by Linda Jaivin
Well, not exactly, I told him. But my boyfriend Tim and I had lived together in a place by ourselves for the first time that December, a cottage in Tasmania.
Hou chuckled, pleased with the answer.
‘Don’t forget when you go back to give my best to my brother-in-law,’ he said. I promised I would. Then I thought, hang on, Tim and I aren’t actually married. It didn’t even occur to me until later that Hou and I aren’t brother and sister either.
After lunch, a confident woman in her fifties, Ms Yang, arrived at the office for a fengshui consultation with a friend of hers, Mr Yu, a paunchy, worried-looking man in his late forties who was the manager of a finance company. Though they were clearly well-off, Hou was doing the reading gratis. Yanmei, who looked after their finances, gritted her teeth and whispered to me that she wished he wouldn’t give quite so much away for free.
Mr Yu laid two maps on Hou’s desk. One was of his house, the second a detailed blueprint of his office.
Sipping from bottles of flavoured mineral water accurately labelled in English ‘Near Water’, we watched as Hou took the map of the house, and overlaid on it a clear plastic sheet which was divided into octants. Printed on the plastic were the directions of the compass, and within the octants, hexagrams from the I Ching and Chinese characters indicating various family members and their rightful place, according to his unique system, within the home. He lined up north and south with the indications on the map, and taped it down.
‘Yanmei!’ he called out. ‘Photocopy!’
Recalling ‘Yuanzhen! Cigarette!’ I thought, some things never change.
‘Mr Yu’s divorced,’ Ms Yang offered helpfully as Yanmei returned with the photocopied document. ‘He wants to know if he’ll meet someone new.’
‘Not with the bed where it is,’ Hou replied, shaking his head. ‘Its position is bad for your career, too.’
Mr Yu, his pudgy face screwed up with concern, slowly rotated the blunt end of a toothpick in his ear as Hou told him where to shift his bed.
Picking up the office blueprint, Hou turned to the whiteboard hanging behind his desk and drew what looked like a tic-tac-toe board. In each of the outer squares, he scribbled a character: wind, mountain, water, sky, marsh, fire, thunder, earth. As he was about to explain the significance of these, the phone rang. ‘South Africans? Australians? No problem.’ He explained that some foreigners wanted a fengshui reading. Mr Yu and Ms Yang looked impressed.
‘You’ll translate,’ he said to me.
Yes, emperor.
There was more bad news for Mr Yu: he needed to move the Chairman of the Board out of his big office with a view into a windowless room in the back where the computing centre was. The point was not the windows but the position of the office. Mr Yu’s worry lines deepened on his face. The reception area was in the wrong place as well, Hou told him, illustrating the importance of the position of doors by launching into a riff on imperial history. The gates to the imperial walled capital of Beijing all had different functions: ambassadors entering by one, victorious troops returning from battle by another and so on. Hou’s face brightened as he spoke. Watching him, I realised that while Hou undoubtedly enjoyed helping people, as well as testing his theories in practical situations, the real joy in fengshui for him was in the history, the stories, the colour and light and art of it all, as well as the intellectual expeditions into the I Ching—not the repositioning of computer centres in company offices.
Mr Yu wiped his perspiring neck with a tissue.
Hou regaled his visitors with more fengshui anecdotes, about the late Communist Premier Zhou Enlai, about a businessman who grew fat because his desk was in the wrong place. Hou’s eyes flickered a warning at Mr Yu’s creeping paunch.
‘The Chairman of the Board,’ Mr Yu ventured with obvious discomfort, ‘might not be very pleased with the move, and they’d have to shift all the computers, and when you move reception there’s the question of all the phone lines…’
Hou smiled and rubbed his forearms with his palms. ‘I can only tell you about the fengshui,’ he said.
‘I’ll move the chairman,’ said Mr Yu. ‘I’ll shift reception.’
Mr Yu’s problems solved, or perhaps just beginning, Hou turned to Ms Yang. Ms Yang was concerned about her daughter. Educated overseas, she had a good job but didn’t have a steady boyfriend, didn’t want to think about marriage, and worst of all, insisted on asking men out on dates instead of waiting for them to call. Hou studied the map of her home and concluded her daughter’s bed was in the wrong place. I reckoned it might be the right place, but bit my tongue.
Later, after they left, Hou asked me to draw a map of my flat in Sydney. I was reluctant. My bed is heavy and I’ve got the biggest room, so I’d be disinclined to take any advice that involved shifting. I wasn’t entirely convinced by this fengshui business. But it would feel like tempting fate if he gave me advice and I ignored it. I told him I could sketch it out but didn’t have a clue as to which way was north. ‘Why not call your flatmate?’ Hou suggested. ‘Give him this fax number. He can draw up the map and fax it through.’
‘Okay, okay.’
Later, back at the hotel, I turned on the television only to see a news broadcast by mainland China’s Central Television. I had one of those profoundly disorienting moments. I recalled with a perverse nostalgia the good old days when even a photo of a Communist leader would be stamped with the words ‘bandit’. The old slogan was right: Commie bandits are capable of extensive infiltration.
The following morning, Hou picked me up in a cab and we went to a local television station. He had a regular segment on a pre-recorded Saturday night show with the self-mocking title of Guihua lianpian— ‘Ghost Stories’, a Chinese phrase signifying a pack of lies. In the green room, we were joined by a young singer with big eyes and a sweet, open face. His name was Tian Jiada. Tian arrived with a small entourage, including a publicist in shorts and platform-heeled silver running shoes. Someone explained to me that Tian was a hot new ‘idol’.
Tian gave Hou a copy of his new CD, passing it to him the traditional way, with two hands and a slight bow and calling him ‘Teacher Hou’. Hou received it with both hands. He read the titles of the songs, murmuring praise. At Tian’s age, Hou was writing songs about Cambodian refugees and Chinese political prisoners and his own struggle with cultural identity; Tian’s songs had titles like ‘I Miss You’ and ‘Hold My Hand’. I wondered if Tian knew whether Hou was anything more than the fengshui master who was about to tell him on air where to put his bed.
Soon it was time to appease whatever gods were in charge of television entertainment. In Taiwan, this was not Kerry Packer. The presenters, guests, producers, camera crew, assistants and I—everyone who was to enter the studio—gathered round an altar on which sat what appeared to me to be a fairly generic ceramic deity. No satellite dish ears or box eyes. The deity was surrounded on the altar by plates of bananas, watermelon, apples and star fruit heaped on pink plastic plates. Someone gave each of us a handful of burning joss sticks and, led by Hou, we bowed to each of the four directions, then stabbed the joss into a large round incense holder at the back of the altar and trooped onto the set.
Taiwan, for all its flash modernity, skyscrapers, coffee houses and dance clubs, was at heart a superstitious old peasant with a healthy regard for fortune-tellers and a ritual for every planting and every harvest. I began to understand why people there seemed so comfortable with Hou’s latest incarnation.
The studio set was a mock lounge room in what looked like a traditional Taiwan house, sort of Japanese, sort of Chinese, down to the suggestion of bamboo outside the latticed ‘window’. A thin line of smoke drifted up into the set from a small incense burner in the centre of the table.
What looked like organ pipes of varying length hung from two bars over the back and side of the stage. There were twelve of them, numbered with Roman numerals in texta. This was a musical instrument of Hou’s own invention, based on an interp
retation of the I Ching and Chinese calendar systems. While the crew scurried back and forth, attaching microphones, testing angles, Hou asked me my birthday and birth year again. He picked up a little baton and struck one of the pipes. ‘That,’ he informed me, ‘is your life note.’ He then struck another. ‘That’s this year. They’re in harmony. Things will go very well for you.’
Not so for Tian. His life note was out of tune with the year. His eyes and mouth made three big ‘O’s. Hou struck another, harmonising note. ‘There.’ Tian’s features fell back into place. ‘When you need to make a decision,’ Hou instructed Tian, ‘go to the piano and hit the note “so”. Things will be okay.’ Tian nodded, solemnly repeating ‘so’ under his breath.
Studying the young singer’s house plan, Hou informed Tian that he was sleeping in the wrong place. ‘You’re in the daughter’s place, not the son’s. It means that you will be like a girl, obedient and domestic.’
‘I do help a lot with the housework,’ offered Tian.
‘Ah,’ said Hou, ‘is that the business of the son or the daughter?’
I rolled my eyes.
Hou handed Tian a chunky perspex disk the size of a saucer in which was sandwiched a photocopy of a Taiwan coin. He told Tian to spin it six times, thinking of a question he wanted to ask the I Ching. Heads (yang), tails (yin), tails, tails, tails, tails. ‘What did you ask?’ inquired Hou, marking down the hexagram on a small whiteboard.
‘Will my new CD sell?’
‘Hmm,’ Hou replied. ‘Maybe not immediately. Think long-term.’
Tian looked crestfallen. His bed was in the wrong place, his notes were out of tune and according to the I Ching he wasn’t going to make the top ten.
‘You can’t do anything about the weather,’ Hou pronounced, ‘but you can get an umbrella. Fengshui is your umbrella. It is also a compass and petrol station.’
Finally, it was a wrap. As we stepped into the lift, one of the show’s presenters asked if I was writing an article on Hou. A book, I told her. She looked surprised. Hou informed her we’d known each other for eighteen years. ‘Wow,’ she said, ‘and have the two of you ever got it on?’ We laughed.
‘Nah,’ Hou said. ‘She was always too fat.’
‘Nah,’ I confirmed. ‘He was always too skinny.’
She shook her head. ‘What’s life worth living for?’ she asked as the lift doors closed.
Hou’s younger brother Junjun dropped by to say hello. He was studying for his exams in traditional medicine. ‘I’ve gone from repairing cars to repairing people,’ he told me. He had a girlfriend and life was good. Things hadn’t gone so well for their other brother, Dewei. His wife Fengying had gone mad. In the end, she slipped into a coma and died.
‘That’s awful.’ We sat in silence for a while. ‘And I was sorry to hear about your father, too.’
Junjun smiled sadly.
Hou Guobang was diagnosed with stomach cancer in 1997. The doctor said he needed an operation. Terrified, Hou Guobang gathered his stuff and ran away from hospital. Hou Dejian and the other three children tracked him down and did their best to persuade him to return, but by the time he agreed to surgery it was too late. ‘He was so afraid of death,’ Junjun said. He died on 13 February 1998, at the age of seventy-three.
Hou still slept into the afternoon. One morning, I went for a walk. Some things about Taipei were exactly the same as when I’d lived there twenty years earlier: the smells wafting from the ubiquitous snack carts offering egg-wrapped pancakes with chilli sauce, the aptly named ‘stinky beancurd’ and betelnut wrapped in vine leaves. Open-fronted restaurants served up steaming bowls of soy milk, sweet or savoury, as well as bubbling soups of puffed beancurd and stewed meats. A Buddha sat in the window of a shop selling motorcycle parts.
On a whim, I found my way over to the Jesuit production house where I’d worked with Jerry Martinson. Now in his mid-forties, and with strands of grey peppering his thick brown hair, Jerry was still a handsome priest—and one with a following some rock stars would envy. Though he no longer sang in the coffeehouses of Taipei, the English-language teaching programs that he starred in were broadcast not just throughout Taiwan but via the Star cable network to the mainland as well, where in a bow to Communist sensitivities about Vatican ‘agents’, he told me that ‘they know me as “Uncle Jerry”’. He grinned.
I asked him if he ever picked up his guitar. ‘Not that often,’ he sighed. He was sure he’d read a mention of Eat Me in Eureka Street, a Jesuit publication. ‘It’s a cookbook, isn’t it?’
He guffawed when I explained. He gave me a copy of his memoirs, which he’d written in Chinese. The title translated as A Priest Who Doesn’t Seem Like a Priest. I stayed up late that night reading with total fascination how he experienced and then overcame a sexual attraction to a female friend.
The news that evening revealed that the Chinese Communists had built an exact replica, to size, of Taichung’s Chingkuankang Military Airport somewhere in the barren province of Gansu, presumably for bombing practice. A French SPOT II satellite had taken photos of this and passed them on to the Taiwan government. The PLA also had deployed more than two hundred M-class missiles in such a way that they were capable of hitting all points on Taiwan. The mainland was patently uncomfortable with Taiwan’s new democracy; every election in which there were candidates advocating independence, or an end to a ‘one-China’ way of thinking, brought fresh threats.
On Wednesday, Hou took a call from a woman who had been scammed out of half a million Taiwan dollars (US$15,250). Should she get gangsters to beat up the men who conned her? She wanted him to consult the I Ching for her. She threw coins, telling Hou over the phone what the results were. He studied the resulting hexagram. ‘Act rationally,’ he advised her. ‘Under no circumstances hire gangsters. Pay your debts slowly. Sleep in a protective position.’ He then worked through a number of options for handling the situation with her.
‘I hate taking money from people like that,’ he told me afterwards. ‘They’re all people with problems. And sometimes their problems are very serious.’
Hou sighed. He scribbled some numbers on a piece of paper: 1919 and 1989, the dates of China’s two most tumultuous student movements, the May Fourth Movement of 1919 and the Tiananmen protests. ‘Have you noticed that history moves in seventy-year cycles?’ he asked.
‘I’m not so sure about that,’ I said. I subtracted seventy from 1919. We looked up 1849 in a historical almanac that Hou pulled from the shelf behind him. The Taiping Rebellion, which was to shake the Qing empire and leave twenty million people dead, could be said to have begun in that year.
‘See?’ he said, excited.
I subtracted seventy from 1849, and seventy from the next date and so on till I reached 1429. We checked every year in the almanac. Two others could be said to fit the pattern of upheaval, one, marked by some major earthquakes, could match it at a stretch, and the rest failed the test.
‘Nup,’ I concluded. ‘Doesn’t hold water.’
‘Right,’ Hou agreed, slightly disappointed, but we’d both enjoyed the exercise. ‘I like thinking about abstract issues, big issues,’ he said. ‘I’m a hunter, I like big game. I can’t stand sitting around picking strawberries, which is what running a business is all about. Yanmei’s great at picking strawberries, she’s not interested in the hunt at all. She’s my perfect complement. And she’s teaching me how to love. She’s teaching me how to listen.’
As he spoke, I felt an enormous fondness for Yanmei.
Later, I put on the Rock n Roll Babes from Outer Space CD I’d made with the Melbourne band Hum from a pub show we’d created based on my second novel. Hou listened, grinning and shaking his head. It was a weird and somehow satisfying feeling, playing my CD to Hou. It had always been the other way around.
He told me that he still writes music, though rarely lyrics. ‘The frequency of my “A” is lower by a tiny fraction from the standard. It’s based on the I Ching, ancient tuning instruments and the
four seasons.’
On Thursday night, I accompanied Hou to another television station, this one for a live broadcast. The following night was the Taiwan equivalent of the Grammies, and he’d been invited onto an entertainment news show to predict the winners. Hou was so out of the pop loop that he didn’t even know who most of the nominees were. Yanmei briefed him before we left. She also cautioned him not to be too definite with his answers, as the winners would be announced the following night.
On the set, Hou showed his giant coin to the presenters and explained that the results would depend very much on their intuition, their ‘sixth sense’. The female presenter spun the coin and the male one slapped it down. They did this six times. The resulting hexagram signified running into a waterfall while climbing a mountain. ‘Which of the nominees in this category has overcome quite a few obstacles, and come at his career from a side path?’ he asked. They thought about it a second and named one. Working through all the categories, they came up with a list. Hou was pleased the next night when most of the predictions came true.
One day, I took a cab to one of the big hotels to meet my ‘gang of four’ as well as some of the old crowd from that time. Fang was CEO of a semi-conductor company, and Jesse, who now preferred to be called T. S., a lawyer in an American firm’s Taiwan office. Lawrence was a high-profile lawyer.
The cab driver, a Taiwanese man in his fifties, gestured at the streets. ‘Taiwan is a marvellous place, isn’t it?’ he said, more a statement than a question.
I nodded politely.
‘That’s because we Taiwanese are so clever,’ he said, pleased with my assent. ‘We’re courteous, brave, and hardworking. We’re completely unlike the Chinese, who are corrupt, selfish, stupid and conservative.’
‘But aren’t Taiwanese also Chinese?’ I asked, a faux-innocent.
‘No!’ he replied, slamming on the brakes at a red light. ‘I’m not Chinese. Taiwanese aren’t Chinese. I hate the Chinese.’