Calculating Fate: Taiwan’s Fortune-Telling Fever of the ’90s – S5-E16

THE TAIWAN HISTORY PODCAST – FORMOSA FILES

TRANSCRIPT

S5-E16 – Calculating Fate: Taiwan’s Fortune-Telling Fever of the ’90s

Release Date: June 12, 2025

Time: 29:26

PLEASE NOTE: This transcript was created by AI; it may not be entirely accurate. Any errors are the result of the AI transcription, and Formosa Files is not liable for the content in this transcript. Thank you, and use AI responsibly 😊

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The 1990s were a wild time in Taiwan. Man, if you were here, you would know exactly what we're talking about. The country was newly rich, newly free, and there was an explosion of activity in all sorts of things.

Politics, culture, tons of stuff was happening. There were an explosion of programs on TV. People started having cable in most houses.

When I first came here, there were three channels. KTVs, oh my goodness, were all the rage. Taiwanese started traveling overseas.

 And one of the booms was in fortune-telling. It was described in Taiwanese media and academic literature as 算命熱 or fortune-telling fever.

The Taiwan History Podcast, Formosa Files, is made possible through the generous sponsorship of the Frank C. Chen Foundation.

Today we're looking at fortune-telling. In the mid and late 1990s, it was so popular that it earned the name 算命熱, so 算命 literally, calculating fate, and the character 熱 literally means heat or hot, but it's also commonly used metaphorically to describe a craze or boom, similar to how we say fever in English. I've seen the word fever applied to a few things here at that time.

There was China fever. The newly opened PRC was seen as a land of opportunity, and Taiwanese businessmen moved there to set up companies, and part of that movement also saw skilled Taiwanese going to China for work. Managers could earn double what they did here.

Engineers, designers, other skilled professionals, they could earn quite a bit more money. This is true, but over time, the local talent in China caught up or perhaps stole some of the trade secrets, but for a time, yeah, the living in China was good for Taiwanese. Yeah, I remember all these debates within families, whether dad should be allowed to go live in China, work there by himself, it was a bit dangerous, if you know what I mean.

I do know what you mean, yes, a few too many freedoms allowed to people with money there, yes. Exactly, but enough of that. Yes, yes, yes.

What are we talking about? Yes. Fevers, fevers. Fevers.

Of the various trends or fevers of the 1990s, we're looking at fortune telling. It's still popular now, and has been popular for thousands of years, so it's not like some fashion that came and went, like… Like bowling alleys, do you remember that? Yeah, yes. Quite popular here once, these big shining bowling alleys.

Good luck finding one today. I had a moment of horror just last week while teaching. Hmm, a moment of horror.

Was it because you were in your 60s and you were still teaching? Hey, I haven't crossed that watershed yet. Okay, was it a headless ghost student perhaps, or, oh, okay, wait, markers writing on the whiteboard by themselves. These are the things I imagine happening in Jiayi.

Do not mock that which thou do not know. What shocked me last week was the return of a creature from the 1990s. A strange, unexplainable creature, the Tamagotchi.

Oh, okay, the Tamagotchi, I remember that. Put simply, an electronic chicken. It was a small electronic device, some sort of chicken on a screen, you were supposed to take care of it by pushing different buttons, and then it would die, and then you could resurrect it as I recall.

Yeah, a Japanese digital device, a small electronic toy, yes, a screen with a chicken. The Tamagotchi invaded Taiwan in 1997. It was a big hit with students.

I think Taiwanese schools, or some of them banned these Tamagotchis because students were distracted by them in class, because like a baby, you've got to feed and clean up after these virtual pets, chicken on a screen. Yeah, anyway, they're back now, you can buy them in some places. Grown.

Grown, yeah. Do you remember what killed the Tamagotchi? Why did the craze end? Because it was stupid and boring. Yep, there's that.

Kids got bored with it, the novelty wore off, and there was a superior new toy that came into town, the Game Boy. I remember that. I remember confiscating electronic chickens and then Game Boys from my students.

Hey, speaking of being replaced by new technology, in the 1990s, there were internet cafes, very popular for gamers, mostly gone. And there were MTVs, which were, I've never actually been in one, you explain it. Okay, so an MTV, I think it's supposed to stand for movie TV.

It's like a KTV, a place with a big TV, or more often, one of those projectors with a roll-down screen. So, you would choose your VCD or DVD, or even better, a Laser Disc. They were only popular in some parts of Asia.

They looked like records, but they were movies on this shiny disc. I'm sorry, I've missed that somehow. What did you say? A Laser Disc? A Laser Disc, yeah.

It was one of those things, like the guys who went into Betamax and thought it was the cool thing, and then it never really worked out. But anyway, you would take one of these rooms, an MTV, and pick a movie, go in with your sweetheart, and then either watch or not watch the movie. I get it, I get it.

Anyway, those MTVs are long gone, but yeah, fortune telling, it's not disappearing anytime soon. And like I said, it's something with thousands of years of Chinese history. And it's fair to say that Chinese characters have their origin, at least partly, in ancient divination.

Divination, another word for fortune telling. The earliest Chinese writing was connected to that, no? Correct, yeah. In a way, it's called oracle bone script, the earliest known form of Chinese writing, about three and a half thousand years ago.

Okay, so oracle, basically fortune telling, a person or thing that provides prophecies about the future. The bone part in oracle bone comes from the fact that these Chinese characters were inscribed onto animal bones. Yep, but don't forget the turtle shells, they were also used.

And these bones or turtle shells were heated until they cracked. The cracks were interpreted by diviners to answer questions posed to ancestors or spirits, the gods. It doesn't make a whole bunch of sense to me, but at least it's cleaner than looking at animal intestines, entrails.

That was the Roman thing, wasn't it? Anyway, a long tradition in China of fortune telling, a rich tradition of many forms, and it was brought to Taiwan when the Chinese came here, starting about 400 years ago. But I'm sure the indigenous people also had their version of it. Absolutely, yes.

During the Qing Dynasty era, it was part of life. Lots of temple divination, selecting auspicious dates for this and that, avoiding inauspicious ones, and feng shui, especially useful for locating a good place for a tombstone. But there was something of a break during the 50 years of colonial rule, 1895 to 1945.

The Japanese saw themselves as a modern civilizing force. And part of this civilizing was discouraging folk traditions. There was a ban on the import of books from the mainland, such as almanacs used for fortune telling.

And then the nationalists took over in 1945, and the nationalists, the KMT, also saw themselves as a modern civilizing force, you know, in contrast to the old dynastic China. And they looked down on superstition. But among the exodus of mainlanders to Taiwan in the late 1940s were some prominent fortune telling masters, and they brought along some important texts as well.

Transmission of fortune telling skills and the knowledge was not really organized. So often it was a case of that traditional relationship of teacher and student, you know, like kung fu. So, it took some time to build up a number of fortune tellers.

And there was also a Japanese influence. Taiwanese visiting Japan would bring back techniques and texts. Man, those Japanese forms would have originally come from China, no? Correct, correct, yes.

But anyway, by the 1980s in Taiwan, fortune telling has gained momentum. In 1985, Fortune Telling Street in Taipei was opened. Fortune Telling Street.

I'm assuming you've visited many times and experienced that? I'm embarrassed to say I hadn't even heard of it until yesterday. Okay. But I have an excuse.

I see it's easy to miss because Street is overselling it. Yes. It's actually an underpass, some stalls and booths at an underpass at the intersection of, what is it? Minchuan East Road and Songjiang Road in Zhongshan District.

So, it's central Taipei. It's small, but there are a variety of fortune telling forms on offer from what I read. Like I say, I haven't been there.

There's palm reading, face reading, or more complicated ones, which involve calculations and drawing up a chart for you based on the eight signs. Ba Zi, one of the more traditional and popular methods in the system. A person's birth year, month, day, and time in the Chinese lunar calendar are used to create this chart.

It's got something to do with 10 heavenly stems, 12 earthly branches, and the five Chinese elements. My eyes are glazing over. Yeah.

Yeah. The palm reading and the face reading are a lot simpler. Yeah.

Doing some research for this episode, I came across a fortune telling method I had not heard of before. Mi Gua, rice divining. Using grains of uncooked rice, the person takes three pinches of rice, places them in three piles.

Oh, well, makes total sense. And the number of grains clearly relates to your fate, right? Yeah. I think sometimes there's another one where you just make patterns in a rice thingy and yeah, I don't know.

What about tea leaves as well, you know, reading the tea leaves? But the strangest method is probably bird divination. So, there's a bird that picks certain sticks and this is then interpreted. This one is by far my favorite.

It's just so cute. A little bird is there picking your fate. Anyway, how much these things cost? Sometimes they would have a price list, but I don't remember.

Do you know? No, I don't. I think it starts from a few hundred NT and goes up to a few thousand NT. Sorry, Eryk, you've been to this fortune telling street? Actually, from my memory, there was even more than one way back.

It used to be almost every underpass would have at least a couple of these people offering there. I think the one you're referring to, because you said Song Jiang Road, that would be near Xingtian Gong, right? The temple devoted to Lord Guan, the patron deity of businessmen, military personnel, police officers and gangsters. I like how it's all wrapped together.

I'm not kidding. Guan Gong, okay. Multi-purpose.

He's also one of my favorites. He's got the red face and that sword. So, Wikipedia says, sculptures of dragons feature prominently in this temple's design.

Oh, shocking. The temple was constructed in 1967. In 2014, in an effort to reduce particle air pollution, the temple became the first in Taiwan to ban the burning of incense.

That is a surprise. Yes, excellent. But going back to our episode topic, the mid-1990s saw a dramatic increase in media coverage of fortune telling.

It had been popular, but yeah, the popularity increased and there was a flood of books, of articles and magazines, newspapers, programs on radio and TV, and eventually at the end of the decade, on the internet. But the internet was not a big thing yet for most people. Even today, the news has your horoscope every day.

Yes. Is there any difference between a horoscope and fortune telling? All right. We're experts in Chinese history, aren't we? So, let's give some nuance here.

All right. The Western horoscope is very short-term focused, what's going to happen today, the next few days. The Chinese fortune telling is more long-term.

They look at a lifetime, decades, not just days. Maybe even extended lineage. Your fourth grandson will.

Okay. A cool thing about Taiwan, I think, because I love newspapers. I love holding a newspaper and people here still read newspapers.

But back then, newspapers were even a bigger thing, obviously. And at that time, as you noted, they featured massive sections on divination. Yeah.

Bookstores were full of books, both those for fortune telling professionals wanting to upgrade their skills and knowledge, but also various books for beginners, regular folks looking to do some DIY fortune telling. And there were even bookstores specializing in these kinds of books. They could be found near popular temples and fortune telling areas, you know, like Longshan Temple.

Radio and TV shows about fortune, divination, all that, also very popular. Yes. Eric, it's time to get personal.

I've not been to fortune telling straight unlike yourself or even to a fortune teller, but I have had my fortune told. Yeah, you told me this. The fortune teller went to you.

A divination delivery service. A food panda, but with spiritual goodness. You mock at your peril.

Well, it was decades ago when I shared accommodation with a middle-aged Buddhist nun. Okay, wait, this one you did not share with me. You were in a room with a nun.

You slept with a nun. No, separate rooms, separate bathrooms, but we shared a kitchen. Oh, oh, oh, is this the one you were telling me how you got a fridge for your own bedroom because the kitchen fridge, you were putting beer and animal products in there and it was not, let's say, Buddhist friendly? That's the one.

Okay. The Buddhist nun's former teacher was something of a silver fox, sly, a white-haired fortune teller from Taipei, and he would sometimes drop by for an overnight stay at the school. He'd come with a few female devotees in tow.

In return for our hospitality, he would give some fortune-telling freebies, although it seemed to be a matter of getting what you paid for. Not rosy futures, so perhaps pay more and... You joke, you joke, but that's actually a thing. You're right.

I have heard of second, more detailed or more favorable readings offered for an additional fee. Yeah, but these readings were completely free. Anyway, one of the school teachers was told that her husband was having an affair and she rushed off home in tears.

He told this poor woman that her husband was cheating on her and any evidence that ever... No, no, no, baseless. Horrible. I don't know the exact wording, but he told her that.

He did also give you a spiritual reading, no? Yes. I gave him the time and date of my birth and he went into a trance and started mumbling a strange heaven language. Speaking in tongues, right? I see no difference.

Okay, so he's got a thin black marker and this fortune teller's scribbling unintelligible signs across a large sheet of paper in a very wavy shorthand that looked a lot like drunken Arabic. Drunken Arabic. That is the most unkosher phrase you could have come up with.

Nice, very nice phrasing, but potentially dangerous, offensive. Thank you, thank you. So, after our fortune teller has covered the entire A3 size sheet of paper, he hands it to the youngest and most shapely of his female followers.

She translates the heaven language script into Chinese. My boss then translates it into English for me. It was all rather vague stuff, you know, a few statements about my personality and background, such as, you like writing.

Oh, God. And then he moved on to a few predictions like, you'll be old before you marry. Definitely not before 35.

Okay. I was just thinking that translating heavenly language is one thing that AI probably won't be able to do for quite a while. Good career choice, if you're thinking.

Good career choice, oh. Jokes aside, he was right about you and your late marriage, was he not? He was, he was. The vagueness in what he said meant that he was mostly right, not that much wrong.

But still, I wasn't impressed and I later politely expressed this opinion to my boss. How, how can you politely express that opinion? Your fortune teller is, um, ahem. Full of.

Yes. So, my boss thought the master's reading had been pretty good, that it was closer than mere chance would allow. Quote, John, it's like clouds covering mountains.

You can't expect him to see all of it clearly at one time. Deep, whoa, clouds covering mountains. And you're from New Zealand, where there are clouds that cover mountains.

Well, uh, the Māori name, the land of the long white cloud, okay. Oh, this is becoming just more truthful by the second. Anyway, about six months later, I once again had the kitchen refrigerator to myself.

The nun went off on some pilgrimage and she never came back. Well, I'm looking forward to your book, The Vanishing Nun. An unsolved mystery, but you know, happy for you.

You got your kitchen refrigerator back. Indeed. So Eryk, have you ever been to a fortune teller?

Nope. I'm almost certain that my wife's mother or others have taken my name and birth details and then shaken some sticks at a temple or something. But no, I've never been to a fortune teller, nor would I ever do so.

You've got some pretty strong feelings against this, haven't you? I do, yeah.

I wouldn't even do it out of curiosity. I loathe charlatans who prey on the difficulties of others to make money. It's nauseating.

Yeah, okay. Which is some, but not all, fortune tellers. I think some believe they're actually got powers.

But just to clarify your hostility, it's for the dishonest practitioners. You don't have anything against people seeking out some answers to problems. No, I bite my tongue.

I would never voice an objection to either my children or my wife wanting to visit a fortune teller. I wouldn't say a word of negativity if a friend mentioned that they visited one. I never see a reason to deny someone comfort, even if it's from something that I think is total balderdash or less than an ideal source.

Good man, good man. John, you're a pretty skeptical guy. And I sense you're holding something back.

In our conversations, you dislike pseudoscience. You also hate con artists that scam people out of money. You frequently, in our private conversations, use the word nonsense and stronger words as well.

Why have you adopted this rather measured tone for this episode? Have you been watered down by your years in small town Taiwan? Not suffering from water, my friend. I got you. Corrupted by the mysterious orient, my dear fellow.

Mellowed by years in the superstitious east. In all seriousness, you have softened your attitudes a bit. Yes, I have.

Let's put aside the practitioners, that is the fortune tellers, and just focus on those people seeking advice from fortune tellers. They have problems, difficulties, maybe job problems, romance problems, family problems. We can have sympathy for them.

Life is tough, and if people get some encouragement or peace of mind from it, good. Yeah, that's exactly or basically what I just said. There's comfort in talking to someone about your problems, getting something off your chest.

My wife's mom, Freudian slip. My wife's mother is a “tong ling,” or was at least, where the spirits speak through them. And I would watch her in action.

Most of the time, she would just be chatting with this woman. It's just someone to unburden yourself with, and then an added sprinkle of la, la, la, la, and some incense, you know? Exactly. So going to a fortune teller is, rather than some sort of mysterious prediction of fate, it's more informal.

It's a bit more like chatting to someone, often an impartial outsider. Someone who has a lot of experience of dealing with people and people problems. So again, I go back to my wife's mother.

She's a bit older than the people she's talking to. So, she's been divorced. She's had experiences that are rougher.

So, she can counsel in a way, right? And it is changing very, very slowly. But there's a negative stigma in Taiwan to psychological counseling to this day. If it were known that you were seeing a psychiatrist, the implication would be that you are a bit loco.

Yeah. So just to repeat what you said, in terms of social acceptance, it's still better to say you went to a fortune teller than to a psychiatrist? Yeah. Yeah.

I was even talking about this with some teenagers recently. They were talking about kids in the school with problems. And if you were to go see a professional, then you're in the boat of crazies.

Okay. And we haven't gotten over that yet, at least where I live. Yeah.

And for older Taiwanese especially, they get more value out of seeing a fortune teller than a Western trained Taiwanese psychologist. You know, this modern psychology approach can be a bit sterile. Too much the same, too standardized.

All highly educated doctors trained in the same way. And they have professional caution about stating things. But with fortune tellers, you have a wide range of practitioners, different personalities, backgrounds, different approaches.

Ordinary people feel more comfortable. They can find someone they can relate to. One thing to clarify.

You were talking about psychologists. We have almost no psychologists in Taiwan. We have psychiatrists.

So, you go in, you say, I haven't been sleeping. I feel sad. And they give you drugs.

There are almost no counseling. And what exists is very expensive. And it's not considered a path that your parents want their kids to pursue.

Anyway, moving on. Let's go to the topic of fortune telling and the world of politics. Okay, fun.

Yes, fortune telling is very much connected to personal concerns, love, marriage, business. But it also has a very prominent place in politics. It's not just a politician privately going and seeking assurance on their political fate.

You know, am I going to win the election? Shake, shake, shake. But politicians seek to get approval from various religious groups and be sort of legitimized, saying the gods want me to run. Yeah.

A relatively recent example would be Taiwan's richest man, Terry Guo. Guo Tai-ming. You're the news guy.

Remind me, what's the story? He is the founder of that huge electronic giant, Foxconn. And back in 2019, when he threw his hat in the ring for president, he said that he had first had a dream from the goddess Mazu, who is a massive deity in Taiwan. Fisher people, all sorts of what?

Fishermen, never seen a woman fishing.

Fisher folk, get with the wokeness. So, he said he had a dream, Mazu, and she told him to run. And then later he said things about he had been tasked by her.

Later, when reporters would bring this up, he tried to downplay it a bit because it made news all over the world. You can find this headline. But yeah.

Okay. So, he got approval direct from Mazu, though not through a fortune teller. So, let's go back earlier.

There's a notable journal article from 2003 called Religion and the State in Postwar Taiwan by Paul Katz, a historian of Chinese folk culture, folk religion. He gives some fascinating examples from the 2000 presidential election. My favorite presidential election.

Nothing will beat that one, in my opinion. It was an amazing thing to witness. The main candidates were Chen Shui-bian for the DPP, for the KMT, Lien Chan, and the breakaway renegade James Soong heading up the People First Party.

All of them tried to align themselves with local religious elites, institutions. They campaigned at temples. So, the guy Katz you were talking about, Paul Katz, he cites accounts from the media, quote, Representatives of the Lien campaign actively publicized supposedly miraculous events that occurred at temples, including the spontaneous flaring up of incense burners.

Sorry, sorry, sorry. Read that again. What was it? The spontaneous flaring up of incense burners.

Okay. And Lien, the candidate, himself professed to be optimistic about his chances after one of his supporters drew an auspicious poem in the course of a divination ritual. Other KMT legislators claimed that one of these gods had declared their intention to support Lien.

Well, you know, the supporters of the other candidates were also looking for godly approval at the Zhenlan Temple. That's in Dajia, Taichung. It's one of Taiwan's most popular Mazu temples.

There were divination rituals held to show that the goddess was solidly behind James Song. Chen's Shui-bian supporters also cited godly approval, and they were on the lookout for miraculous signs. Katz has a quote in his journal article, One example involved predictions of Chen's victory by the golden mother of the Jasper Pool during spirit writing rituals.

So similar to what you had there, the Drunken Arabic. Yes. And during Chen's presidency, he was associated with a master medium, a chap called Cai Zicheng, who lived in Hualien.

And this feng shui master was famed for his rose stone collection. Not the rose stones, the meigui si. The rose stones, yes.

I know the Stone Roses, you know, they were a pretty cool band for one album. But the rose stones, these are a kind of ornamental pink or rose-colored stone found in Taiwan, particularly in the Hualien region. They are pretty.

In Taiwan, though, some people use them for feng shui or spiritual purposes, others for decoration. And there are people who believe they carry positive energy or good fortune, you know, sort of like the crystal thing that others are into in the West. And this master Cai had made some notable predictions.

He predicted that Chen would win the 2000 presidential election and the 2004 one too. And for that election prediction, he used the words, quote, After a brush with death, he will be reborn. And on the eve of that 2004 election day, there was an assassination attempt on Chen, which would qualify as a brush with death.

Following his re-election, the president conferred the title of Guo Shi, literally teacher of the state, on this master Cai. Wow. Something for us all to aspire to.

Exactly. So Eryk, time to wrap things up. Anything we forgot from our look at fortune telling and the crazy 1990s? Yeah.

I mean, how could we do an episode on fevers of the 1990s and not mention everyone's favorite long-haired saxophone playing maestro Kenny G? How's his fortune been recently? We'll get back to you on that. Thanks for listening to this slightly bizarre episode of Formosa Files.

I'm John Ross.

Thank you for listening. Bye.