The Feng Shui Detective - By Nury Vittachi Page 0,2

fireman arrived to find an elderly Buddhist nun had stamped out the fire with her bare feet—hard calloused hooves which were quite undamaged by the harsh usage.

Wong, who had already been to his first meeting of the day, arrived, sweating, at the door of his office at 9.30, and was greeted by a worried-looking Winnie nodding at a large figure sitting on his desk, reading a foreign magazine.

‘M.C. Queeny. She’s not a boy, you see,’ said Winnie.

‘Yes,’ he said, seeing.

Ms McQuinnie hopped off the desk, strode across the room in two steps and shook his hand firmly. Her name was not Joe, but Joyce, although her family called her Jo or Jojo. She was not interested in filing. She was in her gap year, whatever that was, and was doing a project about oriental geomancy with a private tutor as part of her application to get into an exclusive college. She wanted to spend some of her summer observing Wong and learning about the practice. She wanted to be his ‘shadow’, as she put it. She wanted to watch how he worked in the office and accompany him on field visits. She had been in Singapore three weeks. She emitted a torrent of words, but what language was it in?

‘I’m like, “So how am I going to become an instant feng shooee master, then?” And my dad’s like, “My mate Mr Pun’s got a real feng shooee master and you can work for him for three months.” And I’m like, “Wow.”’

Wong stared.

‘I’ll be like, totally quiet and stuff,’ she added with a laugh. ‘You won’t even know I’m here. Ha ha ha ha ha.’

Wong realised immediately that this person could not be quiet, even if she had her larynx surgically removed. Her look was not quiet. She was big. She wore bright colours. She was a Westerner. It would be as logical for a giraffe to say he is inconspicuous because he has no voice. Some people just don’t fit in some places. What was that English phrase in 500 English Idioms Explained about bulls? She was like a bull in China.

She laughed again, for no particular reason. Wong realised that it was a nervous laugh. They stared at each other for a moment, silenced. This is not going to work, he thought. Still, think of Mr Pun. Must make sure he gets positive feedback. ‘So you are interested in becoming a feng shui master yourself?’ Wong asked, forcing his cheeks to rise in a smile, and carefully enunciating the Chinese phrase for geomancy in his Guangdong accent as foong soi.

She roared with what the geomancer took to be scorn. ‘Me? No way! I wanna be rich. Where do I put my stuff?’

Winnie cleared one of the stock tables for Ms McQuinnie to use as a desk. The intruder immediately shoved her desk towards the window with one foot. ‘Better view,’ she explained, forgetting the insult implicit in her desire to rearrange furniture in a geomancer’s premises. After making herself comfortable—with her desk causing an awkward swirl of energy right towards the meditation area—she explained to Wong that she just wanted to write about feng shui from an academic point of view.

‘I mean, I dunno if I even believe in the stuff. I’m generally, pretty—you know—skeptical about any sort of like magic or mumbo-jumbo, not that I mean that your work is mumbo-jumbo, no way. But I might try and write it up in a sort of debunking way, because my tutor likes a bit of controversy.’

Wong was not sure what ‘mumbo-jumbo’ or ‘debunking’ meant, but he knew that he was not going to be comfortable with this young woman in his office. His observations over the next half hour confirmed this. She was too foreign, too young, too loud, too large and too curious about his work. She kept asking questions. She wrote down everything he said. She listened intently to all his phone conversations. He had to resort to Putonghua, Hakka, Hokkien and Cantonese with callers who shared those languages.

She then went out to a shop and returned with a big cardboard bucket of something she called Tall Skinny Latte, which smelt of bitter coffee and cow milk, and made him feel so sick that he was unable to finish the stewed colon he had picked up from a hawker for his lunch. She laughed like a braying donkey on the telephone to her friends, the way only men should laugh. Her squeals were so loud they could