Ancient Chinese Craft : Feng Shui: It Can Make a Difference

The Chinese buyer of the $800,000 home in the San Francisco suburb of Hillsborough asked for all the standard contingencies: termite and building inspections and 60 days to secure a loan.

Then there was one other little matter. The buyer insisted that before the deal closed, the house would have to pass muster with a master of the Chinese mystical craft called feng shui. The master would determine if the site and the layout of the house augured well for the buyer’s health, wealth and happiness.

It did not. The feng shui practitioner, who was flown in from Taiwan, inspected the property, using beads and a compass, and nixed the deal.

Commission Lost

“ Feng shui has cost me a lot of money,” complained Ben Lee, a San Francisco broker--and nonbeliever--whose commission went down the drain when the deal collapsed.

Adherents would have a ready reply for Lee: Perhaps he should check out the feng shui of his office.

Forget about astrology. When Nancy Reagan moves back to California next year, she will find a state whose landscape has been subtly altered by feng shui, the centuries-old Chinese craft of placement and fortune telling.

The words feng shui mean “wind and water,” and the concept is actually quite simple. To ensure good fortune, buildings, roads and other man-made objects should be placed in harmony with nature. Otherwise, disaster may ensue.

The direction a building faces, street locations, furniture placement, birth dates and even burial sites of ancestors play key roles in channeling cosmic forces that allow good luck and wealth to flow into a building.

Just as important is not blocking that flow. Trees and stairways should not be placed in front of doors. And building at the end of a narrow street invites evil forces into a home.

Believers even consult feng shui practitioners to decide investment strategy or where to be buried. And with so much money at stake, there are charges that unscrupulous practitioners trade feng shui clearances for cash.

As the Asian population has risen dramatically in California, homes, office buildings and shopping centers are being built and sold with feng shui principles in mind.

But it has shaped projects throughout the country as well, including the choice of a site for a peace park in Lincoln, Neb., and the design of Chinese restaurants in New York City and Washington.

Feng shui’s influence is especially felt in the San Gabriel Valley, the home of the nation’s first suburban Chinatown.

Take the two-story office building in Alhambra on the corner of Valley and Atlantic boulevards, built in 1983 by Raymond Cheng, president of Hannon Development Inc.

After consulting a feng shui practitioner, Cheng first demanded that the driver of the bulldozer be born in a certain month of the Chinese calendar.

The building was then constructed at a slight angle, and the front facade angled like a jagged saw blade to ensure that every door faced exactly south. All doors facing the east or west were blocked on the advice of the feng shui practitioner, who warned they would be unlucky.

“For people who deal with the big money, one way or another they are going to want to get feng shui on their side,” Cheng said. “I use it on my own projects, every one.”

Many real estate agents say that for some Chinese families finding a house with good feng shui is just as important as getting a good price.

Clients Demand Inspection

Valiant Chiu, president of Garfield Realty in Monterey Park, which sold $40-million worth of homes last year, said that about half his clients demand a feng shui inspection before completing a deal.

“Of course we don’t write that in the contract. We say the buyer is seeking legal advice,” Chiu said. “It’s just too difficult to explain to Americans.”

Chiu is planning to build a $20-million, 11-story office building in Los Angeles’ Chinatown near downtown. But before construction begins, a final decision on everything from the building’s design to the ground breaking will be left up to an elderly New York City feng shui practitioner.

“We won’t do anything until she says so,” Chiu said. “What’s a few weeks compared to the potential profit or disaster with a $20-million building?”

Feng shui also has been embraced by a growing number of Westerners attracted by its philosophy of harmonizing man-made structures with the natural environment.

Ceremony Blessed

Earlier this year, for example, the Beverly Hills-based Creative Artists Agency, a talent agency, had a feng shui expert bless the ground-breaking ceremony for its new building.

And the World Peace Center, a nonprofit organization based in Lincoln, Neb., recently sought a practitioner to review several sites for a proposed peace park and exhibition hall near Lincoln.

“We think it is very important to pay attention to all the variables,” said Don Tilley, head of the center. “We want to blend art and science and religion.”

But many non-Asians say the reason they are paying close attention to feng shui is not philosophical, but financial. Whether they believe in it or not, many business people say its use has grown so widespread that it has become an important part of doing business with the Chinese community.

Randy Storer, general manager of Skylawn Memorial Park in San Mateo, said the cemetery called in a practitioner two years ago after hearing of its importance in Chinese burial rituals.

Extensive Renovation

The practitioner recommended moving 140,000 cubic yards of soil and power lines, and relocating roads, hedges and trees. The renovation cost more than $600,000. But Storer said business has boomed and the cemetery is selling about 2,000 plots a year to Chinese, while sales once averaged about 500 a year.

With so much money at stake, there have even been reports of shady feng shui practitioners anxious to cash in on the superstitions of their clients.

Allen Co, owner of Allen Co Realty in Alhambra, said some feng shui practitioners have demanded bribes in exchange for telling a prospective buyer that a property’s feng shui is good. Co’s story was repeated by several other area real estate agents.

“A feng shui person can make or break a deal,” Co said. “Unfortunately, there are some really unscrupulous people out there.”

Feng shui began 3,000 years ago as a codification of common-sense rules to avoid flood and bad air circulation.

But over the centuries, it became interwoven with superstition, astrology and Chinese philosophical concepts.

Key to Many Things

Good feng shui is the key to everything from marital bliss to stock market success. But bad feng shui can cause a wide range of disasters. To this day, many people still attribute the sudden and unexplained death in 1973 of kung fu film star Bruce Lee from brain swelling to his living in a house with bad feng shui.

While many Chinese dismiss feng shui as a silly superstition, others are more respectful. Followers cut across the entire spectrum of the Chinese population, from impoverished immigrants from rural China to wealthy, college-educated business people from Hong Kong or Taipei.

“Today’s superstition may be tomorrow’s science,” said Lin Yun of Berkeley, who is one of the best known feng shui practitioners in the country.

His teachings, which he has explained at universities around the world, resonate with New Age sentiments. “Our life and destiny are closely interwoven with the workings of the universe and nature,” he said.

Although it is officially banned in mainland China, the practice is pervasive in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore.

Hotel Entrance Revised

The Hyatt Regency Singapore went through extensive renovation of its front entrance after a practitioner determined that the hotel suffered from bad feng shui. The solution was to place the front doors at an angle to the street and to remove a water fountain.

In its basic form, feng shui is composed of thousands of rules, many of which are explained in books and magazines that can be found in Chinese bookstores. For more detailed advice, believers consult practitioners who divine the future.

Many feng shui concepts, such as the rule that rooms be light and airy, seem like just good common sense.

But others can be utterly puzzling, even to believers.

Take for example the rule that the head of a company should never have an office with a front door that faces the entrance of the building. The explanation is that money will flow out the doorway.

It is generally agreed that a building’s entrance should face the sea--water is considered a symbol of prosperity--and be protected from the north, where storms originate.

A building should face south and the kitchen east or west to ensure the best feng shui.

Furniture arrangement is a key determinant of good feng shui. A marital bed, for example, should be shielded from evil spirits for a couple to be fertile; thus, there should only be one or two entrances into the bedroom.

There are many ways to alter a building’s feng shui. Mirrors can expand a room and are also useful in deflecting evil spirits. Light--the more the better--helps, too, as does the color red.

Plants are definite pluses, as are wind chimes and fountains. So are aquariums. Many practitioners recommend the placement of a tank containing six black fish at a building’s entrance. If the fish die, so much the better; they have been absorbing the evil spirits intended for the residents.

No one has an accurate count of how many practitioners there are in this country, but in Los Angeles about two dozen practitioners advertise in Chinese publications.

Developers and real estate agents who frequently deal with feng shui say the number is probably higher since many do not advertise their services.

Some Learned From Monks

Like Lin, some practitioners learn the craft from Buddhist monks in China. Others are taught by practitioners who share skills passed down from generation to generation. Still others, skeptics say, are self-proclaimed experts who simply open shop.

Some do not charge for their help, while others demand, and get, thousands of dollars an hour.

Most practitioners use a traditional folk form of feng shui that relies on the occult art of divining the future through what is called “ba zi,” or the “eight characters.”

The characters are derived from the year, month, day and time of a person’s birth.

Once the interpretation is finished, the master relies on a special compass, called a luo pan, to check the proper alignment of such things as buildings and furniture.

‘It’s Like a Computer’

Chang Tai Ei, a feng shui practitioner, said interpreting the eight characters is simple, but like others interviewed, she refused to explain her method.

“It’s like a computer,” she said. “Once I know their birth date, I can see their future.”

Chang, a Chinese from the Philippines, is one of many practitioners who drift through Chinese communities around the world.

She temporarily set up shop in a motel room in Monterey Park recently, drumming up business through a front-page advertisement in the Chinese Daily News.

“At first I just wanted to come for 20 days,” said Chang, who charges $50 for feng shui advice. “But I’ve decided it’s not bad here.”

Chang began studying the craft as a child by reading the occult books her grandfather collected, and later became the disciple of an elderly master who was a family friend.

Impact Can Be Enormous

The impact feng shui has on believers can be enormous.

For example, Larry Chan, president of C&L; Financial Inc. of San Francisco, has based his entire life on it.

Chan, who runs the 1,015-room Ramada Renaissance Hotel in San Francisco and is developing a $200-million redevelopment project in Oakland’s Chinatown, said he came to the United States on the advice of a feng shui expert in Hong Kong.

“I have put my entire life and career path in the hands of feng shui, “ he said. “I was told to surround myself with water, so that’s why I moved to the Bay Area.”

Even city officials have begun to feel the effects of feng shui.

Last year, the city of Alhambra began installing about 200 new street lights, some of which were put in front of storefront doorways.

At first no one worried about the location, but city officials soon realized that they had committed a serious mistake as far as some Chinese were concerned.

Received Complaints

Leroy Tafoya, traffic engineering supervisor for Alhambra, said the city received at least seven complaints from Chinese store owners who said the light poles damaged their business’ feng shui.

“At first I thought it was kind of humorous,” he said. “Now, we avoid doorways.”

Lin, a jovial 55-year-old with the demeanor of comic Buddy Hackett, rejects fortune telling through the eight characters. He relies instead on his own method that combines Chinese philosophy and elements of psychology, medicine, biology, political science and a host of other disciplines.

“I take modern science and join it with feng shui, “ he said. “It has nothing to do with ghosts and spirits.”

To analyze the physical environment of a neighborhood, he looks at such disparate elements as the topography, local architecture, animal life, crime rates, backgrounds of past owners of the property and the psychic forces he detects in the area.

Lin, who does not charge for his feng shui advice, said the same principles that give a house good feng shui can be applied to any environment.

L.A. Is OK

Los Angeles has excellent feng shui because of the mountains and the Pacific Ocean. Beverly Hills is even better, he said, because of its abundant plant life.

But other cities do not fair as well. New York City has decent feng shui around Central Park, but the situation deteriorates around Roosevelt Island, which is too rocky, and the United Nations, which is oppressed by the presence of too many towering office buildings.

Washington, D.C., has only so-so feng shui and the situation at the White House seems downright bad.

The big problem is 16th Street, which points directly at the White House and channels evil forces toward the President, Lin said.

“It makes the President occasionally have an unsettled feeling in making decisions,” he said.