Chapter 17

十七

I’d taken my pills but still I lay awake at night, staring at shadows. I peered out my open window and realized I’d not seen any stars, or the moon, since I’d arrived in China. I could imagine the school’s ghosts as gremlins crawling and clawing up into the sky, eating the moon like a cake.

Tonight, there were no drilling sounds and my room was silent as death and my mind was racing, abuzz, unable to quiet...

I was feeling like an overloaded plane in a turbulent sky, wishing that I’d plummet, crash into sleep.

Our building sat on the same area as the prison. I was levitating over their cells, levitating over their graveyard. I was thinking of the men, crammed into the dingy rooms, imagining the torture they’d endured. The convicts in chains, counting the hours until they were brought out to the guns. Mosquitoes feasting on their flesh. I sensed a vestigial energy, spirits in the air.

Tired of staring at the air, mind in void, I rolled over in bed, pawed at my bedside table, grabbed my phone and cradled it in my hands and its blue light cut through the blackness of the room.

I surfed the net and noticed an email from the school. It was a stern warning to all teachers and staff not to throw debris of any sort from our windows or balconies after an elderly man, a Chinese teacher’s father, was seriously injured by a dog that’d been thrown off an upper-storey balcony of a campus apartment building ... There was no word on the dog’s condition.

I was beginning to understand more why many of the long-term China expats I’d met were such nihilists ... Something of angry ghosts themselves...

I looked more into past Chinese death penalty cases at the prison that was here. After a deep dive into Baidu, I found two more notable ones.

They were both striking.

The first one was of a pudgy girl, a young girl, who’d helped her boyfriend sell meth, and was convicted, sentenced to die.

There was a series of pictures of her, and I was shook by her youthful exuberance, a charisma she exuded that leapt off my phone’s small square screen.

The series of photos showed the girl smiling, eating dumplings with her jailers in the hours before she was to be executed, then the same jailers bringing her out to the execution grounds, and the girl in tears as she was being brought to her death.

Seeing her face, sweet as a birthday cake, her cherubic, blushing cheeks, I could feel the anguish, the thumping of her heart.

I hoped her spirit was at peace.

The next story I read was of a scrawny young guy with a bowl haircut, big glasses, and buckteeth. Only 20, he was an unemployed loner who’d lived with his parents.

He’d been tormented as a child and later, as a young adult, sought vengeance on his middle school, where he’d been bullied.

In the article, the young man claimed that he’d been visited by a demon from a video game he’d played, a demon in a dragon robe, with a long beard and high-brimmed hat.

The demon had handed him a knife with a gold-seal and told him to slay the schoolchildren, that the children’s souls would go to Hell, where the demon and the young man could torture, torment and punish them forever.

The young guy believed in the dream, and had gone over to the school, to the school’s front gates, with a knife, and when the school let the kids out, he went on a killing spree, ran amok, and stabbed over 10 young girls to death, seriously wounded 4 others.

After the stabbing spree, he’d dashed off and snuck into an internet café nearby, was found hours later, playing the video game on a computer, his hands and clothes stained with blood.

The young man was executed, and the video game banned in China.

It struck me that he’d gotten away with killing so many in a public place. Wouldn’t someone have stopped him? And how did he manage, soaked in blood, to sneak into an internet café?

A voice spoke to me from the dark. The soft female voice again. It was sweet as honey, the voice, but its words bit.

“In China, they stand. They watch. The bystanders don’t usually get involved. They watched the girls get murdered. Are they as guilty as the killer? Do you think?”

I dropped my phone, bounced up in bed, scanned around the room, yelled, “Who’s there?”

The voice disappeared. I looked back down at my phone. The page had changed. It was now on a Baidu news story about another execution. Looking at the mugshot under the headline, I knew the face; I knew the person. It was the stunningly beautiful girl I’d read of before, executed here back in 1993.

It was her! She was the ghost I’d been seeing!

I picked up the phone, read the story. It was a more in-depth article than the one I’d read before...

The article explored her upbringing, said she’d had a tough life. Her parents were janitors and were strict, tough on her, forced her to study for hours on end. Her alcoholic father ruthlessly beat her when she got anything less than perfect grades.

She’d done well in school and made it to a top university in the province. But her good fortune ended there.

She’d had a boyfriend in college who pushed her to sleep with him, then dumped her because he said she was “impure” for sleeping with him and later forced her, at knifepoint, to go have an abortion.

Then she’d allegedly been raped by her boss at a mining company where she worked as a secretary after college.

Then the boss’s daughter pressured the girl, under a thinly veiled threat of being fired, to have a sexual relationship with a county tax inspector. The inspector had demanded extortionate bribes and threatened to expose the company’s tax evasion, fiscal malfeasance.

After being coerced into spending the night with the inspector, the girl snapped.

The next evening, when the inspector, the boss, the boss’s wife, son and daughter, as well as three other workers from the company were having dinner in the company’s upstairs lounge, the girl rode her motorbike to the company’s office, smashed open a back window, poured gasoline into the building and rode off as the trail of flames licked its way to a dozen freshly-delivered cooking gas canisters sitting in the hallway and the building exploded in a loud fiery boom. Everyone inside died, including a security guard who’d been asleep at his desk.

The girl had been caught on a security camera starting the fire. She was guilty beyond a doubt.

Along with her looks catching the public’s eye, the case itself was so gruesome and shocking on all levels that it garnered much media coverage.

She did nothing to fight or dispute the charges, neither claiming innocence nor pleading guilty. It took only an hour for her to be convicted by the three-judge panel; a year after that, she lost her automatic appeal and days later, she was sent to the firing squad.

The company she worked at was only 20 kilometers from the school. And she’d been executed here, where the school’s soccer field sits.

Looking at her picture, it was hard to believe she’d committed such a crime. Her face was beautiful, I mean, really beautiful, like hideously beautiful; when I gazed at her face it was like the picture was made of knives, carving her image into my mind.

Staring at her photo, I awed at how pale she was; she was pale as a kabuki dancer, and had such delicate features, her round face with such big brown eyes and full, bell-shaped lips, and the cutest little pert button nose. Her straight, raven black, shiny hair was parted to the right and hung down to her thin, hourglass waist. She was so thin, petite, and fragile looking, so innocent looking, like a children’s doll.