Chasing the Dragon (7 page)

“I’m delighted the police have closed the opium dens,” I replied. “Why do you want me to complain?”

“Because they’ve let the heroin dens stay open, and we’ve all paid them the same money. It’s not fair!”

No right and wrong. Just fair and unfair.

A young man named Joseph was one of the earliest Youth Club presidents. Unlike Nicholas and Chan Wo Sai, he had no overt connections with vice. His father had remarried when he was six, and his new wife did not like her stepchildren, so she did not feed them. Joseph and his sister, Jenny, were sent out to beg with plastic bowls or to grub through a rubbish heap for food. They were rescued by a pastor in the New Territories and sent to Mrs. Donnithorne’s Mission School. Having finished primary school, Joseph got himself a room and worked as a coolie whenever he could. His sister soon joined him there.

Characters such as Nicholas would drop in on him and stay the night, and his room became a breeding ground for gangsters. His sister, Jenny, however, was in moral danger. At 15, she was very pretty and reveled in release from her highly supervised Christian hostel. Now she could talk all night with her brother’s friends—or go out with them. She was not at school, and it was great fun. I thought that if she remained in Joseph’s room, there was only one way she could go.

I could not offer them both a home, as I was already sharing my Hong Kong room with another Walled City girl, Rachel. But I thought I could squeeze Jenny in, so I bullied her out of the Walled City to live with me. I found her a secondary school and bought the uniform, the books and the lunches. She was not grateful; she wanted to be back in the Walled City, and she caused many headaches during the next year that she lived with us.

One of our regular attendees, Christopher, lived in the Walled City in a house that could only be described as a loft. To find it, you had to walk down a narrow street where no
light penetrated; the houses were built so close to each other that it was like going down a tunnel. When you reached a couple of hencoops made from soft drink crates, you had found their home. It was very, very smelly. Beside the coops and up some wooden ladders you reached the living level; you had to open Christopher’s door from underneath, exactly like a trap door. There was just one room over the chickens; should it catch fire everyone would be burned to death. Escape was impossible except by lifting the door and going down the wooden ladder. The family sleeping quarters were behind a curtain; there you found a pair of wooden bunk beds, one on top of the other. Everyone slept in these two beds—everyone being six brothers and sisters, plus the parents.

The rest of the single room was taken up with huge piles of plastic objects, which Christopher’s mother assembled. She earned about HK $1 a day for this work. All the children had to help her assemble these plastic parts; they began working as soon as they were three or four years old. Christopher’s younger sister did not finish primary school; she was sent to work in a factory as soon as she was 13. She was badly paid for the sweated labor and every dollar and cent she earned had to be given to her mother—she was not allowed to keep anything for herself. Although already exhausted by a 10- or 12-hour day and a crowded bus journey, when she eventually returned home, she had as many as 4 more hours of work ahead of her sewing on sequins. One sweater would take her up to a week to complete; when finished it would bring another HK $3 in wages, all of which would be kept by her mother.

When Christopher went to work, all his money went to his mother, too. It was an unwritten law in Chinese families that the parents were paid back by their offspring for supporting them; their ambition was to retire and live off their children. Christopher’s mother used to say, “I bore you, I brought you up, and I sent you to school. I paid out everything for you … now you children should be paying me back for having had you.” The Chinese children, I knew, found the process of starting work
very depressing, as it meant that they entered into a lifetime’s debt. They got no pride from their paycheck, because they never saw any of it. Their parents got the lot. Christopher’s mother saved all this money and later on bought herself a flat outside the Walled City.

The reason why so many Chinese families are large is an economic one. Parents have far bigger families than they can afford to maintain so that they will be rich in their old age. It seemed to me that family love and solidarity were based not so much on mutual love and respect as on economic advantage.

Christopher’s younger sister, Ah Lin, finally rebelled at such exploitation. She met a boy at her factory who liked her, but her mother forbade her to go out with him. She was not allowed to come to the Youth Club either because our program was mostly recreational. Had we provided sewing lessons or English classes, it would have been permitted; but enjoyment, pure and simple, was to be no part of her life. Instead, the girl’s task was to stay at home and look after the babies, or assemble plastic parts, or carry water.

Eventually the drudgery became too much. Ah Lin left home at age 14 and went to live with the boy. Her mother recaptured her and locked her up at home, saying that she was a bad girl. She was beaten for what she had done; her action had not only brought shame on the family but also was considered an attack on the family earnings. And her mother continued to refuse to let her go anywhere outside the home. Treated like chattels, it was not surprising that many girls made the jump into prostitution rather than remain imprisoned at home.

My mission was to help the Walled City people to understand who Christ was. If they could not understand the words about Jesus, then we Christians were to show them what He was like by the way we lived. I remembered He had said, “Whoever forces you to go one mile, go with him two.”
¹
So this was the beginning of what I called walking the extra mile. There seemed to be a lot of Christians who did not mind walking one, not many who could be bothered to walk two, and no one who
wanted to walk three. Those in need that I met seemed to need a marathon.

I became even more involved with the boys, their families and their problems. It meant walking with them in a practical way so that they could see and know who Jesus was. One example of this was when one of the boys asked me to help his sister get into a secondary school. The usual process was to queue up for a day merely to obtain an admission form to take the entrance examination. If the school was Protestant and discovered that the applicant had studied in a Catholic primary school, he or she would not get a form, and the queuing would begin at another school.

The boy’s family thought that the way I would help would be by going to the headmistress and saying, “Look, I’m so and so and I know so and so; can you get this girl in?” I did it the opposite way around and queued up for whole days with the ordinary people—which surprised them, as this was not at all their idea of how I was supposed to help.

Oftentimes there were problems regarding identity cards, as many who lived in the Walled City had not been registered at birth. They thought that I could have a word with the authorities and a card would be issued. Instead, if asked to help, I would go with them and sit all day at the government office to help them make the correct application. I had to do all this during the holidays, as by now I was teaching music full-time at an Anglo-Chinese girls’ college, St. Stephen’s.

For several years, I had many followers who reckoned that if they hung around for long enough they might get a baptism certificate or a document that would enable them to get to America. They were real “rice Christians.” Perhaps they could get an introduction to a priest who needed someone to clean in a convent, or they could grab any of the side perks they thought they could get from a church. They began to treat me as they treated other missionaries; they thought I was a pushover. They were careless with my property and equipment and were continually asking to borrow money. They simply did not believe me when I told them
that I did not have any. The conversations were always the same, and they went like this …

“Poon Siu Jeh, I haven’t got a job and I’ve run out of money.”

“But I’m afraid I haven’t got any money.”

“Oh, but you must have—you’re terribly rich.”

“No, no, really, I haven’t got any money.”

“Oh yes you have, because you’ve got a church in America like the rest of them.”

“No, really, I haven’t got a church in America. Actually, I come from England, but no church sent me.”

At this point another jumbo jet would lurch low across the rooftops as it came in to land at Kaitak airport, which was close to the Walled City. Indeed, the Walled City must have been directly under the flight path, because in the summer months the tourist-filled jets came over every couple of minutes, making conversation impossible as they thundered overhead.

The plane noise would die away and our conversation would continue.

“Huh, one day I expect you’ll get into one of those and fly back to where you came from.”

“No, there’s no danger of that,” I would reply honestly, “because I haven’t got enough money to get on one.”

“Well, your parents can send you the money anyway—there is plenty of money where you came from—we’ve seen how all those English people live it up.”

“No,” I said, “you’re wrong about that—my parents haven’t got any money either.” There would be a pause, and then Ah Ping would join the conversation. Ah Ping thought more than the others; his remarks were always more to the point, more understanding and more desperate.

“Maybe you haven’t got any money now, but you could always get away from here if you had to get away. We can’t. There is nowhere else for us to go; we’re stuck on the edge of the sea, and the only escape is into it. But you Westerners—you can fly away when you want to, and then you can forget all about us.”

“No, Ah Ping. I’m not planning to fly away and forget all about you.”

Ah Ping could really talk when he got warmed up. I respected his honesty, for few Chinese ever tell Westerners what they really feel about them. “You Westerners—you come here and tell us about Jesus. You can stay for a year or two, and your conscience will feel good, and then you can go away. Your Jesus will call you to other work back home. It’s true that some of you can raise a lot of money on behalf of us underprivileged people. But you’ll still be living in your nice houses with your refrigerators and servants, and we’ll still be living here. What you are doing really has nothing to do with us. You’ll go home anyhow, sooner or later.”

This kind of conversation took place many times; it was an indictment of those evangelists who flew into Hong Kong, sang sweet songs about the love of Jesus on stage and on Hong Kong television, and then jumped back into their planes and flew away again.

“Fine,” said Ah Ping to me savagely one day. “Fine for them, fine for us too, we wouldn’t mind believing in Jesus too if we could get into a plane and fly away round the world like them. They can sing about love very nicely, but what do they know about us? They don’t touch us—they know nothing.”

Sometimes I tried talking to the men who guarded the gambling dens, but when I told them that Jesus loved them, they just nodded. “Yeah, yeah, how nice. That means nothing to us.” And of course, it did not mean anything to them, as most of them had no idea who Jesus was or what love was. I went on—preach, preach, preach about how Jesus could give them a new life, but no one seemed to understand.

5

LIGHT IN THE DARKNESS

J
esus did not promise running shoes in the hereafter to the lame man. He made him walk. He not only preached but also demonstrated that He was God. He made blind men see, deaf men hear and dead men return to life. Some Christians claimed that these things still happened, and I certainly needed to find them.

My missionary friends could not help me much. Most of them were well over 40; many had spent their lives in China and now felt lost. They did not expect people to be converted, and they explained this by saying that there was a spiritual cloud hanging over China that covered Hong Kong, too. Some missionaries had all sorts of cultural hang-ups that infected me, until I found myself worrying over such questions as to whether I should wear sleeveless summer dresses and whether it was wrong to go bathing on Sundays. I got in the ridiculous situation where I was more concerned to please these missionary friends than to find out what God wanted me to do. I did not belong to any missionary society, was not sponsored by any group at home and, in reality, had all the freedom anyone could want; yet I was feeling bound and ineffective.

One day, I went to play the harmonium in the chapel. There, I found out that a Chinese couple was to lead the service. As soon as I saw them, I knew they had it. What “it” was I did not know—but even watching them praying, I sensed a vitality, a power. Immediately, I wanted to know what made them so different. After the service, I made a beeline for the couple. They spoke hardly any English, and I knew hardly any Chinese. Yet
soon, it was clear what they were trying to convey.

“You haven’t got the Holy Spirit.”

A little indignantly, I replied that I had. They replied that I had not, and so the futile argument continued as we walked out of the Walled City and back to my bus stop.

Of course I have the Spirit
, I thought to myself.
I couldn’t believe in Jesus if I didn’t
. So what were we arguing about? These people obviously had something I needed, which I had recognized even without understanding their sermon. They called it having the Holy Spirit, and I wanted to call it something else. I quit the quarrel over terminology—receiving the Spirit, being filled with the Spirit, baptism of the Spirit, the power of the Spirit, second blessing, or what have you.
¹
If God had anything more for me, I wanted to receive it. I would sort out the theological terms later. So I made an appointment to go to the young couple’s flat the next day.

Their flat proved to be a one-room affair, exactly like thousands of flats all over the colony. There was one table, and on it were placed a plate of oranges and a plate of wet flannels. The oranges are a traditional Chinese food for a celebration; they were for when I had “received” the Holy Spirit, while the flannels were for me to cry into.