Spate of Eights : Repetiton of Number in Monday’s Date Seen as Once-in-a-Lifetime Lucky Combination by Chinese
If you’re among California’s more than 300,000 Chinese, particularly Cantonese-speaking Chinese, Monday was your once-in-a-lifetime day to:
- Start a new business venture, as a Los Angeles Chinese accountant did.
- Confidently stage a fund-raising banquet.
- Hold an open house for a new bank building and, for good measure, make sure the bank’s new California address adds up to eight.
- Get married.
Cantonese-speaking Chinese believe that a date consisting of eights bodes well for the future. So it wasn’t surprising that uncounted numbers of California’s Chinese, like their counterparts abroad, took special note of the special day: the eighth day of the eighth month of the century’s 88th year--8/8/88.
As occult as all of this may sound to a Westerner, the rationale is not that mystical.
In the Cantonese dialect, the number eight is pronounced as “baat,” which sounds like the word “faat,” which means prosperity. Hence, the belief that events held on 8/8/88 will be successful.
“The whole (Chinese) community was aware of the day,” said Rita Mak, administrative assistant to San Francisco’s Deputy Mayor James Ho.
The coincidental timing of quadruple eights is so unusual, Mak said, that the city’s Chinatown Resource Center, a private group that underwrites low-cost housing, scheduled a fund-raising dinner Monday night.
“Normally, we have our (annual) fund-raiser in June on a Thursday or Friday, but the date is so auspicious” it was decided to hold it Monday, Enid Lim, assistant to the center’s director, confirmed.
“I’m Chinese, and I really believe in these symbolisms,” she said in an interview. “In fact, I’m folding dollar bills into butterflies for every table’s centerpiece. It’s a day of prosperity.”
If Monday was an auspicious day, there can be a dark side to Chinese numerology, too.
For example, real estate agents say that if Chinese have a choice when buying or renting property, they generally avoid houses or apartments containing the number 4 in the address. This can foreshadow bad luck because in Cantonese the word “four” sounds like the word for dying.
Roselyn Smith, spokeswoman for French Hospital, which serves Los Angeles’ downtown Chinatown community, said for that very reason there’s no floor marked 4 in the Bank of Trade building where her office is located.
But Monday was no day to let bad omens crowd the mind, even if one wasn’t consciously aware of the day’s good luck.
A Los Angeles engineer, Munson Kwok, said he was taking his parents to Las Vegas on Monday. He assured a reporter, however, that “quadruple eights” had “absolutely nothing to do with it.” But, as an afterthought, Kwok said, “Maybe my heritage called me and I didn’t know it.”
The secretary of the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Assn. in Los Angeles, Saykin Foo, said he expected plenty of California lottery tickets were bought on Monday by Cantonese-speaking Chinese. “I probably will buy eight tickets with eights” in the numbers, he said.
(A spokesman for the California Lottery said it wouldn’t be known until today if a glut of eights, or numbers in combination with eight, were purchased on Monday.)
Foo, an accountant, said he also planned to start a business venture on Monday featuring a new product, which he declined to identify. “I’m going to incorporate on the eighth,” he said, so that the product will have “good luck.”
What’s more, Foo said, Monday was “a good day” for a Chinese woman to get pregnant. “You create a new life (on 8/8/88) and that new life will have good luck and bring good luck to the family,” he said.
A Los Angeles building contractor, Irvin Lai, said that he got an invitation from a Chinese developer in the Northern California community of Mountain View to attend an open house for his new bank building--on Monday. “We’ll have a celebration,” Lai said.
The bank building’s developer, Peter S. Chan, said that not only did quadruple eights make Monday a lucky day, but that he made sure his building was assigned a lucky address too. “We had our choice of three addresses,” he said, but finally settled on numbers that added up to eight--215 Castro St.
2 Marriages
Getting married on a date full of eights wasn’t a big deal at the Los Angeles County Superior Courthouse, however. Only two Chinese marriages were performed on Monday, according to Betty Williams, a Marriage License Bureau supervisor.
But it was a different story in San Francisco, where 14 Chinese couples exchanged wedding vows by Monday afternoon, a sharply higher total for Chinese marriages on a given day, according to Robert Kerrigan, a deputy marriage commissioner.
