Throwing in the Tao

By Kristin Henderson
Sunday, March 26, 2006

She was searching for the mystic oneness of the East. Instead, she had to settle for twoness

The leafy hillside looks like it's sprouting a temple -- upturned corners of green, curly tile roofs and outcroppings of ancient, red-painted walls. It's as if the hillside had eroded through the eons to reveal a series of buildings rising up its slope, the temple of the Taoist goddess A-Ma, queen of Heaven and the sea. High up in the temple complex, I look out over a stone railing and across the treetops to the harbor. The water is white, the sky is white; they merge into one.

My younger sister Ingrid and I are in Macau, which used to be a Portuguese colony on the South China Sea. Now it's a capitalist appendage of the People's Republic of China. Across the hazy harbor lies the communist mainland, a pale, jagged line, overexposed and out of focus. Macau and China are now one. This temple and this hillside are one. The people all around us seem to be comfortably at one, too -- they know their place in this temple, where they fit in, what's expected, connected by language and history and culture. Only Ingrid and I are out of place on this, our first trip to Asia.

Earlier, on our way up through the hillside temple, we crossed a courtyard toward a large circular opening in one of the red walls. An old man sat next to it reading a newspaper, a small-brimmed canvas hat on his head. A shopping bag and a tin cup sat on either side of him. He looked as if he were just taking a break from an industrious day of running errands. But then he glanced up. He grabbed the cup and started clanking it against the ground, mewling at us like a cat.

We stepped through the circular opening. Next to an outdoor staircase that hugged the hillside squatted an old woman. She let out a creaking wail and banged her cup, too. Moving faster now, we climbed up and away, the treetops on one side of us, the rough face of the hillside on the other. We rounded an outcropping of rock and nearly tripped over a silent young man lying on the landing on a straw mat.

His legs were twisted. A crutch leaned against the wall. He didn't bang his cup -- he just held it out and stared at me. He took a drag on a cigarette. I forced myself to look away and keep moving.

At the next landing, I glanced back. A group of well-dressed Asians were climbing the steps behind us, and as they passed the silent man with his cigarette, a couple of them casually dropped a small amount of money in the cup. Watching them, I realized I'd been behaving as if I were heading into a Metro station in Washington, instead of a temple in Asia. Giving him money -- was it enabling an addiction? Or a religious act? What if the unlucky cigarette man and the old couple at the bottom of the stairs were here in this temple to give us, the lucky -- the able and the young -- an opportunity to do a good deed, to positively influence our eventual fate? Looking at it that way, I wondered if I had just stumbled across a life lesson.

I hissed to Ingrid, "On our way back down we have to give them a little money." Then I added, falling back on the Indian, Hindu-esque jargon of our hippie childhood, "Our karma's at stake."

Ingrid hissed back, "All I have are large bills."

Now, a few minutes later, having climbed to the top of the temple, I turn away from the view of the harbor to an open-fronted pavilion that shades a red-and-gold altar. In the shadows behind it sits an ornate icon, half-curtained in red and green, looking down on offerings of fruit and urns of incense. I lean close to Ingrid. "A few tweaks, and it could be the chancel of any Christian cathedral."

Ingrid asks loudly, "Why are you whispering?"

And then I notice that while there is a woman on her knees before the altar, her forehead nearly touching the stone floor, there's a man leaning on that same altar like a shopkeeper behind a counter, chatting with another visitor. And next to them, a woman noisily shakes a bamboo cylinder filled with fortune sticks until one clatters out and she bends to peek at her fate. Several other people walk into the pavilion, laughing and talking. One of them pauses to bow his head before the altar with his hands raised in front of his face and his palms pressed together. But his friends go on talking. Beside me, a woman opens her wallet near a small aquarium where several turtles squat in two inches of water, small denominations of damp paper money draped across their backs.

The woman's coins go kerplunk. The turtles stare into space. Overhead, bell-shaped coils of yellow incense gently turn to smoke. I'm beginning to sense that on this side of the world there's less of a dividing line between the holy and the everyday. It all seems interconnected. I want to feel connected, too, but my traditional Christian reverence, automatic and hushed, is out of place. My wallet is filled with nothing but large bills. I've never before felt so tall, so pale, so entirely unable to blend.

MACAU IS A TINY CITY-STATE, nearly half a million people on one peninsula and two islands, all of them small. Their entire land mass adds up to about one-tenth that of the District: no pastures, no woodlands, no arable land whatsoever.

The crooked streets of Macau's old Portuguese neighborhoods are lined with Mediterranean architecture from its colonial heyday, back when it monopolized trade between China and Europe. Macau lost its monopoly in the middle of the 19th century, and the trading business promptly moved 40 miles across the water to the British colony of Hong Kong. Abandoned, Macau fell into gambling, which might seem like a bad thing, except that Macau turned out to be pretty good at it. Casinos take up a lot of the available space, casinos and hotels in sleek glass towers, and pits filled with construction cranes from which more towers are rising.

In the late 1990s, Britain and Portugal gave their capitalist colonies back to communist China. This created an obvious problem: How could these tiny islands of entrepreneurialism be made to fit into the Five Year Plans of the mainland? Luckily, the solution was simple, summed up in a new slogan: "One country! Two systems!" Hong Kong and Macau could keep right on doing what they'd been doing, raking in enormous amounts of hard cash, only now for the Chinese motherland instead of for their old colonial masters.

This solution has been lucky for Macau. Last year, it surpassed Atlantic City as the second-biggest gambling market in the world. Now it's gunning for Vegas. Inside the casinos, the roulette wheels will spin until Macau is No. 1.

While the Buddha claimed all of life is a revolving wheel of pain, the optimistic Chinese put a more positive spin on it. More than 2 1/2 millennia ago, the result was Taoism, which is both a religion and a philosophy. Today, mainland China is officially atheist, but in the former colonies of Macau and Hong Kong, nine out of 10 people still practice Taoism, Buddhism, Confucianism or Chinese folk religions; most of the remainder are Christian. Religious Taoists who visit A-Ma's temple in Macau believe the goddess provides prosperity and protection, especially for children.

For the more philosophically minded, Taoism is "simply a particular way of appreciating, learning from, and working with whatever happens in everyday life," writes Benjamin Hoff in his popular introduction to Taoism, The Tao of Pooh, aimed at beginners like me. "From the Taoist point of view, the natural result of this harmonious way of living is happiness."

Random everyday lessons = happiness. Good to know.

BACK DOWN IN THE COURTYARD of A-Ma's temple, I am drawn to the jade trinkets offered for sale by a one-legged man. Ingrid and I have been joined by a Chinese friend of ours, who taps at his BlackBerry while I pick out a small, flat wheel of jade.

I turn it over in my hand. "How much?"

"One hundred Hong Kong dollars," says the man. About $12 U.S.

For 12 bucks I can break a large bill into small ones, some of which I can then go back and give to the old couple and the silent cigarette man, plus get a nice little memento out of the deal -- a wheel, a circle, a symbol of all things in balance. "Okay," I say.

Our Chinese friend looks up sharply from his BlackBerry. "But you didn't bargain with him." He turns to the man and says something in Cantonese. The man sputters. They fire back and forth, short and sharp, and as they do, my friend resumes tapping at his BlackBerry, smiling down at the screen. The man, however, begins to shout. He grabs the jade wheel out of my hand, shoves it into his case of trinkets and closes up the case. Then he covers it up for good measure. People gather around us to stare. Still shouting, the man waves at us, palms down, an unmistakable dismissal, and my friend shrugs and walks away. I hurry after him.

"He's mad because he thought he caught a nice, fat fish." My friend looks pleased with himself. "And I got in the way."

Me, I can't even buy my way to interconnected balance.

On another hillside, outside a colonial cathedral, three vendors have set up a row of tables of knockoff watches, porcelain Buddhas, a crucifix and, lo and behold, more small jade wheels. I pick one out. I ask how much. When the vendor says 120, I say 80; we settle on . . . 100. The same price the one-legged man was charging. The vendor seems happy, I am happy, my friend approves of my neophyte effort at bargaining. I hope that somehow, in the big picture of the universe, this begins to balance out my many failures at A-Ma.

Meanwhile, Ingrid is pointing at another vendor's clock. She points with her whole hand, palm down. Ingrid knows to do this because she is a cautious traveler. Cruising at 30,000 feet, while I was dozing over a paperback copy of The Bourne Identity, she was diligently studying China: A Quick Guide to Customs & Etiquette. Unlike me, she now knows to present her credit card with both hands and a small bow. She knows not to casually pat people on the back, not to laugh too loudly, and not to give gifts wrapped in white or blue paper, the colors of death. The goal of Chinese etiquette, she tells me, is a community in harmonious balance, and that requires its individual parts to always be polite.

So here at the vendors' tables, she politely points at a clock with her whole hand, palm down, the way the Quick Guide said she should. She bargains much more effectively for the clock than I did for the jade: She shakes her head and turns away. The vendor makes his final offer, holds out the clock. She turns back. She takes it in her hands. She ponders it. It's the only one of its kind on the tables, and at last she says, "Okay." Everyone smiles.

While she counts out the money and presents it with both hands, I hold her new clock. It's an old-fashioned, windup alarm clock -- silver bells on top like mouse ears, the metal body painted bright red. The trim is rusted, the paint is scratched. But printed on the cheap cardboard face of this most bourgeois of timepieces is an homage to the proletarian revolution: Mao Zedong in a halo of light, smiling down beatifically on the masses, who march along in green military uniforms and red armbands, up to their waists in a flowing red river, their mouths open, their arms raised. They're holding up Mao's Little Red Book. With every tick of the second hand, one peasant's upraised arm actually waves the Little Red Book back and forth, ticktock, ticktock.

I want this clock. I want it so much that if Ingrid weren't my sister, if she were just another American, I would offer a higher bid right this minute. I'd launch a bidding war, every woman for herself. Not with my sister, though. For my sister to get this clock makes me almost as happy as me getting it. When we were little, Ingrid and I both showed equal talents in writing and drawing. But by the time we were teenagers, Ingrid was the family artist and I was the writer. Without discussing it, without even realizing it, we had chosen not to compete.

As Ingrid and I walk away, we giggle in two-part harmony over her one-of-a-kind piece of communist kitsch.

FROM MACAU, WE TAKE THE FERRY over to Hong Kong, humming from the South China Sea into a forest of giant cranes that crouch over miles of cargo ships, swinging containers into neat stacks on the decks. At the other end of their journey, many of these containers will be hauled by semis down American interstates; they're filled with products manufactured in the new Chinese factories that lie just to the north on the mainland, tying China and Hong Kong together.

Those factories make Hong Kong the busiest container port in the world. If Macau is the party girl, Hong Kong is the smart girl, gateway to the booming Chinese mainland. The skyscraping headquarters of banks and corporations punctuate Hong Kong's foggy skyline. In fact, Cantonese for "go to work" is "go back to work," as if that's where you belong, instead of home with your family. If you're not in Hong Kong to work, what you do is shop so other people can work. The stream of shoppers hurrying along the sidewalks sweeps us along with it. We crowd onto a bus.

The bus twists and groans through Hong Kong's steep hillsides to the Stanley Market, a vast, dense warren of vendors. While Ingrid dickers over an embroidered silk Nehru jacket, I wander across the narrow aisle into a booth thick with tchotchkes. And there, among the plastic figurines and music boxes, I see it.

A Mao clock. And another, and another. A whole row of Mao clocks, all shiny and new, row upon row of them, dozens of Little Red Books all ticktocking back and forth. "Ingrid!" I rush back to her breathlessly, waving my very own Mao clock. "Look what I found!"

Across the harbor, on Nathan Road, a circus of neon signs hangs out over the storefronts. In the front window of a budget optometrist, I spot a glass of water among the eyeglasses. "A little sip," I say merrily, "strategically placed for a thirsty moment."

"Actually," says Ingrid, ever the good student, "that's feng shui. It's supposed to help you live in harmony with nature." Another educational tidbit from the Quick Guide.

"No kidding." I take a closer look.

Ideally, you orient the front of a building so it looks out on water. It maximizes your luck, though that word, "luck," trivializes the original Asian concept it's supposed to represent. In the West, luck is a completely random phenomenon. In the East, luck is the result of the world's complex web of interconnectedness. In the same way that the beat of a butterfly's wings in Asia may produce a tiny air current that entwines with other currents to produce gale-force winds in North America, a seemingly disconnected cup of water in a display window may somehow have an impact on the shop owner's ability to turn a profit.

After that, I notice that one of the swankier stores has positioned a bubbling aquarium just inside its entrance. A more value-conscious retailer has made room in its window display of watches and faux gems for an artful arrangement of full water goblets. And then there's the disposable cup set. In a dark and narrow nook between buildings, beneath racks of cheap embroidered slippers, sits a paper cup of water.

At the end of the day, we hail a taxi. We show the driver the piece of paper on which the concierge has written the name of our hotel in English and in Chinese, because most cabdrivers speak no English. But this one does.

"I like America!" he announces. "You know why I like America? No America, no balance. Whole world all out of balance!" He assures us that in the future, though, China will be number one. He points out sights along the way to our hotel. He sets us straight about Hong Kong film stars -- Bruce Lee was the best; Jet Li is better than Jackie Chan. And basketball player Yao Ming has a face like an idiot. As for the mainland, our next destination: "China very dangerous. Always robbering. Very dirty! Chinese immigrants bring families to Hong Kong, then don't work! Get the money from the government, spend it in China. That's why Hong Kong people don't like Chinese people." Suddenly he turns to look over his shoulder at us. He snorts a laugh. "And we all Chinese!"

WE TAKE ANOTHER FERRY, this one from Hong Kong to Zhuhai, People's Republic of China. Outside the ferry terminal, a hired car waits for us. It's an elderly compact, worn but polished and smelling of carpet shampoo.

The roads, though, are new and built like grand boulevards, lined with palm trees. We're part of a steady stream of cars and trucks. A few people walk along the curb. But despite all the traffic, Zhuhai has the sleepy, empty air of an off-season resort. Enormous buildings sit far back from the road. The cars drive slower, the people walk slower, and there are bicycles here, lots and lots of bicycles, some with a passenger riding sidesaddle on the back fender, some pulling carts. We pass a moped puttering along beneath a family of four -- a man and a woman with a child in her lap, granny hanging on behind. None of them wears a helmet. There are no seatbelts in our car. The builders of the grand boulevards neglected to install traffic lights.

Zhuhai was one of the special economic zones where mainland China first dipped its toe into capitalism. Since then factories have spilled over into the surrounding area, and now the whole region is a special economic zone. In Tanzhou, the next town over, construction cranes stud the hazy horizon; smoke pours from the stacks of more factories than I can count. Suddenly the white skies to the south make sense. That's not just fog hazing the views in Macau and Hong Kong. The prevailing winds tie their ecological fates to each other.

Our hotel is staffed according to central planning. Downstairs in the restaurant, only one other table is occupied. Half a dozen uniformed servers converge on each one. They are very attentive. They giggle at Ingrid's lack of chopstick skills.

When dinner is over, we're asked if we'd like a massage. "After," we're told, "you feel much better!" We've been hearing that the massage practitioners in China are superior to the ones in Hong Kong, and cheap, too -- an hour that would cost at least $60 in the United States and $30 in Hong Kong is a mere $5 in China. Only tourists get massages in Hong Kong, we've been told. Hong Kongers go to China.

An entire wing of the second floor has been converted into a massage center. All but one of the rooms are empty. Another dozen uniformed staffers hop up when we walk in. We opt for foot massages and are shown into a small room with two big padded chairs. While a quiet young woman on a stool works on my feet and an enthusiastic young man works on Ingrid's, the TV shrieks with a Chinese game show. The studio audience waves sparkling pompoms. The host is long-haired and suave. It needs no translation.

The enthusiastic young man at Ingrid's feet says something in Cantonese and mimes chest pain. Then he points at Ingrid's chest, his eyebrows raised like a question. Ingrid looks surprised. She puts a hand to her chest and nods. "Yes. Uh-huh." He mimes pain a little lower, eyebrows still raised. "Yes," she says, her hand on her stomach now, "there, too." He figures out her shoulder as well. For years now, Ingrid has been suffering from a pinched nerve in her chest, a hiatal hernia and, since spending 20 hours on a plane, a muscle spasm in her shoulder. In the space of a few minutes, this guy has figured it all out just by touching her feet.

Chinese medicine theorizes that we are our feet. Various parts of the foot are somehow connected to various parts of the rest of the body. Take your big toe for instance; that's supposed to be connected to your head. As the quiet young woman kneads my feet, my whole body relaxes and I close my eyes. Me, I'm finally starting to feel connected, too.

BACK IN HONG KONG, we're on a street that grows so steep it turns into a staircase. Ladder Street stretches up between the high-rises as far as we can see. We're puffing hard. When we reach a cross street, Hollywood Road, we turn off to catch our breath. Right in front of us is a temple.

It's old, the stone carving along the rooftop blunted with age. It seems as if it's part of the neighborhood, not a destination like the A-Ma Temple in Macau. The sign out front says it's the Man Mo Temple.

I ask Ingrid, "Do you think we can go in?"

"I don't know," she says, "but if you go in, I'll go in, too."

It's dark inside. I inhale incense. Narrow shafts of sunlight stripe the darkness, streaming through pale clouds of smoke. I wait a moment to see if anyone's going to throw us out.

No one does. Hesitantly, I lead Ingrid farther into the temple. It opens up around us, a cavernous red-and-gold-painted room divided by lattices and columns, with altars tucked into the corners. Overhead, a thick canopy of yellow incense coils hangs like a silent, half-visible carillon. Candles dot the shadows. Strings of white holiday lights flash. Standing at one of the altars, a woman holds a handful of incense sticks before her face and bobs her head in prayer.

It feels like a holy place to me. But, just like at A-Ma, a couple chats while walking through. A man calls out a greeting. None of them takes any notice of us. It's a random, everyday kind of holiness. We stay until we are ready to go. As we step back out into the street, I look at Ingrid and Ingrid looks at me. Suddenly, we are smiling as one.

Kristin Henderson, author of While They're at War, is a frequent contributor to the Magazine.