Word: feng
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Hong Kongers, myself included, love to affect a certain expertise when it comes to feng shui. Because I am otherwise a materialist (as in believing only in physical matter, not as in bling), it has always been self-contradictory of me to discourse on the Chinese system of geomancy and the notion that the arrangement of landscape and objects affects well-being. At dinner parties, I can denounce mysticism - or yogic flying or reincarnation - as shrilly as any Red Guard, and declare that Christians ought to be deprived of the vote. But I'm also capable, at the evening...
...These days, though, I am cured of such intellectual malady. In fact, I am able to accuse feng shui's practitioners of contemptible quackery. Let me explain how I have arrived at this incontestable position. (See 10 things to do in Hong Kong...
...billionairess Nina Wang Kung Yu-sum (a woman who wore her hair in pigtails, dressed like Lolita and answered to the nickname Little Sweetie), two conflicting wills were produced. One bequeathed her $4.2 billion estate to the Chinachem Charitable Foundation, run by her siblings. The other was flaunted by feng shui "master" Tony Chan Chun-chuen - who also claimed to be her lover - and stipulated that everything was to be left to him. It emerged in court that Chan had told Wang to bury large amounts of cash and precious stones at up to 80 secret sites around Hong Kong...
...court, Chan's professional tomfoolery (he once told a former legislator to burn nearly $2,000 a day "for luck") was thrown into sharp relief against the obscenity of his remuneration - so sharply that many Hong Kongers, including myself, were at last woken from the thrall in which feng shui had held us. Chan couldn't even produce a credible expert witness. Joseph Yu, the Ontario-based feng shui practitioner called as such, revealed that he was almost entirely self-taught, prompting Justice Johnson Lam to remark, "I think there is no need to cross-examine any further." (Watch TIME...
...Students from China are already the second largest group of foreign students at U.S. universities, after those from India, but their numbers are increasing as well. Last year, 81,000 mainlanders studied in the U.S., a 20% increase from 2008. Growing educational exchanges can only help relations, says Zhu Feng, a professor of international studies at Peking University. "I think it will be an indispensable parallel to economic cooperation and political cooperation," he says. "It's the right time for both sides to take a more serious look at each other. Part of that is for ordinary people to understand...