A Fortune-Teller Told Me: Earthbound Travels in the Far East

Sitting on the wooden stools of the Honey Tea House we had breakfast – some very greasy fritters, which a young man deftly plucked with bare hands from a cauldron of boiling oil. We dunked them in condensed milk. Among the soldiers and traders at the other tables on the pavement, Andrew saw a friend of his, the son of a local lordling of the Lua’ tribe, and invited him to join us. People continued to file past on their way to the market. We saw some men dressed entirely in black, each with a big machete in a bamboo sheath at his side. ‘Those are the Wa, the wild Wa,’ Andrew’s friend informed us with a certain disgust. ‘They never part from their big knives.’

He told us that since he was small his father had taught him to be extremely careful of these Wa. Unlike the ‘civilized’ Wa, these had remained true to their traditions, and they still really cut people’s heads off. Shortly before the harvest, when their fields are full of ripe rice, the wild Wa make forays into their neighbours’ lands, capture someone – preferably a child – and with the same scythe that they later use for the harvest, cut off his head. ‘They bury it in their fields as an offering to the rice goddess. It’s their way of auguring a good harvest,’ said the young man. ‘They’re dangerous only when they go outside their own territory. At home they don’t harm anyone. If you go and visit them they are very kind and hospitable. You only have to be careful of what they give you to eat!’ At times, he said, someone invited to dinner by the Wa finds a piece of tattooed meat on his plate. In a word, it would seem that the Wa are also cannibals – at least if you take the word of their neighbours, the Lua’.

I asked Andrew and his friend to help me find a fortune-teller. Divination is a widely practised art in Burma. It is said that the Burmese, geographically placed between China and India – the two great sources of this tradition – have been especially skilled in combining the occult wisdom of their two neighbours, and that their practitioners possess great powers. Superstition has played an enormous role in the history of the whole region. It was the Burmese king’s hankering after one of the King of Siam’s seven white elephants, very rare and therefore magical – that sparked off a war which lasted nearly three hundred years – the upshot being that Auydhya was destroyed and the Siamese had to build a new capital, present-day Bangkok.

Even in recent times, astrology and occult practices have been crucial in the life of Ne Win and the survival of his dictatorship. One of the first things you notice on arriving in Burma is that the local currency, the kyat, is issued in notes of strange denominations: forty-five, seventy-five, ninety. These numbers, all multiples of three, were considered highly auspicious by Ne Win, and the Central Bank had to comply.

Like the Thais, the Burmese believe that fate is not ineluctable, that even if a misfortune is forecast it can be averted: not only by acquiring merits, but also by bringing about an event which is similar in appearance to the predicted calamity, thereby satisfying the requirements of destiny, so to speak. Ne Win was a master of this art. He was once told that the country would soon be struck by a terrible famine. He lost no time: he issued orders that for three days all state officials and their families should eat only a poor soup made of banana-tree sprouts. The idea was that by acting out a famine they would avoid the real one – a calamity which in the event never materialized.

On another occasion, Ne Win was told by one of his trusted astrologers to beware of a grave danger: a sudden right-wing uprising which would lead to his deposition. Ne Win gave orders that everyone in Burma immediately had to drive on the right-hand side of the road rather than on the left, as had been the rule since British times. The whole country was thrown into confusion, but this ‘right-wing uprising’ fulfilled the prophecy after a fashion, and the real revolt was averted.

In 1988 the same astrologer warned Ne Win that Burma was on the eve of a great catastrophe: the streets of the capital would run with blood and he would be forced to flee the country. Shortly afterwards, thousands of students were massacred and the streets of Rangoon really did run with blood. Ne Win feared that the second part of the prophecy might also come true. He had to find a way out, and the astrologer suggested it: in Burmese, as in English, the verbs ‘to flee’ and ‘to fly’ are similar. The president would not have to flee if, dressed like one of the great kings of the past and mounted on a white horse, he could succeed in flying to the remotest parts of the country. Nothing simpler! He got hold of a wooden horse (a real one would have been too dangerous), had it painted white and loaded it on to a plane. Dressed as an ancient king, he climbed into the saddle and flew to the four corners of Burma. The stratagem succeeded, and Ne Win was not forced to flee. He is still a charismatic figure behind the scenes, the eminence grise of the new dictatorship.

The new rulers too have their advisory fortune-tellers. Not long ago one of the generals was warned by an astrologer that he would soon be the victim of an assassination attempt. He immediately ordered a public announcement of his death, and so no one tried to kill him any more.

Obviously the reason why the famine, the right-wing uprising, the expulsion of the president and the assassination attempt did not happen was – how shall I put it? – that they were not going to happen, not that they were averted thanks to prophecies. But that is not the logic by which the Asians – especially the Burmese – look on life. Prescience is in itself creation. An event, once announced, exists. It is fact, and although it is still to come it is more real and more significant than something that has already happened. In Asia, the future is much more important than the past, and much more energy is devoted to prophecy than to history.

I had been told in Bangkok that there used to be an old Catholic mission in Kengtung, and that perhaps there were still some Italian nuns living there. We climbed up the hill to the church at dusk. A night light was burning at the feet of a plaster Madonna, and in the refectory young Burmese nuns were clearing the rows of tables after supper. I told one of them who I was and she rushed off, shouting: ‘There are some Italians here! Come…come!’ Down a wooden stairway came two diminutive old women, pale and excited. They wore voluminous grey habits and veils with a little starched trimming. They were beside themselves with joy. ‘It’s a miracle!’ one of them kept repeating. The other said things I could not understand. One was ninety years old, the other eighty-six. We stayed and chatted for a couple of hours. Their story, and that of the Catholic mission in Kengtung, was of a kind that we have lost the habit of telling. Perhaps it is because the protagonists were extraordinary people, and today’s world seems more interested in glorifying the banal and promoting the commonplace types with whom all can identify.

The story begins in the early years of this century. The Papacy, convinced that it would never manage to convert the Shans, highly civilized and devout followers of the Dharma (the way of the Buddha), saw instead a chance of making conversions among the primitive animist tribes of the region, thereby planting a Christian seed in Buddhist soil. The first missionary arrived in Kengtung in 1912. He was Father Bonetta of the Vatican Institute for Foreign Missionaries, a Milanese. He brought little money, but with that he managed to buy the entire peak of one of the two hills overlooking the city. It was there that they hanged brigands on market days, and the land was worthless: too full of phii.

Bonetta was soon joined by other missionaries, and in a short time they built a church and a seminary. In 1916 the first nuns arrived, all from Milan or thereabouts, all in the Order of the Child Mary. An orphanage and a school were opened, later a hospital and a leprosarium. As the years went by, Kengtung was caught up in the political upheavals of the region, and troops of several armies passed through it as conquerors: the Japanese, the Siamese, the Chinese of the Kuomintang and then those of Mao. Last came the Burmese; but the Italian mission is still there.

Today nothing has changed on the ‘Hill of the Spirits’: the buildings are all there, well kept and full of children. Father Bonetta died in 1949, and with other missionaries who never returned to Italy, he lies in the cemetery behind the church. Five Italian nuns remain: three in the hospital, and the two oldest in the convent, together with the local novices.

‘When I first came here you couldn’t go out at night because there were tigers about,’ said the oldest, Giuseppa Manzoni, who has been in Kengtung since 1929 and has never gone back to Italy. Speaking Italian does not come easily to her. She understands my questions, but most of the time she answers in Shan, which a young Karen sister translates into English.

Sister Giuseppa was born in Cernusco. ‘A beautiful place, you know, near Milan. I always went there on foot because there was no money at home.’ Her parents were peasants. They had had nine children, but the seven sons all died very young and only she and her sister survived.

Sister Vittoria Ongaro arrived in Kengtung in 1935. ‘On 22 February,’ she says, with the precision of someone remembering the date of her wedding. ‘The people had little, but they were better off then, because there were not the differences between rich and poor that there are now.’

The Catholic mission soon became the refuge of all the sad causes in the region. Cripples, epileptics, the mentally disabled, women abandoned by their husbands, newborns with cleft palates (left to die by a society that sees any physical deformity as the sign of a grave sin in a previous life), found food and shelter here. Today it is such people who tend the garden, look after the animals, and work in the kitchens to feed the 250 orphans.

It grew late, and as we got up to leave I asked the two nuns if there was anything I could do for them.

‘Yes, say some prayers for us, so that when we die we too can go to Paradise,’ said Sister Giuseppa.

‘If you don’t get there,’ I said, ‘Paradise must be a deserted place indeed!’

This made them laugh. All the novices joined in.

As we walked to the gate Sister Giuseppa took my hand and whispered in my ear, this time in perfect Italian with a northern accent, ‘Give my greetings to the people of Cernusco, all of them.’ Then she hesitated for a moment. ‘But, Cernusco, it’s still there, isn’t it, near Milan?’

I was delighted to confirm it.

As I went down the hill I felt as if I had witnessed a sort of miracle. How encouraging it was to see people who had believed so firmly in something, and who believed still; to see these survivors of an Italy of times past, which only distance had preserved intact.

People born into a family of poor peasants at the beginning of the century, in Cernusco or anywhere else in Italy, could not dream of having the moon: their choices were extremely limited, which meant that they had a ‘destiny’. Today almost everyone has many alternatives, and can aspire to anything whatsoever – with the consequence that no one is any longer ‘predestined’ to anything. Perhaps this is why people are more and more disorientated and uncertain about the meaning of their lives.

Children in Cernusco no longer die like flies, and none of them, if asked ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ would reply, ‘A missionary in Burma.’ But does their life today have more meaning than that of the children who at one time might have answered in that way? The nuns in Kengtung had no doubts about the meaning of their lives.

And the meaning of mine? Like everyone else, I often wonder. Certainly one is not ‘born to be’ a journalist. When I was little and my relatives bombarded me with the usual stupid question, which seemingly must be inflicted on all children in all countries and perhaps in all ages, I used to annoy them by naming a different trade every time, and in the end I invented some that did not exist. It is an aspiration that I continue to nourish.

After three days in Kengtung Andrew and his friend had not yet found me a fortune-teller. Perhaps Andrew’s Protestant upbringing made him reluctant, or perhaps it was true that the two most famous fortune-tellers were out of town ‘for consultations’. Finally, on our last evening, we found one playing badminton with his children in the garden of his house. But, with great kindness, he excused himself: he received only from 9.30 to 11.30 in the morning, after meditating. I tried to persuade him to make an exception, but he was adamant. He had made a vow imposing that limit ‘to avoid falling victim to the lust for gain’. If he broke that commitment he would lose all his powers, he said. His resistance impressed me more than anything he might have told me.

On the way back to the border we saw the chained prisoners again. This time we were prepared, and managed to give them a couple of shirts, a sweater, some cigarettes and a handful of kyat.

At the border we were given back our passports, without any visa stamp. Officially we had never left Thailand, never entered Burma. A fast taxi took us to the city of Chiang Rai. We spent the night in a sparkling new, ultra-modern hotel, where young Thai waiters dressed like the court servants of old Siam served Western tourists dressed like explorers in shorts and bush jackets. The next day they would be taken in air-conditioned coaches to Tachileck, where they would be photographed under an arch that says ‘Golden Triangle’, visit a museum called ‘The House of Opium’, and buy a few Burmese trinkets of a kind that by now can be found in Europe as well.

A French mime, with a bowler hat and walking stick, who had been hired by the hotel on a six-month contract, did a Charlie Chaplin turn between the tables of the restaurant, in front of the lifts and among the customers at the bar, in an attempt to liven up the atmosphere. I could not have imagined anything more absurd, after the chained prisoners, the monks and men who chopped off heads.

The next morning Angela and Charles caught a plane, and were in Bangkok in two hours. I had ahead of me four hours by bus to Chiang Mai and then a whole night on a train. Inconvenient. Complicated. But the idea of keeping to my plan still amused me. I remembered how as a boy, on my way to school, I tried not to step on the cracks between the paving stones. If I succeeded all the way I would do well in a test or write a good essay. I have seen this done by other children in other parts of the world. Perhaps we all from time to time have a primordial, instinctive need to impose limits, to test ourselves against difficulties, and thereby to feel that we have ‘deserved’ some desired result.

Thinking about the many such bets one makes with fate in a lifetime, I reached the bus station easily enough, then the railway station, and finally Bangkok.

CHAPTER SIX Widows and Broken Pots (#ulink_c653a117-241d-5211-9155-cc72532c22e5)

It was inevitable: I began to have doubts. Along came the old familiar voice of my alter ego, true to form, ready to question every certainty. The doubts first surfaced when I began investigating the topic of fortune-tellers and superstition from the point of view of a journalist. Was I not perhaps wasting my time with this business of not flying? Had I not succumbed to the most foolish and irrational of instincts? Was I not behaving like a credulous old woman? As soon as I looked at the subject with the logic I would have applied to anything else, it struck me as absurd.

I began by going to interview General Payroot, the secretary of the International Thai Association of Astrology. He was a distinguished looking gentleman of about sixty, lean and erect, with thick grey hair, cut very short like that of a monk. When I came in he handed me not one but, as happens more and more often in Asia, several visiting cards, each of which gave a different address and different telephone and fax numbers.

‘Why the International Thai Association of Astrology?’ I asked, to start the ball rolling.

‘We also hold courses in English, for foreign students; last year we had two Australians.’

It doesn’t take much to become international, I thought; and I imagined those two, now in some Australian town, making a living by saying heaven knows what about people’s destiny, with the prestige of having studied in Thailand, one of the great centres of the occult.

‘Also,’ continued General Payroot, ‘we maintain contacts with the astrological associations of various countries. The German one in particular.’

‘The German one?’

‘The Germans are at the cutting edge in this field; they are brilliant. I myself have studied in Hamburg.’ He had indeed: years ago this distinguished gentleman – in all truth an infantry general in the Royal Thai Armed Forces – had been a cadet at the famous Führungsakademie. In the morning he had attended classes in warfare, and in the evening he had learned about the stars at the local Institute of Astrology.

After retiring from the army he devoted himself full-time to his two pet creations: a school for fortune-tellers, with the specific intention of disseminating the ‘German method’, and an ‘astro-business’ company which combines astrology with economic research to predict the behaviour of the stock market. ‘The system is already fully computerized,’ the general explained to me proudly. Clients paid an enrolment fee plus 5 per cent of all profits from investments recommended by the ‘astro-business’.

My meeting with the general-astrologer took place in the headquarters of the Academy of Siamese Astrologers, a handsome, spacious wooden villa built at the beginning of the century. The floors were of polished teak, the open verandas were ventilated by large fans revolving slowly on the ceilings. The setting had much to recommend it, too, being at the centre of one of those neighbourhoods that have best preserved the atmosphere of old Bangkok. Across from the Academy is the Great Temple, which in Thailand is rather like the Vatican, being the residence of the Patriarch, the head of the Buddhist Church.

I had arrived early in the morning. Along the pavements were dozens of stalls displaying religious trinkets. There were lucky charms and amulets against the evil eye, statuettes of divinities and venerable abbots from ages past, and the highly realistic little wooden phalluses which it is believed increase male virility and make women give birth to boys.

The Thais have unbounded faith in the powers of the occult, and these little markets of hope and exorcism are among the most colourful and profitable in the country. No Thai walks out of the door without carrying some amulet or other. Many wear whole collections of them around their necks, hanging from thick gold chains. Thais will spend huge sums to procure a powerful amulet, or to be tattooed with signs that can ward off danger and attract good luck. No part of the body is spared: it is said that a certain lady who recently became the wife of one of the most prominent men in the country achieved her goal thanks to some very special shells tattooed on her mount of Venus.

While I was talking with the astrologer-general in the main hall of the Association, from two adjoining rooms came the voices of teachers giving lessons to classes drawn from all over Thailand. Even astrology has been affected by the process of democratization. Originally it was a court art, studied and practised only by kings or for kings. Knowledge of the stars and their secrets was an instrument of power, and as such had to remain a monopoly of the few. Now astrology, too, has become a consumer good, accessible to all. Rama the First, the founder of the dynasty that currently reigns over Thailand, was an excellent astrologer, and predicted that 150 years after his death there would be a great revolution in the country. And lo and behold, at the time appointed, the revolution occurred: in 1932 the absolute monarchy was forced by an uprising of intellectuals and progressive nobles to become constitutional.

‘And the present king, Bumiphol, is he a good astrologer?’ I asked.

‘I cannot say anything about my king,’ replied the general, avoiding a subject which is still very much taboo in Thailand. There are too many unresolved mysteries, too many whispered prophecies – including the one about the dynasty coming to an end with the next king, Rama the Tenth – for a Thai to discuss the royal family with a foreigner. The general even refused to admit what everyone knows: that King Bumiphol, like his predecessors, has astrologers in his service, and it is they who determine the times of his public appearances and fix his appointments.

The Academy has a small garden, unkempt but not unpleasing, with a litter of newborn kittens and a couple of mangy dogs, some shirts hung out to dry, and a cement deer pretending to drink from a waterless fountain. Along the verandas stood a number of small tables, each with a palmist studying the lines of a proffered hand with a big magnifying glass, or an astrologer making calculations and drawings on sheets of squared paper and recounting the past, predicting the future, or just giving advice to intently listening women.