Home    

I met Frank in the fall of 1986 when my friend Allan, a just-landed Canadian immigrant at the time, and my Canadian business friend and manufacturer, Ergo, traveled with me from Toronto to Kaiping, Guangdong, to talk business.

Frank was a small guy with thick eye glasses, a sharp-pointed jaw and thick black hair. He had a permanent grin on his face – fitting the stereotypical description of a Chinaman in a comic book to the fullest.

From the moment we met, Frank attached himself to me. He emphatically stated that he wanted to work for me, in any way I thought suitable. Perhaps my more worldly experience, my education, my Canadian status, or even my white wife impressed him; whatever the reason, he said he felt honored to have me as his friend. I gave him the English name Frank, without realizing that he could not pronounce it.

Frank and Allan had been partners in the New World Restaurant in Kaiping. When Allan moved to Toronto early ‘85, Frank closed the restaurant and went back north to Anshan to resume his former business as a steel trader.

Steel trading at the time was strictly based on guanxi or personal connections. In the early years of the “open door” policy, large corporations were all owned and subsi­dized by the government; the steel mills were no exception. The central government mandated the price for steel supplies and also designated the buyers. However, when construction started to boom, steel became in huge demand, especially in the newly developing private sector, which still had no designated buyers. The shortage of steel in private construction industries boosted the price of steel five times over the government fixed price. For instance, when steel was sold from one state-owned entity to another, the price per ton was ¥300. This same ton of steel could be sold to private builders for as high as ¥1,400.

For a few years, Frank enjoyed exceptional guanxi with some managers of large steel mills in Anshan. They would give him a few hundred tons of steel on credit and he then sold it to private buyers for a huge profit. When I met him, he boasted that a year earlier he had been one of the four richest men in the county of Kaiping. He had bought himself an apartment in one of the newly built high-rise complexes, as well as an American Dodge Chrysler, the one and only in the county.

Frank had a special interest in fengshui and had begun to study it to become a practitioner. His knowledge of fengshui was perhaps below average, and over the years I knew him, it never seemed to get much better.

Nonetheless he was convinced that his father was buried on an average spot, meaning that he and his brothers were destined to lead average lives, neither rich nor poor. There was nothing he could do to improve their destiny though since his brothers would not consent to moving their father’s grave. By Chinese culture, it was not defensible to do it alone against the will of close family members.

And so it really came as no surprise to him when early in 1986 his steel trading business began to crumble. By that fall, just before I met him, he no longer had much to do, so he had come back to Kaiping to rest. Ever since that time, his fortunes rolled steadily down­hill. He knew that his bad cycle in life had begun. His health was deteriorating fast and most of his money was swindled from him by his new partner.

In the following three years there was basically nothing he could do to make money, and, to make matters worse, the government came after him for back taxes. He also got pulled into a law suit involving a few hundred thousand yuan. He came to the edge of a nervous break­ down.

Again, the thing was that he claimed he knew before-hand that all these events would happen to him, yet there was nothing he could do to stop them unless his brothers would agree to change the location of his father’s grave.

During the few years Frank was languishing in Kaiping, he hung around with a self-taught master of fengshui, Lok Sook (sook means uncle in Cantonese, so in English it’s Uncle Lok), whom he had met some years earlier. Frank claimed that he had become Lok’s apprentice. The two of them did a few things together and the following are two related stories they told me.

Frank’s brother-in-law, the crazy kid:

Sometime in the mid-80s, Frank’s wife’s family re-packed the bones of his father-in-law in an urn and re-buried them in a new spot. It is a custom practiced in various counties in southern China that after a few years of the dead being buried in a coffin, the bare bones are dug up, cleansed, repacked, placed in an urn and reburied in a carefully chosen new spot.

A gut feeling told Frank that he didn’t like the new spot, but he didn’t know enough fengshui to tell what was wrong with it.

Then a strange thing happened. After about six months, his wife’s 15-years-old younger brother began to act abnormally. They sent him to see different doctors to find out what was wrong, but in vain.

The teenager was at first living with his mother in the village. For the convenience of visiting the various doctors in town, Frank’s mother-in-law asked Frank to accommodate her son in his apartment. The boy made a lot of trouble for Frank and his family. All his friends and neighbors knew there was a crazy kid living in his place. He would run down the streets with no clothes on, sometimes talking and screaming to himself in the house, even in the middle of the night. But the doctors didn’t have a clue how to fix the problem.

Frank, in his desperation, went to see his teacher, Lok, and asked if there was something wrong with the grave to cause this unfortunate family tragedy. The two of them went to see the grave.

Sure enough, Lok only took one look at the surroundings of the grave and said to Frank that it had to be dug up because the urn containing the bones of his young brother-in-law’s father was being eaten up by termites. And once they ate their way inside there would be death in the family. What I found curious was that Lok was able to tell what was happening to the urn without actually digging it up.

Frank informed his family-in-law and they went to dig up the grave immediately. When the urn was uncovered, they all saw hundreds of termites crawling on top, trying to find their way into the jar. So they burned the termites, cleaned the jar, and brought it home.

The next thing to do was to find a decent place to bury the bones. Lok, with Frank in tow, spent the next few days looking around in the hills for a suitable spot and they eventually found one. (What happened during the process of the burial is the second story.)

Four months after the reburial, the boy, without further consultation or treatment by any doctor, recovered and moved back to the village to live a normal life with his mother. A number of years later, Frank told me, not a single thing seemed abnormal about the young man.

This incident, together with the events that took place during reburial itself, no doubt reinforced Frank’s belief in the power of fengshui.

The burial

After Lok and Frank found a nice spot to bury the bones of Frank’s father-in-law, Lok spent some time on his calculations and came up with a date and time for the burial. It was important to find the right day and “hour” which would not conflict with the bazi, the eight characters of a birth chart, of any of the family members.

In ancient China the way to keep track of time was to divide up the day into 12 “hours” and each one was given a specific name. Therefore each Chinese “hour” is in fact two hours of today’s 24-hour system.

For some time before being told this story I had wondered how one knows when within the “hour” is the appropriate moment to lay down an urn. Years later I was told that within the “hour” something would happen to signify the correct moment. The happening could take the form of, for instance, the cloud moving over to block the sun; the few birds sitting on the tree top suddenly flying away; or an animal rushing out from the bush. A true fengshui master is able to pinpoint the particular sign through his calculations. In this story of Frank’s father-in-law, Lok was able to detect “noise nearby” as the clue for the correct moment.

On the morning of the day set for the burial, Frank instructed the diggers to dig a hole three feet deep on a particular spot and to be ready by 3 PM. The whole morning it seemed everything was out of control; either the diggers forgot some tools and had to return to the village to get them, or they needed water or food, or something! The process was slowed down even more when the diggers hit a big rock halfway and could not continue without removing it. By 3 PM the hole was not ready.

Lok and Frank became very anxious and were pushing the diggers to hurry because the time had come to lay the urn. Lok was carefully observing the surroundings, waiting for the “noise nearby”.

Sometime toward the middle of the “hour” there was suddenly a cicada chirping loudly on a nearby tree. Lok told Frank that this was the moment, but the hole was still not ready. The correct moment therefore bypassed them.

Shortly after the designated “hour” the diggers finally removed the hard rock, only to discover that the soil under it was bright red. After examining the red soil, Lok declared that it was perhaps fate that they would miss the correct “hour” – not to mention the correct moment – for the burial. He explained that the appearance of the red soil meant blood and fire for Frank. But when and how it would happen, Lok had no idea.

Frank hurried to finish the burial and he felt a little uneasy. But still, he did not at the time completely believe in the preciseness of the fengshui practice. He still dared to hope that Lok was wrong about the blood and fire.

It was close to six o’clock and the sky began to go dark when everyone packed up to leave the site. Frank got on his motorcycle to go down the hill on a dirt road. At a sharp curve halfway he fell off his bike and hurt his leg, his arm and his face. Though they were mostly surface skin cuts, there was a fair amount of blood staining his shirt and pants. When Lok came up to the curve and saw what had happened to Frank, he was amazed that the prediction had come true almost immediately.

At home, Frank began to worry – the blood part had come true, so now the fire still had to happen. He was very careful in the house, prepared water everywhere in case it was needed. He did not go out unless absolutely necessary and he cut his trips as short as possible. It almost sounded ridiculous when he told people that he was staying at home waiting for a fire to take place.

A couple weeks later, one evening when he went into the kitchen to start the gas stove to cook there was a small explosion. His hair and clothes caught on fire but he was able to put it out immediately. He went back out to the living room, sat down on the couch, and lit up a cigarette.

He took a deep breath and said to himself: “Thank God that’s finally over!”

These experiences turned Frank into a firm believer. Many years later I learned that he was using his knowledge in fengshui to earn a living.