A Cautionary Tale for Expats in China – a Guest Post by Lionel Carver
A half hour later, I’m sitting in an interrogation room of the local PSB office with an English-speaking immigration officer telling me I am “illegal”, because it’s against Chinese law to not carry your passport at all times.
On top of that, according to their computer, my visa had expired.
It took most of the day to get all the paperwork done—the Chinese are not known for their expediency.
Since I didn’t have money to pay the exorbitant “fine”, I agreed to eight days in detention.
When I signed that fateful agreement, I also checked a box so that the American embassy would be notified and so they could begin processing my new passport—even though it was never really lost.
Off I went in a white Santana police car to begin my eight days of incarceration.
After being processed at the detention center, I was corralled into a cell with five bunk beds.
– violence Inside American prisons –
There was a TV set above the door, a small radio, and a closed circuit camera that watched everything, which were the only things modern about the cell.
A Chinese squat-style toilet offering no privacy (which is common in U.S. jails too) sat in one corner along with a sink. Inmates are given a package of recycled paper to use as toilet paper, which is not very comfy on the rear.
Opposite the toilet are shelves where inmates put their wash basins, which also house our eating bowl, spoon, toothbrush and toothpaste, a bar of bath soap, laundry soap, and a hand towel.
Each inmate is issued a button-down t-shirt with the Chinese name of the jail written on the back, along with a pair of black-gym shorts with white stripes on the sides. Shoes are placed on a shelf outside the cell and inmates are given rubber sandals to wear in the cell.
I also received a laundered pillow case and a bed sheet. The beds are cushioned and have bamboo-reed mats on top.
The inmates were all Chinese, and I was the only foreigner there. I noticed that most of the prisoners had tattoos or horrible scars from their lives outside jail. Some looked like beggars and others like gang members. The most any of them could say in English was “Hello.” Better a Hello, I thought, than the “Your sh*it on my d*ck or blood on my knife” greeting I would have received in an American prison.
Continued on October 7 2011 in My Experience as an Inmate in a Chinese Jail – Part 4 or return to Part 2.
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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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