It took conversations with three impatient shopkeepers to give me a name for this Oriental discipline: fungshwei, the fish-seller called it, shaking an octopus in my face, but no no, he didn't know no-one, go down to bookstore, please go now he busy. So I left him to his eels and squiggly things and went past the barber shop and around the pavement-seller of small decorated cakes, stepping into the street to avoid hitting my head on a platoon of flattened ducks, in the direction that he had indicated, only what appeared to be a bookstore turned out to be some kind of apothecary, odorous and shadowy with an entire wall of drawers marked only by characters. Further down the street, a building with curlicued roofs that I took to be a temple was revealed as a telephone exchange, so I turned back, narrowly avoiding collision with a heavily laden silver tray of fragrant covered bowls, and made a more methodical search. The bookstore, which I had passed twice, was tucked behind a pavement greengrocer's; I found it only by spotting a man coming out with a fresh newspaper in his hand.

I pushed between the crates of strange knobbly dark objects on the one side and baskets of strange smooth light objects on the other, to enter a world that was comforting in its familiarity. Books of all sizes, colours, shapes, and languages stretched from floor to ceiling, riding in neat piles on central tables, filling the hands of the half dozen patrons, all of whom glanced up as I entered and watched me unabashedly for a while before their books pulled them back in. The front of the shop displayed newspapers, mostly Chinese although I saw two San Francisco English-language dailies as well as a week-old New York Times. Nothing from England, though.

“May I help you?” asked a voice in lightly accented English, with no trace of the pidgin dialect. I hadn't noticed him before, as he had been standing behind a high desk, but now he rose up and seated himself on a stool. A Chinese man of about thirty, wearing a brown suit, flecked red tie, and wire-rimmed glasses much like those on my own nose.

“Yes, thank you,” I said. With the recent experience of harried and impatient shopkeepers in mind, I thought I had better pin the man down in a commercial transaction before asking questions about Chinese cooks and gardeners. “I understand there's something called fungshwei. I'm probably not saying it right—it has to do with balancing energies in a room, or something?” I allowed my voice to rise into a question mark, to say that I was just a harmless white woman with money to spend on oddities that took her fancy.

“Fungshwei,” he repeated, and I took note of his pronunciation. “You wish a book on it?”