The Expat Diaries: Misfortune Cookie (Single in the City Book 2) (15 page)

The ticket agent says we’re in the right place. Helpfully he writes down a bunch of characters. ‘Number sixty-four bus. This stop.’ He points to the slip of paper, smiling his bon voyage wishes.

As we wander to the bus stop opposite the station, I hand Sam the paper. ‘You’d better hold this.’ He’s a man after all. He’ll enjoy being keeper of the directions. 

The bus carries us through densely packed streets lined with shops, the ubiquitous neon signs, and people. Down narrow side roads I spy little clothing and food markets. It takes almost half an hour of crawling in traffic but eventually we reach the outskirts and the shops recede, leaving long stretches of barren road. It’s starting to look more like a place that wishing trees would live. ‘Is that it?’ I say, pointing to the bus’s electronic sign, which has been flashing each stop as we approach. ‘Hat, squiggle, four, squiggle, squiggle?’

‘No, it’s a house looking thing, seven, tepee, o with a line through it, chair.’

At the next stop I say, ‘Is that it? Upside down V, squiggle, chair?’

‘No,’ he says patiently. ‘It’s…’

This goes on for most of the next twenty minutes until, disappointingly ‘Lam Tsuen Wishing Tree’ appears on the screen. Still, we could have read it in Chinese if we’d needed to.

The bus deposits us alone at the side of the dusty road. There’s no indication of a magic wish-granting tree, just a hand-painted sign down an embankment. A red arrow points into the scrubland. ‘Do you think it’s down there?’ I didn’t imagine trekking through the underbrush.

‘I don’t think so.’ He shakes his head. ‘It doesn’t look like anybody goes down there. Besides, there are probably snakes in there.’

‘You’re not afraid of snakes, are you?’ This is the man who took me trekking through the jungles of Laos.

‘Yes, I’m afraid of snakes,’ he says, as if I’ve just asked him the most obvious question.

‘Really? I used to catch them to keep as pets. Not poisonous ones obviously,’ I hasten to add. ‘Just grass snakes. And garter snakes, though those were stinky. They peed on you when you caught them.’

He’s looking at me like something he’s just dug out of the drain, but chooses to overlook my creepy confession. ‘I think the tree would be signposted,’ he offers. ‘After all, it has its own bus stop.’

‘Okay. Maybe we could ask that man?’ A lone workman has been standing beside his truck, following our lack of progress. ‘Where’s that little piece of paper the agent gave us?’

Sam pats his pockets, looks sheepish, pats again, sinks deeper into sheepishness, pulls out his wallet, rifles, and flourishes the now well-folded if slightly tattered slip of paper. ‘Excuse me,’ he says loudly, to aid comprehension. ‘Do you know?’

The man points across the street, away from the embankment.

‘This way.’ Sam takes my hand and hardly makes an ‘I told you so’ face at all.

Back across the road is an open gate, and to the right is a large tree. ‘Are you sure this is it?’ I ask.

‘It’s where the guy pointed.’

‘It looks kind of…’

‘Sick.’

The tree’s sparse branches are supported by tall wooden braces, those few branches rather barren of leaves. ‘How do you throw oranges into that?’ I wonder aloud. Sam’s guidebook definitely said that chucking our wishes, tethered to oranges, into the branches would make them come true. This is very disappointing, like finding out that Santa Claus doesn’t come down the chimney at all, but simply walks through the front door. A big part of the magic is in the delivery.

A middle-aged woman wearing a conical straw hat sidles up beside us. Finally, some authenticity. ‘You get wishes. Two,’ she says, handing us each a sheet of yellow paper and pencil and leading us through a gap in the fence. My wishes pop straight into my head. I want to be happy. And I want to stay with Sam forever. Sappy, I know. I don’t care. I scribble them down and follow Sam’s lead, hanging the rolled-up sheet on one of the hooks drilled into a tattered board beside the tree. I’m smirking. He’s smirking too. We’re in this together, and I love it. The setting doesn’t matter. We could be gazing at each other on my sofa and I’d be just as happy.

Maybe my caffeine buzz is wearing off, but now that we’ve found the tree, I feel a little deflated. That wasn’t the magical adventure in my imagination. But I suppose the important thing is to be with Sam, right? Still, I feel like we we’ve been short-changed.

As if reading my mind, he says, ‘I thought there’d be more. Maybe we should go to the fortune teller’s temple on the way back for some actual mysticism?’

‘Let’s do it!’ I’ve never had my fortune read. All I have is my fortune cookie fortune, tucked up in my wallet. It’s been right so far, hasn’t it?
Following your heart will pay off in the near future.
It certainly has. No one can accuse me of following my head. My heart has led me to Hong Kong with Sam, to this weekend, this day, this moment. So do I believe in fortunes? I think so. Unless the fortune teller says something bad. Then it’s a load of rubbish.

Sam seems to know his way to the temple, which is a good thing because it’s not easy to find. ‘Have you been here before?’ I ask.

‘Uh, no. Well, once, but it was closing so we didn’t go in.’

I have to keep reminding myself that Sam lived here without me. He started a whole life here with Pete, and his new job, and his colleagues, when I was still in London. He talked a lot about Pete (was he in a ‘disapproving phase’ then?), but he must have gone out with other people too. This is an uncomfortable thought. I can’t help it, I have to ask. ‘Who’d you go out with when you first moved here?’

‘Mostly Pete. You know that. We talked every day, remember? Han, why do you ask?’

‘I was just thinking that you’ve probably been to lots of these places that I haven’t. Because you’re away now, I guess I forgot that.’ I mean, of course, that he’s had an entire social life that I wasn’t part of.

‘I didn’t go out that much. You know that though. I told you what I was doing every day. I spent most of those first months just settling in, sometimes going out with Pete for drinks or dinner.’ He’s peering at me. ‘Does it matter?’

‘No. I didn’t expect you to sit in your apartment waiting for me to arrive. It just hit me that I wasn’t part of that time. I
was
part of your life in London. I guess I felt a little excluded all of a sudden, which is ridiculous because I wasn’t even here. Don’t listen to me, I’m babbling.’

‘I do listen to you, Han. If something’s bothering you then we should talk about it. Hmm?’ His thumb gently strokes my hand.

‘No, it’s nothing.’

I’m sabotaging this perfect day with inane conjecture. What do I expect him to do, invite me into his time machine so we can spend those first two months in each other’s pockets? These imagined wounds are self-inflicted. Snap out of it, Hannah.

‘I’m glad you’re here now,’ I finally say. We’re walking alongside a tall stone wall leading to an imposing red and gold gate. As far as temples go, it’s impressive. I had a look at the Man Mo Temple back in Central when I first arrived, but it’s rather puny in comparison. Plus the lit incense hanging from the ceiling is a downright hazard. Health and safety would disapprove of dropping incendiaries on tourists. 

A lone fortune teller is sitting beside the gate. ‘Should we go to him?’ I ask, a little nervous that he’ll shut up shop for an early dinner and take my fortune with him.

‘Nah.’ He shrugs. ‘There must be others. What if there are better ones?’

This strikes me as a typically male approach to choice. As women we’re prepared to make a decision without exploring every last option. Which is why we’re able to choose a mate without wondering if there might not be a better one out there. ‘Okay,’ I say, by which I mean, ‘If we miss the fortune telling I will hold a grudge for the rest of my life.’ Just so we’re clear.

The stone wall hides a golden-roofed temple, ornately carved and painted red, green and gold, merry with hanging paper lanterns. It’s thick with swirling incense smoke and mingling worshippers, walking, standing, kneeling, bowing or prostrate in the stone courtyard. It’s much noisier than one would expect for a place of worship. I’m used to churches, where a whisper can send you straight to hell. We wander through the complex, careful not to step on the faithful.

Off to one side, nestled amidst the skyscrapers and grumbling traffic, is a garden. A very peaceful garden with koi ponds and bridges. ‘Let’s look,’ Sam says. He really does seize the moment. I know it’s a small thing, but so important to me. He’s my ideal partner in crime. On a little arched bridge we stand shoulder to shoulder, watching the fish execute their hypnotic water dance. ‘It’s so peaceful.’

I mean this whole thing. The feeling is almost overwhelming, waves of the gentlest calming I’ve ever known, of complete peace, like being stroked until you’re just about to fall asleep, floating in that limbo between slumber and consciousness.

‘Bdllling!’

‘Is that your phone?’ He asks.

‘Yes.’

‘Do you want to get it?’

‘It’s just a text.’ I sigh. ‘From my mother.’

Hannah, are you with Sam? plese invite him home for 4
^th
July.. Your father wants to bbq

As if Dad needs an excuse to char meat in the back yard. She’s getting desperate now.

Thx Mom, that’s v patriotic but I don’t think we can make it. Maybe for Secretary’s Day.

‘My mom says to say hello,’ I fib, pressing the send button. ‘So what do you think, shall we find our fortunes?’

It takes less than five minutes to circumnavigate the grounds and see that there aren’t any fortune tellers here. Maybe they’ve gone on strike. That man by the gate may have been the only scab to cross the picket line. I don’t want to encourage strike-breaking, but I want my fortune told. Just as I’m about to suggest finding him, Sam spots a narrow lane alongside the temple building. That has to be it. Fortune tellers’ alley. Little pink papers, fluttering in the breeze, are stapled to boards lining the walls. They’re covered in red Chinese characters. This is definitely the right place. ‘We’d like our fortunes read, please,’ I tell the lithe young woman tending the boards.

‘Number?’ She asks.

‘Sam, what number do you want?’ I’ve always been partial to eleven. It was my soccer number, though I only played for a week before realizing that a) I have virtually no foot-to-eye coordination and b) sweating in a field wasn’t as much fun as, say, anything else I could think of. They let me keep the shirt though.

The woman looks confused when I tell her this. ‘Get number, in temple,’ she says, clearly thrilled at having tourists riding roughshod over her ancient customs.

But there wasn’t any place in the temple to get a number. The vendors are all out here. The temple was filled with people waving incense, and praying, and… Wait a minute… ‘I know, Sam.’

There’s a small open area neatly laid with straw mats where people are making an awful racket, shaking cans full of tongue depressors. I’m not sure how, but that must be where we get our numbers. We follow the small crowd up the broad stone steps, shedding our shoes as the others do. Ladies behind the can-laden tables offer them in exchange for a few Hong Kong dollars. Tentatively we join the devotees. What are we getting ourselves into? I feel like a fraud, kneeling at this shrine, shaking my sticks and trying to keep nervous giggles from erupting into full-scale mania.

Sam’s wrestling with his own it’s-inappropriate-therefore-I-must-do-it giggle fit. At least if we’re destined for Taoist hell we’ll be together. A young man notices our inexperience (read: agnostic disrespect for their age-old religion) and suggests, ‘Think about your questions, and shake until one falls out.’

Oh, I see. I did wonder what kind of sign we were waiting for. The sticks are numbered. It takes a bit of technique but eventually they start creeping forward. Within minutes we’ve got our numbers. Suddenly I’m nervous. What if the fortune teller says something terrible? Will I really not believe him?

As we return to the alley, a young man is watching our progress. The minute we pay the woman, who hands us our fortunes, he appears at our side. ‘I’ll take you to my master now,’ he says, greedily eyeing the pink papers.

I imagine a wizened old man with a long beard and Chairman Mao pajamas. I had a Chinese friend in school called Amy whose mother consulted her fortune teller before making any decision. Amy was embarrassed by her family’s traditions, but maybe there’s peace of mind in trusting your decisions to someone else. I’ll judge after I hear what he says.

The young man leads us into a low corridor lined with stalls, brightly lit with ugly yellow fluorescent overhead strips. Wooden stools line our path, waiting to receive the faithful’s bottoms. In one of the stalls sits a forty-something-year-old man behind a metal desk. His face is bathed in the glow of his computer screen. He looks like an IT programmer.

‘You sit,’ the man says, holding out his hand as his minion melts away. Eventually, from his pointed look rather than any polite request, I gather he wants my paper. ‘What’s your question?’ he demands, scrutinizing the pink slip.

Well, I want to snap,
you’re
the soothsayer. You tell me what my question is. Of course I don’t. I sit silently, having not prepared for this exam, until he prompts, ‘Work, family, relationship?’

‘Relationship.’

He stares at the paper, making some notes on it, then says, ‘Relationship okay. Marriage no. Marriage not happy. You make unhappy. Yes.’ He sits back, like Yoda in a polyester suit, pleased with his proclamation.

Thank you. So, just to be clear, I’m not the marrying kind and will someday make a man very unhappy indeed. Forgive me if I’m not prepared to believe a man who may have been surfing porn when we interrupted.

It’s Sam’s turn. ‘Relationship,’ he says in a show of solidarity.

The fortune teller sighs, considering the paper. ‘You don’t pay attention,’ he says. ‘You need to pay more attention in relationship. And you work too much. Too much time working. This is bad. Yes.’

‘Great, thanks very much,’ Sam says. ‘Er, is that all?’