(i)
I woke up on the morning of my arrest with a jittery mind. For the past few days, I had been cooperating with the police in an in-depth investigation as the custodian of the cash because the company’s safe had been burglarized. After a hasty breakfast, I put on a pair of black stockings, corset, white satin blouse, and a light blue women’s suit and overskirt, drew a light makeup, and draped my long hair loosely over my shoulders, and hurriedly left the house to go to work.
I was busy working as usual, the general manager’s secretary, Ms. Wu walked in and said that the general manager was waiting to see me in the conference room. I followed Ms. Wu to the door of the conference room, she stopped, opened the door of the conference room and said: “Ms. Wen please come in.” I just stepped out, the door closed behind me.
The general manager was not in the room! Replaced by a man and a woman two police officers, saw me come in, the male police officer said to me: “Ms. Wen, you are suspected of economic crimes and arrested.” The words did not fall, the policewoman from the pocket touched out a pair of shiny not steel handcuffs, twisted my hands, only to hear the “click” sound, my wrists and cool and numb, my hands were firmly handcuffed.
Stunned by this sudden turn of events, I whispered and begged them to wait until they were out of the office before locking my handcuffs. “No!” The policewoman’s voice was cold and firm. I was escorted out of the conference room by the two policemen, and as I walked through the long office hall, I felt the astonished gazes and cutting whispers of my coworkers, and I was simply ashamed of myself.
I was shoved into a police car that was already waiting at the door and escorted to the local police station.
In a small room, a young male police officer, after asking me some basic questions such as my name, age, etc., uncuffed me, ordered me to remove my high heels and jerked off the belt on my suit skirt, and then lay on my stomach on a table, where he twisted my hands behind my back and handcuffed them behind my back, and then glued a cloth tag with my name on it to my back, and locked me in to a walled and barred cage with walls on three sides and an iron fence on the other. cage with walls on three sides and an iron fence on one side. Inside were about a dozen men and women, all handcuffed behind their backs like me, squatting there facing the wall.
Towards the middle of the afternoon, more and more people were being locked up in the cages. At this time, some female police officers came and took a long chain with handcuff rings and put each ring on the foot of a female prisoner, so that the female prisoners were chained together by such an ankle chain! We were put on a bus with bars on the windows, which was specially designed for transporting prisoners. After a short while, the male prisoners were also chained together in a long line of anklets, and were escorted to the bus with their heads in their hands.
The prison bus drove for about an hour to a prison on the outskirts of the city that specialized in unsolved crimes. First, we passed through several thick iron gates, and the male prisoners in the same car were escorted out of the car. After the prison bus drove through one or two more iron gates, a few of us female prisoners were also escorted off the bus. The escorting policewoman handed over the list of prisoners to the prison guards, and after naming the prisoners one by one, they unlocked our handcuffs and ankles… Under the escort of the guards, we lined up in rows and headed towards an eerie house…
The house snapped to life with the sound of a young woman’s heart-rending screams.
(ii)
In a windowless but blindingly brightly lit room, a fat policewoman ordered us to line up with our backs to her, checking the tags on our backs against the roster sent by the police department. Then she ordered us to turn around, cleared her throat, and began to lecture.
“Ladies, as much as you hate it, we have to follow orders. None of you are yet prisoners until the court has officially found you ladies guilty. Therefore, here you can use your own names, wear your own clothes, and keep your long hair. In other words, except for the lack of freedom, you’ll be treated like normal citizens. However, in order to prevent any accidents during your stay here, you must be shackled, after all, most of you will be sent to prison as a real female criminal in a few days. Is that clear? Ladies, let’s do it!”
At that moment, two female police officers came into the room carrying a pile of heavy iron handcuffs and threw them on the concrete floor, the heavy sound of metal clanging made every one of us female inmates tremble with fear.
“Start with her.” The chubby female officer said, pointing at me.
I was immediately handcuffed and shackled with my hands twisted behind my back, and then they used a long chain to connect my handcuffs and shackles into one place and locked me at the waist with a lock.
When a few of us female prisoners were escorted into a long corridor covered with iron cell doors on both sides with clanking shackles, we were surprised to find that behind the iron doors were all male prisoners. They squeezed their faces as hard as they could towards the small window of the cell door and looked greedily at us, a few of us dressed as flowery yuppies.
The police officer who escorted us seemed to have read our minds, and she said with a disdainful skim, “This is a detention center, and the number of female prisoners is very small, so of course we won’t build a special boudoir for you bitches. The easternmost two rooms are used to lock you up, when you go to prison, ten or eight years, want to see a man is not easy.”
(iii)
The verdict was made in the morning, and in this case, I was the only female offender, and when I was escorted into the hall by two female bailiffs, there were immediately countless lenses of cameras and camcorders aimed at me. As a young and beautiful woman, my blushing face was connected to the root of my neck.
When I heard that my sentence was twenty years, I blacked out and almost fell. A sharp jolt of pain in my buttocks brought me back to my senses, and it turned out that two female bailiffs were in the background giving me a heart-strengthening shot.
When I returned to the detention center, I was changed to a prison cell with several female prisoners who had been sentenced earlier, where the custodial measures were very strict and the guards were watching you almost every moment. Compared with the unsentenced prisoners, we had no time to let off steam, and we ate, drank, shit, pissed and slept twenty-four hours a day, all in this crowded room.
A few days later, late at night, the lights in the cell suddenly came on, the alarm bell rang loudly, and before we female prisoners could figure out what had happened, we were removed from the handcuffs and shackles, made to put on a diaper each, and then escorted to the prison van, tied up with ropes like dumplings, and whizzed away in the night.
As the day dawned, we could finally see that the chairs across from the prison wagon were filled with male prisoners, all of whom were also tied up in knots. However, the ropes used to bind them and the chains used to lock them together were much thicker than those used to bind us female prisoners. As a favor to the ladies, we were allowed to sit on the seats instead of squatting like them.
In the afternoon, the prison bus arrived at a prison, with male prisoners were escorted off the bus. After the roll call, I realized that one was missing, at which point the guards ordered a very young and sturdy female prisoner next to me to get off the bus, and she said firmly, “This is a male prison, I’m not going!”
The guards had no choice but to take out her file and show it to her. I glanced at it from the side and saw that the gender column was indeed “male”! The female guard who was escorting me realized that I was looking at her and immediately slapped me twice.
The police were busy unchaining the woman beside me from the women’s prison. The woman struggled desperately, letting out ear-piercing screams, but was finally dragged off the prison bus. God knows what life would be like after that… It was around midnight when we finally arrived at the women’s prison.
(to be continued)