Originally Posted on August 2nd 2003
I spend time talking to an ex triad (HK gang member). About his life, about his regrets, about what haunts him. I don’t know why he trusts me to talk to me. I never asked. He just started talking one day, and he hasn’t stopped. He says it’s because he trusts me to understand. And I have no idea why I do, but I do. He also knows I am a writer and filmmaker. He made me promise not to tell anyone, I told him I promise that, but I can’t promise not write about it. He says I can write about it in English and never ever discuss it in this city. He tells me about kids being paid to go to jail for others, about the dealings, about what these people do, about the mind games authorities plays in interogation. What it’s like to make so $100 000 a day.
It’s a different world, where a bar fight over a table at a club can escalate into full scale gang attacks. And why and how that happens. It blows me away he is telling his secrets to the one person he shouldn’t. He knows I will do something with it one day. I even said that to him. Maybe he wants someone to know his story. Sometimes I am afraid, he wants me to know his story in case something happens to him so his life is not completely gone.
Years ago, I asked my father who is a retired police person, who sent me a book on the East Harlem gangs, whether someone could do that in Hong Kong. He said if someone could, they would have and no one’s ever gotten close enough to these guys to do it. Now I wonder. Maybe it’s possible. But I feel like a shit to even talk about our conversations. But I can’t sleep at night sometimes, knowing what I know and have no one to talk to about it but I made a promise to him. And selling out someone who refused to sell out his brothers, when it would have been his best interest to, is like dealing a bad bad card with karma.
Once he said to me. If I let on I know something he told me, then no one can help me. Only the police. I laughed because the only people who I would know to ask for help is the police. It struck him as odd, because in his previous life, going to the police is like asking for a death warrant. They are not here to protect you, that’s the job for your elder “brother.” I said, maybe the Police is the elder brother for normal people who don’t have real “brothers” to watch your back. He liked that.
Years ago. I worked in East LA in a warehouse (East LA is what South Central is to Mexicans, which is next to Montery Park, the New Chinese Middle Class Area) and I would hang around with some of the guys who do the packing. They would buy me slurpies and show me around town. You know, I was the strange foreign receptionist that needed to be skooled about LA. They found that my step dad was a police rather amusing, like they were corrupting the enermy’s daughter. Sometimes I would see in movies that one pan over the LA Drain which they call a river, and on the side would be the massive tags. It always reminds me of sitting on the concrete at three am, watching them spray down another name of another friend who had been shot or stabbed.
You know some of those guys were the most amazing poets I ever met. Most amazing. They could make your cry and laugh with freestyling. They cried when Easy E died of AIDs, but I say Easy had nothing on Jose. My boss thought I was insane to talk to those “Mexicans.” They were the only ones my age at work, I would tell him. But really they were my friends. They weren’t gang bangers, just guys who lived in a bad, evil, awful place. But life gets in the way. Eventually I left that job and we just grew apart. One ended up working as a gardener, one ended up hooked on crack, one ended up in jail. I wish we were all 19 again, when we were just all kids, earning minimum wage. One ended up in UCLA. We still talk. He lives behind enermy lines now, as he likes to say. Maybe I need to call him up and asked what it is about me that made him tell me all his secrets, to be my tour guide to the other side.
Yan Sham-Shackleton Online 