LOTTERY POETRY

She retrieved a bamboo tube that contained red-tipped sticks, each with a number from one to 100.

- KEVIN CHONG​​​​​​​

MAISY WU HAD LEARNED fortune-telling from her mah-mah, who’d read faces and palms in a stall in Temple Street Market, in Hong Kong. A decade later, as a university student in Vancouver, Maisy would tell fortunes at parties. Her dorm mates invariably thanked her for the advice she’d given while buzzed on hard lemonade.

Eventually, she decided to quit her job at the Vancouver Public Library and monetize her talent, specializing in Chinese forms of fortune-telling and divination. With a smallbusiness grant, she rented a studio on a gentrifying stretch of Pender Street, where she read palms and offered her own interpretation of kau chim, or lottery poetry. The space was clean and white, with a chrome kitchen table at one end opposite a shrine for the god Wong Tai Sin.

At first, when the strange new pandemic hit Vancouver, there was no drop-off in Maisy’s clientele. Apparently, people wanted her reassurances more than they cared about social distancing. But, when her business was declared nonessential, Maisy felt absolutely unprepared. She had only $300 in her savings account. Moreover, she was single. Her internet access was limited to the data on her phone. There was no laundry room in her building.

Maisy, whose estranged mother had come from wealth, had always preferred living close to the bone. Now, she wished that bone was encased in $100 bills.

Out of desperation, she made her fortunetelling business mobile, renaming it Curbside Divinations. Inspired by the takeout drivers and delivery trucks speeding past her window, she envisioned cycling up to a quarantined house and reading fortunes from the gate. Or from the hallway outside an apartment. Either would be more human contact than she’d had in weeks. She composed a press release and blasted her socials.