Page 141 of Roberto

I could tell people that my mother raised money for charities and threw parties.

But when they asked what my father did for a living, I could only reply, “He works in the city.”

When they askedDoing what,I would say, “I don’t know… but he gets me DVDs.”

That was all I knew about his job…

Until I was kidnapped.

59

It happened when I was 16 years old.

I’d been befriended by a girl at school named Jing. She had a much older boyfriend who was already out of high school, which made Jing seem both scandalous andveryworldly.

One day, she told me her boyfriend could get us some weed, and would I like to go to his apartment and smoke some?

I’d never tried marijuana before. I’d never even smoked aregularcigarette – but I was beginning to go through the normal teenage phase of wanting to rebel for the sake of rebelling.

My life was a suffocating, never-ending loop between home and school. A chauffeur drove me to my private academy every day, then promptly brought me back home when classes were over.

My oldest brother had long since graduated and gone to university.

My other brother had been given his own car. He got up to all sorts of mischief and never got in trouble once, which galled me to no end.

Both of them seemed to have unlimited freedom.

I had none.

So of courseI said yes when Jing asked if I wanted to smoke some weed.

I snuck out of my house on a Friday afternoon. The boyfriend picked me up in his Audi with Jing in the passenger seat.

He was 23; she was 16. Warning bells should have gone off when I discovered their age difference, but I was young and naïve. At the time, I just thought it made Jing cooler.

The boyfriend drove us into Wan Chai, the seediest neighborhood in Hong Kong.

I was thrilled and nervous all at once. Boys at school bragged about how they did coke in Wan Chai over the weekends – rich kids slumming it in the ghetto.

My mother had only mentioned Wan Chai in disapproving tones. My father never talked about it at all.

The boyfriend pulled into the garage of a run-down apartment building, the type of place that looked like it had rats running around in the alley out back.

I got frightened and asked to go home, but Jing berated me and told me to stop being ‘lame.’

I should have listened to my intuition.

When we parked and got out of the car, three grungy-looking men appeared out of nowhere. They wore short-sleeved shirts that exposed the gang tattoos on their arms.

One of them threw a burlap sack over my head and told me he would kill me if I screamed.

Petrified, I cooperated and allowed them to guide me to a car, at which point they shoved me inside the trunk and slammed it closed.

Only once the car was moving did I realize that my ‘friend’ had set me up. I’d never heard Jing or her boyfriend make any noise – almost like they were expecting the three men to show up.

The car drove for 20 minutes before it stopped. I was taken out of the trunk and guided blindly through a maze of hallways.

When they removed the burlap sack, I saw I was in a windowless room with a metal chair, a dirty mattress on the floor, a mound of rope, and an ancient toilet and sink.

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