Disobey. Jacqui Rose

       3

      ‘I’m impressed, Lin. You did well. The fire was only a warning, but one they’ll take seriously. It’s only a shame I couldn’t have been there to see their reaction.’ Mr Lee, a small unassuming-looking gentleman who’d just celebrated his sixty-fifth birthday, smiled darkly at his second-in-command. His accent, a surprise to those who met him and far removed from the obvious assumption of a heavy South-East Asian one, was Etonian in sound, and certainly not representative of his rural upbringing.

      Chang Lee had been born to impoverished but hardworking parents in the poor, yet beautiful town of Zhouzhuang in the Jiangsu Province of China, which had a rich 900-year history. It was a place surrounded by water, often dubbed by the Europeans as the Oriental Venice.

      Growing up in Zhouzhuang, the young Chang Lee had despised the poverty and hardship which seemed to determine and limit his family. With the harsh and controlling idealistic socialist regime of the people’s republic of China, led by Mao Zedong, Chang saw the widespread famine and perishing of families due to Mao’s land reforms which formed the basis of the infamous and disastrous Great Leap Forward campaign.

      The Great Leap Forward had been an economic and social campaign that was supposed to change China from an agrarian economy into a leading, modern society to rival and compete with other industrialised countries in the world within a five-year time period.

      From the beginning it had been a disaster, with the Maoist regime forcing millions of Chinese citizens to move and work in communes on farms or in manufacturing. Private farming was prohibited, and those who did it were assumed to be counter-revolutionaries and were either tortured or executed for it.

      As a consequence of the Chinese people being forced off the land and into the factories to try to produce steel, the crops were neglected and along with the compounding effects of the floods of 1959, within the three-to four-year period during which the campaign ran, the estimated death toll was between twenty to thirty million.

      When the campaign was brought to an early halt, Mao Zedong was forced to resign from his position as Head of State, but the damage had been done.

      All around him Chang saw the devastating effects of abject poverty, hating, yet strangely admiring, Mao Zedong. He’d looked with disdain at his parents who had nothing and were certain to die that way, and then he’d looked at the tyranny of power and fear Mao had implemented in a once-great nation. Although Chang could see that Mao’s campaign had desolated the country, it was Mao whom he admired and wanted to emulate.

      The chance of following his dreams of a better life and escaping the picture-postcard town of Zhouzhuang, with its numerous arched bridges, murmuring brooks, narrow waterways and quiet simplicity, came when Chang had been just fourteen. An uncle of his had had permission from the government to travel down to Lo Wu, on the border of Hong Kong.

      Travelling throughout the country in the Sixties was mostly a foreign concept to the people of China, risking death or imprison-ment if caught doing so without permission, therefore Chang saw his uncle being allowed to take the refined bars of iron ore down to Lo Wu as probably his only opportunity to make the seven-hundred-and-fifty-mile journey to where China bordered British-ruled Hong Kong, the place he’d set his heart on being.

      He’d sneaked into the back of his uncle’s lorry, without thought or goodbye to his parents, and had lain crammed amongst the metal rungs for over a week, with barely any water and certainly no food for the whole of the journey.

      When Chang had arrived in Lo Wu, he’d slept rough, hiding out in the backstreets. During the day he’d tried to glean information about how to cross the border to Hong Kong. It’d taken over a month for Chang to find out what he needed, during which time he’d stolen food from shops and broken into houses to steal money. It all came naturally to him; even though crime had previously been absent in his life it now seemed second nature, and although he was fending for himself at only fourteen, Chang was the happiest he’d ever felt.

      A man Chang had met when he’d been getting something to eat had told him about the yellow waters of the Sham Chun River which flowed unceasingly under the Lo Wu bridge; the only link between China and Hong Kong.

      He’d told Chang about the town of Sham Chun which stood on the river, a few miles down from Lo Wu, telling Chang about the people who’d risked their lives by swimming the river to the British side to escape communist China.

      But Chang hadn’t seen it as a risk as he’d listened to the tales of those that’d made it and those that’d perished by drowning or from the bullets of the soldiers who stood in the chain of sentry boxes along the shore. No, Chang had seen it as his bid to freedom.

      At its widest point the river was less than a quarter of a mile across; an easy crossing to a strong swimmer like Chang. What wasn’t so easy to avoid was the manned twenty-four hours a day armed guards searching the river banks for any would-be escapees hiding out until the darkness of night.

      Over the next few weeks, Chang took daily trips to Sham Chun to survey the river, taking in the position of the sentry boxes and the patrolling guard’s schedule, then on the 3rd July 1965 Chang hid amongst the rushes of the river, waiting for his chance to make the journey across.

      Chang knew from hearing the nightly echoing of bullets across the river that the sentries would fire at the slightest noise and the waters would be aglow and riddled with bullets, but neither this nor the stories of failed escape attempts could deter Chang from lowering himself quietly into the cold blackness of the river.

      The swim across had been almost uneventful until he’d seen a family of six a few metres behind him. The youngest child had begun to cry, and had immediately brought attention to the escapees.

      Without a moment’s hesitation on hearing the child’s noise, the guards had opened fire, killing all those present and wounding Chang in his leg. The wound had been deep and the blood had poured out into the river but Chang had continued to swim through his pain and haziness, making it across to the other side, onto the safety of British-ruled soil.

      He’d blacked out on the river bank and had woken up in the back of an old van, after a kindly man had driven past and seen him lying there. The man had taken Chang to his home, a tiny, squalid apartment within Kowloon Walled City; once thought to be the most densely populated place on Earth, with 50,000 people crammed into only a few blocks,

      From the Fifties the walled city had been run by the triads and this was the place Chang Lee had learnt his trade; prostitution, gambling, drug dealing, along with implementing fear and torture.

      Chang had lived within the walls of the city until the government destroyed it in 1994, forcibly evicting everyone; but by this time, Chang had become one of the most feared triads – powerful and ruthless, still basing his ethos on Chairman Mao.

      Chang hadn’t minded leaving Kowloon Walled City, the place had become too small for him, and he too big for the place, and now he’d set his eyes on something more international; London.

      In 1997, Chang found himself on a boat to England, and although the government’s demolishment of Kowloon had ultimately put paid to Chang’s livelihood, leaving him with no money, it hadn’t