For instance, the true popularity here of UFOs may be hard to gauge, but when the China Post (1995) ran an editorial encouraging the study of UFOs in the schools, skeptical hackles were raised.² In a letter to the editor, Tim Holmes (1995) of the Taiwan Skeptics delivered a telling riposte.

Whereas the paper printed his letter, public lectures by UFO buffs don’t usually admit any questioning. I attended one such free presentation during an island-wide blitz by believers in 1995. As a door prize they offered Streiber-alien look-alike dolls. The slide show was a “Best of National Enquirer” tour de force, at which I thought everyone would double over laughing. Seeing as how the audience seemed to be taking everything in and being taken in, I ventured to question the plausibility of a slide which allegedly showed a U.S. bomber that had been transported by aliens to the dark side of the moon. My comment was greeted with stony silence, and my escort scolded me for breaching Chinese etiquette, which does not permit the raising of “problems” for a speaker. (Wen-ti, the Chinese word for question, is also the word for problem). In short, no public questions allowed — unless requested by the speaker at the end. Catch-22, in Chinese.

Another cult practice here apparently has its fountainhead in India. The supposed medicinal benefits of drinking one’s own urine made quite a splash in the media (Graves 1996; China Post 1996a,b). A television station aired an “investigative report” in which a credulous and somewhat flushed reporter watched mainly older men and women wash, gargle, and even swallow what they said was their own urine. The practice seems to be limited to small handfuls of devotees throughout the country, though the media gave “estimates” of tens of thousands of believers — based on reports from the adherents themselves. Tim Holmes (1996) tells me he has neighbors who assure him they practice urine therapy, which is said to cure disease and lead to a longer life.

Taiwan is part of that exotic Orient which has embraced Western technology and even adopted democratic electoral procedures. Behind all the hustle and bustle of daily life is the world of commonly shared cultural beliefs, some of which extol the paranormal or perpetuate pseudoscience. While many of these strike Westerners as quite odd, others at root are similar to widely held beliefs in the Occident and elsewhere. Certainly this sketch, and the one previous, in no way exhaust the world of the weird in Taiwan.

Notes

1. Two sixth-graders who attended that same camp joined my English class in the fall; they said they had not been harangued in any way.
2. The same newspaper subsequently reported that a woman had “sat in a bathtub for three years” (China Post 1996c). To the paper’s credit, they decided in the end that the family making the report “might have exaggerated.”

References

• China Post. 1995. Study of UFOs can be helpful. April 17, p. 4.
• —. 1996a. Urine can cure mad cows, says doctor. April 14, p. 8.
• —. 1996b. Urine drinking attracts more faithful followers. May 6, p. 20.
• —. 1996c. Woman sat in bathtub for 3 years, family says. August 11, p. 16.
• —. 1996d. Temple said to be forcing campers into monasticism. September 4, p. 15.
• —. 1996e. Angry relatives try to find college students-turned-monks. September 5, p. 1.
• —. 1996f. Temple melee prompts debate on religion law. September 6, p. 1.
• —. 1996g. Buddhists pledge parental approval. September 12, p. 16.
• Graves, N. 1996. Urine advocates say drug firms should listen. China Post. March 21, p. 7.
• Holmes, T. 1995. Using jackpot lure in science is risky. China Post. May 7.
• —. 1996. Personal communications.

Many of the practices that one can witness daily in Taiwan, such as the burning of “ghost money” and “god money,” are a mix of folk beliefs and religion. Like our Halloween, there is a day during “ghost month” in the fall in which people put out offerings of food and drink for ghostly hellions on little tables out side their houses.

During the Dragon Boat Festival, held in the late spring, there is usually an egg-balancing contest, but given the following favorable conditions, one wonders how anyone can lose: On that day, “the fifth day of the fifth month of the lunar calendar, the orbits of the sun moon and earth are perfectly lined up. The interaction of the gravitational forces of the three heavenly bodies lends eggs the unique power of being able to stand up on end without any external support” (Tung 1996a).

As in the West, many Chinese look to the stars for guidance in their lives. Asian astrology, unlike its Western counterpart, uses a twelve-year cycle of signs, based on their own pictures in the sky. Hence the return of the Year of the Ox. But this is only part of the information the compleat fortuneteller uses. Seated beside little tables in the arcades or in the underground passageways, Chinese soothsayers combine one’s star sign with blood type as well as palm and face reading to reveal the future.

Although I rarely see anyone other than teenage girls at the tables, many Chinese do follow the list of astrologically derived dos and don’ts in the equivalent of a farmer’s almanac, found in most businesses and homes. In addition to days for planting and harvesting, some days are said to be good for travel, others for cutting your nails! One of two English-language papers, The China Post, even runs a regular column entitled “Science and Myth” to explain the good and bad-omened days.

True believers here also have to make sure their lives are in line with the wind and water, a practice called “feng-shui” in Chinese. At first glance, feng-shui is a commonsense alignment of structures to conform to the shape of the land, an idea shared by any sensible architect in a land fraught with typhoons and torrential rains. Actually, however, as Stored (1994) and Bruun (1996) point out, it is more of a mystical belief in cosmic harmony. This Chinese geomancy can “explain” one’s good or bad fortune, as well as affect the choice of a site for a new building or a grave. While Tomb Sweeping Day in April is an obvious instance of the intermixing of custom and belief, the desire for south-facing or slightly angled entrances to businesses reflects the combination more subtly. A friend back from the U.S. tells me that a feng-shui expert, or geomancer, was called in to decide the position of a house in Vermont last year (Yen 1996).

Hand in hand with concern over the future and fate is the preoccupation with good health and longevity. Good diet plays its role toward those ends, but the rationale given for consuming certain animal products puts a new twist into the old snake oil. Most worrisome is the use of parts of endangered species, based on the notion that elixirs made of, say, tiger penis or rhino horn will enhance a man’s virility and hence prolong life (Wong 1995). In a slightly different vein, a family reaped the deadly reward of believing that the meat of toads would have “therapeutic effects” when a two-year-old boy died and other family members got seriously ill from eating mom’s toad soup (China Post 1996b). Another man “frequently” told his neighbor that he was drinking motor oil because it “contained a secret medical remedy to cure his liver-related diseases” (China Post 1996a). A strong Chinese belief in noninterference with the private lives of neighbors may have played a role in their inaction as the sixty-four-year-old man finally drank himself to death.

As far as I can tell, people in the Occident aren’t bullish on Asian astrology, nor do I suspect toad soup will be on the menu at Ye Olde Macrobiotic Shoppe any time soon. But acupuncture, Chinese herbal elixirs, and now feng-shui have made their way to many lands outside the Orient. Can the old Chinese almanac be far behind?

Note

1. Pronounced “chee-gong,” Storey (1994, 23) calls it a kind of faith healing; Zhu and Penny (1994) report a “resurgence” on the mainland.

References

• Alcock, J., et al. 1988. Testing psi claims in China: Visit by a CSICOP delegation. Skeptical Inquirer 12 (4), Summer: 364-75.
• Basser, S. 1994. Acupuncture: The facts. Rocky Mountain Skeptic 11 (5), January/ February: 1, 4,6-7, 10-12,15.
• Beyerstein, B. L., and W. Sampson. 1996. Traditional medicine and pseudoscience in China: A report of the second CSICOP delegation (Part 1). Skeptical Inquirer 20 (4), July/August: 18-26.
• Bruun, O. 1996. The fengshui resurgence in China: Conflicting cosmologies between state and peasantry. The China Journal, no.36, July. China Post 1996a. Man dies from drinking lubricant as tonic. June 14, n.p.
• China Post 1996b. Toddler dies, family ill from toad soup. July 31, p. 16.
• Holmes, T. 1994. Chee’s sandwich, etc. Taiwan Skeptics, September: 1-2.
• Huston, P. 1995. China, chi, and chicanery. Skeptical Inquirer 19 (5), September/ October: 38-42, 58.