Free The Shanghai Union of Industrial Mystics by Nury Vittachi

buildings seemed to morph and shrink as he watched. And then, seconds later, he was up in the sky and the buildings and streets had all laid themselves out as toys below him, the biggest city in China becoming a doormat at his feet.
    Standing next to Wong was Bi Yun, a vice-president of the company that owned the hotel at which he was about to dine. His eyes were on the feng shui master’s face, and he had noted his guest’s obvious pleasure in the elevator ride.
    ‘Gorgeous view, isn’t it?’ Bi said in Beijing-accented Mandarin. ‘You feel like you are blasting off into outer space. It’s like being in a glass rocket or something, right?’
    Wong nodded. ‘View very beautiful, yes.’
    ‘Well, we want people to feel they are blasting off to heaven, because that’s exactly where they are going,’ the businessman gushed. ‘Wait till you see the final table settings. It’s a gourmet’s paradise, it really is.’
    The elevator continued to fly smoothly on its way up to the 45th storey penthouse restaurant. ‘Do you know how fast we’re moving?’ the businessman asked.
    ‘Yes. We are not moving at all. The world moves down.’
    ‘No, you’ll find that we’re moving up at almost three floors a second—that’s about thirty feet a second. Think about it. Three floors a—’
    ‘No,’ said the feng shui master. ‘Each person is the centre of his own universe, as Mo Zhou said. When you go in an elevator like this, you do not move. What happens is the universe falls forty-five storeys down.’
    Bi’s eyebrows rose a centimetre. ‘I’ll have to think about that one.’ He gave Wong the kind of smile one gives to a child who believes his own fantasies.
    People who knew Wong as a taciturn old man would have been surprised to see him now. He stood tall, his chest thrust out. Had he been walking, they would have noticed the spring in his step. There were even the early glimmerings of a smile curling at the edges of his lips, although Wong was not generally a smiler. The fact was that the past months had been a remarkably profitable time for him. For years he had dismissed northern China as any sort of viable market for his skills. Following the war on Falun Dafa in the late 1990s, feng shui was placed on the frowned-upon-activities list, along with most other non-materialistic codes of belief—although they could do nothing about the feng shui-influenced architecture that was already going up. All unregulated spiritual activities were disliked by the government.
    This had upset Wong, as he was in the feng shui business for largely materialistic reasons, and was happy to interpret it as materialistically as anyone wanted. You want an excuse to buy a load of gold trinkets? No problem, I’ll give you one. But in the past two years, feng shui had become fashionable in China again—absurdly, as an import from Westernised, British-flavoured Hong Kong. How can you import something to a country from where it originates? There was an idiom in English about this—sending coals to castles, or something? And a matching one (much older, of course) in Chinese: herding ducks to Guangzhou. Yet now there were feng shui ‘waving cats’ at the entrances to all the shops, and Shanghai people were filling his bookings diary. He could afford to turn down all but the biggest payers.
    He had had so many commissions from Shanghai over the past year that he had decided to base himself in the city for a few months, mop up whatever cash there was, set up a satellite office, and a branch of his association. East Trade Industries, the property company which paid his biggest retainer, had bought land, office blocks and several strata titles in Pudong, so it was happy to underwrite the costs of the move. It was cheaper than flying him up and down from Singapore every few days.
    The money was great. Normally, that would have been more than enough to satisfy him. But on visits to Shanghai in recent weeks, he had gained more than cash: he