PILLARS OF THE COMMUNITY
A Saju Fortune-teller in Gwangju
By C. Adam Volle
“You have no sense of humor,” Kim Jung-ho tells me through my translator.
This judgment comes as something of a blow. I tell a lot of jokes. As Kim has reminded me several times during our interview, however, a saju consultant invents nothing. Reading someone’s saju – their “Four Pillars of Destiny” – is a systematic process unaffected by the biases of the reader. According to the principles of the universe as carefully studied by East Asian diviners and philosophers for millennia, I am simply not funny.
It is unlikely Kim understands his words are hurtful. My face has been pinched for the last hour while I have concentrated on trying to understand his world, so he probably thinks I already know. When Kim is aware that he is presenting bad news to a customer, he says he usually takes pains to focus on the positive, such as the ways in which the customer can lessen the impact of some bad luck. In fact he largely credits his success in the business to his personal touch with customers. He says he has investigated the smaller offices and tents of less-successful readers and finds no other difference that might account for it. After all, the saju itself is unchanging – there are even websites that read it now.
If Kim’s rapport with clients is what sets him apart from the competition, the secret to it may lie in his empathy. Like the people who visit him for advice, Kim came to the Four Pillars because of confusion and anxiety about his fate. The man has led an eventful life. In his youth, he worked as a salaryman in a business conglomerate and as a member of one of Gwangju’s gangs. The latter position resulted in his spending time in prison. As his saju predicted, Kim was also fated from birth to love multiple women. He is a widower and two-time divorcee.
Even though he now interprets destinies for a living, Kim disclaims any unique perspective on his life or others’. He considers himself just another customer, faithfully calculating his own saju on the first day of each year in the exact same manner he arrived at the unfortunate truth about my personality. First he notes the year, month, day and hour of his subject’s birth – each of these elements is one of the four metaphorical pillars – then he looks up their corresponding entries in the pages of the book he uses as an index of his customer’s personalities, relationships and fates. The year of birth offers insight into the subject’s relationship with his or her parents, the day with romance, and so forth.
Only, the work is both more simple and more complicated than this bare-bones description of Kim’s routine suggests. The job is easier because Kim’s book is no longer a physical object, although he does keep a copy of the tome on his bookshelf just in case his computer dies. These days, he types the relevant information into the database on his computer and receives results instantaneously. Understanding these results is more complicated, however, because the book in question is the Tojeong Bigyeol, or Tojeong’s Book of Secrets. The eponymous Tojeong, a scholar who lived during the Joseon Dynasty in the 16th century, wrote his great work in a form of poetry that utilizes couplets of four-syllable phrases, meaning every couplet is eight syllables long. Each of the Four Pillars – year, month, day and hour of birth – is represented by two Chinese characters, so that a person’s fate is written out in eight characters. Kim cross-references these eight Chinese characters representing a person’s fate with a corresponding eight-syllable couplet of Tojeong’s to discover their meaning.
If that does not seem to you like a reliable system for divination of the future, you are not alone. Most of Korea’s modern youth take saju far less seriously than their elders. The days are certainly gone when Samsung’s founder, Lee Byeong-cheol, allegedly demanded that prospective employees have their saju checked before being hired. Yet Kim Jung-ho remains busy day after day, and many of his customers are repeats. The outlook for his business and other saju experts’ looks good.
But then, they know that.
Facts about Saju
- In China: Ba Zi. In Japan: Syo-kan
- Four Pillars of Destiny / Life. The Four Pillars are: the year, month, day and exact time when you were born. Each answer to these questions is signified by two Chinese symbols, one representing the heavenly branch (the Elements) and one representing the earthly branch (the month of the Zodiac).
- There are online websites, both free and paid, which will compute the same.
- Naturally, Kim’s business sees a sharp rise in the months of December, January, and February, as people regularly have their fortunes checked on either the Solar New Year or the Lunar.
- He has read the fortunes of some people and realized they are criminals, in which cases he has gently suggested a more meritorious path.