Rediscovering Hong Kong

I curled the slip of pink paper around my fingers as I entered into the complex of fortune-tellers.

To the side of Hong Kong’s Wong Tai Sin Temple is a concrete building neatly dissected into rows. Housed within are box-like rooms, self-contained businesses where fortune-tellers sell their predictions and wares.

As I walked down the alleyway between the office-like rooms, glass fronts allowed an opportunity to peer inside each cramped space. One window disclosed an old man stooped over his desk and a couple who were sat staring at him expectantly like children. Others revealed fortune-tellers who looked up as I passed, beckoning me inside.

A young woman caught my attention. She steered me into her office and slid the door shut, containing us from the babble of chattering tourists swarming the temple outside.

The fortune-teller was dressed in plain clothes with a sensible bob and prescription glasses.

I handed over the pink slip of paper. Ten minutes before, I had written upon it the number of a fortune stick which had tumbled from a bamboo basket I was shaking before the temple’s altar.

She glanced at it. Her smile widened as she rifled with deft fingers through the pages of a well-thumbed book. I looked around her room as she squinted her eyes, sliding a finger down lines of Chinese characters. A rickety wall fan gently blew the corner of a palmistry diagram on the wall and her rice thermos flask lay open, left over from her 1 o’clock lunch break.

‘Yes, this year is good for you. Everything you want... no problem!’ she stated matter-of-factly.

She requested my hand and I laid my palm across the desk. She inspected the imprints, jabbing at shallow lines with a not-so-gentle finger. In her office, a red, miniature shrine sat beside a blocky telephone and yellowing newspaper clippings peeled off slowly from the glass window of her room.

‘You should marry and have children between 25 and 28, while your heart is still strong’, she said and beat her hand upon her chest as if to demonstrate.

As she spoke rapidly, she furiously scribbled. The next ten years of my life were sketched onto lined paper with a ballpoint pen.

I should have my own business at 35. I shouldn’t have any arguments with my boyfriend in 2015. I should be very careful with bad people, money and jobs.

She slipped her predictions into a red envelope and slid her glasses back up her nose.

‘That will be HK$370 please’, she said whilst standing up and holding out her own palm.