Chasing the Dragon (19 page)

At the end of the evening—it was nearly morning—I gave Ah Kei a Bible and wrote in it, “To Ah Kei, my friend; I pray one day you’ll be my brother.” He might have laughed inwardly,
Huh? Brother! Some hope
, but he thanked me politely—he was still handing out favors. He had no intention of reading it. It was in fact strange that I had given him a Bible at all, knowing how such men hated to read.

For the next three months, I followed Ah Kei around. He had a wife and family, but he used to sleep wherever he found himself late at night—often on a staircase. He got so high on drugs one night that he even read two pages of
The Cross and the Switchblade
, two pages of
Run Baby Run
, and then two pages of the Bible in turn for two days. He began to confide in me and told me how much he regretted marrying so young—he already had three children under five. My sympathy was rather with his wife for having a young family and a husband who never came home.

Sometimes Ah Kei would sleep for three days at a time. At other times, he would not sleep at all. During these binges, he would go through a fantastic amount of money. He was being fed drugs all the time by his gang members. God told me which staircase he was sleeping on and after a while, each time I found him, he had a hunted look. “Oh, it’s not you again! I mean, how did you know I was here?”

Meanwhile, I had armies of Christians all around Hong Kong praying for him; this had to have an effect. One day when I caught up with him, he said, “God’s been talking to me.”

“What do you mean, God’s been talking to you?” I asked crossly. I was annoyed, because I thought he was joking.

“Yes, God has been talking to me,” he insisted. “I’ve been reading in the Bible and it says He gives special grace to people like me.” He almost preened himself at “special grace.”

“What do you mean by special grace?” I enquired.

“It says in the Bible that if you’ve sinned the most you get forgiven the most.”
²
He sounded so privileged that I almost felt jealous, but he was completely serious about this discovery and was ready to ask for the special grace. We were in a hut next door to the gambling den that he had originally taken me to. Ah Kei sat down on the floor, and I sat down in the darkness too, hoping I had avoided the cockroaches. We prayed together for the first time, and Ah Kei asked Jesus to take his life and make him a new person. He believed that Jesus died for him, but at that point he had very little sense of sin and was still rather proud of his past.

I rushed across the harbor to Mei Foo, where Jean and Rick were living. I knew they would be delighted to meet Ah Kei after praying for him so long and even more pleased that he had become a Christian.

We had a party, a grand celebration of Ah Kei’s first birthday. Sarah, the Willanses’ Australian friend, and their daughter, Suzy, were also there and shared in our gladness. We usually prayed at parties, and as Ah Kei had not yet received the gift of the Spirit, we told him that God gives this power to all who follow Him. All of us sitting around began to pray together in the Spirit, and when Ah Kei heard this, he suddenly fell forward onto his knees with a terrible thump. Afterward, he told us that when he heard the tongues he was knocked down by the awareness of his past life of robbery, drug pushing and selling girls into prostitution. As he gained this terrible sense of his own sin, he felt that he could no longer sit in front of God. He had
to kneel; and he began to pray in tongues. It was a near impossible sight of a Triad boss on his knees; in Chinese culture, it is the most servile of positions—and a gang leader lowered himself to no one.

As he continued to pray in tongues, the Willanses’ parrot, Sydney, triumphantly extricated himself from his cage and, flying across the room, alighted on Ah Kei’s head. For some time afterward Ah Kei was rather confused about the Holy Spirit and doves, since his had been a heaven-sent parrot. That same night we took a taxi to a beach, where Rick baptized Ah Kei in the sea.

During the weeks before his conversion when I was getting to know him, Ah Kei and I sometimes settled down to read the Bible in a wooden shack at 3
A.M.
or so. He told me that he would not believe in Jesus in a hurry because if he built a house quickly it would fall down just as fast. But the night he was baptized, he began to put his life in order immediately. He went home to his wife for the first time in many months. She looked as if she would like to believe Ah Kei had changed, but she had such a deep distrust of her husband that she was afraid it would all turn out a forlorn hope.

Ah Bing had married Ah Kei seven years previously. Their courtship could not have started more badly; Ah Kei met her at a party and seduced her in order to sell her as a prostitute. But he fell in love with her and decided to keep her instead, which was only temporarily to her advantage. Years of neglect then reduced this once pretty girl to a careless sloven who kept their tiny resettlement room in a filthy state.

In a way Ah Bing was right to be cynical, for when Ah Kei decided to build his Christian house, it demanded too great a cost. He not only relinquished his vast illegal income and control over men with no alternative source of cash to care for his family, but he also had to face coming off opium and heroin.

Ah Kei did not immediately come off drugs, and I did not know what to do about it. Some addicts who became Christians were delivered instantly, while others went to Pastor Chan’s center to withdraw, where there was a greater amount of
after-care. Ah Kei applied to this center and others, but he was refused admittance because there was no place available. What could I say to him: “Pray, Ah Kei, and you’ll get off drugs miraculously”? I could say, “Pray, and perhaps you will cut down gradually.” That would be compromise. I could try, “Pray, and maybe God will give you money for your heroin.” But surely God did not support drug habits.

I could not take Ah Kei into my house, for it was already full of boys who either were supposed to have quit heroin already or who had come out of prison officially drug-free. I wondered what was happening in that house sometimes—some of the residents behaved very strangely—and I certainly did not want to mix in an open drug-taker with them. So instead, I encouraged Ah Kei with a weak, “God will work it out,” and hoped that he would get into a withdrawal center sooner or later.

Just before Christmas, I was awakened by a telephone call at 4:30
A.M.
I never liked to sound as though I had just woken up. If I had just woken up, my solution was to clear my throat and practice saying, “Good morning—good morning!” very brightly so that by the time I picked up the receiver, I sounded like the bird of the dawn.

Ah Kei was in no mood for sunrise salutations. He had rung to say goodbye.

“Thank you, Poon Siu Jeh, for these past nine months of Jesus talk, your care and consideration. But my gang brothers were right all along. I can’t be saved.”

“Yes, you can, Ah Kei. Anything is possible with God.” I meant it sincerely, but my words sounded weak to my own ears.

“It’s no good. I can’t be a Christian anymore.”

“What do you mean you can’t be a Christian?”

“I can’t afford it. I’ve given up running the gangs; I’ve given up running the girls, the gambling and the drugs. Now I have nothing left to live on. I can’t afford to be a Christian. Thank you very much, Miss Poon, for everything you have done; I’ll never forget you, but I will not be seeing you again. It just didn’t work.”

I tried desperately to reason with him. I dragged up every argument I could think of—I hunted around for suitable texts. We could not lose him. If I could keep him talking, maybe the trouble would all go away. But Ah Kei’s voice sounded harder and harder, and he was impossible to reach. He was far colder than before he had become a Christian, and he started to speak cruelly and bitterly. I could hear him carrying on a simultaneous argument with someone at the other end, and then he said he was going out to find Ah Chuen to kill him.

“Ah Kei, you can’t kill people. You’re a Christian.” He was long past listening to my pathetic interjections. He was high on heroin, and having furiously informed me that he would shortly be forced to do a couple of robberies to raise some money, he hung up.

I stared at the phone in the gloom. I really could not believe what I had heard. I did not want to accept the fact that someone who had believed in Christ could contemplate murder. I quickly rang up Jean and Rick. They knew that both Ah Kei and I had a talent for the dramatic, but they soon listened with deep concern.

“You’ve got to get up and pray. I think Ah Kei is going out to murder someone, and he’s planned a couple of robberies.” There are not many people I could tell to do this at that time of night. The Willanses prayed.

I prayed despairingly all through the Christmas celebrations. I cried all through the Christmas carols.
Joy to the world?
I thought tragically.
It doesn’t look very joyful to me
. Because I was grieved for Ah Kei, I was also a little angry with God.

Lord, I really believed You were the answer. How can it be that he knew You and then didn’t want You? You didn’t do everything You were supposed to either, Lord, did You? I mean, Ah Kei believed in You and others did too, and look at them now. There are a load of addicts and spiritual cripples lying around the streets being a reproach to Christ. People look at them and mock, “What a God—He started a miracle but it didn’t last; it was something that came and went.”

I hunted for any Christian who could reassure me that when Christ began a good work in someone, He would carry it to completion.
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I believed this was true, but it certainly did not look as if God were doing His part right then.

Some days later, Ah Kei turned up on my doorstep. “I don’t know why I’ve come—I was just passing—but anyway, goodbye.”

“Wait a moment,” I said. “What about the robberies?”

“Well,” said Ah Kei looking rather sheepish, “my wife got the pillow cases all ready, hoods for our armed robbery, slits cut in them so we could see through. The first time we got everybody together, we found that one of my own gang had given the game away. So we couldn’t do it. Then the second time we were sitting in the car all prepared with knives. We were ready to drive off, but I just did not feel like doing a robbery that day, so we didn’t go.”

He had also been unable to find Ah Chuen the night he had telephoned me. I thought it was time we now did something positive about Ah Kei’s future.

“Right,” I said. “We are now going to see the Willanses; you have got to talk to them. It’s time someone was firm with you.”

We left the house, and on the way Ah Kei bought a gift of oranges wrapped in pink paper. He presented it to Jean and Rick, and we all ate dinner together. As usual Jean was extremely hospitable, but I could see that she was becoming more and more annoyed at a situation in which a true believer was not coming off drugs.

“Do you have any problems?” she asked him while I translated.

“Oh, no, no problems,” he said airily and then added, “well, just one; I’m still on heroin.”

“When we were in Indonesia and had no money,” Jean continued firmly, “we prayed and it simply appeared before us. If you are really serious about Jesus, He will do anything you ask.”

“I’m serious,” nodded Ah Kei.

“Well, would you like to stay here and withdraw from heroin?” Jean asked. I was amazed; this was what I had hoped for and longed for but never dared to suggest, as I knew how precious
the peace of her home was to Jean. She herself had never meant to suggest it either, but concern for Ah Kei’s future and the Spirit of God worked together in her to bring out an invitation that surprised her.

“I agree,” said Ah Kei. He opened up his jacket, took out some red paper packets of heroin and flushed them down the lavatory bowl.

Next, Ah Kei made some dramatic gestures. First, we went back to his resettlement home, where he tore down the idols his mother kept and threw them out of the room. Then he reached under the bed and dragged out a box containing several weeks’ supply of heroin. He washed it all down the lavatory while we watched. Finally, we took him back to the Willanses’ flat in the Mei Foo district, where he climbed into bed.

Jean called a Christian doctor and asked what to expect from a 10-year addict with a 100-dollar-a-day habit. The doctor said that without medication Ah Kei would suffer agonies, accompanied by chills, fever, vomiting, diarrhea and intense stomach cramps. He might roll on the floor with pain and become violent to the point of attacking his helpers. He did not advise it, but if Jean insisted on her course of action, he would come around and administer a substitute drug, methadone.

“We will try Jesus,” said Jean, refusing his offer, and so began the experiment.

I spent three sleepless nights sitting with Ah Kei; I expected all the terrible side effects that had been forecast, but he slept like a baby. At the end of three days, I looked haggard and unkempt and he looked wonderful. When he did awake, if he experienced any twinge of pain, we would quickly urge him to pray in tongues, and the pain would miraculously disappear. Now we knew without a shadow of doubt that praying in the Spirit was the answer for painless withdrawal from heroin. Ah Kei was able to eat well and ordered cheese sandwiches, which he swallowed voraciously.

After four days, Ah Kei’s wife came round to see him. She tried to persuade him to go home, as he was cured. We opposed
this firmly; he still needed care and a drug-free environment. Fortunately, he was suddenly seized by withdrawal effects—sensations of terrible cold followed by feelings of tremendous heat. As Ah Kei had once before tried unsuccessfully to withdraw from heroin in China, he knew how terrible the pains could be. We all went back to praying in the Spirit to obtain relief, and as we worshiped God, the pains left him. Again, God had delivered him. On the fifth day, Ah Kei knew he was free from heroin, but he still badly wanted to smoke; he did not want to give up cigarettes. Rick insisted that if he did not free himself from tobacco addiction as well, he would not be free. Ah Kei was very unhappy about this, and on the seventh day he persuaded the Willanses’ Buddhist maid to give him a couple of filter tips. Almost immediately he felt the pains he should have felt during his heroin withdrawal. All of us redoubled our prayer effort. And once he was willing to agree to Rick’s demand, the pain disappeared.