Numbers Racket

I grew up in bland suburbia. However, embedded in the midst of that sprawl existed a neglected downtown with a smattering of high rises. These were not gleaming, modern structures but rather, elegant relics of a once prosperous and quaint city center; constructed in the first quarter of the 20th century by entrepreneurs and architects optimistically facing the future. Office parks, malls, and housing subdivisions had rendered a once lovely downtown, redundant. For a suburbanite teenager this downtown was the equivalent of Atlantis. My friends and I would embark on excursions downtown like archeologists searching for artifacts from a lost civilization. On one such mission we slipped undetected into the old Plaza Hotel and hopped a ride on the elevator. It was the first time I confronted the missing thirteenth floor. I smiled smugly at the superstitious ways of the “olden days.” Convinced, as I was, that no modern people would purposely mis-number the floors in a building to accommodate old-fashioned beliefs.

Then I moved to Asia where number thirteen was not numerus non grata. In the East it was even, humble number four and any number containing the number four, especially the forties. By contrast, forty is a serious, symbolic number in Western Judeo-Christian society. While Noah was aboard the Ark with his family and the menagerie it rained for forty days and nights. The Jews wandered in the wilderness for forty years and Jesus fasted and fended off Satan’s temptations in the wilderness for forty days and nights.

Once in Asia I discovered a whole new significance of the number four, and it was not a positive one. In Japan I was perplexed that glasses and dishes came in sets of five, rather than four. While residing in my sheltered, expatriate suburb of Shanghai I lived in villa number 32. I was flanked by villas 31, 33 and 35. A stroll around the neighborhood revealed that there were no forties or fours of any kind to be found in any address anywhere in the community. Even the name of the neighborhood changed; initially it had been Fours Season’s Villas. The name was changed without explanation to the more economic, and auspicious, Season’s Villas.

The reason for this aversion to the number four is that in both Cantonese and Mandarin the words for death and the number four, “si,” sound similar; guilt by pronunciation. Alternatively, the words for prosperity and bat, “fu,” also sound similar. Thus, for Chinese, the bat is considered a lucky symbol, rather than a blood-sucking, Transylvanian one. In perhaps an oversight, the name of the road outside our neighborhood gate did not change, it remained Hua Si Road; which probably meant Four Flower Road but I preferred to tell people I lived on Dead Flower Road.

In Hong Kong, I lived on the fifteenth floor of a high-rise apartment tower. I was uncertain as to the precise number of floors as so many were missing. The floor below mine was not the fourteenth floor and I noticed that the 4th floor was missing too. Because even in a city as modern as Hong Kong, in a neighborhood futuristically named the Cyberport, old superstitions die hard. Once again the numbers superstition had struck and all fours were banished. Ironically, the floor beneath me was the thirteenth. Hong Kong was, until 1997, a British colony. Thus, in a superstitious nod to East-meets-West some buildings eliminate both fours and thirteen.

However, it is not all bats and death. Most of the world has adopted the metric system. The United States flirted briefly with the metric system in the mid 70’s but abruptly called things off. I remember being relieved at the time. What I failed to appreciate was that under the metric system I am twice as tall and weigh half as much.

If I thought the imperial system of weights and measures was archaic, I was stunned to discover a bathroom scale in my hotel in Canberra, the capital of Australia, using the stones system. I thought stones went out with the Renaissance and the Reformation. Curious, I stepped on the scale. Not quite eight stone, I think that is good. But how do they measure height down under? In hands?