Enemy of the State.(Travel narrative)

Beijing Second Prison is on the outskirts of the city for which it is named, and you can drive past the drab compound without ever noticing it. It's set about a tenth of a mile off the highway, and when I visit I usually have to tell the cabdriver about the exit on the left, because it's easy to miss. The first thing you see, after the turnoff, is a heavy, dun-colored metal gate framed by a white tiled arch, and then the guards standing in front with long-barrelled automatic weapons. Electrified wires are stretched taut along the top of the outer wall; it's a maximum-security facility. Inside the waiting room, adjoining the gate, I stow my purse and cell phone in a locker, present my documents, and wait to be called. The guards recognize me but maintain a professional remoteness. I'm visiting my brother, Zha Jianguo, a democracy activist serving a nine-year sentence for "subverting the state."

Jianguo was arrested and tried in the summer of 1999, and I remember with perfect clarity the moment I learned what had happened. I was standing in the kitchen of a friend's country house, outside Montreal, drinking a cup of freshly made coffee, and glancing at a story on the front page of the local newspaper. It was about a missile that China had just test-launched, which was supposed to be able to hit Alaska; in the last paragraph, Jianguo's trial was reported. I was astonished and outraged, and, as his little sister, I was fiercely proud as well: Jianguo's act of subversion was to have helped start an opposition party, the China Democracy Party (C.D.P.). It was the first time in the history of the People's Republic of China that anyone had dared to form and register an independent party. Jianguo and his fellow-activists had done so openly, peacefully. Now they were going to prison for it.

My first visits, seven years ago, were particularly arduous. I had to obtain special permits each time, and during our thirty-minute meetings Jianguo and I were flanked by two or three guards, including an officer in charge of "special" prisoners. I was shocked by how changed Jianguo was from when I'd last seen him, two years earlier. It wasn't just his prisoner's crewcut and uniform of coarse cotton, vertical white stripes on gray; his eyes were rheumy and infected, his hands and face were swollen, and his fingernails were purple, evidently from poor circulation and nutrition. We sat on opposite sides of a thick Plexiglas panel and spoke through handsets--they were an incongruous Day-Glo yellow, like a toy phone you'd give a child. Our exchanges, in those days, seemed fraught with urgency and significance. After the first few visits, I also met with the warden, who turned out to be a surprisingly cordial young man. ("You expected a green-faced, long-toothed monster, didn't you?" he said to me, smiling.) We discussed various issues regarding Jianguo's health. Within weeks, he granted my two main requests. Jianguo was taken out of the prison in a van with armed guards to a good city hospital, where he received a medical checkup, and he was moved from a noisy cell with eleven murderers to a less crowded, quieter cell.

Four years ago, I moved back to Beijing, where I write for Chinese magazines and work for an academic institute; the monthly trip to Beijing Second Prison has become a routine. I try to make conversation with the officer at the "book desk," where you can leave reading material for the prisoner you're visiting; he excludes whatever he deems "inappropriate." Anything political is likely to be rejected, although a collection of essays by Vaclav Havel got through: the officer peered at the head shot of the gloomy foreigner, but didn't know who he was.

The so-called "interview room" is a bland, tidy space, with rows of sky-blue plastic chairs along the Plexiglas divider; you can see a well-tended garden outside, with two heart-shaped flower beds. Farther away, there's a row of buildings, gray concrete boxes, where the inmates live and work. (They're allowed outdoors twice a week, for two-hour periods of open-air exercise.) You can even see the unit captain lead the prisoners, in single file, from those buildings to the interview room.

These days, I'm just another visiting relative, and, though the phones are monitored, the guards have long ago lost interest in watching my brother and me. Time passes quickly. Jianguo and I often chat like two old friends who haven't seen each other in a while. I start by inquiring after his health and general condition, then report some news about relatives or friends. After that, we might talk about the books he's read recently or discuss something in the news, such as the war in Iraq or Beijing's preparation for the 2008 Olympics. Sometimes we even exchange carefully phrased opinions on China's political situation. Finally, I make a shopping list. Each month, a prisoner is allowed about eighty yuan in spending money (about ten dollars) and a hundred and fifty yuan of extra food if a visiting relative buys it at the prison shop; this is for security reasons, but it also provides a source of income for the prison. Jianguo often asks me to buy a box of cookies. Another prisoner, who is serving a ten-year sentence for being a "Taiwanese spy," has been teaching him English. The man's wife left him, and no one comes to visit. Apparently, he really likes the cookies.

In the first couple of years, I kept asking Jianguo whether he was ever beaten or hurt in any way. "I'm on pretty good terms with all the officers," he would tell me. "They are just following orders, but they all know why I got here, and they've never touched me. My cellmates have fights among themselves but never with me. They all kind of respect me." He told me that the jailers let it drop when he refused to answer if he was addressed as fan ren (or "convict") So-and-So; he objects to the title because he doesn't believe that he committed a crime. He has also refused to take part in the manual work that all prisoners in his unit are supposed to do: packing disposable chopsticks and similar chores.