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Treacherous Bodies
If I had it to write over, I would mention that China has no rule of law: that justice is handed down by local governors who have taken the place of the mandarins and warlords. The more things change the more they stay the same.— February 12, 2008 10:22 p.m.
Treacherous Bodies
At some point while strolling through the Bodies exhibit it dawns on you that every corpse is Chinese. Most of them are young Chinese men, to be specific, their testicles separated and exposed to the crowds. I never realized before how, when you remove the scrotum, the two testes separate and hang straight down like pendulums. Or both layers of the scrotum resected so that the dead organ underneath is exposed like a window within a window. In 1980 while walking through the city of Shenzhen in southern China a dark, blue, unmarked wagon full of prisoners passed me. All I could see of the prisoners was their hands clutching the bars of the small window at the back of the wagon, and in that way they gave themselves some little stability as the prison wagon bounced along the road. Years later I saw a TV documentary on the many healthy, young men who were executed in China with a bullet to the back of the brain -- a method of execution that preserves the health of the kidney -- and then their kidneys were sold to Americans for $5,000 each. What does it take to be a criminal in China? Could it be that these men and women were what we would call heroes? The young man who faced off a tank just before the massacre at Tienamen Square. Is he now stripped of his skin, posed like an Olympic discus thrower, with his dead naked penis exposed to the world at University Towne Centre? And did some sadistic Communist officer in a drab green uniform torment him with that thought before his execution? "I will strip your skin off your body and expose your organs to the world forever!" Maybe it's better if I don't know.— February 6, 2008 8:42 p.m.