FRAGMENT 71
The Frequency Controlled by a Lama
Fragments: The Frequency of a Body Governed by Intention | Casually Dusting Off a Robe
Time & Location: Autumn 2007 · Kansai Ki-in, Osaka | Xiyuan Magazine Office, Beijing
Orchid called me from the Kansai Ki-in.
Click.
That was the sound of her placing a stone on the board.
“Hey. I have a fan who's a Tibetan lama. He's very good at fortune-telling. Want me to have him read your future? Hahaha…”
I asked about her life.
I asked which Japanese masters she had been playing.
I asked about her health.
I carefully avoided responding to the subject of fortune-telling.
“Stop changing the subject,” she said.
“I've already told him. He'll be at your office tomorrow afternoon.”
Click.
The line went dead.
The lama arrived exactly as promised.
A black Mercedes S350 delivered him.
He came alone.
No attendants.
No followers.
He was lean, like a bamboo leaf.
His footsteps were light.
All of his movements were light.
The frequency with which his body obeyed his mind was as smooth as a bamboo grove swaying in a gentle breeze.
His face was warm.
He seemed to carry sunlight with him.
“Oh. This is where Teacher Yehenara usually sits.”
That was how he opened the conversation.
Beneath the softness of his expression, a hidden sharpness slipped through, probing for my reaction.
“Orchid admires you very much.”
I was calmer than he was.
Ever since Orchid had gone to Japan, I had spent my days smoking and thinking beside the graves of the missionaries.
I was slowly turning into stone myself.
No longer a pond.
The collisions and chemical reactions of the human world produced few ripples within me.
I watched his eyes.
I calculated how many seconds—or minutes—would pass before his mouth opened again.
The second hand of the Vacheron Constantin on my wrist tapped steadily against the heart opposite me, a heart pretending to be aloof.
He remained silent.
He tried to keep every facial muscle motionless.
But the tiny involuntary sounds hidden in his throat vibrated clearly against my eardrums.
I knew he could not ask the first question.
To him, that would feel like surrendering the initiative.
So I decided to move first.
“Master, how old are you?”
He said nothing.
He simply looked at me.
“Oh, forgive me. I'm a writer. We tend to be overly precise with words. How old are you?”
Silence.
Tea.
Then suddenly, he spoke.
“There is an eagle within you.”
I smiled.
He had avoided the simplest question.
Instead, he chose a common trick—reinterpreting my name through wordplay.
Flattery.
Nothing more.
He had certainly not perceived the existence of the White Crow.
The subtle fluctuations deep within his mind betrayed confusion.
I could not help looking down on the monk sitting before me.
He had avoided my question.
Clearly, he was trying to conceal himself.
Was concealment really wisdom?
I thought of my father's advice about keeping oneself hidden.
I thought of the strategists recorded in the Records of the Three Kingdoms, famous for disguising their intentions.
I thought of missionaries like Matteo Ricci and Giuseppe Castiglione, who had mastered the Chinese art of concealment—earning favor, securing wealth, and preserving their lives.
“Master, you flatter me. I'm nothing more than a crow.”
“An albino crow, perhaps.”
I laughed.
“Please, have some tea. The finest Pu'er from Yunnan.”
He never found an opportunity to tell my fortune.
Instead, he spent the entire meeting carefully defending himself against my logic.
“Yes,” he replied.
“Not all crows beneath Heaven share the same color.”
It sounded very wise.
I understood perfectly well that the complexity of the Chinese language had become a magnificent toy for those who possessed sharper minds—or perhaps greater spiritual gifts.
History records that the endless possibilities hidden within combinations of words were once powerful enough to frighten people to death.
Eventually, we drifted into ordinary conversation.
Much like that afternoon at Songzanlin Monastery.
Half an hour later, he rose to leave.
Casually, he brushed a speck of dust from his robe.
Then he pressed his palms together and bowed slightly.
“Your younger brother takes his leave.”
FRAGMENT 72
Fortune-Telling Tricks
Fragments: Dissecting a Lama's Tricks | The Tremor of Survival
Time & Location: Winter 2007 · The "Metaphysical Arena," Chegongzhuang, Beijing
I took out an envelope marked TOP SECRET and handed it to the lama.
As if struck by electricity, he immediately raised both hands in refusal.
“Brother, I have done nothing. Nor is there anything I need to do.”
I pushed the envelope directly into his shoulder bag.
Buddhist symbols were embroidered on the fabric.
I felt obliged to insist.
After all, he was Orchid's admirer.
Inside the envelope were one hundred crisp one-hundred-yuan banknotes.
Each one bore the face of a man my father had deeply admired during his lifetime.
Holding a cigarette burned halfway down, I accompanied the lama to the door.
I chose to employ a technique I rarely used:
The art of seeing someone off.
I watched him until he disappeared among the cluster of missionary gravestones.
Only then did I return to my office.
His frequency gradually weakened in the distance.
Yet it soon returned to the same steady rhythm as stone.
I seemed to hear Orchid's breathing.
I imagined a white Go stone suspended between her fingers.
Buzz.
A text message arrived.
From Orchid.
"What are you doing?”
I called her immediately.
“I just sent your admirer home.”
“Oh? The master told me you're even more formidable than he is.”
Click.
The sound of a stone landing on a Go board came through the telephone.
“You should tell my fortune sometime. Hahaha. Gotta go. I'm playing.”
The line disconnected.
I continued holding the receiver.
I could no longer hear the busy tone.
That single sound of a stone touching the board filled my ears completely.
Reconstructing the lama's fortune-telling method was surprisingly entertaining.
The monk's first step was simple.
By maintaining extraordinary calm, he sharpened his senses beyond those of ordinary people.
Smell.
Temperature.
Vision.
Small details captured in real time.
In this way, he purchased trust and obedience.
The second step was to wait for questions.
Then avoid answering them.
Mystery creates credibility.
The third step was to deploy language as a weapon.
A carefully chosen phrase could sever whatever doubts remained.
A three-act formula:
Establish Authority. Conceal. Confound.
He performed it effortlessly.
Soon enough, the client would begin believing in the master's powers of calculation.
Payment followed naturally.
Not necessarily in cash or jewelry.
The most skilled fortune-tellers often accepted other forms of compensation.
The pleasure of winning.
The satisfaction of influence.
Sometimes the person being "read" became little more than a walking advertisement.
How ordinary.
The game played by a creature that was both man and crow was different.
Orchid's Go tea room gradually became my own metaphysical arena.
Before long, my reputation as a fortune-teller would spread outward—
like ripples across still water.
FRAGMENT 73
The Garbage Sorter
Fragments: Listening Beyond the Words | A Sound Like Cracking Ice
Time & Location: Winter 2007 · The "Metaphysical Arena," Chegongzhuang, Beijing
I renovated an entire row of old buildings.
The cost was considerable.
My wife complained that I was wasting money.
What she did not know was that I had tens of millions of U.S. dollars sitting quietly in accounts at HSBC and Citibank.
Even people as close to me as Borjigin and Xu Yanan knew nothing about it.
They still assumed that without the "Super-Frequency Satellite Television Company" in Macau, I would be struggling.
I had no desire to tell fortunes for strangers.
Yet people arrived every day.
Some asked:
“How is the country doing?”
What they really meant was:
Will I be promoted?
Some asked:
“How is the economy?”
What they really meant was:
What should I buy?
Some asked:
“How is my family?”
What they really meant was:
What about my lover?
Some asked:
“How is my health?”
What they really meant was:
How long do I have left?
I was no master.
I was merely a garbage sorter.
Every act of fortune-telling amounted to the same thing:
Listening beyond the words.
Stripping away layers of lies until the same fear underneath was exposed.
One day, a senior official from Guizhou came to see me.
Baorigé had arranged the introduction, though she was not present.
Long before he arrived, I could hear his shoes crunching across the gravel path beside the missionaries' graves.
The sound resembled a rusted machine grinding over broken bones.
He sat across from me, doing everything he could to control his breathing.
Yet I could hear the cuff of his jacket rubbing against his shirt sleeve.
The sound carried a frantic tremor of survival.
The moment he began speaking, another sound surfaced in my ears—
the slurping noises of villagers eating from bowls of douzhurou stew.
“Ten cents a bowl”!
I followed the script.
“Would you like to talk about yourself,” I asked, “or not?”
He shook his head.
He had no intention of revealing his cards.
“Master,” he said, “could you tell me whether the nation will experience any unusual events in the next three months?”
Very few senior officials ever include a specific time frame when asking such questions.
There was a faint bruise along his carotid artery.
It pulsed strangely as he spoke.
He was lying.
The word nation was merely a veil.
Behind it stood his own fate.
I said nothing.
Instead, I gently pushed a teacup toward him.
The base scraped across the elmwood tabletop.
The sound resembled cracking ice.
He flinched.
Then noticed that my gaze remained fixed on the table.
A few moments later, he stood to leave.
Muttering to himself as he walked away.
“Brittle, but not strong. Brittle, but not strong…”
Several weeks later, Baorigé called.
“Darling, your prediction was absolutely right!”
“He's already gone in.”
My voice sounded nothing like that of a former lover.
“Wow. You got it right again. He was placed under investigation last week.”
“Where are you?” I asked.
“I'm in America. I wish I could fly back and smell your scent.”
“Take care.”
I hung up.
The line went silent.
FRAGMENT 74
“Master, Please Enlighten Me”
Fragments: Signals of Defeat in the Carotid Artery | A Dry Friction with the Smell of Blood
Time & Location: Winter 2007 · The "Metaphysical Arena," Chegongzhuang, Beijing
Ever since Orchid began playing Go here, I had felt like an electrical control box whose switches were being turned off one by one.
Including the switch that had governed desire for decades.
With the slightest touch, she had sealed it shut.
Emptying.
Then becoming wiser.
In truth, I did not need to hear what people said.
Before those fortune-seekers even opened their mouths, I could already hear the signals of defeat carried within the pulse of their carotid arteries.
The panic.
The fear.
The disorder rising from the deepest layers of their minds.
Fortune-telling was not mysticism.
It was merely the precise capture of initial conditions.
As I listened to someone speak, a subtle shift in tone was enough for me to infer that, during some future transfer of power, this person would be removed like a single block from a larger structure.
Parsing language was exhausting.
I preferred to listen only for the vibrations that preceded collapse.
Then I told them the result.
The man sitting before me today was not particularly senior.
A bureau-level official.
Someone from inside the Red Wall.
I studied his face.
Beneath that smooth, official-looking mask, the electrical currents running through his nervous system had already fallen into chaos.
Without years of disciplined emotional control, this forty-year-old man would probably have been committed to a psychiatric hospital.
Yet he kept trying to tell me more.
Personal connections.
Political relationships.
Tiny details.
His own theories about what was happening around him.
I waved a hand.
“Director, next month—don't attend that dinner.”
“Master, please enlighten me.”
Like Gao Yong before him, he deliberately thickened his voice.
I did not answer.
Instead, I turned my head and noticed a magpie perched on the gravestone of Johann Adam Schall von Bell.
A magpie is a close relative of the crow.
Both belong to the corvid family.
The bird called out several times.
And in those calls, I heard something else.
One year from now, the man sitting before me would collapse beneath the spotlight of an interrogation room.
His screams crossed time and space.
At this very moment, they were already rehearsing themselves inside my little room.
Obviously, he could not hear the fate emerging from his own nervous system.
I could.
And it made me nauseous.
“But I've fought my way up from nothing. I don't believe in fate.”
He paused.
“Oh, forgive me, Master. Perhaps you can change my fate for me?”
His voice and heartbeat both confirmed that he was lying.
I did not dislike lies.
After all, I rarely listened to what people actually said.
But low-level intellectual games inevitably became tiresome.
“That dinner,” I repeated.
“Don't go.”
I stood up and began gathering the scattered black and white stones from the Go board.
A stack of U.S. dollars slapped onto the tabletop.
The official rose and departed without another word.
I looked at the gray-green paper.
And heard the dry friction of something stained with blood.
FRAGMENT 75
Placing a Stone
Fragments: A Deeply Hidden Mechanical Frequency
Time & Location: Spring 2008 · The "Metaphysical Arena," Chegongzhuang, Beijing
Several months later, Xu Yanan came specifically to see me.
The moment she arrived, she gave me a hug.
She was not wearing a military uniform.
Instead, she was dressed like a local government official.
To be honest, she looked almost excessively plain.
“Little brother, Director Huang has gone in.”
“Who?”
“The one you upset and sent away. You don't even know his name?”
“I never ask names or birth dates. You haven't forgotten, have you? I came out of Compound No. 7.”
She laughed.
“Director Huang was one of the big boss's favorites. Very capable, but much too flamboyant. The day he left here, he called me and shouted for half an hour. Said you refused to save him. Said you watched him walk toward disaster.”
“How could I possibly change anyone's fate?”
I gestured toward a chair.
“Sit down. What would you like to drink?”
“I should introduce you to a major businessman.”
“I'm happy to follow your arrangements.”
The businessman arrived in considerably greater style than any government official I had ever met.
Never mind the clothing.
He carried a cigar.
Twelve attendants followed behind him.
Some expensive cologne surrounded him like a cloud.
It was overwhelming.
“Master! Master!”
His face was covered with the practiced smile of a businessman.
“Please sit.”
For the first time, I decided to apply my technique of listening to speech patterns to a businessman.
I wanted to see how he worked.
He seemed remarkably relaxed.
The frequencies around him were active but orderly.
His accent, however, betrayed him.
A trace of northeastern dialect still lingered beneath his speech.
He was trying hard to conceal it with standard Mandarin.
Now and then, he even sprinkled in an artificial foreign flavor.
“OK. OK. Then I won't stand on ceremony.”
He raised his Cuban cigar.
Immediately, a young woman in professional attire flicked a lighter and held the flame to its tip.
She looked as if she were about to offer her lips as well.
The girl lacked the skill to conceal herself.
A faint swallowing sound escaped her throat.
I knew that sound.
I had heard it many times in a low house tucked away in Pocket Alley.
“Master,” the businessman said, “Sister Yanan tells me you're extraordinary. In fact, many senior leaders around me have spoken highly of you.”
I knew this trick well.
A businessman praises someone openly while quietly displaying his own connections.
“Go ahead.”
I placed a black stone on the board.
Somewhere in Osaka, I imagined Orchid sitting before another board, deep in her own game.
“Our group doesn't need money,” he said.
“Of course, many senior leaders keep encouraging us to go public. I'd like you to tell me whether our IPO will succeed.”
He leaned back and drew deeply on his cigar, sending a thick ring of smoke toward the ceiling.
The phrase we don't need money emerged from a strained voice.
His heartbeat accelerated.
He desperately wanted an answer.
The Louis Vuitton suit wrapped around him could not conceal the echoes of his circulatory and nervous systems.
Within those echoes, I detected a deeply hidden frequency.
Mechanical.
Stable.
Enough for me to reach a conclusion immediately.
I placed a white stone on the tengen point at the center of the board.
Then I spoke slowly.
“Your IPO will succeed.”
“I can already hear the bell ringing at the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.”
That deeply hidden mechanical frequency reminded me of Gao Yong.
It was not greed.
It was certainty.
Only a man who already knew the answer could produce such a stable rhythm.
“Really? Wonderful. Thank you for the blessing.”
The businessman glanced toward another young woman.
A gold-wrapped box was gently placed on my elmwood desk.
One hundred thousand yuan.
“A small token of appreciation.”
“I'll take my leave now.”
The footsteps that carried him away were firm and steady.
The footsteps of his twelve attendants, however, traced question marks of every imaginable size.
