Chasing the Dragon by Jackie Pullinger Read Free Book Online

Chinese way of drug taking has a magic ritual all its own—a sort of devilish liturgy that is sacred. Once inside a drug den, addicts would take a piece of silver tinfoil; on it, they would place the small sand-colored grains of heroin. After heating the foil with a slow-burning spill of screwed up toilet paper, the heroin would gradually melt into a dark brown treacle. The addicts would then put the outer casing of a matchbox into their mouth to act as a funnel through which to inhale the fumes. They would keep the pool of treacle moving from one end of the silver foil to the other, following it with their mouth. This is “chasing the dragon.”
    Mr. Fung never chased the dragon in public but in drug dens or lavatories. It was a full nine months before I actually saw it for myself. And I soon discovered that not all drug takers looked like Mr. Fung. Some were very well dressed; they regarded their neat appearance as evidence that they were not enslaved to the dragon. As I was going into the city, quite frequently I saw Mr. Fung.
Should I learn to say “Good morning, how are you?” or “Do you have a problem?”
In any case, I could not understand his reply, even had he confided in me. I wondered whether I should do something about him and others like him. I hoped someone was doing something.
    Prostitution, unlike drug abuse, was seldom concealed. The first prostitute I met used dark mauve lipstick and mauve nail varnish—a macabre combination with her thin grey face and emaciated body. She spent her whole life squatting in a street so narrow that the sewer tunnel ran by her heels. I never saw her in any other position. When she ate, she remained squatting there with her rice bowl and her chopsticks, waiting for customers.
    Farther down, other women sat on orange boxes, and one even had a chair. It was hard to tell their ages, because most of them were drug addicts too. The score marks on the backs of their hands showed that they were mainlining—directly injectingheroin into the veins. Day after day, I walked past them and could not tell whether they were asleep or awake; they nodded all day, showing the yellow of their eyes in a heroin haze.
    One day I tried touching the little one. I had learned to say, “Jesus loves you” (
Yeh sou ngoi nei
), and my heart went out to her. But she cringed away from me. Looking at the expression on her face, I suddenly realized that she was feeling sorry for me because she thought I had made a mistake. She seemed to be saying, “You’re a good girl and shouldn’t be talking to the likes of us! You’re a nice Christian, dear; maybe you don’t know who we are.” She put up the barrier, and I did not know how to cross it. She was embarrassed that a clean girl had made an error and touched a dirty one.
    Some of the older prostitutes were clearly involved in procuring. As men came out of the blue film theatre, these
mama-sans
would literally pull them in. You could hear them saying, “She’s very young and very cheap,” as they pushed them up the wooden flight of steps. Compared with the prices charged in other places by the more glamorous Susie Wongs, these prostitutes were cheap indeed at HK $5 each. Not, of course, that the girls were allowed to keep all this money—most prostitutes were controlled by Triad gangs, and these brothels were only allowed to operate by the gang controlling that area. The Triads also supplied the young girls.
    There were two girls I saw occasionally, as I taught percussion band next to their sordid room. One was a cripple and the other was mentally retarded. They were both prisoners. They never went anywhere without a
mama-san
accompanying them. They were visited up to three times an hour, and I reckoned they might be dead of disease by the time they were 20 or so.
    Later, an English-speaking Triad member explained how these two girls, and others like them, would have been introduced to the trade. A group of young men would hold a party and