An awkward beginning with the A Team
After I returned to Hong Kong in October 1988, I was alone for a few weeks until Fr. Joe arrived and joined me. One of our first tasks was to prepare the Christmas Newsletter of the Asian Team. How thrilled I was then to use the Gestetner Photocopy machine we had! In fact, just a few months ago, I was using another Gestetner machine at YCS Sri Lanka office, a Gestetner Cyclostyle machine. Instead of using cyclostyle stencils on a traditional typewriter, I was using computer printouts from a noisy dot matrix printer and then cut paragraphs, arranged them on A4 paper to create the newsletter. This mastersheet would then be put on the photocopier to create the first copy. Then we would use tipex over all the edges of pasted pieces and then use that version as the ultimate master sheet. By the time we photocopy the newsletter, any photo pasted on the master sheet would come out really really bad that no person could be recognized. But we were so happy with that newsletter and would fold them to A5 size and then staple them and then put them in envelopes, place stamps, print and past address labels on them and all these will be done manually. Later, we would bring hundreds of them to the post office to be posted in three categories, local ones for Hong Kong, green box for Asia and blue box for outside Asia.
Fr. Joe kept in touch with two communities in Hong Kong, the Salesians and sisters of the Missionaries of Charity, or Mother Theresa Sisters. Those sisters would treat Fr. Joe likes royalty. And he certainly enjoyed that royal treatment. Some Sundays we tagged along but after a while we stopped and let him go and enjoy his royalty alone. We had our Teresa to deal with.
Teresa Teo came and joined Victor and I. I already had a quite a strange and seemingly negative introduction to Teresa by others. I have never met her. I only knew that there was a bit of a tug of war between past members of my Team. One liked her and others liked another person. I was influenced by the latter. So, even before Teresa arrived, I sort of disliked her. WHen I think of it now I feel that that is the worst way to start a team. So, soon I began to see things quite negatively. But me being me, I kept those feelings to myself. I tolerated Teresa. Luckily, Victor did not have that luxury to be influenced prior to Teresa’s arrival. Victor being Victor took things quite lightly or at least gave that impression to the outside world. That was why often people regarded him as not so serious. As a consequence, even when he tried to be genuinely serious, people thought he was kidding. I struggled. I had this negative image of Teresa painted by others before I even met her and Fr. Joe was not much positive about either Teresa or Victor. Fr. Joe looked down on Victor but was firm and less flexible with Teresa. He privately complained about both of them to me. I was more close to Victor and I would often caution him to be careful when he confronted Fr. Joe. Such advice ended in deaf years. So these team dynamics continued.
But I did have opportunities to work together with Teresa. We were on a trip in Taiwan together and we also went to Pakistan together. When I think of those days, I fear now that I may have been unkind to her or suspicious about her. The worst thing one can do is to put poison in your mind about another person. I still had those negative poison. I was struggling to reason with reality–the real Teresa I now saw and worked with. Is she real? This is not what I have heard about her! But she is always so intense and righteous. How can I work with her? She is also quite bossy and stubborn. How can I deal with that? These were the thoughts that ran through my mind those days. But the more I worked with her, I began to fight my negative biases with living experience. She treated Victor and I so kindly. She was genuinely caring. She was, of course, blunt at times. But she had a lot of kindness, honesty in her. She had great work ethics. She worked much harder than us, making me often guilty thinking that I was not doing enough. She was also the oldest among us three lay people. And I was the youngest.
This awkward beginning of our team sustained for a while. I shared more with Victor as we shared the same room. We also had Lima behind us so that bond continued. All this would change due to one incident. The most unprecedented thing happened in our team.