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Chapter 3

Changes

“Baby, whatcha lookin’ at?” Amanda tried to catch my attention. She could see me occasionally craning as I tried to catch a glimpse of a stranger who was about a block ahead of us in the mall. She swung my arm playfully as we walked together—trying to get my attention—but she could see that I was clearly distracted.

“Nothing really … I think I just saw an old friend that I haven’t seen for a long time. Let me go say ‘Hi.’ Why don’t you wait for me back there at the food court? Grab us something to drink at the bubble-tea stand. You know what I want. I’ll meet you there in a minute, all right?”

I gave a quick look both ways as Amanda disappeared around a corner and dodged my way through the mall traffic to catch up to Cheri and a couple of her friends. When she saw me, her eyes lit up. “Hey, baby! What’re you doing here?” she asked. “You stalking me?” She cocked her head and squinted her eyes coyly at me.

“Yeah, totally! I’m watching you, so you’d better be good! Nah, I’m just here with another friend.” I leaned over and kissed her on the cheek. She smiled and looked me in the eye with a hint of suspicion. Man, she was pretty. Cheri introduced me to her friends, though I’m sure I had seen them before at a party or something.

“A ‘friend,’ eh? Better not be another girlfriend! You’re not allowed to mess around with other girls. You promised me that!” Cheri punched me gently square in the middle of my chest. I didn’t feel guilty, but I was a little nervous that I was going to get busted.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah … don’t worry. What are you doing here—just shopping?” I tried to change the topic.

“Yes, in fact, we are here to shop. Tanya and Brenda are helping me pick out something.”

“Well in that case, I better let you continue your mission. I need to get going too. Don’t stay out too late. See you tomorrow?”

“All right. Of course you’re gonna see me tomorrow! Call me before you go to bed. Love you!” She threw her arms around me and pressed her whole torso against mine. I could smell her hair and a gentle waft of perfume rising from her blouse. She really liked me—it was obvious. Over time, being a two-timing jerk was bothering me less and less. I was addicted to the feeling of finding someone new, and my conscience gradually faded behind the fog of my own desires.

I burned through girlfriend after girlfriend—I needed the rush of new feelings to keep me excited about life. Different types of girls attracted me in different ways. If they were taller than me or had money to flaunt, I didn’t let it intimidate me. All it represented was another challenge in a game that I was getting pretty good at—for a guy who used to be a geek, that is.

Some of my guy friends thought I was some kind of hero, but the truth of the matter is that maintaining the deception and constantly lying were completely exhausting. The exhilaration would keep me going for a while, but eventually I would long for a calmer and more honest reality. This I am certain of: a lot of this was overcompensation for my days as a social outcast. It was what you might call an “evil nerd syndrome”: high-school loser is suddenly popular and becomes a megalomaniac.

_______

I still remember my first impressions of Pinetree Secondary School in Coquitlam, BC, Canada. It was a beautifully built modern school surrounded by stands of West Coast fir trees and overlooking Lafarge Lake. I was very grateful to be able to attend such a great school in a beautiful part of greater Vancouver. The natural beauty of north Coquitlam—the mountains and the constantly fresh air blowing through the valley—stood in sharp contradistinction to the place of my birth, Hong Kong. All I remembered is the concrete. Never before had I seen so many living things (other than humans, that is). Real trees and plants everywhere I looked. For a city kid from Hong Kong, this seemed pretty exotic.

The educational system in Hong Kong was very stressful and competitive. Students were forced by their parents to have tutoring in almost every subject, just to make it to the top tier. My parents wanted to shield me from that environment. Further, Hong Kong was scheduled to be handed over from the United Kingdom to the government of China in 1997. This created a lot of uncertainty as to what Hong Kong would become. For all these reasons, my parents decided to move to Canada.

At the age of 15, I had a lot of anticipation about senior high. Feel free to call me naive, but I thought it would be something lifted out of a scene from High School Musical and My Super Sweet 16. Everything I had learned about Western teen culture had come from TV and movies, so I was certain that the formula for social success was (athletic + good-looking + fashionable + eloquent) x popularity = hot girlfriend + happily ever after. Notice that I took the time to factor my equation—Math 9 was not completely wasted on me.

To my horror, high school was not at all like a Disney movie, and for some reason, I had received none of the variables on the left-hand side of the equation. First, I wasn’t athletic. As a matter of fact, I was kind of a wimp. There I was, with skinny legs in gym shorts that didn’t fit right, doing the old 12-minute run … dying. I wasn’t good-looking. I knew very little about how to live in my skin, so to speak. No grooming skills. No confidence in my stride. And then there was my haircut—skillfully supplied for 10 dollars cash by some neighbour-lady who had a barber chair in her basement. I wasn’t fashionable. My entire wardrobe was from Wal-Mart. I wasn’t eloquent. My English was broken and heavily accented. I could never even finish an English phrase without punctuating it with so many “umms” and “uhhhs” that people did not want to take the time to listen.

Lacking all of the necessary ingredients for popularity, not surprisingly, I wasn’t popular. All of this led to a paralyzing self-consciousness and the complete inability to engage any girl, never mind the pretty ones, in any form of meaningful conversation.

Moving to Canada was like moving to another planet, except on this planet. Culturally it was so different. Even the Asian kids did not act like they did back home. They had been “bananified,” as they say. They still held on to some aspects of Asian culture, but they seemed to blend in pretty seamlessly with Western culture also. I didn’t know how to interface with people. It was like having the wrong power cable for your cellphone: it just did not work. In my primary school in Hong Kong, things had not been this way. I had friends, and I was not the quiet one. I seemed to be able to make friends with everyone. Even the principal seemed to like me, and I was the prefect for my grade level and had been nominated for head prefect before my departure.

Being able to express yourself in your native tongue imparts a confidence that you can’t appreciate until you have been parachuted into a place where you barely understand a word. Back in Hong Kong I had it all together—fearlessly ready to conquer the world each day. Each morning I’d show up early for school in my neatly ironed uniform, proudly displaying my prefect patch on my lapel. I was like a little hall monitor, and I wasn’t afraid to confront troublemakers, even ones from a higher grade. Although there was the odd person who didn’t like me that much, they still had to show me some respect because of my title. Generally I was liked by my fellow students, and, I have to admit, between the popularity and the fact that I was an only child on whom my parents doted, I had a bit of a swollen head. My parents tended to heap praise on me for my every achievement, which eventually turned me into an overconfident brat.

But that world came to a rapid demise after we moved to Vancouver. I was now a victim of culture shock, just another one of thousands of clueless Asian kids trying to figure out how to be in a place that had an entirely different set of rules. Despite the fact that there were lots of kids in my situation, I felt totally alone. My support network had bid me a final farewell at Hong Kong International Airport. In this new land, nobody knew who I was, and no one particularly cared.

As I mentioned, the language barrier was a big blow to the precocious Poon ego. Nothing that I said would come out smoothly, and every English-speaking listener would ask me to repeat it three or four times. It was completely debilitating—all of this social isolation was simply because my first language was Cantonese. The part that quietly irritated me the most was that my teachers would treat me like a kindergartener and give me Walt Disney books for homework—all this in front of the class. The other kids would snicker while I died the same thousand deaths many other Asian immigrant kids had died before me. Only, I did not know any of my fellow martyrs, so I just swam around in my tears and felt pity for myself.

Even choosing my clothes was a big deal. In Hong Kong I wore a uniform, but in Canada I had to pick my own outfits five days a week. Even this small task intimidated me. Bosco Poon, former grade six socialite, graduates to the status of mute loner. Even though eventually I strived to maintain really good marks in school, I still couldn’t completely adapt to the Western culture. I was desperately homesick for my former life.

_______

Everything changed the day I met Blade in the English as a Second Language (ESL) class in senior high. He was about my height (which is kinda short) and came from Hong Kong, just like I did. He was built like a tank and had a big black dragon tattoo on his right arm. Against the backdrop of quiet, demur, studious-looking Asian immigrants, Blade really stood out. I watched him interact with his friends. They were all pretty cool looking: stylish clothes, edgy haircuts, and boisterous confidence.

Even though Blade had a strong Cantonese accent, like I did, the Caucasian kids didn’t laugh at him. They actually seemed to respect him. Wherever he walked, he was flanked by at least two guys—like a pair of bodyguards but without the earpieces and billy clubs. Blade exuded authority. It seemed to me that Blade had all the elements of the formula–and whatever he had, I wanted it! Quietly, over the course of a few weeks, Blade became my role model.

Despite all the social turmoil, my grades were good, and I was actually excelling in school. In fact, I was on the honour roll and remained there from Grade 9 up until the second semester of Grade 11. That was the point when Blade and his friends fully brought me under their wings. In addition to the cool factor, Blade offered me something very practical: protection from the bullies. I got to take advantage of the bodyguard types.

One of the many reasons for my intrinsic trust of him is that we both spoke Cantonese—I knew he understood all the things that I had gone through during the prior three years. This created a special bond between us. I started to hang out with him and his friends at the smoke pit, and then after school we would go to the arcade. Recognizing that I lacked a certain je ne sais quoi in the fashion department, they dyed my hair blond—well, that kinda orangey blond that dark-haired people get when they use peroxide. Then they took me to the mall for their impromptu version of What Not to Wear. They were systematically purging me of my nerdiness like some kind of upside-down version of My Fair Lady. House parties, rave parties, hip-hop, cigarettes, booze, weed, and ecstasy.

Twelve months later, the old Boz was gone, and the new Boz was suddenly surrounded by friends of all nationalities. And, at long last, girls finally started to show an interest, and just about everyone at school was treating me like someone who mattered. I was no longer an immigrant geek. The formula had worked. Though it had taken longer than I anticipated, I had successful engineered my social life back to something I was happy with, with the help of Blade and his friends.

While my social life was soaring, what with all the partying and dating, my marks were really tanking. Not surprisingly, my parents, being Asian parents, were doing the usual Asian-parent-flip-out about getting into university and becoming a professional. Professional was a secret code word for any one of the following: doctor, lawyer, accountant, businessman—in order of relative importance.

They warned me over and over about my friends, who were never going to amount to anything, and begged me to get serious about my studies. “Son, birds of a feather flock together. You are who you hang around with. Those friends of yours are no-good company. Look at your marks, and look at your hair! You’ve changed for the worse! Wake up, please. Don’t waste your time on useless things.” My mom cried every time I headed outside to party.

“Blah blah blah. Whatever, Mom. I know my future ain’t becoming a boring nerdy accountant like you always wanted me to become. I hold my own future, not you, not Dad, not anyone else! I’m heading to my future right now as I speak: to live LIFE!” I would slam the front door as I stormed out of my house in anger.

Naturally, I ignored them and proceeded to spend every weekend partying and getting high with friends from all over the city. Popularity was no longer a problem. When it came to the decision to pursue my grades or my social life, I always chose the latter. I kept hanging out with the same gang of guys, and I was very content to do so. But as time passed, I understood more and more that it was not just a gang of guys; it was actually a gang.

That fall, Blade revealed to me that he was a member of an Asian gang called the Cat-Walk, a branch of a well-known local organization called the Lotus. For reasons inscrutable to me at the time, he made a decision to introduce me to his boss, Fury, a local underground Chinese boxer. He was one of the very few Asians who could hold their own in the underground boxing tournaments that went on in British Columbia. The tournaments were really just an excuse for illegal gambling—like dog fights or cock fights. Fury’s followers were bidding high money on him every time he was in a match. At the time I figured Blade just wanted to show me how much he trusted me.

It never gets terribly cold in the fall in Vancouver. It’s not like other parts of Canada. Most of the trees here are evergreens, so we don’t have the beautiful fall colours of the east. But in the city parks, isolated stands of deciduous trees create the familiar sound of dry leaves crackling in the breeze before they are shaken free and drift to the ground, blanketing walking trails and filling them with the scent of their gradual return to the earth.

It was a typical fall day, an overcast Friday afternoon, when Blade decided to fill me in on the details of his extracurricular activities.

The car speakers were blasting hip-hop. I was crammed into the back seat of a white two-door Mustang GT. Blade was in the front passenger seat, having a cigarette, flicking the ashes out the window intermittently, as another friend drove us down Barnet Highway. We were on our way to the headquarters of Lotus. Gradually the scenery of the North Shore mountains was swallowed by the concrete of Vancouver’s east end, the griminess of the downtown east side, and eventually Chinatown. We parked on the sidewalk in front of a two-story building with a huge yellow sign displaying two red Chinese characters: 天下 “Tian Xia” (Dynasty).

“This is the home base of many major players in this city. Don’t say anything stupid. I want you to leave in one piece! I’ll handle all the talking,” Blade warned me sternly.

His comment sent a chill down my spine. As we entered the front doors, I heard the pounding of a heavy bag coming from the left. Pumph … thump … pump-thump! I turned to the left and saw couple of guys sparring in a ring—sweat beading up on their faces only to fly off in a spray when each blow connected. We walked past and continued our way up the stairs to the second floor. The upper floor was separated into two spaces by a bar counter in the middle of the room. Half of the room was devoted to a half dozen snooker tables, and the other half was a dance floor, with multiple private meeting rooms at the very end. The lights were dimmed because we had arrived during off-hours.

Blade led us to a corner of the room, where I could see the silhouette of a man seated by the window. He bowed his head in deference and respectfully addressed the man as he turned toward us. “Boss, we’re here!”

I could now make out his face with the help of the track lighting behind me. Fury was a five-foot, eleven-inch man in his late thirties who had broad shoulders and looked like he could bench press 300 pounds. He was wearing a black muscle shirt and tight jeans. I don’t quite know how to put this, but he gave off an angry and wrathful vibe—you could just feel the cloud of menace around him, and I knew immediately that he was not one to mess with.

“Welcome, boys! I’ve been hearing excellent reports from Blade about your team in Coquitlam.”

Team? I thought. Am I part of a team that I didn’t know about?

“I’m well pleased with the expansion of our territory in that area,” he continued. “Well done.”

“Thanks, boss.” Blade seemed pleased with the affirmation.

“Come on, let’s have a shot! It’s on me!” Fury snapped his fingers, and a waitress brought a half dozen shots of tequila.

As I downed the tequila and reached for a lemon wedge, I listened intently to the conversation, carefully trying to infer what exactly was going on. It seemed to me that I was in the middle of a strategy meeting of sorts. I turned to Blade and gave him a subtle “Why am I here?” look. He stared back and whispered, “Just keep your calm, everything is fine. You’re with me. We’re gonna party hard later tonight, all right? But let me deal with some business first.”

They spent another hour discussing how to recruit more members and increase membership dues. I was not in any way interested in the topic of conversation, and, probably to my own peril, I didn’t keep that fact a secret, constantly gazing out the windows.

How did I end up in this place? I thought. I didn’t think that being popular would have anything to do with ending up at a gang headquarters in Chinatown.

After their meeting was over, Fury called a troop of five guys to escort him out of the building to his vehicle, a heavily modified street-racing silver Honda. The others gave me a cue to bow my head until he disappeared down the stairs. Though I was somewhat resentful about it, I didn’t have any other choice. I bowed my head, all the while feeling extremely uncomfortable.

Then I took Blade aside. “Blade, did I miss something? Am I being forced to join this gang?”

“Well, not forced, really,” he said, “but I will need you to assist us in a few things.”

“So, I am being forced.”

“No, no, no … relax, man. Just chill out for a sec. Look, if we’re going to get access to Fury’s people and money, I’m going to need you to play along. You don’t need to go through any initiation or anything. I don’t need you to be ‘official,’ but I need you act like a member of the Cat-Walk.”

“But I’m not technically a member, right?”

“No, not technically, but if anyone asks you about it the last thing I need you to do is say you’re not one of us. Just act like you fit in, and no one will start wondering.”

While I was relieved on the one hand, I wondered what the implications of “playing along” were, exactly. Even though I was never pledged to be part of the Cat-Walk, most of the members thought that I was. Only Blade and I knew the truth, but I wasn’t sure that it made a great deal of difference. The expectations of me seemed more or less the same.

As the evening wore on, more and more people appeared on the dance floor as the lineup around the bar counter gradually grew. Blade introduced me to all kinds of people. Fortunately, there were enough girls there that I actually maxed out my phone’s memory (ahh, the flip phone) gathering their phone numbers. So I selectively deleted the old girls from my phone and put the new ones in. In those days, there was only one thing on my mind: fun. The concept of faithfulness didn’t even cross my mind. I didn’t care about hurt feelings, lies, broken promises, or betrayal. I just did what made me happy, and as long as I was happy, nothing else mattered.

In the middle of the dance floor with my new friends, I was totally revelling in the moment. The DJ was spinning hot, and laser light filled the room. The mixture of booze and the smoke coming out of the fog machine created a very sensual, almost pornographic, mood. When the high came down at the end of one party, I’d just go to the next one, seeking another high. In quiet moments, I knew I had changed. I was not the same person I once was. I didn’t care about my school, my future, or even my family. Consequently, everything except the party scene was coming apart at the seams. Problems were piling up in reality. Not willing to deal with any of them, I chose to escape. Bottle after bottle, joint after joint, Blade and the gang were taking me farther and farther away from the place where they had found me. Without thinking about responsibilities or consequences, I continue this style of living until my high school graduation.

“Do not be so deceived and misled! Evil companionships (communion, associations) corrupt and deprave good manners and morals and character.” (1 Cor. 15:33 AMPC)