Chasing the Dragon (10 page)

Jesus said, “Blessed are the peacemakers,”
⁸
but gang fights are not easy to stop. This kind of problem was one that the new converts would have to face all too often.

I remember one Sunday evening inside Oiwah church. It was not a day off for most people in the Walled City; the fact that you could actually get to church was a source of pride to these marginally more prosperous Chinese folk. As I looked up from the organ keys, I could see some of the teachers from the Oiwah School, together with various hawkers, vegetable sellers and other traders. All looked to be solid, law-abiding, decent folk, serious and respectably dressed, although most were very poor. The fact that I troubled about the young tear-aways really rather appalled them.
This Westerner
, they thought,
simply doesn’t understand how wicked these boys are
. They did not like having the
boys in church with them, whereas I sat there hoping and praying that some of them would come.

All at once, the little door swung open violently and the boys arrived. The sight of their Teddy boy shirts and tight trousers sent a ripple of fear through the congregation, who thought it was a raid by the Triads. And this time, I too was a little surprised, because the boys were in a terrible state; normally scruffy, this time they were caked with filth and blood, having come straight to church after a terrible fight. Several of the boys had dull red abrasions on their faces. One hunched over, limping from a blow to the groin. Their clothes were torn and their eyes were staring. However, they sat down and stayed quiet throughout the service. As soon as it was finished, I got up and hurried to find out what had happened.

Apparently they had walked into a trap carefully set for them. As the boys entered the local public lavatory outside the Walled City to spruce up for church, a group of youths had leapt out of the cubicles where they had been hiding and savagely attacked them with bats.

Several were quite badly hurt; I took them out of the Walled City, called a taxi and went off to the hospital with them. That they should come and find me at church after such a terrible fight pleased me very much. Naïvely, I thought it was wonderful.
Praise God, they’ve come to church and they’ve come in here—they haven’t gone to their gang leaders; they’ve come to Christians
.

I was soon to find out that the rest of the congregation saw the whole incident quite differently. They were outraged that the boys should have dared to invade their church looking and smelling so dreadfully. They did not accept that boys like that could become Christians; they expected an inward change to be followed by an outward change into shirts and ties and lace-up shoes. And they were particularly upset that I had allowed the boys to come into church immediately after partaking in violence. The elders were convinced that I was being used by a bunch of unscrupulous rascals. In their experience, no one like that had ever become a Christian. And when I asked that some of the
boys who had become Christians should be baptized, their answer was a straight “No.” They told me very firmly that the boys should have a time of testing first. This ban on their baptisms meant that the boys could not take part in the breaking of bread ceremony, either.

At first, I continued to encourage the boys to come to the church, even though they were clearly not welcome. Then one day, a wise and older missionary, George Williamson, came to the Walled City; he watched what was going on and understood the whole situation immediately.

“Jackie,” he said, “why do you make these boys come to church here?”

There was no escape; I had to give him answers. “Well, for two reasons really,” I began rather hesitantly. “One reason is very negative. It’s because I don’t want to be criticized and I don’t want everyone to think I’m doing my own thing.” George smiled warmly; he knew how the older generation disapproved of women missionaries taking their own initiative.

“Second,” I continued a little more confidently, “I think these boys need elder brothers and sisters and need the family of the church. In the same way, the church needs them. It is not healthy for us to be simply a young persons’ group.”

I felt that George, with his background, would be sure to agree with me. But he did not. “No, Jackie, your boys are not ready yet. You should look at it like this: They are like seedlings that you wouldn’t transplant too young, because they’d die. At the moment, the boys can’t take the knocks they are getting from the established Church. It’s too soon to expect them to make allowances for the attitudes of these church people. You can’t expect them to have that sort of grace.” I felt amazed; he was asking me to go ahead and do my own thing. He continued, “Look on them as seedlings; take them away and care for them; tend them until they have grown up. Then they will be strong enough to stand and take the knocks. And then you can plant them and they can help the church to grow up. The church in Hong Kong isn’t ready for them yet.”

Therefore, instead of insisting that new young Christians join the church, I expanded our Bible study group; we met several times a week and were now open on Sunday mornings. The clubroom was used more and more and began to be well known among Triads even outside the Walled City as a splendid place to spend Saturday evenings. We had raucous singing sessions and ping-pong. If I insisted on a prayer, most of them would go outside and hoot in friendly fashion in the alley until I had got it over with. Then back they swarmed.

Without Dora Lee, I could never have coped. She had been head girl at St. Stephen’s school and, together with other students, helped me with the kind of Chinese translation I could not manage, like translating from the Bible. She was an outstanding Christian, for years giving up most of her weekends in order to help the boys understand Christ.

Dora’s help was valuable in other ways; she taught me much about how Chinese people think and react. The more I understood, the more I realized how English methods for telling the world about Jesus Christ and how to follow Him did not work out as practical possibilities on the other side of the world. Worthy members of the Christian Union talk about prayer in terms of getting up early and having a quiet time with God. But this sort of advice was quite impracticable for the boys I knew. They often lived in a house with 10 other people; it was never quiet, and no one had a bed to himself, let alone a room. They slept in the bed on a rotation system, some working while others rested. The idea of finding a quiet place to study their Bibles and contemplate the Almighty was a joke. But praying in a new language is essentially practical, because they could walk along any noisy Hong Kong street and no one would notice.

Many of them could not read, so my suggestions had to be workable. This I learned through a sad experience when one of the boys prayed that he desired to follow Jesus. In misguided fervor, I gave him a copy of St. John’s Gospel, Scripture notes on St. John, and two booklets entitled,
Now You Are a Christian
and
The Way Ahead
. I did not see him for two years, and I felt hurt and
concerned for his spiritual well being. When I saw him again, I asked why he had been avoiding me for so long. He looked embarrassed.

“I wanted to know Jesus, and you gave me a library.”

I reexamined some of my concepts about studying the Word of God. The Early Christians certainly had no Bibles; they must have learned another way. For those who could read, I suggested they take a few moments from their factory benches by retreating to the toilets to read a few verses. Others found they could memorize a few lines. I tried to see all the boys I knew as often as I could, encouraging them to follow Christ’s teachings. They did make progress, but there was never enough time to see everyone. My school duties curtailed my time and my inadequate Chinese meant that I found it pretty difficult to convey spiritual truths. I needed more hours to study; practicing with the boys was not enough when I did not understand the complex structure of the language.

As the pressure grew worse, I began to pray about it. “Lord, I’ve got too much to do. I need more time to spend with these boys. And I can’t do this if I have to spend much of the day teaching. You have promised to provide our daily bread; please let me know if you will provide mine without my ‘earning’ it.”

Three days later the phone rang; it was Clare Harding, the friend who had introduced me to the Willanses. She came straight to the point. “Jackie, I wanted you to know that when you leave St. Stephen’s, we want to offer you some money.”

I was staggered; no one knew that I was even considering such a move. “But hang on a bit,” I gasped in reply, “who told you I was leaving St. Stephen’s? As it stands at the moment, I’m not.”

Clare did not hesitate. “Yes, I know you aren’t leaving right now. But Neil and I have been praying together. And I wanted you to know that if you were thinking of leaving, we’d like to offer you HK $200 a month.”

“Well, in any case, if I left it wouldn’t be until July at the earliest, because I must continue teaching until the end of the school year.”

Clare replied, “The money can’t be available until July anyway, but I just felt I had to ring and tell you now.” It was mid-November.

Her call was a great encouragement. I felt that if God could tell someone who did not know I was even considering leaving my job to offer me a monthly check worth about US $33, it was nothing for Him to provide my whole living. Now, many years later, I realize that this was the point where I decided to live by faith.
⁹
But at that time, I had never even heard of the phrase, and I would have found it hard to tell anyone about my financial needs. I knew, surely, that if God wanted me to do this job, He would provide. It never worried me in the slightest as to how He would do it.

7

BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU

T
he telephone was ringing and ringing in my dreams. I struggled awake, clambered out of bed and lifted the receiver. It seemed to be the depths of the night; actually, the time was around 5
A.M.
Ah Ping spoke in a quick, strained voice.

“Poon Siu Jeh, you’ve got to come quickly. Someone has broken into the club, and there is a terrible mess everywhere.” He hung up.

Despite the sticky heat, I shivered as I hurriedly climbed into yesterday’s clothes. I had moved by this time to the Kowloon side of Hong Kong and was sharing my apartment block with 8,000 other sardines. When I reached the street, it was still asleep and deserted. No buses were around that early, so I ran and ran.

My friend at the baker’s stall was lifting a tray of hot pineapple buns out of his oven and carefully parking them on the pavement. At last, I found a cab that would take me to the Walled City. When I got there, I hurried again through the tortuous alleyways, the smells and the filth to the clubroom. I was ready to find a mess. The scene that greeted me was beyond my imagination. Benches, books, ping-pong bats and skateboards had been thrown around and smashed up. Far worse, the filth of the alleys had invaded our clean club. Someone had deliberately thrown sewage all over the floor and walls. Ah Ping had no need to explain anything; the destruction screamed its own message.

I wanted to sit down and cry. My pride crumbled to dust. I thought these boys were my people who trusted me as a friend; we had our problems, but really everything was fine. Then they
threw feces all over my walls and showed what they honestly thought of me and the four-year-old club.

“All right, God,” I said, “enough is enough. I don’t mind working here forever, as long as they appreciate me. But if they don’t want me or You, I don’t have to stay here. I can be a Christian in Kensington and do normal things like normal people—dinner parties and discussion groups, apologetics and concerts. After all, I really don’t want to stay down here for the rest of my life playing ping-pong. I mean, God, it’s no joy for me to have a little room like this; I’m doing it for them. I’m willing to pour my life out for them, but if they don’t want it, they need not have it. Let’s close the room up.” Resentment burned at me. “They’ll soon miss the club if I close it up; they’ll soon see what they’ve done was really harming themselves.”

But at the same time, I also heard what Jesus had said: When people hit you, you should let them hit you again; when they persecute you, you should bless them.
¹
There was another insistent passage about praising God in all your troubles.
²
But I did not want to do that—I wanted to howl and wallow in self-pity. I wanted my enemies to suffer too. I certainly did not feel like rejoicing or turning the other cheek.

So I spent the whole day sweeping up the place, muttering tearfully, “Praise God, praise God.” I hunched over the bamboo brush and swiped the floor savagely—but less savagely as the day wore on and more sadly. “Praise God, praise God.” I had fits of sobbing. The foundations of my world lay in ruins.

The next night, I opened the club as usual. For the first time, I was frightened—not of being beaten up, for God had always protected me from that—but of being rejected by the boys that I loved and ministered to. I did not know who had done it and why, and I stayed there in the club trembling all over. I was lonely and vulnerable.

A youth I had never seen before leaned against the club door. He jerked his head at me and spoke coolly, “Got any trouble?”

“No. No. It’s fine, thank you very much,” I replied hastily. “But why are you asking?” He sucked in his cheeks and thumbed
his chest nonchalantly. “Got any trouble, you just let me know.”

“I’m happy to hear that,” I said. “But who are you? Who sent you?”

“Goko sent me,” he replied abruptly.

I was shaken; I knew exactly who Goko was. He was the leader of one branch of the 14K and was reputed to have several thousand little brothers in the Walled City and surrounding areas. He controlled all the opium dens and vice in the area. The fact that this stranger had even used Goko’s name to me was undoubtedly a compliment. It is both a term of endearment and respect, meaning, “my big brother.” He was the Big Brother of the big brothers. One of the little brothers in my club had confided his name to me with awe; even 10 years later, gangsters were daunted that I knew his name, for it was only ever mentioned among themselves.