“A-Ma’s in the little garden,” Mom told me. “She’s expecting you.”
“Why don’t you go and rest?” I said. She looked exhausted; the bags under her eyes reminded me of a really sad basset hound. “I know the way,” I added.
She didn’t argue. “OK,” she said. “It’s good that you’re home.” She smiled wanly, then turned and dragged herself up the stairs. I know it sounds weird to say that, but that’s what it looked like – like it was some super-steep hill and she might not make it to the top.
I dropped my laptop and my knapsack by the door and walked down the long, wide hall toward A-Ma’s bedroom. The garden was in a small, enclosed courtyard connected to her room. I knocked tentatively, heard a faint “Come in,” and pushed open the door. The room was only dimly lit. I could just make out the brooding hulk of her big bed, built out of cypress and covered with decorative carvings, and the red and gold armoire in the corner, with its black frame and butterfly decor handles. The lattice door to the courtyard was open. I steeled myself, then crossed the bedroom and walked out into the garden.
A winter-flowering plum stood at its center, its gnarled branches reflected in the clear water of the little carp pool beneath it. The flower beds that flanked the walls were planted sparingly with wispy bamboo and miniature rhododendron. Beside the pool were a pair of chairs, separated by a glass-topped side table on which was placed a small cherrywood box. A-Ma reclined in one of these chairs, covered with an elaborately embroidered peacock-blue satin quilt, despite the warmth of the early August evening. Carp, fat and golden, slipped through the water like big drops of yellow oil, and the air was tangy with salt, the way it is in cities by the sea.
“A-Ma.” I squatted down beside her chair and took her icy hand in mine. I squeezed it carefully – bird bones, skin as thin and brittle as a dried leaf. I was shocked at how fragile she had grown since I’d been in Calgary. It was like she was turning into a husk or something.
Her eyes creaked open a slit. “You came. I was hoping you would.” Her voice was weak; she spoke in a faint whisper.
“Mom told me you weren’t feeling well.”
“She told you I was dying.… No, now shush.” She lifted a trembling hand to silence my protests. “I told her to. Besides, it’s true. You mustn’t feel bad. I’m ready. I’ve lived eighty-four long years and now I’m tired. I want to be reborn into something young and sprightly. Something with a little sparkle.”
“You look pretty sparkly to me.” I smiled, but my eyes filled up with tears. “Besides, eighty-four is young. Look how old The Grandfather was when he died. And then only because he choked on a moon cake.”
“Well, The Grandfather was a different case altogether,” said A-Ma. “Help me to sit up a bit, will you?”
I cranked the chair to a more upright position.
“There now,” she said, seeming to rally a little. “That’s better. I’ve something for you.” She pointed to the wooden box on the table.
I stood, reaching over her, and picked it up. It was maybe eight inches square, with intricately worked brass hinges and a symbol inlaid on its lid – mother-of-pearl and ebony. The symbol consisted of a circle equally divided into black and white sections by a reverse S-like shape. Within the black section was a small circle of white, and within the white section was a small circle of black. I recognized the symbol – it was the yin-yang symbol and you saw it all over Chinatown – but I couldn’t remember what it meant, or maybe I’d never known. “Wow,” I said. “This looks old.”
“Go ahead,” she said. “Open it.”
Gingerly I opened the box and peered inside. I don’t know what I expected – a jack-in-the-box? an explosive device? – but there, nestled in a lining of faded gold satin, was some sort of round instrument, about six inches in diameter, made of ivory. A smaller version of the yin-yang symbol on the lid appeared in the center of the instrument, surrounded by concentric rings densely inscribed with Chinese characters. “Cool,” I breathed. “What is it?”
“A lo p’an,” she replied. “Lo in Chinese means ‘everything’ and p’an means ‘bowl.’ The lo p’an is a circular bowl that holds all the mysteries of the earth. At least that’s what The Grandfather used to say. It’s what they call a geomancer’s compass.”
I remembered Dr. Yu, the fumbling, fusty old geomancer with hair growing out of his ears, who had selected the date of The Grandfather’s funeral based on the year, month, day, and hour of the old man’s birth, using a Chinese almanac and something called a Heavenly Sixty-Four Hexagrams Chart. Ridiculous, of course, but according to A-Ma it had been totally important that the date be auspicious, which is to say lucky. If it wasn’t auspicious, well, terrible things would supposedly happen. I remembered her description of monsters at The Grandfather’s funeral, iau-kuais, seething whirlwinds of teeth, claws, dust, and rags with fierce orange eyes. “Was this Dr. Yu’s?” I asked.
A-Ma smiled faintly and shook her head. “Dr. Yu? That old fool? No, this was The Grandfather’s compass, Miranda … and his father’s before him, and his grandfather’s … and so forth and so on. This compass dates from the seventeenth century and was made, if memory serves me, in Quangdong Province, our ancestral home. The tradition, however … that goes back much further.”
I have to admit that this took me by surprise. Given all his wheelings and dealings, The Grandfather must have been a pretty busy man in his day; not the kind of guy who had time for a lot of hobbies. “The Grandfather was a geomancer?”
A-Ma nodded. “He was. And his father and his grandfather. Of great renown. You come from a long line of geomancers.” I think this was supposed to impress me.
“Really?” I said. “Well, what do you know? To tell you the truth, though, I haven’t a clue what a geomancer does. I mean, other than event scheduling.”
“Geomancy is an ancient and revered science,” she replied. “It involves the identification and balancing of those subtle energies, or earth radiations, that disrupt our lives.” She seemed more with it now than when I had first arrived. Her voice was stronger and the shaking had subsided. Maybe she had been asleep before and I had woken her up. “Which brings me to my point,” she continued. “Why I asked for you. The Grandfather placed this compass in my safekeeping until such time as I could pass it on to you. That time has come.”
This was a surprise. If I hadn’t once thrown up on The Grandfather’s birthday cake, I would have sworn that he didn’t even know who I was. (He was jiggling me on his knee at the time, so really it was partially his fault; who does that to a kid who has already eaten her body weight in candy?) I mean, you’d think that two generations of grandchildren and great-grandchildren would all start to blur together after a while. But now he had left me this … I don’t know what you’d call it … this precious family heirloom. He’d left it to me, specifically. “Wow,” I began. “I’m so honored …”
A-Ma shook her head. “It is not a question of honor so much as obligation, Miranda. The Grandfather wanted you to safeguard the compass because of the mission you must undertake.”
Suddenly I was beginning to get this bad feeling. And I mean very bad. “What mission?” I asked.
“The salvation of our family,” she replied.
A flash of memory briefly lit up some distant corner of my brain as my mind jogged violently back in time – something locked away in RAM having to do with The Grandfather’s funeral. “Is this about … the curse?” I asked.
She nodded.
“You think our family’s cursed?”
“I know it is.”
I sat back on my heels. “Well, in the first place, it isn’t. That’s just crazy. And, even if it was true, what would you expect me to do about it?”
“You must lift the curse,” she replied. “That’s your mission.”
“Lift it? How?” I was beginning to feel kind of panicky. I didn’t have time for some bogus mission. I had places to go, people to see. Well, not people to see, but metalanguages to w
rite. “I’m a minor. Surely you’ve got to be a grown-up before you’re allowed to go around lifting curses.”
“This is serious, Miranda.”
“No it’s not. Not really. We may be a little dysfunctional –”
“Miranda!” she snapped. “Don’t patronize me. And we are not dysfunctional. Families on sitcoms are dysfunctional. We are doomed.” It was the first time she had ever raised her voice to me. I was so shocked I couldn’t say a word. I just sat there, my bum on my heels, staring at her with my mouth hanging open. “Look,” she continued, “I’m not the only one dying here. Our entire family is dying. All this illness … these accidents … you have to listen to me and do what I say. I haven’t much time and, frankly, neither have you.”
This took me aback. “What?”
“How long do you think it will be before something happens to you as well?” she demanded. “Some sort of cancer, or you just accidentally happen to fall down an elevator shaft?”
“Excuse me?”
She leaned forward in her chair and, reaching out, took my chin in her hand and stared deeply into my eyes. “I’m saying that you’re the only Liu who has yet to be struck down. Do you think that’s not going to happen? Why should you be spared?” She squeezed my chin, released it, and settled back in her chair, closing her eyes. This burst of activity, brief as it was, had clearly worn her out.
“I don’t think about it, OK?” I stood. “It doesn’t occur to me to worry about random things I can’t control. That’s being obsessive. That’s being crazy.”
She sighed and shook her head without opening her eyes. “I agree, Miranda. It is crazy. It’s also true.” She waved her hand in the air. “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Miranda, will you just sit down and stop trying to talk me out of what I know, and let me explain?”
I shuffled over to the other chair and sat. I replaced the box containing the compass on the side table. “OK,” I said. “Shoot.”
A-Ma cleared her throat. “The reason why The Grandfather lived as long as he did was that he was waiting for you to grow up.”
I shifted uncomfortably in the chair. “Me? Why me?”
“So that you could help him find a body.”
“A body?”
“Well, more like bones.”
“Bones?”
She nodded.
“What?” I asked. “Were they lost?”
“Terribly, tragically lost,” she replied. “Unfortunately, The Grandfather choked on that moon cake before you were ready.”
“Ready for what?”
“To help him,” she said. “He knew that he would need your technical skills if he was ever to find the body of Qianfu and lift the curse.”
I held up my hand. “Hold on a minute. Who’s Qianfu?”
“Qianfu was The Grandfather’s twin brother,” she replied. “He was beaten to death in the CPR rail yard in Moose Jaw in 1908.”
Why had I never heard about this? “Wow. That’s rough. Why?”
“It was passed off as a hate crime – there was a great deal of prejudice against the Chinese at that time, fear on the part of white men that the Chinese were taking their jobs. But that wasn’t the real reason Qianfu was killed. It was because of Violet McNabb, a young woman who worked as a waitress in Wong’s Chinese Restaurant. A white woman.”
“And?”
“They fell in love.”
“And that was such a crime?”
A-Ma smiled wearily. “At that time and in that place such a liaison was more than a crime, Miranda. It was … unspeakable, even unthinkable. It could be neither countenanced, nor forgiven. And he paid for it with his life.”
“What happened to Violet?”
A-Ma dismissed my question with another wave of her hand. “Violet is beside the point. I think she married some pig farmer.”
I whistled. “That’s cruel and unusual punishment. Have you ever smelled a pig farm?”
“There’s more to this than just a story of star-crossed lovers,” A-Ma warned me. “Our family buried Qianfu, and after seven years his body was dug up and taken to the local Death House …”
I blinked. “The what?”
“The Death House,” she replied matter-of-factly. “Where the bones of the deceased were scraped and whatever flesh remained on them was burned so that they could be returned to China and buried in our family graveyard in Zhongshan.”
I shivered. “That’s seriously creepy.”
She shrugged. “It was the usual practice back then. Nobody wanted to be buried in a barbaric outback like Canada.” I must have looked sort of green because she added, “What? Pumping corpses full of formaldehyde so they’ll be preserved for perpetuity isn’t creepy?”
“It’s the creepy we know,” I pointed out. “Go on.”
“One cold winter night, the Death House caught on fire. When the firemen finally succeeded in putting out the flames, they discovered Qianfu’s body. What was left of it, at any rate.”
“And …”
“Moose Jaw went berserk,” said A-Ma. “It hadn’t been widely known that we twice-buried our dead. When white people found out, they exploded in outrage and horror. The local newspapers were full of it, riling up people, fanning the flames of hatred, of racism. Do you know how the editor of one of the local newspapers described the Chinese community? As ‘half-human, half-devil, rat-eating, rag-wearing, law-ignoring, Christian-civilization-hating, opium-smoking, labor-degrading, entrails-sucking celestials.’ That’s how.”
I reflected on this for a moment. “ ‘Entrails-sucking’? Really?”
She smiled faintly. “You can’t make this stuff up. That was a bad time to be Chinese in Canada, Miranda. A very bad time. In any case, Alfred Humes, the town’s chief of police, insisted on holding Qianfu’s body, but refused to tell The Grandfather why. By the time a district court judge finally agreed to release the bones to The Grandfather, they had disappeared off the face of the earth. Clearly someone had gone ahead and disposed of them, but who and where? No one seemed to know … or, at any rate, no one was talking. Over the years, The Grandfather hired private investigator after private investigator. To no avail. To this day, we don’t know where Qianfu’s bones are.”
I took a deep breath. “That sucks, A-Ma, but we’re talking about bones here, not an actual person and, besides, the whole thing happened over a hundred years ago. It’s over and done with. Why not let sleeping dogs lie?”
She shook her head. “If we only could. The cosmos doesn’t work that way, Miranda. Sleeping dogs may lie, but not disgruntled ancestors. They roam. They cause trouble. And as our family has learned to its great sorrow, they can cover vast distances in pursuit of those they seek. The Grandfather moved his family here to Vancouver shortly after the terrible ordeal, but not even an entire mountain range has kept us safe from Qianfu’s ghost.”
I was beginning to put two and two together – curse, disgruntled ancestor, missing bones. “Let me get this straight: your theory is that Qianfu’s ghost is hounding us from an unmarked grave somewhere on the Prairies? That he’s the one responsible for all our problems?”
“It isn’t a theory,” she replied. “It’s a fact.”
“But why?” I asked. “Even if there are such things as ghosts, why would one go around attacking his own descendants for no good reason?”
“Clearly he is buried in a place with very bad feng shui,” A-Ma replied. “And he doesn’t like it one bit.”
“Feng shui?” I repeated. It was a Chinese term that had floated around my house attaching itself to this or that for as long as I could remember. What it actually meant I had no idea.
“Feng shui is the ancient Chinese practice of using the laws of heaven and earth to draw down positive chi,” explained A-Ma. I must have looked blank because she continued, “Chi is essence – it’s life force – oh, there’s no word for it in English. Anyway, it’s very important that a grave site have good feng shui. Like The Grandfather’s. Its feng shui is excellent.”
“Feng shui is more than a view,” she corrected me. (Well, scratch that theory.) “Don’t you understand, Miranda? Souls are connected; families share karma. If a body is incorrectly laid to rest, it can’t tap into beneficial chi, and that leads to great unhappiness for both the ancestor and his descendants. In Qianfu’s case, this has resulted in his rebirth as an e gui.”
“As a what?”
A-Ma looked sharply at me. “Geomancy, feng shui, e guis…That Chinese school we sent you to – did you learn anything there?”
A gut twist of guilt. “Not really,” I confessed sheepishly. All us kids had been made to attend a Saturday-morning Chinese school when we were younger, so that we would know about Taoist beliefs and practices and Chinese culture in general. All of us but Oliver, that is; he wouldn’t leave the house. I never understood how intelligent people living in the twenty-first century could believe in stuff like the Six Realms and the Wheel of Life, not to mention this whole wack of really lame gods like the Celestial Worthy of Numinous Treasure. (No, I’m not kidding; he was one of them.) Plus, doddering old Mr. Huang, who taught the class, was a one-man cure for insomnia, that singsong voice droning on and on. I could barely keep my eyes open. Besides, what’s the use of learning something if it isn’t true?
The Geomancer's Compass Page 3
