The Shanghai Union of Industrial Mystics (2 page)

He was shaken, but only physically. He was not panicking: he was pondering. He had lived through earthquakes before. The sensation was not easily forgotten. It is impossible to convey the horror of an earthquake to someone who has never experienced one. It’s beyond frightening. The one thing you have always always
always
trusted turns into a lethal enemy. The ground, the firmament, the rocks and trees and mountains, the world, the steady foundation of everything you have ever known starts playing the fool, shimmying and tangoing around for minutes on end. It’s the physical equivalent of your mother telling you that she is not your real mother because you are actually the offspring of the Kanasi Lake Monster in Xinjiang province. Earthquakes touched the deepest, darkest part of one’s soul. And this was not doing that.

‘I think not an earthquake,’ Wong commented, mostly to himself, tugging at the straggly hairs on his chin. ‘I think demolition ball.’

He moved to the old sash window and pulled it open, not without a struggle. The chill air of a Shanghai April rushed into the room, as did the signature tune of the city: whining soprano drill-pieces harmonising atonally over the staccato rhythm of massed baritone jackhammers. And, oddly, a New York-style police siren was wailing a fugal tenor countermelody in the distance.

In the muddy wasteland in front of their small block, just off Henan Zhong Lu in an unfashionable bit of Huangpu district, stood several unfamiliar pieces of heavy machinery. He immediately spotted the culprit: a rusty green crane was idly swinging a wreckers’ ball into the rooms next to them on the fourth floor. It was instantly familiar yet unfamiliar. On any given day there are twenty-one thousand construction sites in Shanghai, and their office block had just become the twenty-one thousand and first. To be demolished by heavy equipment along with one’s premises was definitely not good feng shui—especially not today, the official opening day of CF Wong and Associates (Shanghai), a feng shui consultancy retained by a major international property development company, East Trade Industries Company Limited.

‘
Wei,
’ Wong called out to a pot-bellied man with a dirty yellow hardhat and a clipboard who appeared to be directing the operation from ground level. ‘You cannot demolish this building now. People are inside. People are here.’ He spoke in southern-accented Mandarin.

The foreman languidly lifted his megaphone and directed it at their window. ‘Get the people out quick-quick,’ he replied in the same language, pointing to his mud-spattered watch. ‘Have deadline.’

Joyce, joining her boss at the window, shook her head in disbelief, pleased to have finally summoned up enough courage to move a few metres. ‘This is so, like, totally not done,’ she said.

‘You have to tell us in advance,’ the feng shui master shouted down in Chinese to the uncaring men 12 metres below. ‘You must give us warning. You can’t just knock down the building.’

To their left, the man operating the crane swung the iron ball away from the building but remained waiting at the controls, while his senior colleague gave the condemned building’s occupants the full extent of the bad news: ‘Building is coming down. Today. Better you go.’

Seeing the two shocked faces remaining defiantly at the window, he continued: ‘We sent you a letter telling you that we would knock the building down on this date. But it got lost in the post.’ A nasty half-smile appeared on his face.

‘Oh.’ Wong thought about this for a moment. He translated for Joyce: ‘He says they sent us a letter. But it got lost in the post.’

The feng shui master’s eyes crinkled as he weighed his options. Hmm. So. Now he knew what was happening. This was a round of one of the most popular games in mainland China. It was called Bureaucracy, and you could find yourself in the middle of a life-and-death round at any time of the day or night, without warning: this was what made life in China so, well, interesting. Performing well in the game required great skill which could only be acquired through active play, as there were no books or teachers who could give you lessons. Fortunately, Wong had played it before, although not for a long time.

Joyce blinked. ‘Hang on a tick. He may have sent us a letter, but how does he know it got lost in the post?’

It was a logical point, but probably too predictable to be of any help. Wong decided to pursue it anyway, in the absence of other inspiration. ‘How do you know it got lost in the post?’ he shouted out of the window.

‘That sort of letter
usually
gets lost in the post,’ the demolition man replied, his unpleasant smile becoming a notch more evil as he delivered what he thought was a knockout punch.

Wong nodded. It was an excellent answer, and one that was hard to gainsay. But he had to try. If the man below could use fine points of uniquely mainland logic against them, he needed to follow suit. ‘Actually, it
didn’t
get lost in the post. We received it,’ he said, raising his chin and lowering his brow to show that he was not going to be a soft target.

It was the turn of the foreman’s brow to crinkle. This was not an answer he expected. It was not a move which had been attempted before by victims of Bureaucracy. He was not prepared for it. He lowered his megaphone to consult with the man next to him, a thin individual holding sheaves of paper plans. How should we reply?

Wong, seeing the growing discomfort on the men’s faces, realised he had snatched the initiative and had to hold on to it with all his knobbly fingers. ‘Yes, we
did
receive it. Also we replied to it, asking for extension of time. Also we received a reply
granting
us extension of time.’

The foreman lost it. He snarled in fury: ‘Ach! No, no,
no
. It
did
get lost in the post.’ ‘It did not.’

‘It did. It
must
have done. Because we never—’ He stopped dead. He knew that he had nearly given the game away, and he knew that his opponent knew it, and knew that he knew he knew. The man’s expression altered as he changed tack, becoming calmly belligerent. ‘Letter doesn’t matter,’ he shouted. ‘Whether lost or not. You get out. We have
permit
to do this.’

Permit. A trump card in China. But Wong had lived in Singapore. He knew all about permits. ‘You must show me three signed permits from the three relevant ministries,’ he replied calmly.

‘Ah. We have exemptions,’ the foreman said. Now it was clear that both sides were achieving a sort of equilibrium in the game. Thrust. Parry. Thrust.

‘Then you must show me the permit that exempts you from having the three signed permits.’

‘We are exempted from that one, too.’

Wong gritted his teeth. His enemy was highly skilled in the fighting techniques used in Advanced Hand-to-Hand Bureaucracy, Black Belt, fourth dan. What line to take now? Of course: chops, seals, stamps: nothing happened in China without pieces of paper bearing official splodges of pressed red ink. ‘But you can only be exempted from that with chopped paper. Show me your chops.’

The foreman lowered his megaphone to think. After a few seconds, he raised it and declared, less confidently: ‘I have chopped papers. They are back in the office.’

‘You go get them.’

‘Cannot. Too busy. No time.’

‘Then I will call my friend Mr Zhong who is head of security for the Secretary-General of the Communist Party of China and his men will come and explain to you why you need the right chops. I call him right now, okay?’

A sneer in reply: ‘If you are best friends with the immortals in the Politburo, why are you in this poky office in the cheapest street in town?’

‘I am humble feng shui master,’ said Wong, displaying his
lo pan
in the window. ‘But these days everyone needs feng shui—even the President.’ With his other hand he reached into his pocket and pulled out what looked like a business card, which he also held to the glass, although he knew it would be impossible to read at that distance. ‘One month ago I had a meeting with the most powerful people in this country.’ The card was actually a piece of junk mail urging him to get his plumbing from Wu The Number One Wonder Water Worker, but Wong spoke with conviction—because he had indeed advised the premier’s head of security on feng shui matters on a preparatory visit the previous month.

‘I don’t believe one word of this,’ said the foreman in a nervous voice that revealed that he did in fact believe some of it. He stared at the oriental compass and the card Wong was displaying and the cockiness in his face started to evaporate.

‘I call him now,’ said the feng shui master, putting down the
lo pan
, picking up a phone handset and starting to press the buttons.

There was a tense moment of frozen inactivity—one second that was somehow ten seconds long. ‘Stop,’ the foreman said, apparently speaking to both Wong and his colleague in the crane. ‘You got one hour to clear out. Then we pulverise this building to dust, and anyone inside with it. This project is for the
Central Military Affairs Commission
. You can’t stop it. You got one hour.’ The emphasis he gave to the title of the organisation he was name-dropping was clear evidence of the power he believed it carried.

The feng shui master quickly jerked his upper body back through the window like a turtle whose head had been struck. ‘Victory, but very minor,’ he said to his assistant. ‘Just got time to grab our stuff and go. One hour.’

Joyce was already dialling a number on the phone. ‘If we gotta go, we gotta
et cetera
. I’ll call Marker PDQ.’

‘Peedy-queue?’

‘Colloquial English term. Means pretty damn quick. He can help us move our stuff again.’

‘Yes,’ said Wong, sitting down and lowering his chin into his hands. ‘Call Marker, peedy-queue.’

It was a shame to have to leave. This office was quite good. His life was an endless search for spots where energy flowed in precisely the right ways that would make his life work. People these days often designed their offices with large windows and open-plan layouts which made ch’i energy move quickly in straight, fast streams: and then they were surprised when they felt tired and burnt out all the time. In contrast, older offices were often maze-like rabbit warrens of filing cabinets and old papers, where ch’i stagnated—and people were surprised that their businesses failed to thrive. What he looked for were environments which allowed the ch’i to flow and pool and meander, like a stream dipping in and out of small lagoons. And of course cheap rent. This office had both. But evidently luck was not with him this time. He must check his pillars of destiny to find out what had gone wrong.

Today had been a time of great
yin
—calm, cool, smooth, watery energy flowing around him, enabling him to do some useful work on his literary masterpiece: a book of educational, inspirational, ancient Chinese anecdotes called ‘Some Gleanings of Oriental Wisdom’. Yin was intellectual, yin was creative, yin focused the brain marvellously. And yet the yin day had been interrupted by a demolition ball—probably the single most
yang
object imaginable, other than a ballistic missile. Yang energy was forceful, hot, unyielding, heavy, and had hit his yin space with the force of a meteorite. How could such extreme contrasts exist? Then he recalled the ancient text which said that extreme yin was but one step from being yang, and extreme yang was but one degree from being yin. He quickly flicked through his book of notes and found the passage he wanted. It came from the writings of Chou Tun-yi in the eleventh century: ‘The Ultimate Power generates yang energy through movement. But what happens when movement reaches its extreme limit? It becomes tranquillity. Tranquillity increases. But what happens when tranquillity reaches its extreme limit? It becomes activity. Thus yang becomes yin and yin becomes yang. Each is the root of the other.’

But dreadful though it might be to say it, this was no time for mulling over classic Chinese philosophy. They had to move. Their brief time in this office was over. He saw that he may have won a small skirmish, but there was no way he would win the whole battle—not against the Central Military Affairs Commission. What a start to the week. There are few things more depressing for a feng shui master than to painstakingly arrange a set of premises to maximise good fortune only to find, on the day of completion, that it is about to be demolished—unless, of course, the client has paid for the examination in advance and will have to pay again, which didn’t apply in this case as he was his own client. His only hope would be to pass the additional costs upwards to the company paying his retainer.

Something else occurred to him: there had been a strange omen that morning that he had been struggling to understand. The local newspaper had carried a picture of a white elephant on the front page—no doubt imported into the city for some circus or other. The image had stuck in his mind: when one made a big change in one’s life, such as setting up a new business in a new country, one naturally took care to see what sort of omens presented themselves. And white elephants carried a host of different but important implications in various branches of Asian esoteric thought: Chinese, Thai, Indian, Vietnamese. They were connected to royalty, to longevity, to magic, to heaven, to all manner of things. But what did this mean to him, at this time, in this place?

He had even asked Joyce what a white elephant signified to a European (to Wong, like to most Chinese, all Westerners, whether from Australia or Canada or Argentina, were ‘Europeans’). ‘In Western culture a white elephant is a thing which is totally useless,’ she had replied. ‘It means, like, a silly mistake.’ So much for Western culture.

Setting the omen to one side, he had decided to write an ancient Chinese anecdote for his book, which would be his first work published in English. And it had been that classic tale which had been so rudely interrupted by a thunderous metal ball of yang
.