Jan Lee
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Back in Hong Kong, in my old neighbourhood, Tin Hau, there is a tiny shrine on Mercury Street. A woman was killed on the sidewalk when a car’s brakes failed, almost twenty years ago. They still burn incense, there beside the miscellaneous shop, the one where you can buy rice and mung beans in bulk, out of big plastic bins, just down the street from the shop where you can buy fresh fish from huge, cloudy, greenish tanks.
I thought of it today, when I saw an odd photo on the internet. The image was of a little shrine that someone had built to the god Mercury, tucked into a corner on a lonely British Rail platform. He was named there as the patron of travel. Mercury, the sign said, was ready to accept the petitions of the delayed, the lost, and the stranded. Post-its, scraps of lined paper, and messages stuffed into the cracks in the concrete blocks attested to the travellers’ need for such petitions.
Yet the connection is illusory. My Mercury Street refers only to the planet Mercury, which we call 水星, the water star; this photo showed something else, an ironic shrine to a Roman god.
Is this how people manage things here in London, by sarcastically worshipping defunct gods? If so, perhaps Mercury should be my god now, here in my new home.
My new boss, whose parents and grandparents were born in London, knows all about Mercury and is ready to impart this and all knowledge of Western Civilization to me. I’m not one of “those” immigrants, after all; I’m a British National (Overseas), the right sort. Since all that trouble in Hong Kong a few years ago, they’ve been allowing my sort in, and he’s all for it.
He tells me that Mercury is quite the clever fellow – responsible for the very establishment of Rome itself. If Mercury hadn’t appeared to Aeneas in a dream, my boss declares, Aeneas would have gotten distracted by that slag Dido, and forgotten all about his mission.
But I do not care about the heroic deeds of Mercury. I am more interested in his failings.
I learn from a comic book, purchased in a junk shop, that the god Mercury steals. He has no heroic strength; instead, he uses trickery and deceit to get his way. He gambles, although, it seems, he is lucky. Yet he is filial: when Mercury’s father sends him on long and dangerous journeys, far from home, with uncertain outcomes, he obeys.
Yes, this is the god I need.
My boss is surprised when I tell him of my new devotion to Mercury. He asks – as long as I am interested in religion – whether I wouldn’t rather come along to evensong on Sunday around 6ish. The choir are not too bad, all things considered. And Mercury isn’t, well, he isn’t British.
Yet I come from a long line of gamblers, and I need a fallible Western god, who can understand my petitions. I need someone to be with me until the world has changed, and I can return to my water star.
By then, however, it may be too late. If I have children by then, they will pooh-pooh the need for any gods at all. They will not know the difference. When someone mentions the cradle of civilization, they will think of the humans of Greece and Rome, and not the gods who made them.
Jan Lee is a digital native, who first published via Telnet in the 1990s. Jan’s work is published or forthcoming in Soft Star Magazine, Maenad Review, and Whimsical Press, among others. Jan’s short stories are collected in the book Route One and Other Stories, available on Amazon. Jan is Editor-in-Chief of The Apostrophe, the quarterly magazine of the Hong Kong Writers Circle.
Twitter: @Jennychu2
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