Purchases obtained, gift wrapped and generously labeled with goodwill messages, Lady Zhao was trying to hail a taxi in competition with hopeless tourists when â duang! â next to her appeared her fortuneteller. Lady Zhao's fortuneteller was a woman who possessed many of the qualifications necessary for a career in the occult â the face of an eighty-plus-year-old (Lady Zhao suspected she applied make-up to look more weathered), a thirty-degree curve to her back, and terrifying eyes. She teetered in vertigo-inducing heels, and her upper half was shrouded in an orange silk shawl with a label still on that revealed its brand name.
"Oh, what a coincidence!" the elderly woman said, grabbing and then stroking Lady Zhao's palms, scrutinizing her hair and nails and cheeks. How come Lady Zhao hadn't called for so long, had missed their scheduled appointments, she wanted to know. They usually met once a month.
Lady Zhao had an unhealthy relationship with superstition. By nature, she was rational-minded. Indeed, she had begun her teenage years heaping derision on those around her (and she felt there were too many, including her father) who believed in â and sometimes made important life decisions based on â advice from mystics and the self-proclaimed paranormally-gifted. To shame an old nemesis at school who had one day renounced meat and glutens following a card reading, Lady Zhao went online and found an article on how such confidence-professionals gain a person's trust in order to lure them into a parasitic economic relationship, for example by reading body language, fishing for information, revealing things the target host believed they simply couldn't know. She had planned a kind of public humiliation of her school peer, but ultimately got distracted by less frivolous matters and forgot about it all.
Then, at age seventeen, with profound decisions arising in her own life, she and her then Default Friend (not necessarily the person Lady Zhao liked the most, but the one who always seemed available) had run into a palm-reader at a train station. He was in his forties, wore a leather jacket and kept an unlit cigarette dancing between his lips. Lady Zhao tolerated a conversation with him because he was well built, her train was delayed, and she secretly looked forward to exposing what she considered to be a con-artist's tricks.
But within twenty minutes, he had discerned where Lady Zhao was going, what she thought (in terms of opinions on a few contemporary issues), and had proposed she take a certain course of action regarding whether to study in Shanghai or Tianjin. It was an entertaining performance, even if it was one she was absolutely sure shed no more insight into the fifth dimension than her makeup mirror. The key fact, however, was that her parents wanted her to go to Tianjin, and she didn't. It made financial sense, they had argued â her family was not the richest in the neighborhood by any measure â and it was closer.