Listen to the Squawking Chicken: When Mother Knows Best, What's a Daughter To Do? A Memoir (Sort Of) (14 page)

One day, during one of our several daily calls, Ma asked me if I’d eaten my papaya yet. It was midafternoon. And I was putting it off. I sighed, like it was a drag. First she reminded me that my papaya should ideally be consumed before six o’clock so as to maximize its effectiveness through the day. Then she asked me what my problem was. I told her that the flavor wasn’t the best. That papayas weren’t my favorite. That I regarded the eating of papayas as a necessary chore, like a visit to the dentist.

The Squawking Chicken sighed back, never a good thing. I panicked. I thought it was over. I worried I had just pissed away all my good luck. I thought maybe something might happen to me—a car accident, a backstabbing, Lindsay Lohan suing me for repeatedly calling her an asshole . . .

“What’s wrong? Am I going to be okay?????” I pleaded down the phone line.

“Yes. You will be fine. You could be better though. But the papaya can’t help you to its full capacity if you’re not fully committed.”

That’s what a bitch feng shui and fortune-telling can be.
Not only do you have to follow it, you have to fucking enjoy it at the same time.

Eventually, however, my papaya requirement became a problem on the road, legitimately. As a television correspondent, travel was a big part of the job. And papayas aren’t the kind of fruit that can be found at every ordinary grocery store. Papayas are not apples. Papayas aren’t even pineapples. When I presented this dilemma to the Squawking Chicken, she asked me to give her some time to think of a solution. Eventually she recommended oranges. This is when I realized that color might have something to do with it. Papayas and oranges are the same color. By now, though, I knew enough not to verbalize my hypothesis. (At least not until now. Some things are best not said out loud. Saying them out loud might jinx it. Which is why I have serious anxiety about writing this chapter. If this book ends up bombing, I’ll know exactly why.)

Anyway, oranges became a substitute. Papayas are still the best, but oranges will do in a pinch. Some days, when I need some extra juju, I’ll have both.

But papayas and oranges aren’t for everyone. Papayas were specifically chosen for my coordinates, my sign, my particular energy. Jacek, for example, has since transitioned off papayas and over to bananas. In 2009, the Squawking
Chicken declared that he was to add bananas to his routine and that he could drop the papaya. I love bananas. I was jealous. I asked if I could have bananas too.

“If you want to. But for you, bananas will never be as good as papayas. Don’t look at me if you figure that out too late.”

I could not have written this book without papayas.

But the Feng Shui Blackmail of hot water, eye drops, and daily fruit is nothing compared to the Feng Shui Blackmail restrictions of house hunting. The home is the center of people’s lives. Feng shui guidelines in home selection and home interiors are very specific. You see this in the Western real estate market—the industry is becoming more and more savvy as the Chinese continue to invest in properties around the world.

Eight is the luckiest number in Chinese numerology. It’s that pronunciation thing again.
Baht
is how you said the word for “eight” in Cantonese. It rhymes with
faht
, the word for “rich.” So an eight is synonymous with getting rich, getting lucky. This is why real estate agents often end their list prices with the number eight. This is why Chinese people often send back their counteroffers with amounts that
include at least one eight. If a house is listed at $299,400, a prospective Chinese buyer might send back a counter of $299,388. You see what I did there? Four is normally regarded as an unlucky number. It’s been replaced here with a couple of eights.

This is just a generalization though. As it is with the fruit, we all have our own lucky numbers. A couple of years ago, Jacek started seeing fours all over the place. He’d look at the clock, it was 4:44. He’d buy something, it would amount to $14.44. Or $24.44. He was freaking out. So much so that he asked Ma whether or not he was in for it. She assured him that it would be okay. That the fours that were surrounding him were protecting him. That he was one of those rare people for whom fours were lucky. After all, he was born on April first, the first day of the fourth month. Me, I don’t have a super-lucky number like Jacek. But I do have a very unlucky one. It is five. I generally avoid fives.

Chinese numerology became a big deal for us when we were looking for a home. We had sold our small apartment on West 4th Avenue (see? Jacek is drawn to fours) in Vancouver in the early part of 2008. We decided to rent while we took our time waiting for the perfect place to come up. A couple months later, we had our hearts set on a town house by the beach. It was ideal. But we had to consult with the Squawking Chicken first about the offer “number.” She
recommended an amount slightly under asking, with a complicated series of numbers that added up to something we didn’t understand. And she would not move from that amount. We tried telling her that the market was so competitive that there was no way we would get it with that amount. Very calmly, she assured us that if we didn’t get it, it wasn’t ours to begin with.

Jacek was becoming frustrated. He was really into this house. He felt handcuffed by her “crazy” Feng Shui Blackmail. But as much as I wanted my husband to be happy, I also wanted to protect our happiness. The wrong house can ruin lives. The right house can enhance the lives of those living there. I wanted our home to have good energy. I trusted that Ma knew how to help us find the kind of energy we needed. I asked Jacek not to compromise our energy, our spirit, our hot streak for the sake of a piece of real estate that happened to have a good view of the city and an awesome basement that he could turn into a man cave. He eventually agreed. In the end, we lost out on that house.

That fall, the world economy collapsed. We would have overpaid on that house. Jacek just shook his head.

A couple of years passed and we checked out another town house in a development right by a park that we thought would be great for our dogs. We saw the for-sale sign one
day just as the owner was outside doing some work. He agreed to show us around. It was a corner unit with a black spiked gate and chimes hanging on the porch. Inside there were three levels. The entire top level was the master bedroom. It was an oddly shaped room, with weirdly angled corners and a sloped ceiling. A hot tub took up most of the backyard. The place needed some work but we were interested so we told our agent to look into it. The day after I started feeling unwell. I was tired all the time. I felt nauseated. I couldn’t eat. Ma saw me on TV a few days later and called me straightaway. “You okay? What’s wrong with you? I just watched you on television and your forehead looks dark. You have no life in your eyes. Did you do something?”

I told her I wasn’t sleeping well. She muttered something about taking better care of myself and hung up. The next day it was the same. She said I looked like shit on TV, insisting that I go to the doctor.

At the end of the week, our real estate agent came back to us with some more information about the town house. We always consulted both sets of parents about our home searches, so Jacek emailed the pictures to his mom and my dad and asked them what they thought. The phone rang almost immediately. It was the Squawking Chicken. She was very concerned. “Did you go into that house? Did you step
inside that house?” I said that we ran into the owner and ended up getting a tour. She flipped out. “The house is dirty! That house is very dirty!”

I remembered how sinister those spikes seemed on that black gate and the sound of the chimes as we walked in—not exactly welcoming. I remembered how uncomfortable it felt upstairs, in that bedroom with the strange dimensions. I passed on these observations to the Squawking Chicken. “Bah,” she spat over the phone. “I could tell just from the pictures. There is filth in there. You should have showed me before you went in.”

She warned me to never again go see a house without telling her, without at least showing her some photos. So I’d been infected by a bad house. And why not Jacek? Just as certain fruits and numbers are lucky for certain people, certain forces, helpful and harmful, are attracted to others. For the evil influences swirling around that home, I was the one.

So now what?

Ma wasn’t too worried. I had been eating my papayas. I was riding steady on my luck cycle due to the fact that she had spent years feng shui voodooing my ass, insulating me from exactly these kinds of occurrences. Part of that voodoo involves getting my blood taken annually after Chinese New Year. I’ve been doing this since 2006, when I started working for myself. Ma was concerned that success would expose
me to greater dangers. As usual, she wouldn’t explain what she had seen or read in my fortune that supported her theory, but she was particularly preoccupied with my health and physical well-being. So she added another ritual to the growing list of feng shui fortune-telling tasks. Jacek and I were both to “shed blood” by submitting to a blood test—for cholesterol, for creatinine, for pregnancy, whatever the reason the doctor checked off on his form, she didn’t care, so long as we lost some blood. By voluntarily “shedding blood” we were preempting something that could be much more serious. It’s kind of like a sacrifice, only without major consequences. (By the way, a dental appointment works too. Because when you get your teeth cleaned, there’s inevitably a small amount of bleeding.)

Since I had dutifully given of my blood that year, Ma was confident that my luck was at a decent level and that I could recover quickly from the dirty house. She advised me to get my hair cut right away. She wanted at least three inches off the length. I have very long hair, halfway down my back. And I don’t like it any shorter. But Ma convinced me that I needed to purge. That the only way I’d rid myself of the darkness, the negative energy that the house had left on me, was to release it through the ends of my hair. It was holding me down. I had three inches taken off and immediately felt better.

Our house search continued. I don’t think we were any more or less picky than any other home buyers, but we did have one condition that complicated the process: the staircase. Many town houses are designed with the staircase facing the front door. Ordinarily this is considered to be bad feng shui because it means that your luck can exit easily. A home is supposed to be the garden and the vault of your luck. This is what feng shui is for: to help you nurture and safeguard your luck. How many times have I walked into a potential town house and groaned at the sight of the staircase staring me in the face? Please, homebuilders, if you are reading this, please take notice. You are losing
so much money
by designing your properties this way.

We never did end up finding a house in Vancouver. In 2013, we moved to Toronto so I could cohost a new talk show. Jacek and I could only fly back and forth from Vancouver to Toronto so many times to look at homes. We found a real estate agent, narrowed down the neighborhood we wanted to live in, and gave her a list of requirements, the staircase issue being one of them. She emailed potential properties to us, and if we were in town, we’d check them out, after clearing the pictures with the Squawking Chicken so that she could tell us if it passed her preliminary dirt test.

But we weren’t in town when the house we eventually bought came up for sale. It had a staircase issue. Normally,
when a house had a staircase facing the door, we discarded it from the running immediately. This time, for some reason, Jacek ended up including it on a list of potentials that he emailed to my parents for review. Ma was all over it. She rang right away to say that this might be the one and that she wanted to make an appointment to go see it for us. We were shocked.
WTF? But what about the staircase?

“Let me worry about that. I will go see it first.”

She spent an hour and a half inside the house. And she loved it. She loved it so much she not only encouraged us to put in an offer, she approved of us going over asking. This is a woman who has a problem paying sales tax on groceries. The Squawking Chicken never goes over asking. That’s how strongly she believed in this house.

And the staircase?

“Ma,” Jacek asked, exasperated. “How come the staircase is okay?”

“When a house is strong, it can overcome its flaws. This house is strong. This house is very, very good for both of you.” Feng shui—wind and water. If they are allowed to be, they can be flexible.

Our house is on the corner of a small intersection. The front door faces north, the back door faces south. So the sun comes in from three sides. That’s a mega bonus—the house is light, there is very little room for shadows and darkness.
Because we’re on the corner, the house sits on two streets. In feng shui terms, it means we have options—double the opportunity to maneuver, double the opportunity to escape, if necessary. That’s a feature that’s especially important for someone like me who works in a creative business. More roads lead to more imagination—the paths are open. Plus, in addition to a standard dining room, our kitchen has an island that can pass as an eating surface and it’s been built with a breakfast nook. In Chinese, the slang expression for “making money” is “finding food.” More places to “find food,” i.e., eat, will give us more ways to make money.