About Cheung

My surname is Cheung. Don't call me Sifu. Too many men on this street call themselves Sifu, change the name on the door, last three or four years and disappear.

If you came hoping I'd tell you a stock will rise, or a relationship will hold, keep your hundred and eighty dollars in your pocket. The auntie at the temple gate sells incense for five dollars a stick. If peace of mind is what you need, she's the better deal. You could also open your phone and ask the AI. It answers in a second. Smooth, even-handed, easier to read than what I write.

I'm not in this because life was kind to me.

2003. SARS had just passed. I was doing IT support for a company in Central. Thirty-five years old. Second wave of layoffs. The HR woman handed me my paperwork and her hands were shaking. She was let go herself the next month. I saw her on the street once after that. We didn't say hi.

I lived in a Sham Shui Po SDU then, thirty square feet, facing the back alley. Two months unemployed, a little over two thousand dollars in the bank. I couldn't sleep at night.

Mid-Autumn afternoon, I walked from Lai Chi Kok to Wong Tai Sin Temple, over an hour on foot, and not out of piety. I was saving the bus fare.

I shook the cylinder a long time before stick thirty-two fell out. Moderate. Su Wu tending sheep, in four lines of verse.

I didn't pay anyone to interpret it. I took the slip back to the SDU, bought curry fish balls on the way through the market, three dollars, and that night on the wooden bedboard I read those four lines I don't know how many times.

The first few times, I wanted to know when I would find work. By the fourth or fifth read, I noticed something.

There's no time in this poem.

It only says Su Wu was there, eating wool, swallowing snow, watching sheep, for nineteen years. It doesn't say he counted, hoped, or asked.

Something I should tell you. I've read sticks for twenty-one years now. Other people, telling the story, make it sound like I had an awakening that night. I didn't. I still couldn't sleep. I still went to interviews the next day. Three weeks later I found work. Computer maintenance, eight thousand a month.

I started doing this two years later, after a friend died. Brain cancer, thirty-five. I took leave the week of the funeral and sat at home. Everything I'd been doing, going to work, paying the mortgage, worrying about getting laid off from a job I didn't even like, none of it seemed to mean much.

“Awakening” is a word other people added later. I don't use it. I just remember that during that period I went to the temple every weekend and sat. Not as business at first. Just sitting.

It's been twenty-one years. I'm fifty-five.

On the price. One hundred eighty Hong Kong dollars. I'll admit it's expensive. There are fifty-dollar readings at the temple gate, hundred-dollar at the next stall over. So what does the difference buy.

The difference is I don't bullshit you.

Most of the people who come to me already know the answer. They want a stamp. With that stamp they have the courage to file for divorce, to quit, to go home and tell their mother they're not getting married.

Most of what I do is look in their eyes and say back what they already know. That sentence doesn't take twenty years to learn.

It takes twenty years to learn what to leave out.

Can the AI do this work. It can. Eighty percent. It translates classical Chinese more accurately than I do. Cites more references. Has perfect manners. It can't do two things.

One is refuse. I sometimes tell people to come back another day, today's stick I won't read. That sentence isn't in any program. Programs optimize for customer satisfaction.

The other is silence. When someone cries in front of me, the stick text means nothing in that moment. I sit. I don't speak. Anything more is intrusion.

I have not seen a product that does these two things.

I've used kaucim.ai. It's done well. The classical translation is accurate, the categories are detailed, the price is fair. For drawing a stick alone at home on an ordinary day, it's enough. But if you're after a stamp, the kind that gives you the courage to make the decision, then in the end you'll still want a person.

It doesn't have to be me. It can be your mother. An old friend you haven't spoken to in years, but you know exactly how she would answer. Someone you don't even respect, but who happens to understand you.

I'm one option among them. Cantonese, Mandarin, English, all fine. I don't read bazi. I don't draw zi wei charts. I only read Wong Tai Sin sticks. One stick, HK$180. However long it takes.