Wong stared. Flames were springing from soaked rags that had been laid in a line across the front door of the flat.
The feng shui master watched with horror as a viscous liquid gently rolled across the floor from the front door. Dr Leibler tripped awkwardly backwards on his heavy feet. It was evident that just minutes earlier someone had sloshed the contents of a container of some sort of highly flammable oil under the gap at the front door and then lit rags placed in the small opening.
As they watched, the growing puddle suddenly burst into flame, slowly rolling toward them like lava. The air in the room was instantly scorching.
‘Mummeeee!’ Melody screamed, coming into the room and leaping into her mother’s arms.
Cady Tsai-Leibler squealed even more loudly than her daughter and raced back towards the balcony, awkwardly clutching the tall child with both hands.
Dr Leibler cursed again and stepped backwards, away from the flames. ‘Where’s the fire extinguisher?’ he barked.
‘Not have,’ his wife shouted, reverting back to Chinglish in her panic. ‘Wait. Outside is one.’
There was no way they could get anywhere near the front door, let alone to the corridor outside. ‘Call the fire service,’ her husband shouted. ‘Then go out the back door. I’ll see if I can find a bucket or something.’ He raced into the kitchen and threw open all the cabinet doors.
‘Phone fire service,’ Mrs Tsai-Leibler said to herself, dropping the child at her feet and reaching for the phone on a side table. It didn’t work. Then she was breathlessly scrabbling through her handbag for her mobile. She jabbed at the numbers with frightened fingers and had to clear the tiny screen twice to try again. Eventually getting an answer, she barked out the address. ‘Hurry, hurry!’ she said. ‘We don’t have much time.’
She turned her face, suddenly tear stained, to the feng shui master. ‘Ho marfan! I think they can’t come in time. No road through front garden, only small path. We must get out of the window or something. Aiyeeaah!’
But the windows were barred. The only open space was the balcony—but being on the third story, it would be too high to jump from.
Madeline Tsai, the young lodger, wandered in a slightly dazed way into the room. Clearly she had been asleep, despite the fact that it was almost lunchtime.
‘House is on fire,’ Cady shrieked.
Her cousin, who appeared to be in her late teens, seemed oddly unperturbed by the blaze around her. She calmly strolled towards the door, approaching within a metre of the flames, and picked up her shoulder bag.
Drug taker, Wong decided. Her skin was dry and dehydrated like that of an ecstasy user.
Then Dr Leibler noisily returned to the main room, his heavy form bumping against the side of the kitchen door. ‘There’s nothing to use to fight the fire with. We’ll all go out through the back door.’ He looked at his wife and child, both frozen with terror. He added, in a shout: ‘Do you hear me? NOW.’
Cady Tsai-Leibler and C F Wong looked at each other. Neither wanted to deliver the bad news to the angry man in front of them. The Hong Kong woman spoke first: ‘This type of old flat doesn’t have back door. You didn’t notice?’
Her husband reacted unexpectedly well. He spoke calmly: ‘Okay. Get your valuables together. We’ll go over the balcony when the fire service arrives.’
She raced around the room, putting her mobile phone in a bag that she slipped over one shoulder and then started looking for her shoes.
‘My bag my bag my bag!’ shouted Melody, who had been ordered to stand on the balcony. The child was jumping up and down. She pointed to the corner of the room, where a pink backpack with a Winnie The Pooh motif stood against a wall.
Her mother, braving the flames, picked it up and threw it onto the balcony. The child immediately unzipped the top and looked bereft. ‘My Miffy pencil case isn’t inside.’
‘Just GO!’ her father shouted.
‘I want my Miffy pencil caaaaaase,’ she squealed, suddenly bursting into tears. ‘I want it.’
Her mother saw the missing item under a chair. ‘Here,’ she shouted, throwing it to her.
The child squeezed it to her chest, and then started crying.
‘I wanna go home,’ she bawled.
Madeleine Tsai stood watching the chaos from the balcony. ‘Aiyeeaah,’ she breathed. She appeared to be gradually waking up to what was going on.
‘Do something, Mr Wong!’ Mrs Tsai-Leibler screamed, as the heat became more intense.
‘I am, I am,’ said Wong. He was scrabbling through the mess on the table. ‘I try to find my papers.’
‘Forget papers. Gau meng! Save you. Save us.’
She raced into the bedroom. Seconds later, she raced out again, her arms full of silks. She raced to a window and threw them over the balcony.
‘You see Hello Kitty clutch purse somewhere?’
‘Forget the child’s stupid things,’ her husband shouted.
‘Not Melody’s,’ said Mrs Tsai-Leibler. ‘It’s mine.’
‘Geez,’ the American said.
‘And my DKNY top. Can’t find it.’
The flames advanced steadily across the living room.
‘Must jump out,’ she shrieked.
‘No,’ said Wong. ‘You hurt yourself. Stay.’
‘We’ll be fried if we stay,’ said her husband.
Right on cue, there was a roar as the chair nearest the front door ignited, and flames started to lick at a small rug in the centre of the room.
‘Where’s my digital camera?’ Gibson Leibler thundered.
‘Where my earring box?’ his wife gushed.
‘My computer. We need to save the hard disk. And my laptop. Where’s my laptop?’
‘My Cartier panther brooch.’
‘Where the hell is my Palm Pilot?’
The couple stared at each other.
‘Must find my papers,’ said Wong. He was sure he had put them on the dining table, but they had vanished.
‘Forget the papers,’ said Mrs Tsai-Leibler. ‘Get important stuff.’ Then a thought seemed to occur to her. She turned to Wong: ‘I moved them to that chair so I could put the teapot on the table.’
‘The man’s mad,’ said Dr Leibler, who had absently picked up a hammer to fight the fire with, before finding himself unable to think of anything to do with it.
Wong found his papers on a chair. He sat down and started flicking through them one by one.
They were running out of time. Dr Leibler was formulating a plan. ‘The old guy’ll jump down first to the balcony below,’ he said, pointing to the feng shui master. ‘Then you hold on to Melly and I’ll gently lower you guys to the flat below.’
He looked at the feng shui master’s skeletal arms and changed his mind. ‘He won’t be able to catch you. Maybe I should jump down and catch you instead. Or Madeleine. One of you could lower Melly first. Do you think you could handle the weight of this child, Mr Wong? Maybe Madeleine should go first.’
‘Shh!’ said Wong. ‘I am reading,’ The flames roared again as Mrs Tsai-Leibler re-opened the french windows and joined her child, having found her favourite DKNY top. The heat was blistering.
Gibson Leibler stared at Wong. ‘Don’t you understand what is happening? We are going to die unless we get out of this flat immediately. We are going to DIE. Dying is very bad feng shui I am sure, Mr Wong.’
Wong turned a piece of paper over and smiled. ‘Found,’ he said.
He walked into the heart of the burning living room with the paper in his left hand. ‘This apartment qualifies as a K’un dwelling because it faces south-west. But its water sources come from the south,’ he shouted over the crackling of the flames. ‘Just here, in fact.’
‘Mad,’ said Dr Leibler again. ‘Totally.’
The feng shui master pointed to the wall and mumbled some numbers to himself in Cantonese, working out that the spot he wanted was five feet to the left of the corner of the room: ‘Ng chek jor.
’ Then he picked
up the hammer that the dental surgeon had abandoned. He swung it at what appeared to be a protruding joist running between the wall and the ceiling. The blow had almost no effect. He swung again, this time cracking the salmon gloss with a thud. A third, heavier swing caused several inches of red undercoat and white plaster to fall away. A fourth produced the sound of metal on plastic. The fifth produced a slight hiss as the hammer fractured a pipe. The sixth cracked open the pipe, producing a shower of water that spurted from the wall soaking Wong. The fire on the carpet behind them hissed as a spray of water droplets hit the flames.
Wong continued to hammer at the pipe until a torrent was gushing into the centre of the floor.
Monday:
Crimes
committed by
dead people
Recently, 3 000 years ago, the floating people of old China lodged on the water and dined on the wind.
Each family lived on a platform in a bay.When a boy grew up he would stand at the edge of his platform and call. The girl he loved would call back.
Then he would build a bridge from his platform to hers.
If his family liked the girl they would help build the bridge. Their homes would be joined and the two families would become one.
One day a floating boy heard a whisper from over the horizon. It was a girl from far away. They called to each other a long time. They decided to get married.
His family said no. She belonged to a different people and was too far away.
But the boy was determined. He started to build a bridge to the horizon. He dug deep into the seabed to make a strong foundation.
His family did not help. They said the tradition of marrying neighbours gave strength to the community.They called his bridge ‘the whisper bridge’. They told him to stop.
But he did not listen. He built the bridge for eight years.
When it was complete he met the girl who whispered from the horizon and they were married on the great bridge.
The following year, a great storm blew up. It destroyed the platform homes of the floating people.
But the whisper bridge remained.
And so it is with us, Blade of Grass. That which takes a long time to build, takes a long time to destroy.To do what cannot be done is difficult, but once it is done, it cannot be undone. To make sure an old tradition retains its power, change it.
From ‘Some Gleanings of Oriental Wisdom’
by CF Wong, part 342
CF Wong blew on the paper to dry the ink. He was at his desk, writing in his journal. The chapter on which he was working was a series of anecdotes from the sages on the subject of ingenious solutions to unusual problems. From time to time, he looked up and stared out of the window. It was morning in the Singapore financial district.
During rush hour the constant background grumble from the vehicles on Church Street and Cross Street turned into a pained roar. Double-decker buses would grind their engines as they lumbered along, consuming the road in jerky, stop-start mouthfuls. Many vehicles existed in a permanently overheated state, whirring noises from their automatic cooling systems adding a high-pitched shriek to the massed mechanical choir. Taxis, attempting to cut from lane to lane, would inevitably find themselves wedged over dividing lines, their engines shivering and drivers yawning.
Providing contrast was a smattering of private cars, inevitably German, ferrying wealthier executives to their offices. The luxuriousness of these late-model limousines contrasted dramatically with the austerity of the other main group of minority road users: loose-skinned elderly men in dirty singlets cycling with baskets of flapping fish for factory canteen lunches.
Every two minutes or so, there was a periodic rise in the sound level as green traffic lights unleashed more vehicles from side roads into the already jammed main thoroughfare. The racket would grow into a hellish cacophony that made pedestrian conversation difficult. Occasionally, there would be a break in the rhythm as the ticka-ticka-ticka sound of pedestrian signals added a light counterpoint to the general low-pitched rumble of the road.
The structure of the central business district of Singapore, as a series of steep glass canyons, meant that the morning arrived in waves. Some junctions quickly turned into suntraps, bathed in bright, yellow heat, while the areas around them remained misty, receiving only diffused light from pale stone-and-glass buildings. The taller mirror-walled skyscrapers, backlit by the strengthening day, would be visible only as gray silhouettes until at least ten o’clock. That was the time when most people had arrived at their offices, and peace, relatively speaking, returned to the streets of the Lion City.
During the time of the northern Song Dynasty, 960 to 1279, two royal families fought over property. Each had a share of a great inheritance.
One of the princes went to Prime Minister Zhang Qixian and said: ‘My brother’s share is bigger than mine. I have a list of what I have. It proves what I am saying is true.
’ But the man’s brother also went to Prime Minister Zhang Qixian. He said: ‘The opposite is true. My brother’s proportion is bigger than mine. I have a list of my possessions. It proves what I am saying is true.
’ Zhang Qixian took the two lists to examine and compare.
The fighting brothers waited and watched.
Then Zhang scratched out the names at the bottom of each scroll. He replaced each name with the name of the other brother.
He gave the lists back. He said to the first brother: ‘Now you have more than your brother.’ And he said to the second brother: ‘And you have more than yours.
’ If you can win a battle by accepting your enemy’s arrows, Blade of Grass, your victory will be untouchable from any side.
From ‘Some Gleanings of Oriental Wisdom’
by CF Wong, part 343
He wrote feverishly, knowing that moments of creative tranquility within the Telok Ayer Street offices of CF Wong & Associates were rare and inevitably fleeting. Glancing at his watch, he saw that it was one minute past ten o’clock. He had been working quietly alone for almost three hours. How kind the gods were, to bless him with staff who were always late! Long may their bad habits continue. He clapped his hands together and performed a short, grateful bow in the direction of the nearest temple, which was a few hundred metres south of his office. While not overtly religious, Wong had a deep-rooted habit of performing lip-service to the Taoist rituals he had learned during his childhood in Baiwan, a village in Guangdong Province, China. He could not pass a temple, even on the other side of the road, without a quick bow and a cursory wave of his closed palm.
Ten o’clock! He looked out of the window for a moment and blinked. One of these days, he thought, his receptionist-secretary-clerk-office administrator Winnie Lim might miss the entire morning—or not turn up at all. Perhaps she would go—what was the phrase in English? A wol? Or was that a type of bird?
Then there was the nightmarish intern that his main client, Mr Pun, had forced on him a few weeks ago. He would never forget the horrific moment a gawky young female mat salleh had appeared in his office speaking a bizarre and incomprehensible sub-dialect of English. ‘My dad’s like “My mate Mr Pun’s gotta real feng shooee master and you can work for him,” and I’m like “Wow”,’ she had said.
It had taken him a long time to establish any sort of proper communication with Joyce McQuinnie, who came from British-Australian parentage but seemed to speak only a strange language called ‘Teenager’. An early breakthrough had been when he had realised that her word for yes was ‘Whatever’. More recently, he had worked out that her term for no was ‘As if.’
On arrival at Telok Ayer Street, her first action had been to re-arrange her desk and chair to get more light. Who but the most insensitive person would unilaterally move the furniture in a feng shui master’s office? From then on, she spent her days talking in an unknown tongue to her friends, and laughing the way that only men were supposed to laugh. He found it almost impossible to think let alone work with McQuinnie in the office.
Worst of all, she insisted on accompanying him on many of his assignments, where her loud and garish presence—she wore shapeless clothes and too much jewellery—would unsettle his clients. A few brave ones tried to converse with her. A developer named Tak had politely asked her about how her studies had been going. She had replied: ‘Oh, they used to be like okay and I got through my Os but dad kept moving and everything went like pear-shaped, totally.’
Old Tak had turned to Wong. ‘Pear-shaped? Is that good feng shui?’
Wong had been unable to think of a reply, so had nodded sagely.
He shuddered at the memory of those difficult early attempts at communication. Then a rather more attractive thought drifted into his mind.
If Winnie and Joyce disappeared, he may have space and budget enough to get a real personal assistant: someone who would ease his workload, rather than add intolerable burdens to it. And he could redesign the furniture in the office and surmount the great shame he presently bore of being a feng shui master with a shockingly badly organised workplace. That, surely, would boost his spirits, not to mention his income. Oh, let Winnie and Joyce be a wol! With that delicious thought bringing a guilty smile to his lips, he turned his attention back to his work.
Slowing his breathing, the feng shui master gathered his scattered thoughts around him and refocused his attention on the masterpiece on which he had been working for several years: a volume he hoped would be his first major work published in English. The handwritten journal was ragged and dog-eared, but remained his proudest possession. Two hundred pages of anecdotes and quotations, it was already more than one and a half centimetres thick. Yet there was still a great deal to do.
The Feng Shui Detective Goes South Page 2