Chasing the Dragon (25 page)

As the police cars arrived, the weapon cars slid away, and when the policemen came into the café, all was tranquility. Here were all these young men having a cup of coffee with a European girl. The young men, of course, did not have knives on them, and I could hardly say to the policemen, “Look, these men are threatening me,” because they were not. I went out to the lavatory at the back, and there was one of the policemen there too, so I said, “Excuse me, but there are men with knives outside in cars.”

“There’s no one there. Do you want me to search the cafe?” he asked helpfully.

“It’s no good searching the cafe,” I said. “You won’t find anything.”

So the police all went away again, and as they went the cars came back. I was still stuck there, not knowing what to do. The one thing that I could do in this situation was pray, but I could not pray in English, for I was in a complete blue funk. I decided to pray in tongues very quietly so that they could not hear.

My knees were shaking under the table, and I went on praying. I had no idea what I was going to do next, for this gang was
getting more and more furious and I could not see how it was going to end. Finally I got up, saying, “I have to go and buy some vegetables.”

Trembling violently I walked out of the café, and as I walked out I could see men getting out of the cars, which were parked close together. They were walking toward me. I did not know what would happen and was still more frightened that the Walled City boys would leap in and fight on my behalf. Mercifully, a minibus was passing, and although I did not know where it was going, I jumped on and got away. I went straight to the police station.

“I want to report something. I’m afraid there might be a murder.” I tried to tell the police about the emergency phone call and about the men with knives looking for Angel. “I’m sure they are going to go to her family’s home. They don’t know where I live yet and have no way of finding out my address. But they’re going to go to her home, and I know they’re going to give her family members trouble.” I gasped incoherently.

They all looked very bored and asked, “Where does she live?”

“In Shek Kip Mei,” I told them.

“Well, that’s not our district.” They sounded irritated. “Would you mind going to the Shek Kip Mei police station?”

“But can’t you call from here?” I asked them. “I’m afraid there might be a murder.”

A police inspector sitting there looked around at me and smirked. “Madam,” he intoned, “people get killed every day.”

“Yes, I know they do,” I said impatiently. “But I just want to tell you before it happens, because I’d like to stop this one.” I made such a fuss that eventually they said they would take me to Shek Kip Mei police station in one of their vehicles. I found the second police station equally unhelpful. “This should be Kowloon City business, as the 999 call was made from there,” they complained. “Anyway, what do you expect us to do about it?”

“Look, here is her address,” I said. “Here is where her family lives. I’m pretty sure that this gang is going to go to her family and give them problems.”

“We can’t send someone to watch there all the time. We’ve got a lot of jobs to do.”

“I know you can’t, but could you tell the policemen on the beat to watch out for this address and to keep their eyes open?”

This all took about six hours and eventually a very helpful inspector took an unofficial report, as there was no way that he could make it official since nothing had actually happened. Twelve hours later, I got a desperate phone call from one member of Angel’s family. I deliberately had not given them my address, as the gang would have got it out of them. “I’m out shopping and I can see up onto the balcony of the resettlement block,” she said in a shaking voice. “There are five men sitting in my family’s house, and they won’t leave. And there are other men sitting on the stairs with weapons, with iron bars.”

I straightaway rang the police. The long six-hour wrangle with them the night before proved its value, because they were already informed and got their policemen there very quickly. Most of the men managed to escape, but they captured two or three of them. The police managed to put fear in them by implying that if they felt like it, they could get this gang into a lot of trouble. Angel was never bothered again.

The strangest part of the whole story was yet to come. Angel’s family told me later that they had been terrified when the gang came and sat in their house. They were questioned as to where I lived and where our church was. Mercifully, they did not know and so could not tell.

“Anyway, who is this Jesus lady and who are these Christians?” asked one of the gang. “Our Angel used to be so obedient; she’d do anything we wanted before, and now she dares to resist us. Did you see that Jesus woman’s eyes? When we were sitting in that café, we were frightened; we dared not look in her eyes because she has some kind of power.” The word they used implied a supernatural power or strength. When I heard that, I really rejoiced, because it had been one of the most frightening moments of my life and I was completely out of my depth, yet they were more frightened than I was and had not dared
touch me because they recognized a spiritual power.

Now that her freedom was secured, we could not keep Angel in Lung Kong Road in the middle of boys who were trying to start a new life. Since Jean and Rick had moved to the Hong Kong side to accommodate more people at the Saturday meeting, their Mei Foo house was available for the few months the lease still had to run. We decided to put Angel there together with two girls who had been referred by the courts and the girlfriend of one of the addicts who was going through withdrawal in our houses. Sarah stayed to be the housemother, and so the girls’ house began.

Another of the difficulties in rehabilitating girls was that no one ever forgot their past. Somehow there was a kind of glory attached to a man’s crimes; he could be forgiven, and if they were not forgotten at least no one blamed him for them. For a girl, however, it was different: Even if she became a Christian, no one forgot what she had once been.

Although the lease soon expired and we were unable to continue the girls’ house, we had learned much through this experiment. Angel, who had never been to school in her life, had begun to read a little. She was never molested again and later married a very nice young Christian man with a proper legal job.

It was a year later when another member of the judiciary—this time a district court judge—telephoned Jean and asked if she would consider taking a middle-aged woman into our houses. She had been caught at Kai Tak Airport with four and a half pounds of raw opium in her underclothes. The judge felt that this was an isolated incident in her life, and although the crime actually merited several years in prison, he was unwilling to pass this sentence as it seemed of no benefit to her. The probation report on her home was so discouraging that unless an alternative could be found, probation would be ruled out.

Jean hurriedly told the judge that we no longer had a girls’ house and could not consider mixing a female drug peddler with our boys. However, she agreed to visit the court the next day and talk to the woman.

I went with Jean to translate, and when we arrived the judge, who remembered us from Ah Kit’s case, cleared the court so that we could talk for as long as we liked without being disturbed. We saw a Chinese woman in her late 40s sitting in the dock like a rabbit frozen with fear.

We did not want Ah Ying to think that her future depended in any way on her response to our message, as that would have provoked a weighted decision from her. Without saying where we were from or who we were, we told her about Christ and how He could take away the heaviness of sin and give her a new life with power.

She told us that she had been trying to pray in prison while on remand and that we were an answer to her prayers. She smiled as she realized that Jesus had forgiven her and prayed eagerly with us to receive the power of His Spirit.

Jean looked at me. I looked at her. We both shrugged and smiled as we said in unison, “Well, we had better go in to the judge and tell him we’ll take her.”

Ah Ying went to live in Third House, staying in one of the helpers’ rooms. She was very churchy at first and liked long, flowery, repetitious prayers. She was also very contentious and difficult to live with. But gradually, she grew into a completely different person. It may have had something to do with the fact that she always prayed in the Spirit while she did the establishment’s ironing—and some days she ironed for hours …

God, I can’t tell them about Jesus. Wouldn’t it be awful if they believed?
I used to hurry past some of the old prostitutes, avoiding them for that reason. I was at the stage where I knew that Christ could overcome the power of drug addiction, but I also knew that the new believers needed a safe, strong house to grow up in. We no longer had a place for girls; we had quite enough problems with the boys as it was. So what would I do with a repentant madam? Leave her on the streets?

I could not resist speaking one night as I passed one old crone who had her pitch just near Lung Kong Road. She sat on an orange box and had no home, nowhere to sleep, nowhere for her belongings. The only way she got a bed for the night was if a man hired her, and then she could sleep the whole night in the apartment house room that he rented. She had no cupboard for her clothes but kept them all in a laundry, taking out clean ones when needed and changing them for her dirty ones.

Ah King was nearly 50 and endured her prostitute’s life by taking heroin. Perhaps she had been led into prostitution to make money for her heroin habit. In any case, the two were now inextricably combined, and she was on a hopeless course. She knew who I was, as I had walked by her for years.

I began to tell her about the woman who washed Jesus’ feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair. How she was a prostitute but He, who was God’s Son, liked her and spoke kindly to her. I spoke of the religious people whom He was not so keen on, and how upset they were at Jesus’ manners in public, letting a soiled woman touch Him; how He had said to her, “Your sins are forgiven … go in peace.”
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Ah King listened and believed. “That’s the Lord I want,” she cried.

I told her how she could receive this Lord, and she prayed out loud in Chinese, completely naturally. The old man who was the street pimp was close to us; he was not a very high-class pimp but one who took a few dollars from each of the elderly street women. This coolie watched us sitting with our eyes closed praying and nearly split his sides with laughter. His howls of mirth did not put Ah King off. She sat there talking to the Lord who loved prostitutes.

“This Lord will also give you power to help you pray, and this power will stay with you to teach you everything,” I told her. She began to pray in a beautiful new language quietly and clearly as the Holy Spirit taught her.

When Ah King had prayed for 10 minutes, she looked up with happiness flooding her face. Now came the awful moment.
I had nothing to give her. I had no house for prostitutes; my floor was already covered with boys. My purse was empty. I had not even a bus fare. She continued sitting on her box.

“You know, Ah King, you don’t have to look to men anymore for your daily rice,” I said. “Look to God.”

She roared with good-humored laughter. “Do you mean to say it will fall down from heaven?”

“Maybe,” I replied seriously. “If God really is God, He could quite easily send you rice from heaven. You cannot live this kind of life anymore.”

She seemed to catch the idea. “I tell you what,” she said. “Next time I see you, I’ll tell you how it came.”

I walked away, leaving her on her box. I did not like doing that—it was hardly an auspicious beginning to a new life—but I decided to put her completely into God’s hands.

A week later, I saw her again.

“I’ve learned some things,” she told me. “I think it is reasonable enough for God to provide my rice money but not my heroin money.” That was the last time I ever saw her. When I asked the other prostitutes where she was they replied, “Oh, she does not do this anymore. She has gone away. She has gone somewhere to get off drugs.”

I always like to think of Ah King sitting somewhere in the best house God can provide while He rains rice down upon her.

13

WITNESSES

I
t was dark in the Walled City that night; only the lights of our little room blazed out bravely in the sultry gloom. Four or five boys lounged around watching a table tennis game. Into the light slipped a pathetic figure, very young and very thin and clearly addicted to heroin. I recognized Bibi, Winson’s youngest brother, who was called “Bibi” because he was the baby of the family. He was on the run from the police; they had let him out for one day’s holiday from prison and he had not gone back.

I called him, sat him on a wooden bench away from the tennis table, and told him about Jesus. He seemed to begin to understand, but he did not stay more than half an hour; boys on the run can never stay long in any place. He promised me to come back again, and some days later—or it may have been weeks—he did come back. I told him more so that he knew enough to make the decision to follow Jesus if he so chose; I warned him that he now had to make up his mind for himself. “I can’t go on seeing you, because I’ll be breaking the law if I encourage you to visit me here,” I said. “If I do not know where you live that is one thing, but if I am regularly seeing you here, I will be obliged to turn you in. I will pray for you, and as soon as you are ready to follow Jesus, tell me and I will go with you to the police station and help you give yourself up. I will go through the whole thing with you, because if you really start to pray, I know you can be helped.”

Bibi did not turn himself in. Later, he was arrested and sent back to prison. I went to see him there and we talked, but on his release he went back on drugs. For the next few months he
dropped into the Youth Club occasionally, and then I heard he had been arrested for two very serious crimes. One charge was for wounding a newspaper seller and stealing his watch; the second charge was for robbery with assault. The police claimed that they had found identity cards and property from the victims on Bibi when they arrested him. As soon as I heard the details, I knew that Bibi could not be guilty of at least one of the charges: He was in the Youth Club talking to me at the time that he was supposed to have been robbing the newspaper seller. I hurried to see him in prison and discovered to my horror that he wanted to plead guilty because, although he was innocent of these particular charges, he had done about 20 other robberies in a completely different area of Kowloon. He said in a resigned tone, “Let’s just get it over with and plead guilty.”