Chasing the Dragon (6 page)

4

THE YOUTH CLUB

S
ometimes I think that Chan Wo Sai was the real reason why I started the Youth Club. He was a most unattractive 15-year-old with about as many problems in life as anyone could have—personal problems, educational problems, home problems, background problems and no prospects at all.

I first got to know him when I was teaching English and singing on one of my three afternoons a week at Oiwah Primary School. I was teaching the children “Ten Green Bottles”—a less sexy song I can hardly think of—yet there was Chan Wo Sai getting really “sent” by a traditional English nursery rhyme in a language he could not speak. Chan Wo Sai was rolling his eyes and clicking his fingers; then he got up and began to slide across the classroom toward me in a sexy, hip-thrusting motion like a bad Chinese movie actor. I hurriedly ordered him back to his place and changed to another song. As soon as class ended, I went to find out where he came from. The story was both simple and sad.

Chan Wo Sai was born in the Walled City. His mother was a prostitute and his father a drunkard. They lived in a sort of cockloft; to find him I had to go down the narrow passage where the prostitutes were living, along the main street where the older woman pimps spent all day waiting, and then left at the blue film theatre and down a very muddy path to a collapsed building. Here, beyond a heap of stones, he lived with his whole family in half of a room that had been added on to another building. The walls were crumbling off.

There were more prostitutes next door. He’d known about them for as long as he could remember. He was in no way shocked
by them; they were just part of his life. Indeed, he thought their activities were very funny. His horizons were limited to the brothel next door, the gambling dens down the road and the opium dens beyond. There was nowhere in the Walled City where you could go and do anything neutral, let alone take part in constructive activity. So I tried to get to know him, to help him with his problems.

This was difficult, because I could hardly speak a word of Cantonese. All I had managed to learn as of yet were a few sentences. I could say “good morning” and “have you eaten yet?” but that was about all. And to make life still more difficult, Chan Wo Sai had a speech impediment, which made conversation hard even for fluent Cantonese speakers. Our great point of contact was the drum pad I gave him; it is a sheet of rubber stuck on a wooden board on which you can practice, with drumsticks, making a noiseless drum. The drum pad provided the perfect excuse for going to see him regularly. He was supposed to practice with it, but he seldom did, and in any case he had the most hopeless sense of rhythm. But he was pleased to find that someone was interested in him. This was the first time in his life that anyone had shown care for him.

As time went on, I found myself constantly thinking about him, which alarmed me. My English mind had been trained to think that love for a boy must be romantic, and because I was a Christian, that sort of love would eventually lead to marriage. Yet that, of course, was impossible and ridiculous; my mind told me that he was a very ugly boy with a hopeless background. But I really did love him, and I prayed for him continually. I got to the point where I could quite seriously and willingly have given my life for him.

After some time, I was able to understand—and was surprised by—what I saw in myself. It was as if God had given me a special love for him and that I was meant to show it, although it was not necessarily an emotion that should or could be returned. This love was for his good; it was quite different from any love for other people that I had before, in which I had always wanted
something in return. I had never before loved somebody entirely for his benefit without caring what he felt for me. So it was really for Chan Wo Sai that I opened a club just for young people.

Of the various groups of people in need in the Walled City, none were worse catered to than the young teenagers. At least the younger children had the chance to go to primary school, and most Chinese parents, no matter how poor, encouraged this. But the young teenagers had nothing; getting into secondary school was almost impossible for a Walled City boy, even if his parents could afford it, which was unlikely.

Teenagers often found work in the sweated-labor plastic factories where the hours were unlimited and the pay pitiful. Then, disheartened by the life of ceaseless work, they dropped out. Many boys, and sometimes girls, left home to find shelter in some one-room hovel where lots of others, all following the same path, slept. Soon, with nothing to do, they drifted into crime; the Triad gangs often provided the only other employment available.

My involvement with Chan Wo Sai grew during the summer of 1967, when all of China was thrown into confusion by the activities of the Red Guards. The fever crossed the border into Hong Kong; trouble was skillfully stirred by local agitators. Knowing nothing about politics, I remained blissfully unaware of what was going on, although there were riots all over the colony.

I did discover, however, that some of the Walled City boys were being paid to pick up stones and throw them. I felt that they could just as easily be persuaded to come on a picnic. So one hot, humid day in June, I said to Auntie Donnie rather pompously, “I think the Lord would have me start a youth club.” I had visions of a handpicked team of handsome helpers from Hong Kong Island who would sweep in with a beautifully organized program while I sat back and applauded. I envisaged a room open evenings and weekends; it would be a place where young people could play table tennis and take part in all the other normal activities available to boys and girls in a big city. It equally could be a place where they would hear about Jesus. I envisaged committee
discussions, prayer meetings, program planning and further discussion. Auntie Donnie was more practical. “Good, I’ve been praying for that for years,” she said. “When do you start? Next week?”

We started one week later. I had not yet put together my handpicked team, and we did not have anywhere to meet. But I soon borrowed a room from the school on Saturday afternoons. Gordon Siu, a young Chinese man I had met at the Youth Orchestra, became a tower of strength and an invaluable translator. He was also realistic: Unlike some of the Chinese leaders who expected a youth club to be a sort of extended Bible lecture, Gordon helped us hire coaches, came on picnics and went roller skating with us. Soon school ended, and none of the pupils had much to do. The prospect of the boys being caught up in the riots stimulated me to develop the activities further.

Saturday afternoons grew into a complete summer program, with organized picnics, hikes and visits to the forestry plantations. What started that summer became a regular program that happened every July and August for some years after.

The first to come to the Youth Club were the 13- and 14-year-olds; they began to bring friends from outside. Everyone knew from the beginning that I was there because I was a Christian and that events would start or end with a short talk. They did not like the Jesus bit at all; for them, anything to do with Christianity was either full of prohibition or middle class. They had no idea who Jesus really was. Worse, they believed that if you could not read, you could not be a Christian, because to them being a Christian was something to do with the Big Book.

Some young people told me that they could not come to the Youth Club. “We smoke and we drink,” they said. “We go to films and we gamble—and we know Christians don’t do any of those things.” It soon became clear that the blocks to belief were often the result of a culture gap, which local Chinese Christians did nothing to overcome.

All too soon, Chan Wo Sai dropped out of school. At 15, he was one of the oldest boys in Primary fourth form, and he was
at least four years behind. He decided not to finish that year of schooling; a new blue film theatre had just opened in the Walled City, and he got a job selling the tickets.

To the inexperienced teacher from England, dropping out of primary school seemed a terrible thing to do. I spent all summer trying to persuade the hostile boy to go back. Eventually, he humbled himself and went to see his teachers, but they refused to take him back. Their explanations horrified me: One said, “Well, Jackie, we were only too pleased when he left, because we could not control him. He upset not only the teachers but also the whole of the class. Good riddance to him.”

Theirs was a mission school, not a profit-oriented private academy. These were Christian teachers, and I had imagined that when they met once a week for prayer meetings, they prayed for the difficult and troublesome boys like Chan Wo Sai. But the truth was that most of the teachers had barely completed secondary school themselves; they had said they were Christians just to get the job and were incapable of handling anything other than entirely docile classes. For Chan Wo Sai, his departure was effectively the end of his education—he could not go to another school without retaking the Primary Four exam.

The only alternative was to find him a vocational training school that would teach him some skill. However, he proved ineligible for such courses, either because he was too old or because he had not completed primary school and could not speak English. Together we trudged around schools and factories seeking further training or an apprenticeship, and in every case we were turned away. Against Chan Wo Sai the gates were shut, even though he was only 15.

What was to happen to him? He had dropped out of school, and selling tickets at the blue film theatre was as far as he was ever going to go. There was nothing I could do for him except keep this club going. Several of his dropout friends joined the gangs. They discovered that there they had a role. If they proved themselves, they were given respect and responsibility. They were given a rank and treated as people of importance. In the
gangs they found a degree of care, consideration and closeness that they certainly found nowhere else. In school and church, success in exams was equated with righteousness: “Be a good boy—don’t go around with bad people, but study hard and pass your exams.” The school had said it. The Church had said it. Their parents had said it. For the boys like Chan Wo Sai, it was terribly boring to be told the same thing again and again, and they hated hearing it. The gangs and my club were the only places where they did not hear the sentence of failure and rejection.

The Youth Club was indeed unlike any other activity organized in the Walled City. Nobody made any money out of it; no gangsters controlled it, and years later they even sent guards to protect it from those who wanted to smash the place up. The club went through various addresses, but inside it was always the same—a bare room with some game equipment (like table tennis and darts), crude benches and a bookshelf with Christian books bought by me, which no one could read.

Nicholas was another boy I got to know very well during this time. Both his father and mother had been on charges for selling drugs, and the whole family lived in one of the nastiest houses I have ever been in. Half of it was literally a pigsty—for their neighbors kept a pig below. The two eldest girls were prostitutes, and there always seemed to be a lot of babies around. I never found out which baby belonged to which mother. Some were Nicholas’s brothers and sisters—others his nephews and nieces. They all lived in a room the size of a broom cupboard that stank.

The church members resented Nicholas because, like Chan Wo Sai, he was such a bad influence in the school. Of course, they knew about the bargirl sisters and that the father was a hopeless opium addict. In their eyes, the fact that I was welcoming Nicholas to our club gave the Christian Church a bad name—I should not even be seen with him.

I knew what Nicholas was like. He was vile and always a pain; he had Triad connections right from the beginning and later graduated to becoming a heroin addict and, necessarily, a
pusher. But I loved him, even if unreasonably, for Jesus had come into the world for him, which too was unreasonable.

So I made a point of befriending him. I visited him at home all hours of the day for weeks and months and years. I was terribly concerned about him and grieved for him—perhaps more deeply than for any other person over the years. I found him in drug dens; I went to him when he was arrested; I prayed with him in the police station and in the prison before his trial; I helped him with his trial. But none of my efforts changed him.

I learned that any sense of “righteousness” was lacking in that place of darkness. Crime, dishonesty and corruption were considered “right” as long as they paid. But this attitude did not stop its supporters from adopting a cliché-loaded morality in my presence. They felt it was correct, as I represented the Church, the Establishment.

“Isn’t he a bad boy,” Nicholas’s mother would say to me in front of him. “Miss Pullinger—you must teach him a good way and take him to your church and the Youth Club.” It was nauseous prating, and I hated it. Then she would moan, “Can’t understand why my children are bad. I had them baptized and sent them to church.” This from a woman who measured grains of white powder into little packets for sale to junkies.

Later on, one of the younger sisters, Annie, also became a bargirl. Then, incredibly, she scored the ultimate by making a wonderful marriage. Her husband was a
for-gei
and a collector of rake-off money for the police. Annie was ever so pleased about marrying him, because he had his own private car. Annie’s mother was delighted, too; although the nightclubs, ballrooms and brothels owned and run by the son-in-law’s family were only low class, at least they were successful.

One day as I was walking down the street, an old man ran up to me. He was an opium den owner—an important man in the Walled City. He had the skeleton face of an opium addict, with gray-tinged hollow cheeks from a lifetime of taking the sweet stuff. He was beside himself with rage. “Poon Siu Jeh—Miss Poon,” he cried. “You must complain to the police!”

“Why should I complain?” I asked him.

“They’ve closed all the opium dens.” He was outraged and indignant.