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AA in Hong Kong
The First Twenty-One Years
The launching of
Alcoholics Anonymous in Hong Kong was fuelled, literally, in
Thailand. Providence decreed that David D., an English businessman,
should begin his last binge - a 48-hour solo fizzer - in Bangkok on
August 30, 1969. Flying back to Hong Kong, he resolved to get a
regular meeting going as soon as Clark G., who used to make
once-a-month visits from Guam, next hit town.
David recalls,
"Clark flew in, quite unexpectedly, on the first of September. We
advertised immediately in the English-language press. And on
Tuesday, September 2, the first scheduled AA meeting in the Colony
was held at the Mariners Club on Kowloon side of the harbor. The
attendance? Clark and me. Our ad worked for us." Sadly, times have
changed and now the Mariners meeting has closed. The Borrett Road
Club House, it seems, is much more accessible if not even more
salubrious!
David, Clark, and
lqbal respectively British, American, and Pakistani reflect three
main (sometimes overlapping) strands in the membership as it
developed: British and the Commonwealth; North American; and Asian.
David and Clark were quick to register the new group with the
general service offices in New York and London, the link with New
York soon proving to be the more practical. The group began to grow.
Ray H. became Hong Kong member number three. And soon George G., an
active member from Phoenix, Arizona, turned up in the Colony.
In 1970, George,
who then objected to any publicity about AA facilities, got a second
meeting going which was more to his liking than the (advertised)
Mariners Club one. The new Monday evening meeting place was the
library of St. John's Anglican Cathedral on Hong Kong Island,
another convenient place, very near the Hilton Hotel. Over the
years, a strong relationship developed with the Cathedral, and
eventually three weekly lunchtime meetings were being held within
its precincts.
Thus two of our
three main meeting places date back to our earliest days. For the
third location, which is AA's present home at 12 Borrett Road, on
the slopes of the Island overlooking the harbour the group would
have to wait sixteen years.
As elsewhere,
early growth was not smooth or easy. Perhaps every new group has to
have a taste of the difficulties faced in Akron, Cleveland, and New
York in the late 1930s. Hong Kong old-timers all stress how fragile
the young Fellowship was.
"You've got to
remember," says one veteran, "that it took about three years, 1966
to 1969, for AA to get going in Hong Kong. And it was often touch
and go whether the infant would survive. At times it looked plain
impossible."
He went on, "It
was not just that there were so few of us, and so many slips. AA was
an expatriate activity; and for, many expatriates, then perhaps even
more than now, Hong Kong was a place of transit rather than
long-term residence. An AA member might think he'd be here for good.
Then suddenly he'd be posted. Looking back, it seems we needed two
things for survival. One was a sort of anchorman someone who'd stay
in Hong Kong and stay sober to hold things together. Two, we needed
a good supply of AA visitors to pep us up and remind us we were part
of a worldwide show."
Fortunately, both
these resources came into play. David D. is reluctant to admit it
("I just stuck around, luckily for me," is the way he puts it), but
he undoubtedly filled the role of anchorman during the crucial
period. By any calculation he was a prodigious twelfth-stepper,
taking on the toughest cases. And for the first nine years he was
the main AA telephone answering service. This burden he was
eventually to hand over to a pair of second-generation stalwarts,
Jayne and Malcolm S., a husband and wife team (she Australian, he
British) who came into the Fellowship in close succession in 1975.
These three, long
regarded as fixtures in Hong Kong, were to leave the Colony
unexpectedly in 1989, David departing for Guernsey in the Channel
Islands and Malcolm and Jayne for Australia. But by then, AA in Hong
Kong had acquired sufficient structural strength to make it less
dependent on heroic individual effort.
Turning to the
influx of AA visitors, one cannot exaggerate the benefits they have
brought. As a trading and financial center Hong Kong has always had
a stream of overseas business people passing through. In the
seventies and eighties, especially following the opening of China to
foreign investment, many of them came bearing and sharing the AA
message. Quite a few others, with local AA help, got sober in this
hard-drinking harbor city. AA in Hong Kong also owes much to
visiting sailors from the U.S. Seventh Fleet. The sight of a
flotilla entering the harbor is always welcome to AA eyes, for it
promises especially good meetings in the days ahead.
Another thing that
the old-timers emphasize is the camaraderie and intimacy that marked
the first decade of AA in the Colony. During a recent visit back to
Hong Kong, Malcolm S. summoned up some memories: "There were so few
of us, we'd all go twelfth-stepping together. Everyone was everyone
else's sponsor, or so it seemed. When I was twelfth-stepped, the
gang stayed with me, day and night, for about seventy-two hours. It
wasn't just meetings, it was being together after and between
meetings coffee sessions in hotels, poker sessions in someone's
apartment, picnics in improbable places.
"Everyone seemed
to get into the act in my home once even my son, then aged three.
He'd so often heard Jayne and me answering calls from inquirers that
one day when the phone rang, he knew just what to do. He picked up
the receiver and politely announced, 'Alcoholics Anonymous. Can I
help you?' The caller was a neighbor, distinctly nonalcoholic, to
whom lengthy explanations had to be given.
"Today, maybe Hong
Kong is a busier place and everyone has less time. AA in the Colony
is certainly stronger now and there's more of it, better organized.
But those early years, back in the mid-seventies in my case, were
great times to be alive and sober here."
It's time to
mention some of the milestones marking the growth of the group.
Conspicuous among them was the authorities' decision, in early 1985,
to let us have rooms (at very little annual rent) in the old,
high-ceilinged former military hospital at 10 Borrett Road. This
gave the Fellowship a daily meeting-place with 6:00 p.m. meetings
now every day of the year.
One has to go back
earlier for other milestones. This account is no more than a sketch
of growth over twenty-one years, but here are a few key dates and
developments.
In 1974, Tony B.,
a Cantonese-speaking Irish-American who had sobered up in New York,
arrived in Hong Kong and lost little time in setting up a
Chinese-language meeting in Kowloon. This was the start of many
efforts, which continue, to carry the message to fellow-sufferers
among our Chinese fellow citizens (who comprise ninety-eight percent
of the population).
In 1978, AA
acquired a mini-base, a ten foot by eight foot windowless box of a
room, in Wanchai, then a red-light entertainment district. The room,
in the Sailors and Soldiers Institute, had to be given up in the
early eighties. Among many memorable meetings there was one attended
by seventeen AAs -- possibly the most crowded AA meeting, per square
foot, anywhere ever.
In 1979, a new
weekly newcomers meeting began, which brought dozens of active
alcoholics into the Fellowship. The meeting, discontinued ten years
later, was regularly chaired by Dr. John. A class of 1979 entrant
himself, he had been a headline-making binge drinker; the Hong Kong
police learned the hard way that it was best to send at least a
dozen men out to subdue him. As active in AA as ever, Dr. John now
practices medicine in London.
During, the early
1980s, closer links were developed with the Adventist Hospital,
largely through Jayne S.' s perseverance. As a result, many AAs came
to join the program either during or after detoxification at the
hospital.
In 1986, through
the good offices of Carole A., a genial restaurateur, and her
nonalcoholic partner Bill Nash, a Saturday lunchtime meeting got
going in the private dining-room of a high-class restaurant in town.
"Oh, boy, this is real Gold Card AA," said a visiting American
sailor as he first looked around. The label stuck:
Many of us still
refer to this weekly event as the Gold Card Meeting.
Nineteen
eighty-eight saw the start of another big push to get Cantonese
language AA rolling, with dual-language meetings being launched in
hostels in densely crowded Kowloon. The initiative came from our
outstandingly durable Chinese member, Peter W.
During 1989,
baskets for contributions were introduced at the main meetings. A
real old-timer, back on a visit, exclaimed: "Good God, we were
saying in 1970 that we really must get a basket. Let no one say that
the Hong Kong Group does not get there in the end."
It has been
remarked that AA is different wherever one goes in the world, and
yet the same everywhere too. Some of the peculiarities of AA in Hong
Kong have, been touched on. Regular visitors to the Colony will be
able to recall other oddities. For example, despite a variety of
meetings in various locations and despite repeated attempts to "groupify"
the meetings separately, so far we have always reverted in the end
to being one single Hong Kong Group. Again, most of our meetings are
discussion ones, with only one fixed speaker meeting a week.
Generally we close the meetings with the Serenity Prayer, and often
say it seated rather than standing.
There are
historical reasons for most of these ways of doing things, but it
would be tedious to relate them here. The important thing is that
when Hong Kong AAs travel overseas (as many of us do frequently), we
feel at home in other meetings. And most of our visitors tell us
they feel at home here too.
From two people in
1969, the membership has grown to around 150 in all today, though
the tally of those present at meetings can swing up and down
remarkably depending on who's in town and who's away. There are
eighteen scheduled meetings a week, with an average attendance of
around twenty. Our non-AA friends and sympathizers have multiplied
over the years; and we rejoice in the progress made by
fellow-pilgrims following other twelve-step programs like AlAnon,
NA, and ACOA. AlAnon was on the scene in Hong Kong from the start
(in 1969), or rather from before the start. NA meetings began, with
AA support, in 1986.
We can now look
back on a decade of survival, the 1970s, and a decade of expansion
and consolidation, the 1980s. What of the 1990s? Well, most of us
are optimists and we have high hopes that, among other things,
Chinese-language AA will really get off the ground in the next few
years. As regards the future of Hong Kong and the impending transfer
of sovereignty in 1997, we seem to worry about it rather less than
others -- so maybe we're actually learning not to project too much
and to be grateful for what we have: something of immeasurable
worth.
It's a far cry
from Akron to a harbour city on the edge of the South China Sea.
That Alcoholics Anonymous should have travelled so far and taken
root here is something for which we owe gratitude to all pioneers,
worldwide and from 1935 onward. It is also, for us AAs here in Hong
Kong, awesome evidence of that Power that makes the impossible come
true.
David L., Hong
Kong
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