Mr Wong Goes West Read online

  He ushered her onto the terrace, where they both slipped into rattan seats. He poured her a glass of coconut water. Wong prayed for his contractor, Arun Asif Iqbal Daswani (‘The Only Known Indian Member of the Chinese Mafia’), to arrive soon, terrifyingly aware of his lack of skill in conducting small talk in English. The geomancer sat on the edge of the chair, smoothing down his suit—a grey mandarin-collared outfit made for him by his tailor, Mr Tommy of Wan Chai, when he had been six years younger and two kilograms lighter.

  Ms Crumley, who was wearing a light grey, stretch-cotton, ruffle-trimmed, belted lightweight coat (purchased last week, $1,200 on sale at Prada), gazed over the balcony at the scene in front of her. Although the suite now faced towards the city instead of the estuary opening, it was still a dazzling sight.

  ‘Well,’ she said, waiting for her host to come out with some standard pleasantries.

  ‘Well,’ Wong replied nervously, unsure of how to proceed. ‘Ha ha.’

  The conversation showed signs of running out of steam at that point.

  A buzzer sounded. Saved by the doorbell.

  Wong stood, bowed, and raced for the door. Moments later, Daswani surged onto the balcony, his robes flapping around him damply. He was a large man given to wearing sheikh-like robes, into which he had had numerous pockets tailored.

  ‘Sorry-sorry-sorry to keep you waiting. Comfortable you are, is it?’

  The newcomer flopped down into his chair so heavily that the rattan gave a moan and sank several centimetres lower, its legs spreading. He grabbed Wong’s glass of coconut juice and swallowed it in a single draught.

  ‘Wah! Never been so thirsty in all my life. Now, how are we, Miss Crum-bly?’

  ‘That’s Crumley. You can call me Cecily. It’s actually Cecily-Mary—good Catholic girl, you know.’

  ‘Ah, interesting,’ said Daswani. ‘I am Sindhi.’

  ‘Cindy?’

  ‘Yes.’ He looked at the surprised expression on her face and added: ‘Do you know many Sindhis?’

  ‘No. You don’t look like a…Cindy.’

  ‘Really,’ said Daswani in a tone of surprise. ‘What do Sindhis normally look like?’

  ‘I don’t know. I just…I used to have a Cindy doll when I was a child. Small blond thing, skinny as a twig.’

  Although Wong thought he could speak English, the logic of conversations in that language regularly foxed him. Where on earth had Ms Crumley encountered Sindhis who were small, blond and skinny as twigs? There were none in Asia, that was certain. Would Arun Daswani be insulted at this? He’d better say something, to set things right.

  ‘In this part of the world, Sindhis are big fat men, not many blonds,’ he said. ‘Like Mr Daswani. Very fat.’

  ‘This fat is all muscle,’ Daswani said, patting his pot belly. ‘From all the digesting.’

  Crumley chuckled at this, a tinkly, well-rehearsed laugh. But neither of the others did, so she stopped abruptly.

  ‘Come,’ said the Sindhi businessman. ‘Let’s get down to business, shall we?’

  Wong swallowed hard. This was it. He suddenly felt hot, despite the cool breeze. This was a key moment in his life; this was the deal that was going to launch him on a new career. The fifty-seven-year-old geomancer, chief staff member of CF Wong and Associates, a feng shui consultancy, had set up a side business called Harmoney, the idea being to parlay his skill in creating harmonious places, with all elements in a positive balance, to setting up harmonious business deals. This was his first venture.

  Ms Crumley was the buyer for a major European office supplies company. The group she represented, OffBox, was graduating from product distribution to own-label manufacturing. It had come to Singapore because the city–state boasted that it could produce goods with Western standards of quality at Asian prices. OffBox was launching a line of desk goods, starting with highlighters that looked like small fruit.

  She glanced behind Daswani, as if to see if he was somehow trailing the promised goods behind him. ‘Where are the…er?’

  He gave her an unctuous grin. ‘The consignment is downstairs, on the dockside, in a truck, parked nearby. It will be shipped to the provided address as soon as the final part of the required paperwork is done.’

  Wong gulped again and a tremor of excitement raced through his body. He knew that ‘paperwork’ in this instance referred to the climactic part of the business jigsaw: payment.

  ‘Cheque should be made out to Harmoney Private Limited,’ the feng shui master put in. ‘Harmoney with a “e”. Like “Har” and “money”.’

  ‘Of course. Have you got samples? I need to check the quality one last time. Just a formality, of course, at this stage.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Daswani, producing a box from one of the folds of his robes. ‘You can check as many times as you like.’

  He placed on the table a white cardboard box emblazoned with the words: ‘Highlighters: Banana’; and deftly tore it open. Lifting out a small plastic banana, he brandished it elegantly. ‘This box contains twelve pieces of banana design. In total we have fifteen thousand packages, twelve units each, four different fruity designs, making one hundred and eighty thousand units in total. All at quality and prices unbeatable anywhere else on the planet.’

  Cecily Crumley smiled, comforted by seeing the product. ‘It looks fine,’ she said. ‘So I guess I just need to hand this over, then.’ She started fishing in her expensive-looking, but politically correct, faux-leather briefcase for the plastic file containing the cheque.

  Wong stood up and waved at Daswani to rise to his feet. He had been told by a businessman friend that that was the right thing to do to show respect when payment was being made—and to acknowledge that the meeting had come to its climactic moment.

  ‘Sit down, sit down,’ she said. ‘No need to stand on ceremony.’ She handed Wong a white envelope, which he immediately started to tear open. He needed to make absolutely sure there was no chance of error.

  She turned to Daswani. ‘By the way, Cindy, how did you solve the ink problem?’

  Wong paused, his finger deep inside the half-ripped envelope. He raised his eyebrows. ‘Ink problem?’

  Daswani, smiling just a little too much, said: ‘I told Ms Crumley a couple of weeks ago that we had temporary trouble sourcing fluorescent yellow ink.’

  She nodded. ‘So you did a different colour first?’

  ‘Right. And we’ll get the yellow ones to you before you know it.’

  ‘So what colour ink is in this batch?’

  ‘Hmm?’ the contractor replied, as if he hadn’t quite heard the question.

  ‘What colour ink is this batch? Neon green?’

  Daswani glanced nervously at her eyes and then looked away. ‘We used a different colour for this batch. You’ll have the yellow ink versions very soon.’

  ‘But which colour? Pink? Blue?’

  He picked up the highlighter. ‘Er. Actually, we had trouble sourcing those colours too.’

  The buyer froze. ‘You had trouble sourcing those colours too? So what colour ink did you use?’

  Daswani bit his lower lip. ‘We used a very high quality ink obtained from a factory owned by a friend of my cousin. Highest quality, best possible flow, good value, special price for us, due to our connections. So please don’t worry about the ink, Ms Crumley. It’ll be fine. You have Mr Wong’s personal guarantee.’

  She was becoming impatient. ‘But what colour is it?’

  ‘Er, neutral,’ he said, his voice betraying nervousness.

  ‘Neutral. Meaning…?’

  When the contractor didn’t answer immediately, she reached for the plastic banana. He reached for it at the same time. Wong watched aghast, frozen to the spot.

  She got to it first, pulled open the lid and with a violent sweep of her arm, slashed a mark across the table. All three of them stared at it—a jet black scar on the pale pine surface.

  Ms Crumley spoke first. ‘Black. You put black ink into the highlighters.’


  ‘The very finest ink on the market today, Ms Crumley. None better.’ Daswani wrung his hands and smiled unhappily.

  ‘You can’t put black ink into highlighters.’

  ‘The ink was the finest quality, and flowed into the products’ ink chambers very smoothly indeed. And it flows out equally smoothly. A pure, flowing, er, smooth line.’

  ‘But…I mean…you can’t have highlighters with black ink.’ She looked at Wong and then at Daswani. ‘Tell him. You just can’t.’

  ‘Some small problem?’ Wong asked, now panicking inside.

  Daswani slowly interlaced his fingers, trying to send ‘keep calm’ signals to her. ‘May I remind you that when I phoned you two weeks ago and said that we were having trouble finding yellow ink for the first batch, you said we could use other colours.’

  ‘Yes, but I meant other highlighter colours. I meant neon green or baby pink or sky blue. Not black.’

  ‘Be reasonable, Ms Crumley. You didn’t specifically say that we could not use black.’

  For a moment, she couldn’t speak. She took several deep breaths and then she sat up straight, making herself considerably taller in her seat than the two Asians. ‘Now let’s get this absolutely straight. Are you telling me that you have made me one hundred and eighty thousand fruit-shaped highlighters filled with black ink?’

  Daswani did not reply.

  Wong felt the world slipping away from him. ‘Black very nice, very elegant colour,’ he said desperately. ‘Fashionable and good feng shui. Ha ha.’

  Ms Crumley, her nostrils dilating, turned to the geomancer and spoke to him quietly through tight lips: ‘If you think I am going to buy a single one of these, you are very much mistaken. Goodbye, Mr Wong. Goodbye, Mr Daswani.’

  She neatly snatched the cheque out of Wong’s hands and marched back into the cabin. They heard a door slam.

  There was silence for two seconds and then they heard a door open again. Ms Crumley had accidentally marched into the bedroom.

  ‘Door that way,’ Wong called out helpfully.

  ‘Thanks,’ she muttered before storming through the correct door and slamming it behind her.

  The two men on the balcony stared at each other.

  ‘That did not go so well,’ Wong said.

  ‘She said we could use any other ink colour. She didn’t say we couldn’t use black colour,’ Daswani said in a hurt tone.

  Wong nodded. ‘So what are you going to do with so many highlighter with black ink?’

  The other man shook his head. ‘Not my problem. You are the middle man. Deal is in the name of Harmoney Private Limited. I want my money. I want it now. Question is: What are you going to do with so many highlighters in black ink?’

  A travelling feng shui master entered a monastery in Guizhou.

  ‘I have come to award a title,’ he said. ‘One of the monks here is to be called the Master of Humility.’

  The monks went into an uproar. Which of them was the Master of Humility?

  ‘I am the chief abbot. Surely the title must come to me?’ said the chief abbot.

  ‘I am the lowliest novice,’ said the lowliest novice. ‘Should it not come to me?’

  ‘I am neither high nor low,’ said a monk who was neither high nor low. ‘Perhaps I deserve the title, having no other?’

  ‘I deserve nothing,’ said another monk. ‘So you may choose to give it to me if you think it right.’

  The debate raged for many hours. No agreement could be reached.

  The feng shui master picked up his bag and started to leave.

  ‘Which of us gets the title?’ the monks asked.

  ‘No one,’ said the feng shui man. ‘The Master of Humility is no longer here.’

  Blade of Grass, sometimes giving is taking. Sometimes, taking is giving. The man who tries to catch a feather held by a breeze succeeds only in pushing it away, for some feathers cannot be caught.

  From ‘Some Gleanings of Oriental Wisdom’

  by CF Wong.

  Geomancer CF Wong walked morosely along the street, believing that nothing could worsen his mood, which was pitch-black and vivid crimson at the same time. His life had suddenly turned dark with horror and red with drama. Small and round-shouldered, he stooped even further than usual, his eyes fixed on the ground, a puny Atlas carrying an invisible planet on his shoulders. And the burden he was carrying might as well be as large as a world, given the impossibility of his finding any way to lift it from his back.

  What had just happened was so nightmarish to be almost beyond his ken. He had just committed to spending a vast sum of money that he did not have on the purchase of a large number of tiny, ugly, fruit-shaped pens that he could not possibly use. He had experimented with the repulsive plastic bananas after Ms Crumley had left. They produced solid black lines that were too thick to write with, and too black to use for highlighting. Who would want them? They were useless. Harmoney Private Limited of Singapore was set to go bankrupt with its very first deal. Not exactly auspicious. If news of this got round to his rivals…It didn’t bear thinking about. How could everything have gone so dramatically wrong? He blamed the unidentified Singapore bigwig who had ordered the ship be moved. But to whom could he complain? It was useless. Nothing could be done.

  Arun Asif Iqbal Daswani had ended the meeting by saying he would give Wong ten days to make the payment. Daswani had handed him a fresh copy of his business card, pointedly calling attention to the line that described him as ‘The World’s Only Indian Member of the Chinese Mafia’. He had then made some not very deeply veiled threats about getting his triad partners to ‘take an interest’ if the full sum was not delivered on time. He had become hard-eyed and stone-faced. It was the end of an ugly friendship.

  Where could Wong get that kind of money at short notice? He kept very little money in the bank accounts he used, and his savings consisted of some tiny investment properties in Guangdong province, all of which were handled by a relative he talked to once a year. It would take weeks or months to arrange a sale. There were no liquid assets that could be cashed in to raise the sum Daswani was demanding.

  The feng shui master wearily propelled his miserable bones to his run-down office on the cheaper bit of Telok Ayer Street, just off the main business district of central Singapore, and went up the stairs to the fourth floor—yes, he knew that number four meant bad luck, but it was the only one he could afford. He kicked open the office door, startling Winnie Lim, his office manager. She glared at him with naked hostility.

  ‘Aiyeeah. You break the door, I no fix it,’ she warned.

  He returned her dagger-filled look, narrowing his eyes and muttering curses under his breath. It was nothing short of tragic that a man could not even find sanctuary from the pain of life in his own office. He glanced around the small, cluttered room, with its cheap, mismatched furnishings and broken wall clock. It was not a suitable office for a feng shui master and he knew it. No clients were allowed to visit.

  The only consolation was that the desk which normally housed his beyond-irritating assistant, Joyce McQuinnie, was empty. The young woman had been inflicted on him by Mr Pun, the property developer who kept Wong’s business going by paying a regular retainer. She had arrived as a ‘temporary’ intern, but had become horribly, scarily permanent. Wong spent a significant amount of his time dreaming of ways to get rid of her without upsetting his paymaster.

  Ignoring the spitting, hissing Winnie, he marched past his desk and headed for the meditation room—a rather grandiose name for what was really an ill-designed room, too small for any purpose beyond being a stationery cupboard. When Wong had initially leased the premises, he had made sure that that room had been kept completely empty except for a meditation mat and a flickering candle—red, electric, purchased from a Roman Catholic trinket shop. Then he had placed a hand-carved hair stick from an ancient branch of the Qidan tribe on the altar, a small table at one end. The hair stick was a sort of ugly, miniature totem pole topped with thick, dreadlock-like
tresses. Its purpose was to dismay evil spirits, and to that end it had wide staring eyes and a sticking-out tongue. Wong was fond of it for a number of reasons. First, it reminded him of his mad Uncle Rinchang, who lived in a cabin in the Kunlun Mountains. Second, the Qidan people were reputed to have used real gold leaf in their objets d’art, so he felt it might be valuable. And third, it was so ugly that it put the women off entering the space or using it for anything.

  The idea of having a meditation room in the office was well-intentioned but had proved to be impractical. There was always so much pressure to make money to pay the rent that he rarely used the room, and neither Winnie nor Joyce appeared to be interested in meditation, although Joyce occasionally went to yoga and some sort of church. Winnie’s only interest in life was nail varnish. She used the office computer to subscribe to RSS email alerts informing her of the launch of new nail colours or appliqués. In contrast, Joyce’s main interest was wearing iPod headphones and nodding her head up and down to tsch-chika-tsch-chika-tsch noises while idly scanning celebrity magazines.

  These two women had grossly tainted the purity of his office—after all, it was supposed to be the headquarters of a practitioner of an ancient, mystical, male-dominated spiritual art. But what could be done? Mr Pun paid the retainer and had given him no choice but to accept McQuinnie as an assistant. And Winnie Lim had organised the files under a system so arbitrary that she was the only one who could find anything. He was stuck with them. His temporal life was cursed. He needed to retreat to a better place to recharge his spiritual batteries. If there had ever been a time when he needed the meditation room, this was it.

  He opened the door and peered inside. He hadn’t entered the room for several weeks and expected it to be stuffy and smelly. But something was wrong. It was full of something.

  He turned on the light. It had been turned into some sort of sanitation store cupboard. It contained two foul-smelling mops, three red plastic buckets, and a solid wall, taller than Wong himself, of what looked like several hundred toilet rolls. He backed out of the room and turned to face his office manager.