Chasing the Dragon (11 page)

Although I knew Goko’s name, I’d never met him. For some years I had sent him messages, but he had always refused to see me. The messages had been simple, like “Jesus loves you.” I could understand why Goko did not want to see me, but not why he had gone to the trouble of sending me a guard for the club.

“Goko said if anyone bothers you or touches this place, we’re gonna ‘do’ him,” my protector continued. He demonstrated exactly how they intended to “do” him rather graphically as he picked up an imaginary dagger and thrust it low into a victim’s belly.

“Thank you very much, how kind of you—I’m really most grateful,” I said. “Would you mind telling Goko that I’m most appreciative of his offer and don’t want to offend him, but that I don’t accept it. Actually, Jesus is looking after us.”

“
Yau moe gau chor
.” The Cantonese expression is the equivalent of “you must be cracked.” The stranger was not at all impressed with my stand; his contemptuous expression showed that he thought he was talking to a crazy Westerner. Anyone who thought that Jesus was a fit protector here in the Walled City had to be deranged.

The following evening my protector returned, and the night after that as well. He clocked in every night just like a night watchman. I discovered that his name was Winson and that he was under orders to watch the club. I began to tell him about Jesus. He certainly did not want to hear what I told him, but as he was on guard duty, he had to stay. After a few nights of softening up, he began to talk about a friend of his who had an opium problem. I soon realized that this friend was Winson himself. So I told him that opium was no problem.

All you have to do with anyone who has an opium or a heroin problem or any other kind of addiction is to lock them in a room for a week. Certainly they suffer agonies during the process of coming off the drug—they may even lose their sanity—but they will also lose their physical dependence. However, the cure does not last; as soon as you unlock the door, they will go straight out to take whatever drug it is to which they are addicted, because their mind and their heart continue to crave it with a force they cannot possibly control themselves. Only Jesus, the Lord of life, can settle a person’s heart inside and take away the craving.

I told Winson this many times. He always stood outside the club door, lounging in proprietary fashion. He would never condescend to come in, never interfere. He watched and listened to the boys’ spirited renderings of the current “in” hymn. Then one night, late in the evening when the club was almost empty, I said, “Now, how about you coming inside and praising God.”

“Okay,” he said without hesitation.

I was stunned, for by this time I knew who Winson really was. His rank in the 14K Triad was number 426, which meant that he had the special rank of fight-fixer. His job was to fix the fights and choose the weapons, the location and the strategy. He was a very tough Triad indeed. And yet here he was standing inside my club praising God at the top of his voice. He was belting out, solo, “Give me oil in my lamp” as loudly as he could, and as he had no idea how to sing, it was an amazing noise—a wonderful burst of tuneless sound. Then he began to pray in Chinese—mercifully, he had never heard anyone praying before,
so it came out quite spontaneously. I have never since listened to such a joyous prayer. I kept thinking,
Where did he get that from?
Although, of course, I knew.

It was an extraordinary session, for the next moment Winson began praising God in a new language. This was even more surprising, as he had never heard about the gift from me, nor to my knowledge had he heard anyone else speaking in tongues. After about half an hour, he stopped. The miracle had taken place; he and I knew that he was completely cured of his drug addiction. He had come through withdrawal as he prayed.

When his voice died away, I told him, “Praise the Lord; that is wonderful. Now what you have to do next is to lead your gang to make the same discovery for themselves. You can’t follow your big brother Goko anymore. No man can have two Big Brothers. You have to follow Jesus or Goko. You cannot follow both.”
³
So Winson went back to his gang leader Goko to tell him and the other gang leaders that he now believed in Jesus.

It was Ah Sor, at 18 already a seasoned jailbird, who told me later what had happened the night of the attack on the club. One of the boys had had some troubles, which he felt were all my fault. (These dropout kids had such a problem with authority that whenever anything went wrong in their lives they blamed the nearest establishment figure.) He had come round and started yelling and throwing things at the Youth Club windows. This incited his friends to action, and soon they were all on the rampage. Most of them had no idea what they were angry about; it was just mob violence.

Goko had a report within hours about this mayhem on his patch and was so displeased that he summoned the offenders to appear before him. He ordered them to return anything they had taken and to go back to the Youth Club the next night and behave.

“Can’t do that,” one of them replied. “We’ve broken up the place; she’ll never welcome us back.”

“Oh yes she will,” Goko had said, “because Miss Poon is a Christian and she’ll forgive you no matter how many times you
offend. She’ll open the door and welcome you back.”

So they had come back, and Goko had sent Winson to see that his orders were carried out. I felt very small when I heard what he had said. Obviously he knew how Christians were supposed to behave, even though my inclination had been to do exactly the opposite.

Now that I knew Big Brother was watching, I was much encouraged in the direction the club had taken. Something of Jesus had got through, unaided by social programs and church services. Most of the hangers-on had by now disappeared, as they discovered that I was speaking the truth when I said there were no more funds apart from what I was putting in myself. There was no social advantage in being a member of our club; in fact, quite the reverse—most other churches definitely disapproved of this disorganized Youth Center. Social workers and youth counselors who visited me asked what the program was. I found this rather difficult to explain in terms of a schedule.

“Well, I open the club door at night and sometimes one person comes, sometimes 50. I make friends with them and talk. Sometimes we sing or pray; sometimes we go on an outing. I maybe sit all night with one who has no place to sleep or share a bowl of rice with a hungry one.” Finally, I hit on an impressive phrase. “I’m doing unstructured youth work” was my reply to the social workers, who nodded earnestly and decided that this was the latest sociological technique already pioneered in forward-looking countries.

I had tried regular projects, but they were rarely successful, and I was frustrated in looking for helpers who would understand this. We had a football coach at one time who rented a playing field and had weekly training sessions. All the boys were crazy about football, and over 40 signed up for the activity. Twenty of them turned up for the first practice; the next week there were 10; the third week there were none at all.

The coach was most discouraged and wanted to quit and teach at the YMCA, where the youngsters were really keen. I tried to make him understand what had happened. The Walled
City boys lived such strange lives that they usually had no idea what day of the week it was. They slept by day and got up in the evening, as most of the vice operations they were associated with happened at nighttime. Sometimes they stayed up for 72 hours at a time or slept for two days. They stayed in gang pads, opium dens or wherever they could find a floor or staircase. The idea of football was most attractive, but actually getting there was another matter. They did mean to go, but they had absolutely no self-discipline. The third week of the course one of their brothers had got married, so they all went to the wedding feast. It never occurred to them to inform the instructor or me.

Had the instructor come back the following week, he would have found perhaps a couple of lads, and the next week four and the week after that maybe a dozen. Once they had the idea that the instructor was really concerned about them and would turn up even in a typhoon for one boy, they would have given him their loyalty and their friendship. Eventually, he would have built up a team for life.

Many people came to me and asked to help in the club. It sounded romantic and exciting to work in the Walled City, but few stuck it out more than a few weeks. If they held classes or games that were not well supported, they lost heart and never returned. I needed to find Christian workers who loved the people they were working with more than the activity through which they were trying to reach them.

Like the Walled City boys, I now slept by day and got up at night, at least in theory. In fact, since I had language lessons, court appearances, prison visits and other matters concerned with sorting out problems for them, it meant that I was also up by day. Every day, the only way I could get out of bed was by promising myself that I could come back and sleep later in the day. “I will. I really will,” I would mutter as I struggled into consciousness, but I never did. Instead, I learned how to catnap, sleeping on buses and ferries.

One night, we went to the hills for a barbecue. It was the Autumn Moon Festival, and the boys had strung up paper
lanterns all over the hillside. In the clear moonlight, I saw a large, rough-looking young tough sitting among us and stuffing himself with pork chops, beef steaks and chicken wings. As I had bought all these myself and had reckoned on them being sufficient for our entire coach load, I was quite mad at him. But while I watched, the other boys gave him their rations and seemed mesmerized by his every word. Ah Ping whispered that this was his own
daih lo
, the leader of his particular gang and of most of those present. He was actually the real brother of Goko and was the number two in the Walled City. As more and more of his “brothers” had been attending our club, Sai Di, curious and maybe a little jealous, had decided to come to this function himself. If he chose to, he had the power to run all the boys and the club itself, so there was a distinct possibility that this was a takeover bid.

“Would you mind coming for a talk?” I asked him and indicated a small patch of scrub just over the crest. He was amused at this request from a mere girl and made a great show of rising from his haunches and lumbering toward me amidst cat-calls and whistles. But when we were out of earshot, he dropped the macho attitude and listened quite seriously when I told him that the whole reason for the club was that I wanted them to know the love of Jesus.

His reply was an indictment and a confirmation. “I know,” he said. “We’ve been watching you. Many missionaries come to Hong Kong to help us poor people. They put us in sociological boxes and analyze us. Then they take our pictures to shock the Westerners by our living conditions. Some men get famous because they’ve been here. But inside the Walled City, we usually get rid of them within six months.” He spoke maliciously. “We find ways to discourage them until they have no heart to continue—had you been a man, we would have had you beaten long ago.”

He added, “We couldn’t care less if you have big buildings or small ones. You can be offering free rice, free schools, judo classes or needlework to us. It doesn’t matter if you have a daily
program or hymn-singing once a week. These things don’t touch us because the people who run them have nothing to do with us. What we want to know is if you are concerned with us. Now you have been here for four years, and we have decided that maybe you mean what you say.”

I did not sing in front of him, but there, on a hump in the Chinese mountains, my heart was bursting.

Now that the “rice Christians” had departed from our club, I found that those who remained were the ones who wanted to be friends and who eventually would become interested in spiritual things. Because they could not understand why I would actually be there if I had not been sent by an overseas church, they began to consider seriously the possibility that Jesus was real. One day, we were sitting on the benches in the clubroom when Ah Keung, known as the Walled City joker and a great friend of Ah Ping’s, said, “Poon Siu Jeh, we sat up for the whole night last evening discussing you, and we came to one of two conclusions. Either the British government has sent you here as a spy, or what you say about Jesus must be true, because there can’t be any other explanation. Nobody’s going to spend their life with us down here unless they have to, or unless Jesus is real.”

So Ah Keung became a believer too, and he proved to be a most “hot-hearted,” enthusiastic Christian. I began to visit him and soon found out his fearful background. Ah Keung was one of six sons who lived with their father in the western district on Hong Kong Island. His mother had run away after the birth of the sixth boy and gone to live with a policeman. His father was a member of the powerful Wo Shing Wo Triad society that controlled that area, but after his friend was murdered in a gang fight, he decided to move to a new environment and chose a room in the Walled City. He worked as a
for-gei
in a gambling den doing
pin-mun
, meaning that he did odd jobs in the den, including collecting bets and pawning the gamblers’ watches. As this was a night job, he never saw his sons during the day,
and they were not brought up at all. When they woke, they ate their father’s food, should there be any; and if not, they went to beg it from neighbors and street stalls.

As they grew older, the brothers became clever confidence tricksters. None of them went to school and, of course, they were all Triad members. The eldest three were imprisoned at the ages of 13, 14 and 15 for selling drugs; not only did they make money this way, but they also each became addicted. Later, the fifth and sixth brothers were also arrested for drug-related crimes, and the sixth had received a sentence of six months hard labor by the time he was 14. Ah Keung was the only brother who was never in prison, because he became a Christian just in time.

One night he rushed into the clubroom panting that I had to come to his home quickly. I ran down the street after him, dodging in and out of the prostitutes and around the gambling den where Ah Keung’s father worked. I had to step with care here, for the entrance to Ah Keung’s alleyway was very slimy. The gamblers used that alley to relieve themselves in the absence of toilets. It was 18 inches wide and led to a stone staircase that was crumbling and dripping with green slime. The atmosphere was evil.