JAMES TAM  谭炳昌

The Correctional Services is good at locking up people, but no so good at correcting them. Many prisoners get their advanced education behind bars from like-minded colleagues. That said, prison is also a good place to read, think, and write. Many famous persons would not have produced their magnum opuses had they not been jailed. The Tong Fuk library was a big pleasant surprise with a lasting impact on me.

Within a few weeks, I had filled two notebooks with personal observations and anecdotes collected from fellow inmates. They got jailed for many reasons. But behind legal technicality, one underlying cause dominated — money — that prolific mother of all evils accentuated by greed, desperation, or simple bad luck. Without money, Flower Lounge would be a very quiet place. Some stories are over-the-top fantastic, but that doesn’t necessarily make them false or irrelevant.

In prison, strangers from unthinkable corners of society live closely together for a term of time, then go their own ways. In all likelihood, they may never meet again, especially for ‘non-professionals’ like myself. Like nomads chancing upon each other in the desert, courtesy cannot be taken for granted. Spontaneous kindness to a stranger under that situation is genuinely moving, especially when that stranger is me.

I won’t give up hope, but am trying not to think about the future, or the past. The dilemma is I don’t wish to focus on the present either. I think the adage ‘live in the moment’ needs reconsideration. What if the moment is abominable, like, right now? Contrived positive thinking aside, adapting to being locked up is tough. Having adapted once, the prospect of repeating the process (should we lose the appeal and have to come back in after having been released on bail) becomes

Given a choice between forced indolence and forced labour, I suspect most people would opt for the former, unless they have experienced sitting in a room full of noisy men who have no other occupation but sitting in a room full of noisy men, day after day, year after year. In that non-event, time — that mystically elastic entity which Einstein said varies with speed, that abstract marker of life which prisoners are condemned to serve — may gum up and stall.

Hollywood prisons are full of hairy, muscular, stinky, beastly cons, shimmering with sweat, indiscriminately sex-crazed without due respect to gender, age, religion, situation, or political persuasion. Maybe that’s reality, who knows? Instinctual needs of the younger cons cannot be simply ignored, unless...

Humans fantasise themselves lovers of variety, serendipity, challenges and, believe it or not, adventures. This romantic illusion, creates an irrational discontent about a steady and predictable life such as the one at Tong Fuk prison. The menu was precise and consistent. One knew exactly what will be served for dinner tonight, tomorrow, and the third Thursday nineteen months into the future. Notwithstanding high predictability, many things in jail defy understanding.

I, a harmless old man, new and dumb, walked into Workshop Five to commence my career as a junior prison labourer with due meekness. There was a saying among the cons: ‘Eating and sleeping well reduces the sentence by a third.’ Mmm, what if one dreams of solitary confinement in the Water Rice Hole night after night, or getting chased down the street by the police or a chopper wielding competitor?