fortune teller

I was out to dinner a few weeks ago with a group of student from my Oil Adults 2 class, and one of them mentioned that she was wearing an amulet from a fortune teller (can't for the life of me recall how this came up). Apparently if something bad is going on in your life, a fortune teller will write you a good luck charm that you tie into your underwear and wear around every day. Naturally what with this being such a foreign concept, I wanted to go so my student took me earlier this week.

The fortune teller works out of her home. She has been doing this many, many years now and is known for it in the community. All of her clients find her by word of mouth and she is quite busy.

My student translated for me and took notes in Chinese so I could have someone else re-translate for me later if I wanted. The fortune teller asked my birthday (lunar) and the time I was born. I had to ballpark on the time (morning?) and I may have completely made that up, so who know how much that screwed the pooch on my fortune. I don't really believe in the whole deal anyway, so I'm not too worried about it anyway, I just wanted to do it for the experience.

After she calculated my lunar birthday, she just ran through my life chronologically. She asked what I wanted to know about and I said my career, my student also threw in a bunch of questions about my personal life as well for good measure.

The gist of it is as follows... the next two years are going to be kind of crappy. Not super terrible, not bad enough for her to write me an amulet, but not good. In two years I will marry a man that is tall and most likely foreign, maybe Chinese. He will be very successful in business or maybe in the government. It won't be anyone I know now. We will have two children, a boy and a girl. 

In two years I will also experience a turning point (one could infer that this will be the whole marriage thing but who knows). After that, life will be great, I'll have a career in technology and will be very successful. Nothing too crazy or notable throughout, just an overall good life. If I stay out of the US it will be even better.

I asked about my parents and my brother and had to give their birthdays as well. Got some good and bad details there. Nothing crazy surprising.

My student also had her fortune told. The most I caught there was that she will have a child (a boy) at 43. She is currently in her late 30's and already has an eight year old daughter.

The whole time we were there, other people were in the room. A woman that I'm assuming was the fortune teller's daughter was in the room and then another woman that must have been her next appointment joined as well. I asked my student about the lack of privacy on the way out, and she said that the Chinese think that since they don't know the other people they don't care what people hear about them.

The whole thing was pretty cheap, only 30 yuan. The cost depends on what you ask and what they do; it can be upwards of 150 yuan. I might go again to another fortune teller that reads tea leaves or coins, we'll see. Overall the whole thing wasn't very impressive.