Friday November 23rd 2007 00.49

Raffles, Parties, Elections

Richard Ashworth

Feng Shui Diaries

Solar fortnight beginning:

Friday November 23^rd 2007 00.49

Raffles, Parties, Elections

As I fly into Changi Airport at around 10:30 pm, Singapore is glittering beneath me like a bowl of pearls. I am here for the Singapore International Feng Shui Convention. There is nothing like flying into a new city at night. After all this time, I’m still a tourist.

Changi may be better known as the site of one of the most notorious Japanese prisoner –of -war camps Tonight it is 80-odd degrees fahrenheit and drippingly humid. Not comfortable. Worse if you’re breaking rocks, I guess. All the signs are in four languages: English, Malay, Indian and Chinese. Everybody speaks English; it is one of Singapore’s big edges over China.

This is the Pig hour. And we are in the Pig month of the Pig year.

In feng shui terms the island does appear to form the xue or pearl between the bright hall of Malaysia to the North and the jade belt of the Straits of Malacca which lead out into the trade routes of the South China Sea. You’d expect both islands to be industrious but Singapore to have the financial edge.

It is around 11pm and I am jet-lagged after travelling 17 hours or so. The beautiful receptionist at the hotel tells me I am booked in for four nights, for the duration of the convention, in fact. All the receptionists are beautiful. As indeed were the airhostesses on Singapore Air. Come to think of it, it may be that all the women in Singapore are beautiful.

I am sure she is right, I tell her. Could she remind me what my name is again?

I find my room on the 14^th floor, having travelled up in the exo-lift that opens up the view of the artificial jungle of the lobby. This is quite a hotel. I hear birdsong and look up to double-check I am indoors. Taped. The giveaway of course is the lack of guano. In the lift I bump into a feng shui master I know vaguely.

I sleep fitfully as my body thinks it’s in Surrey and that bedtime is around noon next day.

Not that much bigger than the Isle of Wight but with a much more efficient ferry service, Singapore is approximately 42 miles East-West and 23 North-South. The average age of the population seems somewhat lower and as far as I know The Isle of Wight has no plans for Formula One racing, a casino or a ferris wheel millimetres larger than the London Eye so as to make good the claim “largest in the world”. On the other hand, the island in the Solent, one of the staunchest Tory seats in the UK, may share a view of fixed ruling elites: the People’s Action Party having been in power in Singapore since the acrimonious split with Malaysia in 1965. Father of the Nation, Lee Kuan Yew now designated Mentor Minister, has been followed as Prime Minister by his son Lee Hsien Loong. Which is nice. The party currently holds 82 of the 84 seats in the Singapore Parliament.

I think it’s morning here at the Convention but my eyelids are arguing.

One of these MPs, a shiny young Moslem who would have been at home on the New Labour back bench, is the Guest of Honour at the Convention. We are required to stand for some minutes before he graces us with his presence, addresses some frankly quite well-chosen words and scarpers. What sort of Guest-of-Honour leaves just as proceedings begin? I wonder.

I am here for two main reasons: firstly before I commit myself to my year forecast for 2008 and especially the personalised ones, I want to be quite clear what the Chinese think. Secondly I want to meet and mix with Feng Shui Masters who may never travel to Europe. Grand Master Yap Cheng Hai who trained both Lillian Too and Joey Yap is here, for instance. He is in his late 80’s and still skips around like a stand-up. I have not seen him since 2000 during much of which time his two most famous alumni have been noisily feuding. Which is no advertisement.

Also here is local Feng Shui Master Tan Khoon Long (whose startlingly accurate year predictions I noted from last year’s proceedings) as well as Masters from Hong Kong and elsewhere in Asia. Master Tan is Singapore Chinese where Grand Master Yap is Malaysian Chinese.

Not that you’d know from these two dignified veterans, as so often happens with neighbouring states sharing languages and racial mix, there is ill-humoured rivalry between Singapore and Malaysia. A Scot would understand. Indonesia is two hours sail to the South and Hong Kong three hours by plane but the joke is that although Malaysia is adjacent, customs formalities make a visit to either of the others more rapid.

In a coffee break I check my trusty Blackberry for contact with home, 12,000 miles away.

My wife Sheila has sent a chatty email. The first frosts have hit while I am away, she tells me. The last on Thursday night, was enough to freeze the cascade on one of the exterior water features but there’s enough in the sump to keep it pumping. This water is arranged in keeping with the Water Dragon Classic; one gentle fountain in the South West feeds a major one in the East which in turn feeds another to the South East. These arrangements are easily set up, it’s the orientations that are finicky.

Jessie – my daughter, the film star – has been filming as the young Sarah Jane in the Doctor Who spin-off the Sarah Jane Adventures which has led to invitations to fan conventions and may lead to proposals of marriage (see link below)* but for her like many Dragons, (especially the Earth ones of 1988) the second half of this year is more about learning and preparation than of leaps forward. Her university student twin Henrietta is in exactly the right place. Meanwhile their little brother Joey is filming The Bill. Fame is no trick with feng shui. It is more substantial values that can prove elusive.

I catch up with my friend Jill who is that rarity, a European practising feng shui on the Chinese mainland and meet her friend Peggy who is a Singapore Chinese ex-student of Master Joey. Joey, Grand Master Yap and Ms Too will not, I gather, share the same building.

The metal of this Pig month invites its own trouble. Pigs, attentive readers will recall, don’t get on with each other, so the Pig month of a Pig year can be fraught. The particular variety of fraughtness depends on the stem (as opposed to the branch or animal) Here, it is yin metal whose negative aspect is por kwan, the Broken Soldier. At its worst this represents a catty, indirect aggression. The clash of Masters hangs over the ceremonies like a spell.

Por kwan is nasty: this month I have already been dealing with an unusual number of neighbours from hell. One, an amateur enchantress, has sworn to bankrupt the innocents next door. Another flushed my friend Patricia, journalist and magician in her own right, out of her home with threats so insidious that she sold at a discount to get out. How to help?

There are broadly two approaches: turn them around or get rid of them. The first usually involves the addition of goy moon shapes and mirrors to the afflicted boundary, the second, employment of what the Chinese Calendar calls a Remove day whose function is exactly what it sounds like.

Sheila tells me Rosalie in Derbyshire has emailed. She is being sued by an opportunist who figures her alternative health practice will pay him off rather than challenge his trumped-up charges, I have suggested she notices that this is not the first time she has experienced male aggression.

“If you keep driving into trees,” I have reminded her, “They increase your insurance premiums, not the trees’.”

“Can you be a little less Zen?” she asked me and by way of response, I told her to place fresh water daily at the tai chi (geometric centre) of her house. Now apparently the hearse-follower has agreed a settlement that will cost Rosalie nothing. Hurrah.

Master Tan Khoon Yong fronts a professional Geomancy Consultancy here in Singapore and although he speaks excellent English, presents his predictions for the year in Mandarin. He expects floods in Beijing. There is a solar eclipse just before the Olympics but he does not explicitly tie these facts together.

Another Master from Thailand expounds on the use of Xuan Kong Hexagram feng shui for date selection. His suggestion is that we ignore the Chinese Almanac. The days set out there for initiation, consolidation and so on can not be true for everyone.One person’s good fortune is always another’s loss, isn’t it? The logic is flawed but he is right that customising dates will tend to induce customised good fortune. I am depressed by his routine facetiousness about “visible” feng shui: the placing of gourds, pagodas and other knick-knacks. He has no idea of metaphor or of intention; just a predictable disdain for what is “superstitious” and not “scientific.” Don’t start me talking. There is a burst of laughter when he asks how these charms can work for the blind. This may well be at the expense of the (Malaysian) Lillian Too.

After the convention, I visit the Long Bar at the Raffles Hotel as one does. This Edwardian relic of Empire has been dwarfed with palm trees and the entrances bricked in. It’s more like a theme park with its arcades of concessions. The Empire no longer strikes back. I share a pot of tea with my father who has been gone these six years but that’s another story. The Eagles are playing the Last Resort as I enter: call some place paradise, they sing. Kiss it goodbye.

I take a boat trip and see with my own eyes how much land has been reclaimed from the sea and the site of the proposed casino. It will cost locals $100 dollars to enter but to you and me with our Western Currency it will be free.

I draft ba zi’s in Starbucks in the Marina Mall where they serve me a venti latte in the familiar green and white mugs and but for the air-conditioning and the lack of a Marmite panini I might for these hours, be in Guildford.

And in this piggy time, it is no surprise when Neil texts me in Kowloon to tell me that his daughter Carina has been disciplined at school for bullying. What is a surprise is that I am by then on the Hong Kong MTR on my way to visit a friend (also called Carina) who is a temple diviner. Carina fled Shanghai in the 30’s and has access to oral information I have found nowhere else. No such thing as a coincidence. I ask Neil to remind me of his daughter’s birth details. Meanwhile I respond that there are three golden rules:

1. Every girl is a princess.
2. Daddy knows best.
3. In that order.

Neil’s kids adore him but he is smart enough to seek advice. Carina (the daughter) is 8 which is early for such dramas and I remind him as if he needed it, that every child is an innocent. For the other parents the bad company is little Carina.

Carina (the diviner) is at least 60 odd and I think she lies about it. She acknowledges that she is a Snake (1941) and then later insists she is a Monkey (1944). She has been seriously ill this year which is what you’d expect of a Snake in a Pig year. Monkey health has been pretty good. She takes me to a restaurant where there are no European faces and the waitresses tease her in Cantonese about her toy boy. That’s me (Water Dragon 1952).

Carina knows I am a vegetarian. There is a long Buddhist tradition of not eating meat of course but she still considers me a bit odd.

“You not like to eat beef?” she confirms.

Masterfully she orders several dishes. One is a delicious bean curd creation.

“Vegetable duck,” she tells me.

With the birth details, Carina can say the little girl is “broken inside.”

“Hurt but not showing,” she says. There is envy and peer pressure. I report this to Neil without mentioning the brokenness and he texts back that he is impressing upon her that when she is upset, it is fine to admit it. This is in effect direct dialogue with the diviner, pretty much bypassing me.

She is an extraordinary woman, a little mortified that the Western authorities who have pumped her for information have failed to acknowledge the fact. I pay for the lunch and for her time and she is mollified..

Everything is bilingual at Hong Kong Airport. As I take off I think of Master Tan Khoon Yong talking rapidly in Mandarin on the convention stage. Several times his eyes defocus as if he is many miles and several centuries away. He is going within, I think, to a place that is not subject to reason and where English is not spoken.

Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTS5zDGr_XU*

Richard Ashworth

My super-duper revamped website is at www.imperialfengshui.info and

my book The Feng Shui Diaries is available now from:

Amazon

Waterstones

or indeed Tescos. Do buy it from a bookshop if you can.

Names have been changed to protect..uh..me..

Feedback is welcomed including that you never want to hear from me again if that happens to be the case. Please also let us know if you are getting too many or too few diaries or that they are appearing in Cinemascope on your screen or whatever. Thanks. R