The Shanghai Union of Industrial Mystics Page 6

  Linyao’s phone rang. ‘Not again,’ she said. ‘Now what?’

  She’d forgotten that her child had not reached home. But the spinning had stopped. The ball was landing.

  She wiped her hands, picked up the phone and listened to the caller’s voice. And the irritation in her face was quickly replaced by fear. ‘Oh,’ she said, quietly. ‘Oh dear.’

  Joyce and Flip stopped breathing, stopped crinkling paper, stopped moving.

  ‘I’ll come and see what’s happening. Ring me immediately if they turn up. It’ll be fine, I’m sure it will be.’ Her tone failed to reflect the confidence of her words. Linyao slowly let the handset drift downwards, forgetting to hang up.

  ‘Jia Lin?’ Joyce asked.

  Linyao’s voice lost its hard edge and became vulnerable. ‘Jia Lin and the maid are still not home. Now, I must admit, I’m a bit worried. I’m going to go and walk the route from the school to home, and then I’ll ring friends, in case she and the maid decided to visit someone and forgot to tell us or something. You’ll have to—’ ‘I’ll deliver the stuff; don’t you worry,’ Joyce said. ‘I’ll use my bike. It’ll be a piece of cake.’

  ‘You’ve got to leave it at a place called the Herborium: you know it? It’s a health food shop on Rujin Yi Lu. The operation is at the Jin Jiang Plaza Tower, which is nearby at the junction of Maoming Nan Lu. They’re going to storm some animal restaurant or something near there. Some new dining club called This Is Living. What a stupid name.’

  Joyce’s fist flew to her mouth.

  3

  In 61 BC, Emperor Xuan of Han made an avenue of eighty-eight rare deciduous trees for the people. Each had different coloured leaves.

  It was beautiful, but the ground was soon covered with leaves. They fell so fast the royal gardener could not keep the ground clear of them.

  The Emperor asked the wise man: ‘What shall I do? The path to the palace is buried.’

  The wise man told him to announce a new currency in the land: leaves. He said: ‘The exchange rate will be five hundred leaves for one gold coin.’

  From that day on, the avenue was kept perfectly clean. No leaf even touched the ground before a loyal subject snatched it up.

  Some people gathered leaves and swapped them for gold. Others collected leaves and hoarded them. The king was happy to pay a small sum for such a great service.

  Blade of Grass, all things can be achieved by uniting the right human beings together in the right combination.

  From ‘Some Gleanings of Oriental Wisdom’

  by CF Wong.

  Twin doors slid apart and welcomed him on a high speed journey to the heavens.

  Elevators, CF Wong had long believed, were little cuboids of good feng shui—and especially external glass lifts like the one into which he was about to step. For a start, they were more or less square, the simplest of the recommended room layouts in the ancient texts, although this one, like most glass elevators, extended outwards slightly in a bay window shape to ensure that the riders got the widest possible view. Second, they were in full control of the person inhabiting them, thanks to the buttons. Third, and most importantly, there was an element of magic in them. Of course, most people didn’t see this magic at all—people today were so blasé, they failed to register any wonder at the modern miracles surrounding them. How quickly people’s minds closed and became tragically desensitised to the world!

  The feng shui master had spent a great deal of time thinking about this. It was all to do with natural physics, he reckoned. When one was young, one learned basic physics. That’s all one did. One was carried around by one’s mother and one’s entertainment was to watch adults interacting with the world. The laws of physics accumulated in one’s head. Adults communicate with other adults by making sounds. Days are bright, but nights are dark. Water flows, but the ground does not. Pictures of people in picture books look like people but have no life. Birds live in the sky, but people do not. The rules pile up in the child’s head and the world starts to make sense.

  And then comes the day when electricity arrives in the village, and things start to change. Now the dark is not dark— there are bright suns shining in the blackness (sometimes so bright that you can’t actually see anything). Then a box appears in the village headman’s house where the pictures laugh and talk and move, like live, albeit grey-skinned, people. The first time Wong saw television he assumed that the reason Westerners were called gwai lo, or ghost people, was because they had greyish white skin, as they did on television in Guangdong in the 1960s.

  And then comes the day when the child, now grown up, goes from the village to the big city and discovers that all the most fundamental laws of physics have been overturned. The gradual trickle of modern magic into China’s rural areas becomes, in the urban parts, a Changjiang—a Long River—of marvels. In Guangzhou, the ground moves, up, down, and sometimes crawls flat along the ground, or snakes around corners. Water flows, not just in rivers, but elegantly out of stone carvings in the middle of buildings. Buildings stand like glass mountains, higher than the trees and hills around them. And Guangzhou was on the flight path of two airports, so up there in heaven, just above the clouds, there was a constant line of tubes filled with people—he used to think of them as trains of the air—flying as high as any bird has ever flown.

  And then there were the elevators. He recalled the first time he stepped into one. He was twenty-seven years old and had just entered his first skyscraper, an office building in eastern central Guangzhou, near the trade halls. He had heard of the things, but had never tried one himself. Initially the experience was very unpleasant. For a start, the space was small—claustrophobically small, especially since six people had entered it with him. Then there was the fact that the walls and doors were metal. He felt sealed in, almost as if he was in a standing-room-only tomb of some sort. But worst of all, he had no feeling of control. The doors appeared to close without clear human intervention—only later did he become aware that some of the individuals who had entered the small room had been applying their fingers to the side wall panel.

  But it was when the door reopened thirty seconds later that his attitude changed. The elevator had not appeared to move. There was a slight jerk and a shake, but there had been no perceptible vertical movement. He did not feel as if he had flown up a tall building. Yet when the door opened, the scene outside had changed. Instead of a narrow pale green corridor and an aged security guard, there was a pale mauve corridor and no security guard. The doors whisked shut again, the room shook itself once more, and this time the doors opened to reveal a large red-carpeted office. It seemed to be some sort of magic—every time you spent half a minute in this tiny room, the world outside the door changed. He knew how it worked, but that did not lessen his amazement.

  Wong spent half an hour going up and down in the elevator on that first occasion, and had arrived late for his appointment. At first, the lack of apparent movement mystified and intrigued him. Why did one have no real sensation of movement, except for a slight tremor in the stomach when the elevator stopped? Then he worked out the answer. Since each person was the centre of his own existence, what was really happening was that you and your elevator-room were staying still while the world outside moved up or down. This accorded perfectly with the saying of Mo Zhou in 479 BC: ‘The wise man knows that he is the centre of the world. Throughout his life, he never moves an inch, but the world runs and jumps and leaps around him.’

  That experience took place thirty years ago, but CF Wong had still not lost his love of elevators. And he particularly liked glass-walled elevators on ultra-high skyscrapers, where one could see the world changing shape before one. This elevator was an external one, clinging to the side of a glittering glass-walled tower. He watched with eyes wide as the Shanghai cityscape rearranged itself gracefully in front of him. One moment the office blocks towered above him. The next moment, they seemed to elegantly throw themselves down, and he was level with the tops of the highest ones
. The buildings seemed to morph and shrink as he watched. And then, seconds later, he was up in the sky and the buildings and streets had all laid themselves out as toys below him, the biggest city in China becoming a doormat at his feet.

  Standing next to Wong was Bi Yun, a vice-president of the company that owned the hotel at which he was about to dine. His eyes were on the feng shui master’s face, and he had noted his guest’s obvious pleasure in the elevator ride.

  ‘Gorgeous view, isn’t it?’ Bi said in Beijing-accented Mandarin. ‘You feel like you are blasting off into outer space. It’s like being in a glass rocket or something, right?’

  Wong nodded. ‘View very beautiful, yes.’

  ‘Well, we want people to feel they are blasting off to heaven, because that’s exactly where they are going,’ the businessman gushed. ‘Wait till you see the final table settings. It’s a gourmet’s paradise, it really is.’

  The elevator continued to fly smoothly on its way up to the 45th storey penthouse restaurant. ‘Do you know how fast we’re moving?’ the businessman asked.

  ‘Yes. We are not moving at all. The world moves down.’

  ‘No, you’ll find that we’re moving up at almost three floors a second—that’s about thirty feet a second. Think about it. Three floors a—’

  ‘No,’ said the feng shui master. ‘Each person is the centre of his own universe, as Mo Zhou said. When you go in an elevator like this, you do not move. What happens is the universe falls forty-five storeys down.’

  Bi’s eyebrows rose a centimetre. ‘I’ll have to think about that one.’ He gave Wong the kind of smile one gives to a child who believes his own fantasies.

  People who knew Wong as a taciturn old man would have been surprised to see him now. He stood tall, his chest thrust out. Had he been walking, they would have noticed the spring in his step. There were even the early glimmerings of a smile curling at the edges of his lips, although Wong was not generally a smiler. The fact was that the past months had been a remarkably profitable time for him. For years he had dismissed northern China as any sort of viable market for his skills. Following the war on Falun Dafa in the late 1990s, feng shui was placed on the frowned-upon-activities list, along with most other non-materialistic codes of belief—although they could do nothing about the feng shui-influenced architecture that was already going up. All unregulated spiritual activities were disliked by the government.

  This had upset Wong, as he was in the feng shui business for largely materialistic reasons, and was happy to interpret it as materialistically as anyone wanted. You want an excuse to buy a load of gold trinkets? No problem, I’ll give you one. But in the past two years, feng shui had become fashionable in China again—absurdly, as an import from Westernised, British-flavoured Hong Kong. How can you import something to a country from where it originates? There was an idiom in English about this—sending coals to castles, or something? And a matching one (much older, of course) in Chinese: herding ducks to Guangzhou. Yet now there were feng shui ‘waving cats’ at the entrances to all the shops, and Shanghai people were filling his bookings diary. He could afford to turn down all but the biggest payers.

  He had had so many commissions from Shanghai over the past year that he had decided to base himself in the city for a few months, mop up whatever cash there was, set up a satellite office, and a branch of his association. East Trade Industries, the property company which paid his biggest retainer, had bought land, office blocks and several strata titles in Pudong, so it was happy to underwrite the costs of the move. It was cheaper than flying him up and down from Singapore every few days.

  The money was great. Normally, that would have been more than enough to satisfy him. But on visits to Shanghai in recent weeks, he had gained more than cash: he had gained status. One of the people who had hired him was a tycoon, another was a senior Communist Party official, and a third was a senior security agent working for the President’s office. In the last of these assignments, Wong had been asked to find the safest spot in the vicinity, in case ‘important people have to hide or find shelter for any reason’. This had not been difficult. Wong could do it without a map. He simply pointed out that Tsz Lum Cove, a bay cut into a nameless barren rock in the Yangtze Estuary, was sheltered in every way: physically and spiritually. A steep cliff hung over a small plateau just above sea level. The sides of the cliff surrounding the bay were so steep and the material it was made of was so thick (limestone and granite) that nothing could penetrate it—bad vibrations or the blast of major weapons. ‘Even if you dropped a bomb on Shanghai, a fisherman in Tsz Lum Cove would be just fine,’ he’d said.

  And he had been thrilled at how seriously the security chief had taken the pronouncements, laboriously writing down everything he said in simplified characters. In the end, the man had declined to pay his bill, calmly explaining that, ‘The President’s office does not pay for consultancy work; to work for us is an honour.’

  Normally, the feng shui master would have been furious at such a cop-out. But not this time. He had been content to bite his tongue and say nothing. Although he had never thought of himself as status-conscious, he was pleased to think that his words were being added to the emergency files for evacuating top people in the event of war in China. It made him feel important and, more significantly, it made him feel he could do some name-dropping and raise his fees.

  ‘We’re here,’ Bi said. The lift came to a halt, the internal elevator lights went out and the doors wooshed open.

  ‘Lights not working?’ Wong said, noting the darkness of the lift and the gloom of the corridor. ‘Power cut?’ The only light leaked out of the floor, like the emergency strips leading to exit doors on an aircraft.

  Bi shook his head. ‘No. We use an automatic dimmer to turn them right down so you get more of an effect when you enter the restaurant.’

  They followed the spooky floor-lit corridor around a turning to the left and came upon the main door of the restaurant. As Bi had said, the darkness enhanced the drama of the entrance. The doorway was bathed in multicoloured light and surmounted by a temporary sign: a neon light with the name of the dining club which was meeting tonight: This Is Living. The letters were in luminous yellow-green which gradually changed to shocking pink as they entered. Wong stopped and stared at it for half a minute, wondering about the feng shui implications of a light which changed colour (yet another modern artifact that broke the recognised laws of physics). Bi, impatient, grabbed Wong by the elbow and pulled him through the doorway.

  In shape, the restaurant was much as Wong remembered from the previous week—a large, elegant, oval-shaped room on two levels, with a balcony rail making sure no one tripped off the higher level, which had been turned into a sort of stage. But in another way, it looked very different—the lighting engineers had given it an otherworldly atmosphere with low-slung lights, focused beams, and mixed colours. The room was reddish on one side, blue on the other, and had a clear, balanced tone only in the middle.

  Wong looked up with delight at the suspended ceiling. Modern ceilings, to him, were one of the marvels of room design. Suspended ceilings, by definition, lowered the height of a room. But clever layering and lighting effects meant that the net result was to make it appear higher than it would otherwise have seemed.

  The room was dotted with tables—thirty-one of them—at intervals large enough for people to have discreet conversations: not like in most Chinese restaurants, where diners ate shoulder-to-shoulder with strangers. In the middle of the raised area was the display table—a high-standing platform where chefs would perform their culinary party tricks from time to time.

  There were only four people in the restaurant when they entered, but a steady flow of couples joined them. Each person was welcomed effusively by celebrity chef Jean-Baptiste De Labauve, who gushed over them. He clearly had not been able to decide whether to wear a professional chef ’s outfit or something stylish that a haute cuisine restaurant host might wear, since he liked to do both jobs—or at
least to take the credit for both. As a result, he was wearing chef ’s whites, but in ivory silk, and without the stovepipe hat. Around his neck he had a natty Hermès scarf knotted to one side. He had no fear of getting the outfit ruined, as most of the actual cooking was to be done by his staff, overseen by his deputy, a Japanese chef named Benny Tomori.

  Virtually all the diners were Asians, and about three out of four were male. It was a strongly testosterone-dominated group. The few women present were mostly young, attractive and rather quiet: mistresses, trophy wives or doting personal assistants, which in Shanghai was a widely recognised term for concubines. There were to be only eighteen guests tonight, all of whom—well, all the men anyway—were founding members of the This Is Living dining club. Wong was not an official member. He was well out of his league as all the others were wealthy businessmen or top officials (which often meant the same thing, not that anyone would be stupid enough to say so). Several were sons of tycoons. But during the preparations, De Labauve was delighted to learn that a number of the guests knew Wong and had employed him. And once he heard that the geomancer used to work in the seafood industry in Guangdong—centre of China’s live and exotic food sector—he had invited him to join the founders’ meal as a special guest.

  Wong was looking forward to it, and his mood went from good to superlative when De Labauve handed him his payment for doing the feng shui reading of the restaurant—a fat envelope of cash. No records, no signatures. No need to declare anything for tax. He tucked it in his jacket pocket right over his heart and from time to time stroked the pleasant bulge it made.

  Within twenty minutes all the guests had arrived, and gongs were pounded to invite everyone to move from the bar area to their tables.

  De Labauve mounted the raised area and beamed at each table in turn. He spoke in Mandarin, made semi-unintelligible by his French accent. ‘Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to the founding meal of the most remarkable dining club in Shanghai. Most of you will know that we offer the freshest, most delicious food in China. This is true. But we offer more than that. We are, I believe, offering the only culinary experience in the world in which all the main ingredients will be alive as you start the meal.