In 2001, Han Ong published Fixer Chao, a satire on the spiritual vanity of the ruling class. The novel follows a gay Filipino sex worker who transforms himself into an enigmatic Feng Shui master, swindling Manhattan’s ultra-wealthy to “purify” their moral rot. In advance of its summer reissue by Outsider Editions, a new Doubleday imprint, we publish an extract from this cult classic.

Beware the life you earn.

Most days I can’t take a drink quick enough. Then I wait for that moment. A square of pure light to open up in my head. I peer inside, looking at the many things that I could, if I wanted to, still be. Time being elastic during these moments, it seems like my entire youth is still before me, instead of already half over.

I could be a writer… I’d been saying this for years, but the furthest I’d gotten was only to try out sentences in my head like a radio broadcast formulated to pass terse comment on my life and on others’, but which I never bothered to write down to see if I had any of the essential ingredients: clarity, focus, insight, concision, the ownership of something to say. I needed to muster a continuous sobriety, instead of the intermittent bouts – full of great, promising starts that go on to crash with a condemnation best described as orchestral – that kept passing through my life like a tease of the worst sort. A writer, hmmm, a writer. I knew how to type, that was one thing. My mother put me in secretary school to get me out of her hair one summer. My fingers danced on a keyboard, revealing their autonomy from the rest of my body. For several years that was how I supported myself. I worked typing up the awful, turgid manuscripts of wannabe writers – I charged 75 cents a page, undercutting the going rate of a dollar a page. Looking back on it, I realize that that was a stupid thing to do. This was before the predominance of the personal computer when every Wite-Out-covered mistake stood out on the page like a signal flare. My typing was immaculate. That alone would have recommended me, guaranteed that I got more work. Why did I have to continually undercut myself, filled with the pathetic belief that I was a loser with a target on the forehead? Well, OK, I am a loser, but hey, my typing speed: it was in the range of 120 words a minute. And the mistakes, no one could find any.

For a while I answered phones at an employment agency, a job requiring a good voice – which I had – and only light typing skills. But that didn’t last long because I soon discovered that I resented having to speak to people. My hands were all I was willing to give. Take my hands, but leave the rest of me alone. And also, it required me to appear presentable, and I was still young enough not to see that getting out of bed and going straight to work bringing the face that I had acquired during the night was far from socially acceptable.

Today, it takes me about 40 minutes to an hour of reviewing myself in front of a mirror before I’ll step out. I want to minimize the chance of anyone pointing to me on the streets and laughing, echoing my thoughts. This is my routine: I wash my face to get rid of excess oil, put ChapStick on my thick lips to replenish the moisture that washing accidentally takes out, and then comb my hair and set it in place with hair spray that I choose for the ability to hold but not stiffen. By the time I get out the door, I’m about as human as I’ll ever be.

Then I was a mail clerk for the city’s Workers’ Compensation claims department. I pushed a metal cart that was a bulkier version of a supermarket cart up and down three floors, distributing mail that I had previously sorted and then rubber-banded together. I would leave these packets at the desks of the lawyers’ secretaries, whom I didn’t get to know beyond their bright, sunshiny names: Mary, Violet, Clarita, Sara, Jamina.

Later, I worked as a data entry clerk for Arco, the big oil company notorious for owning the tanker that spilled millions of gallons of crude oil into the waters surrounding some part of Alaska. My stint there was postdisaster, but it didn’t seem to have bothered me one bit. This is what I’m trying to grow out of: the unwillingness to see that I am connected, even if by the thinnest of threads, to everything else. I remember only that I sat on a stiff chair that had wheels which I couldn’t resist sliding back and forth, back and forth, to alleviate the soul-destroying repetitiveness of my task. I stared into a green screen; that at least was helpful. My favorite color, the color of trees, of grass, of certain kinds of ice cream that tickle the tongue, ice cream with names that seem like nothing remotely sugary could be extracted from them: avocado, green tea, pistachio. The screen was green, and the cursor blinking to be filled in like an outstanding debt was a lighter-shaded green, psychedelic in its insistent winking. I keyed code numbers into the boxes that asked for project headings. What these “projects” were I was never quite sure of. I typed names of employees, their titles and designations, locations pertinent to these reports, comments. Comments written by whom? Come to think of it, I wasn’t sure of anything that I was typing. It all became abstract: merely speed and touch; keystrokes like paddling in water until I could get to the first 15-minute break.

I was supervised in this job by a kindly black woman who looked like a newscaster with her helmet of stiff hair and her repertoire of suits and skirts that always made her look older than she was. Whom did she go home to at the end of each day? It made me sad to think of her unlocking the door to an empty place. A pet – a cat perhaps – the sole witness to her life. But how come that sadness never touched my own thoughts about myself, when the same scenario – minus the cat – was the exact one I lived through? Well, for starters, the word “bachelor” seemed fine, unlimned by bad vibes, unlike “spinster,” a word conjuring a winter tree, spindly branches reaching upward in torment.

And then through referral from a friend, I went to work for an old Jewish woman, a survivor of the camps who paid me to type up her memoirs, which she dictated on the spot. The job was frustrating because it required me to suppress my natural instinct to improve on another’s words. Her grammar slipped in and out, in a touching way that I’ve only seen white people pull off. Have a colored person speak the same way and immediately you’d yell: English only! And also, her locution was disastrous, sentences that snaked back and forth and then back again until you weren’t sure how everything had begun and where you were in relation to two beats ago, in a way that I’m sure would’ve sent James Joyce into fits of epileptic jealousy. A joke about Irish writers, somewhat applicable to this Jewish woman: Get to the verb!

Here is a sample sentence:

Nowadays walking these ugly gray streets called New York City and seeing American friends going from shopping back to house and we stop on the streets and say many things, saying hi, things like that, also we ask each other about so-and-so, how is so-and-so we ask, and usually so-and-so, for example Mrs. Heifetz from originally Kraków, is fine, always fine, maybe a little under the weather, maybe suffering from like King Lear where the ingratitude of children is sharper than a serpent’s tooth, but always, still, fine, and then one day I will hear that so-and-so is dead, and of course immediately I think when will be my time, but after that, I always think, my God, Mrs. Heifetz the Nazis did not succeed in killing, but eventually she is gone to pneumonia, or high blood pressure, or arterial blocking, you know what that is, that is thickness of the blood in the heart or somewhere that blocks the blood from getting to your parts, but that is not a feeling that’s so bad because eventually we all have to go, but what is worse is this other feeling, this experience of walking the streets one day and you see a revelation, my God right there half a block away from me, standing at the corner of Eightieth and Broadway near Zabar’s, my God isn’t that Mrs. Heifetz and you go running, screaming all the time, Mrs. Heifetz Mrs. Heifetz! and you look closer and it’s not Mrs. Heifetz at all but someone with the exact same face but a different name, and you become ashamed of making such an unnecessary farce, I mean fuss, and after shame comes such a sadness, big big kind of sadness, like you realize the streets are full of ghosts now, more ghosts than living kind of people, and the way someone stands, something very simple like that, or the way the sun happens to be hitting someone’s face or their clothes, will bring back for a very brief moment, your entire life of friends and acquaintances, and yes, even enemies who are now all dead and who you wish they were alive today so you could forgive them, and yes, be forgiven by them, because life, yes life is so precious.

How did I know that that was one sentence? Well, the woman spoke so fast that the comma seemed the only response, like those notations comic-book writers would put at the heels of superheroes to indicate flight, or departure, which was exactly the way she spoke.

She called me boychik, her voice going up and down, and it made me afraid because I thought this meant she saw through what I concealed from her: that I was a big fag: chick boy. But seeing my face seize, she explained: It’s the word for young boy in Yiddish.

But all these were things I had been.

What would I be?

This was exactly my frame of mind when, sitting at a bar called the Savoy near Times Square, a place frequented by hustlers and transvestite hookers way past their prime and by junkies who resembled stick figures and moved as if struggling underwater – a bar I went to because I liked its sad, defeated air, and because it helped remind me of everything I was afraid of becoming – it was while sitting in there, nursing the first of what would be a million shots of cheap tequila, that Shem C walked into my life.

Shem C was a Jew. His eyes sloped up at the sides, giving him a Far Eastern look, but his pupils were the cool gray of steel. His name was given to him by his father. He told me it was the Yiddish word for name. I told him I knew another Yiddish word: boychik. OK, he said, I can see we’ll get along. Where did his father get the name? From Joyce, Shem replied, and then proceeded to recite a passage from Ulysses with the word “shem” in it. Oh wow, was all I could think to say.

But first we had to slog through an opener like this:

Are you a Chink? Shem asked, sidling up to me at the bar. Up until then he had been just another silhouette with red eyes glowing in the dark, the kind of thing that made you think, and nine times out of ten you’d be right, forewarned: Out for meat!

What? I turned to him, surprised out of my stupor. What had I been thinking about before he’d disturbed me? Oh right: What would I be… And I was right in that quicksand place when…

You a Chink? Shem repeated.

It took me only a few seconds to regain my composure.

Flip, I replied.

Flip? What’s that?

Filipino.

What’s that?

(Is this guy kidding?) Philippines, man.

Philippines, he pronounced, making it sound fictional. That a place?

Country.

Wow.

Well, I wouldn’t go that far.

You being sarcastic?

Duh.

Listen. Don’t make fun of me. His tone was hurt.

No one’s making fun of no one. Relax.

Can I buy you a drink? he asked.

What for?

What do you mean, what for? This is a bar. You buy people drinks.

I considered for a moment. OK. Sure.

What’re you having?

Tequila, I replied. And tell them not to water it down.

He motioned for the bartender, Barney, a thin bookish type who looked wrong in a place like this, like Jesus in the midst of lepers. But when he fixed your drinks, turning everything into rainwater, you realized he was just as snaky as the rest. Another tequila for this young gentleman right here, Shem told Barney, indicating my nodding figure.

Barney laughed, replying, He ain’t no gentleman.

He put a shot glass in front of me. I raised it in front of Shem’s face to let him see what he was paying for, said, Cheers, then knocked it back in one try.

An expert, Shem declared approvingly.

Then he whispered: The guy over there said you suck cock.

Excuse me?

You heard me.

What guy? I asked.

Over there. He pointed to a mummy figure even a six-year-old would know not to trust.

Well, I replied, he’s got a big mouth, maybe you should be interviewing him for the job.

Oh no no no. I wanna be clear. I’m not looking to get my cock sucked.

Why did you ask then? I replied in a tone of great indignation.

I just wanted to know how low you could go.

What’s that mean, how low can you go?

Limbo. You know the limbo? How low can you go?

I’m in this bar, ain’t I?

My point exactly.

So why do you even have to ask?

Just want to double-check. So talk to me. I told you my name. Now tell me something about you. He took a millisecond pause, and then: Besides the fact that you suck cock.

Fuck you. I moved several barstools down from this Shem who should’ve been called Sham instead.

He came over to me and apologized.

Another drink? he asked.

Sure.

Bartender, another – Shem looked at me and asked, Tequila? I nodded. Bartender, another tequila for this young man. And one for me too.

Barney slithered over with two shot glasses, pounding the counter in front of us. He was eyeing Shem with a look of: Is this guy gonna stiff me?

What’s wrong with you? I asked.

Barney looked straight between my eyebrows, as if at a third eye. What’s wrong with you?

I showed him my throat as I chugged down the drink.

Shem, on the other hand, took a faggy sip. Ow, he said, like being burned.

Whatsa matter? I asked.

Do you know, he asked me, that tequila’s the hardest form of liquor for the liver to process?

What’s that mean?

It destroys the liver over the long haul.

Good, I replied, I can’t wait to die. I blinked. Then looked away. My God, why did I say stupid things like that?

Barney eyed the scene to our right with a laconic distaste. People were singing along to the jukebox or talking to themselves. Also, they rubbed their bodies against the vinyl of the small booths, making what sounded like kissy-smoochy sounds. Barney looked away. Everything he did was filled with an implication of wearing a space suit. Why work in a place like this and act like a messenger from God?

He was standing in the center of a clock that radiated sunbeams made of tinfoil. The clock said one o’clock. Two of the sunbeams gave the illusion of being horns on Barney’s head. I laughed. Barney moved away. Picking up a comic book from underneath the far end of the bar, he started to read, his sullen expression glued on.

Shem said, Wait a minute wait a minute.

I waited a minute.

Shem continued, OK, I remember what I wanted to say. I waited another minute. My throat was scratchy but I didn’t want to involve Barney again.

Shem spoke as if coming back from a trance. I approached you – God! He stopped suddenly. This tequila’s not agreeing with me.

Are you kidding? I asked him. That’s not even 100%. It’s one third water.

Still my stomach’s not – Anyway.

Right, anyway.

Are you being sarcastic again?

Listen. You’re not going to ask me to suck your cock, are you?

No.

Good. Cause I don’t do that anymore.

Anymore, he repeated, italicizing.

We all get desperate sometimes, you know, I told him.

I certainly do.

On his wrist was a fancy-looking watch. Looking at it, I dismissed that this man ever knew what desperation meant. But if that was so, what was he doing in this place that made everyone who walked through its doors partake of its cheapness and sorrow? Maybe like some drunks who wouldn’t otherwise have the conviction of their drunkardness, he needed a place ugly enough to loosen his inhibitions.

Oh for heaven’s sake, look at him, he’s no drunk: one sip of diluted tequila and he’s clutching his stomach!

Are you OK?

Fine. And to prove his point, he sat bolt upright. It’s one o’clock, he said.

One-fifteen, I corrected.

It’s one-fifteen.

I have to go, I told him. I was feeling sleepy. Ever since I turned 30… My God the things I used to be able to do. It’s true, I used to suck cocks. In fact, right outside this bar, not half a block away, was my former headquarters, the Port Authority Bus Terminal, where I had to compete with frisky Puerto Ricans and athletic black boys for a cut of the overweight white businessman business.

Cut a montage this way: Bathroom stall door in the men’s room of the Port Authority Bus Terminal. Let it be a plain door, black or some blacklike color with the nickmarks of time cut into it. Door opens, a portly white gentleman, with a bald spot in the middle of his head, walks out. A sliver flashes between his exiting figure and the slowly closing door to reveal a young boy of 21, or 22, wearing a tight white T-shirt and black painter’s pants. That’s me! Jump cuts like a staccato radio beat: again and again the door opens to reveal yet another version of the first guy; they all make quick exits, adjust their zippers on the way out, heads bowed down, the better to showcase the tops of their heads. With few exceptions they are all bald or balding. They are on their way home to the suburbs. They’ve had disastrous days and want to take out their frustration on someone. I’m perfect, a skinny colored kid, almost like the ones they see a lot of nowadays on TV, except shabbier. They’re witnessing their time in the spotlight stolen by a whole crew of new, mystifying faces. Or so they think. And they want somebody to pay, be humiliated, physically put under them like restoring their natural position in the world.

Another montage: a love chorus. Though one long sentence, attribute each segment to a separate talking head, forming a comic chain: Yeah suck that dick, come on fuckhead, that’s it, take daddy’s juicy dick in your hot mouth, isn’t daddy’s dick juicy, come on, yeah yeah yeah.

Sometimes the montage is interrupted by an errant scene, but whatever its nature, make sure to always run comedy through it.

Say someone comes in who really needs to shit, and seeing that all three stalls are taken up by two pairs of feet, he’ll bang on the stall doors and yell: Hey, give it up, someone really needs to use the john and I don’t mean you fatsos who can’t get a decent date even if you had to pay for it!

Or say a policeman does a random sweep. When we open the doors, the johns sheepish and the boys roguish, think of the one-liners we’ve had to come up with: Sorry, Officer, I was just performing some Extreme Spunk – I mean, Extreme Unction.

Also cut in a brief scene at the sink. Stand the young boy there, washing his mouth out, gurgling discreetly as if the locale had shifted to some high-class place. He looks up and though he doesn’t mean for it to happen, there he is staring back at himself in the scraped-into mirror. Quick, frightened look away. Then look back, curiosity getting the better of him. Quick cut to close-up: face bleached by the lights. Stay on the mirror as he turns his back, and as a retreating figure shrinks.

A second later, the mood turns. He’s smiling, bounding up steps and counting his money. You only have to realize: One day this boy will be a typist. He will live in an apartment, paying rent on time.

But back to Shem at the Savoy:

Can you come with me? he asked.

Where? I heard myself asking.

I’m staying at a hotel.

I told you –

And I told you. No sex. I’m straight. I don’t want what you got to offer.

I ain’t offering.

Well if you did –

Well I’m not.

Just come to my hotel. It’d be more conducive to conversation.

Which hotel? I asked.

The New Yorker.

This was a hotel near Madison Square Garden that I had always passed by but never, in the course of my ho’ing career, entered. It seemed to speak well for Shem C, but my head was like a quickly closing bloom, so I said: I’ll take a rain check.

You sure?

I need to be asleep right now, I said.

You sure? he repeated.

Damn sure. (Though, of course, I felt the exact opposite… What would I be? What was that corner to be turned? And was it Shem who would show me the way?) You be here tomorrow. He turned to motion to Barney.

He laid down two tens and a five, which Barney retrieved with a small bow and took to the register.

What’s tomorrow?

I didn’t get a chance to talk.

About what?

Plans. Listen, I didn’t approach you just to tell you the origins of my name, OK? For your information I got a plan. A plan that involves you.

A plan that involves me? I don’t think so.

What’re you afraid of? He reached into his pocket and produced a twenty. Here, he said, pushing it toward me on the bar. A sign of good faith. From me.

I don’t want it, I said, although you could tell I was riveted.

Take it.

What for?

Cause I have it and you need it.

Smooth lines like that were a dead giveaway of something bad, but still I couldn’t take my eyes off the twenty. I don’t want it, I repeated.

He took the twenty between two fingers, did an origami move turning it into a cocaine pipe thing, and proceeded to shove it into my shirt pocket, which I didn’t even recall being there. Be here tomorrow, he said.

I staggered home with the twenty next to my chest like a gift of plutonium. And the lights on the street, even when pushed to the outer edges of my vision, seemed to foretell one last fling with black things before I could pull myself up and write all about it later.