A Fortune-Teller Told Me (31 page)

“Rabbit.”

“Good. The older the rabbit gets, the more beautiful it becomes. Your wife is like that:
ye lao ye piaolian,
the older the prettier,”
she said, chuckling.
“The marriage will last because the tiger is very accommodating with the rabbit. You’re a tiger born of darkness. You, therefore, take great care of your children and go hunting for food for them. You are more of a mother than the rabbit.”
I was amused at how the animals of the zodiac were used to describe a person, to reconstruct character.

The woman kept looking at me and at the cards in front of her.
“Soon you will go to live in a new country, and the people there will help you greatly.”
(Did she mean India?)
“You are alert and intelligent. You have your own opinion on everything and you don’t need to wait for the opinions of others to have your own. Your paternal grandfather was a good man and a great help to you as a child.”
(Well … he was the only grandfather I really knew, and the memories of particular walks with him are precious to me. Helped? Only in that sense.)

“Have you any questions?”

“I’d like to change my job. To do something completely different from what I’m doing now,” I said.

“If you really want to change, go ahead, but only after the Rice Festival in August. It’s not wise to change, however. You know the work you do now. It gives you a salary. You will lose that if you change. Better not to change. Take my advice.”
It struck me that, more than the cards, this was her Chinese practicality talking.

She shuffled the deck and arranged the cards in rows of eight.
“This month you must be careful. Try not to swim in the sea, because the dragon will not protect you. You can swim in a pool, but not in the sea. After the end of May, swim where you like. Also, don’t go into the mountains. Avoid mountains for the next two months. And mark my words! Last month a Japanese came to see me. I advised him not to swim in the sea, but he said he had to because he was a pearl fisher. I’ve just learned that he has drowned!”
(Who knows if it is true, but these stories always have a persuasive effect.)
“Take care. April is still a month of dangers for you.”

“Can I be a politician?” I asked her.

“No. Governments are not made for you. You are against governments
by inclination.”
(There she hit the mark!)
“And then, with the work you do, you’re already half a politician.”
(My job as a journalist had never been mentioned.)

She shuffled the cards again, and laid them out in the form of a cross, then a circle.
“Now listen carefully: never eat turtle meat or snake meat, and you will have a long life. When you are sixty, throw a big party and invite all your friends, and you’ll live to the age of eighty-three. If you take a bit of care, you may even reach eighty-eight.”

All the other customers, who had been listening with great curiosity to my destiny while waiting their own turn, broke into laughter as I gave up my place to my Chinese companion.

The card reader told her to move from her present house as soon as possible: her husband’s death had deprived it of a stabilizing element. If she remained there everything would go badly for her, and she would very soon fall gravely ill. My companion was convinced.

It was only as she was accompanying me back to the hotel that it occurred to me that she had the same surname as one of the men closest to Lee Kuan Yew, a pillar of the regime. “A relative?” I asked, expecting a “no” and ready to change the subject. Instead: “Of course, he’s my son,” she said. I felt secretly pleased. Lee Kuan Yew and his acolytes had even changed Singapore’s climate, but here was something ancient and irrational which they had not managed to uproot, not even in their own families.

S
ir Stamford Raffles was absolutely right to choose Singapore as a base for the East India Company in 1819. Every ship that sailed in the region had to pass through there to avoid the monsoons. Singapore’s geographical position was its wealth. It is still so today, and Singapore is one of the great maritime centers of the world. But a very vulnerable one.

All it would take would be a canal across the narrowest part of the Malay peninsula, the isthmus of Kra, and all ships traveling between Europe and Thailand, Indochina, the Philippines, China and Japan would be spared hundreds of nautical miles. Singapore, cut off, would soon become a dead city, like those that sprang up and died in the American gold rush. Lee Kuan Yew and those around him are aware of this, and are already recycling Singapore to prepare it for another role: that of Asia’s information-technology capital, the first truly all-in “intelligent city” on earth.

Singapore has more robots per capita than anywhere else in the world, and the most computer-literate population. Computers, and courses on their use, are everywhere. Thus on this island, where already materialism is rampant and money the sole criterion of success and morality, another element of narrowness is added: the binary logic of machines that are changing not only the way people work, but the way they think.

“This is the future,” I heard again and again in Singapore, and I was terribly depressed to think it might not only be Singapore’s future, but also that of millions of other Asians. And perhaps ours as well.

Once upon a time, even in Singapore, schools taught children how
to think. Now they mainly teach them how to program. But what happens to a society that grows up like this, without learning to make distinctions, with only the computer’s logic of “yes” and “no”? What happens in the heads of children who grow up with the impression that every problem has a solution, and that everything is at most a question of software?

Singapore scared me because to a great extent it already works that way. The state is the computer and society is regulated, like the temperature, by a sort of electronic thermostat. Does the evidence show that the children of intellectuals have a higher IQ than others? University teachers are encouraged to procreate. Does the evidence show that the young are not marrying in sufficient numbers? The state creates a special Social Development Unit to organize cruises and dances to help bring them together. Is this rich, modern city discovered one day to be boring and cultureless? Take an army general and make him a minister: his job will be to give orders so that the arts may flourish.

I was curious to meet this character, and asked for an appointment with him, but I was only permitted to invite one of his secret service agents and a secretary to lunch. I asked them which artists I could meet, but there was not one they could name. Instead they wanted to know what I was doing in Singapore, and reminded me that with my tourist visa I was not entitled to interview anyone.

Did they know that I had met—with all due precautions, including the tricks of taking two taxis and walking the last stretch—a recent victim of their totalitarian state? This was a young university teacher who had believed in the rhetoric of democracy and had labored under the illusion that he could offer himself as an opposition candidate in the next elections. The regime began digging into his past, and exposed his crime: he had posted a personal letter with university stamps. He was accused of theft, sacked and subjected to a severe campaign of denigration. In protest the poor wretch had gone on a hunger strike, but he got no sympathy. Everyone was against him: the university chancellor, his colleagues, the press and public opinion of this island with no feelings and no soul. He was a fine character, an idealist, and was still determined to make his dissenting voice heard. “If I don’t do it, who will?” he told me. It was precisely this that the computers found unacceptable.

“Ah, you’re interested in strange things? Go to the Chee Tong Temple this evening, then, and you’ll see some good examples.”

About twenty years previously I had known an architect called T. K. Soon. I met him again by chance, and we began talking about what we had done in the meantime. He had been teaching and building. The Chee Tong Temple was his design. “A unique experience!” he said.

Originally the temple, an old Taoist sanctuary, was in the northern part of Singapore. As it was in the way of a modernization scheme, it had been demolished. In compensation the government gave the Taoists another piece of land on which to build a new temple. There was a competition, T. K. Soon’s plan was successful, and he was invited to discuss it with the Master. The Master imposed certain changes: the roof had to be designed so as not to point at people or at any other building, and there must be no right angles in the entire temple. T. K. Soon obeyed: after all, the Master was a Taoist sage who had died more than two thousand years ago.

The taxi driver who took me there said that by now everyone called it “the temple of the Glass Lotus,” and when I saw it I realized why. It stood in the middle of a working-class housing estate—row on row of houses differing only in the numbers painted on the front. Wrapped in a bluish light, this unconventional, ultramodern structure really did look like a flower miraculously blooming from the asphalt. The petals were the overlapping roofs curled upwards to the sky, and the columns on which they rested formed the stem. The roofs were all of glass. Between the columns there was not a single wall, and the whole building, standing on an octagonal white marble platform, appeared transparent. Thus the temple looked like a vast empty space, open to the breeze. Beautiful! In the center was an altar with many oil lamps, whose flames were reflected and multiplied in the panes of the ceilings. On the altar were statues of the Monkey God and two Taoist saints. The right-hand saint, a smiling old man with a very long white beard, was the Master, Kuan Lao Xiang Xian, who had lived a hundred years before Christ in China, near Chengdu. It was his spirit which every Thursday evening, without fail, visited the temple in this anonymous suburb.

A couple of dozen people were waiting. In front of the altar,
ensconced in a big red chair with arms in the form of dragons, was a corpulent woman of about fifty dressed in flame-colored silk pajamas. Her eyes were closed, and she sat straight-backed and motionless. She was the medium. Two other women also dressed in red, her assistants, hovered around her with bowls of tea, sheets of green paper and a calligraphy brush. In the background people carried on with the irreverent to-ing and fro-ing and casual chatter which one finds everywhere in Chinese temples.

The secretary of the Temple Association came up to ask me who I was and what I wanted. From his visiting card it turned out that, among his various functions, he was president of the Singapore Restaurant Association and chairman of the Rotary Club. I told him I had come, like all the others, to speak with the Master. He had no objections, but he warned me not to go too close to the medium—the slightest touch might shake her out of her trance. The two assistants were the only ones who could touch her.

I sat down on one of the marble benches. Time passed. The secretary told me that the temple itself was the fruit of a miracle performed by Kuan Lao Xiang Xian. It was he, the Master, who had designed it, who had decided every detail and done all the engineering calculations. “Incredible, isn’t it? A man who lived two thousand years ago, and so modern!” he exclaimed. I did not tell him that T. K. Soon was an old acquaintance of mine. After all, I thought, the miracle makes a better story, and as the years pass it will be told and retold and will gradually become the only true version.

Suddenly the woman in the chair began to shake, rocking her body backward and forward. “He’s come!” cried the secretary, and the temple fell silent. A very strange, shrill old man’s voice seemed to come from the bowels of the woman. The secretary said that as I was a guest from far away I had precedence over the others who were waiting, so I found myself kneeling on the right of the chair with my hands joined over my chest, facing the woman. Her agitation subsided, and only her head continued to move convulsively. Her half-closed eyes were fixed on the statue of the Master. One of the assistants put a pipe in her mouth and lit it. She inhaled a great lungful of smoke, and then, as if she really were the old man of the statue, slowly began to caress, from lip to tip, the long white beard which she did not have.

She asked me my name and where I came from. I reexhumed my old Chinese name, Deng Tiannuo, and introduced myself. I saw her shake herself, nodding her head violently, and then I heard a brief, almost sardonic, laugh. I looked around, because I could not make out where it came from. Then it was heard again. It came from the woman’s stomach: she was a ventriloquist. From her half-closed lips issued a beautiful ancient voice, speaking in fine classical Chinese, rhythmical as the language of the Peking Opera:

I had to smile: even a shaman, if Chinese, could not escape the racial arrogance of all the children of the Yellow Emperor.
“What do you have to ask of Kuan Lao Xiang Xian?”
she inquired.