Chapter 3: The Art of Feng Shui

“Argh!”
“Bang!”

All our hearts skipped a beat from the sudden noise. I turned my head to my left and saw Nicky with his head resting on the keyboard. I looked at Dawn’s desk. She was not there. I opened my MSN Messenger window and checked. She was not online. Okay, so it was not the “where and what for lunch” harass from Dawn. I went over to Nicky’s desk to find out what was going on.

“Hey, you okay?”

Nicky slowly raised his head from the keyboard and stared at me with a distraught look. My heart skipped another beat. He looked just like that Ju-On ghost from the famous Japanese horror movie.

“I just knew it! I just knew that it’s bad luck! But not this bad!” Nicky hollered.
“Maybe you would like to tell me what’s going on here?”

Nicky pulled me down to stare at one of his two monitors. He was the only one in the team that worked on a desktop computer instead of a notebook. As a product analyst, his job did not require him to hop from meetings to meetings like us, and besides that, he needed a strong processor to render the vast amount of charts. Yes, he did use one of the monitors to monitor his shares most of the time, but that was not its intended function. The two monitors are meant for him to compare charts and tables side by side.

One look at the monitor screen and it did not take long for me to realize what the problem was. The screen was showing a watchlist of shares with their respective prices and volumes. And the screen was awash with red numbers. Nicky must have placed a considerable amount of his assets somewhere there.

“See that bloody STel?” Nicky poked his finger hard onto the screen, so hard that it was as if he wanted to rub away the red number behind the screen. “I bought it at $2.50! And in half a day’s time, it actually dropped to $2.35! I just knew it is coming!”
“You knew that the price will drop?”
“No, not the price! The bad luck!”

I was sure that the irregular pulsating of the purple veins on his forehead was disturbing the functioning of his brain. Nicky was not making any sense at all.

“Erm… could I get you some cold water?”
“No, I’m okay! Lost lots of money but okay,” Nicky sighed. “This bad luck must be due to the broken Pi Xiu.”
“What?”
“The pair of jade Pi Xius that I placed by my shoe rack, facing the main door. I accidentally dropped something onto one of it yesterday and broke its horn.”
“What’s a Pi Xiu? Some kind of Feng Shui animal again?”
“Yeh, it has got a horn, a face that looks like a mix between a lion and a dog, hoofs at its feet, two little wings and a tail.”

That animal sounded like it will scare the hell out of the Beast from the Beauty and the Beast.

“And it’s mad that you broke its horn, so it’s bringing you bad luck now?”
“No, that’s not how it works! You see, in Feng Shui, we believe that if a part of a Feng Shui animal is broken, it can’t protect you or enhance your luck anymore.”

Which means that, due to Nicky’s negligence that caused his Pi Xiu to lose its horn, good luck will desert him, and all shares that he own will start to tumble. For a second, the thought of shorting whatever shares that he had bought crossed my mind.

“I need to take get a new Pi Xiu during lunch time.”
“Isn’t that a bit hasty?” I was astonished at the emergency caused by a broken Pi Xiu.
“No it’s not. I need to replace the broken Pi Xiu ASAP, before worse things happen to me. You want to come along?”
“Where are you going to get a new Pi Xiu?”
“The Bencoolen.”

During lunch time, the two of us proceeded to shop for a new Pi Xiu. Nicky parked his car at the Fortune Center and we walked down the street towards The Bencoolen. En route, we passed by the busy Krishnan Temple and Kwan Im Tong Hood Che Temple.

The Krishnan Temple is a very unique Hindu temple. It is the only Hindu temple I was aware of that had a joss sticks urn in front of the temple so that passer-bys, especially the Chinese, could light some joss sticks and pray for blessings.

The Kwan Im Tong Hood Che Temple is a temple built for the Goddess of Mercy, a.k.a. Kwan Im. If there is a top ten popularity chart for temples, I was certain that this temple would make it to the top easily. The number of devotees barging into the temple to offer joss sticks and pray could easily outnumber the ants that are required to shift a lollipop.

“Geez, if this temple can be so crowded during a weekday, I can’t imagine a weekend.”
“But this temple’s good. The Kwan Im ‘qian’ here is very accurate,” Nicky commented.

A ‘qian’ is a prediction of the future. To get a ‘qian’, devotees would have to rely on some bamboo sticks. On each one of the thirty over little bamboo sticks stuffed in a bamboo container was written a number, and each number represented a ‘qian’. A devotee will get on his knees and shake this bamboo container furiously till one stick fall off the container and onto the ground. With this bamboo stick, he could then get a small slip of pink paper from the ‘qian’ counter. Written on that slip of pink paper will be his fated destiny, the answer to the question that he asked when doing the “Shake’em up” action. And it would be written in both English and Chinese.

“So I presume, you must have gotten one before?”
“No, not one. More than that. Whenever I feel that I need a direction, I’ll drop by for a ‘qian’.”

I wondered was Nicky’s ‘direction’ referring to the ups and downs of the Straits Times Index. I imagined Nicky kneeing on the ground among other devotees and do the “Shake’em up” action, while mumbling “Please, oh Goddess of Mercy, please tell me if I should get the China Construction Bank call warrant or put warrant!”

Finally, after squeezing through the carts selling flowers to the devotees for offering to the Goddess of Mercy, and stands of fortune tellers telling their patrons what their ‘qian’ actually meant if they really read between the lines, we reached The Bencoolen. Ninety percent of the shops in The Bencoolen were Feng Shui shops selling crystals, jades accessories and bronze Feng Shui animals.

Nicky led me straight into a small shop that seemed too narrow for its plump owner. He must be the ‘Si Fu’ that Nicky told me about, the Feng Shui master who assisted Nicky in his apartment’s interior design by placing the appropriate Feng Shui items on specific locations in a very precise manner. The solemn looking ‘Si Fu’ listened as Nicky told him in Cantonese about the misfortune of his Pi Xiu. After Nicky finished his story, the ‘Si Fu’ told him to wait and went into the back of the shop. When he finally emerged, he was holding a beautiful pair of animals craved out of something that looked like jade, lying on a pair of matching wooden stands. From the grin on Nicky’s face, I knew that he was going to bring them home.

After we left the shop, I queried Nicky on the pair of Feng Shui animals that he paid almost two hundred dollars for.

“It’s a pair of Pi Xius”

So that was how Pi Xius looked like. Not as horrifying as the way he described. They actually looked similar to the pair of stone lions in front of the Kwan Im Tong Hood Che Temple.

“But I thought only one of your Pi Xiu was broken?”
“Yeh, but in Feng Shui, when you replace, you replace in pairs. And anyway, nobody sells a single piece of jade Pi Xiu.”
“But what’re you going to do with your old Pi Xiu?”
“Just wrap it in a piece of red paper and throw it away!”

Gosh, not only would people abandon their living pets, they will also abandon their Feng Shui animals.

“Anyway, the previous pair that I’ve got is made of yellow jasper. This pair looks better.”
“And this is some kind of jade?”
“Yeh, it’s called rainbow jade,” he answered avidly.

Somehow, I felt that the jade was not named appropriately. A rainbow contains seven colors. However, the jade had an elegant light greenish grey with random strokes of shades of brown on it. But of course it would have looked horrible if it had seven colors on it.

“So I guess the first thing you’ll do when you reach home today, will be to replace your old Pi Xius with this new pair?”
“No, I’ll do it at 3a.m.”
“What? You’re going to wake up in the middle of the night to replace your Pi Xius?”
“Of course! That’s the auspicious hour of the day!”

After this experience, I realized that believing in Feng Shui was not only expensive, but knackering.

A few days later, Nicky told me happily that his new Pi Xiu was bringing him lots of good luck. In fact, after the new Pi Xiu was placed at his door, the shares of CapLand rebounded for three straight days and broke the cap at $3.30. He had gained back whatever he lost and more.

So the CEO of CapLand should write Nicky a thank-you note because his company shares were up, not due to their successful investment in Shanghai residential properties, but because of Nicky’s new pair of rainbow jade Pi Xius.