SIX - Feng Shuei and Chinese superstition

One evening, I went out with Ron, Ben and not-so-Sunny to a dance club in another district of Taipei. “E-den” and its supposedly incredible trance and techno music was the topic of the month among the younger teachers. At my age and raised in a small town, I didn’t know trance from tap – and I certainly had no idea how to dance to it - but I decided it would be a learning experience.

Shortly after arriving at the multi-level warehouse with its blacked-out windows and pulsating strobe lights, I began to feel ill and in need of fresh air. I went to the washroom to splash cold water on my face. When I emerged minutes later, I discovered I had lost my friends in the crowd. I wandered onto the dance floor in an attempt to find them. People were hopping and kicking, flailing their arms and spinning like whirling dervishes around me. I decided this wasn’t quite what I had in mind, and found the staircase up to the next level.

On the second floor, the music was a little different. It had more of a beat, and I could dance to it. I spotted a girl that I knew from the neighbourhood, and joined her and her friends on the dance floor. Brittany seemed to be lost in her own little world of dance, and didn’t acknowledge me. It was extremely warm in there, and I was beginning to feel claustrophobic so I excused myself and went over to the bar for a drink. There were a few token bottles of beer on display, and a couple of vodka coolers, but as I looked around, I realized everyone was drinking water. As my eyes adjusted to the dim light, I saw lounging couches circling the room with people lying on them, making out to the music. A girl handed me a colourful candy pacifier from a bowl on the coffee tables. Slowly it dawned on me. I was probably the only person who wasn’t on drugs in the whole place. The “E” of E-den stood for Ecstasy. God, I’m slow. I decided it was time to go, but I wanted to find my friends, to tell them I was leaving.

I headed out to hail a taxi, bummed that I had spent $1000 NT on the cover charge and wouldn’t be able to split the fare back to the city with my roommates. I looked around. Surely Ben, the religious boy in the group, had never made it to the second floor. I checked my phone and sure enough, there was a text message from Ben, saying he had decided to go to a movie instead of staying at E-den. 

My thoughts kept me company on the long, expensive ride home.

At about three in the morning, something woke me up. My bed sheet was soaked with sweat. I threw it on the floor and lay naked, letting the tropical breeze dry the sweat beads on my belly. The temperature had risen during the night – a sign that another typhoon was coming. At least we would have tomorrow off work.

I wafted in and out of sleep for the next few minutes. Suddenly, I heard a sniff. I flipped over, grabbing the sheets to cover myself in the moonlight. Ron was leaning in the doorway.

“What the hell are you doing there, Ron?” I yelled.

“Oh. You’re home,” he said, and then mumbled, “I didn’t see you leave,.”

“I didn’t see you at all,” I said. “I went to the loo and when I came back, you were gone.”

“I was there. You didn’t see me?” he asked.

“No. I didn’t see you. Now go to bed and get the hell out of my doorway.”

Ron turned to leave, and I promptly fell asleep.

Moments later I woke again to see him sleeping on the floor against the doorjamb.

I wrapped a sheet around myself, struggled across the room and gently shoved him out into the hallway with my foot, where he curled himself into the fetal position, still asleep. Then I closed the door and bolted it, despite the heat.

I got a really good deal on the rent at my three-storey garden home at the foot of the mountain, overlooking a river because the address had two 4’s in it, and it was parked next to a graveyard. Bad Feng Shui, I realized, but it was fine with me. The view from the rooftop patio was awesome, and the air was slightly above city smog level.

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Special to the Advance 
2005

Do you have a tortoise at your back? Are there poison arrows pointing at you? These are ideals of Feng Shui, the ancient Chinese practice of manipulating the flow of energy through your personal environment, based on your birthdate and the movements of the solar system. There is much confusion between traditional Feng Shui teachings and everyday Chinese superstition, according to the American Feng Shui Institute. Allow me to simplify things for you with my own methods of creating better ‘chi’ in your life.

The principals of Feng Shui (pronounced ‘fung shway’, literally meaning ‘wind and water’) are Yin and Yang, (opposites and balance), the Five Elements (Fire, Earth, Metal, Water and Wood), the natural environment and magnetic field.

According to the date of your birth, you have been assigned a ‘personal trigram’. In Feng Shui, this determines whether you are better off with wood or metal furniture, in a North or East-facing house. Your trigram grouping can help you to decide what color clothing to wear for an important job interview, what numbers to pick for the lottery and what date to get married on.

If you end up in a house that has all the right elements but it is facing a busy street, some FS advisors would recommend that you hang metal wind chimes outside the door to stop the negative energy or ‘chi’ from entering the home. Others would advise that you hang crystals, charms or mirrors for the same purpose but this is actually closer to Chinese superstitious practices than traditional Feng Shui teachings. My advice is to use the side or back door. Place large potted trees in front of the main door to remind you not to use it. This should also make things difficult for unwanted door-to-door solicitations but beware of angry, vindictive trick-or-treaters on Hallowe’en.

One day I noticed a pair of brass turtles standing in opposite corners of our living room window, looking out over the busy street below. They were perched up on blocks of ugly styrofoam packaging, and so, thinking I was making an aesthetic improvement, I removed their pedestals and placed them back on the windowsill. I was quickly informed that the turtles could no longer ‘see’ out the window. This was making their job of deflecting negative ‘chi’ from the passing traffic all the more difficult. I apologized and created new stands for our little guardian gargoyles out of piles of books. I made sure they could see every scooter and taxi moving aggressively through the intersection below. I was assured that they would keep the negative energy from all of that business out of our apartment.

But this isn’t the ‘turtle’ that I mentioned earlier in the article. A ‘turtle at your back’ refers to having a mountain or larger building behind your home, to offer support. In my thinking this also applies to your place of work. It makes sense to me that a person working in a large open room with many others viewing the back of his head while he works has less peace of mind than someone who has his back against a wall. Think of how children like to go and hide in a corner with the walls for support. Perhaps having the desired ‘corner office’ is subconsciously about more than just the view.

I prefer wood to metal furniture. Does this mean that I am a member of a certain FS grouping that thrives in a more natural setting? I suspect it has more to do with the warmth of wood and the chilliness of metal. I am quite familiar with Canadian winters, after all.

They say you should never have a mirror facing your bed, as it can lead to marital woes, even infidelity. I can think of an even more practical reasoning for this. Do you really want the first thing you see every morning to be your own puffy-eyed face?

Another piece of Feng Shui advice for the bedroom is that you place a fish aquarium on either side of the bed to offer balance and a feeling of floating. I strongly advise against this for a few reasons. Have you ever smelled a fish tank? Do you really want that beside your head all night? And if the tank has any sort of gurgling water mechanism, as they often do, it may have the same effect as running water and cause you to wet the bed.

Numerology is the study of the occult significance of numbers. This is not Feng Shui, because it deals with the supernatural rather than the scientific. It’s pretty easy to recognize the ‘lucky dates’ in Taipei for weddings. It’s the day when the streets are clogged with limos and flower trucks. I don’t know how ‘lucky’ I would feel choosing the same day to tie the knot as everyone else in town, being rushed out of my own wedding dinner so that the next party could begin theirs. Still, numerology is very popular for choosing apartment and house numbers, and even the birth date of your child, if you are Asian.

Getting back to the ‘poison arrow’ that I mentioned earlier, this refers to a lamppost or telephone pole pointing at your house, or the close proximity of a ‘negative’ structure, such as a prison or a hospital. Firstly, I’m wondering why a pole of any kind would be pointing at your house instead of the sky. Perhaps you should get that looked at. Secondly, I have discovered for myself that this particular Feng Shui ‘no-no’ can actually work in your favor.

One of my apartments in Taipei was in a garden home sitting right next to the Air Force cemetery. A real ‘poison arrow’ and a property value problem, even by some North American standards. The landlords explained that they had difficulty renting the apartment to superstitious Asians, and refused to live in it themselves. This brought the rent down dramatically in relation to the neighboring units, and it had one other perk as well.

The neighbors were extremely quiet.

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Numerology and the “sounds like” phenomena are big in Asia. I was told by my Chinese teacher that it was considered very good luck to have a phone number, address or license plate with the number 8 or 6 in it, as those numbers sound like words for luck, wealth and prosperity. The number 4 is not good at all, as it sounds like the word for death. Asians will do anything to avoid getting assigned that number for any purpose - it is for this reason, much like the number 13 in many Western cultures, you often won’t find a 4^th floor on an Asian elevator.

The ‘sounds like’ thing is so popular, it has turned into its own cryptic language. I received texts from my teenaged ESL students: “3Q for your help.” It took me a moment to realize they were saying thank you - 3 in Mandarin is “san”. San-Q. Apparently this coded language comes so naturally to them now that one class of high school students was permitted to write an entire section of their year-end exams using it.