My communications with the Hainan Webmaster had led me to believe that Haikou was a small, compact city, almost more of a town, and that most people spoke some English. The Web man did not have the address of the crematorium, but thought I could find it by asking around. “Even just ask a taxi driver,” he wrote.
It took a half hour to even just ask a taxi driver to take me to my hotel.
Like all taxi drivers and almost everyone else in Haikou, he spoke no English. Why should he? Few foreigners come to Hainan, only holiday-making Chinese from the mainland. The driver eventually telephoned a friend who spoke some English and I found myself in the midst of a vast, urban sprawl in a modern high-rise with huge red Chinese characters on its roof spelling out, I supposed, the hotel’s name. Chinese big-city hotel rooms are modeled after their Western counterparts, with triangulated toilet paper ends and complimentary shower caps; however, there is always something slightly, ever so charmingly off. Here, it was a tiny bottle labeled “Sham Poo” and a flyer offering the services of a blind masseuse. (Oh, madam! I’m so sorry! I thought that was your back! You see I’m blind….) Exhausted, I collapsed on the bed, which made a shrieking, assaulted noise, suggesting that it could as easily have been the bed that collapsed on me.
In the morning I approached the reception desk. One of the girls spoke a little English, which was helpful, though she had an unsettling habit of saying “Are you okay?” in place of “How are you?” as though I’d tripped on the rug coming out of the elevator. She understood “taxi” and pointed to one outside.
The night before, in preparation for my journey, I had drawn a picture to give to the cabdriver. It showed a body hovering above flames, and to the right of this I drew an urn, though the latter had come out looking like a samovar, and there was a distinct possibility that the driver would think I was looking for a place to get Mongolian barbecue. The driver looked at the piece of paper, seemed to understand, and pulled out into traffic. We drove for a long time, and it seemed we might actually be headed for the outskirts of town, where the crematorium was said to be. And then I saw my hotel go by on the right. We were driving in circles. What was going on? Did the blind masseuse moonlight as a cabdriver? This was not good.
I was not okay. I motioned to my merrily revolving driver to pull over, and I pointed to the Chinese Tourism Agency office on the map.
Eventually the taxi pulled up outside a brightly lit fried chicken establishment, the sort of place that in the United States might proclaim “We Do Chicken Right!” but here proclaimed “Do Me Chicken!” The cabdriver turned to collect his fare. We shouted at each other for a while, and eventually he got out and walked over to a tiny, dim storefront next to the chicken place and pointed vigorously to a sign. Designated Foreign-Oriented Tourist Unit, it said. Well, do me chicken. The man was right.
Inside, the tourist unit was having a cigarette break, which, judging from the density of the smoke, had been going on for some time, years possibly. The walls were bare cement and part of the ceiling was falling in. There were no travel brochures or train timetables, only a map of the world and a small wall-mounted shrine with a red electric candle and a bowl of offerings. The gods were having apples. In the back of the office, I could see two brand-new shrink-wrapped chairs. This struck me as an odd purchasing decision, what with the ceiling collapsing and the very slim likelihood that more than two or three tourists a year came in and needed a place to sit.
I explained to the woman that I wanted to hire an interpreter.
Miraculously, two phone calls and half an hour later, one appeared. It was Sandy Wan, the woman who would later help me track down the truth about the abortus vendors. I explained that I needed to talk to someone at the Haikou crematorium. Sandy’s English vocabulary was impressive but, understandably, did not include “crematorium.”
I described it as the big building where they burn dead bodies. She didn’t catch the last bit and thought I meant some sort of factory. “What kind of material?” she asked. The entire staff of the designated foreign-oriented tourist unit were looking on, trying to follow the conversation.
“Dead people… material.” I smiled helplessly. “Dead bodies.”
“Ah,” said Sandy. She did not flinch. She explained to the tourist unit, who nodded as though they got this sort of thing all the time. Then she asked me for the address. When I replied that I didn’t know it, she got the crematorium phone number from the information operator, called the place to get the address, and even set up an appointment with the director. She was amazing. I couldn’t imagine what she had told the man, or what she thought I needed to talk to him about. I began to feel a little sorry for the crematorium director, thinking he was about to be visited by a grieving foreign widow, or perhaps some glad-handing retort salesman there to help him cut costs and maximize efficiency.
In the cab, I tried to think of a way to explain to Sandy what I was about to have her do. I need you to ask this man whether he had an employee who cut the butt cheeks off cadavers to serve in his brother’s restaurant. No matter how I thought of phrasing it, it sounded ghastly and absurd. Why would I need to know this? What kind of book was I writing? Fearing that Sandy might change her mind, I said nothing about the dumplings. I said that I was writing an article for a funeral industry magazine. We were outside the city proper now. Trucks and scooters had gone scarce. People drove wooden ox carts and wore the round, peaked sun hats you see in rural Vietnam, only these were fashioned from laminated newspaper. I wondered if someone, somewhere, was wearing the March 23, 1991, edition of the Hainan Special Zone Daily.
The taxi turned off onto a dirt road. We passed a brick smokestack, issuing clouds of black: the crematorium. Farther down the road was the accompanying funeral home and the crematorium offices. We were directed up a broad marble stairway to the director’s office. This could only go poorly. The Chinese are wary of reporters, especially foreign ones, and very especially foreign ones suggesting that your staff mutilated the dead relations of paying customers to make dumplings.
What had I been thinking?
The director’s office was large and sparsely furnished. There was nothing on the walls but a clock, as if no one knew how to decorate for death.
Sandy and I were seated in leather chairs that sat low to the floor, like car seats, and told that the director would be in to see us shortly. Sandy smiled at me, unaware of the horror about to unfold. “Sandy,” I blurted out, “I have to tell you what this is about! There was this guy who cut the butts off dead bodies to give to his brother to…”
It was at that moment that the director walked in. The director was a stern-looking Chinese woman, easily six feet tall. From my humbled position near the floor, she seemed to be of superhuman proportions, as tall as the smokestack outside and as likely to belch forth smoke.
The director sat down at her desk. She looked at me. Sandy looked at me.
Feeling seasick, I launched into my story. Sandy listened and, bless her, betrayed no emotion. She turned to the director, who was not smiling, had not smiled since she entered the room, had possibly never smiled, and she told her what I had just said. She relayed the story of Hui Guang, explained that I thought he might have been employed here, and that I wrote for a magazine and that I hoped to find him and speak to him. The director crossed her arms and her eyes narrowed. I thought I saw her nostrils flare. Her reply went on for ten minutes. Sandy nodded politely through it all, with the attentive calm of a person being given a fast-food order or directions to the mall. I was very impressed. Then she turned to me. “The director, she is, ah, very angry. The director is very… astonished to have these facts. She never heard of this story. She says she has known all her workers, and she has been here for more than ten years and she would know about this kind of story. Also, she feels it is a… really sick story. And so she cannot help you.” I would love to see a full transcript of the director’s reply, and then again I wouldn’t.