Godfather

I went all the way up to Queens, NY today with some friends, one of them told us that the Chinatown up there is bigger than the one in Manhattan and they have tons more good food. It turned out to be true.

On my way back, we passed by Bowery and Canal and I spotted a little storefront that happens to be a temple for my godfather - WongTaiSin.



My family is all inclusive when it comes to religion; better safe than sorry seems to be my grandmother's motto. Us Chinese are mostly buddhist, if not in practice at least in lifestyle. There are plenty of buddhist temples in Hong Kong, heck we have one of the largest buddha statues in the world. My grandma also practice Taoism, so much so that I often confuse the two. Until this day, I couldn't really tell you what the difference is between Buddhism and Taoism. They both requires the burning of incense, they both believe in the living dead, both related to some sort of Kung Fu. Although Taoist stories are often more colorful since they believe in a lot more deities and ghosts.

I grew up going to a Protestant primary school, and then a Catholic boarding school and high school. Our family went through a phase of Shintoism from Japan which I still don't know why. Our neighbors down the hall are Indian Muslims. So I guess I inherited that mentality, in that in anything you do you should expect karmic consequences. In reality I would categorize myself as agnostic or borderline atheistic, mostly because I'm anti-authority and organized religions are seedy and unnecessary.

That brings me back to the story, my grandma actually brought me to the WongTaiSin Temple when I was a baby and prayed to him to took me in as his grandson. It was so forced, ha. But it is our family's tradition to go to the temple every year to pray for things during Chinese New Year. My godfather here also perform some special functions. There are all these bamboo containers that holds a hundred bamboo sticks in there, and each stick corresponds to a poem. So every year, we prepare a long lists of questions and then we bring it to the temple. For each of these questions, grandma would shake the bamboo container until one of the sticks falls to the floor and the corrsponding poem is supposed to be the answer.

I asked my godfather about Medic Guy today, he seems to like him.