Sample text for Dragonhead : a true story of the godfather of Chinese crime--his rise and fall / John Sack.
Bibliographic record and links to related information available from the Library of Congress catalog
Copyrighted sample text provided by the publisher and used with permission. May be incomplete or contain other coding.
Chapter 1
Coolie
Gongjalu
Ants. Army ants. A column of creepie-crawlies, advancing like a wobbly pencil line across the paddies south of Shanghai, that's what these people look like. It's winter, 1959, on the paddies a cracking crust of ice reflects the sky and its gloomy clouds, clouds like mole holes, clouds like icicle-sided caves, and the ten thousand coolies are cold in spite of their ankle-length underwear, cotton-padded outerwear, scarves (muddy towels) around their necks, caps with flaps around their ears -- caps with shiny stalactites of frozen sweat. On their shoulders the women and men carry yokes: crosspieces of crucifixes: finger-to-finger bamboo poles: at every end is a rice-stem rope and a basket of wet and stinking mud, for at this freezing season (as in the past hundred? thousand? who in Gongjalu ever counted? years) the Chinese are dredging the Gongjalu Canal. On their callused feet are the rice-stem sandals that Mao, their venerated chairman, has rather untenably approved as the proper attire for the Great Leap Forward.
Above them the seagulls screech. On one boy, aged sixteen, the sandals are scratchy, the thong is a saw between his toes, his toes are bubble-gum bubbles: red, spherical, shiny-skinned, his toes are the source of shooting pains that run to his straining shoulders, oh, the boy thinks, my tortured toes! And squatting, slipping the sandals off, sinking into the mud to his ankles, wrenching them out, the mud making sucking sounds like an underground octopus, wup, wup, the boy climbs the twenty or thirty steps that men with shovels have sculpted into the canal's embankment, climbs with his crucifix, baskets, mud. His name is Kon. His home ten miles from here is a stone-walled room in the morgue of the Heaven Eternal Cemetery. Allotted to him by his commune, the pad isn't home sweet home for Kon, who, having cleaned the grimy windows, cleared the pawing cobwebs, and hauled off the one dozen coffins, is still afraid of the prowling ghosts, afraid of going outdoors at one, two, three in the morning (the door going creak, the wind whipping down from Mongolia, the door going bang, then creak, then bang) to pee off the porch on one of those probably offended apparitions. Most days, Kon is in his commune, standing at a hot cauldron, dropping in hundreds of Chinese weasels -- of Chinese weasel skins -- and making the meaningless salary of one half penny per day by stirring the weasels, stirring the weasels, moving his paddle in figure eights, dyeing the weasels "jewel black" or "jasmine white" like the American minks they'll be sold in America as. At noon there's a bell, at the mess hall he trades his red coupon for his eight ounces of rice: not enough, and in the evening he uses his adze to scratch out one or two peanuts the farmers have missed, to fish with a spear and to crab with his bare right hand, his hand going gallantly into a hole, his wrist, elbow, armpit following it, his arm on a hazardous recon patrol till Kon triumphantly says in his Shanghai dialect, "I got it! It didn't get me!" At night he attends the commune's self-criticism sessions ("You did something wrong," "Yes, I ate one peanut," "You still aren't red") but on this special dredging day he's merely an Anomma species ant, another anonymous dot advancing across the paddies, dumping the stinking mud, and descending the slippery steps to the Gongjalu Canal.
The canal's without water today. On its bottom are muck and mire, sewage and garbage, a wasteland of all that's inedible: of bones of skin-nibbled fish, of roots of digested vegetables, of shiny ceramic shards: of soup bowls, rice bowls, soy-sauce bowls, of Chinese household gods, why not? the squalor excreting an odor that in an instant drops from Kon's nose to Kon's queasy throat. Still barefoot, he steps inadvertently onto a broken bottle, says, "O," the Shanghai dialect for "Ow," and extracts a couple of blood-reddened shreds that the boss of this operation disapprovingly notices. "You," says the man, his uniform blue, his armband red, his belt just a yellow rice-stem rope-"you don't have sandals on. Why not?"
"Comrade, I can't walk with them."
"You've got to wear them anyhow."
"Comrade," says Kon, his words turning solid, turning to cap-strap stalactites. "Without them I can walk faster, and I can carry more mud for the People's Republic." He flashes his summery smile at the boss, practically melting the stalactites.
"Good boy, Yu," the boss approves-Yu is the boy's first name, though soon (while trying, trying to climb from this wasteland, climb from this wretched poverty) the nice but, oh, so nimble fellow will ask to be known as Johnny, as Johnny Kon.
Shanghai
Flat on its face falls the Great Leap Forward. Unnourished by eight ounces daily of rice or by barbecued dogs, cats and rats, some twenty million citizens of China have died. In Gongjalu the Chinese weasel-works (founded in the 1920s by Kon's go-getting father but in the 1950s expropriated by Mao: they're capitalism, they're feudalism, they're puppets of American imperialism)-the mink-works have flopped. At eighteen years old, Johnny (we'll call him Johnny) is staying alive by straying from the precepts of Mao and peddling string in the shadows of the Szechwan Street Bridge. "Fishing line! Fishing line! It's green," cries Johnny, the former weasel-dyer, the boy who earns two hundred times what he did in Gongjalu by dyeing his fishing line the color of the Yangtze River. "The fish won't see it!"
Uh-oh, the communist cops. His brother on the corner signaling him, Johnny closes his ragged satchel, wraps it with slices of inner tube, ties it to his rusted bicycle, ceases to peddle but pedals swiftly into the noodle-shop-smelly streets.
Shanghai
Johnny sells out. His miles of river-colored strings sell out, the man who sold him the raw white string (a man who'd presumably stolen it) is also unstrung these days, and Johnny's nouveau-impoverished father sits in their slatted home on a tattered sofa saying in Shanghai dialect, "There are no jobs in Shanghai, you must resettle in Hong Kong," to somewhere so far from anywhere that Johnny has ever remotely known that Johnny can't picture where it is.
"Yes, daddy," says Johnny, an obedient son, a Buddhist, a boy who prays every day at the Buddhist temple, prays to a black-bodied god who if Johnny is bad and doesn't observe the Buddhist commandment to honor his father and mother may resurrect him as an Anomma ant, and who prays every day to a white-bodied god who if Johnny is good will terminate all these tiresome reincarnations. "I'll go where you say," says Johnny, a boy who knows that the Kons (three sisters, three brothers, the oldest is Johnny) must live on his gleanings in, where was it? Hong Kong? and who, before departing, visits his grandfather's garden to tell the old man goodbye.
The garden has four impressive levels. On each are mountains, waterfalls, rivers, across every river arches a scarlet bridge, trees as gorgeously gnarled as India filigrees grow on each bank, behind them hundreds of thoroughbred horses graze. But the garden envelops an area smaller than a vegetable patch-it's a miniature garden, a rock, water, plant, and glass-horse menagerie, and as Johnny enters it his grandfather is using manicure scissors to trim it. "I hear you're going to Hong Kong," his grandfather says in Shanghai dialect, then sits down in a straw-colored rattan chair.
"Yes, grandfather," says Johnny deferentially, then sits down on a bamboo stool.
"Do you want some tea?"
"Yes, grandfather." And raising a flower-decorated pot, the grandfather pours some for Johnny while he himself drinks from the spout, the Shanghai way. "I tell you," he whispers. "You mustn't say I told you, but you mustn't forget it. In Hong Kong," he whispers, staring at the garden's bamboo wall, a wall that pedestrians walk by, pedestrians who might overhear him and tell the Shanghai authorities that he isn't red, that he's due for a reeducation camp-"in Hong Kong it's like the old days here in Shanghai." Saying the old days, the old man sighs, raises his hand, and points a cigar-stained finger over his shoulder at what apparently are the 1920s and 1930s, are fond recollections of opium dens, of pai-gow dens, of dens full of sing-song girls: of girls whose finger-sized feet a man could caress, could smell, could lick: a man could nibble the almonds between the nipple-sized toes or put his penis between the two Lilliputian feet till yes! he abandoned himself to the Time of the Rain. The sing-song houses (and in Shanghai, one house in every twelve was one) of course were run by organized crime: by gangs, by secret societies, by what would someday be known as the Mafia, Chinese Mafia, by organizations as well-connected as New York's Tammany Hall, on their long rosters were Sun Yat-Sen, the founder of the Republic of China, and Chiang Kai-Shek, China's leader in World War II. And now Johnny's grandfather whispers, "They still have these gangs in Hong Kong. They still run the opium, morphine, heroin, the pai-gow, fan-tan, mahjong, the delicate sing-song girls-they run all the illegitimate and legitimate businesses in Hong Kong. They --"
His grandfather stops. His eyes become narrow, and Johnny turns around thinking, He sees someone listening. From under his rattan chair, the grandfather draws a scissors that's more like a shears, stands up, moves forward like a stalking animal, snap! then snips an imperfect leaf off one of his miniature pine trees. He sits down again and tells Johnny imperturbably, "These gangs run Hong Kong. You must respect them. You needn't," he says, shaking his brown-stained finger, his almost hypnotic metronome, whatever I tell you, you will do -- "you needn't join them." He knows that in 1948 another of Johnny's grandfathers was in the Green Gang, the biggest gang in Shanghai, and that the other grandfather kidnapped a VIP, was caught, and was killed by a firing squad, and that he lay in his coffin as Johnny's father stared at the red that edged every hole in his ashen face. "Don't join the Green Gang. Don't, don't, don't," Johnny's still-shaken father told Johnny, Johnny who promised him, "Daddy, I won't," this, too, the man in this flawless garden knows, and he says emphatically, "You needn't join them. But you must make friends with them. Don't think, I'll wait till I need them. By then it's too late. You'll tell them, 'Hey, I have trouble,' and they'll just shrug and say, 'Who are you?' Then who will you turn to? The Royal Police? Ha," the old man half-laughs, then he uses some gangland slang, "the oafish officers are in the gangs themselves. But if the gangs are your friends, they'll tell you, 'Trouble with who? What name? What address?' Listen," the old man interrupts himself, meaning listen to the sparrow that's perched in one of his miniature trees. "Listen, that bird sings well!" He stands up, scatters some seeds to the sweet-sounding sparrow, and says to Johnny, "Don't forget what I've told you."
"I won't forget," says Johnny obediently. And bowing goodbye, going to the sooty station, standing in line three days, buying a dirt-encrusted seat on a train to Shenzhen, the city in China closest to Hong Kong, then riding, crying, telling himself, I'll never see my mother again -- and truly he never will -- he steams past the paddies, the sprouting stalks, and the penniless proletariat, steams to the Chinese border at Shenzhen three days away.
Shenzhen
What famished man in China wouldn't rather escape to Hong Kong? None, but one billion people is more than the British have flats for, and Johnny has two unauthorized options to get to that beckoning wonderland: to (1) climb across mountains, guarded by Dobermans, or (2) swim across water, guarded by great white sharks. But after a month making friends (some of them gangsters, some in the Green Gang) in the corridors of the Peace Hotel, he learns of another nefarious option, to (3) pay the riches of Solomon, that's $125, for one little six-inch shred of thread, and he has eagerly bought one.
The thread, which is red, dangles from Johnny's passport as he walks anxiously onto the bridge to Hong Kong. All this month he's watched the men crossing it, the businessmen in their fresh white shirts, their slant-striped ties, their pin-striped suits, their Rolexes glinting in Shenzhen's sun, and he's thought, These fools. If I had their money I'd send so much to Shanghai. And someday I'll have it. That day seems nearer as, on this narrow bridge, the little red thread (like a flaw in some fabric) impresses the Royal Police as a pair of blue knickers impresses a Dodger fan if the man who's wearing them is rounding third in Dodger Stadium. "Go this way," the tan-hatted police tell Johnny enthusiastically, but one policeman counsels him, "Go slower. Go slower. Or they," the police who consider themselves above their corruptible colleagues, above what the Chinese call the biggest gang in Hong Kong, the gang named the Royal Police -- "or they will notice you." At the border a British policeman walks casually off for coffee, not tea, and a Chinese policeman wielding a great rubber stamp goes blop! not on Johnny's passport but on some scrap paper near it, a blop! that echoes authoritatively as the Chinese policeman waves Johnny on. Then, Johnny boards a train, and, not speaking at all, for Cantonese is the unintelligible language here and Johnny's own Shanghai dialect could alert a virtuous cop, he points to a vendor's orange juice, buys it, and rides past the sunny paddies into the Promised Land.
Library of Congress subject headings for this publication: Kon, Johnny, Criminals China Hong Kong Biography, Organized crime China Hong Kong, Organized crime United States, Chinese American criminals