on the way to wuhan

By David Geiger, November 2, 2019

I have many reasons for traveling but the specific reasons for choosing one city over another can be very ambiguous if there is no family member or other clear reason for going to a city. Do you have a friend there? Do you have family there? Is it a business trip? Is it part of a tour?

And the real reason can’t always be spoken out loud, because it may be as lame as “I heard some people talking about this city” or “I remember a movie about that city.” At least this is my truth.

It could be even worse. It could be that the city is just the right amount of space between two other cities that I am going to. I don’t want to say that about any city, they all have their own history and memories as a city, things that defined the people as part of the city or the city as part of the people.

Like Nanjing, China, where just last fall they observed the 70th anniversary of the Nanjing Massacre with silence throughout the city. The whole city seemed to feel or at least acknowledge the pain in those moments of silence. I had to ask the concierge at the hotel what was going on when everything and everyone stopped. The pain of that event was evident on the faces of people of all ages. Young children are taught the importance and the reverence of the day. I remember learning something (in high school maybe) about the Nanjing Massacre, but not a bit of the details. The Japanese overtook the city wall and raped, tortured, and killed about 300,000 residents of Nanjing. But before my trip there I knew only that it was a large city on the rough path I was following.

The city of Wuhan, the capitol of the Hubei province of China and home to over 10 million people, came into my life in a slightly different way. It was on my mind to visit Wuhan for several years before I finally made it there.

A while ago, I worked with a young man from Wuhan who became a friend as well. It was several years ago when he told me about his sister in Wuhan. Just a few years younger than my friend, his little sister was a success. She finished college, got married to a nice man, she had a good job with the government as assistant to a higher level bureaucrat. Her husband had a good job too and they had a beautiful daughter. Her name is Qing.

Somewhere in the early 2000’s, the president and leadership of the party in China started to crack down on corruption. As a part of that crackdown, eventually Qing’s boss was found to be corrupt and she was dragged into the muck with him. Hearing this story I remember thinking “what could the criminal justice system in China really be like?” I thought it must be on the internet somewhere. I read what I could find about the topic in general but could not find anything on this specific case. Of course the actual records may not be available anywhere at all, much less online, but even if I found them, they would probably be recorded in Mandarin only.  Searching for “Qing” is not even going to come close.

So I did some searching for Wuhan Women’s Prison. There are a few things online and none of it is very nice.  Mostly about the women awaiting execution there, but also some more general statistics about the prison. I will share more later.

My friend and his sister were raised in the “new” China, bringing children into the world in their young families and aspiring to have their part of it all. There are other ways to look for success, but Qing was on the perfect path – her husband a respected bureaucrat, she too was successful, and her boss was important to her success as well. Her parents were proud of her career, her family, and happy for her future prospects.

The corruption investigations hit upon many places that were just doing business as usual, as it had been done for many decades prior. It was swirling and growing in cities all across the country. Then it hit her boss and soon she was dragged into the mess. She was loyal to her boss; it was not possible to be successful in her position if she was not loyal. She was a very small part of his deception. She did not know that anything she did was illegal. She was paid well for her government job but did not receive any cash or value from the corrupt activities of her boss. She had only small tasks that kept the machine in motion, she had no knowledge of the larger machine.

And so it went that she was convicted and sentenced to ten years at Wuhan Women’s Prison. Several years later my friend told me about his sister, and I went online to try to understand how such a thing could happen. What I found was far worse than I expected.

The first articles I found about Wuhan Women’s Prison were about women waiting to be executed, mostly for drug offenses. Here it is:

“CBS News: A rare look at China’s death row“

There were more articles, all of it sounded horrible.  Here is a sample:

“Wuhan Women’s Prison Injects Falun Gong Practitioners with Nerve-damaging Drug“

“Woman Denied Visitation and Tortured in Wuhan Women’s Prison for Not Renouncing Her Faith“

“Brutal Brainwashing in Wuhan Women’s Prison“

A more recent article about tuberculosis in central China prisons drives home the point that this is not a place anyone would want to end up:

“Epidemic Situation of Tuberculosis in Prisons in the Central Region of China“

And journalists or others inquiring about life in China do not fare well:

October 28, 2019 – RSF calls for the release of a Chinese reporter who covered the Hong Kong protests

After several years of reading and research and asking my friend how Qing was doing, knowing that another 6 month’s or year went by and I was here, she was still there, I could sense the fear, sadness, and despair he must have felt. After all this time I was finally traveling on a train from Hong Kong to Wuhan.

It took about 6 hours to arrive in Wuhan. I was getting sick, I could feel it, a chest cold or worse and I felt down already. On the train there were several men displaying what I consider to be very annoying behavior. I think it bothers a lot of Chinese people as well. This man just feet away from me is just yelling into his phone (or really, past it) in Chinese. It is always about his job or his importance or talking down to some employee or underling. No, I do not understand all the words, but I do understand what is happening on this call.

I shoot him glances, and so do other people but of course all it does is encourage him – it is the attention he wants. Finally I found that if I video recorded him he seemed to know it and just stop talking. That worked a couple of times. Anyway, I was sick and not enjoying the train.

When the train arrived in Wuhan, I exited and made my way to the main terminal. It was cold and grey. It was much colder than the tropical weather and sunshine I left behind in Hong Kong. There was a McDonalds, but I didn’t go in. I found a taxi at the taxi stand, got in, and headed to my hotel.

Sitting in the back of the taxi, behind the caged-off driver, I followed the route in the maps app on my phone. It was a long way, more than an hour, and he was not familiar with that part of the city. At least he was comfortable using voice translation on an iPhone.  Communication was slow, but we could communicate.

At first it looked like an impossibly long way to the hotel, crossing three or more major bridges which somehow made it feel, looking at the map, that we must be taking a very long way around. So little by little I asked for more information, trying to figure out what we were doing and not having much trust.

We drove past one high rise building after another. Block after block, mile after mile of these similar-looking hi-rise buildings. It seemed to go on forever. Most of the buildings were older, with clothes hanging on almost every balcony, implying that maybe a clothes dryer was not an option.

I wasn’t even thinking about the prison, I was just thinking how difficult and different living in one of these buildings would be for me. I thought I am goin g deeper and deeper into this city and I am that much farther from getting out again. It was another world entirely, even from the other cities in China I had visited. There was no glamour, at least none that I saw.  In Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, there are bright lights and shop signs and malls and restaurants.  Here there was none of that on my route.

The thing that I can rely on, the thing I was focused on at that moment, is that an Intercontinental Hotel has certain standards, and no matter what this area might look like I will be exiting the taxi at the front door to the Intercontinental Hotel Wuhan.

So I conversed with the driver.  Why the long trip?  Because it is rush hour and if we go downtown it will take much longer. It took us a little while to similarly understand, I think, the difference between “shortest route” and “fastest route”.  He said he was fine with driving through downtown but it would not be quick and might even cost more.  When I understood what he was doing and why, I felt better about the taxi and the driver. He took the time and had the interest to communicate with me.  Not everyone does that.

So one at a time we drove over three absolutely beautiful bridges. There was a lot of traffic but we kept making progress toward the hotel.  By the time we arrived it was dark outside.  The road we were on took us underground for a while, and then we were past the hotel.  I asked him and he saw the same thing, but no hotel. Everything started closing in again, in my head, now in the darkness under the ground with no hotel in sight. He drove up and down several underground driveways and passageways but still not hotel, not even a large building.  Then we were almost going over another bridge to somewhere else.

We turned around and went back underground, back to the point where the GPS said this 500 room hotel was located.  There were not even any people around, not one person, just white lights almost lighting up the darkness, and casting many shadows. I started to think maybe I got the wrong information, maybe it’s not built yet. It was hot in the back of the taxi, caged off from the driver and no apparent way to open a window.

Then he parked the cab, got out, and said he saw someone in a booth and he was walking back to get directions. As I waited things just got worse. Looking around I decided if he comes back and wants me to get out with my two bags and no coat in the freezing underground I am just going to refuse to get out. I moved my small bag over between my legs in case I had to hang onto it and I grabbed the cage with the other hand. I was not going anywhere.

After about 10 minutes he came back smiling, jumped in the taxi and said he knew where to go. We drove around underground to a ramp going up which took us to the front door of the hotel. Oh my! That was close to being terrible or embarrassing, or both! He was as happy as I was to find it. I gave him a very nice tip.

Inside the hotel there were no guests around but about a dozen front desk attendants to help me check in and get to my room. I think I will end here and write another post about the rest of my time in Wuhan. I left quite a few things hanging, not intentionally, but this is getting long already.

David