The next Sunday I attended church and saw the service differently. God’s presence was there during worship, and Patrick read a passage from the Bible, but there was so much else going on that was just not the Lord. It was Patrick preaching, excited to talk about his own pet ideas, emphatic gestures and animated body language to emphasize his message … but it wasn’t the Lord. It was just a lot of hot air. What a terrible revelation to bear witness to … and no, I never went back.
And I tried but I could not deal with my broken heart in a mature way. I was wounded beyond my ability to self-heal. Second, we openly taught that we were the ONLY real church in New Hampshire. We didn’t just believe it, I believed it! This was years before John Paul Jackson set up a prophetic ministry in the area and yes, the prophetic ministry was nascent, but it was there had I only been open to asking God to show me.
It is certainly not biblical to act or speak like you are the only people following God; that is the common indicator of a cult! This exclusive mindset caused me more harm than anything else because I firmly believed we were the only real church in the whole state, certainly the only real prophetic church within several hours’ drive, and now since I was an outcast from it, there was nowhere to turn to find new fellowship, let alone a prophetic community, not even hoping to find a family!
In fact there were several communities I could have gone to; yes, not so many at that time, but they were there. When I then went to Law School in Rhode Island there was one with an entire Bible School quite close to my school, had I only been open to looking for it.
My last year of university was then starting and I moved onto the main campus into a very fun dorm and stopped hearing from God mostly altogether. My guilt fueled my backsliding and that fueled my guilt.
Let’s skip the whole next year … then graduation. Skip it. Then next summer: I was working at a restaurant on Lake Winnipesauke back where I grew up called the Naswa, maybe some of you know it. I’ll skip over the details again but after a late night at work, then after work stuff, then I was driving home and the sky was becoming light and well I figured it was almost dawn so I’d just drive around to a hillside and try to see the dawn. I grew up in that town but there was a road and a hill I had still never gone to and I remember looking up at the clouds and realizing that clouds circle the earth just moving from country to country, nothing stops them, no border, no language. And I heard a word in my heart, “You will travel far from home.” I knew I was soon going to move to Rhode Island, it was about three hours away, but that’s not what the Lord was talking about.
Just as I moved into law school in my first-year townhouse I heard the Lord speak, “You are exactly where I want you to be.” I didn’t hear from him again for maybe two more years!
First year of law school was hard. Second year was even harder and I began to feel like I just needed to get out of Rhode Island. So I enrolled in an overseas summer law program in Hong Kong in 1996 learning about technology transfers for foreign joint ventures with local factories in China, and that’s when I met a woman from India who was working as a flight attendant in Hong Kong and we started a very intense email-correspondence long distance relationship. She then came to visit me in New York, which since she was a flight attendant was not so unusual for her to be able to do, but when I went to visit her I felt two very strong impressions. First, I felt like I was falling. I was falling. Was I falling in love? I couldn’t discern it exactly but I just felt the very real spiritual sensation of falling. Second I felt the Holy Spirit around me.
Just then I got stuck in traffic. I missed the light on Metacom Ave turning left towards New York City and a huge procession of bikers in leather blocked the intersection in a very long procession as I waited and waited, feeling like I was falling.
Falling
But I could not understand how anything I was doing was God’s will anymore. I remembered the prophecies, the interpretations of so many previous visions was so plain, and the pastor’s daughter was clearly my chosen mate. Why was I now feeling the Holy Spirit leading me forward like this to go see this woman; why right now? But if God’s presence was with me going to see her and I was falling for her, falling in love I assumed, just falling forward in God’s leading at least, I just didn’t know what it was … but I was in.
We had met in Hong Kong in July I think, and we got engaged in Boston by November; we visited her parents in India over Christmas break and then we were married by March in Hong Kong during my last year of law school. We got pregnant on our honeymoon and I moved to Hong Kong immediately after finishing classes to be with her and start working, skipping my law school graduation ceremony actually. Oh, but I’m getting ahead of myself.
Everything in our courtship was really so awesome … perfect! Ideal! Her British accent and Indian mannerisms, quite like a princess to me! Tall, exotic, adorable … it took me in. Her parents were charming. Her father was a financial controller but his hobby as a Shakespearean scholar was to reveal patterns of institution building from Shakespeare’s plays. Erudite, tall, dark, with a deep-toned outdated British accent. I was totally sold on the idea of marrying her and not a warning sign to take note of … until coming home from the marriage registry in Hong Kong.
We had just signed our marriage contract in the registry near the famous waterfall in Victoria Park and going home we were now riding a double-decker bus, sitting in the front top row on the second story which in those buses had a very large wrap-around windscreen window looking out over everything. It was in March and as soon as we signed the marriage license and were on our way home I saw a great demon fly into the bus through the window and it went right into my new wife of only two hours and instantly she began ranting and saying wild and confusing things. It never manifested in the many months of our courtship, not even a clue, not even a hint, not even once. The strongholds in her family were hard to break and I’ll skim over most of it since it is so awful, but that started a very long and very unhappy season—but for which I am now very grateful.
After the March wedding in Hong Kong I went back to the US to finish the last few months of my law degree and soon she visited me again on duty, I think it was late April maybe, but this time she was feeling … different.
I had a sudden inspiration to show her the New England seacoast. The last time she visited New England we had no time for sight-seeing and anyway it had been winter and very cold, and so now it being Spring I wanted to show her where I used to SCUBA dive and some other local sights in York, Maine. But driving around she was feeling sick and on a hunch we stopped at a 7-11 in New Bedford, Massachusetts (the same New Bedford of literary fame near Nantucket) and we got a pregnancy test—we were pregnant!
I was ecstatic! Over the moon! She … not so much. Rather cool to the idea if I can say it like that, an abortion was our ONLY option she insisted. We were not stable, only newly married and so many other reasons why it was the best, no our ONLY choice to end the pregnancy.
Avoiding the Rubble at Nubble
This was suddenly very serious. I had been pro-life many years and this was not some hypothetical baby, it was MY baby and no, never would I let anyone harm it!—not it, but ‘her’ I later found out but at that early time I didn’t know if it was going to be a girl or boy!
So we were still on our way to the seacoast to show her where I learned to SCUBA dive but I was unsure which exit to take off the highway to get to Cape Neddeck and Nubble Lighthouse. Coming from university we drove up the New Hampshire coast past Long Sands Beach but now I was coming from a different direction and just not sure how to get to where I wanted to go.
We always joke in New England, “Ya can’t get there-ah, from here-ah.” Well, I was trying! From Massachusetts to Maine you first cross the measly 17 mile coastline of New Hampshire, which by highway only takes a few minutes. York, Maine is the first town across the border from New Hampshire and so obviously if I went any further North once I crossed the border I would get stuck on the long highway to the outlet stores in Kittery, Maine, which I knew had no exits for a long section of the road if I went that far. So the ocean is everything to the East, I need to NOT go North to Kittery, so I couldn’t get too lost if I keep my bearings heading that way looking to take an exit to the right as soon as we crossed the border into Maine. I then saw signs on the highway for Kittery right ahead so I quickly pulled off the next highway exit ramp and the Holy Spirit fell on me, enveloping me like a cloud.
Having an In-Body Experience
This was not a vision; at the time I described it more like a prophetic act, but that’s not right either. I was not acting out my faith in a symbolic way—this was a sovereign move of God’s Spirit on me.
I was more than filled, I was enveloped, enshrouded in the Holy Spirit’s presence and I stayed IN my body but was observing everything I was doing with an outsider’s perspective. It was like I was a movie director watching a movie of my own life, starring me. I was hyper-aware of myself and everything around me, as if in a cloud of God’s tangible presence—everything seemed to have a prophetic significance, like I was watching myself, listening to myself and recording everything around me in hyper detail, and all of the real life events were a prophecy.
Off the highway I looked at the unfamiliar road sign in front of me, the Holy Spirit tangible on me and I didn’t know if I should go left or right. I considered my bearings and decided to go left and my wife started to complain very emphatically, “That’s the wrong way! We’re lost!”
I drove just a few minutes and noticed we were heading North again, parallel to the main highway towards Kittery, but I knew the ocean was still to my right and so I was looking for a road headed to the right. I suddenly passed one but was going too fast to take it so I turned around in a parking lot of a lobster restaurant and thought a minute. It seemed right, so I went back and took that road.
Meanwhile the Holy Spirit was still around me like a cloud and I was aware of every tiny detail, and yes, my wife kept complaining, but now she was getting more and more upset and saying things like, “You ALWAYS do this; you always get us lost!”
I was beside myself in the Holy Spirit, observing things unfold with an objective perspective and so I spoke, “Well, we’ve never gotten lost before and we’ve only taken two car trips together, ever. How can I ALWAYS do anything? That makes no sense.” Logic to the rescue! But she wasn’t having it!
“No, this is the wrong way,” she firmly insisted. “Turn back and take the other road!”
I reminded her, “You’ve never been to Maine a day in your life! You’ve never been to this part of the world, ever. How do you have any idea where we are or where we are going or which is the right way to get there?” Captain Logic! Thank you for showing up!
But she doubly insisted, “This is the wrong way; you NEVER listen to me.”
In the Holy Spirit’s unusual presence like that I knew this trip was itself a prophetic message. So the way she was acting was probably symbolic of something, but symbolic of what? We all joke about getting directions and maps and common misunderstandings between men and women but that’s not what was going on. So being in the Holy Spirit’s enveloping presence like that I just kept watching everything very carefully—and kept on driving.
We drove through some beautiful areas and by such pretty, large Colonial-style family houses with such beautiful roses and lush gardens with no idea of where we actually were—but then suddenly I hit the brakes! There was gravel in the road so I skidded a little before the car stopped. “THIS IS IT!” It had only been a few minutes since turning around at the lobster restaurant and I saw the road sign that points to the Cape Neddick peninsula. I usually came up by the beach from the south, but this time I just came East past what used to be York’s Wild Kingdom, a seasonal Zoo, only I didn’t know it at the time. I backed up and drove up into the peninsula access road! “Here we are!” I said matter-of-factly, and frankly a little relieved!
“No, we’re lost.”
“No, this is the actual road. We’re on the right road. See, the sign.” But she still wouldn’t have it.
“No, you always do this. You never listen to me. We’re lost.”
We passed some large homes on a cliff overlooking the ocean and for a moment she became so happy and even said how nice it would be if maybe one day we could have a house like that: big American house, set on a cliff, overlooking the ocean … but then went right back into her complaining and accusing: you always do this, you never listen, we’re lost ….
So I pulled up into the parking lot facing the lighthouse; I mean the parking lot parks you right in plain view of the famous lighthouse—no mistaking it! There it is! Right in front of us! But she kept saying it, “No, we’re lost.”
!!!!????
So I made a demonstration of turning the car off as is to say without words, “There, can’t you tell we are here?! The car is already off …” but she still would not stop.
So I said, probably with some gravel and cold wintry slate in my tone of voice, “We’re here.”
But she was still not convinced. The Holy Spirit still enshrouding me. I didn’t know what to do!
Upset and continuing her tirade I finally opened my door, and the car open door alarm started to sound—BING BING BING—and I slowly got out. But she kept talking, now to herself, accusing me of always getting us lost, never listening … I closed the door and left her in the car still talking to … no one! But yes still talking!
I walked over to the rocky ledge where the waves were splashing, and the Holy Spirit was still covering me so I looked right out into the cold wind and told Satan, “I don’t care what you do, I WILL NOT QUIT!!”
Wow, the wind was cold! And I stood there, alone, for a minute or two. The cold wind and barren rocky coast on a gray, overcast day was not beautiful. I came all this way to show my wife something special of my past, a beautiful landmark, a lighthouse that’s a part of American heritage, but actually it was just a cold, dreary day and all of the beauty in the world would simply fade into gray, all it’s wonder and charm would simply die away if people were just going to be upset this way.
My heart sank and I was about to give in and just turn around and drive the two hours back home in defeat … when I heard the car door open—BING BING BING. I didn’t move until finally she came and stood next to me and even put her arm around me!
And just at that moment, maybe you don’t believe me, but it was like a moment from a corny movie but a huge wave came rushing ashore and just at that second CRASHED right in front of us against a big rock like it was on cue, and the water shot straight up into the air maybe twenty feet or more! W-O-O-S-H!
“WOW!! Amazing!” she said! It really was too!
Only I had never seen anything like that in my entire life, either here or anywhere else! She must have thought that’s what I brought her here to see, but I didn’t know that could even happen! And we were at that very second facing the exact right spot and at exactly the right moment to see it!—and then the Lord spoke.
“You will get to your destination no matter which way you take. And what you will find when you get there will be better than what you came there for.”
The Holy Spirit’s enveloping presence then faded away. It was a prophetic … well, I don’t know what to call it. A prophetic lighthouse-journey-crashing-wave event? Maybe. A prophetic car drive? OK, sure. It was a prophetic car drive. And good or bad it was a model or pattern for me in my life over the next many years. Later still, I asked the Lord what did he mean, ‘I would find something better than what I was looking for,’ and He said, we would find Him, personal intimacy with Him, even though we were not looking for him in that way in our journey, especially not back then. We didn’t even know at that time that it was possible. But that’s what we would find, even though we were looking for something else, probably just successful careers and money and things—but we would actually find Him.
Oh, one more thing: back at the lighthouse it was still cold and windy so after a moment or two we did leave and as I turned back home taking the familiar road along the beach that I normally drove to get to Cape Neddeck, to my great shock the whole Long Sands Beach road was under construction!
I mean it was gone!
The road had been dug up and was being redone from the sub-base level up! My new car bottomed out as I drove into the huge ditch—CRUNCH!—and we bumped and banged our way down the stretch of the beach towards York town. I didn’t know it, but the road we first took, unknowingly, was in fact the best, most smooth, most direct, fastest and most scenic way to get to the lighthouse after all.
Jumping Water Bowls and Saltwater Aquariums
So that prophecy began to come to pass from that time on and really helped me understand the journey, in a way to help me stick with it and not quit. It was quite brutal actually. We were not on good terms most of the time over the next 15 years—even after finding the Lord in such a personal way—until she left.
As for me, in Hong Kong despite there being so many US law firms there, try as hard as I could but I just could not find work as a lawyer. Hong Kong has a UK-based legal system and I had a US degree, but that wasn’t it. If God closes a door, NO ONE can open it!
I later had several dreams about NOT being a lawyer to help me understand this was God’s will for me, not just my bad luck. Initially I did work in China for just a few months for a US law firm and it was simply awful. One day driving in a taxi in Guangzhou I had a real inspiration to write a poem about marriage. I used to get inspirations to write poetry a few times a week in university. I wrote more than 600 poems before I finished university, but in law school I only wrote legal papers and was even published in International Law, but I wrote no creative writing for years until this moment.
What I was hit with came out as a 20,000-word poem I called Lovepoem. “A man’s journey from Java, into the North, and back to Pondicherry: traveling through time and culture to discover the mystery of the Sun.” But that’s neither here nor there; God recently said it’s almost past time to finish it, and no I’m not quite done with it yet.
But my salary was so low I could earn more by teaching children English; I was losing money working for him and so I soon quit and had a string of bad jobs I was either way-overqualified for, shunned for being the only non-Chinese person in the office—or both.
Giving birth was not a happy time. Lots of teaching English, and some editorial work, and divorce threats almost on a weekly basis. My wife was battling depression, and later what I saw was 12 demonic strongholds in her life that manifested to do anything possible to cause trouble. We went to church only very rarely. It was far away and we were not on the same page. I didn’t see a lot of hope.
But one day we went to a garden metalwork factory in the rural areas of Yuen Long and they had a sound vibration bowl; it’s got water in it and you rub it a certain way just like making a wine glass sing, and the water jumps all over the place. I did it; there is a certain trick to it actually but I knew I could figure it out and I did. I’m good with stuff like that. But then she did it—and she did it exactly right her very first try, only the water did not jump quite as high as when I did it, and God spoke, “She will be exactly like you, only a little less.”
Amen! So there is real hope!
But it’s funny right? He didn’t say all the things I heard in this word. He didn’t say we’d stay together, serve him together, be happy and successful as a couple. But that’s what I heard or at least believed. All he said was that she would one day ‘be just like me only a little less.’ Later Jesus told us, “I’m not saying everything you think I’m saying.” Funny how we hear. Jesus even said that, be careful how you hear!
And at one point I almost started an English Tutorial School since I was doing so much English teaching and organizing classes for companies and schools and I heard the Lord speak and say that if I stay with it, that school would become the biggest English Tutorial company in Hong Kong within a few years. But no, I didn’t stay with it. I should have. I could have. But no, I didn’t. He never mentioned it again. But actually he was giving me options!
And like I said, I went a few times to the large ICA church in North Point, and even brought my wife a few times with me but she greatly resisted it. We lived an hour and half away and one time we got all the way to the top steps out of the train station within view of the church and without any reason she starting raving about money, and my attitude and this and that. We weren’t even talking about any of those things! But suddenly a few feet before we got into the church it seemed so important that she had to stop and turn around and go the hour-plus trip back home, alone. Talk about intrusive thoughts!
The International Christian Assembly, or ICA, was a good, middle-of-the-road church in an old theater but after service they had a few people ready to pray for anyone and these ministers were actually Spirit-filled and they often prophesied too! They gave me a word at that time, sometime around 1999 that I lost but found again just when I needed to hear it five or six years later. I am not a failure, God said. Apart from his word I had no evidence to convince me otherwise.
Then one day I went to the washroom at ICA and walking down the stairs my feet were echoing in the concrete and tile staircase when suddenly I heard the echo of my footsteps DOUBLE—I immediately knew it was an angel walking next to me! That freaked me out! I don’t even know why!
Then one time I finally was able to bring my wife down for prayer after service. I admit it—I tricked her. I said I wanted prayer and asked if she would come with me. After my brief prayer I asked if they would pray for her, and she tried to escape but we caught her! They prayed the sinner’s prayer and prayed for the Holy Spirit baptism and she got so nervous, “I can’t speak,” she said, “If I speak some rubbish is going to come out of my mouth!” Oh, she caught it alright! She was now baptized in the Holy Spirit and began speaking in tongues! By all means, Paul said!
And we used to go to the plant market street and the goldfish market street a lot to get plants and pet fish and one time I decided to set up an ocean tank with seawater. When I was a kid I used to have so many tropical freshwater fish and that was so easy to me, but the ocean tank idea was the next step up—but it was a total disaster.
I remember setting up the tank the first time and I heard an angel speak, “It is not time to make a seawater tank.”
I am pretty sure from the presence next to me and the tone in the spirit that it was an angel. I didn’t ask God first if I should do it, and didn’t think there was any plan of God involved in such things. But he spoke! Why??
Soon all my fish died; the banded bamboo shark ate all the blue devils and everything else and then died itself. I converted it all into a river tank for turtles, but what a strange thing to hear God say? It was not time to make a seawater fish tank? He didn’t say don’t do it, but only that it was ‘not yet time’ to do it! That means … there would some day be a time when it was God’s specific and perfect will for me to set up a seawater fish tank. How strange!
No Adequate Magazine for Filipinas
I often worked for myself because no one would hire me, and I briefly shared an office with a real estate developer from Mainland China and it was way outside the city center on Electric Road in Fortress Hill, far from all the action. The one thing it did have was a small coffee shop called Just Java. Starbucks was a new thing and I never drank coffee yet. In law school I felt I would drink tea, something I learned from the Irish Missionaries, and it was less caffeine than coffee so if I really needed an extra kick I could take the next step up. Strange thinking for sure, but that was my mind. But now right next to my office lobby was this nice little shop and run by Western guys my age. We never chatted much but it impressed me. I was getting lonely. And so I also started drinking coffee on a regular basis.
It was there that I heard the Lord say like a whisper that I would soon have an office downtown.
Sure enough and not long after, I opened a small office on Pottinger St., near the city center; I used it to teach English, and one morning as I was walking into the building I heard a voice speak to me. It felt like it was an angel because there was something like a holy presence located there by the entrance to our small building lobby. What it said was, “There is no adequate magazine for Filipinas.” It was the Lord’s word, but it seemed like I sensed that it was coming from an angel.
But I had to puzzle over that. I knew nothing really about ‘Filipinos,’ or the feminine form that God spoke ‘Filipinas,’ besides what I learned from our own domestic helper and live-in nanny. Hong Kong at that time was a huge labor importer of domestic helpers from the Philippines mostly. There were about 130,000 Filipina domestic helpers working there at that time, mostly all ladies. And most all had the same day off, Sunday, and they had nowhere to go and not much money so they just swarmed the public spaces in Central to sit on cardboard mats, eat, share stories, sleep. They kept to small groups of ladies from their own village back home mostly. But others spent the day in church, others in bars, or worse. So I started to do research. What I found was astounding. The publishing market for Filipinas was all tabloids, very trashy ones, and of very poor quality.
A week later, same day, same doorway, same voice, “Do the magazine.”
Now I had specific direction from God! So I tried to learn the publishing business myself. I had worked the previous year as an editor for a textiles trade magazine but now I had to learn the design and layout software on my own too, do sales and get contacts in the foreign Filipino community that I knew nothing about. We published our first issue I think just at the end of 1999 and even did a second issue and by then we had real models and real photos, better stories and real advertisers lined up. It was going to be really good but I could not hold it together with income only once in five or six months which was how long it took me to make an issue, and so little real help.
But we made such an impression in the market that it actually changed the publishing environment for Filipinas, how magazines looked and how they presented themselves … but I had to close it down before the second issue. My wife was completely against the idea and only after it closed, maybe a year later did she say what a shame it was to stop it, it was such a good magazine! But when it was running she would so often call me at work so upset that I was doing such a stupid thing! Was it just to ogle Filipina girls? Did I have a girlfriend? Was I crazy?—it was none of the above. God spoke!
I tried to take it all in stride; the failure was hard but I really did achieve so much with so very little. And I learned so much. We needed to be in production faster, do more in-house production, we needed a real distribution company and help with sales. I learned so much so fast but I could not self finance it like that on my own!
But that wasn’t the lingering question on my mind. It was God’s direction. Why tell me to do this? I know He did. Why tell me to do it and then let me fail?
Promoduck, Asian Lawyer, Planet Build
I then worked at a premiums manufacturing and sourcing website as a marketing manager with a big salary, far away … and was fired very soon after joining when their real choice for marketing manager finally arrived. I was only hired as a stop-gap measure for a few weeks and they just didn’t tell me. “Supply and Demand!” she said. “Supply and Demand!”
I then worked for a legal tabloid and learned photography and better graphic design. This was before digital cameras so learning photography was slow and expensive! I also became well acquainted with most of the large law firms and many of the partners who were mostly British and a very friendly lot.
The magazine I worked for was a scam. It was filled with nonsense and they lied about their print run by a factor of about 90%. The owners were real scammers and most of the sales staff worked at ‘bucket shops’ before, selling fake ads and making high pressure scam sales to business managers in the past. You can bet I fit right in! But Buttersworth bought them out just after I joined and so I was there during the merger transition.
I revamped the magazine quickly, upgraded the content, format, graphics and quality. They didn’t care but I did!
I then got fired a few months later as my new boss wanted to hire her girlfriend to replace me as editor. But during my short stint there I learned a lot and made a lot of contacts. And then in the span of one week I heard two or three different people say the same thing about there not being any good magazine for construction in Hong Kong.
Hong Kong was constantly under construction and they were then in the process of expanding the rail network, building a new airport, two new large cable-stayed bridges, two of the world’s tallest buildings and other Grade-A office towers. And in fact there were magazines for construction, two or three. Why would I hear this same opinion spoken out-loud at least twice in the same week from totally different engineers? I saw an opportunity.
I had met so many lawyers in my magazine job that when I got fired I quickly asked a few partners I knew for help to start a magazine for construction and engineering but with a legal base—basically a way for lawyers in construction to ‘advertise’ to the engineering field by contributing legal articles for the industry since outright advertisements by law firms was illegal. And frankly it was awesome. Planet Build! Lasted a year until I was robbed by my staff when I was away on Christmas break. It was 2001 and we came out just as Discovery Channel was doing their production series on big construction as well.
This time I did all the engineering site visit interviews, photographs, writing, editing, graphics, layout, computer troubleshooting, sales and distribution. I was everywhere, doing everything! It was awesome!
I finally hired some sales staff (who later betrayed and robbed me) and after one year into it were just about to make it work: we got a real advertiser, Siemens, and were getting things into a faster production pace when I made the next issue’s printing films. We used to have to use four half-tone cellulose films, one per color per page. Now it’s all digital, but these physical films were expensive and important. I gave them to my sales manager to bring them to the printer who lived down his street and over Christmas I went to Sydney with my wife on a free ticket, and felt unusually, abnormally liberated.
I came back to find the office ransacked, a note from my sales guy claiming responsibility, the films and proofs, some of which belonged to advertisers, all stolen, nothing printed and within a few days started hearing people ask why was I still in Hong Kong, they had heard I “took the money and left” but that my sales guy was going to honor their contracts with me and give them ads in his new construction and interior design magazine instead! He actually faxed all of our contacts with this story that I was gone and “took the money” which no one had been billed yet, but it sounded sinister, and I won’t elaborate any more than that … it was a disastrous mess.
Speedflex – Round Three – TKO!!
New season, new partners. I was very soon contacted through a mutual friend that a local printing company wanted to ask me if I wanted to make Planet Build together with them. They did a lot of contract publishing work and so I said sure, but what the really big idea I had on my mind to do was a magazine for the legal community with a lot of high-end lifestyle thrown in—not a tabloid, but high-end legal-lifestyle. It was doubly awesome—Eye Witness. Our first issue blew everyone away. We interviewed the Attorney General, had articles on malpractice, the opera, collecting Delorians, yacht racing … our first issue made HK$200,000! First issues are giveaways, but ours made a lot of money!
Then we made the first issue of Planet Build with the new team and it was top shelf. We interviewed Sir Gordon Wu, I mean we just visited Hopewell Center and asked him what he had on his mind to talk about … he retreated to a back room and came out with detailed architectural maps of the Pearl River Delta. “There’s several roads to Shenzhen from Hong Kong, but none to Zhuhai – Macao. If we can make a bridge-tunnel like the one in Chesapeake Bay we can connect Hong Kong by road to the south bank of the Pearl River and drive a container from Hong Kong to Vietnam in less than ten hours.”
This was in 2002 OK, and the bridge/tunnel idea had been panned by lawmakers for many years and we asked if he could give us the graphics and explain his idea in our magazine, and so we did. We printed it and gave free copies to hundreds of government engineers and policy makers. Not long after my ‘partners’ fired me, saying they were going to keep the magazines for themselves, crushing me and stealing my ideas. But in Hong Kong you can’t sue and pay your lawyer based on a promise of a future payment if you win, a contingency fee arrangement, like you can in the US. That is illegal. You need to secure payment for legal fees upfront by law, and my very cash-rich partners knew that so they just laughed at me. They were a cash rich 20-year-old establishment run by five or six top Western businessmen, all millionaires, and they said correctly, ‘You have no money, you can’t sue us. Just go home!’
The magazine in their hands of course collapsed within an issue or two … but within a few weeks the talk of the town was Sir Gordon’s bridge-tunnel project idea. A few months later it was being discussed in the parliament for feasibility and funding. A few years later it was planned, approved and under construction. You can now drive it yourself!
I know all of this only came to be ONLY because of my story and my magazine. But by then I was already out.
