Exclusive – China Underground by Zachary Mexico (Chapter excerpt)

LAO ZHANG IS hungry for blood. He hasn’t killed in four days, and he feels like there are wires shorting out in his brain. He feels like an addict in serious need of a fix. He has been keeping odd hours. Sometimes, he won’t sleep for three days, and then he’ll crash and pass out for two days in a row.

    A heavy shade covers the window in his bedroom, and when he wakes up, he can no longer tell if it is day or night. In the darkness, he reaches over to his nightstand, feeling around for his Mount Tai premium cigarettes.

    He finds the pack, lights a smoke, and inhales deeply. He fumbles for his glasses, puts them on, and squints at the clock on his cellular phone. It is eleven o’ clock. Morning? Nope. Evening. He smiles broadly and sucks on his cigarette. He swings his legs over the bed and stubs out the cigarette, the smile never leaving his face. First, he will take a shower and brush his hair.

    Then, it will be time to kill.

SIXTEEN MEN ARE seated around a long table in a small room. The table is cluttered with half-empty cups of tea, cans of Red Bull, sunflower-seed shells, and ashtrays overflowing with cigarette butts. Most of the men are smoking cigarettes, and the room has no ventilation. Most of this country’s public places— restaurants, bars, even museums and hospitals—are unbearably smoky, but this room is even more smoky than most. It’s ridiculous, really, but no one seems to mind or even to notice. The men have glassy eyes. They seem washed out and wired at the same time; hyper-weary, like they make a habit of going without sleep for days at a time. A small plexiglass window on the back wall contains four long fluorescent bulbs, calibrated to simulate artificial daylight.

    Three of the men are police officers. Four more are killers. The rest are peasants. The task at hand is for the policemen to find out who the killers are and to apprehend them. The killers are trying to be mistaken for peasants so they will be able to leave freely.

    Outside, morning has just broken, and the sun has risen over the ocean and cast its light on the eastern port city of Qingdao, famous for its idyllic beaches and excellent beer. The policemen have until noon to catch the killers, and they’re not making much progress. They have large black bags under their eyes; as they suck on Red River and Peaceful Temple cigarettes, you feel like you can almost see the bags swelling, getting larger and darker.

ONE OF THE men, number eight, according to the black card sitting in a plastic holder on the table in front of him, small and bespectacled, weaselly-looking, launches into a defensive salvo: He’s just a peasant, not a killer. He’s a peasant and to mistake him for a killer would be a crime. He’s a peasant, just a simple peasant. He repeats this like a mantra. Behind his glasses, his eyes blink nervously, and there is desperation in his voice. He is just a simple peasant, not a killer.

    It’s time to vote. Lao Zhang, cigarette in hand, adjusts his glasses with his other hand and stares at the weasel. From the front of the room, the judge barks: “Number eight!”

    Lao Zhang thrusts his right hand into the air. He looks around the room; his is the only hand up. Number eight has bought himself some more time.

    The electronic scoreboard at the front of the room lets loose a loud beep, and techno music blasts out of speakers on the walls. Number eight has won. He’s gotten away with murder.

    As soon as the music starts playing, everyone in the room gets up and starts screaming at each other. The policemen are pissed off at the peasants, the peasants are pissed off at the policemen, and the killers are high-fiving in joy because they’ve won the game and scored thirty-five points. Lao Zhang’s screaming at everyone else. He knew it was number eight! How could they be so stupid!

    After a moment, the hubbub dies down. There’s no clock in the room. By this time, everyone knows it’s very late. Lao Zhang lights a smoke, and the players next to him follow suit.

“Fa pai!”—“distribute the cards”—someone says, and the next round begins.

IT’S AN AVERAGE late night/early morning at the Qingdao branch of the Killing People Club. The killers aren’t really killers, the policemen aren’t really policemen, and the peasants aren’t peasants: they are all urban, educated Chinese involved in a complicated role-playing game.

    The lobby of the Killing People Club is sparsely decorated. It looks like a cross between a flophouse and a defunct bowling alley. In one corner, a few ratty couches bracket ashtrays the size of garbage cans. Across the room, a small shop sells water, Red Bull, tea, sunflower seeds, cigarettes, and other staples of the all-nighter.

    Upstairs are six identical rooms. In each are sixteen marginally comfortable, Day-Glo orange chairs arranged in a U-shape around a yellow Formica table. Sixteen ashtrays, also Day-Glo orange, sit on the table, one in front of each chair.

    In the mouth of the “U” stands the judge’s podium. The judge, incongruously, is played by a young Chinese woman in some kind of perverse waitress uniform; pale pink apron and matching bow in her hair. Mounted on the wall behind her is an electronic scoreboard showing the code names of each player: “Western Wind,” “Snake Head,” “Little Black Fatty,” “Hedgehog.” Lao Zhang is “Barman Lao Zhang.” (My Killing People name is “Dragon Head Stick #1,” a sly nod to the popular Hong Kong film Election.)

    Techno music begins to blare from the lousy speakers mounted on the ceiling, signaling the start of the game. Like most amplified music in China, the volume has been set way too high, the speakers are cheap, and so the music consequently becomes crackly and distorted.

    The waitress-judge passes around a tray with metal squares, which are about the size and shape of a Zippo lighter. Each player flicks open the square to reveal a picture underneath: killer (man in a black mask and ninja-style robe) policeman (man in a blue US-style police uniform) or peasant (farmer wearing a coolie hat and baggy Mao-era clothing.)

    The judge pushes a button on her console. “Everyone close your eyes!” barks a distorted electronic voice. She watches to makes sure everyone’s eyes are closed and presses another button. The expectation of the new game hangs pregnantly over the room like the cloud of smoke that’s making me hack up a lung.

    “Killers, open your eyes!”

LAO ZHANG IS six feet tall and whippet-thin. He co-owns two successful French restaurants in Qingdao’s central business district. He’s got a long, raggedy ponytail that hangs down to his waistline. He wears a pair of tiny spectacles, a scraggly beard, and, generally, a huge smile that reveals a gap on the left side of his mouth where the incisor should be.

    His hippie-like appearance and emaciated torso lend him the general air of a junkie; however, he doesn’t drink or do any drugs, save for the Mount Tai or Nanjing cigarettes that he chain-smokes. A few years ago, he liked to stay out all night taking Ecstasy and chasing women, but he’s had his fill of carousing and claims that those days are behind him. He stays thin by eating only one meal a day, usually a plate piled high with fried noodles.

    This year he turned thirty-five, but he looks at least a decade older. When he went to see the Rolling Stones in Shanghai, an elderly security guard referred to him as “Grandfather,” and it really pissed him off.

I ARRIVED IN Qingdao with Lao Wei, a former classmate from my undergraduate days in Beijing. We were planning to stay at a local friend’s apartment, but our host was out of town on business. He had, however, left the keys to his place with Lao Zhang. I tried to get in touch with Lao Zhang, but his cellular phone was “guan ji”—powered off.

    Lao Wei and I made our way over to La Villa, one of Lao Zhang’s restaurants, but the manager on duty told us that he wasn’t around. We took a seat at a table and ordered coffee, strong and straight, from an imported espresso machine, and called Lao Zhang again, but his phone was still off.

    An hour later, he returned my call (he had seen my number on his call log) and said that he’d be coming by to get us. The better part of another hour passed and we had a couple more cups of coffee. Outside of the major cities, which now boast both Starbucks and independent cafés, good coffee is hard to
come by in China. Ten years ago, it was borderline impossible to find.

    Eventually, Lao Zhang’s short, pretty wife, Doudou—“Little Black Fatty” in the Killing People Game—came in and handed me a set of keys to a spare apartment behind La Villa.

    “I thought Lao Zhang would be coming,” I said.

    “He’s not around,” she said.

    I didn’t want to press the issue. Last time I visited Qingdao, their relationship had been in trouble; Lao Zhang had found a much younger girlfriend and was spending his afternoons shacked up in a love nest somewhere.

    So I thanked Doudou; she left, and I ordered a cold Qingdao beer. A few minutes later, I noticed a familiar face across the room. Wang Gang is a bespectacled, attractive kid in his mid-twenties. He serves as the general manager and de facto DJ for both of Lao Zhang’s restaurants. He came over, and we exchanged pleasantries. Wang Gang bought me another beer, and I asked after Lao Zhang.

    “He’s out playing this Killing People Game,” said Wang Gang. “He’s crazy. Plays all night, every night. Doesn’t go to work anymore.”

    He wasn’t lying: for the next several days, my friend and I hung out in Lao Zhang’s restaurant, drinking coffee and enjoying one of the few wireless Internet hotspots in Qingdao. The last time I was in Qingdao, Lao Zhang was always around, fixing things, puttering around the place, or sitting in the corner drinking tea. This time, he was nowhere to be seen.

    He had discovered the Killing People Game. At first, he would play for a few hours once a week. Then, he’d stay out all night playing, once or twice a week. Finally, it had gotten to the point when Lao Zhang developed a daily routine around the game: he woke up in the late afternoon, ate a plate of noodles, went to the Killing People Club, and stayed there until the sun came up the next morning. His wife took care of the day-to-day operations of his business, and all of his friends—except the ones who were also members of the Killing People Club—wondered where he’d gone and why his phone was always powered off.

AT FIRST I thought Lao Zhang was an isolated case, a guy who was, for whatever reason, addicted to the Killing People Game. Certain people, after all, have addictive personalities: junkies, gaming nerds, compulsive eaters. But then, I started to play the game in Qingdao, spending most evenings at the Club, and I saw the same familiar faces night after night. As I made my way around the country and continued to stop in at Killing People Clubs all across China, I met many people who, like Lao Zhang, were basically spending their entire waking lives within the confines of the Club. I realized that the Killing People Game had reached critical mass. It was no longer a fad but a full-blown epidemic.

    There are sixteen players. The objective of the game is simple: killers want to avoid detection. They also want to ferret out the policemen and kill them. The policemen, conversely, want to identify and catch the killers. And the peasants,
who, like Chinese peasants, don’t have much real power, but still could be killed, want to aid the policemen in catching the killers.

    It’s a team game: the four killers are on one team and the policemen and peasants are on the opposing team, which we’ll call the “Society” team. If the policemen and the peasants can identify and vote out all the killers before the policemen are killed, then the “Society” wins: the policemen receive forty points and the peasants ten points each. If the killers can avoid detection long enough to kill all the policemen, then the Killers each get fifty points. Since players typically play upwards of five rounds a night, usually everyone will get a chance to be a killer or policeman (it’s much more fun than being a “passive” peasant.)

    After each player has taken a card to establish his identity, the judge barks through a loudspeaker for everyone to close his eyes and bow his head. The techno music starts playing.

    Then, the four killers open their eyes and look around the circle to identify each other. Using hand signals, they attempt to agree upon which player to kill. After they’ve reached a consensus—signified by nodding all around—the wild techno music stops and they are treated to a cheesy, eighties-style sound effect: a “thunk” that’s supposed to symbolize someone getting killed.

    The killers, having sated their hunger for blood, close their eyes and bow their heads. The computerized voice returns, instructing the four policemen to open their eyes. Using hand signals, the policemen motion to the judge which other one player they want to “investigate”: each round, the judge will tell the policemen whether one of the people in the room is or is not a killer. A massive red thumbs-up or thumbs-down will appear on the electronic scoreboard in the front of the room.

    At the judge’s instruction, all the players open their eyes.(The peasants have kept their eyes closed the whole time and therefore have no idea what’s going on.)

    The judge reads out the name of the player whom the killers have agreed to kill (“The victim is number seven: Black Cloud” and suchlike.) The person who has been killed receives a chance to eulogize himself and muse on whom he suspects is responsible for his murder.

    Then, the other players each get a chance to speak for thirty seconds and accuse their chosen suspects of being killers. If the policemen have identified a killer, they attempt to impress this fact upon the other players, without revealing their identity as policemen. The killers attempt to deflect suspicion to other players. This roundtable culminates in an election, à la the US television show Survivor: someone gets voted out of the game.

    After the first round, the player who has been killed and the player who has been voted out are now “eliminated.” Fourteen players remain.

    The game continues, with the policemen trying to get the killers voted out of the game and the killers trying to kill the policemen.

    An average round with sixteen people usually takes a little less than an hour to play through. The game ends when all the killers have been discovered by the policemen and peasants and voted out, or when the killers identify and kill all the policemen. Points are awarded and displayed on a large LCD screen in the front of the room.

THE KILLING PEOPLE Game is actually an American invention, created by a group of computer programmers in Silicon Valley who played it as an exercise in procrastination to blow off steam while working on challenging projects.

    A group of students from Shanghai who were studying at Stanford in the mid-nineties learned the game and brought it back to China. For a while, among Chinese engineering circles, the game became a pleasant way to pass the time on long train rides and stuffy summer nights in overcrowded college dormitories.

    In late 2005, the first dedicated Killing People Club opened in an average-looking office building in central Beijing. The game’s popularity blossomed among the city’s fashionable elite, and soon the building’s parking lot was full of Mercedes and BMWs. “It caught fire very quickly,” said Xiao Li, who has been working at the Killing People Club since its inception. “All kinds of people—big bosses, policemen, wearing fancy clothes.”

    Soon, the Killing People Club expanded to neighboring Tianjin, and by 2006, the craze had expanded to fifteen other cities. All over China, people are turning on to the Killing People Club. Membership has risen exponentially. As of this writing, there are over ten thousand members of the Club, and hundreds of new members register every day.

    The Club charges a one-time registration fee of 100 yuan ($12.50) and hourly fees that hover around 10 yuan ($1.20).

LAO ZHANG’S HAPPY. In the past week, his point total reached the number-one position in all of Qingdao. The Killing People Club has a website which is updated daily (www.xclub.com.cn) and members of the Club use a password to log in and check the previous night’s rankings. In Beijing, “The Literary Animal” led the field with 775 points; in Chengdu, it was “Fish-O,” with 260 points.

    The ultimate goal of the game, as in all games where points are accrued over a long period of time, is to attain the maximum amount of points. Of course, the more hours spent at the Club, the more points one can achieve. However, since
even a marginal player will still score a couple hundred points over the course of a long night, it’s not necessarily the best players who have the most points: instead, it’s the players who have spent the longest time within the confines of the Club.

    “Right now, there are a couple people who are superstars in the Killing People Club world,” Lao Zhang comments, referring to two old hands in Beijing who play the game so much that they have, far and away, the highest point totals in the nation.

    Across the entire country, thousands of people are staying up all night, every night, playing the Killing People Game, paying 10 yuan an hour, even quitting or neglecting their jobs to play.

    Why has this phenomenon taken over so many people’s lives? Why are people so obsessed with the Killing People Game?

    “We all need a little escape sometimes,” says Lao Zhang, stroking his beard.

    He laughs. “Also, it’s really fun.”

    Lao Zhang’s not lying; the first time I popped open the metal lid of my card to reveal a picture of the killer underneath, I felt a sharp rush of exhilaration; a jolt of adrenaline later, I was trying to transform my face into an expressionless mask. When I opened my eyes to greet my fellow killers and choose who we would be eliminating from the game, I felt a real sense of camaraderie. When nothing of value’s at stake, it’s always fun to lie, to deceive other people: it’s even more fun if a few others are in on the scheme.

ON THE WALLS of the lobby in the Chengdu Killing People Club are photographs of a gaming session, where the people playing the game have their faces covered by grey, shapeless plastic masks that resemble cartoon robot heads, with lighter, square areas of plastic in the approximate locations of the eyes and mouth.

    Because they’re unwieldy and uncomfortable, most outlets of the Club have stopped using the masks, trusting the players to close their eyes and not peek at the other people in the room. Some very serious players, however, insist that the masks are an integral part of the game. They offer insurance against cheating.

    I was sitting in the lobby of the Chengdu Killing People Club, which is more upscale than most of its counterparts, in that it has decently upholstered furniture and several computers so that dedicated players of the Game can check their e-mail between binges. The Chengdu Club also boasts a few vending machines dispensing caffeinated beverages and instant noodles which supply refreshments to late-night gamers. I was drinking a cup of muddy-tasting instant coffee and looking at these masked faces in the photographs, and then it struck me what the images reminded me of: the photographs that came out of Abu Ghraib of people being tortured: helpless captives bending down, their heads covered by hoods, blind and scared.

    In the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, millions of Chinese were systematically identified as “rightist enemies of the state.” Under the leadership of Mao Zedong, these ordinary people were rooted out and killed: teachers, intellectuals, people who wore glasses, people with good handwriting, people who owned land, and everyone else who might have been deemed a threat to the anti-intellectual, anti-capitalist regime. The government encouraged its “patriotic citizens” to be wary of their fellow men and women; informing on one’s neighbors, one’s friends, even one’s spouse, was seen as an obligation to the Supreme Leader.

    It was hell. The Cultural Revolution shattered Confucian family ties that formed the backbone of the Chinese cultural and moral system. In the name of the Chinese Communist Party, children were forced to turn against their parents. Wives publicly denounced their husbands. It was a society of paranoia, public humiliation, and private torture. It was psychological warfare: every citizen for himself.

WHILE LAO ZHANG told me that he enjoyed playing the Killing People Game, there was something about the Killing Club that seemed off—based on my first experience, it didn’t seem like anyone was having very much fun. The faces of the players ranged from grim to angry. No one smiled or laughed. Everyone seemed nervous at all times, as evidenced by the players’ compulsive chain-smoking and sunflower-seed-eating.

    At times when I played I enjoyed myself, because I had somehow stumbled onto an interesting phenomenon. But I was viewing the game as an outsider, as an observer. The more I tried to understand why people would spend their entire waking life at the Killing People Club, the more baffling the whole thing became. On several occasions, I stayed at the Club for six and seven hours at a time, well into the morning hours: by that time, playing the game had become quite unpleasant. It isn’t—and it shouldn’t be—very fun to sit in an uncomfortable, brightly lit room for prolonged periods of time. If you’re eliminated in the early stages of each round, the amount of “dead time” can be almost unbearable.

    On one occasion, I decided to play a few rounds of the game with a group who were wearing the masks. They are made from thick silver plastic; when my head was bowed, face flush against the plastic, covered in sweat, with awful music blaring in the background, it reminded me of a torture method that was used by the Germans in World War II where the enemy prisoner was blindfolded and forced to listen to the same song being played on repeat for hours at a time.

    It wasn’t fun, in the slightest, and as the game progressed when I took my mask off and looked at the other players, it seemed like they weren’t having fun, either.

IN TODAY’S CHINESE society, the echoes of the Cultural Revolution are keenly felt but never discussed. The central government decided to mark the recent fortieth anniversary of those terrible years by doing . . . absolutely nothing to remind people that the Cultural Revolution ever happened at all. In government issued history textbooks, the period from 1966 to 1976 is kongbai—a blank slate. Those years are literally not discussed. The government is attempting to erase them from history. After all, to acknowledge the atrocities committed when the Communist Party was founded would be to implicitly question the Party’s legitimacy.

    Many of the players at the Killing People Club are old enough to have lived through the Cultural Revolution; others are too young to understand the depth and scale of the atrocities that the government inflicted upon its people.

    The passion of the members of the Killing People Club often becomes brutally intense: they scream at each other and even threaten physical violence when their teammates make mistakes. The Club members are part of the white-collar class of Chinese urbanites. Yet here they are, playing unfairly victimized peasants and sinister policemen. They are paying money to engage in psychological warfare against each other, just as they, or their parents, were forced by the government to do.

    Is the popularity of the Killing People Club, then, an exercise in masochism? Is it a way to acknowledge a terrible slice of history without actually acknowledging it, in the traditional Chinese manner of defl ecting blame to avoid shame, just like Chairman Mao’s atrocities were explained away by the government when it announced that he was “70 percent right and 30 percent wrong?” Is the Killing People Club a way for educated Chinese citizens to subvert their history as victims and to become, briefly and metaphorically, the oppressor?

    Or is the game just a fad that happens to be addictive, like gambling or computer games, both of which are hugely popular in China?

WHEN I ASK Lao Zhang what he thinks of my theory, he laughs, and says that the Cultural Revolution and the Killing People Game have nothing to do with each other. He says that the game is just fun, just a way to pass the time with other intelligent people. It’s an escape, he repeats again and again, people need an escape. In China, regular people can’t get involved in politics, there’s no forum for the open discussion of ideas, and this is where the people go that would be shooting the breeze about their government in some coffee shop if they were from New York or Amsterdam. It’s just an escape, he says. There is no metaphorical meaning to it; no socially cathartic release, no cultural psychosis.

    A couple months later, I returned to Qingdao. Lao Zhang was back together with his wife, and with another of his girlfriends. He still wasn’t coming to work on a regular basis, but he’d stopped playing the Killing People Game, he told me. No more killing people. He wasn’t going there anymore. “Really?” I asked, somewhat incredulously.

    He grinned sheepishly. “Well, only once or twice a week . . .”

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_{China Underground is published by Soft Skull Press.}

Zachary Mexico started studying Chinese at age fifteen, and traveled to China for the first time at age sixteen. He has studied at Columbia University in New York and Qinghua University in Beijing. He plays in the rock group The Octagon (www.theoctagonrock.com) and the electronic duo Gates of Heaven (www.gatesofheaven.net.) He lives in New York City’s Chinatown.

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