Geomancers embrace earthly
intervention By Kent Ewing
HONG KONG - This city's fortune-tellers
and geomancers have considered the future of their
ancient art and come up with a dire
prognostication: Unless they clean up their act,
they have no future. And it didn't take a crystal
ball or ominous astrological warnings to figure
that out.
Responding to a long-running
string of financial and sex scandals involving
alleged practitioners of what the Chinese call
feng shui masters, Hong Kong's most
prominent soothsayers are now calling for the
establishment of a monitoring body - like those
that already exist in the city for professionals
such as doctors and lawyers - to assure that the
geomancy being practiced here is the
real deal rather than
some charlatan's interpretation of their
increasingly tainted field of expertise.
There are an estimated 50,000 people
practicing or studying feng shui in the
city, and 80 of them - including well-known
masters such as Szeto Fat-ching, James Lee
Shing-chak and Ma Lai-wah - have agreed to join
the proposed association. Szeto, who has his own
feng shui show on television, will serve as
its first chairman.
As it is now
envisioned, the group - to be called the
International Taoist Metaphysics Association -
will attempt to standardize the practice of
fortune-telling and geomancy, recommend reasonable
fees to be charged by practitioners, accept and
act on complaints and even offer free services to
those on welfare. Moreover, and perhaps more to
the point, the association will promote Hong Kong
as the world capital for legitimate feng
shui.
While its proponents are touting
it as the first such body in the world, in fact
feng shui associations already exist in
Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia and other
countries. Adding Hong Kong to the list and giving
the new group a grand title evoking inscrutable
Taoist mysteries is unlikely to result in
internationally recognized standards for a
practice that is based on supernatural divination
and astrological interpretation.
That
quibble aside, however, Hong Kong's feng
shui masters are in desperate need of a
winning public relations campaign to combat an
onslaught of recent news that puts them in a bad
light. Chinese emperors of old may have kowtowed
to the edicts of feng shui, but for many
people in Hong Kong today the term has become a
synonym for fraud and sexual abuse. Those who make
a living foretelling the future are increasingly
seen as using their dubious divinations to take
advantage of the ignorant to make a fast buck and
sate their perverse sexual desires.
While
there have been a number of such scandals, the one
that set geomancy back at least 2,000 years
involves the disputed will of Asia's richest
woman, Nina Wang Kung Yu-sum, who died of cancer
in 2007, and her self-proclaimed lover and
personal feng shui master, Tony Chan
Chun-chuen. In February, Hong Kong's High Court
rejected Chan's claim to Wang's US$4.2 billion
fortune, ruling that the 2006 will on which it was
based was a forgery. Instead, the court upheld a
2002 will leaving Wang's billions to a charitable
foundation run by Chinachem Group, the Hong
Kong-based property empire that Wang ruled as
"chairlady" before she died. (See Geomancer loses in battle of the
wills, Asia Times Online, Feb 3, 2010)
The drawn-out courtroom drama was rife
with stories of secret liaisons between Chan, a
51-year-old former bartender who is married with
three children, and Wang, aged 69 and a widower at
the time of her death. There were also bizarre
tales of rituals performed by Chan for Wang
costing $93 million. In one instance, Chan was
said to have dug 80 holes on Chinachem properties
that were placed so as to prolong Wang's life.
In addition, Chan's lawyers produced a
video in court of Chan and Wang engaged in a
Taoist ritual that Chan described as a ceremony
intended to seal their relationship as man and
wife. In that video, however, Wang can clearly be
heard referring to Chan as Kung Kung, a
term used to call a eunuch in Chinese.
At
the conclusion of the trial, Chan was arrested for
forgery, but he was subsequently released on bail
of $640,000. He and his lawyers are now planning
an appeal, so this prolonged embarrassment to Hong
Kong's feng shui fraternity will not be
going away anytime soon. Meanwhile, Hong Kong's
Inland Revenue Service has billed Chan for $38.6
million in back taxes on the income he earned for
his services to Wang.
"The Tony Chan case
was a real shame for the feng shui sector,"
Junno Tang Hong-si, who has been designated as
president of the new association's board, told the
local media. "We hope to set up a complaints
system and, if someone finds misconduct, we can
publicly condemn the person's behavior and kick
that person out of the association."
Recent candidates for the boot, besides
Chan, would include another 51-year-old,
self-described seer who was convicted in April of
2009 of sexually assaulting a woman, aged 20,
after painting her body red in a ritual
purportedly intended to exorcise an evil spirit.
The man had previously been imprisoned for four
years for a similar offense.
Last January,
a truck driver claiming to have supernatural
powers was sent to prison after convincing a
19-year-old model to engage in a sex ritual with
him that would give her career a boost. The ritual
was carried out on nine separate occasions before
the model discovered that she was pregnant and,
after having an abortion, went to the police with
her story. As it turned out, the truck driver had
pulled the same sex scam on six other women.
It is stories like these that have served
to discredit Hong Kong's community of geomancers.
The association, which plans to establish feng
shui schools to provide training for aspiring
practitioners based on a common syllabus, hopes to
restore pride and place to an art grounded in
Taoism, a philosophical and religious tradition
dating back to the sixth century BC whose deepest
roots can be traced to the folklore of prehistoric
China.
Those promoting the association
hope to launch it before an international
feng-shui exhibition comes to Hong Kong in
December. Here's one thing you can count on:
Neither Chan nor his team of lawyers will be
invited to attend that exhibition.
Kent Ewing is a Hong Kong-based
teacher and writer. He can be reached at
kewing@hkis.edu.hk
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