2 A Previous life
My circumstances were a bit more complex on Earth. Thirty-five years old, unmarried, leftover career woman, whose career was not able to pull the big moolah ala money of a Chief Executive Officer, just something of a dream long past. Just 'a disease detective'.
Come to think of it. If there were no calamities, I won't have a job.
Heard of storm chasers who deliberately enter areas where a hurricane is forming? I was an infectious disease chaser, an epidemiologist, who enters epidemic hotspots. Work tore me from elderly parents, with the jet-set lifestyle of travelling around the globe to control diseases.
Sounds glamorous? Yes, alcohol is present. As sanitizers. In my line of work, we have seen more dead bodies than a common person on the street. The only ones who can beat me at the number of dead body sightings are the professionals and staff in forensic pathology and the funeral industry.
By right, according to the fortune tellers, my fate was not supposed to be so lucky. My late maternal grandmother had taken me to one in my childhood days, only to receive the declaration that my destiny is cursed and my life is actually shortened.
In hindsight, that fortune teller was correct. Meeting Zaixing is my curse on Earth and my lifeline on planet earth was oddly extended, instead of prematurely severed.
So how did it all culminated in me being thrown into a new world? A series of misfortunes. Zaixing did warn me in my dreams about expecting everything to turn south at the end of 2019 and then tumble downhill while 2020 rolls on with a pesky spiky virus.
Whoever thought that Zaixing was actually REAL? Certainly not me. So from 2019, my story starts with the background.
While working in Hong Kong, there is the famous Wong Tai Sin temple. And for a fair few years since living there, old Mr Lam was my fortune teller. Mr Lam is a kind jovial, rotund, middle aged man who is very frank.
No flattery, just straight-in-the-face honesty if he thought there was going to be trouble. No sales of special amulets or garbage offers about special voodoo like methods of removing bad luck. He could barely speak English or Mandarin but fortunately, my late grandmother had drilled into me, enough survival Cantonese.
To tell you the truth, it was cheaper to pay 30 Hong Kong bucks to get a psychologist of a fortune teller. They are far cheaper than the professional psychologists who charge an arm and a leg for just an hour in the lounge chair to 'talk' about 'your feelings' or 'worries'.
Those old fortune tellers could read behavioural cues expertly. Some will tell you what you really want to hear. Some, like Mr Lam, will analyse the situation with a keen listening ear and give some elderly advice.
If you could battle past the jostling crowd and tolerate the cancerous ash filled haze from the burning joss sticks, grab yourselves a fortune stick. Those sticks indicate a part of ancient Chinese history. Almost like Christians flipping pages for biblical verses to be chosen as a guidance for a decision.
Using fortune sticks is your 'discount' 30 Hong Kong dollar coupon to seek advice or a listening ear from a stranger cheaply in the common hole-in-the-wall shops of a high rental premium, space starved Hong Kong.
While comfortable telling Mr Lam about my problems, my only regret was never to tell him about my recurring dreams of the Deity. When I last went to see Mr Lam, my world was a mess in late 2019. Everything fell apart then - my father died suddenly as a result of an accident and a week later, my mother in Melbourne.
Yours truly here, signed the cold legal papers to end his life support. It was what my late father wanted. Yet, the guilt of 'killing' dad never left despite the unfaltering fact that his brain was herniating into the brain stem, pushed by an inoperable internal haemorrhage. Catch 22: even the neurosurgeon refused to operate - operation meant an 80% chance of dying on the operating bed. 20% required divine intervention from any gods.
Herniation of his brain stem meant the inevitable - death was coming in mere hours. Everyone, from my extended family to the intensive care nurse, kept telling me that the right thing was done.
My father died on my birthday. The day of my birth was superseded by his death. Things didn't go downhill after. Everything sunk into the deepest abyss of despair. Mother gave up the will to live and in her lucid moment, signed her death warrant of refusing all medical treatment.
A week later, after dad's cremation, she was cremated. While my boss has been understanding, the dreaded news came - COVID-19 was discovered. Returning to Hong Kong was necessary. So with no time to even go through the grieving process, my life was thrust into securing control measures in what is now known as the world's longest ongoing pandemic. Even Spanish flu did not last that long. Let alone SARS.
COVID-19, that spiky virus, was my ultimate bane. Rest day? What rest day? Long entrenched memories of the 2003 SARS in Hongkongers had arisen in another form of epidemic. Yes, the toilet paper roll, alcohol hand sanitizers, bleach and medical mask snatching epidemic.
Most Hongkongers are admirable resilient and risk adverse people but misery needs companions - a few were opportunistic price gougers who gleefully marked up prices up to a 100% or more. Supplies were swept off in mass bulk until supermarkets were forced to restrict items. That left the entire healthcare system wanting.
My day was filled daily with cries for help from fellow frontline clinical colleagues struggling to find personal protective equipment (PPE); tracking COVID-19 cases; messages about pointless meetings about control measures to student well being; check on quarantined cases in their rooms; cries for what to do in the university college's medical advisory WhatsApp chat; and training staff to use the remaining stock of PPE or infection control measures.
Yeah, f**k my life.
Every day. Non stop. Quiet Sundays no longer existed since the pandemic was declared.
If a student coughed, had a sore throat, or sneezed from hay-fever, off to the hospital they went for COVID-19 testing. Sent more than ten, directly from the college, and watch their horrified faces when the ambulance arrived with paramedics dressed in disposable hazmats. All negative then.
Diarrhea? Not to fear. Send them to the university doctor , who will then forward the student to the hospital. Yes, even common food poisoning, by mid of 2020, was regarded as a suspicion. The list of symptoms grew.
Unfortunately, the list of symptoms coincided with the symptoms of common minor ailments, readily available in the highly densely populated Hong Kong - bacteria or virus' ultimate wet dream of replicating rapidly through the tightly packed humans in the city state.
So how does it connect back to the story? Depression and overwork during an ongoing disaster of a pandemic could lead one to many quaint decisions, and even questioning the meaning of life.
So the last drawn fortune stick 94 was it! My 'discount' coupon to have Mr Lam to hear me groan about life and how it sucked. If I recalled, the question directed at the drawn stick was whether I should continue staying where I was.
Its riddle (English translation) went like this:
"A cave cannot have two tigers,
One must separate to hunt in a different area,
Build elsewhere.
Avoid any conflicts which lead to regrets."
Now the poem was about Liu Qi who was a defecting general to Sun Quan's side during the tumultuous Warring States period. He assisted Sun Quan against Cao Cao in the Battle of the Red Cliffs. This riddle was about how Zhuge Liang advised him to get the f**k out and save his a**.
In short, find greener pastures with no serious competition. Career competition was a dog-eat-dog world in Hong Kong.
Dissatisfied with the fortune stick reading, I requested for a Bazi reading, which was more expensive. Bazi is the ancient Chinese way to divining the future based on one's birthdate, time and direction.
Fortunately with the miracle of modern Earth - a computer program popped every single detail as the processor whirled loudly in the slightly heated laptop. The way Mr Lam's smile melted into a frown was enough to hint of incoming bad news
He hurriedly wrote down some of the characters and did some calculations with his fingers, like those Taoist priests in those 1990s Hong Kong supernatural movies. Then he took a large book off the shelf to flip around its dog-eared pages. More scribbles on the paper. Is he trying to make me feel my money's worth?
"Also, your bazi is odd - all ~yang~ (masculine energy). Only the hidden stems are ~yin ~(feminine energy). A lot of water for a Yang tree . You are what we call 'a man in a woman's body'. That is how I can best describe it. From now on, you have to be careful when leaving your home. A big accident can happen any time." He indicated the displayed chart on his fingerprint smudged monitor.
Long after did I learn that my Bazi had indicated that I would die young. Very, very young before my teens. Quaint indeed.
Statistically, approximately 385,000 babies are born every day with an estimated 250 every minute. That's 15,000 per the hour I was born in.
Then with the direction in mind, probably those who share my Bazi are around 1,800, based on specific directions of when our heads popped out. What happens if these 1,800 die early? No one will notice why.
People die everyday through many causes - accidental, deliberate either from self (suicide) or others (murder), or from diseases. That day at Wong Tai Sin was my last before Zaixing transferred me from Earth into another world.
