Chasing the Dragon (16 page)

I never saw them eat anything except white rice, which they boiled to a porridge known as
congee
. This was because their miserable father spent all his earnings on heroin and never gave his family any support at all. The only income came from Mrs. Chung, a tiny little 30-year-old who carried water buckets for a living. She brought these buckets from the water pumps outside the Walled City, carried them down the narrow streets on a pole, and then upstairs to people’s houses. She received 5 cents each time for this service, but lost even that income after she got rheumatism in her legs and could no longer walk with the heavy buckets.

Although she was expecting a sixth child to be born into her foodless slum, Mrs. Chung was always smiling. She had asked to receive Jesus into her heart and she, I and some of the Christian boys from the Youth Club often prayed together, which brought her great joy. We used to take her dried bacon, salted fish and oil so that the family had more nourishment to put on the rice. Had we given her money, her husband, who came back occasionally, would have stolen it for his heroin. We took the children (who were aged from 6 to 11) toys for Christmas, and we paid their school fees. Even then the children had to work in factories to keep buying the rice.

I referred this case to the social welfare department, asking for compassionate resettlement and some kind of financial aid,
as I could not afford the money to support them all indefinitely. The officials in the enquiry office were unhelpful. Mrs. Chung could not read, so she did not even know which floor to go to; and because they had told her to fill in forms before she could see a social worker, she had not even reached the queue that began the process of receiving help.

The next time she went, I went with her and sat all day waiting to see the caseworker. I suggested that she classify herself as separated, as Mr. Chung rarely came home and did not contribute to the family income anyway. I was shown out brusquely while Mrs. Chung was interviewed. When I visited the family again, this poor little lady told me that she had gone back to the office to sign for aid and that a letter would be coming. Four months later there was still no letter, although she remained optimistic that it would come. Eventually, I checked with the welfare department, who looked up the family’s files. I was told, “This family does not qualify for aid.”

“If that family doesn’t qualify for aid, then I’m sure no one does,” I replied. “I’ve never seen anyone so poor, and they have a newborn baby.” Mrs. Chung had had to walk back home from the clinic on the day she gave birth to her sixth child. “Would you please explain your assessment?” I asked.

Apparently the welfare authorities had asked Mrs. Chung’s husband to go to the office to provide a statement about his income. He told them, “I earn HK $600 a month, out of which I give my wife HK $400.” This was a complete lie, but it would be great loss of face for a Chinese man to admit that he could not support his family. The misinformation was carefully written down, and then the welfare officer asked Mrs. Chung to sign her husband’s statement. She did not know what it said. She thought she was signing to receive help, so she made her mark.

“Couldn’t you see that he was on drugs?” I said to the officers. “His word can’t be trusted.” I was so upset that I was aggressive.

“He told us he was completely drug-free,” they replied defensively.

“Don’t you know what an addict looks like? That’s as plain an example as I’ve ever seen. He has heroin staring out of his eyes.” The officials, who had learned their procedures out of books, labeled me a troublemaker, but they reversed the decision and Mrs. Chung received some financial help at last.

We then helped the family to move out of the Walled City. My boys hired a lorry and we moved the double bed, only to find barrels and barrels of clothes stored underneath. The family had previously been in contact with another welfare organization that had donated a dozen barrels of clothing sent from overseas for the “refugees.” The barrels were full of articles such as soiled sequined evening dresses, but Mrs. Chung had been so keen to have possessions that she would not throw anything away. We bought 150 hangers and strung them up in the family’s new room, which was otherwise completely bare. Then we began the unpacking; the barrels were crawling with cockroaches. Whole nests of them had been living there for years and emerged to take up quarters in the new home. When only half the barrels had been unpacked, each hanger had about three gray, crawling, moldy items on it. There were six fat English ladies’ winter coats, which had rotted and stank.

There were scores of unsuitable and unwearable garments, so I put great heaps of them by the trashcan around the corner of the building. The next day I came back to find that the eldest girl, Ah Ling, had gone and fetched them all back—they were the only security she had.

About the time we moved into the Lung Kong flat, Mrs. Chung told me with simple acceptance that she had been ordered to go out and get a job, as the government could not support drug addicts’ wives indefinitely. She told them she was not well, but they refused further help. Two weeks after hearing this decree, she died. She had had a cough for a long time, and although it was difficult for her to get to a doctor, she had visited a clinic several times. A bottle of medicine was all that had been given to her.

I felt partly to blame for her death. I had known that she had been coughing, but I had never taken the trouble to accompany
her to the doctor, and she had not had her tuberculosis diagnosed. She had sought help from professionals; we had all kept her waiting, and she had died a death that might have been prevented.

After the funeral, I continued to visit and support the children who were now being exploited by their father. He took the 13-year-old daughter away from school and sent her to work in a factory. For a pitiful wage of HK $100 a month she sewed collars on dresses; she had to give her father all the money. When the Youth Club went on outings, we would take all the children with us, which was when they suggested coming to live at my house. I flatly refused this as a possibility and told them that under the law they belonged to their father. One month after my refusal, they packed all their belongings and ran away from home, to me.

They were a pathetic sight huddled in my doorway. They had complete trust that I would take them in. It did not seem very suitable; my house was already sleeping boys on the floor, but I had no option when I discovered that Ah Ling was being molested by her father. She showed me the bruises on her legs, so I took her to hospital and then allocated bunks for the little ones. They were so withdrawn that it was a long time before any of them would speak to me. However, I soon discovered that our boys, themselves rejected, were really good with the children and loved playing with the baby.

So the family in our house grew and was further augmented by constant appearances from Mrs. Chan, whom I had come to know some months earlier through her son, Pin Kwong. He was a vicious addict of 19 who had no intention of changing his ways and who collected money by holding up victims at knifepoint in the public toilet. I often asked him about his widowed mother, but he refused to allow me to visit her, saying, “She is an old idol worshiper. She won’t want to hear from a Christian.”

When Pin Kwong was arrested and put in prison for the fifth time, I sought out his mother and found her lying on a little bed in her Walled City room. She had decided to die, because
her son had been arrested yet once more. She had no husband or family; Pin Kwong was all her life. Chinese women are very proud of their sons, but Pin Kwong was rotten and took away any money she ever had, so she had no more will to live. He had not wanted me to visit her for fear that I would discover that he had been exploiting her for the little amount she could collect selling vegetable herbs in the market. When we found her, she had already lain there for some days without eating and was very weak. The boys went out and bought chicken essence and bones to boil for soup, and we set about restoring the elderly lady. While we fed her, we told her about the Father who had given her His most precious possession, His only Son, because He loved her.
²

Mrs. Chan was a simple woman who had never been to school. She had never heard of Christ before and could not follow long sentences. We laid our hands on her and prayed out loud, asking God to teach her in a way she could comprehend. After the prayer she looked up, grinning from ear to ear, saying that when we prayed she had been healed of “sickness of the lungs” and could breathe clearly for the first time in years. Her illness never returned.

That night, she dreamed that a man in a long white robe came to her and, holding out His arms, asked her to come to Him and be baptized. Since that time she was quite radiant, and when I moved into Lung Kong Road, she was delighted. We gave her a key to the new home and she pottered in and out, happily cleaning everything in sight, cooking meals and introducing all her local market vendor friends, who would sell us provisions cheaply. Bestowing on me a signal of honor, she became my
kai ma
and I her
kai neui
, meaning godmother and goddaughter. She adored her new family and bossily clucked around us all.

Because she could not read a word, I had the boys teach her Bible verses. It took her a week to learn, “Jesus declared, ‘I am the bread of life.’”
³
This had to be near to her heart, as she had formed a passion for the toaster and now downed marmalade sandwiches in a most un-Chinese manner.

Three years earlier than this, when Dora first started to help me in the Walled City, she had come one evening to translate for a Bible study. It was one of those times when only one of the boys turned up; the others had forgotten completely. I was feeling cross that I had used up an unreasonable amount of time collecting and chasing them up for meetings. It was one of the very rare occasions when I really wished to be back in England, where Christians at least knew what day of the week it was. I did not voice these thoughts, but as we prayed, God gave a message in tongues to the one boy present. Dora had an interpretation of the message.

“No one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or lands for me and the gospel will fail to receive a hundred times as many in this life of houses, brothers, sisters, mothers, children and lands, and in the age to come, eternal life.”
⁴
I had heard these words before, but it was not until Dora’s interpretation that I really listened. Hurriedly, I looked up the verses in St. Mark’s Gospel, to find that it did say we would receive in this life a hundred times as much as we had left. I had only ever remembered the eternal life part, and that was for after death. So that evening I claimed the promise, “God, I’d like a hundred homes, a hundred brothers and sisters—a hundred mothers and children, too.”

Now in the flat in Lung Kong, I counted up and found that among the Walled City boys and students, I had at least 100 Christian brothers and sisters. I was living in my sixth home—with many others opened to me—and the children were adding up. Because I had been a bit short on the mothers, Mrs. Chan appeared, too. She joined a lovely church full of old ladies outside the Walled City and looked after the potential “mothers” I sent her.

More mothers in God came along. One day I was visited by a young man assisting his granny from a nearby resettlement block. She looked very frail and her head was bandaged, partially concealing an ugly gash on her temple. “I want to be baptized,” she squeaked.

I was immediately suspicious. “It means nothing to be baptized if you have not believed in Jesus. If you would like to hear about Him, I will be glad to tell you, but if it’s the bit of paper you require, I cannot help you. We do not give certificates in our church. There are many others that do, and I’m sure they will be glad to help.”

It turned out that having fallen down and cracked her head, this granny was afraid to die without a burial spot. There was a great shortage of these in Hong Kong, and a thriving black market demanded outrageous sums. However, as a member of a Christian church, she could get a reasonable piece of consecrated real estate, and this is what the old lady was after. I took her to Mrs. Chan, who became friends with her and led her to Christ. The old granny had a true conversion, was baptized, and died six months later with a place reserved in heaven.

I had no idea it would be so much hard work caring for the boys in my house. All the books I had ever read about criminals becoming Christians stopped short at their conversion, giving a strong impression that they lived happily ever after. Mine was a basic mistake—I thought that “if anyone is in Christ he is a new man,” whereas the meaning of the text is “a new creation.”
⁵
Although the gangsters had become Christians, they were like newborn babies and had a lot to learn. Their ignorance of normal living was appalling. Some of them, such as Mau Jai (Little Cat), who had been in the drug den when Johnny was arrested, had lived on the streets since they were five years old.

Mau Jai had not been allowed to sleep at home because his father had two wives, and the second one, “Little Mother,” was out of favor, so her children were banned from the home. They had no normal childhood; deprived of this, they grew up quickly in craft and cunning. Since they were used to being up all night, they could not understand why they should shut their eyes at 12
P.M.
They got up when they awoke, and if they did not wake up in the morning, then that was that. If they did not feel like going to work, they did not go. They associated any rules I made with prison, which was the only other kind of authority
they had known, and were careless in keeping those rules.

In Lung Kong Road boys came and went. I sometimes had the suspicion that they were running me rather than vice versa, but I did not want to admit it. For example, Ah Hung came to us on release from prison, sent by the authorities and supposedly drug-free. It turned out that he took heroin the very day he was released, and he must have continued to take it throughout his stay with us. It was therefore not surprising that he soon lost his job as a skilled jade craftsman and disappeared from our flat.