Chasing the Dragon (30 page)

“There is one thing more I must tell you before you go. When you kept telling me I must tell the truth, I had no intention of doing so, but I was praying and I made a bargain with God. I said, ‘Okay, if she comes to see me today, I’ll tell the truth this afternoon.’ You came, so I went and I disclosed to the police that there was as much heroin on the ship that had not yet been found as had been found. Nobody was pleased with that. Of course, my own people were furious because they had a fortune hidden away, and the police were not pleased because they were made to look foolish. The judge was very angry because the amount of drugs was so enormous and gave me a very heavy sentence.”

Go Hing smiled at me as he finished. “I have a heavy sentence here on Earth, but my sins are forgiven and I go to heaven—better that than to have a light sentence here on Earth and go to hell.”

15

WALK IN THE SPIRIT

A
delightful American sailor once took me to task about my praying in tongues. He thought I went on about it far too much. He had this gift himself, but he felt it should only be used sparingly for spiritual highs and for special occasions. I explained to him that one reason why God was able to use me was because I kept in touch through using this gift all the time. I prayed in the Spirit as I went around the colony—in buses, on the boats and walking along the streets, very quietly under my breath. That way, it is possible to pray all the time. I offered, if he had time, to take him on a day-long tour of Hong Kong while we prayed continuously.

The next day, we met up and walked down through Western District to the waterfront. The route reminded me of my first few days in Hong Kong when I began to see beneath the tourists’ glamorous façade to the dirt, poverty, struggle, ceaseless work and more work.

In one steep-stepped ladder street, I passed an old man living in a cupboard five feet high, six feet long and three feet deep. He sold vegetables from his cupboard by day and climbed on top of them to sleep at night, as there was nowhere else for him to live. With four and a half million people crammed into every available square foot, whole families in Hong Kong had to live in one room. This man had no family.

Further down the street, I found an old lady holding out a plastic rice bowl. No one in Hong Kong had money or rooms to spare and there were no pensions either, so she stayed alive by
begging. There were so few old people’s homes that she had not a hope of getting into one.

Walking on, I saw a little girl about five years old with a child strapped on her back, because both of her parents had to work long hours to support their children. Nobody looked after the dirty little five-year-old—she was looking after the baby.

Then I passed a teenage boy who paid rent for the privilege of sleeping on a four-foot shop counter. He had stopped school at the end of his primary years when he was about 13. He was bright and wanted to continue school, but his parents took him away to work. When he got his job, he gave all his money to them so that they could send all his younger brothers and sisters to school. Every time I walked past him, he asked me to practice English with him to help him to get a better job.

I reached the end of the street feeling that if I spent my entire life down there I could just about get to love this street—I could just about get to love all the people and know them and their needs. But when we turned into the next street, it was a duplicate of the first, and beyond that was yet another … more people. I told the American sailor how I had prayed during the early days, asking God to show me which bit of His work was mine; He had answered by sending me to the Walled City and the miraculous events of the next dozen years. I could never have dreamed of anything so extraordinary and wonderful.

My sailor was as overwhelmed by this sight of Hong Kong as I had been. But the purpose of our day was to encourage him to walk in the Spirit, so I began to pray as we went.
¹
We crossed the harbor and arrived at Jordan Road, an area I knew well, as I had lived there for a while. I took him inside a building that boasted both brothels and ballrooms. It was a place where heroin addicts hung out, looking deathly sick and half-starved. We walked up the back staircase; there were various people sleeping on the stairs, and we picked our way over the bodies, looking for a large tramp. I had come to find Mau Wong, the “King of the Cats”; he was much fatter than the others there because he
was a “protector” for various prostitutes, and so earned quite a lot of money.

We found Mau Wong in an extremely unhappy state: He had a terrible stomachache and was sweating profusely and retching. He could not listen to me telling him about Jesus, so the young American and I laid hands upon him and prayed quietly in the Spirit for his healing. Very quickly his pain vanished and a look of great surprise crossed his features. He could hardly believe what had happened to him, but he was now ready to sit down and listen. He accepted Jesus and was baptized in the Spirit then and there.

We had hardly finished praying when he got up, ran away and reappeared, bringing with him a pathetic specimen of a man with sunken cheeks. Mau Wong explained that this friend had toothache; would we pray for him too? So we took him up onto the roof of the building, which was flat and empty, and prayed with him also. He was healed at once; then we told him who Jesus was and what Jesus had done for him. He was ready to receive Christ and His Spirit and did so straight away. Then I had a message in tongues, and Mau Wong was able to give the interpretation about repentance, which thrilled him very much.

I was to visit Mau Wong on the back staircase several times to tell him more about Jesus; the second time I met him, he gave me a knife and various equipment for smoking heroin, which he asked me to dispose of. He explained that now he was a Christian, he had to earn his living in an honest way, so he had bought some shoe brushes and was going to become a bootblack.

The young American and I left Mau Wong to continue our tour of Hong Kong; we crossed back over the harbor and took a minibus to Chaiwan. All the time I was praying aloud but quietly so that no one could hear. My sailor had thought that praying on buses was a bit much, but after seeing what had happened at Jordan Road, he began to join in too. The whole day we prayed without ceasing except to eat and to talk to those we met along the way.

At Chaiwan we headed for a drug den, which was quite a dangerous place for the young American to go. But they welcomed us both as if they had been waiting to hear about Jesus and we had been anxiously expected. “Poon Siu Jeh, can I have a Bible?” asked an addict.

“How can I start a new life?” asked another.

“Am I too old to be saved?” enquired an old man. “Where can I hear about Jesus and learn doctrine?”

“There is no need to wait until you go to a meeting to hear about Christ. I’ll tell you now,” I said to him. I sat down and talked while a small crowd gathered and listened. The old man listened wonderingly to Bible stories and accepted Jesus like a little child. He renounced his petty fencing business and became a regular attendee of the Saturday meetings.

As we left the den, we were followed by Ah Wing, a mean man who sold heroin, killing others’ bodies as well as his own. He came to eat noodles with us through no good motives at all—he just wanted a free meal. I was telling him about Jesus, and he was hurrying this bit through to get to the noodles.

“Are you willing to believe that Jesus is the Son of God?” I asked him.

“I’m not sure,” he replied. “Maybe.”

I didn’t think he was all that convinced, but I went on to the next question. “And do you believe that He died for you?”

“Don’t understand that.”

“Well never mind, are you willing?”

“All right,” he mumbled.

“Are you willing to believe that He rose again from the dead?”

“Well, I suppose He must have,” he acquiesced, “because I’ve heard of the things He is doing.”

“Are you willing to follow Him?”

He answered scathingly. “Oh yes. I mean, if He is the true God, of course.”

“Ah Wing, why don’t you ask God if Jesus is His Son or not?” I suggested. “I am sure He will let you know.”
²
I began to
pray quietly, motioning the American to join us. As we prayed there at the noodle stall, Ah Wing joined in with us gently and confidently in tongues.

After a few minutes I lifted my head, thinking we had done enough praying at that stall even for me. When I looked at the drug peddler, I saw that he was still praying on and on and on. My sailor had moved one seat farther away, trying to pretend that he did not belong to us, although it was difficult for him to disown me in an area where there were no other Westerners. His attitude changed when he looked up to see the extraordinary expression on Ah Wing’s face as he prayed. He had a look that was seraphic. When eventually he looked up after about 20 minutes, I asked him, “What did you see?”

“Well,” he said, “when I was praying I saw what was like a picture, and I think it was Jesus. He was sitting at a table, a long table. There were several other men around; I think there must have been about a dozen or so. They were passing around some bread, and then a wine cup, and drinking from it.”

I explained to him the meaning, that Jesus was giving His body and His blood for us and rejoiced that God should have revealed Himself to Ah Wing through the breaking of bread.

Two more people were converted later on our walk, and my American friend needed no more convincing about praying in the Spirit.

When I got back home and told Rick and Jean about Ah Wing and the others, they groaned and said, “Oh no! Anyone else and we’d be pleased—but yours are all addicts, and where are we going to put them?”

We often had no room to house those we had brought to faith in Christ. Ever since Winson and Ah Ming, I felt that I was responsible for the welfare of each believer until his life was straightened out, but each one needed so much care: Most had no home, no clothes and suffered from severe personality problems as well as drug addiction and disease.

I felt that I must go back to Chaiwan to look for Ah Wing so that I could do some follow-up. I did not see him, but found
an old acquaintance, Ah Kwan, talking in a drug den with some wholesale drug peddlers. They were all being very nice to me, but I felt compelled to say that although Jesus loved them, and I did too, I thought their business stank. Ah Kwan, who had joined the peddlers, said he would “repent” the week after because he needed three days’ money first. (He lived in a wooden hut with a plastic tarpaulin for the roof, five buckets to catch the water, a tired wife only 25 years old and four children under six. They had no income.) I told him that no one chooses when to repent and that if he did not follow Jesus immediately and come with me, he would be in jail within days. He was caught four hours later and sentenced to 30 months. So the word was out in Chaiwan that I was a prophet, and they began to be more careful about talking to me!

I never saw Ah Wing the drug peddler again and could not tell what happened to him afterward. But I trusted fully that since God loved him better than I, He would definitely take care of him better than I. I had come full circle: I first believed that God would heal all addicts instantly, then I believed that they could only survive if I provided a safe environment, and then I trusted again that I could leave them completely safe in His care.

The sailor wrote to the Willanses, asking if he could come and help our work when he came out of the navy two years later. They replied by saying that by that time we might have 5 houses, 50 houses or none at all. Since none of us was called to do drug addict work but to preach Jesus, we did not feel we should necessarily perpetuate the program, lest it become a burden. We would therefore be open to whichever way God moved, whether it would be into China or a dozen more flats for boys …

Goko’s second real brother came back from Canada. He was tall and suave, dressed in an immaculate suit. We met when Johnny married a Christian nurse from the hospital where he worked. Johnny had invited the members of his old gang so that his wedding could be a witness to them.

“I have to shake you by the hand, Miss Pullinger,” Goko’s brother said in perfect English. “I grew up with the boys in the Walled City and I determined to study law so that I could come back and help them. But now I am back, I see that there is nothing left for me to do. You have done it all. I must shake you by the hand.” Quickly I disclaimed the praise, telling the brother Who had done all the work.

We walked together down the Walled City streets toward the clubroom. They were empty now, as many illicit businesses had ceased. This was due partly to the success of the anticorruption commission but also partly to the fact that so many of the 14K boys had become Christians. There was a local story that Sai Di, the number two in influence, had telephoned a 14K cousin across the harbor and asked to borrow some brothers for a gang fight.

“Sure,” replied the other leader, who knew of both Goko and Sai Di’s reputation, “but what about your own gang?”

“Well,” replied Sai Di, “half of them are drug addicts, the other half are Christians, and they are all lousy fighters.”

Goko’s Canadian brother walked into the clubroom and approved of it. Night after night he appeared for the singing and then talked to me.

One day he asked, “What do you do for money?”

I was a bit offhand and answered tritely, “Oh God looks after us. We pray for it.”

“Okay, okay—but
practically
speaking from where? It does not just fall down from heaven, does it?”

“Well, it may,” I said, and at that moment there was a knock on the door and in came an old man. He lived in a little cubicle in the Walled City, into which he could just squeeze to sleep. He handed me a grubby envelope.

“Poon Siu Jeh,” he said, “I was walking along the street and somebody gave me this letter.” I looked at it; it was addressed in English, “Jackie Pullinger—Walled City,” and that was all. There were few post boxes in the Walled City, and it was a dangerous place to send letters anyway. No one there knows English, so
how he got my letter was a mystery. I opened it up, and there were 100 American dollars from a man I had neither met nor heard of before. I showed it to Goko’s younger brother, and he held up his hand as if calling a truce and said, “Enough said, point taken.”