Chasing the Dragon (12 page)

Up the stairs, the door was open that night. The one-room dwelling was not large enough for all six plus their father to sleep, but since two or three of them were usually in prison at any one time, that was no great problem.

When I got there, I found the eldest brother injecting himself with heroin. On the floor there lay a man with stripes and bruises on every limb and a blood-soaked shirt and shorts. He had been beaten up savagely. I have never been brave at the sight of blood, as it makes me feel physically sick, but here I was faced with the job of cleaning him up and caring for him. My first reaction was to send him to hospital.

“We can’t take him,” they said in unison. “He’s a gang member. He walked across someone else’s territory, and they beat him up. If we take him to hospital, he’ll be asked questions by the police. And then they’ll find out he’s a drug addict.”

I had no alternative. I had to help, so I took their bucket of water and some filthy old bandages, went out and borrowed a shopkeeper’s Mercurochrome, and began to clean the man up. Unexpectedly, I did not feel sick and faint; I was calm and happy. Jesus had said that He came to bind up the wounded, and that is exactly what they had asked me to do. As I washed away the sullen man’s blood, I told him about this. I told him about Jesus’ love and how he could know Him, too. He made no response, but I was sure he understood. He came back one day two years later.

After this incident, I became more involved with Ah Keung’s family. I visited those in prison, tried to help them find jobs on their release, and found alternative homes for some of them. One night I was walking out of the city at about 2
A.M.
when I overheard the second brother, Sai So, giving my telephone number to another addict.

“833179,” he was saying as they ate their soup noodles at a makeshift table in the street. “Remember that number next time you are arrested. It doesn’t matter what time of day or night you call. Miss Poon will come. It doesn’t matter whether you’ve done the crime you’re arrested for or not; she’ll come. The only thing you must do is to tell the truth. You see, she’s a Christian.”

As I walked home, I knew that my labor in the Lord was not in vain.
⁴
Here I was privileged enough to see the fruits of some of those labors. Some of the vilest criminals in Hong Kong now knew that Jesus’ name was truth.

As well as Ah Keung’s brothers, most of the boys I knew were frequently arrested and sent to court. As I got to know them better, I sometimes believed their claims that they were innocent, because I checked their alibis myself. Of course most of them were criminals, but they were not always guilty of the crimes with which they were charged. It seemed to me quite wrong that they should either confess to crimes that they had not committed or deny crimes in which they were involved. I discovered that they regarded the whole business of arrests as
a fatalistic game. And they felt that legal proceedings, carried out in a language that they could not understand, bore little relationship to the truth.

Several times while I was walking with Ah Ping outside the Walled City, he would say, “Whew, I’ve walked to the end of the street and I didn’t get arrested.” It was not that he had done anything—only that he had seen a couple of detectives who recognized him. Both the policemen and Ah Ping knew that he was fair game. If they wanted, they could stop him, search him and ask him a few questions. Or they could take him away and pin a crime on him. It happened frequently. Boys would sign “confessions,” as they knew that they could not afford legal representation and that a guilty plea would earn a lighter sentence than a “not guilty” plea.

I began to plead with the boys to tell the truth and nothing but the truth in court. This led to my spending many, many hours in courts and magistracies. I shared the criminals’ shame as I saw people pointing at me and saying, “There’s that simple Christian sitting with those crooks.” I knew the boys had done wrong things, and perhaps some of them were still involved in crime, but I was always willing to go and sit with them, guilty or not, as long as they spoke the truth. But the shame was awful, and it helped me to understand what an amazing sacrifice Christ had made when He not only publicly associated with us sinners but also took our wrong doings as His own.

One evening, I received a call from Mau Jai (a nickname meaning “Little Cat”). It was 7:45
P.M.
and we had a roomful of St. Stephen’s girls and Walled City boys who had just been praying together in my flat.

“Johnny’s just been arrested. Get to the police station quickly,” Mau Jai said.

“How do you know?” I asked. “And where are you?”

“Can’t talk here—I tell you later,” he said tersely.

On the way to the police station, I thought about Johnny, who was one of the most repulsive-looking drug addicts I knew. He was small and desperately thin, more a skeleton than a man.
“If that one can be saved—anyone can,” I had said when I first saw him. He was a carpenter and earned quite a good wage, but he used the entire lot to smoke heroin. He was a Triad too, but useless to his gang.

When I arrived at the station, I asked to see Johnny but was told that he was not there.

“He must be here—he was arrested 45 minutes ago,” I said. But the desk sergeant denied it.

“Why don’t you go home and we’ll telephone you if he appears,” he suggested patronizingly.

“I’ll stay until you produce him,” I said and prepared to settle down for the night.

Two minutes later they indeed produced him, but I was too late. He had already confessed to a crime. He was charged with being in possession of a screwdriver with intent to break into a building a mile outside the Walled City. The time Johnny was alleged to have committed the crime was 8:15
P.M.
, but I knew this could not be true because Little Cat had phoned me half an hour before that. I went to look for him.

It transpired that Johnny and Little Cat had been taking drugs together in one of the largest dens in the Walled City when two detectives had come in and taken Johnny off. The detectives should not have been there; this was not their beat, but they knew well where the dens were, and addicts made easy pickings. The evil of the situation was that certain police, far from intending to stop this ugly business, actually had an arrangement with the vice bosses that they would ignore the dens in return for “tea” money.

The police made show raids, but several times I heard den watchers getting the tip-off from police who phoned to say that they were on their way. During the Walled City’s heyday of crime, there was a syndicate payment from the vice and drug dealers that amounted to $100,000 daily. Although uniformed police rarely went inside apart from raiding parties, I was told that several plainclothes detectives were actually running some of the illegal businesses in league with the Triads. This made it
extremely difficult to sort out the good guys from the bad guys, and I began to understand why the boys I knew were so muddled about right and wrong.

Johnny’s family lived in a squalid flat just outside the Walled City. They were desperately poor, but they borrowed money and bailed him out. This was a mistake, because Johnny used the remand period of several weeks to take even more heroin until he had used up all the family money and pawned most of their belongings. I visited him and tried to persuade him to plead not guilty, as I knew that he was innocent of this particular charge.

Johnny was reluctant. “I can’t deny the confession I’ve signed,” he said. “The police said they’d arrest me for something else if I did. And I need to keep in with them.”

Addicts claimed that they were often given heroin at the police station in return for their confessions. But Johnny had to learn to stick to the truth. I told him all about Jesus and how He always spoke the truth even though it cost Him His life. Then we prayed together. Johnny agreed that it would be right to tell the truth, but he said that it was too dangerous for him at that stage. He explained it all patiently: “If I do tell the truth in court, then that means I’m letting everyone know where the drug dens are. Worse still, I’m saying that the police themselves know where they are but that they are not doing anything about them. Both my friends and the police will want to get me for saying so in court after that.”

I went on meeting with Johnny. When I say we prayed, it is not strictly true. I prayed and he listened. He thought I did not understand the danger he would be in when I continued to tell him that he should speak the truth. On the day of the trial, he had quite decided to go along with the police story and plead guilty, even though I had hired a solicitor to defend him. The solicitor cost me more than a month’s living expenses, but I saw it as God’s money, which I would use in His name. Just before Johnny went into the witness box, I showed him a Bible passage telling us not to be frightened when in court, for the Holy Spirit tells us what to say.
⁵

Johnny told me afterward that when he stood up in court, he suddenly had an overwhelming conviction that he had to tell the truth even though he did not want to at all. What might have been a simple case lasting a few moments became a major battle lasting more than a week. There were long cross-examinations of the police evidence by our solicitor, but eventually the magistrate accepted it as the correct version and found Johnny guilty. The emotional strain of the week overcame me when he pronounced the verdict, and I burst into tears in court.

To see an English girl weeping for a Chinese criminal and drug addict was unusual; the prosecuting police inspector snapped his briefcase shut and came up to talk to me. He asked me why I was crying. “Because he didn’t do it,” I sobbed. “He isn’t guilty.”

“Well, he’s got a record as long as your arm,” said the inspector kindly. “In fact, he has 13 previous convictions. I shouldn’t waste your sympathy on him.”

“That’s not the point,” I replied. “He hasn’t done this one.”

“Well,” said the prosecutor, “you know this is Hong Kong justice. Even if he hasn’t done this one, he’s done another crime. It’s fair enough in the long run.”

“That’s not right,” I insisted. “Jesus’ name is truth, and we are called to tell the truth here in court.”

By this time, the arresting detectives and their companions had gathered around. They knew that I knew they had been lying. They saw the tears streaming down my cheeks. They saw me as a fool, and they laughed. They laughed and they sneered as they left the court for a celebration meal. It was difficult not to feel bitter against them.

Johnny was sent to prison, and from there he was sent to a drug rehabilitation center. He was assigned a probation officer who summoned his mother, saying, “Don’t let that Christian interfere with your lives—you’re not Christians. You’ve got idols—you are idol worshipers.” The officer was very rude and uncooperative, but I continued to visit Johnny.

The final verdict was yet to come. On appeal the chief justice overruled Johnny’s conviction, and he was technically free. However, Johnny went back to using drugs, and later he went back to prison. Out of prison again, he returned to drugs once more and continued this terrible cycle.

But Johnny had never forgotten what had happened in court. I often used to go and visit him as he lay slumped on the chair that served as his bed. After about two years, he did finally believe in Jesus for himself. He became a Christian, went to a Christian drug rehabilitation center and was transformed. After graduating from there, he became a male nurse in a tuberculosis sanitarium, working on the addicts’ ward.

Johnny’s mother was overjoyed when he became a Christian. Every time I passed the market, she threw eggs and sausages at me. Not literally, but she sold these at her market stall and was so grateful that she showered gifts upon me. Another lady at a noodle stall did the same thing. I could hardly pass without a large bowl being thrust at me. Eventually I had to bypass her particular street, for my jeans were getting too tight.

This is to anticipate a few years, but out of that court case came other good results. It was the first case in which I had asked a solicitor to represent our boys, and many others followed. Each time, the police won the case. “Don’t think that Western woman can help you,” they would scoff in the interrogation room. “She has no power.” But their actions belied their words. Several boys told me that they had been stopped by plainclothes men who asked them, “Are you from that place? Are you from that woman’s club?” When they replied yes, the boys were not detained. The reason was that the police knew that if they charged one of our boys when he was innocent, they would be faced with a week’s trial rather than a 10-minute hearing. Although they won the cases, this was too costly in time. It was one more sign to me that I was being watched, and that in this way, Jesus was preached.

Another result came 30 months later. It was Christmastime and I wanted very much to celebrate with a proper Christmas dinner for the boys, but we had no money. I thought they should
have the best on Jesus’ birthday, so having booked a restaurant, I prayed for funds. Suddenly the phone rang; it was my solicitor’s office.

“We’ve been checking our records and we find we have to refund you 1,000 dollars,” said a voice.

“No, you don’t,” I gasped. “You don’t owe me anything.”

“We’ve been checking through Johnny Ho’s case, and we owe you 1,000 dollars in fees.”

“Surely not,” I said. “That was a correct payment; in fact, I know you took the case cheaply anyway.”

“Our records show that there was an appeal, and that is paid by legal aid.”

“Yes, I know that,” I said, “but the original hearing was not on legal aid. We had to pay for that. Will you please check your books very carefully, because if you give me the money, I shall spend it.”

They checked their books and they sent me the money. So on Johnny’s trial money, we all had a wonderful Christmas dinner two and a half years later. God was watching over us, too.

8

CHASING THE DRAGON

E
merging from the dark city one night I was in a thoughtful mood; my lifestyle was extraordinary in the sense that on no two days did I get up or sleep at the same time. I prayed a lot as I walked, for I found that I needed to talk to God all the time. That night, I reiterated a heartfelt prayer of thanks.