Arrested in China

Its not even 9 am Sunday morning and already my brother is on the phone yelling at me. From my end, lying under the covers in my room in Beijing, its sounds like a bunch of thumps and crackles and my brother's voice, yelling loudly, but I can't make out a damn thing he's saying.

My brother, I will later find out, has locked himself in a bathroom in a hotel room in Dongzhou, where he is being interrogated by nine police officers. He is bracing himself against the bathroom door, whose steel frame is slowly bending under the insistent pounding of the nine men, trying to keep the officers out long enough to place a call. The gap between my brother and the police is growing smaller, and he is looking them in the eye through the bathroom mirror as he talks to me.

I make out, "call the embassy," and "get my hard drive" before the line goes dead.

I lie in bed for another minute, watching sunlight hit the row of little green plants on my windowsill while at the same time, my brother is being beaten by nine police officers on the bathroom floor.

The protest in Dongzhou which my brother was covering involved a group of local officials kidnapped by villagers in a desperate attempt to protest the corruption that is sending farmer's land and money to a handful of corrupt local officials. Last year, in the same village, a similar protest broke out in which 3 civilians were shot dead and many more injured. There is a good chance the people involved this time around will be jailed, beaten, and/or sent to labor camps. It is not an unusual story; rather just one chapter in the bigger picture of the battle against corruption that has been unfolding in China's small villages for years.

Last night, while trying to pick out an outfit for a party, my brother calls me to let me know the police are looking for him and he is in hiding. He tells me that he's safe for the night but doesn't know if he can get out of the city in the morning, as all entrances are blocked by police and they're all looking for him. I hang up the phone, looking at the options laid out on my bed: a red tee-shirt and a paisley print blouse. Hmmm.

I call the embassy and the consulate in Guangzhou just to give them a heads up before heading out to meet my new "coworkers" at the season opening snowboard party at Suzie Wong's. The party is insane: free vodka, hot djs, snowboarding on big screen tvs, all the best riders in China and a gang of Kiwis I may soon be living with. Woohoo.

The pictures of the police brutality my brother has captured this time around will not get out. I know this, my brother knows this, and the cops in the process of assaulting him know this. The plants on my sill look happy bathed in light so I yank up the shade to give them more sun before calling the US embassy again, alerting them that my brother has in fact been arrested. They tell me there's nothing they can do until the Chinese authorities have alerted them of the arrest, "And who knows when that'll be." I ask them what they can do in the meantime and the man says, "Nothing. Welcome to China."

The consulate in Guangzhou is manned by a Singaporean lady who tells me she'll "start making some noise so they know people are looking for him."

Meanwhile my brother is watching the group of police officers ravage his camera and computer equipment "like a bunch of monkeys with new toys." They've brought in a hacker to systematically erase and seize his hard drive and all his memory cards.

I get dressed, a little pissed at the US embassy for throwing attitude at me. I swear to god the next American to say "Welcome to China" to me in that sarcastic, superior tone is getting bitchslapped.

I catch a cab to my brother's apartment and as I open the door his kitten, Rusty, runs up to greet me. I grab my brother's hard drives and all the random papers lying around his desk and stuff them into a bag. I almost grab Rusty too, feeling a little guilty at leaving her all alone to face the possible intruders to my brother's pad. After all, I have no idea what the Chinese government's policy is towards kittens.

The air outside the apartment feels menacing on my way home. Same streets, same fruit sellers, same traffic- but it looks different now, as if Big Brother's eyes are looking out from every red light and bus window. I look down at the bag of my brother's crap and almost go back for poor little Rusty. Welcome to China.

I call my brother's phone around noon. No answer.

I call the embassy and they haven't done shit. The woman asks me, "has so and so called you yet?" No. "Ok, yeah, let me call you back in ten minutes, ok?" She never does.

The Singaporean from the Guangzhou consulate keeps calling me all day, with updates like, "we still have not located him. It could be a while- the last journalist who got arrested was detained for almost a month before we even got word of where they were keeping him."

Or, an hour later, "we've called everywhere, they won't tell us where he is but they do know we're looking for him. Hopefully that will help protect his civil rights, but then again, this is China."

Then at around 4, she calls me again, sounding almost cheerful. "We've got the FAO working with us, she says. If anyone has any pull in this situation, it's the Foreign Affairs Office. The head of the Office is making calls right now."

I get the feeling the men who have my brother are going to do whatever they want with him, FAO or no FAO, but in any case, before she's even off the phone with me, my brother calls, telling me he's been released and is on a bus to Guangzhou. Fuck dude. I'm going back to bed.