Flower Lounge (16) -- Know Thy Inmates

Within a few weeks, I had filled two notebooks with personal observations and anecdotes collected from fellow inmates. 

They got jailed for many reasons. But behind legal technicality, one underlying cause dominated — money — that prolific mother of all evils accentuated by greed, desperation, or simple bad luck. Without money, Flower Lounge would be a very quiet place.

I was curious, but keenly aware of the risk of playing investigative journalism in prison. So I tried to be a good listener, patient and respectful, using my ears rather than my tongue when jailmates talked. Understandably, there were details they didn’t want to elaborate. In addition, they often had no idea why events made a stupid sharp turn the way they did. Pushing for clarifications would have been insensitive and dumb. Left alone, my See Hings would often talk on without prompting. They would rationalise, fudge and fantasise to reconstruct a disagreeable reality, making themselves appearing more reasonable in it, then blamed luck or fate for the outcome. Don’t we all do that?

Some stories are over-the-top fantastic, but that doesn’t necessarily make them false or irrelevant. All recollections are part truth and part imagination. Even when the narrator’s intention is to wholeheartedly recall the truth, the truth, nothing but the truth, perspectives could be skewed by personal feelings and warped by time. And lies and fantasies are more revealing than they appear. Hiding in them are deeper motives and secret wishes which can make the story more ‘complete’. Furthermore, some fantastic truths actually sound incredible. I have a few of these unusual experiences myself. I rarely share them lest they put my credibility or sanity in question. 

Recognising the shifting nature of reminiscence, I held back scepticism and listened with an open mind, keeping substantial written notes to reinforce memory. Even so, many crucial pieces were missing when I tried to put the jigsaw pieces together afterwards. Real life stories happen only once, and can only be told a certain way once.

Tong Fuk was infested with Guardian Angels.

Everyone had his guard up against everyone else. However, being together 24/7 helped promote a degree of acquaintance, especially among the older cons. The youngsters were much more distant. They seemed suspicious, even contemptuous, of anyone over thirty and without Triad membership. I was at the far end of the detestation scale. Oh well, friendship can’t be forced. Mature criminals had more interesting anecdotes anyway. If approached gently and respectfully, kindled reminiscence would cruise on involuntarily. Sincere attention was all I needed to egg them on. Very occasionally, I poked gently for more details, but never dug hard no matter how curious. 

Many of my incarcerated pals had sensitive spots which they themselves may not be aware of. I had witnessed amicable conversations abruptly turning ugly because an unknown wound was accidentally trod on. Beneath the generally calm surface of Tong Fuk were undercurrents of deep regrets and bitterness best left unmentioned. I’ll have to make them up with imagination one day. I subsequently assigned some of the composite half truths collected to fictional speculations, reconstructing ‘realities’ which may or may not have existed.

Gollum

Two years my junior, he looked twenty years older. He was overly friendly when I first arrived. Knowing that I was an ‘outsider’, he breathed warm secretive advice into my ears as one of his eyes scanned left right back front and above. Don’t trust anyone here, precious, especially who, and who, and who. It tickled my ear. Since he was here as well, I heeded his advice and distrusted him immediately. His high-pitched metallic voice suggested a thin brittle tongue quivering behind his oversized white teeth — the only visibly straight feature on him, as he was crooked all over otherwise.

Streaks of sparse grey hair glued to his shiny forehead by static or lacklustre grease. Probably slightly above average height originally, he was now doubled over with a lopsided hunchback. His tiny nose was permanently scrunched up to support a pair of diving-mask size glasses. Behind them, asymmetrical eyeballs, deformity magnified optically, protruded like The Simpsons. One of them, the eyeballs, was murky with advanced cataract. The other one, strained by an unfair share of the workload, obviously tired from constant vigilance, remained watchful nonetheless.

He wasn’t talkative generally. When he occasionally conversed at the dining table, he did so at the top of his voice. Hey, everyone, listen, I ain’t talking about anyone else. Then, every so often, when an opportunity presented itself, he would whisper, short and sharp, into my ear, raising hair. When done, he would pull back slightly to give me a one-eyed inspection and a deep set grin.

During mealtime, he prayed, pinching a pocket-size Bible, until his food got cold, or God had lost patience. Now shut up and eat, my son. We shared the same table, but I never asked what he was in for. I sensed that whatever he had done was best left alone in the past. When I eventually learned from others why he was given a stiff sentence, I was glad I had followed my instincts. It was Statutory Rape, a felony which deserved capital punishment according to gangland customs. The first years of his jailed life were spent in high security Shek Pik, where big boys left indelible marks on his body and mind. 

He had been transferred to Tong Fuk in preparation for imminent discharge. Observing him, I realised that discharge wasn’t the singularly good news it’s supposed to be. For years, nobody visited him. His wife had divorced him since his conviction. His son only existed in memory. The outside world had deleted him long ago and emptied the trash can. His reappearance would seem like a bug in the system. And what if the demon in him had only been dormant in his convoluted being, like a deadly virus awaiting revival… As freedom neared, he lost weight, and his good eye grew singularly weary. He looked more and more like Gollum. 

He inspired me to eventually write the short story Gollum’s Demon. Actually, Gollum wasn’t his nickname in Tong Fuk, I made it up to hide his identity. If he has kept up his reading habit, I’d be most interested in his opinion on the story. At the same time, I hope he'll never get a chance to read it. Must stress that his ‘demon’ is purely a product of my wicked imagination. There was not the slightest hint that he was in danger of a relapse, I think…

Ah Kuen

Lawyer Derek told me prisons were full of idiots. I now feel qualified to disagree. His uninformed opinion was no more enlightened than the judge who said Marlboro was unwise to break the law for five hundred bucks. That said, some inmates were categorically weird, at least in the dull eyes of necktie wearing weirdos. Ah Kuen was one of them.

Middle-aged, gentle, and obviously hardworking, Ah Kuen gave a good strong massage, initially for free. Everyone who tried had nothing but praise for his magical hands. To the young thugs’ credit, they forced him to accept three fags per session, and made it the mandatory market price. Cigarettes were the underground currency for everything. If not for the screws, one could probably get carried to the playground by a human taxi for a few cigarettes. 

There was a waiting list for his service, as he would give only one massage per evening. When done, he’d open up the hard-earned cigarettes on the table next to me, and divide each into ten pinches of tobacco. He would then roll up each portion with a little square of thin paper cut out from gossamer toilet-roll wrappers. The finished mini rollups, each the thickness of a match stick, would be stored in a match box. Reengineering his massage income for the evening took about an hour. Oddly, for someone who loved cigarettes so much, he wasn’t a heavy smoker.

He was in for working in the black market with a fake identity. From the onset of his ten-month sentence, he openly enquired about where he could get another fake ID card or passport to go work overseas. Though he seemed genuine, his openness made him suspicious. Nobody responded.

One day, he borrowed a book on herbal remedies from the library, and proceeded to copy it to his notebook word by word. Night after night, he laboured on copyright infringement after giving massage and rolling miniature fags. I asked him what it was for. He replied: ‘Good book. Many useful information.’ 

‘Why not just buy a copy?’ I asked without thinking.

‘It’s very expensive,’ he said. I had acted like Marlboro’s judge.

I gave him my extra box of matches. He insisted on paying me back but I didn’t want a massage or a cigarette. After much protest, he finally accepted my gift.

Taiwan

Most evenings, Taiwanese Xiao Wang (known more simply as Taiwan), probably in his early forties, lay in the upper deck of his bunk bed next to mine, hands behind head, slightly bent legs crossed at the ankles, humming, smiling to himself, enjoying the time of his life at Tong Fuk.

Having been a soldier for years before becoming a professional conman, Taiwan was the undisputed champion in blanket folding. Never in a quiet mood, he was the premier feel-good factor in the dorm. He was enthusiastically friendly to everyone, though the mainlanders who also spoke Putonghua (Mandarin) were his favourites. The locals spoke Cantonese. He loved to tell bootcamp horror stories, and claimed Tong Fuk was paradise by comparison, as if reprimanding us for failing to appreciate what we had. I didn’t ask how long he was in for, as length of stay obviously made no difference to someone who was clinically happy about this institution.

I took notes when he recounted his past life as a soldier, which made him even happier. He said nobody had ever taken his words seriously, and that I made him feel celebrated. 

Taiwanese bootcamp, still influenced by Generalissimo Jiang during his time, was living hell according to him:

Each morning, blankets had to be folded into a taut perfect cube in an instant. Three unsatisfactory foldings constituted a punishable offence comprising folding blankets nonstop in the courtyard all morning without food or drink.


After a single allowable minute to take care of all businesses big and small in the toilet, they jogged out of the room and continued on for five more kilometres before breakfast.


In the evening, another minute was allowed for cold showers (they probably learned to remove their clothes and soap at the same time, then rinse and dry simultaneously), followed by a hundred pushups before bed, which must have made them sweaty. I asked him why pushups didn’t come before the shower. He didn’t know.


Before lights out, instead of asking God for forgiveness and favours, they chanted bedside slogans in full attention: Follow the Three People Principle; Obey Government leadership; Obliterate the Goddamned Communist bandits; Liberate Mainland compatriots. (奉行三民主义，服从政府领导，歼灭万恶共匪，解救大陆同胞 ) Taiwan was dreaming of re-occupying mainland China back then, and had not yet adopted even more far-fetched goals.


Military training was tough back then: Reasonable treatment was training, unreasonable treatment was tempering. (合理对待是训练，不合理对待是磨练 ) 

‘Ha ha,’ Taiwan told me in his blissful poolside tone. ‘Nothing like here in Tong Fuk!’

‘Glad that you’re having a good time. Enjoy your stay,’ I said cheekily.

‘I will!’ he replied sincerely.

Grrrrr!

Uncle Zhao Xing

To balance out Taiwan’s holiday mood, Zhao Xing Shu — Uncle Zhao Xing — on the other side of my bed was a gloomy smiley face. He had a poignant, natural smile. At fifty-three, he looked at least ten years older. Sun and wind had gnawed deep fissures into his leathery countenance, the kind which only fishermen and desert dwellers have. He didn’t talk much. When he did, he stammered with a strong Chaozhou accent, then chuckled involuntarily like a child afterwards. Unfortunately for me, he was one of the top snorers in the room, which was no small feat. When sleeping in his boat, he must have scared fish and submarines away.

Like most fishermen, he was born into being one, in the mainland. Paradoxically, as people consumed more fish than ever, making a living fishing had become increasingly difficult. To make life easier, he smuggled three black-market workers across the border in return for six thousand Hong Kong dollars, and thirty months in jail. ‘Ga-a-a-ass alone cost one-un-un thousand!’ he stuttered, then chuckled at the bad deal.

His family was okay. They had their own house, basic living was not a problem, though they would probably ‘eat less’ while he was in jail. He had a thirty-year-old daughter and three sons in their twenties. The family had visited him once, which cost a few thousand bucks in travelling and accommodation. He told them not to visit again. With good behaviour, he would be out in twenty five months. He sighed, then corrected himself: ‘Own-own-only twen-en-ty five months,’ and gave a sad grin.

According to him, feeding six mouths had become extremely difficult. ‘No-o-o fish ann-ann any more! Not-ot in the s-s-sea!’ Another hearty chuckle. Chinese laugh at misfortunes to lighten it with defiance and distance. One’s own lousy karma looks ludicrous and comical when viewed at arm’s length. Plus a sea without fish is truly ridiculous —- laughably so.

Ah Zong

Ah Zong was the only younger inmate (in his early thirties?) whom I often chatted with in the evening. He first approached me for help with translating a letter from Chinese into English. It was a complaint letter to the police concerning the handling of his mobile phones which were still in police custody without any reason. All information had long been retrieved and he had been properly jailed. I was greatly surprised how well written (and in neat handwriting) his Chinese draft was, but he believed an English complaint would command more respect due to colonial momentum. He had a good understanding of the system.

His life story sounded fantastic in parts. If it wasn’t entirely ‘truthful’, he had repackaged his life for self-consumption, for he had no reason to do that for me. So I listened with minimal interruption.

He was here (this was his third imprisonment) for kidnapping and illegal detention of a loser who borrowed money from Zong’s loan shark client who cruised Macau’s casinos. From a broken family, he grew up with his auntie and her partner who was also his Kungfu teacher. Later on, they moved to Japan with him. He couldn’t speak Japanese, and was often bullied in school which was a total waste of time for him in any event. The only thing he got out of it was the will to fight to death rather than getting bullied. A few years on, he went to France and ‘did all sorts of things’ to make a living. 

‘What’s all sorts of things?’ I tried to seek minimal clarification.

‘Oh, all sorts of fucking things,’ he repeated, merely emphasising it with the expletives.

‘I see.’

All sorts of fucking things included getting shot in the chest. Luckily, he was wearing a flack vest, but ‘it still hurt like hell’. He had a two-year-old son in France — consequence of one of the many fucking things he did there. In addition, he had a ten-year-old daughter who was staying with her Grandmother — Ah Zong’s Mum — in Hong Kong, and two sons — five and six — who lived with their mother, his partner. A prolific young man. He talked about his kids a lot. 

His smiling eyes were charming and spooky; he claimed they could see ghosts. I asked him if our dorm was haunted. To my surprise, he said he had never seen a ghost at Tong Fuk. At home, he had an antique Samurai sword passed down by his master. It hummed audibly in its sheath unless sealed with a mantra. That was the kind of story he told, very sincerely. He said he didn’t often share them but somehow sensed that I would not automatically dismiss them as poorly imagined sword and sorcery. I was touched by his perceptive trust.

His partner in Hong Kong — mother of his two sons — was a cop when they met. So was her father and a few other family members. He was surrounded by the police at home. A few years ago, she was due for promotion but Zong’s brother (who had not been mentioned hitherto) got into trouble and disappeared while under surveillance. Her role in his timely escape was suspected and she lost her chance at promotion. After Zong’s arrest and conviction this time, she was dismissed from the force, struggling to raise two young kids while keeping an eye on her own father whose number one wish in life was to put a bullet between Zong’s ghost-seeing eyes. Yet she still came to visit him every week at Tong Fuk. Love can be mysteriously toxic to the mind.

‘Alas,’ said Ah Zong. ‘I’m stuck. I can never leave the Policewoman, now that I owe her so much.’ He called her the Policewoman.

‘Why would you want to leave her?’

Why? Because his heart inexplicably belonged to another woman, his high-school sweetheart from sixteen years ago. ‘Don’t ask me why, but she’s always been the only one in my heart. You wouldn’t understand.’

In fact I did, kind of. I had an uncanny capacity for irrationality. I didn’t tell him.

He had written four letters to her since coming to Tong Fuk a couple of years ago, but she hadn’t responded until very recently. Now that he was due for discharge in a few weeks, she replied with the news that her current relationship was not going well. Oh dear, I thought. For once, I nearly told him to stop. I didn’t think I could handle more details of this upcoming mess. He was not the only one tormented by love though. Two other inmates had lamented to me the unbearable pain of unrequited love. I was somehow popular among broken hearted gangsters.

Apparently, Gollum wasn’t a lone soul struggling with discharge anxiety. Underneath a confident and carefree facade, Zong was also greatly troubled by the prospect of imminent freedom.

‘In seventeen days, I’ll find out what happened to the flat I rented with three other ‘watchers’ who hung out in Macau casinos. And my car! And the two-year-old in France! I wonder what he looks like. And my Mum and daughter who don’t keep in touch with the Policewoman or me whenever I’m jailed! And my business setup! And the boys who worked for me!’

‘It’d be a whole new life,’ I tried to sound positive, even excited about his to-do list.

‘Yeah, I suppose. No expectations. But there’ll be a lot of fucking needs.’ He forced a wide grin. ‘By the way, Ah Cheong, did you hear the alarm blaring all last night?’

‘No.’ I hadn’t heard anything at all. Didn’t think anyone else had either. 

If Ah Zong could indeed see and hear things ordinary people couldn’t, and feel the bites of hazy heartache nobody understood, he must have felt intensely lonely and isolated. Had they been hallucinations, the result would have been the same — living through a reality shared by none. Besides struggling with uncooperative perceptions, he was also burdened by the nagging practicalities of being the father of four. Though hardly middle-age yet, he was already worrying about obsolescence in his professional circle. To younger thugs who were not qualified gangsters in Zong’s eyes, his way of being a gangster was dated, not cool.

During the short decades he had been involved, gangland had fundamentally changed before his eyes, losing direction and definition. When Zong joined the Triads as a teenager, they still performed initiation rites — beheading chickens, drinking a concoction of blood from the chicken and brotherhood fingers to swear loyalty, jumping over fire and passing under swords to symbolise the deadly consequence of betrayal. He studied harder than ever to memorise identification poems and secret hand signals passed down from Qing dynasty revolutionary cum mobster hybrids. He had felt the power of ritual and tradition in his spirit, transforming him into a Triad, a real one who treasured righteousness and loyalty above rationality, with pride. Then came the iPhone. In Zong’s final analysis, Steve Jobs had unwittingly undermined the integrity of the Triads. ‘It has corrupted their minds,’ he scanned the spectres of young inmates with ghost-seeing eyes.

‘They don’t give a shit about initiation ceremonies no more,’ Zong was palpably disgusted. I wanted to put a hand on his shoulder to calm him. ‘Instead of beheading live chicken, they cut and eat hardboiled eggs — hard-boiled-fucking-eggs! — shell dyed red, to avow loyalty. Instead of drawing blood with a knife, they draw a red line across the palm with a felt-pen. That fucking farce started during the bird flu.’

‘Virtual blood oath?’ I was amused, secretly admiring its cleverness.

Zong puckered his lips and nodded contemptuously in reply.

Loyalty had not only disappeared, but become derisible according to Zong the young traditionalist. It was now common for buddies from different gangs to get together to do a job, then disband. Though still separated according to gang affiliation in Tong Fuk’s dining hall, betrayal of fellow gang bros had become common, no big deal, even kind of cool.

‘Imagine! Gang no longer means anything to gangsters!’ 

I wasn’t as surprised as Zong though. Irony’s everywhere these days — sharp but unnoticed. Why would gangland be different?

In English, gangsters are also known as tough guys. In Cantonese, Triads call themselves Gu Wark Zai — literally Tricky Guys. They pride themselves for being Gu Wark — tricky and cunning — rather than tough. Ah Wah, a jailmate who inspired my story Midlife Triad had committed manslaughter when a teenager. He once tried to impress the youngsters with his experience from the kiddie slammer. He told them how they could cause trouble and tilt the power balance against the guards if they would act with unity, solidarity, you know.

A toothless youngster’s reply was: ‘Wah Suk, of course we fucking know. You think we’re fucking dumb? To stir up shit is easy. But what for? Is the reward worth the fucking trouble? Must fucking calculate lah, Wah Suk.’

The toothless kid was right. Ah Wah smiled his defeat and returned to the kung fu classic novel he had read a hundred times.

Spare Tooth

Most young inmates weren’t very friendly with older cons like myself. Perhaps they discriminated against age, though a few of them were toothless from ice indulgence and looked older than me. Not having to feign friendliness to these juvenile thugs was actually a relief, but a few of them were particularly obnoxious. My initial smiley gestures were not only empathetically ignored, but sneered at. Hey man, what did I do wrong? Naturally, I disliked them in reciprocity, albeit discretely, until I had a glimpse of another side hidden behind their abominable surface.

Spare Tooth was one of the worst. His oral cavity was a black hole with two front teeth and an oversized tongue. He was about two heads shorter than me. To compensate for a lack of stature, he tried to look fierce and mean to us old guys, but was loud and goofy in the company of his peers. His menacing stares had minimal effect on me, however, as his eyes were too far below mine.  

One night, after lights dimmed, he continued chatting like an adult with an illegal worker, a northerner in his late forties. He was recounting his life to the mainlander in Putonghua. What a surprise. What water had he been drinking? I had no idea what started that uncanny conversation but was immediately insomniac with curiosity behind my eye towel, ears on full alert.

He said his father was a delivery man for a camera and gadget chain who regularly worked fourteen hours per day to make sixteen thousand per month. Spare Tooth was the oldest of three boys. He joined the Triads for one reason — money. For that, his father was very upset with him, but he soon netted sixty to seventy grand per month on average, tax free, and became the main bread earner. He didn’t give further details of his job, but emphasised authoritatively that he would violently stop his younger brothers to follow his lucrative footsteps or get anywhere near his circle of bad guys.

‘Oh well, the older one visits me once every couple of months. The younger one hasn’t shown up for two years.’

‘What about your father,’ asked the northerner.

‘He came in February, after Chinese New Year, the year before.’

After that late night eavesdropping, I stopped despising him. I found him pitiable, even secretly likeable. So I kept a greater distance. 

Gulu

Gulu was no more than a hair-width taller than Spare Tooth, but much stronger on a per kilo basis. Poor nutrition might have been responsible for their truncated presence. He was in for mugging. To be a passable robber, one needs a bit of brawn, and preferably a scary face. Gulu had both. Obviously into gymnastics more than drugs, he could do a few dozen sideways curl-ups in bed. Unlike Spare Tooth, he looked more intimidating than comical with all his canine-looking teeth intact, and a severely upturned nose which made him appear above you when you look down at him from above. Like Spare Tooth, he loved attention, and talked a lot at the top of his coarse voice. For a while, he was my neighbour. After a few greeting attempts which made him turn his nose even further up, I stopped trying. We coexisted in silent mutual contempt.

It was also late at night. He was talking sensibly with another youngster. What is it about late hours that makes people spill their guts, I wondered. These daytime werewolves somehow transmuted into melancholy little boys when normal prisoners slept. Gulu was telling his buddy in an oddly tender and innocent voice how much his sister and brother-in-law spoiled him. Coming from a twenty-year-old robber, it sounded unreal and nauseating. His brother-in-law even bought him a twenty-thousand-dollar scooter which he described in detail. I thought everyone detests an ugly, mean, and underdeveloped thug like him. I was wrong. His sister and brother-in-law loved him.

My emotional roller-coaster was probably going through a plunge that day, or Venus was overshadowing Mars. I nearly wept under my eye towel when he described his scooter, then almost laughed out loud when I noticed how ridiculous I was being.

The following morning, I got up slightly before dawn as usual, and jotted down whatever I could recall about the conversation. I associated Gulu with an utterly incompatible word — compassion. He actually made me think about compassion. I understood in theory that even someone as loathsome as Gulu had a good side. That’s why we should never judge anyone too harshly. Well, principles are meant for appreciation, not practice. Plus real arseholes usually hide their theoretical good side extremely well. If not for Tong Fuk, I would not have had the opportunity to find out anything remotely pleasant about someone like Gulu.

Xiao Long

Xiao Long — Little Dragon — was a notable exception. Like most of his peers, the handsome young man was not tall, but well built. He had a lowkey authority, but was definitely not a populist. He seemed aloof to his fellow gang members, but was somehow popularly elected head of the Sun Yee On Triad conglomerate at Tong Fuk. During playground time, he read by himself at a quiet corner and stayed away from team sports. He was the polite and helpful young man who told me on my first day at Workshop Five to just let him know if I ran out of toilet paper.

Drug trafficking landed him a seven-year sentence, initially at Shek Pik. He had served nearly two-thirds of that by the time we met, and was due for imminent discharge, hence his transfer to Tong Fuk Lower Circle. Unlike other young inmates, he realised that he was young enough to start afresh, but not young enough to go through this process again. During playground time, he studied English. He knew it was not going to be easy to face whatever awaited him out there. Self-education was hard; trying to gain trust and recognition by the system was much harder. He told me he planned to stay away from everyone he knew when he got out. I wholeheartedly wished him success. But I also knew that leaving the past behind takes more than a good plan. Had I believed in prayers, I would have prayed for him.

Stan and Ringo

With my opinion of the judiciary at an all time low when I arrived at Tong Fuk, I expected to find a prison full of innocent victims of wrongful conviction — at least in their own minds. I eventually collected enough anecdotes to come up with a reasonable estimate which refuted my presupposition. To the best of my judgement, most of the See Hings were technically guilty as charged. Whether imprisonment was a fair and appropriate penalty for smuggling cigarettes, or ghostwriting an exam, or marrying for money (something which celebrities do legally and repeatedly all the time, albeit in series rather than in parallel) was another question. Every criminal since the eternally unforgivable apple theft in the Garden of Eden has a valid reason for having sinned. Unfortunately, indiscriminate leniency is not always a practical solution.

Stan and Ringo were exceptions. Having interviewed them in detail, I became quite convinced that they were sitting in Flower Lounge mainly due to bad luck exacerbated by other’s ignorance and perhaps prejudice. In fact, based on decades of business experience, I found Stanley’s conviction rather incredible.

The fact that both of them were convicted small commercial criminals is indicative rather than coincidental. I’ve emphasised small because big corporate crimes are a different game played according to substantially different interpretation and manipulation of the same rules.

The business world is alien territory to a typical magistrate. The average judge is as detached from commercial reality as celibate priests were from marital tribulations. But just as Catholic clergy were deemed qualified arbiters of family squabbles in the earthly Kingdom of God, judges inexperienced in business operation are empowered to try mercantile disputes in modern times. 

During my trial, the magistrate specifically mentioned in presenting his verdict that he found the relevant board meeting minutes we submitted ‘suspicious’ because some wordings were identical to the pre-meeting papers. He insinuated that they had been doctored. His Honour evidently didn’t know that managers write background reports to set the meeting agenda, then use the files as templates when preparing the minutes. That has been the way people do things since the invention of word-processors with cut-and-paste functions. I myself would have suspected anyone who wrote Board Minutes from scratch dubiously stupid. But I was not in a position to comment or question His Honour’s baffling viewpoint which, according to himself, had influenced judgement.

All humans have limited knowledge and exposure. In theory, unworldly judges can be backed by expert witnesses. But that doesn’t happen often in reality. Plus having seen how shockingly little my honourable judge knew about basic articles such as Minutes of Board Meetings, I cannot comfortably assume that he had the necessary capacity to grasp specialist opinions on subjects he didn’t have sufficient background.

My opinion above is based on common sense, not disrespect. 

To give an illustrative parallel, although I have received postgraduate level training in science, I cannot responsibly decide whether a person should undergo brain surgery based on a consultative conference with experts. Furthermore, expert witnesses are not necessarily classroom teachers, and judges are not students. It’s understandable that they don’t wish to ask too many detailed questions lest they appear unlearned in a theatre where he’s known as the ‘learned judge’. At some point, they will have to just nod wisely to let things proceed. Nobody can test their understanding on the matter anyway. Under Separation of Power, they are practically challenge-proof. 

Hong Kong has inherited the Separation of Power from its colonial days. The quaint concept might have once worked in eighteenth century Britain, when anyone who spoke with a proper accent had natural authority over illiterate peasants with simple desires and grievances. In today’s complex world, it can be an absurd incongruity at best, a hindrance to justice at worst. But the archaic principle stands nonetheless, sanctified by inertia, defying the passage of time, disregarding common sense. 

Besides detachment from common and legitimate practices in the real business world, the legal actors’ mentality is generally antithetical to that of mercantile folks. Commercial enterprises, even hopelessly bureaucratic ones, have to take calculated risks and make speculative judgements involving multiple unknowns and variables. Magistrates, on the other hand, interpret right and wrong with an absolute scale based on set procedures, permitting no extraneous interference. Though often arbitrary in practice, the law is in theory righteously rigid. A stern and objective approach supposedly makes the legal process fair. Ignorance of practical nuances, some claim, promotes ‘impartial’. The entrepreneurial spirit and the legal mind do not overlap easily due to profound cultural differences, even if the underlying intention and moral principles are aligned.

The misfortunes which befell Stan and Ringo were shattering to them, but far from sensational to onlookers. Similar disasters could happen to any small business operator. All it takes is bad luck, which is always lurking somewhere nearby.

Stanley was in his mid-forties when I met him. We shared a dining table. We sat around doing our own things and watching each other a lot. He ceremoniously cleaned his plate every meal, picking up the very last grain of rice and chewing mindfully with mouth closed, which wasn’t common practice in Tong Fuk. He was quiet and aloof at first. When I got to know him better, he loved to talk about music, from Mozart to Led Zeppelin. He appeared to be a keenly responsible father of two boys. Unfortunately, he couldn’t hover over their development due to imprisonment. I was most impressed by his excellent language skills in Chinese and English, something which had declined alarmingly among middle-aged professionals in Hong Kong. Gradually, after taking his time to warm up, he told me his story. Though he was merely an extra in the saga, the trial was reasonably publicised at the time and made perpetually Googleable.

He has two university degrees from Canada, and had worked five years as a project manager for a publicly listed company when a steamy load of metaphoric manure fatefully collided with the fabled fan. Some got flung his way. The chairman and founder, a conventional crook with limited imagination, had set up a horde of phantom firms owned by his wife, sister, father — the whole clan — to supply services and equipment to the company at enviable margins. The threadbare scam was exposed in no time. Everyone was duly arrested and subjected to the full force of the law. The chairman’s clan was summarily jailed. Justice had been served. Stanley, the project coordinator without the authority to specify equipment, or issue purchase orders, or sign cheques — a common arrangement in most companies — became the only non-family member convicted. The English judge, a conviction-record-holder, opined that a project manager, given the grand title, must surely have known everything, which is very far from the general truth. In addition, he seemed convinced that Stan, who shared the surname Yip — a homophone of karma — with the chairman (as well as more than seven million other Chinese), must have been somehow related. Perhaps it was karma after all.

In my opinion, it would have been truly incredible if Chairman Crook had indeed let on his corrupt scheme to a relatively new employee. It wouldn’t take much IQ to see that Stan’s participation would have been an unnecessary risk, adding neither advantage nor convenience to  the chairman’s shady manoeuvres. But that’s only my personal opinion, not necessarily common sense to those who are unfamiliar with how companies operate, and too unadulterated to get into the mindset of unimaginative criminals.

Anyway, Stan got six years and a ruined career. Meanwhile, his wife held the fort, raising two boys alone, visiting him in Lantau twice per month. Given a choice, I would have preferred to be in his situation rather than his wife’s.

In the workshop, Stan always finished his work properly, as quickly as possible, in order to read and relax at his quiet corner. Unlike me, he wasn’t curious about our fellow inmates. He didn’t like convicts even though he was one himself. He kept to himself most of the time. I was one of a few cons whom he socialised with, cautiously at first. His other acquaintance was Xiao Long.

Ringo’s case was similarly straightforward. Real life commercial crimes are usually not very intriguing.

He was an IT/accounting professional with his own small software house in partnership with a friend (let’s call him Partner Friend). Partner Friend was serving concurrently in another jailhouse, also for ‘Proceed of Indictable Offence’. Ringo and his wife were devout Christians. A close church and family friend of theirs for over twenty years worked as a freelance salesperson for Ringo, bringing in contracts once in a while for a cut. In 2007, he told Ringo he had an opportunity and needed a formal business entity to process some Letters of Credit. Since he knew Ringo had a dormant project company — many companies large and small do in Hong Kong — he asked if he could borrow it for this contract. How could Ringo say no? He was asked to receive — not issue — some Letters of Credit on behalf of his good friend, involving no monetary exposure. They saw each other at work and in church a few times a week, and had been singing the same hymns to the same God for more than two decades. Their wives were besties. Their kids grew up together. The families even vacationed overseas together. Such trivial favours between small enterprises are common anyway. Having observed Ringo everyday for months, I couldn’t picture him saying no under the circumstances.

Ringo was a nice guy, a bit nerdy as IT pros tend to be, intelligent but not always fully alert. Through his wife, he had delegated most things in life to God. I normally find superpious people suspicious, but I had plenty of casual opportunities to discover his good nature on and off the sewing machine, and at the dining table.

It turned out that his brother in faith was the reincarnate of the Devil Himself.

He had opened a company with accomplices whom Ringo did not know. They fabricated scam business contracts and issued Letters of Credit to Ringo’s dormant company. When these Letters of Credit from the HSBC arrived, Ringo would cash them in, then write out a cheque to Brother Devil & Co. In his position, I would have deducted a handling fee, which would have been fair and expected. Ringo said he didn’t, which I found unreasonable. But they were fellow soldiers of Christ, more than just business associates. 

That went on for eight months. Eventually, backed by this favourable track record, Brother Devil & Co. obtained a two-million facility from the HSBC. Soon afterwards, Brother Devil vanished after taking out a second mortgage on the apartment he shared with his wife and kids. He took every penny, and didn’t bother to leave a goodbye note or nice prayer for his children, telling them to be good, study hard, follow the path of God, and that Daddy is very sorry but would be thinking of them whenever he remembers, and that they would understand one day. Until then, a thousand hugs and kisses, see you back in Hell one day, et cetera. No, no fuss. He puffed off without a plume. There were unverified reports by friends who claimed to have subsequently spotted him with a voluptuous woman in the mainland, looking plump and happy.

After Brother Devil disappeared, the HSBC suspected internal misconduct and reported the matter to the ICAC. Nothing untoward was discovered within the bank, but Brother Devil’s four accomplices as well as Ringo and Partner Friend were charged. The accomplices readily pleaded guilty, and testified that they had never met Ringo and Partner Friend, or knew about their involvement. The magistrate — another conviction-happy magistrate better known in the circle as Stanley Express, an allusion to one of Hong Kong’s oldest and toughest penitentiaries Stanley Prison — reputedly hated all criminals real or imagined with a passion. On Day Two of a 27-day trial, the learned judge commented that he found it unbelievable that Ringo and Partner Friend did not know about what their associate was up to. The remaining twenty-five hearings were apparently mere formality. At the end of it, he sent everyone to jail.

When I was in Tong Fuk, Ringo was planning to appeal, but had run out of money. His business had gone bankrupt during the trial. Most unusually, his lawyer had helped him with the appeal submission pro bono. The Appeal Court subsequently admitted the case for hearing — a strong indication that Ringo had substantial legal grounds indeed. But he will have to rely on Legal Aid in the formidable journey ahead. Meanwhile, his wife’s church friends opined that appealing was against God’s will, as the Heavenly Father had already gone through the trouble of arranging Ringo’s incarceration. On my last exchange with Ringo on the subject, his wife had decided to pray overtime for a definitive sign from above before finally deciding on the matter, as the deadline approached.

To middle-aged professionals like Stan and Ringo, the repercussions of a criminal record are profound. Because of the lawsuit, Ringo went bankrupt in 2009. His accountant license — his fallback means to making a living — was revoked. The punishment, irrespective of whether justice had been served, was substantially harsher than official calculation.

Stanley was also nearly bankrupted by the legal process. In Tong Fuk, he filed his own appeal unrepresented. The paperwork was daunting, but legal counsel was unaffordable, and he was a pro with paperwork. On judgement day, after spending the previous night at Lai Chi Kok, he noosed a tie over a wrinkly shirt and went to the Court of Appeal in a caged van. The judge did not show up. A clerk, an old woman, dawdled over to the dock and inserted a big brown envelope through the bars. ‘Not approved,’ she said, then turned to leave.

The written rejection was curt and perfunctory according to Stan. He took the documents with cuffed hands and returned to LCK. The following day, he was shipped back to Tong Fuk. One way to kill time, I suppose.

Photo taken from Tai Kwun Exhibits

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