Taking Idolizing Too Far

​Confession by Hoon

I was sickly as a child; always going in and out of hospital. My constitution was very jialat. If you are to ask what I remember the most of my primary school days, I will tell you it’s the hospital. I think I was absent for half of the school term.
 
My father’s friend was a temple helper and he said that if I took on Guang Kong as my guardian deity, it would help me through life. I believe a ritual was done for me but I can’t recall the details exactly. Anyway, it's not important. For the remainder of this story, I will refer to him as GK. I feel that even calling out his name will invoke power.
 
What's important is that I got healthier after that. When I grew older, I was interested in all things GK. Of all the deities in the Chinese temple, I would say GK has the most pop culture merchandise. He’s in books, figurines, computer games, collectable cards, etc. Anytime I come across something interesting, I would add that to my collection.
 
Eventually, in the army, during reservist, I was inspired to get a full back tattoo of GK after seeing one of my campmates with it. I got a recommendation for a tattoo artist in Geylang who does this sort of tatts.
 
I had to go back a few rounds to finally finish the entire piece. I remember my tattoo artist asked if I wanted to complete the whole image. At that time I was still thinking - “what a dumb question, of course complete lah.”
 
And that’s when my life did a 180 turnabout.
 
My health deteriorated almost immediately, my relationship with people around me soured, and my girlfriend of five years left me.
 
This streak of bad luck went on for another year until a chance encounter with my father’s friend, the one who helped me as a child. We got to chatting and he asked me how life has been. I told him everything was ok; like what else did he want me to say? Should I pour out all of my troubles?
 
When we were about to part ways, he called out to me: “Eh, what have you done?!” I blur siah. “What do you mean?”

He said GK not happy with me. Very bad. I’d done something very bad. I stun siah.
I couldn’t think of anything wrong that I did. To be fair, I can think of many things wrong I did, but I don’t know what would anger GK.
 
Somewhere in the discussion, I revealed that I have a tattoo of GK on my back and wondered if that was the problem. I didn’t think anything was wrong with it because I saw others with it as well, and my intention of the tattoo was to give thanks to GK for protecting me.
 
He saw my tattoo already he lecture me jia lat siah. He said GK tattoo not for everyone. It’s too hiong for me already.
 
Siao liao lah. What to do now? Laser off whole back meh?
 
Thankfully the solution was not so serious. After I lasered off GK’s eyes from the tattoo, my life slowly went back to normal.