The Shanghai Union of Industrial Mystics
PRAISE FOR NURY VITTACHI
AND THE FENG SHUI DETECTIVE BOOKS
‘Unsurpassable mixture of humor, wisdom and whodunnit.’
The Crime Forum
, Germany
‘Should bear a large red label warning against its being read while
consuming beverages, lest unwary readers wind up spitting tea
through their nose as I did.’
That’s Beijing
‘Wacky and hilarious whodunit—you just have to dig in
and hold on for the wild ride.’
Asian Review of Books
‘An international bestseller whose unlikely sleuths
appear to be heading for cult status.’
Herald Sun
, Melbourne
‘Totally engrossing and very, very funny.’
Radio 3AK, Melbourne
‘If Hollywood wakes up...’
The Australian
‘One of the most droll, attractive and
unusual of modern amateur detectives.’
The Bulletin
‘A very funny book. Dangerously so at times.’
That’s Beijing
‘The story is populated by a stream of eccentric characters and
amusing examples of Singapore’s polyglot, multiethnic culture...
a tasty smorgasbord of modern Asian life.’
Japan Times
‘Does for the flow of
ch’i
what Sherlock Holmes
did for cocaine.’
South China Morning Post
‘The man who made Lee Kuan Yew laugh.’
The New Paper
, Singapore
First published in 2006
Copyright © Nury Vittachi 2006
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The
Australian
Copyright Act 1968
(the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10% of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.
Allen & Unwin
83 Alexander Street
Crows Nest NSW 2065
Australia
Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100
Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218
Email: [email protected]
Web:
www.allenandunwin.com
National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:
Vittachi, Nury, 1958- .
The Shanghai Union of Industrial Mystics.
ISBN 1 74114 779 4.
1. Feng shui - Fiction. 2. Shanghai (China) - Fiction. I. Title.
A823.4
Edited by Jo Jarrah
Cover and text designed by Design by Committee
Typeset by Michael Kuszla, J&M Typesetting
Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
I am indebted to many people who helped in a number of ways while I wrote this book. Enormous gratitude goes to publisher Patrick Gallagher, for inviting me into the esteemed circle of Allen & Unwin authors, and to my gimlet-eyed editors, Clare Emery and Jo Jarrah. Thank you to my fantastic family for letting me go AWOL in Shanghai. This book is about how people of different cultures in the Asia-Pacific can achieve wonderful things when they work together. For this reason, I dedicate this volume to Todd and Allison Wong, and to Scott and Marybeth Lawson, two couples who are dear friends and masters of cross-cultural bridge building.
Contents
In ancient China in the first century, a criminal was caught
robbing the emperor’s palace. He was sentenced to twenty
days in jail. But the jail turned out to be no jail. There were
only white squares painted on the bare ground.
The robber was put into the centre of a painted square.
The only other person there was an old man with a long
beard in the next square.
The robber said: ‘What sort of jail is this?’
The old man said: ‘The worst in the world. If any
convict steps outside his lines, all the demons of hell come
and eat him up.’
The robber was terrified. He stayed inside the painted
lines for the full twenty days. At the end of that time, the
bearded man stepped out of his square.
The robber said: ‘Why are you not being eaten by all the
demons in hell?’
The old man said: ‘I am not a convict. I am the jailer.’
Blade of Grass, people think they react to what is around
them. But the truth is that they react to how other people
react to what is around them. The worst demons live inside
a ma—
Crash!
There was an ear-splitting roar of destruction and the world ended. Well, that’s what it sounded like. What actually happened was that the building shook so hard that CF Wong’s pen jumped in his hand, prematurely closing his elegant final line with an out-of-place dash. He jerked upright, suddenly alert.
Mut yeh si?
What’s happening? End of the world? Office falling down? Someone drop an anvil upstairs? He noticed that the tremor had pushed his cup of
gok fa
right to the edge of the table and he reached out to pull it back.
‘
Cheese
,’ said his assistant Joyce McQuinnie as her headphones rolled off the desk and bounced on the floor. ‘What was that? Like, an earthquake?’ She started chewing a fingernail.
‘
Aiyeeaa
!’ screamed his secretary Winnie Lim, emerging from a deep vegetative state and jumping out of her seat. ‘Each person save herself first.’ She scrambled around her desk and tottered out of the office. ‘If I killed I sue you,’ she warned her employer from the corridor. She click-clacked down the stairs in her high heels. Then the sound of her footsteps stopped: she was evidently having second thoughts. The brittle noise restarted as she clattered back up again. Bursting back through the office door like a small aftershock, she started rooting around in her drawer for something important she wanted to save: a frosted silver-pink lipstick that was not available in this country.
At that moment, a second huge thump sent even greater shock waves into the building, running through everything sentient and non-sentient in the room. It tipped Wong’s teacup right off the desk, and he watched it smash with a musical tinkle on the floor. The clear tea produced a stain on the threadbare carpet which was blackish, like blood. Why do liquids which are not black so often produce black stains? Wong stored the question away for a later session of pondering. Joyce’s iPod joined her headphones on the floor. She now had four fingers in her mouth.
Winnie squealed and click-clacked out again without her cosmetic treasure. ‘You owe me one lipstick compensation,’ she screeched.
‘I die first before I pay you,’ Wong shouted back.
‘Yes, I hope,’ Winnie said, cantering unsteadily down the stairs. ‘Today.’
Joyce, frozen in a state of indecision, stopped biting her fingers, took them out of her mouth and started nibbling her lower lip instead. Following Winnie’s lead, she began looking for prized possessions. She groped under the magazines on her desk to find her most treasured item: her mobile phone, or, more accurately, the digital address book inside it. Joyce was a slow-motion panicker. The more urgent things became, the more slowly she reacted. This did not seem to be a wise habit, nor was it a good argument for the survivalist theory of evolution, but that was just how she was made. She had no idea how to react in this situation. ‘We better, like, split the scene?’
Joyce was scared, but she was also just plain annoyed. She didn’t know whether to scream in fear or out of frustration. An earthquake! Could you credit it? It didn’t say anything about earthquakes in Lonely Planet. She had been feeling unnerved all week, finding Shanghai hard to adjust to after slick, English-speaking Singapore. Here, few people spoke English, most of the signage, shop names, menus and everything else was in Chinese only, and so much of life in the city seemed unreal. The buildings were straight out of
The
Jetsons
—or perhaps
Dune
: ancient and futuristic squeezed together side by side. One iconic Shanghai skyscraper looked like a giant pair of steel tweezers holding a ball. Several were globe shaped, and one was a globe halfway up a stick: a weird, giant Cantonese skewered fishball, with people scurrying around inside. The Park Hotel looked as if someone had built a replica Empire State Building and then stamped on it, collapsing all the floors together. Almost next to it was the Radisson, a tall white tower on which a huge UFO from a 1950s sci-fi flick had apparently landed. A pair of thin ropes hung from rods on the roof, as if the aliens were fishing.
And the culture seemed as weird as the architecture. Every day she encountered something new and strange and totally unbelievable. Was the world ready for the Hezhenin Heilongjiang salmon fish-skin suit? Or for taxis which had little English signs in them saying ‘No drunkards or psychos without guardians’? Should shops really be allowed to display dried pig faces—surely no one wanted to see those, let alone eat them? When she told her Shanghainese associates that she’d stopped eating meat, they replied suspiciously that vegetarianism was a cult traditionally associated with violence, gangsterism and the underworld. China was such a totally different planet to, well,
Earth
, that she felt dangerously adrift. The more she failed to make sense of her new home, the more she felt that fissures were spreading under her feet. And now Shanghai was becoming
literally
unstable. The bowels of the city were rocking and the same thing was happening to hers: she discovered she desperately wanted to go to the toilet.
Across the room, Wong did not reply, as he didn’t know what Joyce meant when she said they should ‘split the scene’. If this was an earthquake, the scene appeared to be splitting by itself.