Chasing the Dragon (5 page)

There was legitimate business, too. Workmen carrying loads of freshly mixed cement on their heads hurried down the alleys. Women clutching huge sacks of plastic flowers staggered out from tiny workrooms where the clank of plastic-pressing machines never ceased. There was no Sabbath day of rest here; five days’ holiday a year was considered quite sufficient. Whole families were involved in keeping the plastic presses running day and night. For Chinese children, when they were not studying,
the duty to work all hours for their parents was paramount.

How can such a place exist inside the British Crown Colony of Hong Kong?
Over 80 years ago when Britain apportioned to herself not only the Chinese island of Hong Kong but also the mainland Peninsula of Kowloon and the Chinese territories behind it, one exception was made. The old walled village of Kowloon was to remain under Chinese Imperial Administration, complete with its own Mandarin magistrate administering Chinese law.

Later, however, the British traders complained and the concession was unilaterally withdrawn; the Chinese magistrate died—he was never succeeded by either Chinese or British—and lawlessness inside the Walled City came to stay. The city became a haven for gold smuggling, drug smuggling, illegal gambling dens and every kind of vice. The confusion over its ownership meant that the police could not enforce the law and, indeed, would not even enter the infamous city. Even today, they go in large groups if they are hunting particular criminals, and usually the man they want effectively disappears into its sordid alleyways.

The area was large in population, small in size. A mere six acres sheltered 30,000 people (or double that; no census has ever found the true number). The housing was appalling; no building regulations could be enforced, so crazy-angled apartment blocks without sanitation, water or lighting straddled the streets. A maze of tangled wires was graphic evidence of the fact that their electricity was tapped from the public supplies outside the Walled City. But you cannot steal sanitation, so excrement had to be emptied into the stinking alleys below. At street level there were two toilets for all 30,000 people; the “toilets” consist of two holes over overflowing crawling cesspools—one for women, one for men.

It seemed unlikely that a place like the Walled City would have schools and churches. But in this appalling place where children were born and brought up, Mrs. Donnithorne had found premises and begun a general primary school. The teachers were not properly qualified, but they had attended secondary
school to fourth or fifth form level. The school was small, but it had morning and afternoon shifts and taught several hundred pupils. On the very first day that I visited the school, Auntie Donnie asked me to teach there. Without thinking, I said, “Yes,” and she immediately said, “How often?” Before I had fully realized what I was getting myself into, I had agreed to teach percussion band, singing and English conversation three afternoons a week.

I soon found the Chinese education system to be so miscast that very often the brightest got fed up and dropped out. The system demanded that you learn all your lessons by heart. Every month, every term and every year there were exams. Should a child fail annual exams, he or she had to repeat the whole of the year’s lessons. It was not unusual to come across children who had taken the Primary One exam at the end of their first year no less than three times. I formed a theory that it was the bright ones who got bored with the system and jumped off the ladder while the duller ones climbed up.

Percussion band and singing are not too difficult to teach even if there is little or no conversation. However, when it came to teaching English conversation I was a complete failure.

All the teaching in the school was highly regimented. I would read out, “John and Mary went into the wood,” and the students would repeat after me in unison, “John and Mary [it came out “Mairly”] went into the wood” without comprehension. Traditionally, understanding in Chinese education is not held to be important, but learning is considered vital, and they all learn to repeat what the teacher says like machines.

My attempts to enliven their stories by acting out what was happening were completely misunderstood; we had a classroom riot every time. No one had ever tried to teach them to participate in stories and dramatic ideas; the freedom that I tried to show them resulted in classroom anarchy within a matter of minutes. So I sadly went back to reading out sentences from the book—the sure way to maintain calm.

Once a week, one of the classrooms was converted into a church for a Sunday night service. So Miss Poon—I now proudly
had a Chinese name—played the harmonium. This meant pedaling at 50 mph or so to produce an accompaniment that could be heard against the singing—otherwise, having started on a particular note, they would continue to sing in that key quite regardless of the one I was playing in. I usually gave in and joined them.

Mostly, the worshipers were older Chinese women—some with babies wrapped tightly to their backs—and I discovered that many of them, being illiterate, came to church for a reading lesson. The singing leader had a sort of rehearsal before each hymn, pointing out the characters (the written form of Chinese—one sign for each word) one by one. They all sang loudly and enthusiastically. Then the Bible woman gave the teaching in Cantonese; I could not understand a word of it at that stage, but I felt that I shared in the worship.

Among the crowd of Chinese faces on my debut night, one woman stuck out remarkably. She was an elderly vegetable seller; she had a deeply lined face, with her hair combed straight back and a large circular comb stuck on her head. She had only two teeth, which showed prominently since she was always smiling. She came up and tugged me by the sleeve enthusiastically. Beside her was her half-blind husband—so she pulled him along, too. She chattered on, beaming at me and tugging still. I asked someone to translate what she was saying. It was, “See you next week—see you next week.”

I wanted to tell her that I could not come every week; it was a long journey across the harbor and through Kowloon to the Walled City for a Sunday evening. It meant that I got back late. This was not good, as I had to be up very early the next morning to teach.

But then I found that I could not possibly say all that to her. She would only understand that I was there or I was not; so I decided that for her sake I would be there every week.

By now, I had regular jobs teaching in a primary school in the mornings (which I held for six months), helping Auntie Donnie three afternoons a week in her primary school, playing for the Sunday service, and arranging music programs for
various welfare organizations. This filled up my time. I had been offered a superb job teaching music by a prestigious boarding school at the other end of the island; they additionally offered to refund my fare out. But it was clear I could not combine teaching there with my work in the Walled City.

I do not find that I am very good at guidance, but on this occasion I had been reading a verse in the Bible that said, “For he was looking for the city which has foundations, whose architect and builder is God.”
¹
As I read that verse, I felt quite sure that I should carry on teaching inside the Walled City.

The second time I went into the Walled City, I had this wonderful feeling inside; like the thrill you get on your birthday. I found myself wondering why I was so happy. And the next time I went into the Walled City, I had exactly the same sensation. This was not reasonable—of all the revolting places in the world. And yet nearly every time I was in that underground city over the next dozen years, I was to feel the same joy. I had caught a glimpse of it at confirmation, and again when I had really accepted Jesus into my life—and now to find it in this profane place?

“There’s a drug addict,” said Auntie Donnie as we walked down the street to her school one morning. I had no idea at that stage what being a drug addict meant. Did he jump at you, or steal your watch, or throw fits? He was a pathetic looking man slowly sorting through a pile of waste item by item to see if there was anything of value. He seemed very ill; his face was waxy and he looked more like a 70-year-old than a 35-year-old.

He wore a soiled T-shirt, a pair of cotton shorts and battered plastic sandals. Most Chinese people keep themselves meticulously clean, but Mr. Fung was filthy, his teeth were brown and broken, and his fingernails were disgusting. His rough crew cut, a grey shadow over his skull, was a sure sign that he had recently come out of prison. For Mr. Fung, though, prison was somewhere to sleep—a place with regular meals, which was more
comfortable than his present existence, sleeping in the streets and eating scraps collected at restaurant doors.

But food and sleep were not important to Mr. Fung. He lived to “chase the dragon.” This Chinese way of drug taking has a magic ritual all its own—a sort of devilish liturgy that is sacred. Once inside a drug den, addicts would take a piece of silver tinfoil; on it, they would place the small sand-colored grains of heroin. After heating the foil with a slow-burning spill of screwed up toilet paper, the heroin would gradually melt into a dark brown treacle. The addicts would then put the outer casing of a matchbox into their mouth to act as a funnel through which to inhale the fumes. They would keep the pool of treacle moving from one end of the silver foil to the other, following it with their mouth. This is “chasing the dragon.”

Mr. Fung never chased the dragon in public but in drug dens or lavatories. It was a full nine months before I actually saw it for myself. And I soon discovered that not all drug takers looked like Mr. Fung. Some were very well dressed; they regarded their neat appearance as evidence that they were not enslaved to the dragon. As I was going into the city, quite frequently I saw Mr. Fung.
Should I learn to say “Good morning, how are you?” or “Do you have a problem?”
In any case, I could not understand his reply, even had he confided in me. I wondered whether I should do something about him and others like him. I hoped someone was doing something.

Prostitution, unlike drug abuse, was seldom concealed. The first prostitute I met used dark mauve lipstick and mauve nail varnish—a macabre combination with her thin grey face and emaciated body. She spent her whole life squatting in a street so narrow that the sewer tunnel ran by her heels. I never saw her in any other position. When she ate, she remained squatting there with her rice bowl and her chopsticks, waiting for customers.

Farther down, other women sat on orange boxes, and one even had a chair. It was hard to tell their ages, because most of them were drug addicts too. The score marks on the backs of their hands showed that they were mainlining—directly injecting
heroin into the veins. Day after day, I walked past them and could not tell whether they were asleep or awake; they nodded all day, showing the yellow of their eyes in a heroin haze.

One day I tried touching the little one. I had learned to say, “Jesus loves you” (
Yeh sou ngoi nei
), and my heart went out to her. But she cringed away from me. Looking at the expression on her face, I suddenly realized that she was feeling sorry for me because she thought I had made a mistake. She seemed to be saying, “You’re a good girl and shouldn’t be talking to the likes of us! You’re a nice Christian, dear; maybe you don’t know who we are.” She put up the barrier, and I did not know how to cross it. She was embarrassed that a clean girl had made an error and touched a dirty one.

Some of the older prostitutes were clearly involved in procuring. As men came out of the blue film theatre, these
mama-sans
would literally pull them in. You could hear them saying, “She’s very young and very cheap,” as they pushed them up the wooden flight of steps. Compared with the prices charged in other places by the more glamorous Susie Wongs, these prostitutes were cheap indeed at HK $5 each. Not, of course, that the girls were allowed to keep all this money—most prostitutes were controlled by Triad gangs, and these brothels were only allowed to operate by the gang controlling that area. The Triads also supplied the young girls.

There were two girls I saw occasionally, as I taught percussion band next to their sordid room. One was a cripple and the other was mentally retarded. They were both prisoners. They never went anywhere without a
mama-san
accompanying them. They were visited up to three times an hour, and I reckoned they might be dead of disease by the time they were 20 or so.

Later, an English-speaking Triad member explained how these two girls, and others like them, would have been introduced to the trade. A group of young men would hold a party and invite girls along. Some of them had been warned about what might happen; others were innocent victims. At the party, the new girls would be seduced; if they resisted they were
sometimes forcibly raped. Usually, each member of the gang would take his girl off with him and stay with her for a few days. When the girl was attached to him and thoroughly accustomed to sex, he signed her over to a brothel. One girl could bring in enough money to support several men.

Other girls became prostitutes because their parents could not afford to feed and clothe them. One mother told me, “It wasn’t really selling my daughter, you know. My husband left me, and as there were no social security payments in Hong Kong I had nothing to live on. I couldn’t afford to raise my baby myself, so I gave her to this woman who wanted a child, and she gave me HK $100 lucky money. It was just lucky money.”

Of course, this woman knew what she was doing—she was selling her daughter into prostitution for at least her teenage years. After that, most former child prostitutes escaped from their owners and made careers of their own, practicing the only trade they knew. Child prostitutes could start their careers as early as nine years old.

Respectable people thought of the girls as the scum of the earth, but I knew that it was only by the grace of God that I had been born in a different place. I tried to work out how I could reach girls like these—guarded as they were. Eventually, I shelved the problem by hoping one day to find a concerned man who would pay the hourly rate but share the good news of Christ in that time. Maybe he and I could work out a plan of escape if any of the girls wanted to get out.