A Fortune-Teller Told Me

by Tiziano Terzani

  The spell is now broken. Twelve months after opening the road to Kengtung, built by the forced labor of chained prisoners, the Burmese, under pressure from Bangkok and Peking, have extended it from Kengtung to the province of Yunnan. This has transformed the whole region into a corridor between Thailand and China, and a free market for everything from heroin to virgins. One of the last sanctuaries of untamed nature has been sacrificed to the logic of profit. I was one of those who took part in that rape. At the beginning of December I rode in one of the forty-six cars of the convoy which inaugurated the link between Chiang Rai in northern Thailand and Kunming in southern China.

  China and Thailand want to strengthen their economic ties, and they need a direct overland communication route. My “Friendship Rally,” advertised as a ten-day “adventure tour,” was meant to demonstrate that the Burmese mountains are no longer an obstacle to mutual development, and that the opening of the road is in everyone’s interest. For the organizers, the trip was a great success. To me it was a continual cause for despair.

  The crude, tortuous road from Mae Sai to Kengtung which I had traveled at the beginning of the year had already been doubled in width, and was about to be tarmacked. The prisoners had been sent off to work in stone quarries, so as not to spoil the view for the tourists. In their place were bulldozers, cranes and lorries from Thailand. In the villages I saw new brick houses which had been built with the money earned by girls in the brothels across the border. And Kengtung itself, after just a few months, already showed all the signs of the ineluctable victory of modernity over tradition, of the garish over the natural. Psychedelic haloes—concentric rings of multicolored flashing bulbs—had begun to appear behind the heads of Buddhas in the pagodas; fluorescent lights could already be seen in many houses; and a deafening discotheque had been built on the shore of Lake Neung Ting.

  The morning market was still a great adventure, with its fantastic collection of humanity—Meo hunters, Padaung women, the Lisu, the Karen, the Paò mountain people—each with something to sell or exchange. An Akka woman with a wooden packsaddle held by a strap over her forehead showed some Thai tourists a beautiful blanket covered with embroidery in the old style. One of them offered her a 500-baht note. The woman signaled no. Another held up two 100-baht notes. She took them and gave him her blanket. Everyone laughed, even the poor woman who went away happy, confident that two notes must be worth more than one.

  At the Italian mission, the only change in ten months was that there was one nun less. She had died in November, and they had buried her in the church.

  The most truly “adventurous” part of the trip began after Kengtung. The forest grew dense, and the road, barely opened by the bulldozers, ran up a steep slope. The villages we passed through were clusters of wooden huts grouped around pure white pagodas. The English writer Maurice Collis, who in 1938 was the last Westerner to travel in the region, described how the peasants would fall on their knees when they heard a motor car: it must be carrying a prince!

  After a couple of hours we came to an old iron bridge over a little river. The convoy stopped.

  “Is this the border?” I asked a Burmese official who seemed to be in charge of the place.

  “No, that’s thirty miles further on, but the border controls are here.”

  “Why?”

  The official did not answer, but simply handed back my passport as if from there onward I and all the others were out of his hands. And indeed we were.

  As soon as we crossed the bridge we were stopped again, and the cars were inspected once more, this time by some strange, small soldiers with lean, high-cheekboned faces, Chinese-style uniforms like those of the Khmer Rouge, and AK-47 guns. The striped flag that flew over their blockhouse, fenced with pointed bamboo stakes, was different from that of Rangoon. On maps the region is still part of Burma, but in reality we had just entered “Wa Land,” the territory of the headhunters. We were ordered not to get out of the cars and to keep our windows tightly closed. It was absolutely forbidden to take photographs. Nobody smiled at us or made a gesture of greeting. “Adventure tourism” did not seem to interest the Wa, only a $15 tax per car which the organizers paid, after which we were allowed to pass.

  The Wa are a mountain people. For years they fought alongside the Burmese Communist guerrillas against Rangoon; then the Communists lost the support of Peking, made peace with the government and started growing opium, and the Wa had no choice but to do the same. They obtained an autonomy of sorts for their land, and there, obviously with the consent of Burma on one side and China on the other, they have become full-time heroin producers. This has also turned them into competitors of Khun Sa, the great drug king who operates farther south.

  I am always curious at how the Western judicial system, which by now is formally the law of the world, has not taken root in Asia. Here the typically Western concepts of “right,” of “state” and “frontier,” are adapted to local traditions and interests. The Chinese, for example, have always considered the fringe regions of the Middle Kingdom as “subject areas” that owe tribute to the Son of Heaven, even though they are not officially part of China. Although the “Wa Land” is technically in Burmese territory, its chief is the very Chinese Li Minxiang, an ex-Red Guard and former adviser to the Burmese Communist guerrillas. Now he too has been converted to the production of heroin. His headquarters are in the town of Monglà, the “capital” of “Wa Land,” only a hundred yards from the frontier with China. We were absolutely forbidden to stop in Monglà, but it was not hard to recognize the house of Li Minxiang high on a hill, with a large satellite dish on the roof. In a sort of café by the roadside I saw about fifty young people sitting on wooden benches, glued to a television screen. The swift, dusty passage of our convoy distracted them for only a few seconds.

  The Chinese are great actors, and several rehearsals must have been held for the arrival of the “Friendship Rally.” A barrier, freshly painted red and white, was raised at the sight of the first vehicle, and policemen in brand-new uniforms recited: “Welcome to China. You are pioneers. We hope that many others will follow you.” Since the end of the Second World War no Westerner had passed through there, and television reporters from Yunnan had been brought in to film the event. In the center of the town of Daluò the authorities had laid on one of their standard receptions to celebrate “friendship between peoples.” For me it was a good chance to take a walk around the place. Most of the houses were new or still under construction. A bank was prominent. From the telephone booths it was possible to call anywhere in the world. Everyone knew Li Minxiang, and they said he often came to Daluò. If I asked about opium and heroin they just smiled. A policeman said we had passed the refinery just before the border.

  The setup was perfectly suited to the interests of all the protagonists. By leaving part of its territory in the hands of the Wa, the Rangoon government could claim that it was in no way involved in the drug traffic carried out by those “rebels,” even if it undoubtedly took a percentage of the profits. The Chinese, for their part, could say they had neither plantations nor refineries within their borders, even if they undoubtedly profited from the fact that most of Li Minxiang’s heroin passed through China en route to the rest of the world.

  After Daluò the “adventure tour” was entirely run by the Chinese authorities. Half a dozen police cars preceded and followed our convoy; in the villages and cities we drove through the whole population had been rounded up to stand by the road and manifest their “spontaneous” enthusiasm for the “Friendship Rally.”

  The Chinese count on this road to export the products of their consumer industry through Burma to Southeast Asia and India. The Thais are equally interested in the direct link with China for developing their depressed northern regions and extending their influence to those parts of Burma with populations related to the Thais, such as the Shan.

  The city of Kunming was already famous in Marco Polo’s time. He spent a few days there, and later described the local
women’s surprising custom of giving themselves to visitors with no opposition from their husbands. Now as our convoy approached the city it felt like arriving in Hong Kong, with brand-new steel and glass buildings silhouetted against the sky. But on the roads, pushed to the side by policemen dressed like generals of a Latin American dictatorship, swarmed the usual enormous crowd of poor Chinese. Many still wore the blue outfits of Mao’s time.

  Mao. In Kunming he was far from forgotten. Every car I saw had a big medal hung on the rearview mirror: on one side was the classic photo of the young Mao in Yenan wearing his green cap with the red star, and on the other the photo of Mao in old age, with the mole on his chin. “It brings good luck. It gives protection against accidents,” I was told by one of the hotel drivers. From being the god of the revolution, Mao had become the god of traffic. Perhaps for the Chinese that was a wise and practical way of exorcising the phii, the ghost, of a man who during his lifetime had weighed so heavily on their lives, and who after his death they certainly did not want returning to disturb their dreams. By honoring him as a divinity, they hoped to keep him quiet.

  A strange fate, that of Mao. He began by trying to revitalize China by giving its civilization a new foundation and new values, and ended by wrecking what little still remained of the old. He tried to destroy the Chinese view that they were different because of their civilization, and to replace it with the idea that they were different because they were revolutionaries. When it became clear that the revolution was a failure, the Chinese were cast adrift to be swept away by the current of the times, to become just like all the others. Poor Chinese!

  The fate of this extraordinary civilization saddened me. For literally thousands of years it had followed another path, had confronted life, death, nature and the gods in a way unlike any other. The Chinese had invented their own way of writing, of eating, of making love, of doing their hair; for centuries they had cared for the sick in a different way, looked in a different way at the sky, the mountains, the rivers; they had a different idea of how to build houses and temples, a different view of anatomy, different concepts of the soul, of strength, of wind and water. Today that civilization aspires only to be modern, like the West; it wants to become like that little air-conditioned island that is Singapore; its young people dream only of dressing like “businessmen,” of queuing up at McDonald’s, of owning a quartz watch, a color television and a mobile phone.

  Sad, is it not? And not just for the Chinese, but for humanity in general, which loses so much when it loses its differences and becomes all the same. Mao understood that in order to save China it had be closed to Western influence, it had to seek a Chinese solution to the problems of modernity and development. In posing the problem Mao was truly great. And he was great in being wrong about how to solve it. But always great, Mao: a great poet, great strategist, great intellectual, great murderer. Great like China, great like the tragedy it is now enduring.

  If someone is able to look back at the history of humanity a few centuries from now, he will surely see the end of Chinese civilization as a great loss: because with it ended a great alternative, whose existence could perhaps have guaranteed the harmony of the world.

  Not by chance was it the Chinese who discovered that the essence of everything lies in the equilibrium between opposites, between yin and yang, between sun and moon, light and shadow, male and female, water and fire. It is by harmonizing differences that the world works, reproduces itself, maintains its tension, lives. So in fact there is some reason to regret the end of Communism—not for itself, but as an alternative, a counterweight. Now that it no longer exists there is a great disequilibrium, and even the side that thinks it has won no longer has the tension that stimulated its creativity.

  We left Kunming at dawn, and spent a day crossing a landscape of beautiful nature and forlorn humanity. The mountains, the rivers, the rice terraces and tea plantations were magnificent, but those who lived in the mud huts along the road were in a deplorable state—dirty, dusty, poor, disheveled—the people who never figure in the statistics of economic growth.

  I had heard that as a response to the rise of materialism in China, besides a renewed interest in the occult there had been a notable increase in the number of hermits. More and more people were abandoning society and seeking refuge in the mountains. Yunnan was one of the classical destinations. I saw a couple of hermits marching along with pilgrims’ staffs at the edge of the road, dressed in the old style, their feet wrapped in cloth strips and their hair plaited and tied in buns on top of their heads. I would have liked to talk with them, but it was impossible to stop the convoy. For a long time those figures remained in my mind, like apparitions.

  On the journey back the convoy stopped again in Kengtung. The first time round I had asked a Burmese woman to help me get in touch with the best fortune-teller in town, and she had made an appointment for me with a young man who was said to have exceptional powers.

  He lived in one of the many wooden houses lining a beautiful cobblestoned street. When we arrived he was standing at the door waiting for us: a thin young man of about thirty, with a fine head of thick, rebellious hair and a look of exaltation. He took us up a rickety stairway to the first floor. We sat on wooden floorboards covered with a piece of green and brown plastic. After the usual questions and the usual calculations, he began talking about my life. He said that at fifty-five I was facing a major turn, that I had decisions to make, and that recently I had received a sum of money which had nothing to do with my salary. I said yes, thinking of a prize I had just been awarded, and this seemed to encourage him.

  “During the next two months you will meet a person at a much higher level than yourself, not in terms of power or money but of spirituality, and that person will improve your life. This will happen between the end of January and the beginning of February.” (I thought of the meditation course I had decided to attend, just in that period. Was it I who told him about it, or was it he who “saw” it?) “In your hand there are two life lines. Both are very strong. You have the possibility of living long and of advancing spiritually. It depends on you, but you may still fail. In the next six months there will be many changes in your life.” (Certainly, I thought, by May I have to be in India.) “From next year on your life will continue to improve from day to day, from year to year, for a long period, until you die.”

  He took my hand and held his own an inch or two above it. He closed his eyes as if to concentrate, and after a few moments his hand began to tremble. “I feel heat,” he said. “You have great strength. You have the capacity to become a seer. I feel it; we are in communication. You have something to do with India. Have you been there?”

  That was striking. I did indeed have something to do with India, but how did he discover it? I had just mentally formed the word “India.” But how had he heard it?

  “Yes, I’ve been there, but why do you ask?”

  “Because she is behind you. I see her,” he said, still with his eyes closed.

  “Who?”

  “An Indian goddess, a goddess who protects you, who is always with you. What is your religion?”

  “None, really.”

  “In your past life you were a Buddhist, and now you are tending to return to the dharma, the way of Buddha. When you arrive in India, make a donation at once. Not a charitable gift to the poor, but a donation to a Buddhist institution, to Buddhism. Do you meditate?”

  That too was a word that had just been in my mind. Was it I who suggested it to him?

  “Not yet.”

  “Do it, because in this life, or at most in the next, you will reach Shamballa and you will have the power to help others … and then your life will lengthen and you will be able to control your death. Take care, everything will be decided in the next six months. It all depends on you. You have always had a sixth sense, an instinct that has always helped you. You have been in war zones and survived because you were able to see the danger in your future and avoid it, but now you have only a
short way to go, and soon you will be able to see the future of others.”

  This was certainly one of the strangest characters—but also the most authentic—among the many fortune-tellers I had spoken to. And I myself felt that we were “in communication.” But who was speaking to whom? And in what way?

  “My children?” I asked, returning the conversation to something concrete so as to have a way of checking his capacities. He seemed to understand. “You have two children. The first is a boy and the other a girl,” he replied, after concentrating—or after having read that answer in my head?

  “Do you see any problems in their future?” I asked.

  “No, none. Not even that of your daughter worries me.”

  “What problem?” I asked, knowing well that I was thinking of the witch in Bangkok.

  “That she won’t marry. But she will marry, fear not.”

  It was remarkable how he seemed able to read my unspoken replies to the questions I asked aloud.

  He was still holding his hand over mine, and at one point I too had the impression of feeling heat, something that passed from one to the other. Presumably it was a matter of suggestion. The place, the sounds and odors of the early evening, the smoke of cooking fires, the pleasant interlude of peace after days of cars and dusty roads, all put me in tune with the man. I certainly felt much more in common with him than with the “adventure tourists” with whom I had spent the past week.