He strolled over to the window near the production area, and a young man momentarily glanced at them before returning his attention to the screen. The Singapore cityscape was constantly changing, of course, and Wong noticed several new buildings coming up. But there was no obvious bringer of bad fortune in the view.
A voice called from behind them. ‘Sorry, sorry for abandoning you. Come, come, come into my office and take a seat.’ Alberto Tin summoned them towards his glass tank with flapping palms. ‘It is good to see you, thank you for coming. Would you like some tea, coffee, Coke?’
‘No, thank you,’ said Wong.
Joyce winced, having an insatiable appetite for caffeine.
‘Well, would you just like to get started? Is there anything I can do for you? Any questions?’
‘Yes. Many.’ Wong sat down, took out his pens and notebooks, and asked Tin a lengthy series of questions, eliciting his birth date, birth time, place of birth and other details. He asked for the date the company was founded, the date that business started in this new office, and the date the newspaper was launched. He requested floor plans and all other documents relating to the design of the office, including a map of the computer network. It took nearly twenty minutes to pull together all the information the geomancer asked for, and assemble it in the conference room, which was to be the work room for the pair from C F Wong & Associates.
While Wong started to examine these, Joyce turned to Tin and flashed him a smile. ‘Hey, I really like your mag. It’s way cool. I read it all the time. My flatmate is a subscriber from way back, like for a year or more.’
‘That’s very kind of you. Always good to meet our boss. I always tell the staff that the people who buy our publications are our employers and paymasters, so thank you.’ The roundness of Tin’s face was unfortunately emphasised by his page-boy haircut, circular glasses and wide smile, which turned his cheeks into two smaller circles.
‘I particularly like the Yoot section. I gotta ask you. Why is it called that? I mean, who’s Yoot? Is that like your nickname or something?’
‘We named it after one particular politician’s pronunciation of the word “youth”, you see.’
‘Oh, right, I see. Yeah, I suppose with a Singapore accent. Cool. In England we say yoof. I like your reviewer B K. He likes all the same music I do. I like Dudley Singh’s film reviews, too.’
‘Well, thank you for the compliment. I will tell him. In fact, you have told him. You see, I am B K.’
‘You are? Well, that’s great. Those Mooneaters rock.’
‘They do.’
‘Trip it, trip it, trip-trip hop.’
‘Do me baby, please don’t stop.’
‘Shake your booty in my face.’
‘Push it mama to the top. Yo!’
‘That’s such a cool song,’ said Joyce, with a laugh. ‘The lyrics are like, awesome, totally.’
‘Totally,’ agreed Tin.
Wong gave them a sidelong glance. Tin understands her language. So, it must be a sort of code which can be broken by adults. What is the cultural significance of shaking a boot in front of one’s face? He wondered whether there was a phrase book available on teenage argot.
‘Hey, in the mag your name is B K, but your name’s Alberto, right?’ Joyce was excited.
‘My name is Alberto, and B K and Phoebe Poon. There are only five staff on the editorial side of this newspaper. We all do several columns and have several names. This is standard for successful publications in Singapore. Small staff in editorial, big staff in the ad sales department.’
‘Is Dudley Singh real?’
‘Dudley Singh is real and so is Susannah Lo. You Westerners say many hands, light work. We Singaporeans say few hands, many profits.’ He gave a theatrical frown. ‘But sadly not so in this case. Never mind. Your Mr Wong I hope will help in this regard. Oh, do please excuse me. I shall be right back.’ The helmet-haired woman was waving at him through an internal window. He scurried off to take a phone call.
Wong had already sketched out a rough chart and was examining it with puzzlement. This assignment, which he had believed would be the easiest of the month, had turned into a challenge. How could an office he had already done, and counted as a success, have turned into such a financial flop? There must be something dramatically wrong with timing. Lo shu charts should provide the answer. But first, he must check the basic shape and direction of the premises.
As he pored over the floor plan, Joyce made an announcement, evidently feeling the need to make amends. ‘Hey, here’s something I can do for you. You need to find the middle first, right? Difficult because the office is such a weird shape with the curved window and that L-shaped bit that goes towards the lift, right? Well, I can calculate the middle of a complex rhomboid. I learned it in geometry. You gotta calculator?’ She held out her hand.
Wong just looked at her.
‘Okay, no calculator, huh? Never mind. I can borrow one from B K’s secretary.’
‘Mr Tin.’
‘Yeah.’
She returned two minutes later with a desk calculator from the accountant’s room and sat down in Tin’s leather seat at the head of the conference table. ‘Lemme see. You measure the sides of these bits first, and then…’ The young woman was relatively silent for the next ten minutes as she sat with her tongue caught between her teeth and covered a sheet of paper with scribbled calculations.
‘Bloody difficult, because of this curved bit,’ she said. ‘Hang on a mo. Hmm. Three point five. Plus a half…’
Another five minutes of scribbled calculations flowed. At last, she sat back and surveyed her handiwork with pride. ‘I think the middle is sort of here. Or maybe a bit this way. Hey, what are you doing?’
She looked up to see the old geomancer had cut a piece of cardboard into the shape of the floor plan. He held up a pencil and attempted to balance the card on it. After a few attempts, he found the point at which the card stayed balanced on the tip of the pencil lead. ‘Here is the middle of the premises,’ he said.
Joyce looked deflated. ‘Oh. Right. Yeah, I suppose that’s a quicker way of doing it.’
She compared the middle of the room, according to his pencil-balancing method, with her own result. ‘Well, I was nearly right, sort of, well not too far out, I guess, anyway, I was in the same sort of bit. Think I’ll go and get some Coke from the machine, want some? No? Whatever.’
Wong soon lost himself in his most arcane charts, studying floor plans, consulting almanacs, taking measurements, taking light readings, taking magnetic readings, examining what was outside the windows, going through each room carefully to make sketches. He drew more than a dozen lo shu charts.
Tin, in an interlude between his endless phone calls, re-entered the room and carefully explained the activities of the office. ‘The writers, artists and so on are in that space over there, because it is supposedly the most creative. Dudley is the chief there. The pages, once read by the proofreaders, are taken to the Sam Long Output Centre, two floors down, for processing by my deputy, Susannah Lo, who is also production editor. We bring each plate back here when ready to go. The final camera-ready pages are prepared by 1.15 p.m. exactly, the day before distribution, which is when it goes to the printers. Hollis News Retail distributes them, largely through its own outlets. Money from dealers, subscribers and advertisers is all dealt with in that little room there. The previous tenants told us that is supposedly the best place for attracting gold and holding on to it, in feng shui terms.’
‘Your office design is correct,’ said Wong. ‘It fits with what I said on my earlier reading of the room. For the previous tenant. What exactly is the problem, please? Low sales, low readers, low advertisements?’
Alberto Tin gave a deep sigh. It was clear that he was a cheerful man by nature, but he was under heavy pressure. As soon as his smile disappeared, Wong could see the heavy grey bags under his eyes and tension in his mouth.
‘The problem is-well, to be honest, I don’t know wh
at the problem is. The readers love us, the mailbag is bigger than ever, we’ve got better writers, better photographers, better design, our marketing woman has been working flat out. But it’s just not working. People are just not buying the thing. We were doing 26 000 a year ago, which is not bad for a young, small mag in a relatively small market. This year we were hoping to climb steadily. Instead we’re down to about 9000 or 10000. We cannot survive like that. The advertisers are dropping out like the proverbial flies.’
‘Why not do some ads on TV?’ said Joyce. ‘You get neat ads these days.’
‘We’ve recently invested a lot of money on an advertising blitz. The circulation climbed by about ten per cent, and then fell back again. Very disappointing.’
‘Distribution: that is okay or not?’ asked Wong.
‘We get extremely good positioning from Hollis. Susannah knows the people from Hollis really well, she has relations there. They make sure we get excellent display, right on the counter-front, at all their outlets. But it’s not been enough. Sales are still down. Without the circulation, we can’t get the advertisers. We’re slowly dying. Our backers have given us four weeks and then they’re closing us down.’
Dispensing the bad news had caused the cheerful little man to wilt like an under-watered rubber plant. His shoulders had become round, his chest had caved in and his head had fallen forwards.
‘It’s a great little mag,’ said Joyce. ‘I mean, by Singapore standards, of course.’
‘Thanks.’
Wong told Tin that he wanted to know more about the physical way money moved in and out of the company. The publisher disappeared, returning five minutes later with a bespectacled woman whom he introduced as Sophie Melun, the newspaper’s financial director. ‘Sophie will tell you what you need to know about the money side. I’m going to have to leave you now. I’m heading to Changi to catch a plane to K L, see one of our investors. Ask Susannah or Dudley if you have any questions; they’re in charge while I’m gone. I’ll be back early on Friday.’
Tin put on a toughing-it-out smile and marched out with a wave.
The job thoroughly intrigued the geomancer. The more he studied the firm, the more he was convinced that it stood to succeed or fail on the grounds of feng shui alone. The company was apparently doing things right in business terms, yet was failing for purely intangible reasons.
After he had finished interviewing Ms Melun and returned to his charts, Joyce looked up from the back issue of Update she was reading. ‘So what’s the diagnosis, doc?’
‘The answer is in the birth charts, I think. Each year has its own nine-square number. It takes up the birth chart’s middle. The middle number on the top of the turtle’s back. You remember that story I told you about the turtle on the River Lo? The number of the year goes down by one as each year begins. So 1998 was a Two Year, 1999 was a One Year, 2000 is a Nine Year and so on.’ He showed her a page of charts in a book.
‘But each person also has their own nine-square number. You have your own lo shu chart. It depends on when you were born. You must find the nature of your own ch’i energy. Then you can see how your fortunes will be. A business, also, has energy. It has a birth date. You can find its nine-square number.’
‘Cool. So what’s my number? I was born in 1983.’
‘The year does not begin on January 1 and continue to December 31. No, it goes from Lunar New Year to Lunar New Year. Your birthday is February 9. So you were born in the Year of Eight.’
‘How d’you know my birthday? I don’t remember telling you.’
‘That was one of the first things I checked. After you joined the office. I had to, of course.’
‘To make sure I wasn’t like, a monster with bad vibrations that would upset your office, I suppose. Well, I bet you’re glad I turned out so nice.’
‘Ye-es,’ he said, with not quite enough conviction.
Wong busied himself with his charts, and Joyce, quickly bored, wandered off. As the final copy deadline of 12.30 p.m. approached, and each staff member met his or her final deadline for the issue, the atmosphere began to lighten, with people breaking away from their computers and stopping to chat over their desks or stand by the drinks machine.
She quickly struck up a friendship with Dudley Singh, a tall young man of about twenty-five, and they stood by the coffee machine talking at length about the movie stars they hated, which were legion.
In the production department, Susannah Lo took Wong through the technical process in detail. The pages were prepared on the computer, and then sent to the platemaker.
‘This we call a plate,’ she said. ‘No, no, please don’t touch it.’
Wong whipped his fingers away and apologised.
‘It is very delicate. We have to be very careful, because this is the final product that goes to the printer, from which the actual newspaper is made. It will be collected by the printer very shortly, printed this afternoon, and distributed tomorrow morning. You will see it at the news stands from about seven.’
Ms Lo, a small, unsmiling woman of about forty in a designer suit, had owl-glasses which perched precariously on a tiny nose.
‘Is it available at every news stand?’ Wong asked.
‘There are complex relationships between various publishers, distributors and retailers, which I don’t really want to get into. We are signed with Hollis News Retail as our prime distributor, and they do a pretty good job. We get excellent display at their shops, and they also distribute some to other retail chains, street stands, as well.’
‘Are you aware of any problems in the sections you are boss of?’
Ms Lo pushed her glasses back and replied: ‘No. Production and distribution are fine. I think the problem must be in editorial or marketing.’
The geomancer nodded. He looked back at the page of classified ads in front of him, and tugged at the straggly hairs on his chin.
On Tuesday morning, C F Wong rose at 5.30 as usual, and was in his office at Wai-Wai Mansions soon after 6.30. He gulped down a sharp bowl of Chiuchow tea to wake himself up, and started drawing fresh lo shu charts for all the decision-makers and major investors involved with Hong Siu Publishing, complete with water stars and mountain stars. He went on to draw the Four Pillars of Wisdom, and Heavenly Stems and Earthly Branches, for each person.
After an hour, he had covered his desk with charts, and started to litter Joyce’s and Winnie’s desks with scribbled sheets.
The young Western woman arrived at 9.30 to find her desk had disappeared under a mass of paperwork. She placed her coffee on the window sill and plonked herself down heavily on her chair. It was a hydraulic office chair, and she liked to lift it to maximum height, so she could swivel it from side to side, swinging her legs and irritating the others.
‘Wanna hear my theories?’ she asked.
This was the sort of instance when one really had to ask oneself about one’s adherence to the truth, Wong thought. Clearly he did not want to hear her theories. But she was his boss’s client’s daughter.
‘Okay,’ he said, but with so little enthusiasm that he hoped she might get the message.
‘Well. I went to TGIF’s last night. I’m like, “What do you think about Update?” And Emma’s like, “It’s really cool.” Becky’s like, “Everybody I know reads it.” Emma’s had two letters in its letters page last month. Anyway, I’m like, “So what could be done to improve it?” and they gave me some ideas. I’ll tell you them,’ she said, generously.
She took a sip of coffee, depositing chocolate powder on her nose, and continued: ‘The first thing we all agreed is that there should be more writing about like bands and less about restaurants and cheezy nightclubs and stuff. Who wants to read so much about boring old food?’
‘I think maybe that you do not understand the publishing business,’ Wong replied. ‘Western pop groups like the Beatles probably will not buy advertisement space in a Singapore magazine. But local restaurants, they will.’
‘The Beatles? The Beat
les broke up already. John Lennon is dead. He died two years before I was born.’
‘Well, then he will not be buying an advertisement.’
‘Where you going?’
‘I am going out to buy one. You want to come?’
‘We get it delivered.’
‘I want to buy one from a shop.’
They stepped from the musty, cramped doorway of Wai-Wai Mansions into a dazzling mid-summer Singapore morning and had to virtually shut their eyes against the light as they strolled south on Telok Ayer Street, towards a small cluster of shops near an office complex. The central business area had grown to absorb what had been a quiet road and the background rush of traffic formed a rumbling background hum.
Wong found a streetside newspaper vendor and bought a copy of Update. The seller looked at him with suspicion, as if it was somehow indecent for a Chinese man in his fifties to be buying a magazine with a pop star on the cover.
Moving a few metres away from the kiosk, the geomancer opened the magazine and started flicking through the pages.
‘What’re you looking for?’
‘This page.’ Wong flicked towards the back of the journal, and found a section of lonely hearts advertisements.
Joyce tried to, but did not quite succeed in, stifling a smile. It suddenly occurred to her that she knew nothing at all about her boss’s personal life: whether he was living with someone, or had children, or where he lived or what he did after work.
‘Joyce, you do something for me please?’
‘Sure, what?’
‘You go down that street. Take the second road on the right side. You will find some small shops. Will you see if any of them have this magazine? Then buy one from them. And also, buy copies from any news stand you see while you are going. Take a pen and write down on each copy where from. The name of the shop and the street where you bought it. Get as many as you can. Meet back at the office in half an hour.’
The Feng Shui Detective Page 5
