Chasing the Dragon (17 page)

One day, he turned up high on heroin to confess to having taken part in a recent robbery in which a policeman had been wounded. We persuaded him to give himself up, but 10 minutes later he ran away. Since he had spoken of a gun, I rang the police and had six carloads of detectives screeching through the harbor tunnel and up to the flat, waving revolvers, as they thought he was still there. Embarrassed, we tried to smile at crowding neighbors as if nothing unusual were happening. They all thought us extremely unfriendly not to divulge the details. A series of detectives greedily ate our meals and kept a watch on the house for 24 hours. One pair skipped half of their night shift to find a better class of food, leaving us a nightspot telephone number where they might be reached in case of further developments.

It all turned out to be a hoax. Ah Hung appeared a day later to own up that he had not taken part in the crime. I did not believe him, and so I took him off to the police to confess. This was the best thing that could have happened to Ah Hung, because, according to information that the police later received, there was no way he could have been party to this robbery. He was jeered at for making up such a story under the influence of drink and heroin. But it was exactly what was needed to force his drug taking into the open and bring him to the point of truly seeking help.

The Walled City boys clearly needed discipline, and I was quite unable to give enough. Part of my difficulty was that I had reached the boys through being their friend and equal and it was hard to make the transition into being their teacher or pastor.
I had become so involved with them that I was not firm enough, so they came in at all hours of the night and morning, left me to do all the drudgery of the housework, and were not growing up as I had hoped. Since I was out most of the night myself, it was difficult to check up on what they were doing. I began to pray that God would send someone else to look after the house so that I would be free to get back on the streets.

To ease the pressure on me, I asked two Chinese young Christian men to join us and to help run the house to free me for other work. This was not a success, however. They wanted a salary that I could not promise; they wanted to be addressed as “teacher”; and they felt that any kind of manual work was beneath them, since they were church workers. When I rose in the morning, I asked them if they had woken up the other boys and prepared the breakfast. They replied that they were too busy having their “quiet times,” that is, times for praying and reading the Bible. Their idea of the teaching role was to hold a Bible study with the boys and preach at them for one and a half hours. I discovered that this was how they had been taught to conduct Christian work—having meetings, having a title and preaching was as much as they understood. They had not learned about Jesus washing His disciples’ feet.

To help both myself and the boys, I often took them to the Willanses’ meetings, which they loved. The meetings were always translated into Chinese so that they could fully join in and meet Christians from other countries and backgrounds. Because of this, many people prayed for us; but sadly, no one wanted to be further involved. One day, Jean Willans firmly spoke to me, “If you have to work with these boys, all right, Jackie, but you don’t have to
live
with them. At least have somewhere where you can escape from them and regain your strength in peace.” I did not understand this attitude; in fact, I could not understand why the whole world did not want to work in the Walled City. If someone passing through Hong Kong said he was praying about finding work, I always thought,
You don’t have to pray any longer. Can’t you see the Walled City? There it is
. I did not want to be anywhere else, yet
I felt defensive about my work, exhausted but unable to escape the maternal obligations to my children.

Yet despite the confusion in my disorderly home, I learned that God would often use very young believers to encourage me and the others. All those who became Christians received the power of the Spirit at the same time they believed, just as Winson and Ah Ming had. We encouraged them to share spiritual gifts when meeting together, so they knew clearly that having these gifts was no cause for pride but a way of helping one another. One night we were praying when one of those boys had a prophecy; he said that God had given him the words to speak. “Go and pick the cabbages, and quickly catch the bus.” It sounded a startling message. My Cantonese still had some gaps, and it took a few minutes’ search through a dictionary before I found the correct translation. “The harvest is ready; go out and work to gather it in.”
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There and then we went into the streets and talked to the street sleepers around our alley. One man, impressed to see people of his own background changed and starting a new life, prayed with us and later came off drugs in our house.

I was also much heartened by the boys another time when I arrived home exhausted and deeply worried about the situation in the house. Mary had left; the two youth workers had departed. I was feeling quite unable to manage the many converts plus a succession of boys referred by prison workers. I wondered if people in other countries could have the problems with new Christians that I did, because I certainly did not read about them.

“Please find me a nice, encouraging Bible verse,” I asked the boys, feeling too tired to give them a teaching lesson. After thumbing through the Bible for some minutes, the most encouraging thing any one of them could find was a very depressing text from Revelation. “Enough of that,” I decided. “Let’s pray instead.”

As we were praying, I had a message in tongues, and one of the boys interpreted it immediately. He had only been to school
for a couple of years in his life. He could not read the Bible, and he had only believed in Jesus for a few days before this event. But his interpretation was a clear, direct quotation from the psalms:

Those who sow in tears

Will reap with songs of joy

He who goes out weeping,

Carrying seed to sow,

Will return with songs of joy,

Carrying sheaves with him.

Unless the Lord builds the house,

Its builders labor in vain …

In vain you rise early

And stay up late, Toiling for food to eat—

For he grants sleep to those he loves.
⁷

These spiritual babes through the working of the Holy Spirit were able to say exactly the right words to me at that time. Thus ministered to, I could not agree with those who considered spiritual gifts merely an optional extra. It was no wonder that St. Paul exhorted us to desire these gifts, for their purpose is to edify one another and thus glorify God.
⁸

I knew that God would provide for me, but as the family in Lung Kong Road grew, I was amazed to see our income grow, too.
⁹
Ever since I had stopped teaching full-time, I found that I received all that I needed. I was able to pay for the rent, the Youth Club room and my language lessons. Sometimes a check would arrive in the post. Sometimes a friend would give exactly the same amount as I had been praying for. When I wanted to buy a rubber boat for a swimming expedition with the boys, a friend sent the right sum from England without knowing the need. Now, while we never had enough money to pay for the next week’s food or rent, we always had enough for each day. This was exhilarating for the boys, who felt they had a real part in God’s work when they prayed each morning for their daily
bread. Sometimes an anonymous sack of rice would appear on the doorstep; on one occasion, it was a coffee table.

Every Sunday after the morning meeting, we invited many people to lunch with us all at Lung Kong Road. A number of guests needed the good meal, so it was sad when one Sunday I had to tell the boys that we had no money for food.

“Boil the rice anyway, and we’ll pray for something to put on top,” I said. Ten minutes before lunch, a panting and sweating visitor arrived carrying tins of food and fresh bean sprouts. His Kowloon Bible class had made a collection for us on the spur of the moment and sent him with their gifts. The young man, William, enjoyed being an answer to prayer just as much as the 30 of us enjoyed the huge meal only 10 minutes later. It was an exciting way of life.

I committed many follies during these days, but God honored the spirit in which I did them. One evening, I had the flu and was sitting at home feeling blurry, when in marched Geui Jai. He was a famous kung-fu fighter, having been the champion and renowned expert amongst the 14K Walled City brothers. He was one of the few who had received any education at all; he was clever, and his English was good. He was also now a wreck of a drug addict, fallen both in status and usefulness to the gang. I often found him sleeping in the streets or staircases near my home, because both his parents and his Triad brothers had kicked him out.

“Could you please lend me your typewriter, Miss Poon?” he asked me earnestly. “You see, I can get paid a little money if I help somebody with his Chinese translation and type a letter. This will give me enough money for my heroin today. So I won’t have to steal it, or hold someone up.”

I knew that he was hoping to quit drugs, but the flu must have impaired my judgment. I let him take the typewriter on condition that he brought it back the same evening.

Later that night, he telephoned me. “Miss Poon, I am sorry, but I can’t give it back quite yet, because I have been asked to do another job. Isn’t that good? I have to type out 200 invitations
for a Lunar New Year party; please, how do you spell ‘lunar’?”

This all sounded quite credible to me, until I put the phone down and thought about it. How ridiculous—no one in Hong Kong types their letters 200 times; it is so quick and easy to get them printed. Of course he had pawned it, and that was the last I would see of my typewriter.

Some of the other boys from the Walled City found out what Geui Jai had done and were very angry. They threatened to beat him up and hounded him, although I told them, “Never mind, all right, he has made a fool of me and I lost my typewriter, but so what? Jesus lost His life; a typewriter is nothing in comparison. I was willing to take the risk because I wanted to help him, and it’s my fault, not his. Just forget about it.” But I heard that he had to go on the run for some time and that all the gangsters were angry with him.

Three months later, God produced the first positive result. My typewriter appeared in the bookcase in my flat. I did not know how it had got there, so I questioned Ah Ping as to what happened. He finally admitted that Goko, when he heard what Geui Jai had done, had been so upset that he had sent his men after him. They found him and then demanded that he hand over the pawn ticket. Then Goko had gone to the pawnshop and paid his own money to redeem my typewriter. He then sent it back without a message.

Once more I sent an urgent demand to Goko, for I wanted to thank him for what he had done. Once more we had a tea party. In this incongruous setting, I talked to the powerful gang boss who ran illegal businesses with one hand and protected a missionary with the other.

“Thank you very much for the typewriter,” I said, avoiding his name, for I felt that I could hardly address him as my brother, which his name implied.

“
Moe yeh, moe yeh
. It was nothing, nothing at all,” he replied, looking very embarrassed.

“You have touched my heart deeply,” I continued. “So I would like to explain something to you.”

Goko was puffing cigarettes furiously, lighting one before finishing another and then stubbing it out again after a few gasps. “Geui Jai is a bad boy—he should not have done that to you,” he said.

“But you had no reason to redeem my typewriter yourself,” I continued. “I am not your friend, I am against you, and I have come here because I want to destroy what you stand for.” Then I told him something of what Christ had done when He redeemed us with His own blood, buying back our lives with His own life while we were still His enemies.
¹⁰
Goko listened and looked almost shy. Avoiding my eyes, he paid the bill with a HK $500 note and fled. But he had listened to the story of redemption.

The second result was that Geui Jai’s guilty conscience made him vulnerable. Once more during my wanderings, I fell across the faded fighter sleeping on the pavements and staircases. He saw the change in Winson and Ah Ming, and he was envious. His desire to be a new person grew until the day he prayed with us, went into Pastor Chan’s center, and exchanged his syringe for a cross.

Those gangsters who had hounded Geui Jai could not dismiss what happened to him. He not only came off drugs but also went to Bible school for some years and became a pastor.

Looking back at the experiences of those years in Lung Kong Road, I have mixed emotions. It was a time of learning and of growing up. Often, I was in awful confusion. I find it easiest to express what I feel in the words of St. John: “A woman giving birth to a child has pain because her time has come; but when her baby is born she forgets the anguish because of her joy that a child is born into the world.”
¹¹

The pains of that time can be forgotten, for they gave birth to many children and to a partnership with the Willanses. These things brought me great joy.

10

TRY JESUS

J
ean Stone Willans is a glamorous, vivacious lady. She has the gift of being able to “speak in tongues,” and she has just published the most lighthearted, entertaining book about religion that has ever been written. The book is
The Acts of the Little Green Apples
and describes the adventures of the Willans family—her husband, Rick, and daughter, Suzanne—after they came to the Far East. Mrs. Willans doesn’t practice religion, she lives it. Also she seems to have established a way of communicating with God. This, she claims, is available to everyone; some people take advantage of it; some don’t. The stand Jean Stone Willans takes is that if God is asking her to do His work, then He should make sure she is able to do so. Time and time again He does.

So wrote the
Hong Kong Standard
in July 1973, describing Jean’s hilarious book. I could echo its enthusiasm, for by this time Jean and Rick had become my very close friends and spiritual advisers. They taught me that God’s good things were to be enjoyed, which surprised me, as I had been brought up to believe that missionaries should always have the least of everything and that it was virtuous to live in rags. The Willanses had been through times of great poverty, but certainly they did not expect that God wished them to live like that forever. When they had beautiful possessions they took real pleasure in them, but they were equally ready to give everything away if so directed. Maybe that is why they were such fun to be with—they had learned to be content whatever the circumstances. They were also the only people I knew with whom I could simply sit, pray
all night, watch television, have a drink, play charades, or go out to a gourmet dinner—although I did know others with whom I could do one or two of those things …