IT IS morning once again and Angel Mou Pui-peng rises from her bed, careful not to make too much noise, lest she wake the other Hong Kong girl sleeping in the cell next door. After another restless night spent tossing and turning, the dark thoughts having made their grim, incessant march through her head, she slips off her cot and over to the desk where she keeps her paper, her pens and the photos of her nine-year-old son, Andy. Or is it Gary? In the nearly three years the 25-year-old has been in Singapore's Changi prison, her son has changed his English name so many times, she no longer knows it. In turn, he knows nothing about why his mother disappeared in August 1991, never to wrap her arms around him or place her cheek against his again. He only knows that she is somewhere in Singapore and that she is alive.
Angel begins a letter to her younger sister Mei-mei. 'It has been a long time since I wrote,' she pens in careful Chinese characters.
'I am becoming more forgetful. Could you send me my birthday cards?' There was a time when Angel thought she might have a chance of being returned to Hong Kong around the time of her birthday on July 9. She wanted to read the stack of good wishes at home. So she asked Mei-mei to collect them all and keep them there, as a symbol of good faith, a reflection of the hope she maintains for her release. However, when she lost her court appeal on July 11, she came to the realisation that the only way she was going to read her cards was if they were sent to her, care of Singapore's death row.
'I have heard from the girl in the cell next door that there are some Hong Kong cemeteries that are for life,' she writes, no trace of irony. 'Could you please help me look for one? 'Also please try to find me an urn with black roses for my ashes. And please find me that eternal cemetery. Only then will I be able to rest in peace.
'Don't just read this and forget about it. I want you to go and do this, Mei-mei.' The tone of her correspondence, which throughout her years in death row has been characteristically cheerful and selfless, has now become adamant and stern. Who can blame Angel? She has made mistakes during her life - and at least an irreparable one. So is it too much to ask for her own death right? And then Angel, who before her imprisonment supported her mother, Mei-mei and her son Gary, snaps back into her selfless role. She writes: 'Accept my fate. Some things are just meant to be. It's destiny. We have to accept reality, Mei-mei. Death comes to us all sooner or later.' She signs her name and then adds a postscript. 'If we don't have to use the urn,' she writes, 'we can use it in the house as a vase.' Mei-mei meticulously folds the letter and returns it to the tidy pouch where she keeps all of her sister's correspondence. She has agreed to meet us, hoping that in telling her sister's story something, anything, will happen to help Angel.
Angel, who has already lost her case and an appeal in the Singapore court, has one chance left. An appeal for clemency, which is a plea to the Singaporean president, Ong Teng Cheong. It is a plea for mercy based on humanitarian and compassionate grounds, a legal version of a very basic sentiment: 'I do not want to die. Please, please allow me to live.' Earlier, in February, Mei-mei described for us the events that led to her sister's ordeal in Singapore.