wondered how death would come to him. Would he slowly starve over a matter of days, or would he mercifully be taken in the night as he slept and froze to death?
Once he managed to shake off his moment of self-pity, John rose from the floor, bundled himself up in most of the clothes he owned, and walked through a snowstorm to a pay phone. He called his sister Sandra, who lived several towns over in Braintree with their grandparents and her three children. Sandra assured John that he could stay with them for a while, but after John used his last twenty dollars on cab fare, he arrived to find that Sandra wouldn’t open the door for him.
John slumped his shoulders and put his hands in his pockets. Out of one he pulled three quarters and a penny. From the other, he found the card with the phone number on it from Woping Joe.
“What other choice do I have?” he thought to himself.
In truth, if he had thought longer, or if he was guided less by anger and self-pity, he might have considered his aunt and uncle, Debbie’s parents. His aunt had been married several times and moved around a bit, and his uncle had moved back to South Carolina when his kids were grown. So, both of them would have taken some effort to locate, but John didn’t even try, nor did he reach out to Debbie, who was three years older, putting herself through school, and living in Chelsea.
“Could I have taken him in?” Debbie wonders now. “Could I have supported him? I don’t know, but I would have tried like hell. I would have made sure he wasn’t hungry and that he went back to school. Maybe I didn’t reach out to him. There were a number of people who could have helped. Sonny and his sisters threw him away like he was trash.”
John traipsed back through the snow and went looking for a second pay phone. He remembered why and when he had been given the phone number, but he didn’t really know what it was for, or who would pick up on the other end when he called. But as he fought the wind and the snow and walked several miles from Braintree to Quincy, he gripped the card tightly in his hand and did something he hadn’t done in a long time. He hoped.
The real beginning for John was that snowy January night in 1987 when he reached a phone booth on Furnace Brook Parkway in Quincy, unclenched his fist, and stared at the crumpled card with only a ten-digit number on it. With fingers numb from the cold, John dropped one of his last quarters into the coin slot and slowly dialed the rotary phone. After the third ring, Woping Joe answered.
“Ni hao,” Woping Joe said.
John had picked up a few Chinese words while working at the bar, and he recognized the greeting as the Chinese word for “hello.”
“Ni hao,” he replied with an inherent South Boston accent that revealed his identity.
“Hey,” Woping Joe said, “you’re the white boy from the bar. What do you want?”
John explained the predicament he was in, and to his astonishment, Woping Joe told him someone would be by in ten minutes to pick him up. John waited inside the phone booth where it was still freezing, but at least it was dry and the wind wasn’t cutting through the hole in his jacket. Tragedy had hardened him so much that John had forgotten how to feel scared. So, ten minutes later, when two cars, a brand-new Acura and a BMW, rolled up on him, and a Chinese stranger said, “Get in,” John got in without hesitation.
He was taken to a large three-family house in Braintree where he was immediately surrounded by more than a dozen Asian gangsters. Most of them only glanced up at the white boy in their midst. Others stared him down. John stood nervously in the middle of the room. He noticed each of the gangsters had a gun tucked into his waistband. He saw the latest electronics. He heard music blaring from an expensive stereo, and he smelled a delicious aroma he’d later learn was Chinese noodles. It was a sensory overload that should have made John turn and run, but it didn’t.
“It was so badass!” John remembers. “I loved it!”
Several Asian women came out of the kitchen and were told by the men to serve dinner and set another place. John struggled to use chopsticks, which brought about plenty of laughter at the table, and that laughter only grew when John surrendered, picked up his bowl, and shoveled the food into his mouth with his thick fingers. The gangsters followed suit and good-naturedly copied John, who couldn’t help but laugh himself. It was a fun-filled family dinner like John had never experienced. He looked around the room and saw faces quite unlike his own, and yet he felt at home. He couldn’t know at the time that the seeds had just been planted for something that would grow strong inside him. Those were the seeds of loyalty and respect, and they would be nurtured over time. They were the seeds of an easier way. Never again would John face difficult decisions about right or wrong. If someone gave him respect, he returned it. If someone failed to show him respect, he showed that person what a mistake that was. There was a surprising simplicity in honor. And John would find weeding out the complexities of conscience or societal norms made it easy to accept otherwise unacceptable behavior.
“I can never say enough about these people,” John says sincerely. “As far as being family oriented, your brother is your brother, you know? Things are just the way they are. You don’t ask questions. It is what it is. To be taught a different culture, to live that culture, and to experience things that I have experienced, I have no regrets for anything that happened to me.”
John sat at the Asian gangsters’ dinner table that first night unaware that the direction of his life had been permanently and irreversibly altered. Unwittingly, Woping Joe had just become the catalyst for everything that would happen in John’s life from that day forward, and that included all things inspiring and reprehensible. Woping Joe thought he was simply repaying a debt. John had helped him in the bar that night, so Woping Joe was obliged to return the favor. That is the Chinese way, and John would come to believe that it was the best part of a Chinese culture that has its roots going back thousands of years. Strength and loyalty to his brothers meant so much to John that he had the phrase tattooed on his arm. It was an indelible reminder of how to live.
“I’m never going to walk away from the people. They took care of me in my life. That’s kind of a vow that you make; you never, ever walk away from the people that took care of you and care about you, ’cause that makes you no different from anybody else. Always honor your people. Honor your friends, your family. You know, respect and loyalty to your brothers that haven’t ratted on you, you know what I mean? I’m not gonna change, not in that aspect.”
John slept on the floor that night, but this time there was a carpet beneath him and the house, like his heart, was warm. John had found peace, and he found a family. The next day he would find another family, one even more long-lasting, one with dozens of fiercely loyal brothers willing to fight and die—or kill—for each other.
WOPING JOE brought John to a Vietnamese restaurant in Boston’s Chinatown. This time, there were about twenty Asian gangsters demanding to know who John was and why he was there. Woping Joe vouched for John. They shared a meal of pork chops and rice with fish sauce, and John was in the gang. It was that easy. The rest of the initiation process included a shopping spree.
“I tried to say ‘no,’ but Woping Joe wasn’t hearing that,” John says. “So we went shopping and that was the beginning of my new life. It was the first time I ever went shopping without worrying about the price. If I didn’t have enough to cover something, my new friends paid. I soon learned we all stood together as a family, and that was a feeling I’d been searching for my whole life.”
As a white kid, John’s assimilation into the Chinese gang culture was unprecedented, but surprisingly easy. He walked comfortably among a group of hard-core criminals,
