the apartment as best I could, and take everything on the most optimistic scenario that in Bangladesh I’d stay.  I was already running late for the bus when I finally locked up and started downstairs.  The landlady, Mrs Chen, lived in the building.  I had to stop there to drop off the key; and as I’d already anticipated she didn’t wish to take it.  ‘You’re coming back?’ she asked, ‘keep it with you.’ 

I would have made an interesting tale of the mighty Meghna, ships in the night, jumping onto muddy island banks where even wharves fear to go.  About the on and off rickshaws where a key can easily fall out unsuspected, or the vagaries of village houses with their general lack of locks and flocks of people from wherever inside them.  I would have come up with something nice to explain the gist: that I would lose the key in Bangladesh so it was better she keep it with her; but for the language gap the simplest version was all I could manage.  Still she wanted me to take it; but I refused.

There must have been a frantic phone call because about two minutes later as I headed towards the gate the administrator of the English department found me.  ‘Why did you give your key to Mrs Chen?’ I was asked, the administrator really concerned about it.  It was what I wanted to avoid, that question, that confrontation.  I felt such shame but realistically what could I tell her: that I would be back, don’t worry.  There certainly was no other certainty at that moment, so it wasn’t a lie as much as a probable outcome; just not for me the desired one.  I was asked to go back to Mrs Chen’s apartment and re-take the key; but I was late for the bus I explained, so I couldn’t.

They were really nice to me the university people.  It was a terrible thing not to properly resign; but there really wasn’t a choice in the matter.  In 2007 there is no doubt there was security sector interference in my job applications in Sydney; in Hong Kong when applying by e-mail I’d suspected the same.  In Dhaka, who knew? 

And I’d tried to find a Bangladeshi job online first; I’d even taken to faxing a few places to avoid the possibility of blocked e-mails.  No results.  Not overly surprising, to be fair: the Bangladeshi online job market at the time was still quite poor.  There was simply no opportunity to resign and be financial secure, meaning in terms of food.  It’s the sort of insecurity I could never, ever have found myself in without the kind assistance of Australian security.

And so I missed the bus to Zhuhai, near Macao.  The next one was due to depart several hours later, so, although I’d hoped for a speedy departure there was nothing to do but wait it out on a seat in the bus station.

VI

My plan for a rapid departure had been a good one and missing the bus wasn’t a good idea.  Before the bus was ready to leave my mobile rang.  On a few occasions it was CB.  I didn’t answer.  Then it was the girl.

She was really emotional.  She said on the phone that recently she’d been down by the gates of the local park when a stranger had come up to her and said, ‘don’t go near Andrew!’  The girl said that she was frightened, it’d been threatening, and that’s why she’d not been visiting like before.  I asked for a description of the stranger: she said it was a woman, Asian but not Chinese-born.  The details were sketchy.  I told her, if she was worried, to go to the police.

About that phone call I came to wonder if I wasn’t supposed to rush off madly to the girl in peril, to give comfort and forget the departure.

The bus was finally ready to depart; on it I sat.  Before the driver arrived I noticed a People’s Liberation Army official, judging by the uniform, walking along the row of buses, looking into each one for a minute or two before moving onto the next one.  He stopped outside my bus, looked inside, looked straight at me, and then got onto his radio set.  It’s the usual thing that might be nothing, but I tell you, I so much wanted to get down from the bus and go and shake his hand.  ‘Thank you,’ I would have said, and meant with all sincerity, ‘for keeping me safe this year.’  Because for all that happened I had been safe as it turned out; but the phrase in Chinese was well beyond my Chinese language ability, and I wasn’t even out of China so it could have been premature… didn’t want to tempt fate.

A few hours later we were rumbling along those smooth Guangdong freeways with the nondescript scrubby, patchy farmland I knew to be along each side though by then it was dark.  The phone rang.  It was the girl, a second time.

‘I can’t do it,’ she blurted out.  I was lucky, for I genuinely had no idea what she was talking about.  ‘Do what?’ I said instinctively; the right answer.

‘I can’t take your pen drive.’

‘No of course not,’ I said, ‘don’t worry I don’t want you to.’  Or some words like that.

The conversation soon done, I wondered about that phone call:  was it the Judas attempt, the set-up attempt number five thousand three hundred and sixty two, part b, clause iii? There had been many attempts to push crime into my life over the years, over ten years, almost solely in Australia, always by Australia.  Was this the last attempt to stop me getting to Dhaka?  Maybe you think I make too much of it, maybe I do, but when you think about it, while to me the girl was the girl, my friend still as far as I am concerned, to Australian security, potentially in an Australian court, it would so easily be painted as giving ‘national secrets’ to a foreign power.  Not that I consider there are national secrets in anything I wrote, it was just my life you see and I’m really sorry but whether they like it or not, Canberra does not own that.  Nor am I responsible for the only transparency they achieve: through the amateurism of their efforts.

These were my thoughts, right or wrong: but the phone call was odd and the girl, Judas, on her own would simply not have spoken like that.  Even from her voice I thought there must be something wrong, even without thinking, before the analysis I’d wondered if she wasn’t being told what to say.  She was nearly crying and there was the coincidence in timing: she didn’t know I was on the bus.

Some hours later she rang a third time.  This time she said, ‘forget everything I said.  I was wrong, don’t worry about it.’  Words like that.  She sounded freer then but I couldn’t be sure….  Zhuhai was on its way and I hoped only for Dhaka.

I always enjoyed Zhuhai, a city of little adventures.  I had a whole day to spend there which I was happy with, meaning the place, if not happy with, meaning the wishing to continue towards Hong Kong and Dhaka.  I had only one task, to change my yuan into dollars: as usual, disorganised me, I hadn’t done it yet.  It was my entire savings, not much but enough that the first bank didn’t wish to do such an amount.  I insisted and to their absolute credit, they had one of their bank managers drive me across the city to another branch where they could get the approval or whatever was required to change the money.  He did that, and then offered to drive me out to the Hong Kong ferry terminal.  He did that too.  Normally I used to go through wonderful, fantastic Macao towards Hong Kong, but this time I’d decided to take the direct Zhuhai boat.

As I boarded the ferry, following the queue, there was a security guy.  He looked at me and then got onto his radio set.  Honestly probably nothing to do with me, but I couldn’t help but smile.  ‘He has left the building,’ I imagined him saying.  I wanted to thank him too.

VII

The next day my father was due to arrive in Hong Kong, from Australia.  I’ve written about Hong Kong elsewhere so need not do so again.  Only I think of a certain text message I received, for my mainland mobile set still worked in Hong Kong.  ‘Hello Mr Something-Like-That,’ it read, ‘have you left yet?’  Ah CB, when all is said and done you’re not entirely bad, I’ll give you that.

Meanwhile the Bangladeshi Consulate had improved its efficiency in the six months since I’d last been there.  It no longer took five Hong Kong-expensive days to process but only three; I was able to shift my flight forward a day leave with marginally less-dwindled Chinese savings.

For the four-hour journey through the evening darkness, south to Vietnamese skies, across Laos, Thailand and Burma, I was ecstatic; though it’s not really a reaction sufficiently fit to mark that particularly important journey for I had always arrived in Bangladesh hugely excited.  There’s never been an exception; just as I’d rarely left without tears.

Having passed through immigration I stepped out of the terminal building into a strange thing, a kind of freedom and much better, higher level security.  For the first time in several years there was an opportunity to build a life independently, to have opinions, to write, to live with my brain switched on and without fear.  Look at the Dhaka traffic: Bangladeshis are hardly conformist.  It wasn’t all smooth sailing, of course, but this was the world’s heart* no less, so it would never be possible, no matter what happened, to but wake each morning in that absolute joy of realising in which country I was.

Life did not end there, of course.  There was getting a house, getting a job, working my way through the Bangladeshi visa processes.  There were many things to come, of course, and it’s not a journey yet complete; but in Dhaka I’d finally found enough peace and the freedom to really start recovering from 2007, slowly, slowly.  It’s still going on.

There were the many friends to help me, but especially Situ.  Hey, after e-Bolivia got me through most of 2007, after telephone-Ukraine helped me stay alive on one crucial evening, after in person-China gave me refuge for most of a year and through an election, and well, should mention some good came from some inside Australia too, for it’s not that the entirety of the Australian people are a problem, just the bloody, unaccountable, contemptible, corrupt and racist security systems and those involved there; after such an international relief effort, and there were more who helped than just those abovementioned, it was really about time Bangladesh played its part.  And it’s no small part, the part of the heart.

Remember the Bagerhat man?  ‘Bangladesh is paradise,’ he’d said, fifteen years ago.  Well, it’s not that, but it is a country I’m so much honoured to consider my home.  The Howardites be damned!

Fortunately the world is not only about spies and security.  There are also elegant mountainside villages, enormous, mystical rivers and little salty lakes.  And by the way, China is beautiful.




At Home in Bolivia: Article Index for articles about Bolivia

Bangladesh Dreaming: Article Index for articles about Bangladesh

* I referred to Bengal as the world’s heart in ‘Saccharin Hatiya’ also.  Since writing that I felt guilty because although I have used the term to describe Bengal for several years, it is something I poached from a small kitchen in Eastern Ukraine.  There I was told that in Soviet times people used to say that America was the world’s muscle and the Soviet Union was its heart. 

I can’t vouch for the Soviet Union as a whole, but Ukraine as world’s heart is an entirely sound conclusion to draw.  But to the Ukrainians I ask you grant me the indulgence to shift the term to Bengal since in the experience of my life it fits nicely there, without taking anything away from Ukraine.  Indeed if Ukraine really is the world’s heart then you will grant my request from kindness, though you may beg to differ on its conclusion.

And to the owner of that kitchen I would say that we had so many wonderful arguments in which I was quite adamant about various things, as were you; though these days I find myself willing to concede to many of your points, which we might discuss one day, or argue over; but in return for my concessions I would ask you not to mind my using the ‘Bengal is the world’s heart’ phrase; come here and you’ll see it, and remember I swapped from Bangladesh to Ukraine something too, for as you know, as I said, ‘Ukraine is a tiger,’ a royal Bengal tiger.

Saccharin-Hatiya

Bridge to Potou

This is written in 2011.

‘Saccharin is an artificial sweetener. The basic substance, benzoic sulfilimine, has effectively no food energy and is much sweeter than sucrose, but has an unpleasant bitter or metallic aftertaste, especially at high concentrations. It is used to sweeten products such as drinks, candies, biscuits, medicines, and toothpaste.’
– Wikipedia

2008: Zhanjiang, China

Was it a kind of Saccharin Bangladesh they were striving for, the Australians via the Chinese, or a benzoic sufilimine me?  The quest seemed to be for a kind of pseudo-Hatiya, in China, Muslim-free and with lighter skin tones.

Both Chicken Bones and the girl had done the village bit.  CB had done it twice, taken me to two model villages on two occasions.  ‘You don’t have to live here, but…’

Over the suspension bridge we’d gone that first time, the bridge that linked the Potou District with the rest of the city.  Beyond the city limits and a little off the main road: it was there.  A red gateway marked the village entrance, and away to the left stretched an artificial pond, landscaped with those Chinese zig-zag bridges to make the village park.  Villages don’t have parks like that, Chinese towns do.  And in this park was not a single villager.  The handful of streets, they were swept and clean, the houses a little too immaculate for normal.  The houses were brave; Communist Party and fortune favoured.

‘I’m not a communist,’ CB had said, lying or not, as we walked in the open, his words happily swept away in the little breeze.  Actually the communists, the lower not-necessarily-active ones, I’d thought the nicest people.  At least they believed in something beyond real estate. 

Under the Potou Bridge

That show, Monkey Magic, a Chinese story, Japanese actors: it’d been popular in Australia when I was a kid, and the university students in China knew of it too.  They used to refer to it, though in China there’d been two versions shown; they used to compare them.  I could see it, in that first model village, Tripitaka riding in on the white horse that was really the dragon who had eaten the original horse, finding the village, pristine and perfect, and lecturing Monkey on how nice life could be when everyone lives in harmony.

‘You don’t have to live here, but….’

Inevitably as it would turn out, the village was really under a spell, the harmony an illusion.  There was an evil lake-demon at work.  How else could the fight-scenes start?  That’d be the show, Monkey Magic, dubbed in English.

There wasn’t a lot to do in the model village, so after several minutes we left.  I don’t recall much of what CB said that day, apart from that he used to take his family there.  It was on the way home, across-again the Potou Bridge that he’d made those few disparaging comments about South Korea, saying that Koreans were a recognised minority in China, inferring the Korean Peninsula belonged to China.  It was in the car, with its better acoustics.

Me under the Potou Bridge

Still I wondered why he should have taken me to a village.

The second model village was out in Suixi County to the city’s west.  It wasn’t manicured like the first, but specialised in efficient farming methods.  I seem to recall greenhouses and drip irrigation.  There had been a pond there too, full of wide-mouthed goldfish that we’d fed with crumbs bought from the kiosk.  CB had enjoyed feeding the fish.  We stayed for lunch.

‘I’m not saying you have to live here,’ he’d said, to the breeze, to the wind, ‘I just wanted you to know what a Chinese village was like.’  Except that it’s not what a Chinese village is like.  ‘I thought you might get a few ideas for Hatiya,’ he’d said.

Chicken Bones had quite an interest in my future address.  Once I’d explained to him that while I had no problem with Zhanjiang, and on the whole I didn’t, Hatiya had more than a decade of history to it and I had many friends there.  It was the best I could do, for there’s no explaining Bengal, the world’s heart.  You’ve either been there, understood, or you haven’t.

‘If you stayed here for ten years,’ he’d said, ‘you could have friends like that here too.’  It was lame; who’d change friends like that and why, for skin colour, for religion, for the convenience of some bigoted bureaucrat in Canberra?

And then there was that odd remark about the small NGO I’d co-founded with the Hatiyans in 1999.  It’s another history.  CB had said that if I’d done that kind of thing in a Chinese village I’d be a national hero.  He’d told me of some American doctor who’d stayed in China a long time and was loved for it.  Or was the guy Canadian?  The Chinese understand the value of propaganda, obviously: not worth explaining to CB.  He either knows or he doesn’t know.

Olympic Mascots in Zhanjiang (Me in front - I am not one)

Bengalis are not like that.  Thank heavens for Bengal.

‘You can live anywhere in the world you wish,’ CB had said once.  Yes I know this.  ‘Except Bangladesh,’ he’d said.

‘Well, Hello Dhaka!’ I’d thought. Give me your crowds, smells, inconveniences, rickshaws, noise, manners and rudeness, your laughter, tears, sweat, blackouts, tea, street food, bargaining, cross-country footpaths and no footpaths, traffic, smiles, buzz, drone, shouting, running, dancing, teasing, joking, selling, begging, villagers and true city folk by degrees, your dirt and democracy in the heart, of the heart, the flute-playing and songs and guy sleeping on the median strip, the hammers and drills of the endless un-demarcated building sites… Give me what you are Dhaka, all of it, and I’ll keep up with you!  Or at least I’ll try…

But I write that now, if truth be told, and then, before living in Dhaka I had a lesser opinion of her; it was the village I would pine for.  And it was never the spite that made the destination.  It wasn’t CB’s ‘except Bangladesh’ really; just a happy universal alignment of life’s desire with the moment’s spite.  I’d always believed it important to as much as possible not let Australian security boffins deform my life any more than could not be avoided; and I’ve always tried to be true to myself in that regard.

And he’d said, when I was allowed to live anywhere, ‘and I hope you choose China.’  There was a little suggestion to set up a small shop in Guilin and live quietly; there was an admission that China had an age restriction on granting visas for English teachers, was it 54?  ‘What would I do thereafter,’ he’d asked.  These were the in-the-car, out-of-the-car kinds of things with all the minor contradictions of such a political mishmash.  These were the discussions of my future that had nothing to do with me.

I’d already imagined China was some kind of Australian security sector paradise.  There the state could intervene in any life in any way imaginable; no rights, just like what they’ve been achieving in Australia.  Like they do.  And it’s not only me who’ll tell you Australia cooperated with China closely during the Howard years; do the research, it’s in the public domain.  A kind of Australian Siberia, I’d considered it, closely monitored exile for those who had enough audacity to consider things like human rights and human-write.  

‘You can say and write anything in China,’ CB had said, ‘but you can’t publish it.’

And the funny part – was there any chance at all CB was supposed to be a sort of Saccharin Situ?  They were about the same age.  CB had been on a few package tours and said he was interested in travelling.  The similarities end there.  Situ is a universe.  CB was a peach.  But perhaps that’s going too far; do they go that far?  Like everything else I really just did not wish to know.

Hatiya.  No substitute. No saccharin.  For Bangladeshis are people in the end: as full-blooded as any and more richly human than most. Bangladeshis matter.

My apologies go to the anti-Muslim anti-South Asian Canberra boffins: China wasn’t ever going to work out. 

Post 2007 there was no question it would be Bangladesh.  When I faced death and Ukraine-d away from it that dreadful evening, through the torture months and that other little thing I won’t mention, there was only one thought, well there were two.  The first was, ‘keep going until the world says stop,’ in the stronger moments; the second was ‘if I can only do one more thing, then I’d like to see Hatiya one last time.’  That’d been the ultimate ambition when my life was in the reckless hands of others.

‘Some people say, ‘what’s mine is mine and what’s yours is yours,’’ CB had said.  In Canberra they’d always had a problem with that little Hatiyan trait of sharing: giving, receiving could only mean the red menace to the security set.  They never got over the Cold War, I’d always felt.  I’ve certainly heard those words in Sydney.  Those were words that certainly sounded more Canberra than Beijing.  It can be.

In Hatiya of course it’s not communism: it’s caring and community; it’s custom.  It’s not communism but ‘boro-mon’ –ism: big-hearted-ism.  And if certain Australians cannot understand such simple concepts, well that’s their poverty.  Such a pity that poverty is publicly funded though, to be spread out like manure across the whole of society, or at least in Howard’s day it was.

I’d tell you about the girl too, in China, our trips to that other village and the small town where I could stay forever, so I was told.  It may be she was CB’s Judas, but the girl is good; for seven days I’d loved her before sense resumed.  China was somebody else’s dream, I’d remember: I needed to go west, follow the sun. 

She’d brought forth my tears, the first time since 2007, and more or less the last time since then; that evening by the river.  She’d shed hers that evening in the park.  We drank wine and shared literature.  She was the good one; the good Judas.  I’m getting ahead of things…

And so when CB was done with the Saccharin efforts, and it’s no coincidence I now understand that Bengalis eat sugar by the truckload: real, sweet, cane sugar with everything.  No substitute.  When CB was done there was only one thing left, ‘how do I get to Bangles, quietly, safely, without the Canberra fanatics?’

I thought of it every day in China, the getting to Hatiya.  Especially I thought of it each evening.  The sunset was always the best thing to Zhanjiang.  It was my favourite thing in China, because, due to latitudinal alignment, the orange disc that dropped into the Zhanjiang horizon each day was the most similar… it was a kind of Saccharin sunset to remind of it, that just four hours away by plane was the real cane-sugar version.




Here is the real sugar cane version.  And now i live in a real sugar cane city.  But it doesn't mean I don't know that China is beautiful too.

By the river, Zhanjiang

Bangladesh Dreaming: Article Index for articles about Bangladesh

The Last Dinner

Wikimedia image: The Last Supper, by Henry Holiday, 1909.  Panel in St. Chad's Church, Kirkby.

I discovered this, which I wrote in 2008 at the same time as the events described in China (I believe on that day)....

2007: what happened that year, to resolve, to get over, is going to take my life.

2008 Zhanjiang China

‘If you try to become famous from this, they will kill you,’ Chicken-bones said in the car as he drove back to my apartment on the last night we had dinner. He said it calmly, as though mentioning a forecast for rain or telling the time. The phrase should have upset me but it didn’t.

I was used to being interviewed in the car, especially on the way home. It was in the car that the most valuable information was sought, where my reactions to ideas or events were tested, and where I learnt most about the progress of this. Sometimes I must confess I only went to dinner for the ride home, to see what was up.

It was difficult to be angry with Chicken-bones. He was no more than a messenger, he looked after all the foreigners in Zhanjiang, to be sure they didn’t get into trouble, and it seemed he was a messenger for all sides to boot: in the car the harshest comments were made, at dinner things were motherly and particularly pro-China, and between the two, as we walked in and out of a restaurant, in the doorway and across the car park, he’d sometimes throw little comments my way I’ve always believed his truest feelings, for those comments were designed to help or contradicted the official line, and spies always talk most freely on the street or when moving, the surveillance weak spot. He admitted freely that his ethics were so-so and seemed to have no problem with the hidden agenda that must have formed a good deal of his human relationships.

Apart from being the messenger he was scrawny, how I’d come up with his name. It fit not because of his stature but because of his self-image, as from time to time he’d waffle on about how much stronger he was than he looked, how clever the Chinese were or how he was expert in bed. ‘The best lovers have imperfect eyesight and go bald in the end,’ he’d once told me, explaining the symptoms of high levels of testosterone, symptoms from which, coincidentally, he suffered. In my mind, the self-aggrandisement made his arms shrivel until they were so slim they risked being accidentally snapped off by a passing waiter and lost in the small jar of toothpicks compulsory on any Chinese restaurant table; it made him lose centimetres in height and he started a good foot below me; and it made his wispy hair recede further still from a decent cut. Sometimes as I looked across the table it seemed his suit, usually in elephant grey, was still on its coat hanger. I don’t suppose it would take much to kill me, I knew, but the chance of Chicken-bones leading the charge had to be zero. In his own right he could arouse no fear or loathing, or indeed any emotion at all with any strength to it. He was simply Chicken-bones.

The restaurants we frequented, his choice, were a vast fair of activity. Village girls in short-skirt waitress uniforms and immaculate hairdos rushed back and forth like Disneyland attendants, for as little as $100 per month, working ten to twelve hour days with just one day off. Others pushed trolleys stacked with little plates of food, the doughy balls the Chinese call bread, bony meat dishes or the rubbery brown and black discs of sickly sweet desserts. Older waitresses in serious suits paraded by, checking their apprentices and wielding special authority such as placing orders for fish dishes which must have varied day to day. Their salaries could rise to as much as $300 per month. There was the clash of crockery and rumble of conversation for applause, morning, noon and night.

That day he ordered chicken and fish rather than the usual dishes of eggplant beef and garlic pork. I usually stuck with those two because I liked them, and to avoid the minimum ten minute discussion between Chicken-bones and the waitress a change in order would have necessitated, for things to be perfect. I sometimes wondered if the phrase ‘Can I have?’ in Cantonese didn’t run on for several minutes. With the ordering done, and thankfully he’d taken the initiative to change dishes that last evening without consulting me, he looked seriously in my direction and said, ‘well this is it, the last dinner.’

The way he said it, I knew it meant something. As we washed our chopsticks and crockery with the first pour of tea, as is customary in China, he spelt it out because I hadn’t caught his meaning. ‘It’s a famous painting,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ I laughed, ‘that’s right. Da Vinci’s The Last Dinner’.

‘In the painting,’ he said, ‘which one is Judas?’ It was a comment designed to shock me and, as messenger, I’m not even sure Chicken-bones understood. It was a comment from about two years earlier, when I was living in Nicaragua. It didn’t shock.

I’d stayed in Granada, Nicaragua for about five months waiting for Julie to finish work and arrive from Australia, so we could travel around the world together, and I was living in one of the grand old Spanish villas typical of the oldest city in Latin America. The house had two fine courtyards, a green parrot, two turtles and a lazy cat. It belonged to a delightful elderly Nicaraguan couple who’d taken to renting out rooms to fund their retirement. The husband was absolutely insistent his guests walk in the shade as they made their way along the street, and he used to stand in the front doorway calling ‘La sombre! La sombre!’, pointing to the shady side of the street in earnest, until you crossed over in compliance. ‘The shade! The Shade!’ The wife wove intricate culinary masterpieces with the help of a servant or two, beans and beef, salad, vegetables and fruit as you’ve never known them before, included in the rent.

The meals were so delicious I used to be disappointed if ever I were asked to eat out, and only did so begrudgingly. Sometimes I’d search for an excuse so I could eat at home instead. I was happy in those days as life was simple. I’d started out English teaching, what I did in China too, but after a few weeks I’d decided Nicaragua was cheap enough to devote myself to writing the book on South America instead, particularly as the teaching salary wasn’t even covering my expenses. I had no laptop so I used to go to internet cafes around town and do my best to write something worthwhile between power-shortages, in the matchbox-sized booths allotted to each machine that left my knees with bruises.

Over the dining table in the villa was a picture, The Last Dinner according to Chicken-bones, one of the many crucifixes, Virgin portraits and religious paintings that demarcated the domestic territory as very catholic indeed, decorations that reminded me a little of my grandmother’s house. There were others staying there, up to eight or so in the various bedrooms strung out around both courtyards, a constant stream of people from beyond Nicaragua’s borders, mostly Americans who needed to learn Spanish. In the day they’d attend their courses, and of course be home for dinner. One of them was Christine.

From New York state, Christine was a good few years younger than I, still in her early twenties and with a spectacular English vocabulary that made me want to give up writing each time we spoke. We got into the habit of pursuing obtuse and finicky philosophical discussions about any subject that came to us; some of the time we were serious but much was for fun. I remember in particular the lengthy discussions concerning the fundamental existentialist questions elaborated in Shakira’s song ‘Hips Don’t Lie’, repeatedly played on MTV at the time. We would speak until we couldn’t for laughter.

Christine was good looking, with curled brown locks that tumbled like a dryer beyond her shoulders. Natural curls like those were a rarity amongst Nicaraguan girls, and her light brown hair was considered blond by the Latino boys, both attributes making her extremely popular. She did charity work at a local orphanage as well as taught English. Intelligent, caring and attractive, it was a pleasant surprise to find she had flaws, or at least one: she’d make the occasional faux pas or slip up in her speech, and with her vocabulary consistently intimidating, I took great delight in those occasions. Sometimes I invented them, which she didn’t mind because against my will we’d become friends: actually it was her and I only, at least in the months I lived there, that our hosts the Nicaraguan couple had taken to calling their son and daughter.

One morning at breakfast she came to the table where I was already seated and looking at the painting behind me, said ‘Which one is J...?’ She stumbled slightly on the word, and I started laughing. ‘Which one is Jesus?’ I suggested, completing her sentence. It prompted a lengthy discussion, the pros and cons of each figure in the painting, in turn considered in relation to what features of a Messiah they had.

‘Do you think he might be the one in the middle, that everyone is looking at?’ I asked eventually.

‘Too obvious,’ Christine said, ‘Da Vinci was a Master and he would have been more subtle.’

Ultimately we’d agreed as the most likely candidate the plump fellow on the far right of the picture, who in our version of the painting wore a pink cape. We agreed to ask the other housemates, in a serious tone, and have a kind of vote, mostly to see their reaction at the stupidity of the question, to see how long it took for them to realise we were joking. Which one is Jesus?

What Christine had been meaning to say, before I’d completed her sentence for her, is ‘which one is Judas?’ Now it was being repeated, on the other side of the world after two years, by Chicken-bones the atheist, who barely would have known who Judas was and certainly didn’t care.

I knew I’d written something about Nicaragua in e-mails so it didn’t surprise the phrase should turn up later. The Australian authorities had taken significant interest in what I wrote.  My writing was never sufficiently conservative for their policing minds.

In fact it was quite pleasant Chicken-bones mentioned it because it reminded me of the good food lazy days of Nicaragua.

Later I would think about it more: as was usual multiple interpretations came to me. Was I supposed to be Judas, which would make sense if I was talking to a Christian fundamentalist, as had happened in Australia during 2007?  Or was Judas around me, a symbol of betrayal by one of the two principle branches of inquiry in China, the most likely sources, through either Chicken-bones or the girl? I didn’t appreciate an analogy that would place me as Jesus, but from a Machiavellian standpoint it made sense and I was already worried about it; that as I would be leaving China soon an attempt might be made, the several references to death aside, to frame me for something, as the Australian authorities had for rather many years seemed rather keen on doing. Was it the last dinner for that reason?

At dinner though, I didn’t think it over greatly, and by mid 2008 such things didn’t stress me anymore, as they had done a year earlier. Chicken-bones and I talked instead about religion in general terms and I told him what I thought: that the essence of the Christian religion is love and tolerance, what I liked about it but not always how it is preached. For Chicken-bones all religion was backward superstition, no more: his in-the-restaurant point of view.

The death threat in the car on the way home was preceded by three other notable statements. As we crossed the bridge over the small manmade lake that featured in the local park, Chicken-bones said ‘Australia’s security is not your concern,’ and halfway up the hill, before the death threat he’d said ‘the Australian government doesn’t support you,’ and a little further on, ‘if you go back to Australia it will be the same’. None of the comments made me flinch; as I said I got used to such things in 2007 and more particularly, they sounded like the last desperate cries of a child stamping around to get attention. The comments and not Chicken-bones did though make me angry.

To the first I’d replied, ‘Australia’s security is everybody’s business and what happens if there was ever some horrific terrorist attack in Australia. How could I just say, ‘yeah I knew ASIO was crap but I didn’t do anything about it.’ When it comes to terrorist attacks they have hardly a hope in hell of preventing one. To the second comment, about government support, I said, ‘well they’re going to wish they had,’ which was pure bluff and in any case I ultimately was a bit past caring: the Rudd government was at least immeasurably better than its Howard predecessor and since the election my life had become liveable again. To the third comment, that if I returned to Australia I would face more of the torture of 2007, I stayed silent.

When Chicken-bones gave the final warning, ‘if you try to be famous from this, they will kill you,’ it made me angrier still. I told him how I wished I’d stop being told to be a coward, that the world has enough cowards in it. I thought to add ‘and half of them seem to work for ASIO’, but I controlled the urge.

I thought, ‘and what the hell is this exactly?’ The investigation had been referred to as this before, when I was told the authorities had decided to leave my parents out of this. This was a many-year cock-up of monumental proportion that had nearly cost me my life a few times. This was born not of my actions but of the prejudices and shortcomings of others, taxpayer funded, by a lack of imagination and unaccountable policing. This was a future for the world of war and division and more of the simplistic nationalism that proved so deadly last century. This was racism and bigotry. It has never been fame I cared for. I never asked for this. My goal now is far simpler: I don’t think as human beings we should accept corruption or anything less than full human rights. And as an Australian I don’t think my country benefits from an unaccountable secret police agency.

And so I write.



But the world is not only about security or freedom of expression of course.  There are also random travel tales, cool people and well, english-by-association...