News-Info-Alerts

To: ALL

From: Andi Wolos & Bob Necci

(POW-MIA InterNetwork)

Re: Desperation Leads to Metaphysical Means

Date: January 08, 2001

"Chopstick and an egg - the psychic way to find a missing brother's body

Superstition is flourishing in South-East Asia, David Lamb reports from Hanoi.

Nguyen Ngoc Hung had spent nearly 30 years searching for the remains of his brother, who died aged 20 while fighting American troops. The college professor had scoured battlefields in Vietnam's Central Highlands, talked to military commanders and pored over archival records, always coming up blank.

In desperation, he went to a psychic and explained his grief. "This is easy," Pham Thi Hang said. "I can help." She sketched a map of a hilly region about 650 kilometres south of Hanoi, and drew an "x" to indicate an unmarked grave.

"Before you dig," she said, "stick a chopstick in the earth. If an egg balances on it, your brother will be below."

And there, beneath a chopstick in Kontum province, is where Professor Hung's quest ended two months later and Nguyen Ngoc Cuong was exhumed for a proper Buddhist burial.

"If people feel hopeless, they will reach out, like I did, to superstition; and whether you're a Communist or not, if you're Vietnamese, you're a very superstitious person," Professor Hung said.

Like many South-East Asians, Vietnamese would not consider making a big decision, whether it involves marriage or building a house, without considering the lunar calendar and consulting an astrologer, psychic or fortune-teller. This is pragmatism to them, not superstition.

Abiding by these forces of nature is the key to finding harmony and the reward of good luck and a happy life.

Vietnam's folkloric beliefs - three people, for instance, will never pose together in a photograph because the one in the middle will be struck by ill fortune - are a mixture of Buddhism, Confucian ideology, local tradition, paganism and ancestor worship.

On Hung Ma Street in Hanoi's Old Quarter, shop after shop sells paper cutouts - some near life-size - that people burn to pass to relatives in the afterlife.

There are paper cars, cellular phones, refrigerators, stacks of imitation $US100 notes, TV sets, electric fans - all made in the village of Ba Binh, where most of the population spends its days snipping and folding.

"Our most difficult order was for a sewing machine," said Lan Van Binh, who owns one of the shops.

"But what the living have, the dead also need. This really isn't superstitious. It's about faithfulness and showing serious feelings to your ancestors."

The Government has long frowned on superstition, mysticism and religion. In the postwar years of the 1970s and '80s, it banned fortune-telling.

But as the Government began loosening up in the '90s, the ban on fortune-tellers was lifted and psychics are back in strength.

The Vietnamese are not alone in respecting superstition. So many stewardesses for Thai Airways have given birth in 2000 - the year of the dragon is auspicious - that the airline has had to recruit new attendants. In Vietnam, the birth rate rose 8per cent in the first half of the year.

"I do not know exactly how I got the wisdom to find the graves of missing soldiers," said one psychic, Nguyen Van Lien, 37, whose living room was crammed with 25 people seeking clues to the fate of relatives missing in action. "But I had two serious fevers as a young man, and when I survived, I found I had the ability of a fortune-teller. My fame soon spread."