Circle game A round entrance, signifying good feng shui, leads into the courtyard of a Hong Kong temple Islandspics HK / Alamy
Hong Kongers, myself included, love to affect a certain expertise when it comes to feng shui. Because I am otherwise a materialist (as in believing only in physical matter, not as in bling), it has always been self-contradictory of me to discourse on the Chinese system of geomancy and the notion that the arrangement of landscape and objects affects well-being. At dinner parties, I can denounce mysticism — or yogic flying or reincarnation — as shrilly as any Red Guard, and declare that Christians ought to be deprived of the vote. But I'm also capable, at the evening's conclusion, of telling my hosts that their Arne Jacobsen chairs are blocking the chi in their green-dragon corner. The fact that I'm half-Chinese always seemed to make this O.K. Sure, feng shui was nonsense, but it wasn't the same sort of nonsense as transubstantiation or homeopathy. It was a superior Chinese nonsense, a righteous part of my fashionably ethnic, intangible heritage.