The Shanghai Union of Industrial Mystics

by Nury Vittachi

  So Joyce had arranged for a restaurant to cater a meal for them on Shang Dan’s boat, which was making leisurely circuits of the prettier parts of the Huangpu River, looking at The Bund and the futuristic Lujiazui district opposite. It was a pleasant evening, with a purple-pink sunset and a cool breeze. As the sun set, the water was becoming inky black.

  Sinha was next to be seated, and was delighted to find that the place left for him had a view of the twinkling lights on the east side of the river.

  ‘You do realise, of course, that the people behind all this—’ Sinha vaguely waved his hand to encompass The Bund and the line of mansions and the river and then the whole of Shanghai—‘were the Indians?’

  No one rose to take the bait, most of them being too busy inhaling the fumes which had started pouring from the galley: the unmistakably and uniquely Shanghainese smell of authentic jingcong rousi jia bing: soy pork and scallion pancakes.

  Eventually, Marker Cai looked over and said: ‘The Indians? Not the British?’

  Joyce said: ‘Not the Chinese?’

  Sinha was pleased to have successfully engineered an opportunity to share his wide knowledge of Asian history.

  ‘Emperor Doaguang, in 1823, took a census and discovered that vast amounts of the silver of Chinese people was going to pay for Indian opium, imported by Western business people. The Chinese arrested British merchants and threw three million pounds of opium into the sea. Various battles followed, and the British took Hong Kong in 1841 and Shanghai in 1842. Now before the days of tugboat steamers, coolies—a Hindi word—got into the habit pulling boats and barges of rice along the river just here.’

  ‘Coolies? You mean people pulled boats?’

  ‘Yes. It’s amazing what a human being—’

  ‘Can move,’ interrupts Joyce. ‘It’s all to do with momentum. Yes, we discovered that yesterday.’ She glanced over at Cai, who smiled and moved a micron closer, so that their elbows were touching.

  ‘Anyway, coolies pulled barges along the swampy banks of the Huangpu River. The steps they took in the mud had to be reinforced and eventually became what’s known as a towpath. This path was called the band, which is another Hindi word, meaning ‘embankment’. The British, struggling with the precise pronunciation of Indian vowels, recorded it on maps as The Bund. The Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank was built on it in 1865 and the former Indian towpath became one of the most famous streets in the world.’

  Tonight there were seven diners. Madame Xu Chong-Li was not present. She had sent her apologies. She was busy with a series of unexpected events, including a visit from some long-lost relations and a minor surgical operation she’d booked and forgotten—a bit embarrassing for a fortune teller. But Shang Dan had brought some friends with him: a woman who was an expert in ming shu, or Chinese astrology, and a specialist in the chien tung, which was the use of yarrow sticks for divination. Cai was present, not as a removal man, nor as Joyce’s official boyfriend, which he wasn’t yet, but as a weigher of bones.

  On the way to the harbour, the two young people had purchased a pile of newspapers in English and Chinese, and were whiling away the time before the food was ready going through them to see how the incredible events of the past two days had been covered.

  There was not a word about any of them. The newspapers were all filled with bland pronouncements about government departments releasing positive statistics. Eventually, Marker found a line in one of the Chinese language newspapers which said: ‘Due to time constraints, a scheduled visit by the President and the visiting American leader to the Shanghai Grand Theatre last night was cancelled.’

  ‘Is that all?’ Joyce asked. ‘Nothing about mad bombers or helicopters or kidnapped businessmen or anything?’

  Cai shook his head. ‘Joy-Si, one day you will learn. All the interesting things that happen in China never get into the newspapers.’

  At that moment, the waiting staff emerged from the junk’s galley and started to place pungent, steaming dishes on the table.

  Although this was the official founding dinner of the Shanghai Union of Industrial Mystics, the evening was proceeding rather gloomily. The main reason for this seemed to be that Wong, who usually came to life during events that include large amounts of exotic Chinese food, was in a state of sullen, silent misery.

  Shang decided to probe the sore spot. ‘It’s the elephant business, isn’t it, Wong? You feel destiny placed a white elephant into your hands and you failed to save its life, therefore your life is cursed?’

  The feng shui master nodded. ‘I am a living dead man,’ he said. ‘My life is over.’

  Joyce looked up. She hoped that a man of authority such as Shang could persuade her boss that it might not be as bad as it seemed. ‘He’s wrong, isn’t he, Mr Shang? His life isn’t really over, is it?’

  Shang nodded. ‘Oh yes, he’s quite right. It is very bad fortune indeed. A genuine white elephant is one of the most ancient signs of divine power and longevity in Chinese tradition—and Vietnamese and Indian and Thai and so on. Allow harm to come to a white elephant and—well, you never get over it. Wong is right: he is a living dead man.’

  ‘Oh.’ Joyce didn’t know how to react to this, so lapsed into silence.

  The Shanghainese god of wealth continued: ‘There are five elements, as you know: earth, metal, water, wood and fire. Modern weapons are usually categorised as belonging to metal, although they can include other physical elements in them. In the cycle of destruction, fire leads to metal, and metal leads to wood—Mr Wong is represented by wood in this instance. So with fire and metal and wood in such a harmful conjunction, it was inevitable that a destructive thing happened.’

  Joyce tried to remember the feng shui precepts she had learned. ‘But you can mitigate things, can’t you? Metal energy can be mitigated by water, right?’

  ‘Yes, my child.’

  ‘So would water mitigate it in this case? It happened on the coast.’

  Shang Dan sadly shook his head. ‘Not really. Dead white elephants, huge bombs: these are massive negative forces. You can’t mitigate them unless you had an unbelievably large amount of water directly between you and them.’

  Joyce thought for a moment. ‘How much?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘How much? How much water? A litre, a hundred litres, a swimming pool?’

  ‘A very large amount indeed. A lake,’ Shang said.

  At this point, Sinha interrupted. ‘I see what Joyce is getting at. How about an ocean? If I understand the events of yesterday correctly, the bomb inside the white elephant blew up after the unfortunate pachyderm had fallen more or less to the bottom of the East China Sea, correct?’

  ‘Yes,’ Joyce said. ‘The bottom of the East China Sea. I was there. Splash. Down he went.’

  ‘So there really was a very vast amount of water indeed between the elephant and Wong. More than a lakeful.’

  Shang picked at his beard, intrigued.

  ‘In fact, I would say millions of cubic metres of water,’ Sinha continued. ‘Millions and millions.’

  ‘An ocean of water,’ Joyce said.

  ‘The meeting place of the Changjiang and the Pacific Ocean,’ Cai said.

  Shang Dan thought. He stroked his long white beard and screwed up his lips.

  Wong looked up at him.

  Shang Dan made his pronouncement. ‘That’s very interesting. I would say this. If the bomb went off and the white elephant died right at the bottom of the sea, and there were a million gallons of water between it and Mr Wong, then we are looking at a very different cycle indeed. Instead of a fire-to-metal-to-wood cycle, which is very destructive, we have a metal-to-water-to-wood cycle, which is very positive. It is one of the most positive cycles you can have.’

  This comment was followed by a moment’s stunned silence. It was broken by Joyce, who said simply: ‘Yay.’

  Marker Cai’s heart leapt to see her smile. The two young people leaned further into each other.

  ‘So
that’s that, then,’ said Sinha.

  ‘It may well be that if you look at the circumstances closely enough, the forces are actually in your favour,’ Shang Dan said, indicating Joyce and her boss with his glass.

  Everyone turned to look at Wong.

  ‘Let’s eat,’ the feng shui master said, stabbing his chopsticks into a dish of crispy squirrel fish in garlic sauce. ‘I’m hungry.’

  The Acting Special Agent in Charge was on the phone.

  ‘Commander Zhang? This is Dooley here. I guess you kin call me Tom. I mean, that’s ma first name, I mean ma personal name. Ah’m gonna be leaving Shanghai in a few days, and ah just wondered if you might, I mean, if it would be okay if we had one last sorta debriefing, if you know what ah mean? Just talk things through.’

  ‘At your office or mine, Agent Dooley?’

  ‘Weel, I thought we cud go to a restaurant or something, git a coffee, you know—I’m buying, heh-heh. Mebbe git something to eat afterwards? There’s this place called M on The Bund which is supposed to be nice. Say, five thirty?’

  ‘Okay. Whoever gets there first can find a nice table. I know my way around and I’ll be on my bicycle so it will almost definitely be me.’

  ‘Yeah. You’re probably right.’

  POTUS was on the phone to the President of China.

  ‘You know that time we skipped the official cultural performance doodad because the SS was going nuts—as they do—and we played rummy and blackjack in my Topchop— that’s the official presidential helicopteral vehicle—that’s what they call it— I mean like the official terminologogical term— anyway, we played cards down on the beach in where was it? The Yankee River?’

  ‘In a bay on a small island in the Yangtze River Estuary. I remember.’

  ‘Let’s do that every time. No offence to you or to the small minority of people for whom the culture thing is important, which includes me, but I would much rather do that again than watch the cultural stuff, which has no interest in me, if you see what I mean. It’s just not at the tip of my propaganda.’

  ‘I agree.’

  ‘But that’s not what I was calling about. You gonna be at the G8 in July?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good. Me too. You gotta give me a chance to win all that stuff back. You play a slow hand, you son of a Satan, you. Okay?’

  ‘You’re on.’

  People who understand others are wise.

  People who understand themselves are enlightened.

  People who overcome others need force.

  People who overcome themselves need strength.

  People who are content are wealthy.

  People who persevere have will-power.

  People who do not lose their centre endure.

  People who die but maintain their power live eternally.

  Lao-tze, from The Dai De Jing, 6th century BC,

  quoted in ‘Some Gleanings of Oriental Wisdom’

  by CF Wong.

  NURY VITTACHI did not win the Vogel for his first novel, was not shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize with his subsequent books, and has never been nominated for a Nobel Prize for Literature. ‘I hope to make it a clean sweep by not winning the Pulitzer next year,’ the Hong Kong–based novelist said.