![]()
What’s it like to be a member of the Triad?
My involvement began in high school. There was nothing dramatic about it, I just became friends with a bunch of people I thought were cool and one thing led to another.
High school gangs are like triad training schools. They are not part of the triads per se, they’re more of a triad Mickey Mouse fan club where a group of young wannabes strut around pretending to be something they’re not. You’d be surprised at just how many of these there are.
The leaders of these high school gangs are usually affiliated with a low ranking triad member, called a 49 in triad lexicon. These are the foot soldiers. The 49 functions as big brother whose help the boys would call on in case of trouble, but big brother is also a scout who kept an eye out for promising young talent.
I must’ve seemed like one, because I was soon introduced to the 49er’s tailou (big brother), who was also a 49er. We met a few times at a local disco, snorted cocaine, gargled ketamine, popped ecstasy, and soon he trusted me enough to put me in charge of a few high-school gangs.
The triads are structured like a MLM scheme. At the lower levels, the more followers you recruit, the more powerful you become, the higher up you climb. The people above your rank are referred to as tailou or ____ ko which means elder brother, and your followers are referred to as DauGei, or children.
It’s all about the organization. So we organized.
We recruited the same way ISIS and Al Qaeda does: by giving disaffected and disenfranchised young men a sense of belonging. We start off by convincing the kids that we were cool by bringing them alcohol, drugs and other illicit goods. Then when they have issues they’d come to us for help and we’d help them. Many of the kids I recruited were bullied in school and looking for some revenge, and we’d give the kid’s bully a thorough trashing.
Some of the kids would naively come to see us as these cool guys who were looking out for them, and they’d seek to be a part of our circle. Once we got the kids on hooked on the illusion of brotherhood and coolness, they’re ours to keep. And they’ll bring their friends as well.
We went around the schools settling petty disputes such as who stole whose girlfriend – at the high school level, everything is petty- , and we enforced pax triadica with our fists. We demanded discipline from our members, and if one of our own went out of line we’d beat him up ourselves. We were a group of young bullies with our own set of rules and standards of behaviour. My recruits unwittingly traded one bully in school, for circle of friends who bullied one another.
From petty disputes we graduated on to settling disputes between local businesses. Unlicensed bars, moneylenders and illegal gambling dens would pay us a set fee, and in return we’d step in if they have problems. The money was terrible, but for a young kid, having adults and business owners turn to you for help is a huge ego trip.
I was able to grow the organization effectively because I understood the principles of peer pressure and groupthink. So if you’re a parent, I would advise you to obsess over who your teenager is hanging out with; there are many manipulators like me out there.
I must’ve been a pretty good recruiter, because the boss took me under his wing and introduced me to his boss, Suen Ko. Suen Ko was a hung kwan, or a mid-level lieutenant in the triad hierarchy. This is where I started to get involved with the actual organization. We had a short initiation ceremony in a karaoke room, and I became a 49 under Suen Ko.
Suen Ko owned a few nightclubs and bars, and virtually every night we’d be in one of his fine establishments drinking, partying, and partaking in every drug we could get our hands on. Our sort attracted a certain sort of girl, and there were girls aplenty. The bars were a money maker, but Suen Ko’s real money came from selling bootleg CDs.
At the time, bootleg CDs and eventually DVDs were an organized crime gold rush. This was before napster and way before bittorrent, and demand was so high that we filled up entire shopping malls with outlets selling pirated movies, music and software. A common joke was that if Bill Gates ever visited our malls, he’d have a heart attack on the spot.
For about 5 cents in costs for a blank CD, we sold the end product to the consumer for 15 local bucks a pop. Not even cocaine had that kind of margin. We were selling the bootlegs as fast as we could print them, and best of all piracy was perceived by the local cops as a low-impact crime and as such wasn’t rigorously enforced. Heck, many of our regular customers were cops. At the time, you could drive up to a police checkpoint with a stash of bootleg CDs on the backseat, give cheeky grin and a thumbs up, and the cops would just wave you through.
Suen Ko made millions within his first year.
I was good with computers, and I became his IT department. I helped him organize his production, and in return he gave me a handsome cut. I made quite a bit of money in my teens, but I quickly blew it all on drugs and girls.
The biggest eye opener was during the annual company dinner. They had to construct a tent hall on an empty field to fit all 5,000 of us in, and there were local politicians and community leaders on the front row tables. That drove in the impression of just how big the tree was, and how deep the roots went.
If I made the triads sound like corporations, that’s because that’s what they are. We were even registered with the Registrar of Companies as a multimedia company and we paid our taxes. The big bosses looked just like any other middle aged Chinese uncle you’d meet at the local supermarket. The best way to avoid detection is to be in plain sight and blend into the background. The so-called gangsters you see on the street strutting their stuff are amateurs; many of them are just aping what they see in the movies. The pros keep a low profile and get on with making money.
Once you go far enough up the hierarchy, violence is actually pretty rare. For the most part, being a triad is just like working in any other corporate job.
But when violence does occur at that level, it’s freaking terrifying.
Roundabout the end of my first year, there was a war. The politician who Suen Ko worked for was at odds with another politician from the same organization. There were a few shootings, grenade attacks, and choppings, but it didn’t affect me directly at first so I didn’t give much thought to it. Then a call came one night. All hands on deck. We dropped everything and converged on the HQ.
Pardon the expletive, but it was scary as fuck. There were a hundred or so of us milling about an office block, and someone started handing out machetes and sashimi knives. Suen Ko took me up to the office, and there were hard looking fuckers at every corner. The air was so full of cigarette smoke I could barely breathe. Everyone looked grim. Apparently we were expecting an attack.
I was a skinny teenager, and I was out of my depth. Till that point, I’d been involved on the white collar side of things. The guys I saw that night had the word hard etched on their faces. I’ve never felt more scared than I did that night.
We stayed there overnight, but no attack came so we went back to our branch office. They attacked us there. A dozen or so guys rushed in and we fought back with chairs, clubs, machetes, boxes of A4 paper, everything we could get our hands on. It was a hazy frantic panicky desperate fight for survival. We were cornered and if we lost it would’ve been game over. One of theirs died in the melee.
The police arrived fairly quickly and I went to jail for a bit. It was in a cell that I resolved that this life wasn’t for me. For some miraculous reason, I got off scot-free. I went home, packed my things, and left everything behind to start a new life.
So how did it feel like? Terrible.
It’s not a healthy way to live one’s life. It got to the point where I was so paranoid that whenever I went to a restaurant I’d sit facing the entrance so I’d know who was coming in. I saw potential threats everywhere, and I carried symptoms of PTSD for a long time afterwards.
It took me a very long time to put my past behind and to learn to live again without fear like a normal human being. I had cut off all ties with everyone I knew, and have difficulty trusting people. Till today I know many, but am close with very few.
If there’s any teenager reading this who is in a similar situation as I was, know that the world is vast and there are opportunities everywhere. The cool kids you see in school are anything but.
Don’t make the same mistakes I did
– Anonymous
![]()
What’s It Like To Enter The Japanese Workforce
There used to be a legal concept and now there is a de facto concept known as “lifetime employment.” Basically, when you begin a career with a company, you would have to egregiously fuckup/commit malicious deeds to lose your job. However, businessmen who fail publicly on a major project that they took leadership of, or businessmen who piss off the wrong people in the firm, are often shipped off to undesirable locations (remote countryside, foreign branches, less-than-desirable departments, etc.) or just have their careers turn into a living hell.
As such, if you are a Japanese businessman and you want a relatively cushy path towards middle/upper management, you are dissuaded from taking risks. This leads to situations where people ignore potentially lucrative opportunities in favor of the less risky status quo. This leads to stagnation.
One way Japanese businesspeople bypass this problem is by doing “nemawashi” before business deals. This means taking 6 months or so meeting with all potential stakeholders in small meetings, winning them over one by one, before you ever pitch your main idea to the main committee/bosses (who has also been briefed ahead of time). This way all parties agree with the idea and the risk is mitigated.
Likewise, committees are often formed, sometimes even between multiple business units or even companies entirely, to make sure everyone agrees on everything. This helps everyone save face (as they all agree on the same thing) in the event of failure. Unfortunately this also leads to stagnation on an epic scale as typically it’s impossible to get a bunch of risk-adverse executives to all agree to the same thing.
The Japanese education system does a great job of teaching conformity. This helps squash a lot of the entrepreneurial spirit that you would naturally see out of graduates in other countries. No one wants to be the “nail that sticks out.”
It also teaches Japanese students how to prepare for standardized tests, but not critical thinking skills. This tends to put them at a disadvantage in a global business community, when compared to graduates from other developed nations. Also their foreign language teaching is laughable – designed more for standardized tests than actual international business.
I like to use this story to explain this a bit… As a typical Japanese high school student, here is what you are expected to do:
-
Spend years of your life studying your ass off before school, during school, after school, 7 days a week so you can do well on the entry exams for the best colleges.
-
Spend your senior year of college wearing a suit and job hunting, attending dozens of monotonous seminars and taking more exams, in the hopes that you can get a low paying entry level job at a well known firm (like a Toyota).
-
Slave away for 3-5 years, making $20-40K and working 80 hours a week. Go on forced drinking excursions only to be physically, verbally, and often sexually harassed by your seniors who you actually hate but pretend to like in public.
-
Live at home until you’re 30 because you don’t make enough to move out.
-
Finally get promoted to sub-middle-manager as you approach 30. Go on a bunch of forced group dates so you can finally get laid and settle for the plain jane over in accounting.
-
Get married to plain jane (who secretly resents that you don’t make enough money for her to buy Coach bags) and move into a shithole apartment in the suburbs of Tokyo.
-
Spend the next ten years working 80 hours a week, going bald, and sleeping with hookers on business trips. You’ll develop a pretty serious drinking problem while your wife sleeps with her high school sweetheart when you’re out of town.
-
Finally get promoted to middle-manager and make decent money. Now you can afford to buy a shithole apartment in the suburbs. Enjoy your two hour commute on a packed train every day while you contemplate suicide.
-
Pop out one kid (because that’s all you can afford) now that you’re in your early 40s. Look forward to raising them to be just as miserable as you because “that’s just the way things are.”
-
Finally retire when you’re in your upper 60s and enjoy life for a bit before you die of cancer.
That is the reality of life for a LOT of Japanese youths. And they know it.
– TofuTofu
![]()
What It’s Like When An NFL Linebacker Nearly Knocks Your Head Off
Here’s how I would describe it: Before I hit the ground, something large hit me in the head. I know now that it was Willie, flying in at a death angle, dropping his shoulder and running it through my temple into my tonsils. The blow dislodged the ball and knocked me out. It was the kind of borderline hit that today might get him fined. Being knocked out in a game is not a painful event at impact. It is a dimensional vacuum through an extremely narrow wormhole. It is a piano falling on your head in the middle of your recital. It’s a system reboot. My adrenaline was always too high to feel the pain of a hit, anyway. When I came to, I didn’t know where I was. You’re lying on the grass, Nate. The crowd is roaring. But what are they roaring about? Oh, yes, it’s for you. You got knocked out. Yay! His brain is bleeding!
– Nate Jackson
![]()
What does it feel like to murder someone?
Without a doubt this is probably the most personal question I think I could ever answer. This is a question I have been asking myself for a very long time now, and just coming to grips with the answers I have found. To say my answer is complex, and that I am going to have difficulties expressing exactly how I have felt, and still feel about murdering someone, is an understatement.
I guess the beginning would be the best place to start. When I took another man’s life I was just nineteen years old. Looking back now, I can honestly say I felt immense peer pressure to go through with the murder. I felt like I would be seen as a weak punk if I let another man get over on me. I was a drug dealer, and I felt I had a reputation to uphold. I can see all this now, but at the time I could see none of this. I realize now I was in a very bad place in life. I was in the midst of a serious drug addiction. I felt worthless and unworthy of love, so in return I placed little value on my life or on the life of anyone else. All of these feelings made me feel so powerless in life, I lashed out.
My lashing out cost another human his life. I am ashamed to admit it, but at the time I felt a great weight was lifted off my shoulders when I pulled the trigger. I felt like I had finally stood up for myself. I was completely irrational. I realize now it is like my friend David Monroe always says, “hurt people, hurt people.” I was really hurting and I didn’t know how to ask for help.
I continued to justify my actions for a long time, but somewhere deep inside I have always known that there was never any justice in taking someone’s life. Admitting to myself I was feeling scared, lonely, unworthy of love and respect was just too hard. Also, by admitting these feelings, I would also have to come to grips with what I really did, and how I affected the world. This was a hard prospect for me, but I am finally there over fifteen years later.
Now I feel sadness over murdering someone. I feel I have robbed my victim’s family of the most precious thing in life. I feel immense sorrow for this. I feel I have robbed my family out of truly ever knowing me. I feel like I have created fear in my community. I feel that I have done the world a great disservice, and that I owe a debt that I can never fully repay. I am full of guilt and shame over my actions. I never want anyone else to feel the way I do.
– Tommy Winfrey, inmate San Quentin State Prison
The post 4 First Hand Accounts Of Different Life Experiences appeared first on Caveman Circus.
