A Fortune-Teller Told Me (14 page)

After building the bank, Foster helped to plan the new Hong Kong airport (in the shape of a dragon!). But people in certain areas of his office were continually falling ill. So the
feng shui
expert was called in. He studied the problem, and concluded that the demolition of some
old houses in the area had left a gap through which “evil spirits” flew in a direct line to strike the building. For the people working there it was like having a knife constantly plunged in their chests. His advice was to move all the desks, to curtain the windows and to place mirrors to deflect the spirits. Absurd? Perhaps, but once all this was done there were no further complaints from the staff.

Obviously, the “successes” of
feng shui
, as of any magic practice, are partly explained by an element of autosuggestion: if people firmly believe that something can help them, it may indeed do so. The typical case is that of a couple, childless for years, who manage to conceive after following the advice
of the feng shui
man to change the position of their marital bed.

What is interesting about
feng shui
, despite its façade of magic, is its basic principle: the constant reestablishment of harmony with nature. For the Chinese everything has to be in equilibrium. Illnesses, misfortunes, sterility or bad luck result from the rupture of some harmony, and the function
of feng shui
is to restore it. Ecologists
ante litteram
, the Chinese. They knew nature well. They knew nothing else!

The Chinese have never been metaphysicians, they have never believed in a transcendent god. For them nature is all, and it is from nature that they have drawn their knowledge and their beliefs. Even their writing, made up of images, is based on nature and not on some abstract convention like our alphabet. In any European language it would be possible to agree that from now on the word “fish” means horse and the word “horse” means fish. But in Chinese such a thing would be inconceivable, because the character used to write fish “is” a fish, and the character for horse
is
a horse.

Western man sees God as the creator of nature, and for centuries has distinguished between the natural world and the world of the divine. But for the Chinese the two are indistinguishable. God and nature are the same thing. Divination is thus a sort of religion, and the fortune-teller is also a theologian and priest. That is why, until the advent of Communism, superstition was never repressed in China as it was in the West, where it was seen as the antithesis of religion and has always been vigorously suppressed. The Chinese—like almost all Asians—have never worried about this distinction between religion and superstition, just as they have never posed the problem—also typically Western—of
defining what is and is not science. For centuries the Chinese have practiced astrology, for example, without ever wondering if its bases were “scientific.” In their eyes it worked, and that was enough.

Chinese astrology is based on the lunar calendar. A year consists of twelve new moons to which, every twelve years, a thirteenth is added. Twelve years make a cycle. Each year is characterized by an animal: the rat, the ox, the tiger, the cat, the dragon, the snake, the horse, the goat, the monkey, the rooster, the dog, the pig. The first day of the year is the day of the first moon and the year always begins in January or February.

The animal of the year of one’s birth has an enormous influence on one’s personality and destiny: people born in the year of the rat, for example, must take care all their lives not to fall into traps; those born in the year of the cat will always land on their feet; those born under the sign of the rooster must always scratch the earth to feed themselves. Women born in the year of the horse are indomitable and therefore difficult wives. Those born in the combination of the horse with fire—which happens every sixty years—are wild, dangerous and practically impossible to marry. Nineteen sixty-six was one of those years, and in Asia many women who found themselves pregnant resorted to abortions to avoid bringing into the world daughters who would not, in all probability, find husbands. In Taiwan in 1966 the birth rate fell by 25 percent for this reason.

On the other hand, males born in the year of the dragon are destined to be strong, intelligent and fortunate. As 1988 was such a year, coupled with the fact that the Chinese consider the double 8 to be a symbol of double happiness, many couples tried to have sons then. To render the child even more fortunate, many mothers tried to give birth on the eighth day of the eighth month of that year: all the maternity beds in Singapore, Taiwan and Hong Kong were booked up by women prepared to undergo cesarean sections to bring their children into the world on that ultra-auspicious day—August 8, 1988.

One of the most important factors determining a person’s destiny is the exact hour of his birth. Only by knowing that hour can the astrologer draw his horoscope, identify his character, describe the important stages of his life and even foresee the eventual date of his
death. To know the hour of someone’s birth is to possess a weapon against him; therefore many politicians in Asia keep their birth hour secret, or give a false one.

Everyone knows that Deng Xiaoping was born on August 22, 1904 (the year of the dragon!), but the exact hour remains one of China’s great secrets. Mao Tse-tung and Chou Enlai were less successful. In the 1920s both of them, then living in Shanghai, went—as a joke, or because they believed in it, who knows?—to see the most famous astrologer of the city, a certain Yuan Shu Shuan. When the nationalists fled to Taiwan in 1949, among the piles of documents they took with them were the horoscopes that Master Yuan had carefully preserved of all his clients. Those of people who had since become famous were published. In 1962 a Taiwanese astrologer predicted, on the basis of the birth times given to Yuan, that both Mao and Chou would die in the same year, 1976. And indeed they did.

Innumerable political decisions in Asia are based on astrology, and therefore the secret services of various countries employ experts to predict what their adversaries’ astrologers may advise in certain situations. It is known that the Vietnamese, the Indians, the South Koreans and the Chinese have astrology sections in their counterespionage agencies. Even the British have one, based in Hong Kong, to keep track of what the Chinese are doing in the sphere of the occult. Increasingly, it seems, all sorts of old practices, banned during forty years of Communism, have now resurfaced to flourish not only among the people, but among the Communist rulers themselves.

In 1990, a few days before the anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre, a strange thing happened. A group of workers erected a large ring of scaffolding around the flagpole in the center of the square and started working inside it. When the scaffolding was removed, the height of the pole had been increased by a few yards, and the red flag, symbol of China, flew higher than it had ever done since 1949. Apparently a great
feng shui
expert had suggested to Deng Xiaoping that this would restore the harmony of the square and thus the good fortune of the People’s Republic.

I began collecting stories like these because I planned to write an article on the importance of superstition in Asia, but I also wanted to dispel
my doubts and to convince myself that I was right to change my life for a reason that had absolutely nothing rational about it. But was that not true of much of the life around me? Especially in Thailand, I had only to use my eyes.

In Thailand it is common for important political declarations to be made on days considered auspicious, and for politicians to reassure public opinion about the state of the economy or national security by quoting astrologers. In the middle of the Gulf War, when Thailand feared attacks from Islamic terrorists because of its pro-American stance, Prime Minister Chatichai called a press conference and said: “There is nothing to worry about. Thailand will be spared. My astrologer says so.” Nobody laughed. Everyone knew that he was serious. A couple of months previously he had had a mole removed from under his left eye because his astrologer had told him it would bring him bad luck.

In February 1991 Chatichai was overthrown by one of the usual military coups, but after a few months of peaceful exile in London he came back to live in Bangkok. Even in that coup, the occult seems to have played no small role. The generals who seized power had just returned from a secret trip to Burma. In Rangoon they had made offerings in the temple where their Burmese colleagues had made theirs before their successful coup of 1988. Then, taking care not to “discharge” their energy—which meant never touching the earth, always walking on a red carpet—they went to the car, to the helicopter, to the plane, and at last to the Bangkok general command post. There, still “charged,” they launched their
putsch
, the success of which many in Bangkok believed was due to the Burmese energy.

A year after the coup, General Suchinda, who had become Prime Minister, gave the army orders to fire on a crowd of demonstrators. There were several hundred victims. The crisis was resolved by the intervention of the king. General Suchinda resigned, but not before declaring a general amnesty, thanks to which he and the others responsible for the massacre were granted immunity from any legal action. The deaths, said Suchinda, could not be laid at his door: it had been the demonstrators’
karma
to die. Most people let it go at that, but a group of implacable democrats found it intolerable that no one should be punished for the deaths of so many people. For justice they turned to black magic.

One Sunday morning, on the great Sanam Luang Square in front of the Royal Palace, a strange ceremony took place. The names and photographs of Suchinda and the other two generals of the junta were placed in an old coffin, and the widows of some of the victims burned peppers and salt in broken begging bowls. Coffins, widows and broken crockery are symbols of great misfortune, and the ceremony was meant to put the evil eye on the three generals and destroy them.

The generals took the matter very seriously. Suchinda went to a famous monk to have his name changed, so that the evil eye would fall on the one he no longer bore; one of the other generals, also on the advice of a monk, changed his spectacle frames, shaved off his mustache and ate a piece of gold leaf so as to make his speeches more popular; the third had a surgeon remove some wrinkles that were bringing him bad luck, and then, to be on the safe side, took his mistress and went to Paris to run a restaurant.

No history book, especially if written by a foreigner, will ever give that version of the coup and the Bangkok massacre. But that is how most people in Thailand experienced them.

One encounter that greatly encouraged me to hold to my plan was with some researchers at the École Française de l’Extrême-Orient. For the first time in its history the school had organized a meeting of all its scholars, in Thailand. I went to hear about their work and discovered, to my great surprise, that some of them were studying the subjects in which I had become interested.