The Shanghai Union of Industrial Mystics Read online

  PRAISE FOR NURY VITTACHI

  AND THE FENG SHUI DETECTIVE BOOKS

  ‘Unsurpassable mixture of humor, wisdom and whodunnit.’

  The Crime Forum, Germany

  ‘Should bear a large red label warning against its being read while

  consuming beverages, lest unwary readers wind up spitting tea

  through their nose as I did.’

  That’s Beijing

  ‘Wacky and hilarious whodunit—you just have to dig in

  and hold on for the wild ride.’

  Asian Review of Books

  ‘An international bestseller whose unlikely sleuths

  appear to be heading for cult status.’

  Herald Sun, Melbourne

  ‘Totally engrossing and very, very funny.’

  Radio 3AK, Melbourne

  ‘If Hollywood wakes up...’

  The Australian

  ‘One of the most droll, attractive and

  unusual of modern amateur detectives.’

  The Bulletin

  ‘A very funny book. Dangerously so at times.’

  That’s Beijing

  ‘The story is populated by a stream of eccentric characters and

  amusing examples of Singapore’s polyglot, multiethnic culture...

  a tasty smorgasbord of modern Asian life.’

  Japan Times

  ‘Does for the flow of ch’i what Sherlock Holmes

  did for cocaine.’

  South China Morning Post

  ‘The man who made Lee Kuan Yew laugh.’

  The New Paper, Singapore

  First published in 2006

  Copyright © Nury Vittachi 2006

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10% of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

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  Web: www.allenandunwin.com

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

  Vittachi, Nury, 1958- .

  The Shanghai Union of Industrial Mystics.

  ISBN 1 74114 779 4.

  1. Feng shui - Fiction. 2. Shanghai (China) - Fiction. I. Title.

  A823.4

  Edited by Jo Jarrah

  Cover and text designed by Design by Committee

  Typeset by Michael Kuszla, J&M Typesetting

  Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  I am indebted to many people who helped in a number of ways while I wrote this book. Enormous gratitude goes to publisher Patrick Gallagher, for inviting me into the esteemed circle of Allen & Unwin authors, and to my gimlet-eyed editors, Clare Emery and Jo Jarrah. Thank you to my fantastic family for letting me go AWOL in Shanghai. This book is about how people of different cultures in the Asia-Pacific can achieve wonderful things when they work together. For this reason, I dedicate this volume to Todd and Allison Wong, and to Scott and Marybeth Lawson, two couples who are dear friends and masters of cross-cultural bridge building.

  Contents

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  18

  1

  In ancient China in the first century, a criminal was caught robbing the emperor’s palace. He was sentenced to twenty days in jail. But the jail turned out to be no jail. There were only white squares painted on the bare ground.

  The robber was put into the centre of a painted square. The only other person there was an old man with a long beard in the next square.

  The robber said: ‘What sort of jail is this?’

  The old man said: ‘The worst in the world. If any convict steps outside his lines, all the demons of hell come and eat him up.’

  The robber was terrified. He stayed inside the painted lines for the full twenty days. At the end of that time, the bearded man stepped out of his square.

  The robber said: ‘Why are you not being eaten by all the demons in hell?’

  The old man said: ‘I am not a convict. I am the jailer.’

  Blade of Grass, people think they react to what is around them. But the truth is that they react to how other people react to what is around them. The worst demons live inside a ma—

  Crash! There was an ear-splitting roar of destruction and the world ended. Well, that’s what it sounded like. What actually happened was that the building shook so hard that CF Wong’s pen jumped in his hand, prematurely closing his elegant final line with an out-of-place dash. He jerked upright, suddenly alert. Mut yeh si? What’s happening? End of the world? Office falling down? Someone drop an anvil upstairs? He noticed that the tremor had pushed his cup of gok fa right to the edge of the table and he reached out to pull it back.

  ‘Cheese,’ said his assistant Joyce McQuinnie as her headphones rolled off the desk and bounced on the floor. ‘What was that? Like, an earthquake?’ She started chewing a fingernail.

  ‘Aiyeeaa!’ screamed his secretary Winnie Lim, emerging from a deep vegetative state and jumping out of her seat. ‘Each person save herself first.’ She scrambled around her desk and tottered out of the office. ‘If I killed I sue you,’ she warned her employer from the corridor. She click-clacked down the stairs in her high heels. Then the sound of her footsteps stopped: she was evidently having second thoughts. The brittle noise restarted as she clattered back up again. Bursting back through the office door like a small aftershock, she started rooting around in her drawer for something important she wanted to save: a frosted silver-pink lipstick that was not available in this country.

  At that moment, a second huge thump sent even greater shock waves into the building, running through everything sentient and non-sentient in the room. It tipped Wong’s teacup right off the desk, and he watched it smash with a musical tinkle on the floor. The clear tea produced a stain on the threadbare carpet which was blackish, like blood. Why do liquids which are not black so often produce black stains? Wong stored the question away for a later session of pondering. Joyce’s iPod joined her headphones on the floor. She now had four fingers in her mouth.

  Winnie squealed and click-clacked out again without her cosmetic treasure. ‘You owe me one lipstick compensation,’ she screeched.

  ‘I die first before I pay you,’ Wong shouted back.

  ‘Yes, I hope,’ Winnie said, cantering unsteadily down the stairs. ‘Today.’

  Joyce, frozen in a state of indecision, stopped biting her fingers, took them out of her mouth and started nibbling her lower lip instead. Following Winnie’s lead, she began looking for prized possessions. She groped under the magazines on her desk to find her most treasured item: her mobile phone, or, more accurately, the digital address book inside it. Joyce was a slow-motion panicker. The more urgent things became, the more slowly she rea
cted. This did not seem to be a wise habit, nor was it a good argument for the survivalist theory of evolution, but that was just how she was made. She had no idea how to react in this situation. ‘We better, like, split the scene?’

  Joyce was scared, but she was also just plain annoyed. She didn’t know whether to scream in fear or out of frustration. An earthquake! Could you credit it? It didn’t say anything about earthquakes in Lonely Planet. She had been feeling unnerved all week, finding Shanghai hard to adjust to after slick, English-speaking Singapore. Here, few people spoke English, most of the signage, shop names, menus and everything else was in Chinese only, and so much of life in the city seemed unreal. The buildings were straight out of The Jetsons—or perhaps Dune: ancient and futuristic squeezed together side by side. One iconic Shanghai skyscraper looked like a giant pair of steel tweezers holding a ball. Several were globe shaped, and one was a globe halfway up a stick: a weird, giant Cantonese skewered fishball, with people scurrying around inside. The Park Hotel looked as if someone had built a replica Empire State Building and then stamped on it, collapsing all the floors together. Almost next to it was the Radisson, a tall white tower on which a huge UFO from a 1950s sci-fi flick had apparently landed. A pair of thin ropes hung from rods on the roof, as if the aliens were fishing.

  And the culture seemed as weird as the architecture. Every day she encountered something new and strange and totally unbelievable. Was the world ready for the Hezhenin Heilongjiang salmon fish-skin suit? Or for taxis which had little English signs in them saying ‘No drunkards or psychos without guardians’? Should shops really be allowed to display dried pig faces—surely no one wanted to see those, let alone eat them? When she told her Shanghainese associates that she’d stopped eating meat, they replied suspiciously that vegetarianism was a cult traditionally associated with violence, gangsterism and the underworld. China was such a totally different planet to, well, Earth, that she felt dangerously adrift. The more she failed to make sense of her new home, the more she felt that fissures were spreading under her feet. And now Shanghai was becoming literally unstable. The bowels of the city were rocking and the same thing was happening to hers: she discovered she desperately wanted to go to the toilet.

  Across the room, Wong did not reply, as he didn’t know what Joyce meant when she said they should ‘split the scene’. If this was an earthquake, the scene appeared to be splitting by itself.

  He was shaken, but only physically. He was not panicking: he was pondering. He had lived through earthquakes before. The sensation was not easily forgotten. It is impossible to convey the horror of an earthquake to someone who has never experienced one. It’s beyond frightening. The one thing you have always always always trusted turns into a lethal enemy. The ground, the firmament, the rocks and trees and mountains, the world, the steady foundation of everything you have ever known starts playing the fool, shimmying and tangoing around for minutes on end. It’s the physical equivalent of your mother telling you that she is not your real mother because you are actually the offspring of the Kanasi Lake Monster in Xinjiang province. Earthquakes touched the deepest, darkest part of one’s soul. And this was not doing that.

  ‘I think not an earthquake,’ Wong commented, mostly to himself, tugging at the straggly hairs on his chin. ‘I think demolition ball.’

  He moved to the old sash window and pulled it open, not without a struggle. The chill air of a Shanghai April rushed into the room, as did the signature tune of the city: whining soprano drill-pieces harmonising atonally over the staccato rhythm of massed baritone jackhammers. And, oddly, a New York-style police siren was wailing a fugal tenor countermelody in the distance.

  In the muddy wasteland in front of their small block, just off Henan Zhong Lu in an unfashionable bit of Huangpu district, stood several unfamiliar pieces of heavy machinery. He immediately spotted the culprit: a rusty green crane was idly swinging a wreckers’ ball into the rooms next to them on the fourth floor. It was instantly familiar yet unfamiliar. On any given day there are twenty-one thousand construction sites in Shanghai, and their office block had just become the twenty-one thousand and first. To be demolished by heavy equipment along with one’s premises was definitely not good feng shui—especially not today, the official opening day of CF Wong and Associates (Shanghai), a feng shui consultancy retained by a major international property development company, East Trade Industries Company Limited.

  ‘Wei,’ Wong called out to a pot-bellied man with a dirty yellow hardhat and a clipboard who appeared to be directing the operation from ground level. ‘You cannot demolish this building now. People are inside. People are here.’ He spoke in southern-accented Mandarin.

  The foreman languidly lifted his megaphone and directed it at their window. ‘Get the people out quick-quick,’ he replied in the same language, pointing to his mud-spattered watch. ‘Have deadline.’

  Joyce, joining her boss at the window, shook her head in disbelief, pleased to have finally summoned up enough courage to move a few metres. ‘This is so, like, totally not done,’ she said.

  ‘You have to tell us in advance,’ the feng shui master shouted down in Chinese to the uncaring men 12 metres below. ‘You must give us warning. You can’t just knock down the building.’

  To their left, the man operating the crane swung the iron ball away from the building but remained waiting at the controls, while his senior colleague gave the condemned building’s occupants the full extent of the bad news: ‘Building is coming down. Today. Better you go.’

  Seeing the two shocked faces remaining defiantly at the window, he continued: ‘We sent you a letter telling you that we would knock the building down on this date. But it got lost in the post.’ A nasty half-smile appeared on his face.

  ‘Oh.’ Wong thought about this for a moment. He translated for Joyce: ‘He says they sent us a letter. But it got lost in the post.’

  The feng shui master’s eyes crinkled as he weighed his options. Hmm. So. Now he knew what was happening. This was a round of one of the most popular games in mainland China. It was called Bureaucracy, and you could find yourself in the middle of a life-and-death round at any time of the day or night, without warning: this was what made life in China so, well, interesting. Performing well in the game required great skill which could only be acquired through active play, as there were no books or teachers who could give you lessons. Fortunately, Wong had played it before, although not for a long time.

  Joyce blinked. ‘Hang on a tick. He may have sent us a letter, but how does he know it got lost in the post?’

  It was a logical point, but probably too predictable to be of any help. Wong decided to pursue it anyway, in the absence of other inspiration. ‘How do you know it got lost in the post?’ he shouted out of the window.

  ‘That sort of letter usually gets lost in the post,’ the demolition man replied, his unpleasant smile becoming a notch more evil as he delivered what he thought was a knockout punch.

  Wong nodded. It was an excellent answer, and one that was hard to gainsay. But he had to try. If the man below could use fine points of uniquely mainland logic against them, he needed to follow suit. ‘Actually, it didn’t get lost in the post. We received it,’ he said, raising his chin and lowering his brow to show that he was not going to be a soft target.

  It was the turn of the foreman’s brow to crinkle. This was not an answer he expected. It was not a move which had been attempted before by victims of Bureaucracy. He was not prepared for it. He lowered his megaphone to consult with the man next to him, a thin individual holding sheaves of paper plans. How should we reply?

  Wong, seeing the growing discomfort on the men’s faces, realised he had snatched the initiative and had to hold on to it with all his knobbly fingers. ‘Yes, we did receive it. Also we replied to it, asking for extension of time. Also we received a reply granting us extension of time.’

  The foreman lost it. He snarled in fury: ‘Ach! No, no, no. It did get lost in the post.’ ‘It did not.’


  ‘It did. It must have done. Because we never—’ He stopped dead. He knew that he had nearly given the game away, and he knew that his opponent knew it, and knew that he knew he knew. The man’s expression altered as he changed tack, becoming calmly belligerent. ‘Letter doesn’t matter,’ he shouted. ‘Whether lost or not. You get out. We have permit to do this.’

  Permit. A trump card in China. But Wong had lived in Singapore. He knew all about permits. ‘You must show me three signed permits from the three relevant ministries,’ he replied calmly.

  ‘Ah. We have exemptions,’ the foreman said. Now it was clear that both sides were achieving a sort of equilibrium in the game. Thrust. Parry. Thrust.

  ‘Then you must show me the permit that exempts you from having the three signed permits.’

  ‘We are exempted from that one, too.’

  Wong gritted his teeth. His enemy was highly skilled in the fighting techniques used in Advanced Hand-to-Hand Bureaucracy, Black Belt, fourth dan. What line to take now? Of course: chops, seals, stamps: nothing happened in China without pieces of paper bearing official splodges of pressed red ink. ‘But you can only be exempted from that with chopped paper. Show me your chops.’

  The foreman lowered his megaphone to think. After a few seconds, he raised it and declared, less confidently: ‘I have chopped papers. They are back in the office.’

  ‘You go get them.’

  ‘Cannot. Too busy. No time.’

  ‘Then I will call my friend Mr Zhong who is head of security for the Secretary-General of the Communist Party of China and his men will come and explain to you why you need the right chops. I call him right now, okay?’

  A sneer in reply: ‘If you are best friends with the immortals in the Politburo, why are you in this poky office in the cheapest street in town?’

  ‘I am humble feng shui master,’ said Wong, displaying his lo pan in the window. ‘But these days everyone needs feng shui—even the President.’ With his other hand he reached into his pocket and pulled out what looked like a business card, which he also held to the glass, although he knew it would be impossible to read at that distance. ‘One month ago I had a meeting with the most powerful people in this country.’ The card was actually a piece of junk mail urging him to get his plumbing from Wu The Number One Wonder Water Worker, but Wong spoke with conviction—because he had indeed advised the premier’s head of security on feng shui matters on a preparatory visit the previous month.