A Cautionary Tale for Expats in China – a Guest Post by Lionel Carver
During the first three days in jail, all inmates are required to skip naptime after lunch.
This may not seem like much of a punishment until you realize that every day starts at 6 am and ends after 9 pm. Most of the time, I felt exhausted, not from any physical exertion but from extreme boredom.
Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s chain gangs, tent prison and no television for prisoners – in the U.S.A.
In prison, sleeping or dreaming is an inmate’s only salvation, and I dreamed about many things that week
For example, I dreamed about a cute Chinese girl I’d once met in Nanjing. I even began having delusional fantasies that I was in the video game Final Fantasy having sword fights.
Each day begins with an officer on the intercom yelling something in Chinese (I’m guessing it means, “Get up!”).
The first thing we did was make our beds. Inmates need to fold their bed sheet everyday, like in a military boot camp, and it must be folded correctly. The supervisor comes in each morning after roll call to inspect the rooms.
Then somebody empties the trash by throwing it through the bars of the door. Two inmates out in the halls do the task of collecting garbage. In fact, those same two guys did all the tasks for the jail house (garbage, deliver food, water, etc), which is kind of gross when you think about it.
Next, came the hot water (in a giant metal barrel with a tap). Soon after that, the helpers bring the breakfast cart.
U.S. unemployment, poverty and then atrocities in the prison systems
Prison meals always consisted of rice and vegetable soup with the exception of breakfast, which was some kind of orange-colored root. No meat! But since I was a foreign guest, I was allowed to also request a Chinese steamed bun.
Although the food was tolerable, it produced torrents of gas. Imagine being trapped in a cell with nine Chinese men ripping farts all day. That is the true definition of torture.
Continued on October 9, 2011 in My Experience as an Inmate in a Chinese Jail – Part 6 or return to Part 4.
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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
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