When they were around, my folks had a variety of gods in the living room. These were there even after dad was gone. It's a common feature among traditional Chinese families, but that's not what we were.

The fact that there was an altar table of gods in the house was not because it was the way it was done in their past, but a sequence of events that led to it. This is that story.

Dad studied in a convent school during Malaya time. English was the medium, Chinese wasn't taught. He did speak many dialects though, all learned from the street. Ironically his preferred type of entertainment are all Chinese (including Cantonese opera).

Mom's educational background wasn't clear. She couldn't say exactly, but she stopped schooling at about standard three, I was told.

None of them were particularly superstitious. All these pointed a hard-to-predict religious leaning in the household.

I was maybe 14. Whatever dad had going on, he felt being stuck in a rut. It was either about business not doing well or being hit with depression; most likely both. I wasn't told any of these (not that I would've understood), but I do wonder now how was it expressed to mom at the time in simple enough terms. I still have no sense of the magnitude of the problem he was in. From his demeanor I imagined it to be mild (I was still a kid enough to imagine him to be invulnerable), but it could have been dire.

Interestingly mom had an older sister who was a medium. She ran the whole business from her home. When a session started, she would chant (in Hakka exclusively) and a very specific version of Guanyin would inhabit her. Again this Guanyin would speak only in Hakka (how convenient). And that's how people from the entire village in Raub get to speak to a Guanyin through this her.

Every time my mom visited, there was a bonus deal. Mom's mother (the only grandmother I knew) would take over the medium and they get to talk. It's fascinating that the spirit world can be this high-bandwidth and on-demand with their service availability.

This time though mom bought along dad. It wasn't a social call, it was a plea for help from the divine. Aunt/Guanyin would first establish her credibility by describing our house's surrounding by simply asking for our address. Once proof-of-divinity is in place, she went on to describe what's wrong.

Many things were said of dad. It wasn't anything like personality flaws or failings. Mediums/gods see the world in a machine-like manner, perhaps even deterministically. Matters weren't working out for dad (they weren't specific about how) because things are not well aligned. Forget self-improvement, those are for losers.

One very specific detail mentioned of dad stood out to me because it was repeated over and over. Dad apparently were surrounded by little-people, that's Chinese for the opposite of menches. It's an umbrella term to describe shady people, grifters, posers, frauds, backstabbers, deadbeats, good-for-nothing motherfuckers. Dad needed to protect himself from little-people, it was said, and surround himself with people of good influence.

I didn't know if that was true, even up to the end. But this occurred to me many years later: why be a shoe-licking smootcher to other people when you can be your own good influence?

So my folks were advised to install an entire line-up of gods in our home, to protect our physical security, harmony with earth, harmony with the sky, some motherly divine love, looked after by the ancestors, and top it off with some Buddha goodness.

The whole business of acquiring these things started with the hardware store for praying supplies. We went to one, picked the nice enough looking Buddha, Guanyin, Guan Yu and plaques of grandparents, earth-gods and sky-gods.

Not that Chinese people care, but putting these gods together are like combining Marvel, DC and Dragonball characters into a single page. It only works when you don't think about it. But when you come to know they all came from different lore with barely any relation to each other, you can't help but cringe. So you may think of common people's altars as badly done teenage fan fictions.

The next step involved bringing them to the temple to have their OS installed. After a few strokes of brushes, they were inhabited by the respective gods and my grandparents' spirits. That or there's an API linkage with the spirits and the hardware.

We came home with the plaques and statues. Now they had to figure out how to place them. Therein lied the first pitfall: we had no altar-table.

So they adjusted the nicest looking decorative cabinet, placed it at the back of the living room to face the front door. The cabinet was tall, but the top was reachable on a chair. That's where the statues stayed.

Here's a detail that's going to matter down the line. On top lived the gods. Next to them were my grandparents' plaque. Problem is they were supposed to be one rung lower than the gods (as instructed). My folks solved that problem by placing a piece of glass underneath the gods as a raised platform.

Mom was diligent with the whole joss sticks operation. Oil lamps were refilled, annual clean for the altar table, and daily serving of joss sticks on four spots. Dad would pick up the slacks if she wasn't around to do it. This went on until the end.

In the early days of their installation there was a genuine sense of power up. Thing felt more hopeful, the mind hack worked. And that's what mattered: if you can fool yourself into a state of power, it doesn't matter if it's fictional.

About a year later, something didn't fly. My folks felt things either didn't improve or gotten worse. So we visited my aunt again.

Same deal, aunt got into medium mode, went to the astral plane to take a look at our home and figured out the problem.

"Your ancestors were placed on the same level as the gods. That created a serious disharmony," she said. That's my generous interpretation. Basically their whole gods on top of the cabinet solution didn't work.

So my folks went and bought a proper altar table, have them placed with the configuration that's designed for. This one lasted until the end.

There was a phase where I did pray to them with some amount of seriousness. That's what people do when they feel helpless. Thing is I didn't feel particularly helped afterwards. But of course, my faith wasn't strong enough.

I don't think I have ever prayed aloud while putting on joss sticks, saying to the gods what I wished for. After all they were gods, can't they read my mind? And if they couldn't, in what position were they able to help me anyway?

Welcome to my /Logicland/; where wonders come to die.

Given that all these was happened in a period where we moved into a house that dad owned for himself (we've been renting houses until then), there was this sense of matter-of-fact-ness to have gods installed in it. It's like a utility, it's dispensable for the soul in ways they cannot explain.

The way I see it, for these things to really pay off, the gods have to be part of the family. Legends of them have to be told repeatedly (even if it's fictional). The gods have to be stakeholders as if their opinions matter. But that's only true for the most hardcore of families; and those who do would do it in the most wrongfully superstitious manner.

Towards mom's end, I did hear dad prayed aloud to Guanyin. I wish she could speak back and say to him: "Son, her time is up. She had a good run, that's what counts."

Beliefs can serve or they can kill. But beliefs are not a matter of free will. You can't will yourself into believing something you don't already believe; nor can you unbelieve something upon logical debunking.

Inserting wrong beliefs into a person's head is like serving slow poison. Be careful of the beliefs you consume.