I sell villain hitting over the internet. The rituals happen under a flyover in Hong Kong, and the women who perform them are people most of my customers will never meet. That gap bothers me, so I am writing these profiles. This first one covers the aunties of Canal Road, the women who do the work we sell.
The noise under the bridge
The Canal Road Flyover carries traffic between Causeway Bay and Wan Chai. Underneath it runs a strip of permanent shade that Hong Kong people call Goose Neck Bridge, 鵝頸橋, after the canal that flowed here before the road went over it. Trams grind past on either side. The concrete deck flattens everything into a single low roar, and the stalls sit inside that roar.
Each stall is a small territory. A folding table, a few plastic stools for clients, a shrine crowded with deity figures and offerings, cardboard boxes of paper goods stacked within reach. A brick sits on the pavement. When a ritual is under way, a paper figure lies on the brick and the practitioner works on it with the heel of an old slipper. The sound is unmistakable once you know it, a flat repeated slap cutting through the traffic. Shoppers stream past from Causeway Bay without looking. The stalls have been part of the streetscape long enough that only tourists stop to stare. Incense burns through the day, and the smoke drifts out toward the tram tracks.
Who the aunties are
The practitioners are nearly all women in their sixties, seventies and eighties. Around the bridge everyone calls them aunties, which in Cantonese carries affection and respect at the same time. Some learned the ritual from a mother or a grandmother. Others came to it in middle age, when other work fell away and this trade asked for nothing more than a stool, a brick, an old slipper and the nerve to use them in public.
Nobody certifies them. The trade passes along informally, watched and copied, then corrected by older women until the hands are right. Villain hitting, 打小人, daa2 siu2 jan4 in Cantonese, grew out of Guangdong folk practice and has never belonged to any temple. Hong Kong put it on the city’s first intangible cultural heritage inventory in 2014. Time magazine had already listed it in its 2009 “Best of Asia” issue as the “Best Way to Get It Off Your Chest”. The aunties worked the same way before either notice arrived and have carried on the same way since.
[PLACEHOLDER: practitioner’s first name], who has been at the bridge for [PLACEHOLDER: number of years], performs the rituals we film.
[PLACEHOLDER QUOTE: how she learned the ritual, and from whom]
A day at the stall
There are no set hours. Each auntie opens when she opens and packs up when the light or the custom goes. Most of what I know about the rhythm of the work comes from standing around it, which is a poor substitute for asking, so we will keep asking.
[PLACEHOLDER QUOTE: what an ordinary weekday at the stall looks like, from setting up in the morning to the first client]
The clients bring bosses. They bring colleagues, exes, in-laws, and quite often nobody in particular. Many people ask for the generic small people in their lives to be beaten, the unnamed source of a bad year. The full ritual runs through eight movements in a fixed order: 請神, inviting the deities; 稟告, reporting the grievance; 過火, passing the offerings over fire; 打小人, the beating itself, slipper on paper; 祭白虎, feeding a paper White Tiger whose mouth she smears with pork fat before burning it; 化解, scattering rice and five-colour beans to disperse the trouble; 祈福, burning gold paper to call in 貴人, the benefactors; and 擲筊, throwing the moon blocks until the petition is accepted. We walk through each step in our guide to da siu yan.
[PLACEHOLDER QUOTE: the most common grievance she hears, and the strangest one she is willing to repeat]
Ask an auntie whether the beating changes anything and you will get a more careful answer than most marketing copy gives. Our own position on that question is written down at is villain hitting real, and it is careful too.
What they refuse
Our order form takes a first name and nothing more. There is no surname field. We do not accept photographs of the villain, and we do not take orders against public figures. Part of that is our policy, a set of rules we wrote after thinking about what a filmed curse could be turned into. The harder line came first, though, and it belongs to the aunties. They refuse politicians and celebrities on their own account, and always have.
[PLACEHOLDER QUOTE: why she will not beat politicians or famous names, in her own words]
A first name keeps the ritual what it has always been, a complaint spoken out loud over a piece of paper. When your one-line grievance is read out during the beating, that is the shape it takes. Kevin from accounts. The ex called Michelle. The bridge has managed grievances this way for longer than the internet has existed, and we defer to it.
Jingzhe, the loud season
The busiest day of the year comes in early March. Jingzhe, 驚蟄, the Waking of the Insects, marks the point in the solar calendar when stinging things stir, and by extension when the small people of the world get moving. On that day queues form along Canal Road and prices go up. The slippers barely stop. We wrote about the day itself in Jingzhe, the day of the curse.
[PLACEHOLDER QUOTE: what Jingzhe day is like from behind the stall, the hours worked, the state of her arm by evening]
Nobody is queueing to take over
The trade is ageing along with the women who keep it. It passed down informally, mother to daughter, neighbour to neighbour, and that chain has thinned. Few young people want to spend a working life on a plastic stool under a flyover, and no institution exists to recruit them. A heritage listing records a practice. It does not train a successor.
[PLACEHOLDER QUOTE: whether anyone will take over her stall when she stops, and how she feels about that]
I do not have a solution for this. A website does not save a trade. What a website can do is send the trade steady work at full price, which brings me to how ours is set up.
How our arrangement works
When you have a ritual performed for you through this site, the order reaches the bridge as a first name and a villain type, plus a one-line grievance for the auntie to read out loud. She performs all eight movements. We film from where a second client would sit and stay out of her way. You pay US$15 and receive the video. The mechanics are laid out in how to order villain hitting online.
One rule sits above the others. We pay the practitioner her full rate, in cash, for every ritual, before this business takes anything at all. Her money never waits on our margins or our costs. If nothing were left over for us on a given order, she would still have her money. I set it up that way because the alternative, an internet company shaving the take of a woman in her eighties who works with a slipper, did not bear thinking about. You can read about the individual women we work with at the practitioners.
Go in person if you can
The online service exists for people who are thousands of miles from Wan Chai. If you are in Hong Kong, or ever will be, go to the bridge yourself. A ritual at the stall costs about HK$50. Bring cash. There is no appointment system. You sit down when a stool comes free, and the trams stop close by on either side of Canal Road. We compared the two experiences at online versus in person, and in person wins on everything except distance. The stalls open through the afternoon on most days, and the aunties take clients in the order they arrive.