Nury Vittachi: The Feng Shui Detective

Ten minutes later they were both slumped silently in a taxi, which was locked in a log-jam of cars gently drifting northwards along New Bridge Street. The young woman’s interest surprised Wong. The previous Friday he had explained that the present assignment was very much the standard corporate feng shui reader’s task: to go to an office where business had been poor, and arrange for changes to ensure better fortune. The building was a relatively new skyscraper in Orchard Road, and the job was scheduled for two mornings. Joyce had said that it sounded dull.

He admitted to himself that it would not be a challenging task. He recalled having done a similar job in the very same building, maybe two years ago. It was an almond-shaped tower on a rectangular podium, and belonged to the Four West Houses, being of the Chien Kua, with its back facing northwest and its element being metal. The office suites within radiated outwards like a wheel, and he was hoping that the one he was about to visit would be northwest or northeast of the centre, the more prosperous directions for such a house. But given the business problems, he knew it was more likely that it would face south or southeast.

Still, there was much that could be done even in the worst cases. He thought with pleasure of instances where he made simple changes to the placement of elements within an office suite and caused a dramatic change in the way the ch’i energy flowed. Once he had dealt with an executive, born under an earth sign, who had encased herself entirely in a wood-panelled office, which of course destroyed her natural soil energy. The geomancer’s first move had been to add a red carpet under her chair, to provide a supportive and protective layer of fire ch’i. He then moved her desk to the northwest corner of the room, facing southeast, to build up the woman’s ability to command respect. Other changes made outside her office caused the energy to flow smoothly through the premises, pooling slightly around her desk. During a follow-up visit the following week, he found that the general improvement to the office environment would have been detectable by anyone with any sensitivity.

Wong, like many feng shui masters, knew the lore of several of the more serious schools of the arcane art, and had no scruples about mixing elements of the Flying Star method with those of the Eight Directions or Three Yuan method, if the result was a workable solution to a difficult problem.

Yawning in the taxi, Joyce explained her change of heart. He had not previously mentioned that the publishing house was the office of Update, a small but lively twice-a-week tabloid newspaper of which her flatmate Emma, a flight attendant with Singapore Airlines, was an enthusiastic reader. Update had started as a weekly, two years ago, but now appeared on Tuesdays and Fridays. Joyce, although she had spent less than a month in the city-state, had quickly got into the habit of reading it-particularly enjoying a four-page section called Yoot at the back of the magazine, featuring music and celebrities.

She said she was especially keen on one reviewer, who signed himself B K. ‘He reckons the Mooneaters are really cool, while most people are like, ‘Moon-Who?’ B K also loves That Guy’s Belly, have you heard them?’

‘That what?’

‘That Guy’s Belly.’

‘Whose belly?’

‘No, I guess not. But, like, it’s good to see that there’s someone in this part of the world who appreciates music with a bit of like, class, you know? I mean, it’s not all good. There’s this columnist called Phoebe Poon who is just awful, always trying to be clever-clever, you know, whatever, while really she’s just the pits. She really sucks.’

‘Sucks what?’ asked Wong, instantly regretting the question.

‘Not sucks anything. Just sucks.’

‘Oh, I see,’ he lied.

Talking to Joyce was always exhausting. He knew that some adult men were attracted to young women, but had they ever tried talking to them? They were so completely separate a species that he could not see how any form of human relationship could be possible. One could communicate better with a dog.

The geomancer looked out of the window and marvelled for the thousandth time at Singapore ’s skyline. He still missed the easy predictability of life in calm, rural Guangdong, but he had to admit, there was something enjoyably energising about this electric city, with its towering glass and steel monoliths, which the tropical morning sun was even now turning into million-watt fluorescent lights. And the people, uniform in their white shirts and black briefcases, appeared to be electrified as well, so busy getting things done that their whole lives disappeared in a blur of inconsequential activity. So often he found himself trying to fix the office of some harassed executive with his lo pan, when he longed to tell the man that the best thing would be to flee the office and spend a month squatting on a rotting jetty in Guangzhou watching slow ferryboats ply the Pearl River.

‘You know people in Singapore. I think the people in Update they will be very busy. Perhaps we should not talk to the staff too much. Just do our work quietly.’

‘No prob, gotcha,’ murmured Joyce, who had suddenly become sleepy again.

‘The job, it should not be hard.’

‘Neat.’

‘No, publishing places are often very messy. But I think this will not be difficult. I did a similar office in the same building two years ago. Brighter Corp. The offices, when you move in, are very badly designed for feng shui. But I could see what had to be done. It was easy to redesign the office so that the problem went away completely. Brighter Corp did very well after that, and moved to a much bigger office six months ago. I did that one too.’

He smiled at the memory. There was nothing wrong with boasting a bit if you are an old man just telling the truth to a young person who would benefit from hearing it. For a fleeting second Wong felt correctly positioned in life, as if the spheres and the stars had momentarily swung into the right positions. Little irritations aside, life was good. A friendly sun glinted from the window of the taxi opposite. A DJ’s babble trickled, uncomprehended, into his ears from a panel in the door at his elbow. The driver was nodding at the wheel. A tree waved in the slight breeze. Wong looked at Joyce and found, for the first time, an absence of hostility in his own gaze toward her, although he sensed no warmth in it.

Eight minutes later, the taxi broke free from the slow train of morning traffic on the main road and turned in to the dropping-off point of a grand but rather character-less skyscraper. Wong saw, through the glass doors, the familiar pink-brown floor of polished granite, and dark marble walls, a combination that was now more or less uniform for lobbies of Singapore office blocks.

Heading from the car to the building was like running from a fridge through a sauna to another fridge.

When they were in the fashionably dark mirror-walled lift, the geomancer looked at the address card in his hand, and noticed something which gave him a start. ‘Oh. Hong Siu Publishing is on the same floor that Brighter Corp was on. I wonder if-’

But his question went unasked as the elevator arrived on the twelfth floor and the door opened. To the left of the elevator bank, they saw the glass doors of Hong Siu Publishing, and he received his answer. The company to which they were heading was housed in the old offices of Brighter Corp.

Somewhat taken aback, he rang the bell, and a smiling, helmet-haired receptionist buzzed the door open, and led them to the editor-publisher, Alberto Tin, a chubby man of about thirty, who clamped one hand over the mouthpiece of the phone handset to which he was listening, and whispered: ‘Wait a minute. I’ll come, quick. Sit, sit.’