Flower Lounge (13) Sitting in Flower Lounge

A common English expression for imprisonment is going to jail, giving the impression of a degree of willingness. In Cantonese slang, being in jail is chor garm, or chor fa tang, literally ‘sitting in jail’, or ‘sitting in flower lounge’. While flower lounge is euphemistic, sitting reflects hard reality.

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. People fret death because it ends time, something which we instinctively want as much as possible, even though longevity is guaranteed to bring pain and humiliation. Ironically, law breakers are awarded the much envied luxury of ‘excess time’ for punishment.

The dining/Common Room was the central point of my Tong Fuk life. It had seventeen grey fibreglass tables (each seating up to eight), an open toilet, and a shower room. Looming above these amenities were five competing television sets tuned to two or more channels at full blast. I had not had a TV at home since 1982, and had long forgotten how persistently mind-numbing it was. Amazingly, Hong Kong soaps had not evolved since I last watched in the late 1960s. Nostalgic values notwithstanding, these zombifying devices deserved to be jailed.

We were bombarded with Syrian news every single day — every single day! — every single day! Just as in Libya, that tiny African nation gang-raped and destroyed by some of the world’s topmost military powers, nameless rebels had organised a widespread armed revolt in Syria. Modern revolutions appear to have gone faceless and inorganic, gotten rid of charismatic and visionary personalities, or a comprehensible cause. With Syria dominating prime time news, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Guantanamo Bay had retreated from mainstream attention, hence the collective memory and conscience of the television-watching multitude.

I kept such opinions strictly to myself, of course. Initiating a discussion on imperial politics at the dining table of a Hong Kong prison would have been unwise, though I normally regarded the conventional wisdom of avoiding politics, sex, and religion at the dining table more fatuous than wise. What else should people who are close enough to eat together talk about? The dinner roll?

My dinner roll is very soft. What about yours, darling?

Oh, mine as well, my dear, but the third bite was softer than the second.

Huh, is that right? How interesting.

But I was in jail. Better be stupid and boring than tendentious. I knew that much without the Guardian Angel thing telling me.

However, enough was enough. I finally muttered ‘What? Syria again?’ to myself, as I unhurriedly spooned rice into my face, leaving the fish for last.

My table-mate heard me. He had already finished his meal, and taken three puffs of after-dinner smoke. He carefully inserted his unfinished cigarette into a plastic ballpoint pen cap to snuff it out, put it into his pocket for later enjoyment, then explained as-a-matter-of-factly: ‘Looks like the Americans wanna bomb them. Syria’s in deep fucking shit for a long time to come.’

‘Why do you say that?’ I agreed with him, but was curious about his reasoning. Most See Hings were under-educated, but (therefore?) full of common sense. They needed it for survival.

He explained: ‘Haven’t you noticed? They always have the same fucking news non-stop before dropping real bombs.’

‘I see.’

During our short exchange, the TV had moved on to other crisis.

The stock market fell that day because the Euro Crisis was deepening, commented the analyst. Barely twenty-four hours ago, when we were fed my favourite tofu pok contaminated with fish, he opined that the market had rallied because the Euro Crisis was looking good, really good. Global economy was changing fortune on an hourly basis.

‘Don’t waste time lah, all fucking fake,’ my friend muttered, sucking his teeth.

That was April 2012, long before the term fake news entered the public discourse.

In jail, television was only the second hardest thing to get used to. My cushion-enfeebled gluteus maximus found the chairs and benches much harder to acclimatise to. To be fair, they were not designed to torture inmates. The duty guard’s chair next to the entrance, wooden and cold, painted hopeless grey, raised like a tennis umpire’s, was equally unyielding. It wasn’t even padded with as much as a piece of thin fabric to dampen the punishing pressure.

During showers, I had noticed many hindquarters bruised in the middle of the cheeks, giving them a panda look. It puzzled me at first, until rough skin appeared on my own buttock. I couldn’t see them, but they felt like two round patches of sand paper. The adaptive human body and mind often respond to external pressure by growing callouses.

Each morning, we sat around the dining table for breakfast. After eating, we sat for at least an hour before toddling off to the workshop — less than a minute away — where hard grey plastic stools awaited our delinquent arses. The stools had a hole the size of a mini-doughnut in the centre. An empty hole — with nothing but soft air within its boundary — had to be reasonably accommodating, right? Wrong, at least not these ones with stiffened edges. Shifting my seat in search of the phantom soft-spot was maddening and futile.

After lunch or dinner, we sat around the dining hall for another hour or more as stalled time collapsed onto itself.

On Sundays and public holidays, we spent the whole day (except two precious playground hours if the weather was good) in the dining hall, sitting. Inmates grouped according to gang affiliation held company sponsored junk food feasts. Sunday chips and cheese-sticks seemed to be the only benefits gangsters got in return for a monthly membership due of two packs of fags per head. A typical prisoner’s monthly salary could buy about ten packs of a local smoke which no one but Hong Kong cons had ever heard of. Taxation by In-Gang Revenue worked out to be approximately twenty percent, quite a bit higher than the prevalent rate of Inland Revenue.

Kai Zis (those without gang affiliation) like myself would watch TV, play chess, read, write, or attempt to chat over the party noise, sitting down. One could in theory walk around the crowded and slippery hall to promote blood circulation. That would be like taking a leisurely stroll through strange neighbourhoods where beer drinking boys warm up over a bonfire of waste tyres in the middle of the pavement. Tong Fuk was a reasonably peaceful place, but full of boundaries, seen and unseen. Better just sit tight.

The layout of the dining hall was open and transparent as usual. Two of the three squat toilets were one with the dining area. The third one, tucked away at the corner, was semi-secluded. To neutralise the potential threat of privacy, there was an observation window big enough to allow eye contact between the diners and the defecator.

Any open toilet in a dining area is bound to look incongruous. The ones at our dining room were also overused, wilfully neglected, and contemptuously abused. Stripped of dignity and pretence, the stained bowls were ghastly. Installation art making angry social statements. Anything and everything unwanted was dumped into them. Though ultra disgusting, there was a fascinating side to a veteran sewage engineer like myself. Ancient cracks and fissures on the porcelain surface had self-healed with bio-growth, giving rise to a web of anchored slime camouflaged in the colour of night soil. A thriving microbial community had settled in dynamic equilibrium, serving unintended pre-treatment functions. Unexpectedly, they did not stink. Heavy use and powerful flushing kept them adequately aerobic.

Adjacent to the toilets and Kai Zi tables was the shower area. Big drops of viscous condensate created by the steamy showers rained down from the ceiling. Anything left underneath it would become soaked. Most inmates stripped at the table and walked to the showers naked. When done, they would return au naturel to dry at the table, eyes on TV, watching Damascus.

Once upon a time…Photo taken from Tai Kwun exhibits

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