The Corpse Walker: Real Life Stories: China From the Bottom Up (31 page)

LIAO:
What did the lawyer say?

TIAN:
He was very sympathetic to my situation, but declined to take my case. He said it would be very hard to sue the local Public Security Bureau because no one would be willing to testify on my behalf. He said my own account was insufficient. That made me really mad. I had to seek justice somewhere. I took the case to the local court myself and they wouldn't take it. I then went to file petitions to higher levels of government, seeking 200,000 yuan [US$25,000] in compensation. Nobody listened. So I came to Chengdu to file a petition with the provincial supreme court. I want to sue the police for illegally detaining me. I also want to sue the detention center for secretly encouraging detainees to extract confessions from their fellow detainees. Those bullies in the detention center had turned the Communist jail into a living hell. Last, I want to sue the local Public Security Bureau for embezzling the gold coins. Nobody knows where the confiscated gold coins have gone. Those involved in the case should be liable for the loss of the coins.

LIAO:
Sounds reasonable to me.

TIAN:
So far, nobody has yet handled my case. The Communist Party and this government are very cold-blooded.

THE SAFECRACKER

A week after the lunar new year in 1991, I accompanied a lawyer friend to a jail in Chongqing and visited the famous robber Cui Zhixiong. The date set for his execution had been postponed for forty-five days. According to him, “I got lucky and picked up another Chinese New Year for free.”

Cui was thirty-nine years old, with heavy brows and big round eyes. He was quite strong. Using a Chinese cliché, I will describe him as having a tiger's back and a bear's waist. Even in the cold winter he was wearing only a shirt and summer pants. He was heavily shackled, but didn't look at all frazzled and weary like other death row inmates I had met.

After my interview, I set aside the tapes and notes. I revisited our conversation in 1998, when he had long been turned into ashes.

LIAO YIWU:
How did you end up here?

CUI ZHIXIONG:
I have committed the worst crime under heaven. I have cracked many safes and stolen millions of yuan. I'm waiting to be executed. This is the second time I've been locked up in a prison. Three years ago, I got busted for the first time and was locked up at a detention center on Gele Mountain. That was an old-style prison built by the Nationalists in the 1940s. Even after fifty-some years, the structure was still solid. The walls were built with steel-reinforced concrete, and there were four watchtowers, one at each corner. The daily activities of prisoners were confined to a rectangular courtyard, which was surrounded by a two-story building. The back of the prison bordered on a deep cliff.

To get to the prison, a car had to climb a long circuitous mountain road. After you passed the entrance, you found yourself in a small courtyard. Outsiders were allowed to come in only after going through a thorough body search. On the ground floor, there was an interrogation room, a kitchen, a public bathhouse, a storage room, and a latrine. The second floor housed all the prison cells—sixteen altogether, including one for women. A circular corridor, which cut through the prison wards, was so dark that lightbulbs had to be turned on during the daytime. My prison cell had a window in the ceiling. If I jumped high enough, I could touch the window bars. When I did a chin-up and hung on to the window bars, I could see in the distance a hill covered with pine trees.

LIAO:
How did you get so familiar with the local geography?

CUI:
I am a born thief. I can remember the details of any locale after one visit. Besides, I was locked up inside that detention center for over two months. I knew every piece of brick and stone. The first day I entered the detention center, I began to work on a plan to escape. I was told that nobody had ever managed to escape from that prison. Only a fool would believe that. Even stones have cracks. I had broken into so many safes and frequented so many forbidden areas. Nobody had stopped me. I was quite confident that I could find a way out.

During the first month, I had to go through interrogation every day. I didn't have time to focus on any escape plan. Later on, I began to cooperate with my interrogators. I would confess a little here and a little there. The interrogators became very happy. Sometimes, when I offered them some secrets of safecracking, they couldn't digest them all. They would spend a couple of days researching. As a result, I was able to take a break.

LIAO:
Under normal circumstances, a detainee has to go through all sorts of “procedures” to have his attitude changed. Did they ever beat you up?

CUI:
You are right. A new prisoner would have to go through various tortures designed by the guards and his fellow inmates to break him. I lucked out. Since the prosecutor needed me to help out with some of his other cases, he personally brought me to see the head of the detention center and told him to take good care of me. So I was spared the “procedures.” Anyway, after the pace of my interrogation slowed down, I had time to think about how to escape. First, I had to find opportunities when I could be left alone. When many people huddle together, even a magician can't make himself disappear in front of them. Prisoners did everything together. Apart from three meals, every inmate was allowed to go out for one fifteen-minute break in the morning and one in the afternoon. When the inmates stepped out into the courtyard, the guards would watch everyone from inside the towers perched on top of the four corners of the wall. One way to avoid attention from the guards was to hide inside the latrine. The latrine, which was opposite the public bathhouse, was dimly lit. Its stinky smell was overwhelming. Inside, there was a row of holes on the ground so people could squat on them to take care of their business. Those holes were connected to a huge human-waste pond at the back of the latrine. The stinky latrine was the perfect place for a loner like me.

LIAO:
No other prisoner used the latrine at break time?

CUI:
There was a big wooden shit bucket inside each cell. People normally did their business in there. During our breaks, two inmates were responsible for carrying the buckets out, dumping the contents, and washing them. Therefore, when everyone rushed into the courtyard, people in charge of the buckets would try to finish their tasks as soon as possible so they could go breathe some fresh air or stealthily swap some petty goods with others. So I could squat inside the latrine alone for over ten minutes without arousing any suspicion.

It took me two trips to the latrine to finally figure out an action plan. The first time I was in there, I noticed a tiny ventilation window. From there, I could see a wall right in front of me. There was no way I could get out that way. Then, I found out about the human-waste pond behind the latrine. I began to wonder whether the pond was built inside the jail or outside. It couldn't have been inside because I had never seen prison staff clean out the pond. But, if the pond was outside, was it an open one or was it covered like a manhole with a lid on it? How big and heavy could the lid be?

One day, as I was squatting inside the latrine, I vaguely heard noises coming from outside the prison. I held my breath and pushed my ear against the wall. It sounded like someone was scooping out the human waste. The person might have been a local peasant because I could hear a horse-drawn cart. It was obvious that it was an open shit pond outside the prison wall. At that moment, all my blood rushed to my head. My brain was buzzing. I had a plan in place.

The next step was to calculate the route and the speed of my escape. My daily breaks were about fifteen minutes each. It usually took five minutes for inmates from six cells to empty the wooden shit buckets in the latrine. That would give me ten minutes to go inside the latrine and complete phase one of the plan. At the end of the break, there would be a roll call. If they found someone missing, guards would check the courtyard and cells and then form a search team. That would probably give me nine to ten minutes to carry out phase two of the plan—running away. Then the guards would usually spend time dividing the team into several smaller groups so they could search separately. That would probably add two additional minutes. In other words, during the escape and chasing process, I would have twelve minutes to run away from the guards.

LIAO:
Wow, it was like in a thriller movie.

CUI:
The stuff in a movie is nothing compared to my adventure. When they sent me to the detention center a couple of months before, it took the police car twenty minutes to get from the bottom of the mountain to the top. If my escape was successful, I could run down the mountain in a straight line in roughly the same amount of time. I had rehearsed this escape episode in my mind over ten times.

Things worked out really smoothly. I remember clearly that it was on May 6, 1988, three days before my thirty-sixth birthday. That afternoon, I wrapped in a small plastic bag a vest, a pair of shorts and shoes, as well as a small towel. I tied the bag around my waist and put on a large uniform. After a guard blew the whistle for afternoon break, I joined the crowd in the hallway. Two minutes later, I was inside the courtyard. I held myself against a wall and glanced up at the guards inside the watchtowers. They were chatting. I then quickly crept into the latrine and almost bumped into two inmates walking out with a bucket. I deliberately made a lot of noise unbuckling my pants and they didn't even look back. I squatted over the last hole from the door. I could hear a guy come in and take a piss at the urinals near the latrine entrance. There was no time to waste. I took off my uniform and carefully slid my body down into the hole. I couldn't look down because the stinky smell went directly into my nose, bringing tears to my face. The squatting hole was pretty small. I had to let my legs down first, and then squeeze my body down slowly, with two hands firmly clinging to the edge. Then I slowly lowered my upper body and then my head down. I found myself dangling in the air. I didn't realize the hole was so deep. I clenched my teeth and counted one, two, and three. Then I let go with both hands. The next thing I knew, I had plunged into the shit hole like a heavy bomb.

My heart beat so fast. It was going to explode. My basic instinct to survive overcame everything. I ducked my head down inside the shit and swam forward. I could feel a rat jumping over my back. Time seemed to have frozen. Goddammit, it seemed forever. I began to tremble involuntarily. I didn't dare to open my eyes. I could hardly move because the human waste was too thick. I just splashed forward little by little. I felt I was drowning. Soon, I touched some barbed wire. I raised my head and opened my eyes. I was outside! I was about five meters away from the edge of the pond. A barbwire, connecting with the prison walls on both ends, ran through the middle of the pond. I reached my hands down and tried to see how I could get through. It turned out that the wire didn't reach all way down to the bottom. I dove headfirst into the shit and swam under the wire. By the time I got out, I had two big deep scratches on my back and legs. Since I had pretty strong wrists and arms, I grabbed the edge and managed to drag my body out. I thought I had stayed in the shit pond forever. Actually, the whole operation took less than six or seven minutes because I could hear the prisoners inside were still on break.

I quickly stripped, opened up the plastic bag, wiped myself with that towel, and then changed to my vest, shorts, and shoes. Apart from the stinky smell on my body, I looked like a jogger. I dashed down the mountain on a small wooded path. My legs moved like they were equipped with wings. I jumped over dead trees and big rocks. I think I must have broken the world distance running record. I fell and rolled down a sloping mountain path several times. I got up and moved on. I ran into five or six tourists coming down from the mountain. I smelled so bad. They all covered their noses and ran away from me. All that time, I thought I heard the sirens of police cars. It turned out I was just hallucinating.

Next to the Martyrs' Cemetery at the foot of the mountain was a foreign languages college. I ran right onto the campus and passed through the students' playground. Since I was only wearing a vest and shorts and had muscled arms and legs, people thought I was a professional athlete. Nobody detected anything suspicious. I snuck into a dorm building. It was empty because students were either in class or outside. I cleaned myself in the public shower room, and snatched some clothes that were hung out to dry outside a dorm window. After I left the university, I realized that I was in a place called Shapingba. I knew that there was a large hospital nearby. I stopped a taxi and jumped in. After he drove for about a hundred meters, I could hear the sound of sirens. The search team had already arrived. About two hundred meters away, I noticed traffic police stopping cars to check passengers inside. I immediately beckoned the driver to stop. I said apologetically, Sorry, sir. I forgot to bring my wallet. He turned his head back and said: Do you want me to take you back? Before he even finished his sentence, I had already jumped out of the car. I ran in the direction of the hospital. After I walked in, I roamed around the patient ward and saw a morgue behind the labs. I lifted a latch on one of the back windows and climbed in. I looked around and found that the room was about twenty meters long and thirty meters wide. There were six stone platforms for corpses, and three were occupied. A couple of bodies were stacked inside a fridge with glass doors. Since I had no safe place to go, I simply lay down on a stone platform and covered myself up with a blue plastic sheet.

It was pretty hot in May, but after lying down on a slab of stone for a couple of hours, the dampness began to seep through my bones. The morgue was dimly lit. The stinky smell of the bodies floated in the air. All my dead neighbors in that room seemed to have been killed in traffic accidents. I could see pools of blood on the slabs. I waited for the sky to turn dark. Anxious as I was, time seemed to move very slowly. A breeze came and the door kept swinging back and forth. I was shivering with fear. If anyone came in, I would have been finished. If that person dared to remove the sheet on top of me, I would thrust out my claws and choke him to death.