White Tiger. Kylie Chan

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      ‘Do you know anything about the Nazi regime in Germany? Hitler?’

      She hesitated, thinking, then said, ‘Hitler was a great European General, right? He conquered most of Europe.’

      I suppressed the laugh. ‘That’s one way of describing him. He tried to kill a whole race of people.’

      She shrugged. ‘I don’t know anything about that. We didn’t do much European history in school.’

      ‘Didn’t you go to school in Australia?’

      ‘No, I went to Australia to study IT at university, then got citizenship, then took my parents out there after Tiananmen.’

      She pressed the intercom button next to the gate and it unlocked for us. We went inside.

      The temple sat on top of the Pokfulam hill, overlooking the steeply terraced cemetery that led down to the sea below us. A few highrises were scattered at the base of the hill, mostly inhabited by expatriates who didn’t care about the bad fung shui of living near the cemetery.

      April led me past the main hall and towards the steps down to the tablet rooms.

      ‘What’s in the main hall?’ I said, pointing towards three huge statues inside.

      ‘The Three Big Gods,’ April said. ‘You know, the gods in charge of everything.’

      ‘This is a Taoist temple, right?’

      She hesitated for a moment, then said, ‘Just a temple.’

      ‘But the Three Big Gods are Taoist?’

      ‘I don’t know,’ April said. ‘They’re just the big Gods, but they’re different from the Buddha, so I suppose they are.’ She moved closer and whispered, ‘It’s all just old people’s superstition anyway, but it’s important to worship the ancestors, otherwise they get mad at you and you get bad luck. And I want good luck for my marriage.’

      We went down the steep steps to the tablet rooms at the back of the temple. Dark green and brown mosaic tiles covered the floor and walls, with a bare painted concrete ceiling. A family sat on grimy vinyl couches to one side, folding squares of gold paper into the shape of ancient gold bars and stuffing them into paper sacks.

      ‘Funeral,’ April whispered, and passed the people without glancing at them again.

      The rest of the offerings were ready for the funeral in the main hall of the tablet rooms. A house stood in the middle of the hall, about two metres high, made of flimsy bamboo bracing and covered with paper. It had three storeys, with tiny air conditioners in the windows and a mah jong table in one room. A male and a female servant and a guard dog stood in the front garden. Next to the house was a Mercedes, with a driver made of paper, and stacked next to the car was a variety of day-to-day necessities, all made out of paper: a portable stereo, a mobile phone, clothes, a television, a tea set with a vacuum flask for the hot water, and more servants. The whole lot was waiting for the main funeral ceremony, when it would be thrown into the furnace in the garden next to the tablet rooms and burned. The essence would travel to heaven for the use of the dead relative.

      April moved to the next room. The walls were lined with glass-fronted cabinets, with rows upon rows of ancestral tablets inside, rising all the way to the ceiling. There must have been a thousand of them. One wall had larger tablets for the more wealthy, but April’s ancestors inhabited one side cabinet and were smaller. The tablets were each about ten centimetres high and five wide, made of red plastic. The name of the ancestor was in raised lettering picked out in gold.

      A large laminated dining table sat in front of the tablets, with an incense burner holding a stick of incense and a red plastic plate of oranges on it. The room smelled strongly of incense, and the ceiling was black with smoke.

      While April fiddled around placing plates of oranges, apples and roast pork and chicken on the table, I wandered around the temple, carefully avoiding the grieving family and their paper-folding.

      Another table with a cabinet above it stood next to one of the temple’s peeling mouldy walls, under a heavily barred window. The table and cabinet were packed full of statues of gods, many of them an identical statue of a woman in flowing robes carrying an urn.

      A small elderly man, one of the temple attendants, approached me, grinning broadly. They obviously didn’t get many Westerners in this temple, it wasn’t on the main tourist route.

      ‘Who is this?’ I said, pointing at the goddess statue.

      He shook his head, still grinning. No English. I asked in Cantonese, ‘Nidi hai binguo?’ and he nodded. ‘Kwan Yin.’

      ‘Ah, m’goi,’ I thanked him. Kwan Yin, the Goddess of Mercy, a Bodhisattva of the Buddhist faith who had attained Nirvana and then returned to Earth to help others achieve the same goal. The book in my room was good: its picture of Kwan Yin was almost identical to the statue.

      The attendant pointed to a fierce-looking, red-faced god holding a halberd, a broadsword blade on the end of a pole. ‘Gwun Gong.’

      I nodded, recognising the statue. The God of Justice was worshipped throughout Hong Kong, with altars in shops and restaurants as a protector against demons and bad luck.

      Then I saw a statue in the corner whose image resonated with me, making me shiver. It was a small statue of a middle-aged man with long wild hair and black robes. He held a sword in his hand, ready for battle, and his bare feet rested on a snake and a turtle. ‘Nidi binguo?’

      The attendant nodded wisely. ‘Pak Tai.’

      ‘On Cheung Chau?’ I asked, naming the outlying island that had a temple devoted to Pak Tai and was a popular tourist destination.

      He nodded, grinning widely.

      ‘M’goi sai.’

      ‘M’hai,’ he said, and wandered off.

      I studied the statue for a while, wondering why it made me feel a prickle at the back of my neck. It was simply decorated in black, unlike many of the Kwan Yin statues which were awkwardly splashed with a variety of garish colours and picked out in gold. I shrugged. I’d look him up in the book later.

      When I returned to April she had finished kneeling on the cushion provided and bowing to her ancestors with the incense in her hands, and was putting the food back into her bag.

      ‘Do you know anything about Pak Tai?’ I said.

      ‘He has a temple on Cheung Chau,’ she said.

      ‘What else?’

      She shrugged. ‘I think he has something to do with water, or rain, or something. Not sure. Let’s go to Central for afternoon tea.’

      ‘Sure.’

      As we walked back through the temple’s courtyard I noticed a small concave mirror above the main entrance, with the eight Pa Kua symbols around it in a red octagonal frame. Demons couldn’t stand to see their own reflection, so the mirror was a barrier to them approaching the temple. The large screen just inside the door of the temple was another demon barrier: demons were well known to be unable to turn corners and could only СКАЧАТЬ