“How to deal with a toxic boss” is a search that spikes on Sunday nights, and I can guess the hour you typed it. I run a website that sells a Cantonese curse ritual, so you might expect my answer to involve a shoe. It partly does. The practical advice comes first anyway, because nothing performed under a flyover will change your reporting line, and I would rather lose the sale than pretend otherwise.
Do the boring things first
Document everything. Dates, times, the exact words used, who else was in the room. Write the notes the same day, keep them in a personal account, and keep them off company systems. Six months of dated, specific notes carry more weight than any amount of eloquence in the eventual meeting.
Understand what HR is for before you go. HR protects the company. When your complaint describes legal exposure for the employer, discrimination, harassment, retaliation, HR tends to move. When your complaint describes a person who is merely awful to work for, HR tends to file it. Work out which kind you have, and bring the notes either way.
Talk to people you trust, ideally people outside the building. A bad boss erodes your sense of what normal management looks like, and the recalibration has to come from somewhere.
And leave when leaving is the answer. Interviewing elsewhere is a legitimate response to a bad manager. In plenty of cases it is the only response that changes anything.
The part that advice never reaches
All of the above is quiet work. You take the notes and stay professional in the meeting. At home you reread the email with your name missing from it. The grievance itself has nowhere to go. Hong Kong has kept a machine for that exact residue running for decades, under the Canal Road Flyover between Causeway Bay and Wan Chai, at the spot everyone calls Goose Neck Bridge.
The ritual is 打小人, daa2 siu2 jan4, beating the petty person. A 小人 is a small operator. The credit-stealer. The colleague who repeats your idea louder in the same meeting and collects the nod. Cantonese has a term for the workplace strain, 職場小人, the workplace villain, and office workers have been the bridge stalls’ bread and butter for decades. You finish work in Causeway Bay, you walk over, you pay a woman in her seventies about HK$50, and she beats a paper effigy of your problem with the heel of a shoe while traffic passes overhead.
The practitioners are mostly women in their sixties to eighties, and I profiled the aunties of Canal Road Flyover separately. The tradition is established and unembarrassed about itself. Time magazine put it on a Best of Asia list in 2009 under the heading “Best Way to Get It Off Your Chest”. In 2014 it entered Hong Kong’s first intangible cultural heritage inventory. The longer history is in what 打小人 actually is.
What happens for a workplace grievance
The ritual runs through eight movements, always in this order.
- 請神, inviting the deities to pay attention.
- 稟告, the report. Your villain’s first name and your grievance go onto a paper effigy, and the practitioner reads the grievance out loud.
- 過火, passing the paper over fire.
- 打小人, the beating. The shoe. The part everyone films.
- 祭白虎, the White Tiger. The practitioner smears a paper tiger’s mouth with pork fat and burns it, so it eats the villain’s malice instead of you.
- 化解, scattering rice and five-colour beans to disperse what remains.
- 祈福, the blessing. Gold paper, and a request for 貴人, benefactors.
- 擲筊, throwing moon blocks to confirm the message went through.
The shoe gets the attention, and I understand why. For a workplace order, the second movement carries the weight. Whatever you have been swallowing since January has to fit in one line, because one line is what goes on the effigy and one line is what the practitioner reads out at the stall. Workplace grievances arrive in recognisable shapes. Took credit for the launch again. Promised me the promotion twice, in writing, then gave it to his cycling friend. Those read as archetypes because they are archetypes, the composite shapes of a whole category of manager, and writing your own version will still take longer than you expect. A year of resentment reduced to a single sentence tells you what the actual complaint was, which is information you did not have when the year started.
Why it ends with asking for allies
A 貴人 is the opposite number of the 小人. The benefactor. The senior person who says your name in a room you are absent from and means well by it. The ritual opens with your villain’s first name and closes with a request for that villain’s opposite, before the moon blocks hit the pavement to seal it.
I find this the most clear-eyed part of the design. Anyone who has watched a decade of office politics knows the saboteur is rarely defeated head-on. Saboteurs fade into irrelevance, and the fade usually starts when somebody senior begins sponsoring you. Fewer 小人, more 貴人 is a precise description of what a stalled career needs, and a folk ritual older than the concrete it sits under arrived at that formula without reading a single management book.
I will not tell you the ritual produces benefactors. I have no evidence, and I refuse to invent a study. The structure itself shows a certain wisdom about grievance, though. You state it once, formally, in your own words, through a witness, and then the ritual requires you to ask for something better than revenge.
If your office is nowhere near Wan Chai
The stalls run year round, with a spike every March on Jingzhe, the traditional day for it. Most people typing toxic-boss searches at midnight sit a twelve-hour flight from the bridge, and that gap is where my company operates. You order online for US$15, one time. You give your villain’s first name, pick a villain type, toxic boss is our most ordered category by a distance, and write the one-line grievance. A practitioner under the flyover performs the full eight movements with your line and your villain’s name, and we film all of it. We film within six days or refund you, and the video reaches your inbox within 72 hours of filming: the full uncut ritual at eight to twelve minutes, plus a 30-second vertical cut and a photo of the ashes. The mechanics are in how to order villain hitting online, and if you are weighing a filmed order against an eventual trip to the bridge, I compared the two in online versus in person.
One rule has no exceptions. First names only. No surnames and no photographs, and we refuse public figures outright. Nothing in the footage can identify a real person, and we built it that way on purpose. The ritual exists to get something out of you. A video that could double as a harassment tool would poison it, so we do not make one. If you want ammunition against your boss, the first section of this article is the only part of this website that will help.
On whether it works, the company line has never changed. No idea. The practitioners say the effect starts in about a week. What I can promise is that a woman in her seventies will hit a piece of paper with a shoe on your behalf, and you will have the footage. If that is the right amount of seriousness for your situation, you can have your boss’s first name taken to the bridge this week. Keep taking the notes regardless.