White Tiger

CHAPTER THREE

Later in the afternoon the door slammed and Simone yelled, ‘Is Emma here?’

I went out to find them taking their shoes off at the front door, Simone and Mr Chen together. He hadn’t taken his sword, he’d left it on its hooks near the front door. Simone carefully put her little shoes in the shoe cupboard, then did the same for her father. He watched her with delight, then smiled at me. He looked right into my eyes, and for a split second those gorgeous dark eyes hypnotised me; then Simone charged to tackle me, nearly knocking me over.

‘Hello, Emma!’ she yelled. ‘Are you here all the time now?’

I bent and picked her up, warm with pleasure at the thought of being full-time with her. ‘Yes, sweetheart, I’m all yours.’

She threw her little arms around my neck and kissed me on the cheek. Then she rested her forehead against mine and looked seriously into my eyes. ‘Good.’

She wriggled out of my arms and took my hand. ‘Have you seen everything?’

‘Yes I have, Simone. Leo showed me around.’

She screwed up her face. ‘I’m hungry.’

‘Dinner will be soon, Simone, don’t ruin your appetite,’ Mr Chen said from the doorway where he was watching us with amusement. ‘Did Leo tell you about meals, Miss Donahoe?’

‘No, sir.’

‘When I am home at dinner time, we’ll have a family dinner together—me and Simone, you and Leo. We can discuss what we’ve done during the day. Is that acceptable?’

‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Will I be able to go out occasionally? I’m supposed to be having dinner with some friends this evening. I usually go out on Saturday night.’

‘Of course. We don’t want to impinge too much on your private life. If you want to have dinner with someone outside, of course, go.’

Louise didn’t bring a guy along for me for a change. She seemed to know every unattached male in Hong Kong and constantly set me up. Sometimes it worked and I would spend a few months in a pleasant casual relationship; sometimes it didn’t and I was left to my own devices. Either way suited me just fine. I couldn’t keep a relationship in Hong Kong for long anyway; people were always coming and going.

We all drank far too much and stayed well past our welcome in the Thai restaurant in Wan Chai, but we continued to order food so the staff tolerated us.

‘You should go and see Miss Kwok,’ April said. ‘You should have talked to me if you were unhappy there. She’s very upset that you left.’

‘Of course she’s upset.’ I sipped my beer. ‘She’ll lose half the kids without me working there.’

Louise’s blue eyes sparkled. ‘Don’t go back to working for that bitch, Emma. You can do better.’

April was offended. ‘Don’t be mean. Miss Kwok is a nice person. She’s very rich; you should respect her.’

‘You’re just saying that because your fiancé’s related to her,’ Louise said. ‘She doesn’t even pay you to fix the computers at the kindergarten.’

‘How is Andy anyway?’ I said, attempting to change the subject.

‘The wedding’s all planned—we’ll have it with my family in Sydney.’ April was obviously happy. ‘I’m looking forward to it. My family is so pleased. Andy’s family are very wealthy. Very prestigious.’

‘God,’ Louise said under her breath.

‘When is it?’ I tried to appear interested, but I agreed with Louise. Andy was always perfectly polite to us but there was something about him that I just didn’t like.

‘Next month.’ April leaned back and smiled with satisfaction. ‘It was easy to get a ceremony on a good day in Australia. The date will be very auspicious.’

‘God,’ Louise whispered again.

April didn’t seem to hear her. ‘I’m going to the temple tomorrow to get the…’ she hesitated, searching for the English word, ‘blessing from the ancestors.’

‘Which temple?’ I said, interested.

‘The one in Pokfulam.’

‘The one in the cemetery?’ Louise said.

April nodded.

‘Can I come along and have a look?’ I said. April shrugged. ‘Sure. Not much to see, though, just tablets. Ancestors and stuff.’

‘What time?’

‘After yum cha. About twelve, one.’

‘Can I meet you there?’

April nodded, then leaned forward and rapped her fingertips on the table. ‘You should go back to Miss Kwok, Emma. She says she needs you at the kindergarten. Go ask the fortune sticks. They’ll tell you that you should stay with her.’

‘I already have a new job.’

‘But you only resigned yesterday,’ April said. ‘She moved out today,’ Louise said. ‘Fastest damn thing I’ve ever seen.’

‘You’ll be live-in?’ April said. ‘Yep,’ I said. ‘Live-in nanny.’

‘You can do better than that, Emma. Go back to Miss Kwok.’

‘You kidding?’ Louise said. ‘Nearly forty thousand a month, living with this gorgeous rich dude? I’d do it in a second.’

‘Strictly professional.’

‘Yeah, right.’

‘Forty thousand a month?’ April said, shocked. ‘Yep,’ Louise said.

April scowled. ‘Everybody will think that you are more than nanny if he pays you that much.’

‘I don’t care,’ I said.

‘Geez, you’re definitely the most cold-blooded chick I’ve ever met, Emma,’ Louise said. ‘Don’t even care.’

‘Don’t be mean,’ April said. ‘Emma is a lovely person.’

I raised my beer. ‘Oh, no, April, I think I’m the most cold-blooded chick I’ve ever met too.’

Louise snorted with amusement. ‘Sure you are. Look at how you adore his little girl. You have a soft spot for kids, Emma, don’t deny it.’

‘This one is special,’ I said, studying my beer. ‘She always worries about everybody else. She was really concerned that other children were missing out because I was spending all my time with her. She felt guilty about hogging me.’

‘Yeah, she’s a perfect little angel.’

‘In this case, I think she really is.’

It was very late when I arrived back at the apartment building on the Peak. I hopped out of the taxi and it reversed away down the drive. I walked up to the gates, waved to the security guards and they opened the pedestrian gate for me.

I saw the lights and turned. Another taxi pulled up. A smart-looking young European stepped out of the car, and Leo came out the other side. Leo stopped when he saw me, then walked up the drive to the gates.

I held the gate open for them. Leo didn’t say anything, just nodded to me and went through.

‘Hi, I’m Emma, a friend of Leo’s,’ I said to the young man.

‘Hello.’ He held his hand out and I shook it. He was quite good-looking, tall, blond and slender. Looked to be in his mid-thirties, about the same age as Leo. He had a definite American accent. ‘Rob.’

Leo walked in front of us and opened the ground-floor door to the lift lobby.

We all entered the lift together.

‘You live here too?’ Rob said.

‘Yep, I’m the nanny.’

Leo gazed at the numbers above the lift door without saying a word.

‘It’s really humid,’ Rob said.

‘Yeah. Summer’s here, all right.’

‘You been in Hong Kong long?’ Rob said.

‘About four years,’ I said. ‘But I never get used to the humidity in the summer.’

‘Are you English?’

‘No, Australian.’

The lift doors opened and the three of us entered the lobby of the eleventh floor. Leo unlocked the gate and opened the front door for us. We went in and removed our shoes at the front entrance, then walked together down the hall towards the bedrooms.

I stopped at my bedroom door. ‘Nice to meet you, Rob. ‘Night, Leo.’

Rob nodded and smiled, and followed Leo to his room. Leo still didn’t say a word.

I went into my room, carefully closed the door, and collapsed onto my bed laughing.

‘Emma?’

I stopped laughing. I’d woken Simone.

I opened the door between our bedrooms a crack. ‘Sorry, sweetheart. I woke you up.’

Simone sat up in her bed, her face swollen with sleep and her honey-coloured hair tangled around her head. ‘Oh. Okay. Can you sit with me while I go back to sleep?’

I slipped in and sat next to her on the bed. ‘Did you have a nightmare?’

Simone slid under the covers and rolled onto her side. ‘Leo brought his boyfriend home again,’ she said. ‘He’s funny.’

I rubbed her back under the covers.

‘I’m glad he has someone to love,’ she said, her voice sleepy. ‘It makes him happy.’

‘I’m glad too,’ I said softly.

‘Bad people take away the people you love.’ She curled up into a ball. ‘I hate the bad people.’

‘I’m here,’ I said softly, at a loss. I wondered what had happened to her mother. All I knew was that she had died. I opened my mouth to ask and closed it again.

Simone sighed under the covers. ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if there were no bad people? If nobody had to be scared of them any more? If Daddy didn’t have to stay here and get hurt all the time to look after me, if he could go back to his Mountain and be happy, like he used to? Before—’ She choked it off, then her voice dropped to a whisper. ‘Before the bad people came. We had a lot of fun. He did lots of secret stuff all the time, and we laughed.’

‘What secret stuff?’

‘You have to ask Daddy. I’m not allowed to tell you.’ Her voice filled with her cheeky smile. ‘Both Leo and Daddy said I’m not allowed to tell you, so you have to ask. Ask them about the secret stuff, it’s really fun.’ Then her voice saddened again. ‘I just wish we could have the secret stuff, and all of us together again, and no more bad people…and…’

She sighed and curled up tighter. ‘Ask Daddy. I’ll be okay now, Emma, you go to sleep. I’m sorry I made you come in. Go to sleep, and we’ll have fun tomorrow, you and me. I’m glad you came to look after me. We’ll have fun.’

‘Yes, we will,’ I said, still stroking the covers. ‘I can stay here until you fall asleep.’

‘Ask Daddy,’ she said, almost a whisper, then her breathing softened and deepened into sleep.

A taxi pulled into the lay-by outside the temple the next afternoon and April stepped out holding a large plastic shopping bag. She saw me and waved. ‘What’s in the bag?’ I said.

‘Stuff for the ancestors. So they bless my marriage and make it good. I’ll put it in front of the tablets.’

‘The ancestral tablets?’ She nodded a reply.

I stopped at the front gate to the temple and grinned. The wrought-iron fence and gate had swastikas worked into the metalwork. They were the reverse direction from the Nazi swastika, but still recognisable, picked out in red paint against the black fence.

I pointed at one. ‘In the West, that’s a symbol of Nazi Germany and sort of…’ I searched for the word. ‘Bad.’

April looked at the fence, bewildered. ‘What is?’ I outlined the swastika on the gate with my finger. ‘This symbol.’

She shook her head. ‘It’s just good luck.’

‘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 move in straight lines.

‘Kwan Yin is a Buddhist icon. Why’s she in a Taoist temple?’ I asked April as we waited at the taxi rank for a passing cab.

‘She looks after people. If you buy a statue of her and donate it to the temple, you get good luck,’ April said.

‘Old people’s superstition?’ I said playfully, teasing. She shrugged again. ‘Can’t hurt to get a little extra good luck.’

After dinner, back in my room I checked the Chinese gods compendium for Pak Tai and was referred to H’suantian Shangdi. Pak Tai was his name in Cantonese, the dialect spoken in Hong Kong and Southern China. In Northern China and in the standard Mainland dialect of Putonghua, he was called Xuan Tian Shang Di, the Supreme Emperor of the Dark Northern Heavens. There were a variety of legends about him, many of them conflicting, but he was credited with controlling weather and destroying demons, and he was also the Supreme Warrior and God of Martial Arts.

A fascinating deity. The book described his exploits at length; apparently one of the Chinese classics of literature was his story, how he had lived through more than a hundred incarnations before achieving Nirvana and being promoted to Heavenly Emperor.

I could see why he resonated with me now. The similarities between him and Mr Chen were obvious. Both in black, both with long hair, both involved with martial arts. Mr Chen probably took Xuan Tian as a role model to the point of making his appearance similar. I wondered if I should be concerned about this obvious piece of eccentricity, but Mr Chen was too delightful a person to let it worry me too much. He was as generous and caring as his daughter, and both of them were great fun to be with.

Simone squealed and water splashed in her bathroom next to my room. I closed the book. I hadn’t even heard them come back. I wanted to go in and see them, maybe help with Simone’s bath and putting her to bed. They were in there together, father and daughter, both of them adorable.

Then I shook my head. Keep it professional, Emma, and besides, it’s Sunday, the only day they can have some private time together without the rest of us hanging around.

I opened the book again to find out more about Xuan Tian Shang Di. Maybe there was information about him on the net as well.