By Charlie Cheng

I am somewhat confident that this is the first ever Forum article about Chinese prophecies. It’s a bold move, I know, to be both pagan and unscientific at the same time in Hillsdale, but you will still want to find out how the pro-life movement is involved. I am not writing with the presumption that Chinese prophesying is legitimate. It has lasted through millennials of testing by the general public, yet there’s nothing scientific about it. It doesn’t matter, however, since this article does not attempt to prove anything one way or the other. Instead, I simply want to share with you two stories related to Chinese prophesying: the first one happened to me last year and the second to my father’s best friend more than two decades ago. The latter strangely, yet powerfully, aligns with the pro-life values of the West.

In the early 2000s, a Taiwanese scholar, Caigui Wang, went to Mainland China and started a revival of Chinese classics, a movement which I consider a “Confucius Renaissance.” My father was greatly influenced by it, and consequently, he sent me to a Confucius school when I was four. The founder of the Confucius school where I stayed the longest, Mr. Zhang, has been learning Ancient Chinese prophesying mainly from the classic I Ching, or the Book of Changes. I am not an expert in the field, so I don’t intend to explain how the whole thing works. The specific kind of prophecy I’ve encountered takes someone’s birth information, 八字 (“bazi” or “eight characters”), from the year, month, day, and hour. The fortune teller then calculates, using the information to see how they fit in relation to the tides of the world. The prophecies can vary from a person’s natural talents to specific things that could happen at a given time. Again, I myself don’t understand, so I’ll just skip to my stories.

The first story demonstrates how a prophecy works in a simple situation. It took place toward the end of 2023 when my father visited Mr. Zhang. Anxious for his only son, my father asked Mr. Zhang to predict what 2024 would look like for me. Mr. Zhang did his calculation and came to the conclusion that “In spring, someone is coming for me.” While this might sound like a threatening sentence in English, there’s an indication of romantic pursuit in the Chinese expression. Basically, he saw that someone would be looking for me, and considering my age and the time it was to take place—spring, a season that’s often affiliated with love— he concluded that I would soon find a girlfriend. I didn’t quite believe him to begin with, but I treated it scientifically: I bought two tickets to a concert in late April, and I asked my dad to tell Mr. Zhang that if I were to not have a girlfriend by that time, he would pay for the tickets.

Now, dear reader, it’s been a year since he made that prediction, and I’m still single. However, my story is not over yet. In February, my father told me someone from my elementary school was asking for my WeChat (Chinese social media) contact information. It turned out that a girl from my elementary school who was in my father’s choir remembered me as the piano accompanist during the only year I spent in that school. We’ve never talked, and I never knew her name— I had no idea she existed. Nevertheless, she reached out to the assistant choir conductor, who reached out to my father for my contact information. She expressed how she was impressed by me, but I couldn’t care less besides politely replying that I was glad to hear. As you can see, Mr. Zhang’s prediction took place in a weird but accurate way, even though he interpreted it differently. 

Mr. Zhang’s prediction took place in a weird but accurate way, even though he interpreted it differently.

The second story, on the other hand, is much more fascinating to me, and it profoundly strengthened my belief in pro-life values. My father’s best friend, whom I call Uncle Li, encountered a fortune teller more than two decades ago. It is generally believed that the further back one goes in history, the more skilled a fortune teller one can find. Uncle Li asked for a prophecy. In analyzing Uncle Li’s life, the fortune teller concluded that Uncle Li was the second born of the household. However, Uncle Li had always been the firstborn, so he questioned the fortune teller. The fortune teller insisted that Uncle Li was the second born. He was as confident as if he were simply telling his own name. The fortune teller told Uncle Li to go back and ask his mother, and so Uncle Li did. To everyone’s surprise, his mother told him something she had never told before: prior to giving birth to Uncle Li, she’d had a miscarriage. 

. . . a child existed without forming the physical body to come out of the mother’s womb to be seen by the world, yet the soul was perceived through an ancient art that allowed people to understand this world in ways beyond what our senses could provide.

I often ponder on that last bit of the story. The words echo in my head: the joyful knowledge that what I’ve believed is supported by the story, but also the unequivocal fact that the unborn babies are as truly and equally human as we are. Somewhere, at some point in history, a child existed without forming the physical body to come out of the mother’s womb to be seen by the world, yet the soul was perceived through an ancient art that allowed people to understand this world in ways beyond what our senses could provide. Despite not having seen the child himself, the fortune teller was able to perceive that there was a soul no less valuable than ours.  I fully recognize that these two stories don’t prove anything, but aren’t they fascinating? Giovanni Pico wrote in On the Dignity of Man, “[Magic], when it is rightly pursued, is nothing else than the utter perfection of natural philosophy.” There’s nothing scientific about the stories, but they encouraged me to be open to the mythical elements of the world, and they strengthened my belief in the undeniable value and preciousness of the lives of unborn babies.

Charlie Cheng is a junior studying History.