破财消灾

Been trying to find this idiom for ages... haven't got the chinese han yu pin yin installer, so had to search like hell to find the characters!

For non-chinese speakers, it means "spend(lose money) to avoid(resolve) disaster", I literally translated it so it might not be the nicest way to phrase it.


Finally, we couldn't take it anymore. Monday lunch time, me and my colleague walked under the scorching sun along the air-polluted Nicoll highway to the Chinese temple at Bugis. We wanted a change of luck, we wanted to ask for blessing, we wanted to ask for guidance...

霉运! Bad luck has been lurking around us too much and there is nothing much we can do except to try to change or improve it. A friend told me, to change your luck, you need to do more good. No matter how much good I have been trying to do (there are indeed some bad things unfortunately), no matter how long I have waited... since last year, my luck hasn't improved tremendously. It did become slightly better but quickly went down again.

We are not exactly the superstitious people, or 100% into fortune-telling... We each got a lot from the Guan Yin Temple and decided to let one of the roadside fortune-teller interpret it for us. He just went on talking, mainly about how negative things are and then made us pay more to get some prayers and chantings. Actually when we think of it now, whatever he said IS NOT TRUE AT ALL! Bullshit! But when one is down on luck, you tend to be persuaded easily to think that way (yes, it's true... mmmm maybe it's true!). I didn't know these people are so well trained in human psychology! So we ended up paying him over 20 bucks (EACH!!), made us went up for prayers and chanting, another 10+ bucks (each!!) gone... This is how easily they earned our $$$. Like another of my friend told me, every religion will try to con money outta you, LOL. Anyway, we are taking it as 破财消灾 (as the idiom above). We must have some bad karma to repay, so indeed that spending did make us feel slightly better.