WESTMINSTER : Prayers and Predictions Greet Tet

In homes and in temples, Vietnamese residents gathered Tuesday to wish each other Chuc Mung Nam Moi-- Happy New Year.

In Westminster, home to one of the county’s largest concentrations of exiled Vietnamese, among the places residents came together to usher in Tet, the Lunar New Year, was the A Di Da Temple, where they prayed to deities and ancestors to grant them a happy new year.

Through a variety of ceremonies, the celebrants ushered in the Year of the Monkey.

In one ceremony, residents had their fortunes predicted through Sam, numbered thin bamboo sticks that are inserted in a bamboo tube. The celebrants held the tube and silently stated their names, dates of birth and the sort of prediction they wanted to hear.

The fortune is revealed by shaking the tube until one of the sticks falls out. The prediction is determined by matching the number on the stick with the number next to predictions and advice printed in a book.

Some recent fortunes, however, have not been optimistic. According to Nhut Thanh, whose predictions are widely read in the Vietnamese community in the United States, an eruption of violence might be in store for 1992.

“A year the world turns upside down must result in an abrupt blood bath to resolve the order of the world,” Nhut Thanh wrote in the book, “Calendar of Horoscope.”

Still, the mood on Tuesday was one of good cheer throughout the Vietnamese community. Red, a symbol of good fortune, was seen everywhere, on everything from envelopes of money that are given to children to flowers decorating homes and pagodas to firecrackers welcoming in the new year.