This is how it began:
Once there was a man called Zhang Lang, who was married to a very virtuous woman. She brought good fortune and blessing upon his house. The man, however, fell in love with a young woman and left his wife. Rejected, she returned home to her ancestral house. From that day on, Zhang Lang was plagued with bad luck. The girl turned from him, he became blind, lost his wealth and had to resort to begging to support himself. As fate would have it, his search for alms brought him one day to the house of his former wife. Being blind, he did not recognize her, but she did. She invited him in and served him his favorite dish. This reminded Zhang of his lost happiness, and with tears running from his face, he related to her his sad tale. She ordered him to open his eyes, and as if by miracle, he regained his eyesight and recognized her. He was deeply ashamed of how he had treated her and was unable to remain in her presence, so he jumped into the hearth, not realizing it was lit. His wife attempted to save him, but only managed to salvage one of his legs. She mourned for him greatly, fixed a small plaque above the hearth where he lost his life and made sacrifices to him. That was the beginning of his veneration as a hearth deity.
The music on the sound system reached into the shower at intervals, depending upon how ne positioned his body, as if he were playing a broken theremin. The FM radio car ad garble obeyed his body as though he were having the control hallucinations of a schizophrenic. Once, in a locked mental ward in Brisbane, Australia, every hour or so a man of about 65 would walk to the center of the ward room, up to the electrical (no flame) cigarette lighter affixed to a post, and methodically light his cigarette. The thing was, he never had a cigarette to light. Years later I bumped into Harry, the day attendant, on a street corner in Sydney; he told me the man was still hospitalized, and suffering from severe emphysema.
I'm with the agency. They took me because of my fluency in five Asian tongues and because of some old documents that I found up in the garage attic at Maryland and Cervantes streets, where I grew up. Things might have been alot easier if I hadn't.
In Manila, in 1991, I was on a case. One afternoon in a certain bar "owned" by one of our people, I sat at a table with a rum coke in front of me. Suddenly [that volcano to the north burst and belched away all of those burned lives.]
http://www.angelfire.com/in/KnightsTemplars/ChinaCoast001.html
/06/08/00 + /04/13/04/