The Shanghai Union of Industrial Mystics Read online

  3 Then we have the Shoppers, one of Wong’s favourite categories. Twelve or fifteen years ago, this category was filled with the idle rich. But these days, many of the middle class have picked up the Shopper mentality, particularly in Australia, Hong Kong and Singapore. These people are only averagely superstitious and have little interest in hanging plastic tokens around their homes. But they already own all the basic necessities of life (an apartment, nice furniture, a car, a gym membership) and yet are so addicted to shopping that they desperately hunt for more things to buy. They are particularly partial to spending money on items which have no practical use. They are driven by the thought ‘Some people are buying this, therefore I could, too.’ On these people, Wong would unload large amounts of the high-end stuff: elegant, overpriced statuettes made of white jade, objets d’art in hammered metals, figurines in silver, gold, copper or bronze, symbolic items inlaid with ‘good luck’ gemstones. He had learned, over the years, not to sell too many items to Shoppers at once, tempting though it may be, for they have no interest in what they purchase, but enjoy shopping for its own sake; so the right thing to do is to sell them stuff at regular intervals, enabling them to maintain a steady flow of hits for their spending habit. A periodic phone call is all that is needed to bring the money in: ‘Era Eight has started. People are buying gold-leafed wealth vases and booking cleansings to welcome in the energy from the southwest. When can I arrange yours?’ No Shopper can resist such a line.

  4 The next group is what Wong called the Scientific Eclectics. These he found frustrating at first, but they had become good contributors to recurrent income once he had learned how to deal with them. They are highly intelligent and analytical and are violently opposed to superstition of any kind. They find it hard to suppress a giggle if you suggest hiding eight gold coins under their beds. But if you tell them that a ‘ley line’ of energy runs through their study, they are fascinated and want to hear more. They feel they know most things about modern physics, and have moved on from the study of the material world to the study of non-material things. They put feng shui in the same category as quantum physics, dark matter, reiki, extra sensory perception, chaos theory and so on: these are all things that you can’t actually see, but there is enough evidence to suggest that it makes sense to be aware of them, and to pay them some credence. Scientific Eclectics cannot be sold solid items of any sort, but will pay large fees for services. They take a strictly psychological view of feng shui. If they can pay a fee for an expert to make their premises into happier, more creative places in which to live or work, then why not do it? They place feng shui masters on their service-providers list along with ergonomics experts, somewhere after architects and plumbing engineers, but before interior designers and art suppliers.

  Wong had also discovered that even people who were entirely skeptical about feng shui could also be a source of income, as they would pay for feng shui readings to satisfy their staff or spouses. This is Asia, so we suppose we have to shell out for this, even though it’s probably a load of mumbo-jumbo. We guess it’s a small enough price to keep her/him/ them happy. Geez, is that what it costs? Hell’s bells. Wong found non-believers a good category on which to exercise his negotiating skills. They usually have no idea how important or not feng shui is to their staff. Any situation in which the purchasing party has no idea of the value of what they are buying gives a huge advantage to the selling party; one which Wong would play to maximum benefit. ‘I think better you order gold plus package, sir. Or else staff will maybe definitely walk out, possibly, for sure, no doubt about it. All will walk out, probably definitely.’ They usually pay by gold or platinum corporate credit card.

  Wong felt that he and the fellow members of his union tended to fall into the Scientific Eclectics category: very discriminating about what they hung in their offices or homes, yet always studying the esoteric arts to discover what their different areas of expertise had in common. Actually, it was the thought of Wong’s professional association which was the biggest contributor to the smile on his face at that moment. The nearest thing he had to an actual gang of buddies was the small cluster of individuals who made up the Union of Industrial Mystics, an association which started in Singapore but which was spreading to other countries and city-states in Asia. Wong had moved to Shanghai a week earlier partly in order to set up a fully operational chapter of the union here— after his initial raft of high-paying assignments were complete, of course.

  Other than Wong himself, the most active members of the union were Dilip Kenneth Sinha, an Indian astrologer and vaastu expert who was due to arrive in Shanghai from Singapore that night or the following morning, and Madame Xu Chong-Li, a Singaporean-Chinese fortune teller who was also due to arrive some time in the next thirty-six hours. They were due to meet Shang Dan, a Shanghainese ming shu expert whom they hoped would become the main contact in this city in which a new branch would be formed. Then there was Marker Cai, bone-weigher and removal man. (Bone-weighing, despite its gruesome-sounding name, did not involve the handling of corpses, and was largely a numerology-based technique.)

  A group of the mystics planned to meet for dinner somewhere nice on Thursday—perhaps Emperor Xiangfeng’s Kitchen in Yunnan Lu. Wong wanted to introduce his Singaporean friends to the delights of xianji (cold salty chicken) and hupi jianjiao (tiger skin chillies). Then of course there was the squirrel fish—Sinha would enjoy that. Most of them were at the age when food was the main carnal interest they had. It would surely be a wonderful reunion and an excellent meal. For although he would hotly deny it, Wong was not an entirely one-dimensional character. On the rare occasions he was not obsessing about money, he was thinking about his stomach.

  Gastronomic interests were going very well for him at the moment. In addition to the dinner meeting of the union planned for later in the week, he also had an invitation for a meal that night at a new ultra-high-class dining club called This Is Living, based at a fancy new restaurant in a Shanghai skyscraper. He had done the feng shui for the new eatery over a series of flying visits, and was delighted when the manager invited him to be a guest at the founding meal of a club of gourmets which would ‘sample the most exciting menu in China’. Further, Wong had presented him with a truly outrageous bill and the manager had promised to pay him in cash at the meal that night.

  Life was good, and it was wonderful to be here in Shanghai at this time. Wong loved Shanghai architecture, which looked from a distance like a jumbled mess but was often built with well-hidden feng shui traits. The heart of town was an open area called the People’s Square and the People’s Park, but if you took a helicopter and rose above it, you would see that the road surrounding the square formed a neat half-circle. Neighbouring Zhejiang Lu and Nanjing Dong Lu formed the other half of the circle. And running from north to south exactly in between the two semi-circles was Xizang Lu. The whole construction thus formed a squareish circle with a line running through it: yes, the character zhong, meaning ‘centre’ or ‘heart’, and the first character in the word China: Zhong Guo. This was usually translated into English as Middle Kingdom, but that missed the point entirely. The true meaning of Zhong Guo was Land at the Centre of the World.

  The main buildings in the People’s Square were the Shanghai Grand Theatre, the Shanghai Museum and the Shanghai Government Building, and all three had south-facing doors, following the best feng shui tradition. The Grand Theatre looked like a bowl held up to heaven, and the Museum like a ding: a ceremonial bronze container with three legs. In a different part of town, the Shanghai Centre was clearly built in the shape of the character shan, meaning ‘mountain’.

  Yes, the feng shui master’s schedule was packed with good things at the moment: two good, long, stretched-out dinners in three nights. A reunion with his friends. And the official founding of the Shanghai Union of Industrial Mystics. So that was why Wong was sitting in his about-to-be-demolished office and smiling broadly.

  Another deafening crash reverberated through the building. T
he bare light bulb started to swing. The sound of shattering glass followed as window frames fell out of neighbouring walls. The demolition men were back at work. The Central Military Affairs Commission could not be kept waiting.

  Marker Cai picked up the last box and handed it to a colleague, a fat, sweaty youth, to take downstairs.

  ‘Finished,’ Cai said.

  ‘Ah—thanks, well done,’ Joyce stammered. ‘That’s great. Er.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Great. Thanks. You’ve done a great job. Can I ask. Er. D’you want to…’ ‘Yes?’

  ‘Um. I just thought. You know, maybe…’ ‘Ah.’

  ‘Wanna go for a coffee or something, sometime, or something?’

  ‘Okay. Go for a coffee or something sometime or something.’

  ‘Er. I’ll call you. Or you could call me.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Joyce started feeling around in her pockets for something to write with. ‘Er. Let me get a pen or something and I’ll give you my mobile.’

  But all the pens had been packed. ‘I don’t have a…do you have a…’ Marker tapped his pockets and found nothing. Then he discovered half a pencil behind his left ear. He gave a short embarrassed snort of laughter when they both notice that there was a ring of teeth marks around the top.

  Another crash shook the building, but the two young people didn’t notice. There were far larger explosions—we’re talking 100-megaton nukes—happening in their glands.

  ‘Now let me find a piece of paper,’ said Joyce. Problem: all the pieces of paper had been packed.

  Marker handed her a bent, slightly damp business card from his pocket. ‘You call me. I write my mobile phone number on the back of my card. We go for coffee. Or something. Sometime.’

  ‘Yeah. Great. Ha ha,’ she said. ‘Cool. Okay. Well, bye. See you on, on, er, sometime.’

  As he backed away, she held his gaze for one point nine seconds longer than was absolutely necessary and her heart did a set of triple backflips as a trillion new delightful possibilities added themselves to the google which were already there. Life was rich. Then he was gone.

  Seconds later, she and Wong were running down the stairs as the building crumbled around them.

  2

  Heading into work when everyone else is heading home should be depressing, but sometimes it isn’t. At certain times in our lives, we discover that there’s something oddly energising about swimming against the current.

  These days, Lu Linyao felt like that all the time, which was a bit worrying. She felt she was literally charging against the flow of a major river as a Yangtze of people poured out of an office block on the built-up side of Zhongshan Dong Yi Lu, the road that skirted The Bund, and she had to shoulder her way through the bodies like a 58-kilo salmon powering upstream. Being the sort of person she was, Linyao only half stepped out of the way, leaving the person coming towards her to contribute the other half of the manoeuvre.

  A number of men—through carelessness, sleep deprivation, world weariness or for other reasons—preferred to brush heavily against her instead. This was bad news for them, as she was deliberately carrying a hardcover book under her right arm, its sharpest pair of edges scratching painful tramlines on anyone who made the mistake of encountering her right breast. When she saw a trio or longer string of people heading directly for her, she lowered her head, bullet-like, and careered through them, forcing them to break formation and regather behind her, their heads turning. What’s the matter with her? As the pavement obstacle course grew more dense (for that’s how she saw most people: as obstacles), she did not slow down, but marched faster, punishing people for being in her path.

  Yet once she was through the crush of people on the main road and had turned into a quieter side street, she found her footsteps slowing down. Was she going the right way? Was she doing the right thing? Perhaps I should just leave it to the others. After all, they were young people with time on their hands; she was a 31-year-old woman with a professional job, a mortgage and a child. These were big responsibilities, adult ones that had to be taken seriously.

  Her steps slowed even more. Should she be doing this sort of thing at all? She never had enough time for herself and her offspring. Yet here she was, heading for her second job, the voluntary running of the Shanghai Vegetarian Café Society. The group she chaired ran a small canteen and catering operation on Hankou Lu, a road just off one of the main arteries that carries traffic towards The Bund.

  Lu Linyao was divorced and had an eight-year-old daughter whom she adored, and who hated her, or acted as if she did. This was no surprise to people who knew them. The girl had been excessively needy from birth (most of her friends, being childless, did not realise that all children were excessively needy from birth), and Linyao was not cut out to be a mother, as she and her friends knew long before she had a child of her own. She had never developed the ability to build a rapport with small children that other females seemed to acquire in their teens or twenties.

  As a result, Linyao’s daughter Jia Lin (Julie to her mother’s ex-husband and English-speaking friends) was always angry with her mother for one reason or another—the biggest sin, of course, being to have gotten herself divorced. Surrounded by rich friends in an English–Mandarin private school in the north of Shanghai, it was only natural that Jia Lin wouldn’t be able to understand why she had to do without a father or a high income, while most of her friends had both and seemed to live charmed lives filled with extra ballet classes, chauffeurs, electronic toys and age-inappropriate videos.

  Linyao’s velocity decreased, her lower limbs seemed to go into slow motion, and then she came to a complete halt, like a steam train reaching a station. Should she skip this assignment? Should she turn back? Here was an opportunity to win some much-needed brownie points with her sullen and angry daughter. She had managed to leave her job as a government veterinarian early, and yet was going to spend some rare free time doing a task that was strictly voluntary. Although she was chair of the Café Society, she could easily leave it to her deputies, Joyce and Philip. All she would have to do is give them a quick call on her mobile.

  Yes. She’d turn around. They could do the assignment tonight. Be good for them to have the extra responsibility. Instead, she could go to Jia Lin’s school—actually, her after-school tutorial club—and meet her at the gates. On rare occasions when she had done so in the past, Jia Lin had never said anything, but Linyao knew the girl found the extra attention significant.

  She was almost ready to spin on her heels when another thought struck her. The catering job tonight—to make a sumptuous vegan dinner for an important group of eleven visitors staying temporarily in Shanghai—was no ordinary booking. The visitors were a much talked-about group of international animal rights activists called the Children of Vega. The visit of this group was the most discussed event in recent memory, as far as vegetarian circles in this city were concerned. The charismatic boss of the group was said to be extremely sensitive about his food. Woe betide anyone who served him an ill-conceived meal, or one with anti-ideological ingredients. This thought made her feel uncomfortable. Perhaps it was too risky to leave it to the youngsters.

  To ponder over intractable dilemmas is like doing the cha-cha-cha. Two steps north, one step south. Pause. Turn around. Two steps south, one step north. Pause. Turn around. Linyao was performing this complex manoeuvre in her head, and her feet were starting to do the same thing as she twisted her body one way and then the other. Then she made up her mind.

  She started walking forward again. No; she couldn’t skip it. On this occasion, she had better oversee the catering job herself, and leave the job of collecting her daughter to her domestic helper, who did it automatically unless informed otherwise. Can’t risk the Children of Vega being upset. A link with Vega could put their café on the map as far as vegetarianism in China went—perhaps even internationally. She’d pick Jia Lin up from school tomorrow, or another day.

  And so, with a few seconds’ t
hought, we make quick decisions we are to bitterly regret over long hours ahead. For perhaps this is the biggest dilemma of creatures who live temporal lives. Trapped in mono-directional time, we have no ability to step outside and see our lives from more useful angles. Linyao is an over-busy woman eleven and a quarter years older than Joyce, and her problem is not her awareness of the number of possibilities ahead of her, but her lack of awareness of them. Her life has become a high-speed sequence of decisions, huge numbers of them a day, almost all of which are made with little or no thought. Life is not a box of chocolates, but a lucky dip containing an infinite number of tightly wrapped packages, some of which held diamond rings while others harbour miniature nuclear bombs. You just keep absently picking out the packages, every minute, every day, your whole life long. Lu Linyao, on this occasion, picked a 30 ticking package out of the lucky dip of life and slipped it in her bag to explode later.

  First came the sauce inspection. Linyao had always been a meticulous person, but today she was excelling herself. She stood on the staff deck of the small, closed restaurant and prepared for battle. The nine years she had spent in Canada (during which time she acquired a Canadian passport, a child, a Filipina domestic helper and—temporarily—a husband) had given her an easy fluency in English.

  ‘Ingredients check,’ she barked. She started grabbing the bottles and jars from the condiments tray and tossing them to the two young people standing in the centre of the room.

  ‘I’ll do them. Let me do them,’ Joyce McQuinnie said guiltily, snatching bottles from the air. The British-Australian teenager had replenished most of the items on the condiments rack, feeling that important guests needed fresh, clean jars and bottles, not grubby, half-empty ones. As a child, she had always been told off by her older sister for her constant desire for ‘brand new’ things. Her sister had sneered that brand new meant the same as new, but she still felt the two words together conjured up a delight lacking in the word new on its own. It wasn’t until years later that it became obvious to her that first-born children place less value on the virginity of mundane items, while younger children, inevitably dressed in hand-me-downs with ‘not too many stains’, considered it an issue of great importance.