"THE DONGYUE TEMPLE IN BEIJING, CHINA"
by Roy Kesey
The Dongyue Temple was built seven hundred years ago by Taoist monks, and was recently refurbished at great cost so as to confirm the validity of each entry on the list of terrors I have long harbored: that Hell is a real place; that it consists of an immense complex of offices with bad lighting and few chairs; that each office is staffed by horrifying demon-guards and equally horrifying mid-level bureaucrats; that each bad thing I have done thus far in my life has been duly recorded and will be paid for in pain; that any good thing I have done may or may not have been noted, as there are fewer offices and a correspondingly smaller number of bureaucrats dedicated to good than to evil; that the bureaucrats dedicated to evil are aggressive ladder-climbers, eager to please their bosses with full dockets and constant convictions, whereas the bureaucrats dedicated to good are resigned to their lot, concerned mainly with taking long lunches and stacking their 401K’s and stealing office supplies; and that flying birds, who have their own office here, are far more important than most people realize.
Visit for yourself if you doubt anything I say. You will be told at the entrance that the first order of business is to obtain Form 34-URCMPLTLYFKD9372/B from the Death and Life Department. Arriving at this office, you will be told by a guard with the head of a bull that in fact said form is only available at the Department for Determining Individual Destiny, and that it must be filled out in triplicate, signed and dated, and then brought to the Death and Life Department for verification. And when you fulfill these requirements and return, the other Death and Life Department guard, the donkey-headed one, will tell you that due to recent procedural restructuring, the form must actually be filled out in quintuplicate, postdated twenty-four hours, and taken first to the Final Indictment Department for the pre-Life-and-Death-Department-verification validation process.
If you are asked to go to the Department for Suppressing Schemes, may I suggest that you arrange your alibis ahead of time. If you are told to go to the Deep-rooted Disease Department, the Execution Department or the Department of Wandering Ghosts, you should check first to see if there is anyone else with whom you might speak. If requested to stop by the office of the Department of Wind Gods, take your case to the horrifying purple demon with the spiked silver mace rather than to the unassuming man with the empty brown bag--believe it or not, the purple one is more apt to listen. And if at any point you are ordered to appear at the main office of the Department for Implementing Fifteen Kinds of Violent Death, you should first rub the Lucky Testicles of the bronze horse on the outer terrace, as you will be needing all the assistance you can get.
Best of luck.
[This article by Mr. Kesey is very real, and we have more photos here to prove it].
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Roy Kesey was born in California, and currently lives in Beijing with his wife and children. His short stories have been or will soon be published in McSweeney’s, Other Voices, The Georgia Review, The Iowa Review, Prism International and The Mississippi Review , among other magazines. His dispatches from China appear regularly on the McSweeney’s website. This article originally appeared in slightly altered form as one of his monthly “Little-known Corners” columns in That’s Beijing.
His first book, a novella called Nothing in the World, won the
2005 Bullfight Media Little Book Contest, and will be published in May
of this year.
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