Jackie Pullinger in the Walled City

In the 1960s there was a young woman from England who could not shake a conviction that God wanted her somewhere far away. Her name was Jackie Pullinger, and when she could not find a mission society to send her, she did something almost reckless. She bought the cheapest boat ticket she could find, sailed east, and was put off in Hong Kong with very little money and no clear plan. There she found a place that most people only spoke of in whispers. They called it the Walled City.

For a moment, picture it. A few acres of Kowloon packed so tightly that daylight barely reached the alleys. Tower upon tower leaning into each other, wires hanging like vines, water dripping in the dark. Tens of thousands of people lived inside, and outside the ordinary law hardly reached them. It was a refuge for the desperate and a kingdom for the gangs, the Triads, who ran the gambling dens and the heroin. And in the doorways, in the stairwells, in the shadows, sat the addicts. Men hollowed out by the drug they called chasing the dragon. People the city had decided were already finished.

This was the place where Jackie Pullinger stayed. Not visited. Stayed.

Think about what that meant, day after day. She did not arrive with a great organisation or a famous name. She came as a neighbour. She learned the language of the streets. She started a youth club, played music, sat with gang members who had killed and gang members who would. She walked into rooms thick with smoke and fear, and she kept coming back when there was no visible reason to. The addicts she came to love were not a project to her. They were Ah Ping and Christopher and the boys nobody counted. She watched men try to break free of heroin and fail, and try again, and fail again, and she did not walk away.

What she began to see was that a person could not simply be preached at and left. A man coming off the drug needed somewhere to go, someone to hold him through the long sickness of withdrawal, a household that would not throw him out when he was at his worst. So that is what grew up around her. Homes. People praying through the nights. Former addicts becoming the ones who now sat with the next man shaking on a mattress. Slowly, in a place built for despair, something else took root. A community where the disposable were treated as precious.

Many of those men told of being set free in ways they could only call miraculous, of the craving simply lifting. Those stories are best left in their own mouths, remembered as they remembered them. What can be said plainly is harder and just as moving. Jackie Pullinger stayed long enough for love to become believable. In a city that fed on the weak, she refused to leave the weak behind.

The Walled City itself is gone now, pulled down in the early 1990s, its alleys flattened into a quiet park. But the work that began in its shadows did not end. Through St Stephen's Society, the homes she helped build went on receiving the broken, the addicted, the ashamed, for decades. Generations of people who had been written off found that they were not finished after all.

Jackie Pullinger once said she had asked God for a soft heart, even if it meant being hurt more. That is the whole of it, really. She did not conquer the darkness with cleverness or strength. She simply would not stop loving the people inside it. And in the dripping dark of a city the world had given up on, the love that stays turned out to be stronger than the dragon.