Yau tilted his head and read out the tagline, “‘Solutions for the afterlife.’ A bit dry, don’t you think?”
“I agree, but I thought it was important to convey stature. The word ‘solutions’ makes us seem like a trustworthy corporation,” Raymond replied.
But Yau didn’t appear convinced. “I don’t know if it’s going to work,” he said, shaking his head.
“I do,” Raymond said. The doubts from a few days earlier had been replaced by a fanatical confidence. “Our product appeals to two of the oldest fears known to man. Fear of death and fear of poverty. No other product does that. We price it attractively, too. Three thousand Hong Kong dollars. Eternal happiness for just three grand. Bargain. The thing is, we don’t even need to convince them totally. We just need to plant a seed of doubt: what if there is an afterlife economy? Is it worth missing out just for three grand? That’s all we need to do.”
Raymond turned to Lim Wei, who’d been silent so far. “What do you think?”
“I’m thinking of my divorce payments,” the burly ex-serviceman replied glumly.
Raymond smiled. “If this goes to plan, you’ll be able to afford a few more divorces.”
“One’s enough, thank you very much.”
“Mmm. I don’t know,” Yau said, twisting his mouth in a grimace. “I don’t know.”
“Stop saying you don’t know,” Raymond snapped. “A man of your intelligence should be able to express your opinion in a more articulate manner.”
“It feels like a long shot. That’s what I’m trying to say.”
Raymond rolled his eyes. “Do we really have to go through this?”
“What?” Yau asked, shrugging innocently.
“I know you too well. You’re going to start off by saying this is too much of a risk. I’ll say the risk is all mine—you’re investing nothing apart from sweat. Then you’ll say something about opportunity cost. I’ll dispute that by saying you’re brilliant, but can’t hold down a job. Like me, you can’t stand fools, especially when they happen to be our bosses. I’ll remind you that you’re running out of options. You’ll get offended and sulk for a bit. Then you’ll come around and say maybe a bonus could make you change your mind. You’ll mention a figure. We’ll go back and forth before we agree on something. I don’t have time to waste, so let’s just cut to the chase. Here’s my offer to you both: three months of your current pay as a signing bonus, plus two years’ salary in advance. This not only gives you both some security, but it’s also a sign of my confidence that the venture is going to succeed. And it’s on top of a seven-and-a-half-percent stake in the company. So tell me, do you want to come on board or return to your dead-end jobs?”
The two men exchanged wide-eyed glances.
“I want this up and running in three months,” Raymond said without waiting for an answer. “Lim Wei, your first task is to find branch space. It needs to be inside a shopping mall. Somewhere aspirational without being too upmarket. I’m thinking Tsim Sha Tsui.”
Then he turned to Yau. “The product will live or die on how we sell it. We need to formulate a sales strategy and start recruitment.”
“I don’t recall saying yes to him. Do you?” Yau asked Lim Wei.
AFTERLIFE DOLLARS SALES GUIDE
Compiled by Yau Mai Ching, Sales Director,
with input from Raymond Li, Chairman.
Property of Bank of Eternity. Not to be removed from premises.
Understanding—The first step is to study your customer and gauge their attitude toward Afterlife Dollars. Do they believe in the concept or are they skeptical? Most customers are likely to fall in the middle. Also, try to understand what brought them here, e.g., life-threatening illness, death of a loved one, near-death experience.
Confidence—Do Afterlife Dollars really exist? The answer depends on you. If you project confidence, then the customer will believe you. When you’re explaining the mythology, speak slowly and enunciate your words clearly. Your posture should be erect. Never hesitate. Never show doubt.
Knowledge—Know the product back to front. Each of you must become experts in Chinese afterlife mythology. Your customer is looking for answers. You have to convince them that you’ve got them.
Friendliness—Smile. Show empathy if the customer divulges any personal information. If you can establish why they’re here, you’ll be able to build a better rapport.
Patience—It’s easy to sell when someone’s positively predisposed. But remember, even skeptics, in some corner of their minds, want to believe. Otherwise they wouldn’t be here. Be patient. If a customer’s difficult to convince, just plant a seed of doubt and hope they come back another time.
Important: If a customer accuses you of fraud, remain calm and stick to your story. If they’re proving to be particularly difficult, notify the management team immediately.
12.
March 2002
FIVE TO EIGHT. THE TELLERS WERE AT THEIR seats: four heads and torsos framed by steel windows. The afterlife consultants, stationed in grey booths, sat erect and motionless, like terra-cotta warriors in red jackets.
Raymond inspected the rows of empty red chairs in the waiting area, on the lookout for anything that shouldn’t be there: lint, dirt, loose threads, scraps of paper. When he couldn’t find anything to fault, he fussed over his own appearance, smoothing his shirt, straightening his tie, brushing a lock of hair from his forehead. Then he paced near the entrance in an attempt to burn off some of his nervous energy.
In the corridor beyond the closed door, a group of tourists from the mainland wheeled large suitcases, presumably stocked with baby formula or some other crap. The bank was deep in the bowels of a shopping mall, sandwiched between a coffee shop and a ladies’ fashion store.
A few seconds later, he stopped pacing and turned around. His gaze swept the width of the branch: the reception, waiting area, teller counters, grey consultation booths, a white door marked “FOR STAFF ONLY” and behind it, an entire back office working away, hidden from view. For a moment, it was hard to believe this was actually happening because ten days earlier, it didn’t look like it would.
The first uniforms that arrived from Shenzhen were the wrong color. The software had crashed while testing; turned out it had more bugs than a bed in Chungking Mansions. And then nearly a third of the staff quit, citing bouts of conscience.
Yet they’d made it. The new uniforms were ready the previous night. Raymond collected a few speeding tickets driving across the border to Shenzhen to pick them up. The software was quickly patched, following threats of bodily harm from Lim Wei. And Yau managed to find fresh recruits and train them.
This pretty much summed up the story in the last three months. When one door shut, they had to find another. If there were no doors, they had to look for a window. And if there were no windows, well, they just had to find another way out.
Just coming this far felt like an achievement. The end of a grueling marathon. Except they were nowhere near the finish line. The finish line was fifty-three million dollars away. Fifty-three million dollars that meant the difference between life and death.
Raymond gulped and looked at his watch.
One minute.
Still time for another disaster. He stiffened as he imagined everything around him collapsing: the branch, the back office, the surrounding shops, the spiderweb of corridors in the mall. Everything knocked over like a film set bulldozed by a gust of wind. And standing in the midst of the debris, the short, dark silhouette of Wu, gleefully stroking his meat cleaver.
Fortunately, nothing of the sort occurred. The branch stood intact. As did the mall. And instead of Wu, Lim Wei’s barrel-chested figure appeared in his vision, dressed in a white shirt and olive-green trousers. Their eyes met. Lim Wei’s were dark and puffy. Raymond imagined his looked the same. Like two soldiers who’d shared many a cigarette in a trench, they conversed without saying a word.
A few seconds later, Lim Wei walked up to the double doors, stood o
n his toes and undid the bolts. Then he glanced over his shoulder at Raymond, who nodded.
The doors were thrown open.
Bank of Eternity was officially open for business.
13.
“TICKET NUMBER FIFTY-SEVEN TO COUNTER THREE.”
The electronic voice echoed in the branch. A man rose from his seat, prim, snowy hair, face a street map of wrinkles. He wore a blue business shirt, grey pants, and carried a briefcase as if he were going to work. Raymond stood behind his desk and greeted the man with a plastic smile.
“Welcome to Bank of Eternity. I’m Raymond Li. How can I help you today?”
“I saw your ad in the paper. I want to know what’s all this afterlife business.” The man’s voice was gruff and clipped. He sat in a rigid posture: back straight, arms close to the body, fingers splayed across the briefcase resting on his lap.
Raymond braced himself. The last two customers had been relatively easy, superstitious old folks who didn’t ask too many questions. But this one looked like a tough nut. He had the humorless face of a bureaucrat. A lifetime of barking orders, throwing his weight around. Long retired, but unable to let go.
“Of course. The answer is more familiar than you think. Do you burn money at ancestor funerals?” Raymond asked.
“But that’s just a ritual, is it not?”
“Of course. But aren’t rituals symbolic of things that actually exist? The money you burn might be fake, but the need for finances in the afterlife isn’t.”
“Why on earth do I need money when I’m dead?”
“When you die, it’s just your body that dies. Your soul lives on,” Raymond explained. “It splits in two: Po and Hun. The Po soul is associated with the body; it’s the yin: wet, heavy and earthly, whereas Hun is our mind and heart soul, the yang—fiery, dry and heavenly. Po goes to the Land of Yellow Springs of Kao-Li. It’s a transit area of sorts. A place for the Po soul to rest while the Hun soul is judged in the Court of the Yama King for your worldly actions.”
Raymond paused to check whether the man was with him. He noticed a tiny blemish in the man’s tidy appearance: a carefully concealed missing shirt button. No one to mend it for him. Divorcé or widower? More likely, the latter.
“Your first expense is a tribute that must be paid to the judges,” Raymond continued, as if reading from a teleprompter behind the man’s back. “Your second expense is payment for food, shelter and entertainment for the Po soul in the Land of Yellow Springs. And once Hun and Po are reunited, you become an immortal being residing in the Court of the Jade Emperor. This is the bit where you’re supposed to live happily ever after. But guess what? Here too, there are no free rides. There are no free rides anywhere. Not in this life or the next. But none of us know this when we die. So what do you do when you need money?”
The man shrugged. “Get a job?”
“Precisely. But that’s next to impossible with nearly fifty percent unemployment in the afterlife. You’re only left with two choices: roam the netherworld of hell for eternity, or come back to earth to earn money. But here’s the catch. Once you return, your memory’s wiped clean. You’ve no recollection of what happened up there. Thus, you’re trapped in an endless cycle of birth and rebirth.” Raymond’s voice was soft and guru-like, as if revealing the mysteries of the universe.
“Wait. Are you saying my good deeds count for nothing and my only option is to bribe the judges?” The man fumed.
“It’s not that they don’t count. But the standard of virtue required by the Yama King is absurdly high and these days, it’s impossible to keep away from bad karma. Take your shoes, for example. A cow was killed for those. Same for your briefcase. I bet your shirt was made in a sweatshop somewhere. You see what I mean? You’ve committed three bad deeds without even knowing it. Truth is, you need to be someone like Mother Teresa to meet the rigorous entry criteria. And let’s face it, most of us aren’t. We’re just regular human beings having to make difficult moral choices. And we don’t get it right all the time.”
The man narrowed his eyes and looked Raymond up and down. “How do you know all this? You don’t strike me as particularly spiritual.”
Raymond greeted the man’s skepticism with a knowing smile. “Because I’ve been there.”
“What do you mean, ‘been there’?”
“A near-death experience. I saw what’s on the other side.”
“And what did you see?”
“I saw heaven. I saw hell. You know what happens in hell? They don’t deep-fry you in vats of boiling oil. Oh no, they don’t. Nor do they torture you by peeling your skin from your flesh. You know what they do to you? Nothing. That’s right, nothing. They just build a wall and condemn you to one side of it. The side of filth and dire poverty. That’s hell for you. An eternity of a stomach that can never be filled, desires that can never be satisfied, a subhuman ghetto from which there’s no escape. Can you imagine that?”
The man flinched, clutching his chest as if he were in some kind of discomfort. The action opened up his shirt where the button was missing. Not much of a gap, but wide enough to expose a thick surgery scar. Bypass, Raymond guessed.
“So how much would I need?” the man asked.
“Not as much as you think. I’ll have to refer to the Karmic Calculator to give you an estimate—”
The man raised an eyebrow. “Karmic Calculator?”
“A tool to help us assess your financial requirements based on good and bad deeds committed in this life.”
“Ah! But you said a few minutes ago that didn’t really matter.” The man looked pleased at the prospect of catching Raymond out.
“I didn’t say that. Your worldly actions matter to the extent that they affect the tribute you pay Yama’s judges. It’s a sliding scale. The more serious your crimes, the more you have to pay.”
The man’s snowy brows arched with renewed skepticism. “Okay. All right.”
Raymond turned to his computer and opened the Karmic Calculator page: a list of yes-or-no questions, inspired by something he’d found on the internet.
“I’m going to ask you a few questions. Most of these won’t apply to you, but I’m just checking off a list. Have you killed anyone?” Raymond asked, eyes darting from the computer to the man.
“Good heavens, no.”
“Have you lied, stolen, cheated or appropriated property that doesn’t belong to you?”
“What kind of a question is that?” The man looked affronted. “In my thirty-seven years of service, I received no less than fourteen commendations for honesty and dedication.”
Raymond flashed an apologetic smile and moved to the next question.
“Have you knowingly and intentionally beaten, injured or caused physical harm to anyone?”
This time, the man hesitated. Only for a moment, but long enough for Raymond to see it. A stain of guilt in the eyes, which lowered and looked away. Suddenly, the person sitting across the desk in the blue shirt and grey pants was no stranger, even though the man looked nothing like Raymond’s father.
“No,” the man said. “No.”
Raymond held his gaze for a few seconds and turned to the computer. He avoided looking at the man through the remainder of the questions. When they were done, he clicked his mouse. The hourglass spun a few times, and then the computer displayed the results of the Karmic Audit in a red box.
“Your score is 7.7,” Raymond announced.
“Is that good?”
Raymond shrugged. “It’s average. For this, I recommend at least three hundred thousand Afterlife Dollars. At the current exchange rate of 0.01, that’ll work out to only three thousand Hong Kong dollars. Cheaper than a handbag next door.”
“Can I see it?”
“See what?”
“The money. Afterlife Dollars.”
Raymond shook his head. “Sorry, that’s not possible.”
The man scowled. “Why not?”
“It’s spirit money. You can’t see it, just like you can’t
see spirits.”
“Then how do I know it’s there?”
“You’ll get a statement of account each month.”
“But how do I know that money’s actually in my account and isn’t something you created on that computer?”
“I don’t have the power to create any money. I’m just a middleman. A money changer, if you will. But I can assure you all our deposits come with a guarantee—”
“Guarantee from who? God?” A drop of spittle flew from the corner of the man’s mouth.
Raymond flinched inside as he recognized the anger foaming in the face across the table. It was the sort that very quickly escalated to rage, making you pick up whatever was in front of you and hit whoever was in front of you.
“Our deposits are guaranteed by the Afterlife Central Bank,” Raymond said, displaying an artificial smile. But behind his mask, his patience was thinning.
“And who runs this bank?”
“Entities in the afterlife.”
“So you expect me to shell out three grand based on a guarantee from ghosts? Do you really think I’m that stupid? I know what you scoundrels are up to. Taking money from people, knowing full well they can’t come back for it when they’re dead. You think you’re going to get away with it, but I’m onto you—”
“I’m onto you, too.” Raymond leaned forward, looking the man straight in the eye, giving him that icy stare he’d learnt from Wu. The man fell back in his chair.
“I spoke to your wife the other day. She told me about your bypass while she was mending a shirt in Yama King’s palace. She was relieved to hear you survived the operation, because she was in no hurry to see you. You used to beat the crap out of her, right? Did the same to the kids. That’s why they don’t want to have anything to do with you. The only thing you cared about, your job, finished years ago. Now you’re clinging on to your briefcase and some meaningless certificates. You have no friends to play checkers with and there’s only so much TVB you can watch. That’s why you’re here. There are moments when you regret having that bypass operation, because it’s only prolonging this torture of emptiness. You pine for death. You think it’ll bring relief. I have news for you: it won’t. I knew everything about you before you walked in, but I still went ahead with this consultation. You want to know why? Because I believe everyone deserves a chance to be happy. Even a man like you. So as far as I’m concerned, you can take it or leave it. I don’t give a shit either way. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have other customers to attend to.”
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