Fortune
telling seems to be in its peak time of business when the traditional New Year
(Tet) festival approaches, and superstitious people are inclined to seek for
their advice and predictions for their personal and professional lives in the
next year.
On the morning of January 6 many people had
already arrived for help from the clairvoyant Sau at her house, which is
nestled elusively in overgrown fields in Hoc Mon — a suburban district of Ho
Chi Minh City. Her 12 square meter working room was packed with 15 people,
amongst whom she sat, clad in a long-sleeved shirt, performing the job with her
various tricks.
These people say they frequent Sau’s home, and
they hold high confidence in Sau’s predictive ability.
She is famous for her unique capability of
raising the spirits of the dead, accompanied by the imitation of voices of
children, teenagers, and the elderly.
In one case, after being provided with basic information
by a withered mother on her own ill-fated son, Sau suddenly sat up and spoke as
though she had just become a child, to the great delight of the woman, who
began to converse with Sau, or with her seemingly dead son. “How is the life in
the underworld going?,” she asked with an ear-to-ear grin; Sau folded her arms
in response.
In another case, a middle-aged man demanded
that Sau conjure up the soul of his late grandmother so he could inquire about
health, matrimony, and business success in the new year. After five minutes in
silence, Sau replied by producing inarticulate sounds that are expected to be
heard from women in their eighties.
The conversation with his grandmother, and
many other departed relatives, ended with the man, on Sau’s advice, giving her
VND500,000 (US$24) by way of her expense on his behalf on houses, cars, and
clothes for those souls to use. This belief is popularly subscribed to in
Vietnamese society.
That morning also witnessed an entire extended
family assemble around her, and await communication with their putative
relatives who had passed away. After talking to their utmost content, Sau
massaged the family’s backs, thighs, and abdomens, and stroked their hair, in
an effort to ward off evil spirits.
As mid-day approached, the number of people
gravitating towards the house grew greater and greater, resulting in lines of
parked motorbikes reaching as far as the gate at the building’s edge. There
were already over 30 guests that morning alone, and on every Sunday the place
invariably enjoys an overflow of visitors.
Quite understandably, it was Sau’s
money-pocketing practice that she appeared to be retrieving souls of the
deceased, and allowing them to take up temporary residence in her body, then
making requests to their living relatives for paper versions of such expensive
objects as villas and high quality cars, which are subjected to burning for the
hereafter. In this way, she has derived much money from these credulous people.
Besides giving her predictions for personal lives, fortune
teller Sau also offers her clients massaging to ward off evil spirits
Unlike Sau, Moi, another fortune-teller in the
same district, began to shuffle cards in her hands with legerdemain, and
boasted, “It has been several decades since I first did this job. When the Tet
holiday is near, people flock to my house for my divinations.”
In addition to the above personal residential
places, the superstitious can also find help at the gates to pagodas in Hoc Mon
and Districts 3 and 10. There, books and discs with superstitious content are
sold in a flagrant fashion and with a brisk trade.
It often happens that fortune tellers
improvise their own statements in the absence of necessary information.
Hien, who lives in Tan Binh District,
expressed her disbelief at their words. She pretended to tell Sau about her
lost relative to verify her talent, and Sau even gave advice to her on how to
find her lost child, despite the fact that he had been found previously.
Chau, a fortuneteller in Binh Thanh District,
fell into embarrassing word-groping while proffering a prediction to a man that
he would receive part of the fortune from his paternal or maternal side, while
in fact both sides were in penury.
TUOI TRE
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