The Shanghai Union of Industrial Mystics Read online

  ‘I don’t believe one word of this,’ said the foreman in a nervous voice that revealed that he did in fact believe some of it. He stared at the oriental compass and the card Wong was displaying and the cockiness in his face started to evaporate.

  ‘I call him now,’ said the feng shui master, putting down the lo pan, picking up a phone handset and starting to press the buttons.

  There was a tense moment of frozen inactivity—one second that was somehow ten seconds long. ‘Stop,’ the foreman said, apparently speaking to both Wong and his colleague in the crane. ‘You got one hour to clear out. Then we pulverise this building to dust, and anyone inside with it. This project is for the Central Military Affairs Commission. You can’t stop it. You got one hour.’ The emphasis he gave to the title of the organisation he was name-dropping was clear evidence of the power he believed it carried.

  The feng shui master quickly jerked his upper body back through the window like a turtle whose head had been struck. ‘Victory, but very minor,’ he said to his assistant. ‘Just got time to grab our stuff and go. One hour.’

  Joyce was already dialling a number on the phone. ‘If we gotta go, we gotta et cetera. I’ll call Marker PDQ.’

  ‘Peedy-queue?’

  ‘Colloquial English term. Means pretty damn quick. He can help us move our stuff again.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Wong, sitting down and lowering his chin into his hands. ‘Call Marker, peedy-queue.’

  It was a shame to have to leave. This office was quite good. His life was an endless search for spots where energy flowed in precisely the right ways that would make his life work. People these days often designed their offices with large windows and open-plan layouts which made ch’i energy move quickly in straight, fast streams: and then they were surprised when they felt tired and burnt out all the time. In contrast, older offices were often maze-like rabbit warrens of filing cabinets and old papers, where ch’i stagnated—and people were surprised that their businesses failed to thrive. What he looked for were environments which allowed the ch’i to flow and pool and meander, like a stream dipping in and out of small lagoons. And of course cheap rent. This office had both. But evidently luck was not with him this time. He must check his pillars of destiny to find out what had gone wrong.

  Today had been a time of great yin—calm, cool, smooth, watery energy flowing around him, enabling him to do some useful work on his literary masterpiece: a book of educational, inspirational, ancient Chinese anecdotes called ‘Some Gleanings of Oriental Wisdom’. Yin was intellectual, yin was creative, yin focused the brain marvellously. And yet the yin day had been interrupted by a demolition ball—probably the single most yang object imaginable, other than a ballistic missile. Yang energy was forceful, hot, unyielding, heavy, and had hit his yin space with the force of a meteorite. How could such extreme contrasts exist? Then he recalled the ancient text which said that extreme yin was but one step from being yang, and extreme yang was but one degree from being yin. He quickly flicked through his book of notes and found the passage he wanted. It came from the writings of Chou Tun-yi in the eleventh century: ‘The Ultimate Power generates yang energy through movement. But what happens when movement reaches its extreme limit? It becomes tranquillity. Tranquillity increases. But what happens when tranquillity reaches its extreme limit? It becomes activity. Thus yang becomes yin and yin becomes yang. Each is the root of the other.’

  But dreadful though it might be to say it, this was no time for mulling over classic Chinese philosophy. They had to move. Their brief time in this office was over. He saw that he may have won a small skirmish, but there was no way he would win the whole battle—not against the Central Military Affairs Commission. What a start to the week. There are few things more depressing for a feng shui master than to painstakingly arrange a set of premises to maximise good fortune only to find, on the day of completion, that it is about to be demolished—unless, of course, the client has paid for the examination in advance and will have to pay again, which didn’t apply in this case as he was his own client. His only hope would be to pass the additional costs upwards to the company paying his retainer.

  Something else occurred to him: there had been a strange omen that morning that he had been struggling to understand. The local newspaper had carried a picture of a white elephant on the front page—no doubt imported into the city for some circus or other. The image had stuck in his mind: when one made a big change in one’s life, such as setting up a new business in a new country, one naturally took care to see what sort of omens presented themselves. And white elephants carried a host of different but important implications in various branches of Asian esoteric thought: Chinese, Thai, Indian, Vietnamese. They were connected to royalty, to longevity, to magic, to heaven, to all manner of things. But what did this mean to him, at this time, in this place?

  He had even asked Joyce what a white elephant signified to a European (to Wong, like to most Chinese, all Westerners, whether from Australia or Canada or Argentina, were ‘Europeans’). ‘In Western culture a white elephant is a thing which is totally useless,’ she had replied. ‘It means, like, a silly mistake.’ So much for Western culture.

  Setting the omen to one side, he had decided to write an ancient Chinese anecdote for his book, which would be his first work published in English. And it had been that classic tale which had been so rudely interrupted by a thunderous metal ball of yang.

  Fifty minutes later, a removal team led by Marker Cai, a small but stocky young man who had moved them into that very office eight days earlier, was moving the same boxes out again, to put into storage until they could find another office. It was an easy job. Neither of Wong’s two staff members were efficient or fast workers: many of the boxes had not even been opened, let alone unpacked.

  The young man’s real name in Chinese was Cai Ma Ke, but he’d changed the word order for Westerners to Marker Cai. He was attractive: Joyce thought of him as Mister Sigh. She fantasised about one day getting to know him so well that she could persuade him to change his name from the absurd Marker to the more acceptable Mark or even the sexy Marc or Marco. And there was a chance they would stay in touch. For Mr Cai was not just a removal man. He was a weigher of bones: a practitioner of one of the most ancient Chinese arts of divination, and thus a professional contact of CF Wong’s. But an ambitious young man cannot make enough money as a bone-weigher in modern Shanghai, so he shifted crates during the day.

  Joyce McQuinnie was packing the few things on her desk into a cardboard box. It was the last one. She had more or less finished and was working as slowly as she could, given the urgency of the situation. Marker Cai was moving each box downstairs as they finished packing it. He was twenty-five years old. She was five and a half years younger. They were both taking surreptitious glances at each other. At that moment, they were both supremely beautiful in each other’s eyes, which would mean nothing at all to anyone else. Each was hoping that the other would not notice his/her furtive but powerful interest in her/him, while at the same time half praying for the opposite. It didn’t make sense, but what was there in the business of love that did?

  Marker was also in a thoughtful mood, and he too knew the removal operation had nearly finished. His darting eyes revealed that he wanted an excuse to interact further with the young lao wai, but he couldn’t think of what to say. He knew that she spoke little Chinese, so realised that their conversation would have to be in English, which was not his best language. His upper arms were clamped to his sides when he was in the room with her. He was hot and sweaty and was worried that he would smell odd to her, in the same way that Western people often smell unattractive to Chinese. He took the second-last box downstairs.

  Joyce had a feminist ideological aversion to wearing much make-up but was wishing she had worn a bit more of it today. There was a physical pain in her chest but she wasn’t sure why. It was something to do with Marker’s beauty, and the fact that it/he made her heart beat so fast it felt like it would burst, and i
t/he would shortly vanish again. She wanted to make sure that she had another reason to meet him as soon as possible. This was the second time they had met, and the second time his presence had triggered an attack of breathlessness. But it was not like they could move office every week. Or perhaps they could? They’d have to move the stuff out of storage and into a new office again eventually. But that might take a week or two. Or three. Too long.

  It appeared possible that Wong would invite Marker to join his union of mystics, but that wasn’t due to meet until Thursday—two days’ time. The way Joyce felt now, even waiting one day would be too long. She felt she should say something, take the initiative, ask him out even. Chinese guys were supposed to be too shy to start anything. But what should she say? She couldn’t think of a thing. She picked up a gold-leaf longevity vase, wrapped it in newspaper, and placed it in the box. How long did they have now? Only another minute or two. She looked for something else to pack, but the desks were all clear. She slowly taped up the final box.

  The young man re-entered the room. ‘Nearly finish,’ said Marker, picking up the box. Joyce looked up. For seven-tenths of a second they held each other’s eyes.

  At that moment, there was intense activity in Joyce’s head and heart (which in her case was only a single location, two sides joined with an always-on organic broadband cable). She felt the weight of her youth upon her, and the real heaviness was, perhaps surprisingly, the weight of mathematics, or more particularly, of statistics. For Joyce had five different choices she could make at that moment (it would have been seven had she not had three glasses of Tsing Tao at O’Malley’s the previous night). She could hold the young man’s gaze and touch his soul with enlarged, puppy-dog eyes, sending him an unmistakable message that something important relationship-wise was happening between them; she could continue the movement of her hand towards the tape that she no longer needed; she could cough (there was a tickle in her throat which had sent a memo to her brain: please cough immediately); she could let her eyes go out of focus as she continued a thought running through the back of her mind which contained, among other things, a memory of a forgotten song she’d heard on the radio; or she could do none of these things: she could do nothing at all, emptying herself, not even thinking.

  Or could she? A couple of years ago she would have said no. Since all moments contain a portion of time, it should not be possible to do nothing—a portion of conscious time, however small, can’t be empty, and the brain never really shuts down. But time spent in Asia with Buddhists and other meditators would these days inspire her to say yes: we can empty ourselves completely of thought and movement, and can actually stop time working for that particular moment. But it wasn’t easy. Once a moment has come into existence, it is already fading to make space for its offspring—another moment, similar to the first, but not the same. Each newborn moment offers us yet another raft of possibilities to study, choices to make.

  But youth: now that’s when this whole issue of time becomes a serious challenge. You see, Joyce was nineteen years, four months, thirteen days, eleven hours, nine minutes, two seconds and one and a half moments old. She had (demographic experts tell us) another sixty-one years, two days, six hours and two minutes of life ahead of her. With an open-ended number of possibilities in each moment, and sixty-one years of moments ahead of her, her spread of choices was almost incalculable—certainly, it ran into googles. Compare CF Wong, who (the same demographic experts tell us) had only fifteen years, seventy-five days, four hours and nine minutes of life left. For him, the number of permutations was far less, and was falling fast. This basic mathematical principle has a powerful effect on the lives of people who are close to the beginning or end of their lives. Yes, it’s true that most individuals are incapable of adding up a $2.90 coffee and a $3.00 sandwich without computers. But the answer is that we can calculate it and we do it all the time.

  All human brains constantly do advanced maths, whether they know it or not. On a subconscious level, we know exactly how fast time passes, and how quickly our choices are disappearing. It is the subconscious realisation of this which brings about the pressure that makes a teenager’s life such agony. Those are the years when we become dimly aware of the fact that every choice made every moment has consequences that could, nay, will crucially shape the rest of our lives.

  Joyce subconsciously knew that if she caught Marker Cai’s eye and held it for another seven-tenths of a second, she would be sending him a clear message that there could be a potential overlap between several trillion (at least) of the possible permutations of his life and a similar number of hers. This overlap could last a minute, an hour, a day, a month, a year, or, should they get married, the rest of their lives. So it was no wonder that Joyce was having a hard time deciding what to do.

  Across the other side of the room, Joyce’s boss was sitting, smiling to himself. CF Wong was fifty-seven. The main part of his life was over. The number of permutations possible for him had fallen, from googles to quintillions and then to mere trillions, billions and millions. The pressure of having to pick from an almost infinite number of choices had faded. It had been replaced by something equally affecting: a growing subconscious desperation born of the knowledge that since there were relatively few choices left, all of them deserved extra care and attention. But by then, one was so tired. And the kettle’s on the boil. And what’s for dinner, anyway? By the age of fifty-seven, we are tempted to choose the safest option for each moment, the do-nothing option, the perfectly blank do-not-move, do-not-think action, the choice that empties the time from each moment. (That’s one of the reasons why television is such a helpful device: it blanks out thought and action, quietly eating our lives while we pretend nothing is happening.)

  Wong was rescued from the worst of the pressure of the passage of time by being unusually focused: he had a fervent desperation to accumulate money, despite the fact that much of his writing dealt with the superiority of spiritual and natural wealth over material riches. This need in him was so deep that there was no room in his life for unnecessary trivia (like hobbies, television, relationships and so on). He hadn’t the patience to do anything that didn’t earn him countable, collectible, strokeable, fondleable cash. He had been poor most of his life, and the thing that drove him was a determination to earn enough not to be poor, for a little while, before he died.

  Poverty grants many benefits which the wealthy miss. For a start, it toughens the soul marvellously against adversity, and sharpens the part of the spirit that bounces back in a crisis. He may be being knocked out of his office by a wrecker’s ball, but Wong had already fully recovered. He was focusing on the positive: it had occurred to him that it might not be a bad thing to move office again. In truth, he was rather embarrassed about having accepted an office on the fourth floor of a building, so perhaps he should not be too upset about having a chance to change that. In low-brow Chinese superstition, four is a negative number, but in classical feng shui it is positive. Yet he has more simple, superstitious customers than intelligent, well-read ones, so he might be wise to cater for their ignorance.

  And, inconvenient as it may be, another move could turn out to be good news—the property company who was sponsoring his stay would be forced to finance replacement accommodation for them. He knew the accounts department would be irritated at having to go through the operation again, so he would once more offer to take the money and arrange it himself, and they’d probably agree this time. Lack of change was eventual stagnation, whereas change always brought with it the opportunity for personal enrichment. He would argue for a large premium over the standard accommodation budget, explaining that he urgently needed somewhere nice to recover from the inconvenience of having to move in and out so quickly, and he’d say that places with good feng shui always cost more. Then he’d find a cheap hovel with a reasonable flow of ch’i and pocket the difference.

  He was a natural salesman, and squeezing money out of people was something Wong was good at. His consul
tancy was small, but survived. Whenever he met someone who needed a feng shui reading, he rapidly tried to read them before feeding them the most suitable line. He had learned that a come-on phrase which was perfect for one customer instantly turned off his neighbour. Fortunately, feng shui was an amorphous, shape-shifting concept that lent itself to multiple interpretations. There were basically four types of customer.

  1 The Superstitious. Their basic driving force is fear of the future, and their weapons against it are magic totems. They are mildly agoraphobic, a term which to him was interchangeable with the word ‘American’. These people are worried about ‘Bad Guys’ and like being told that they need statues of the Four Kings of Mount Sumeru by their doors to guard against poor luck entering. They want a Curved Knife in their office desks to fight the invisible demons of the world (which these days include the taxation department and computer viruses). For them, life is a battle against a massive horde of invisible evil forces, and they need spiritual weapons of mass destruction for self defence. Fundamentalists of all religions can generally be included in this category.

  2 Then you have your Futuristic Primitives. (For some reason, there are many IT and computer people in this category, plus many Europeans, plus young Indian people who were educated in California.) They are deeply religious but do not realise it. They passionately express their contempt for organised religion while devoting considerable amounts of time and money to filling their homes with items which are ostensibly non-religious. They like to have transcendental experiences. They need to feel correctly allied with the forces of Destiny. They enjoy having a place in their home which is shrine-like without being a shrine. They need regular rituals which are not recognisable as religious rituals. They scoff at people who carry rosary beads, but are happy to be sold Mystic Chinese Knots to rub before going out to greet the world.