Fifty years ago, in Taoyuan, my grandfather ran a temple.
Not a small one. One of the great halls given to the Queen Mother of the West — 王母娘娘 — the oldest goddess in the Chinese pantheon, keeper of the orchard where the peaches of immortality ripen once in three thousand years. He was its general secretary. He kept its accounts and its calendar. He decided which day the great rites would fall on. He was there before the doors opened in the morning and after they were barred at night.
My father was raised on that floor. Other children grow up in apartments; he grew up in a courtyard that was already thick with smoke before he was awake, among drums and folded gold and men who came in the dark to ask the goddess for things they could not say aloud anywhere else.
And in those years, the goddess was taking sons.
It is an old custom, and Taiwanese families keep it still. A child is offered to a deity and received as a godchild — 義子 — and passes under that god's protection for the rest of their life. It is not a thing you can buy. The child is presented, the divination blocks are thrown, and the goddess answers, or she does not.
She answered for my father.
He has been hers for fifty years.
That is where I learned what I know — which papers, which words, which day, and how to stand in front of an altar and ask properly on someone else's behalf. It was not learned from a book. It was learned in that courtyard, from a man the goddess chose for her own, and it is the standard every petition in this house is held to.
This is the house that came out of that courtyard. When your petition is written, it is written by people who grew up watching how it is done.