The Feng Shui Detective Goes South

by Nury Vittachi

  The time inevitably came when all staff had been called to deal with patients, and Wong had to busy himself with his readings. The building had its back to the waterfront and faced a hill, and thus was an unusual feng shui configuration known as ‘sitting empty, facing solid’. But the general picture was good. The water star was located in the east, and the east of the building faced the water, which was highly auspicious.

  ‘When we find this, we say, “The water star falls in the water,”’ Wong said to Dr Gibson Leibler during a gap between two patients. ‘Good sign.’

  Dr Leibler, for the first time, gave the feng shui master a polite nod and half a smile.

  On the whole, the intangible forces were good for both rooms, although the reception desk was ill-situated, Wong decided. The front surface was unhappily facing north-east, and he decided that when he next visited the office, he would hang an ornament—six copper coins with prowling tigers—over it. Despite his general dislike of superstition and the use of trinkets, he knew that physical reminders of non-visible energy often served a good purpose if used judiciously. He also realised that three out of the four people in the office—Gibson Leibler being the exception—would probably take comfort in physical items designed to ward off evil.

  There were a small number of other negative factors revealed by a study of the floor plans. A temporary shar of five was found on the north-east side of the suite of offices, towards the back of Dr Leibler’s room, and a shar of two at the entrance to the office. These were calculated on a monthly basis, and would fade with the next moon, the geomancer calculated. But for now, there were likely to be more repeats of the bad phenomena. ‘Never mind,’ he told Amanda Luk, who had emerged from one of the surgeries to make reminder calls to two patients who tended to miss appointments. ‘I can deal with it.’

  The feng shui master knew he could make the superstitious Cheung Lai Kuen happy by preparing a symbolic Cup from the Heavenly Pond to counteract the forces emanating from the Three Curses Position. He prepared several other feng shui items, but these he wanted to keep back until the problem recurred.

  After finishing these operations, Wong quickly got bored. After the excitement of the arrest at the photographic studio at lunchtime, the late afternoon passed slowly. There was almost nothing he could do except sit in the waiting room, as if he were a phantom patient who waited quietly but whose name was never called. He decided to while away a few hours writing in his journal about the brilliance of the sages. The human atmosphere in the premises felt very uncomfortable, and he found himself drawn to the subject of deception.

  Cao Wei, a great leader of Weizhou, was at a social engagement with other army generals.

  Just then, a messenger arrived on horseback. He had bad news.

  ‘Some of your men have defected. They have joined the enemy,’ the messenger said.

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Cao Wei. And then he smiled very slowly.

  The messenger rode back to the battlefields and told everyone what Cao Wei had said. He also told them that the leader had smiled very slowly.

  The enemy leader, hearing this, decided that the new men he had got were spies. He picked them out and had them all executed.

  The smile of a child comes from the heart. But never forget, Blade of Grass: no one knows where the smile of an adult comes from.

  From ‘Some Gleanings of Oriental Wisdom’

  by CF Wong, part 345

  Joyce phoned Wong at the dental surgery at 3.11 p.m. to say that she had delivered the invoice to Mrs Mirpuri, and was now heading home to change before going out to Dan T’s Inferno for the happy-hour session which began at five o’clock. She said that Mrs Mirpuri had banned Danita from going out that night, but had allowed the two friends to spend an hour talking on the phone.

  Joyce said all her attempts to get in contact with Calida Tsai-Leibler to ask about her cousin Maddy had come to nothing. Mrs Tsai-Leibler had gone to a secret location to protect her child from the murderous ghost, a domestic helper had explained.

  ‘I so don’t need another late night,’ the young woman had told Wong on the phone. ‘But I do want to talk to Maddy again. I think there might be another case there that I can solve. I seem to be doing pretty well this week.’

  ‘Yes, yes, you try to solve more cases, very good for me,’ Wong had replied. ‘Do my work for me. Then I can just do invoices, collect money.’

  The geomancer was pleased to get some writing done, although he felt a little uncomfortable in the waiting room. The earlier part of the day had been a little too dramatic for him, and he was annoyed to discover several nasty bruises on his arms he had received from his encounter with Danita Mirpuri’s kidnapper. He decided that the best thing for him was to be home putting traditional Chinese ointments on his aching limbs, not sitting on the uncomfortably soft benches of a dentist’s waiting room. He wondered if Dr Liew might have some Pak Fa Yeow in the office. But would it be wrong to ask a modern doctor for traditional white flower oil medicine? Would he be laughed at? Worse, would he be charged proper consultation fees? Better not ask.

  Still, at least it was cool and air conditioned. He suddenly realised that he could probably get more work done on his journal here than he would be able to in his un-air conditioned office over the next few days. He pulled the large volume out of his bag and started working on it again. Now what theme were we working on? Deception, that was it. The sages, both greater and lesser, often used a type of deception to solve problems and advance themselves, he mused.

  During the period of the Five Dynasties (907–960) the King of Zhao was a man named Li Decheng. He came from the Southern Tang Dynasty in Jiangxi.

  A mystic came to him and told him that he could spot greatness in a person with a single glance.

  The king was intrigued by this claim. So he arranged a test for the mystic. He dressed his wife, a woman of great class and breeding, in the costume of the court dancers. Then he put her into a group of court dancers, so that she looked no different from them.

  When all was ready, he summoned the visiting mystic.

  ‘Which of these ladies is my wife?’ the king asked.

  ‘It is obvious,’ said the mystic. ‘It is the one with a glowing golden cloud over her head.’

  The women tried not to move. But at the same time they strained to see what was over the queen’s head.They saw nothing.

  But it was easy for the mystic to correctly identify the queen.

  Blade of Grass: If you cannot see something with your own eyes, arrange to see it with someone else’s eyes.

  From ‘Some Gleanings of Oriental Wisdom’

  by CF Wong, part 346

  At 4.01 p.m., there was a scream. Wong dropped his journal and leapt to his feet. Receptionist Cheung Lai Kuen ran out of Dr Liew’s office and almost crashed into the feng shui master. With a yelp, she ran out of the premises and stood with her fists to her mouth in the lift lobby.

  She was almost immediately followed by a large blonde woman in a pale blue apron with a metal device in her mouth. ‘Ak-grr-kr-warrr,’ she said and then also ran out of the office in the direction of the lift.

  Dr Liew appeared. ‘Stupid patient. She’s run off without her shoes or her jacket.’

  ‘And with a mouth extension clamped between her jaws,’ said Dr Leibler, who had been watching from the doorway of his room. ‘She’s going to have a tough time explaining that to her family.’

  ‘Mutyeh si? ’ Wong asked.

  ‘The ghost is inside. It’s in the room.’ Dr Liew spoke calmly and factually, but there was a noticeable tremor in his voice.

  Wong marched toward the door of the room and stopped. He saw nothing inside. Carefully, he leaned the upper half of his body through the doorway. The drama all became too much for Amanda Luk, who also scampered outside to stand with Lai Kuen in the corridor. ‘I can feel it. It’s in there. It’s horrible,’ she said. A shiver of horror ran through her body.

  ‘You should have heard the sound it made. It
was right next to me,’ said Lai Kuen, starting to cry.

  Wong stepped right into the room. Dr Liew remained at the door, peering in.

  There was no one in the room. That was immediately evident. It was a small space dominated by the dental chair, and there was simply nowhere anyone could hide. He glanced under the chair. Nothing. Cabinets lined the walls on one side, but they were shallow. It was difficult to imagine that anyone could hide inside them.

  The room was silent except for a general hum. He realised that there were two buzzing sounds—one coming from a tiny air conditioning vent in the ceiling, and another coming from a small machine on the ground: a fridge, or sterilising unit of some kind, he ventured.

  The geomancer looked around the room. ‘There’s nothing. It’s—’ He stopped abruptly.

  There was the unmistakable sound of a male voice. It gave a pained, gently vocalised sigh. ‘Ahhhhh. Owwww. ’ It apparently came from an invisible person sitting in the dentist’s chair.

  ‘Can you hear him?’ asked Dr Liew.

  ‘Can,’ whispered Wong, his eyes suddenly wide. ‘He’s there.’

  He stood in front of the chair, and heard the sound repeated, coming from roughly where a person’s head would be. It really did seem to be a ghost patient. The geomancer’s jaw dropped.

  Dr Liew started to back away towards the door. ‘Come out. We must leave this place.’ He turned around and stepped out.

  Dr Leibler marched into the room. He had a studied expression of detachment on his face, but his nervousness revealed itself in the distance he kept from the centre of the room, where Wong stood in front of the chair. ‘Where is this alleged spirit?’ he asked with studied carelessness.

  ‘In the chair,’ said the feng shui master. ‘There.’ He pointed to the spot where the thing’s face would be.

  ‘Owwww!’ said the voice. It had a constricted quality— unmistakably the sound of a person moaning with a dental tool placed in his mouth. It followed this with a long, low whimper.

  Dr Leibler gulped, despite himself. ‘I can hear it,’ he whispered. ‘It is like a patient. Like I said.’

  Wong walked slowly around the chair, pointing his lo pan at it.

  ‘What is that?’ asked the American dentist. ‘Can it detect the ghost?’

  ‘No. Only a compass. I want to see if the ghost affects the direction of compass. No effect, I think.’

  After circling the chair, Wong lowered the compass and stood straight, staring at the chair, and twirling the long hairs on his chin.

  ‘I want to try something,’ the geomancer said. ‘How do I make the chair go down?’

  Dr Leibler pointed to a control panel jutting out to the right of the chair. ‘There. Press that top one.’

  The feng shui master leaned over and pressed the button that tilted the chair back, and then pulled the lever next to it. With a noisy hiss, the chair dropped almost forty centimetres. It was a modern chair, which tilted back a full ninety-five degrees, leaving the patient’s head slightly lower than their feet.

  Dr Leibler stepped over, and locked the chair into its new position and the two of them stood and waited. A minute of silence passed.

  ‘Come, let’s all go,’ said Dr Liew, who was watching from the doorway. ‘This is making me feel helluva uncomfortable.’

  ‘No,’ said Wong. ‘You can go. I want to see something. I want to see the sound is coming from where.’

  There it was again. The sound of an unhappy patient, giving a low, moaning croak. This time it wasn’t from the chair, which had been dropped to its lowest point, but from the air in the middle of the room, above it. ‘Interesting. I move the chair. But has no effect. Sound stays there, in the air. Ghost patient has ghost chair. Or ghost can fly.’

  Dr Leibler, with a sharp intake of breath, spun on his heel and marched briskly to the door. ‘Weird,’ he said. ‘Seriously weird.’

  Wong followed more slowly, and strolled into the waiting room, where he picked up his bag. He pulled out a small vase in the shape of an altar and a bag of candles.

  ‘These will look after me. You can go,’ the feng shui master said. ‘You give me a key to lock up. I will stay.’

  Thursday:

  Ghosts can’t

  get any deader

  Thursday dawned cool and damp. CF Wong woke early, his thoughts distracted and confused after his encounter with whatever-it-was in the dental surgery the previous afternoon— an exchange that had lasted for more than an hour. He had gone home with a headache and slept badly. He was not surprised to find himself suddenly wide awake in the dark.

  Noticing through his curtain-less windows that the dawn had yet to even think about breaking, he decided that he would go to work immediately to take advantage of the coolness of the morning. He left his tiny apartment in Chinatown’s Pagoda Street at 5.44 a.m. and was at the door of his office ten minutes later.

  He entered the dark suite of rooms and was pleased to find the temperature pleasant for the first time in forty-eight hours. The last vestiges of a pre-dawn breeze were gently blowing through the space in the window where the air conditioner used to be. The night was almost silent. The murmur of traffic, which formed a constant white noise background during the day, had disappeared. In its place was a very low, undulating hum from the distant main thoroughfare, interrupted only by the occasional rattle of an early morning delivery van carrying newspapers or char siu bau.

  Wong sat down in his chair and pulled out his journal. He would be able to do several hours’ work before it became insufferably hot and he would have to retreat to Ah-Ooi’s Noodles, perhaps even producing several new gleanings for his chapter on the ingenious problem-solving methods of the great sages. He set to work.

  The Emperor of Qi was a man named Jin Gong. One day he found that his stable hand had accidentally caused the death of his favourite horse.

  ‘My favourite horse is dead? The stable hand responsible shall also be put to death,’ the ruler said.

  ‘Kill him immediately.’

  But a wise sage named Yan Zi interrupted.

  ‘O mighty Emperor,’ said Yan Zi. ‘You are right in all that you do. But you have said in the past that a man must die knowing exactly what crime he has committed.’

  The Emperor agreed.

  A court was assembled. The stable hand was placed in the dock.

  Yan Zi read out the charges. ‘You will be marked in history for doing three bad things,’ he said to the stable hand.

  ‘Three bad things?’ asked the emperor.

  ‘Three bad things?’ said the stable hand.

  Yan Zi related the three sins to the man in the dock. ‘One: You killed the Emperor’s favourite horse.Two: You caused the Emperor to kill a human being in return for the death of an animal. Three: You spoiled the reputation of the Emperor, who had previously been known as a wise and kind ruler. For these reasons, you must die,’ said Yan Zi.

  ‘No,’ said the Emperor. ‘I forgive him.’

  In a dispute, Blade of Grass, let time intervene.Only when anger has dissipated will there be room for wisdom to enter.

  From ‘Some Gleanings of Oriental Wisdom’

  by CF Wong, part 347

  He smiled, proud of his use of the words ‘intervene’ and ‘dissipated’. He flicked through his dictionary, looking for more long terms to use. Could he get ‘bene–ficiary’ in there?

  Wong had been working for almost half an hour when he started to feel oddly distracted. He had gradually started to feel, at first only in his subconscious, that he was not alone. Before the thought penetrated fully into his conscious mind, he continued to write for several minutes. Then something made him look up. Had there been a tiny movement in the room, some motion glimpsed from the periphery of his vision? Or had there been a sound, a noise so low that it was barely audible to a person concentrating on something else? He glanced around. The only light came from his desk lamp, so the rest of the room remained filled with deep shadows. He pricked up his ears. He identi
fied no sound except the far-away whispers of vehicles speeding along Orchard Road. If there was no motion and no sound in the office, what had he detected? Was there some sort of presence in the room?

  Chee-sin, he scolded to himself. He had spent so many hours last night thinking about the ghost that he was now starting to think he could detect spirits all around him. Ridiculous! He turned his attention back to his writing.

  Two thousand and five hundred years ago, a child was born who was already old. His hair was white and his brain was filled with wisdom. He was called Lao Tzu, which means The Old Child.

  The Old Child lived fifty-four years before Confucius. He was a great sage. But he refused to write down any of his thoughts. He believed that writing words down killed them. Words should be used in the way he used them, for thinking and speaking about great ideas.

  At the end of his life, when the Old Child had become an old man, he rode on a water buffalo to retire in a faraway kingdom.

  But the lowly keeper of the gate refused to let him in. ‘Write something for me and that will be the price of your entrance,’ he said.

  The Old Child sat at a table and wrote 5000 characters. The result was the Tao-Te-Ching, which is one of the greatest classics of ancient wisdom.

  Blade of Grass, every person thinks other people are like themselves. Lao Tzu, the Old Child, was a great sage. But he believed that every man could journey through ideas as he did. But the poor gatekeeper knew something that Lao Tzu did not. Most men cannot share the journey of a great sage without a guidebook.

  From ‘Some Gleanings of Oriental Wisdom’

  by CF Wong, part 347

  He froze. This time, he knew he had heard a sound. It was unmistakable. It was a tiny, low moan made by a human voice. It was similar to the sound in the dentists’ surgery, except it was made by a closed mouth. And it was right here in this room. An involuntary shiver ran down his spine. Had the thing in the dentists’ surgery left its haunt and decided to follow him around? Or had yesterday’s experience made him suddenly more attuned to the existence of supernatural spirits? Had a ghost been occupying his office for some time?