The Geomancer's Compass (2 page)

My A-Ma's name was Lin, which means “Beautiful Jade” in Chinese; it suited her, even though she was old. She was the most self-contained, most serene person I had ever known. Utterly Zen-like. She ran the household on Pender Street – and it was huge – like it was nothing at all and tended
to our ramshackle and accident-prone family with an air of quiet competence. I'd seen A-Ma upset; I'd seen her sad; but I'd never seen her rattled. I had the feeling that if I ever did, if any of us ever did, we'd panic, come apart at the seams. She was that steady. At the time, of course, I thought she was being ridiculous and pigheaded.

“Oh, come on. What didn't he do? He did everything!”

Because Charlie Liu's achievements were the stuff of legend, at least in the Chinatown I grew up in. He had started out importing and canning Hong Kong opium; then, when trading in opium became illegal, he imported tea and silk and Chinese medicines instead, all the while investing in real estate, both in Chinatown and in the growing city of Xianshuibu, Brackish Water Port, the Chinese name for Vancouver. The company he founded, Azure Dragon Imports, takes up an entire corner of Chinatown and offers customers everything from calligraphy sets to paper lanterns, from
mah-jongg
tiles to silk
cheongsams
, from jade and coral jewelry to statues of the Buddha. And our house – twenty-two rooms built around three courtyards – is more like a small palace than a private home. I mean, you can get lost in there. Trust me.

“He was very successful,” A-Ma agreed. “But even a successful man can have unfinished business.”

“Mother Liu.” Mom's tone was sharp, startlingly so. She usually deferred to A-Ma. Everybody did. But now she scowled at her, raised her eyebrows pointedly, and gave her head a little
shake, like she was forbidding her to do something, warning her. She turned to me. “The Grandfather lived as long as he did because of his diet, Miranda. Period. End of story. Rice and a little fish.”

“And moon cakes.” Auntie Ev sounded rueful. “Let's not forget the moon cakes.”

I wrinkled up my nose. Heavy and not very sweet, moon cakes are round pastries filled with lotus-seed paste and salted egg yolks. Not my idea of a yummy treat, but The Grandfather loved them; they were his absolute favorite thing, and he looked forward every year to the Mid-Autumn Moon Festival when he could eat his fill of the nasty things. Ever since he had lost his teeth back in the 1950s, the women of the family had been terrified that he would choke on a pastry, and with good reason. Then, this year, bingo. Dead at the alleged age of a hundred and thirty-four. Death by Cantonese delicacy.

And then this weird exchange took place between my grandmother and my mother, conducted in a kind of hiss, but still perfectly audible. I mean, I was sitting only a few feet away and, despite how loudly I played my tunes even then, I wasn't deaf.

“Daisy.” A-Ma leaned over to tug at Mom's sleeve. “You know full well the child has to know sometime.”

Mom shook her head. “Not now, Mother Liu.”

“But we all agree that –”

“I said no. She is too young.”

“But we don't know how much time –”

“
I said she is too young
.”

I leaned forward in my chair. “Hey.
Apollo
to Houston. I'm in the room, you know. What are you talking about? What is it that I have to know?”

A-Ma looked at Mom. Mom scowled, crossed her arms over her chest, and shook her head once again. A-Ma shrugged. “All right,” she said, turning away. “As you wish.”

“I am her mother.”

“You are.”

“And you don't know, Mother Liu. The situation might change. Right itself.”

“That is unlikely, Daisy, and you know it.”

“Nonetheless.”

“What is going on? What are you talking about?” I demanded, but neither of them would say a word more on the subject. They just sat there with their zipped lips, so I eventually gave up and went back to my original plan to raid the fridge. Time passed and, in the commotion and chaos generated by The Grandfather's funeral, I would probably have forgotten all about this conversation, or non-conversation, if it hadn't been for what happened at the cemetery.

T
he Grandfather's funeral was five hours long, start to finish – in other words, interminable. A white hearse led the procession up the winding road along the waterfront to the cemetery where Vancouver's Chinese-Canadian community had buried their dead since the 1930s. Through its tinted windows, passersby could just make out the yellow-lacquered casket, nailed shut, in which The Grandfather's dry leaf of a body rested. I knew from A-Ma that he was wearing the burial garments he had chosen in 1949 on his sixty-fifth birthday. Since that time, these garments had lain, carefully wrapped in muslin, in the carved camphor trunk at the foot of the narrow, red-lacquered bed in which he had slept since the death of his wife six decades earlier.

It was a balmy autumn day, not raining for once, unusual for Vancouver. The air was soft and hazy, and a brisk wind
bustled around like an old auntie telling everyone to hurry along, hurry along now. The two teenage sons of Donald Chen, the Chinese undertaker, walked behind the hearse, lackadaisically swirling paper streamers. They were older than me but, in spite of that, they still managed to be completely lame. Maybe all undertakers' children are lame; maybe it goes with the turf. In any case, every few minutes they would jump up and down on the streamers, whooping half-heartedly. Probably they would have preferred to be home playing Mass Driver or World of Starcraft (I know I would have), but I'll bet their dad insisted that they be there, doing their streamer gig. He knew his customers – knew that, for old-school Chinese, streamers were an essential element of any funeral. “How do you think I pay for your fancy video games?” he'd ask them. “Where do you think the money for those expensive cross-trainers comes from?” Chinese-Canadian parents are all alike. They want you to know how much things cost.

Behind the boys crept the white limousine in which A-Ma and I traveled. Of her six grandchildren, A-Ma had chosen me and only me to join her in the lead car (my mom and dad and two brothers followed in another, lesser car, farther back in the procession). I remember being puzzled by this, and a little weirded out. In Chinese-Canadian families, all hopes for the future are usually pinned on the male heir. This meant that, by rights, one of my brothers or male cousins
should have been chosen to sit with A-Ma – probably my cousin Brian, who is a few months older than me. Any of the other kids might have felt proud at being singled out; I felt uneasy. The last thing in the world I wanted was to be The Heir, to have all those family and company responsibilities dumped into my lap. I had my future all mapped out and it was going to be great. St. Izzy's is this insanely difficult private academy with a mission to produce the next generation of computer geniuses. By getting accepted there, I had put myself on a super fast track to work in some of the new markup and metadata languages being developed for Web3D – high-tech, high-level stuff about which my family had no clue – and I didn't want anything to get in the way of my plans.

A-Ma pinched me on the arm – not hard. “You're fidgeting,” she snapped. “Stop it.” She looked very small and neat in her short-sleeved Chinese pantsuit with its mandarin collar and frog buttons. Both her suit and the
cheongsam
that Mom had insisted I wear were made of white silk brocade. For Chinese people, white is the color of mourning, not black like it is for most Canadians.

“It's this stupid dress,” I complained. “It's itchy.” I'd always been more of a jeans girl – a tomboy who, upon hitting puberty, quickly morphed into a nerd. I wasn't used to wearing a dress, especially one with such a narrow skirt. “How are you expected to walk in this thing?”

“Take little steps.”

I squirmed, tugging at the tight mandarin collar, which was chafing me. “How do you run?”

She gave a little hoot. “You don't.”

I scowled at the Chen brothers. I am, by nature, both prickly and finicky, and physical discomfort only makes that worse. “What do those two nimrods think they're doing? They look totally pathetic.”

“Now, Miranda, they are doing an important job.”

“Yeah? What?”

“They are entangling devils.” She said this as calmly as she might have said, “They are eating freezer pops.”

This flabbergasted me. “What did you say?”

“I said they are
entangling devils
.”

I snorted. “Yeah, sure.”

“They are.”

“A-Ma. You've got to be kidding me.”

My grandmother only shook her head. “I am being perfectly serious.”

“Devils?”

“Devils.”

“It's symbolic, right? Traditional?”

“Traditional,” said A-Ma. “But not symbolic.”

I sighed. Every year it seemed she became more traditional, more conservative, more
Chinese
. Even her speech had begun to sound slightly accented, as though English might have been her second language, even though she was second-generation
British Columbian. And she was educated. She had traveled. It wasn't as though she were some peasant from a small village in China. “There are no such things as devils, A-Ma. You know that.”

“I do not,” she said. “And if you saw what I have seen in my long life, you would think differently.”

I believed in progress, in science and technology. I believed in germs. Want to believe in something scary that you can't see? Germs beat out devils every time. I didn't understand why my grandmother felt so compelled to preserve the old traditions, why she was so superstitious, especially when she knew, or
ought
to have known, better.

Take the past several weeks leading up to the funeral, while we waited (and waited) as old Dr. Yu, the geomancer, hemmed and hawed, trying to find a day that, astrologically speaking, was not fraught with danger for the family. How crazy was that?

And what about the household gods, all those garishly painted statues of deities and sitting Buddhas and Confucian figures that littered the house? A-Ma had insisted that they all be covered with red cloth, but that no one should wear red clothing. Red was a happy color, and funerals were sad.

She had also insisted that all the mirrors be removed from sight, and that a white cloth be hung in the front doorway. When I asked about the mirrors, she told me that if anyone saw The Grandfather's yellow-lacquered coffin in a mirror,
there would surely be another death in the family right away. As for the white cloth hanging in the doorway, all I could get out of her was “That is how it must be done. Otherwise there will be ill fortune.”

It would be one thing if it was just cultural, a case of going through the motions. That would have been quaint or charming or something. What bugged me was that she really seemed to believe she could stave off disaster only by observing these ancient rites. It was nuts. And I have to admit I have little tolerance for stupid people, not being one myself. That my beloved A-Ma (because I really did love her) should
act
like a stupid person, especially when I knew she was not one, was super-annoying.

“Anything you may think you've seen, A-Ma, there's a scientific explanation for,” I told her. “Besides, even if there were devils, what would they be doing at an old man's funeral?”

Now, here comes the “oh snap” moment. Are you ready for it?

“They are here to attack The Grandfather,” she said. “He was their enemy in life and now they want revenge. He made them wait a long time and they are very angry at him.”

Now, The Grandfather had been around my whole life, but to tell you the absolute truth he hadn't seemed like a person so much as a family heirloom, something that was taken out and dusted off and prominently displayed at the head of a table or in the place of honor at some ceremony.
His English was heavily accented, despite his having been born in Canada, and in any case he rarely spoke, at least in my presence, and then in such a hoarse whisper that it was difficult to make out what he was saying. It was like his words were trying to escape through a tangle of barbed wire clogged with debris. I had always assumed he was senile. How could you be that old and
not
senile? But senile or not, he hadn't seemed like the sort of person anyone or any
thing
would target for attack. What would be the point?

“Oh, come on,” I said. “I find that hard to believe.”

“You knew him only as a very old man,” said A-Ma. “Past his prime. Believe me when I tell you that in his day he was a fierce warrior, and devils are bound and determined to get him now, when he is most vulnerable.”

“Vulnerable? He's dead. What does he have to lose?”

“His body may be dead, but his soul is not at rest,” she said. “It is neither here nor there. It is confused. When it is in this state, it may become lost, perhaps forever.”