Why is it said never to test human nature?
I met a girl, 23 years old, during a customs raid.
From the moment she unpacked her bags, to the discovery of the drugs, and even to the end, her eyes were animated and relaxed, as if she was sure that she would remain unharmed.
I also believed that she was supposed to be innocent.
Until the last moment.
The day was April 3, 2010, and I clearly remember it was a Ching Ming Festival holiday, the weather was humid, and I was working the evening shift with an old customs officer, Huang, who wasn’t that old either.
When Huang was checking the X-ray machine, he found a large regular shadow in one of the suitcases, and we immediately called the owner of this luggage, a girl, over for questioning.
Huang asked her: What are you doing in Vietnam?
The girl said: to travel, now ready to go back.
Huang said: Where are you going back?
The girl said: back to Guangxi to work.
This time, we all brought gloves, pull open the suitcase, which is very ordinary, are some clothes and daily necessities.
Huang reached to the back of the suitcase, and sure enough there was something inside.
He took a knife and cut open the suitcase, inside there was some yellow transparent tape wrapped around something, tear open the transparent tape, it was a few layers of tinfoil.
He took the tinfoil packet out, opened it, and inside was the plastic bag, and a strong acidic odor spread out.
The girl had absolutely no expression, as if the suitcase had nothing to do with her, and we asked the armed police soldiers to keep an eye on her.
We help her pull the goods of the Vietnamese wife (the border there are many Vietnamese specializing in helping travelers pull boxes with things, generally called the port mother) also called over, she did not know anything, just said that the girl let her help pull the box.
We took out the reagent box test, this time it is very obvious, the test paper shows the color and the color of heroin is exactly the same, we immediately called the anti-smuggling department and the leadership of the Customs and Excise Department, said we found a large bag of heroin.
The duty leader took it very seriously and said to come over immediately with the duty leader of the smuggling investigation department.
And this is the first time in my life to see heroin, the first time to smell the heroin emitted a bad smell of a sour odor.
We weighed, two pieces of heroin gross weight a total of 2.23 kilograms, I took out the girl’s passport to see, found that her surname Tang, three words, a little fat, not very high, skin a little black, she is a year younger than me, 87 years in October, but looks like it may be a little older than me, Chongqing Wushan people.
Unlike the last person we checked out, she didn’t run, she didn’t panic, we asked her to come with us to the duty room, she was cooperative and relaxed.
We were going to cuff her, and she said there was no need to cuff her, that she was innocent, that she didn’t even know what it was or who put it in her bag, but that she would definitely cooperate with our investigation.
This is a very odd thing, she does not admit that it is her, a question three do not know, how can cooperate with the investigation.
Two soldiers stood beside her and she sat on our wooden bench.
I stood next to her and said, “You are a year younger than me, we are all the same age, you now say that we caught you down the line you can not sit in jail for a few years, the future of the road is quite long ah.
She still said she didn’t know.
I poured her a glass of water, she stood up and took it, leaning against our table.
I’ll never forget the question she asked me: Have you ever been to Vietnam for fun?
I was shocked and I said: never been.
Then she started to talk about some things, she introduced me to the sea in Nha Trang is very beautiful, she said that you can dive there, she also said that there are a lot of good food in Ho Chi Minh City, she also said that she had been to Thailand and where else to play.
Then later she realized how I talk, began to introduce her work in Guangdong, she said she had been working for many years to save money for her mother, but also said that she had met a particularly considerate boyfriend, finally able to go to Southeast Asia to play with his boyfriend, and so on and so forth.
In fact, I was curious why his boyfriend did not come back with her, but I did not ask her anything.
Ten minutes later, the duty customs leaders, the investigation of private section and reconnaissance section are people over, a few leaders and asked her how this matter, so that she cooperate with the Customs and Excise Department, an honest account of the situation, but at this time she did not recognize that these things and she has a relationship with a bite and she does not have anything to do with it.
The chief of the investigation section Xi also persuaded ten minutes, reported to the leadership, shook his head, and said to the soldiers: take back to the Customs shut up.
We took her back to the prison with her Vietnamese mother, who kept crying there.
Because of the shortage of manpower during the vacation period, I watched her at night, she was locked up in the iron door of the detention room, the Vietnamese were next door, and I was outside the iron door with two fighters, I had a folding bed and one of them had a bench.
I gave a blanket to each of the two men locked up, and the Vietnamese mother almost brought me to my knees.
The girl remained calm and didn’t say much until after 1:00 p.m., when Xico came over, took her cell phone, and gave it to her, saying, Answer the phone.
She said, who?
Xi Ke said, you will know when you answer it.
On the other end of the phone was this little girl’s mother, they spoke in a dialect that I did not understand, and then she cried, cried very sadly that kind of thing, I have not seen anyone so sadly cried, so far I have never seen.
About ten minutes, Xi Ke put the phone to the past, to her, said: the situation I have given your family said, what you want to say tonight can think about, tomorrow morning we will come back to find you, but you estimate that you know, you have no value.
Then Xi Ke gave me and the soldiers said: sleep a little at night, she can not run away, what she loves to say to her just say; this kind of people also dare not die, I’m in the office, there are things to find me.
She cried for a while, began to talk to me, I looked at her, ignored her, she was crying while talking.
She said her family lives in the mountains of Chongqing, very remote mountains, the Three Gorges can not even flooded the kind of mountains filled with water.
She also said that she was the eldest sister and had to pay for her two younger brothers to go to school. She said that there was no telephone in her house and that it was very difficult to contact her mother.
She also said that her brother was very cute, could do farm work, and was a better student than her.
She said that it was very difficult for her to go back home, and that she had been working in Guangdong since she was 16 years old, and had not finished junior high school, and that she had worked in a textile factory and then in an electronics factory.
She said her parents are honest farmers, the mountains have not been out of the family’s little land to live, the mountains are not much out of it.
Growing up in the city before I went to many poor places, I have no concept of these things, I think this person is quite interesting, the beginning of nothing to say, and now no one let her talk, she said everything.
Then she talked about her boyfriend, a black man, who took her to a lot of places and bought her a lot of stuff, and then they went to Vietnam, Cambodia, and Burma and asked her to bring stuff back to China, and she got a lot of money for one trip.
I was curious and finally looked at her then asked her, how many times have you brought it and how much was it once?
She said three times, 20,000 dollars a time.
I was mentally shocked, not because she said she brought it a few times, but two kilograms of heroin only gave 20,000 dollars, to know that has been ten thousand! And people who risk their lives to transport drugs, only to get a mere 20,000 dollars, I was estimating how to be 80,000 dollars to be worth doing.
Later she said again and again about the poverty of their mountainous areas, working in Guangzhou, Southeast Asia, the journey, she even said that she wanted to merit redemption, she said she wanted to take the things to Changsha, and said that in the future must be a good life.
The soldiers and I, already steeped in little interest, drifted off to sleep, and then it seemed as if she began to cry again.
Early the next morning, Xi Ke came with two men, and weeping and red-eyed, she grasped the iron fence and said, “I’ll tell you everything! I’ll tell you everything! I’ll tell you everything! I went back to the dormitory to catch up on my sleep after the private investigation came, and later I learned that she really did tell me everything, from the character of her family to the details of how she transported the drugs.
I later learned that Xi Ke called her mom and said, “Your daughter is going to be shot, tell her to come and meet her sometime.
Xi Ke wasn’t lying to her or her mom. Judicial practice is that if a drug underling can’t be caught, all culpability rests with that person, and there will be no mitigating or extenuating circumstances for that person if they don’t cooperate with law enforcement’s investigative efforts.
Chinese law 50 grams of drugs can be sentenced to death, more than ten years ago, for 2.23 kilograms of heroin has been unquestionably to death.
You guys say the next day she did not all confess?
But we all know that if her upline or downline can not contact her for 30 or 60 minutes, then these people will disappear forever, and it is almost impossible to find them again with the existing means of investigation.
So the crime of smuggling 2.23 kilograms of heroin and resisting law enforcement investigation all rested on her.
This is the last time I saw her, I can’t forget her soulful eyes when she told me the story of Vietnam for the first time, I can’t forget her sad cry, I can’t forget the night she wrote a story to me like a story to recall her life inside the iron window, I can’t forget the way she looked with red eyes when she was crazy and said that I had all tricks, these looks have been engraved in my mind.
I sighed at the poverty of life will be a person into this, but also sighed at her weak legal awareness and unrealistic fantasies about material life.
In October of this year, I saw her again on a notice: I handed over to the Fangchenggang City Procuratorate 4.3 drug smuggling case suspect Tang Moying, female, 23 years old, for drug smuggling crimes by the Fangchenggang City Intermediate People’s Court sentenced to death immediate execution, deprivation of political rights for life.
Later, we drank together, I asked Xi Ke, this person female imprisoned after what happened?
Her family came to see her?
Xi Ke said: this kind of people are more or less the same, the beginning is to cry, go to the arraignment once crying; later the court a trial, let her family to come, no one to come, the later things have nothing to do with us, I do not know what it is like to wait for the death of that time.
In the end, her parents did not come out of the mountains to this place they certainly do not know to see her one last time, perhaps because of the lack of money or do not want to see her it, up to now, I do not know, but what I know is that they must have also cried a lot of sadness it.
Just like I saw her crying that day.
Assisting in the first heroin case in the history of Dongxing made me reap another commendation, but I couldn’t be happy because this time I witnessed the loss of a life – and, until now, I didn’t feel much when I met the little girl crying because I hadn’t seen one who cried so much as she did ……
