Read Online Chasing the Dragon by Jackie Pullinger - Free Book Online

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 workvery 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 whowanted 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