Dirty Laundry
The mass media is messing with your mind, defining reality and feng shui for you. You should be suspicious. You are being force-fed some very ugly stuff.
Many people like the idea of the noble savage, a traditional person who is viewed as intellectually incompetent. Noble savages, it is believed, cannot understand the world as well as modern people. Modern people believe they are better at exploiting planetary resources.Translate the “noble savage” concept to feng shui and suddenly traditional feng shui is ecological wisdom, the secret of survival and well-being — but it must be “modernized” to be useful. This thinking is social Darwinism — and saying it’s “social Darwinism” is just a polite way of saying it’s an attitude of racial and cultural superiority.
Deborah Root noted that white society’s fascination with the “noble savage” idea works as
another means of colonial pacification because it presupposes the inevitable defeat and disappearance of traditional peoples. — Borrowed Power (1997:228)
Traditional feng shui provides what scientists call ritually regulated ecosystems — lifeways that enable traditional cultures to exist and prosper for millennia. The wisdom in traditional feng shui has been successful for several thousand years longer than any modern methods of feng shui. We should investigate traditional feng shui for solutions to modern problems, like global warming.
If ongoing study in science recognizes the benefits of a traditional practice like feng shui, and traditional feng shui works just fine in modern Asia, why does feng shui need “modernization”? Because some people don’t believe that Asian forms of “modern” are as good as Anglo-American forms of “modern.” This subtle racism is found in most of the feng shui books on the market. You can also find it on websites.
Choice of terminology is a moral statement. If morally neutral terminology is used for morally repugnant acts, it reduces the sense of repugnance. And when the same terminology is used for a moral and immoral act, a moral equivalence is created. — Bruce Dov Krulwich
Here are a few examples.
Nancilee Wydra
In Look Before You Love (1998) she says, “We must interpret ancient Chinese feng shui guidelines in a way that is acceptable today,” which means “to strip away cultural preferences.” (And substitute hers.) She claims that it’s time to abandon a traditional Chinese science that hasn’t seen fit to embrace Anglo-American culture, but she does not demand that her other practices meet this requirement. She demands the conversion of feng shui precisely because it is Chinese. This argument echoes those of nearly 150 years ago:
Although China is far from being a barbarous state, yet every system and institution there is inferior to the corresponding one in the West. … every thing in China is effete.5
Wydra’s associate Katherine Grace Morris repeats the Pyramid School ideology:
As Feng Shui found its way to America, it met with resistance and skepticism. People did not wish to turn their homes into places filled with Chinese artifacts and items.
Their customers wanted something vaguely exotic, not something foreign — and especially not anything Asian.
Nativists in the 1800s objected to the presence of Chinese immigrants and anything that hinted Chinese3 — after all, Chinatown was a ghetto.7
Feng shui has been in the US since at least the beginning of the 19th century. Based on eyewitness accounts feng shui was used in the design of gambling houses3 in the Chinatowns of New York1 and San Francisco.6 Its presence has been noted by commentators since the mid-19th century.4
It is the practices of the average McFengshui consultant that are greeted with skepticism. “Chinese artifacts and items” used as cures, such as the ubiquitous crystals and wind chimes, bagua mirrors, red strings, statues of everything from Guanyin and Buddha to frogs with coins, and the like, are the common “cures” found in Wydra’s books and those like hers.
Racism in education
One owner of The Feng Shui Training Center claims that “wandering tribesmen” came to China from the West. They allegedly brought feng shui with them around 4000 BCE. Alan Stirling, who runs the Feng Shui Institute (UK), says these “wandering tribesmen” came from “Sumeria (Iraq).” Only one problem: Sumerian culture (c. 3100 to 2000 BCE) wouldn’t be established for almost a thousand years after the first evidence of feng shui. They are claiming that white people invented feng shui and taught it to Chinese. There isn’t any proof, of course. But that hasn’t stopped them from perpetuating this racist myth. (They certainly wouldn’t give credence to the intriguing theory that the ancient Koreans were the ancestors of the Sumerians.)
Steven Post
Post says that feng shui knowledge existing today needs to be adjusted and updated to include information obtained by ongoing study. However, no “ongoing studies” have materialized from Post or his associates, except in the realm of “transcendental” marketing of their products.
Terah Kathryn Collins
Terah Kathryn Collins trademarked her version of feng shui, which she markets as honoring “the essence of its Eastern Form School Feng Shui heritage, while focusing on the practical applications it has in our Western culture.” The “essence” she kept was the term feng shui because that’s what sells. Her version of feng shui relies on Western occultism, Western pseudoscience and Western psychobabble. Her school does not teach San He calculations for eight mansions, or calculations for the dragons of mountain and water. Affirmations, the updated version of Puritan prayer-thought, made their way into McFengshui books thanks to Collins (published by Hay House) and Louise Hay, who invented affirmations.
William Spear
Spear lamented in Feng Shui Made Easy (1995) that “so much of what has come to us from ancient cultures has become dogmatic and, as such limiting.”He also said “it is essential to recognize the inherent limitations of feng shui adjustments in the external world.” (page 159) For Spear, feng shui is too old, too Chinese, and it doesn’t work anyway. Like Wydra, Spear does not demand that occult and New Age practices meet the same requirements as feng shui.Instead, he advocates that Greek philosophy replace the “limiting” dogma of traditional feng shui. How astonishing — Greeks (who didn’t know China existed) are the best source for Chinese ecological wisdom!
Mai’a Martin
Martin says in her book Feng Shui for the Southern Hemisphere (1999) that changes in the traditional system were needed because William Spear was upset Anglo-Americans were deserting their usual “intuitively pleasing” designs and aesthetics, and embracing Asian concepts. Spear was upset that white people were “going native”!
Ralph and Lahni DeAmicis
The authors of Feng Shui and the Tango in Twelve Easy Lessons (2001), claim “The Asian culture is yin, small dark-haired people, insular societies, wet-soil crops. … Western cultures are yang.” (pages 41-42) However, Asia is the largest chunk of dry land on the planet. Everyone from the Arctic Circle to the Indian Ocean, from east Russia and northwest Kazakhstan to Provideniya on the Bering Sea, from Israel and Turkey to Taiwan — in all, three-fifths of the world’s population — is “the Asian culture.”That is a lot of people, a lot of diversity. But the DeAmicis don’t see it. For them, Greeks, Russians, Israelis, Arabs, Iranians, Armenians, Kazakhs, Iraqis, Turks, Sikhs, Afghans, and basketball star Yao Ming are “yin” — and yin is womanly, according to them. Ralph DeAmicis (at six-foot-two or 1.88 meters) is dark-haired and would certainly look small standing next to Yao Ming (seven-foot-two, or 2.29 meters), but Ralph claims that he’s from a yang culture. Yang is related to the DeAmicis’ bizarre theories about agriculture (dry = Anglo-American, wet = Asian). It doesn’t matter that the traditional rice-growing regions of the world are below the 40th parallel in the Northern Hemisphere. The DeAmicis see the world in a unique way. Their worldview is from centuries ago, when Europeans traveled around the Southern Hemisphere and conquered the people they met.The DeAmicis claim that Chinese astrology is “graceful,” western astrology is “precise.” (page 149) The use of precise and graceful has the same connotations that Evelyn Fox Keller noted:
if science has come to mean objectivity, reason, dispassion, and power, femininity has come to mean everything that science is not: subjectivity, feeling, passion, and impotence.
By assigning Victorian notions of gender to astrology the DeAmicis communicate the alleged “delicacy” of women/yin (= intellectually and morally inferior) and the supposed “strength” of men/yang (= intellectually and morally superior). The DeAmicis are saying that Asians are inferior to Anglo-Americans. Racism, sexism, and xenophobia should not be sold as feng shui.
Do you understand what you are buying?
Keep in mind that
- People who sell a product are responsible for what they sell. That is the main idea behind laws that protect the public from unscrupulous businesses. Hold McFengshui authors and marketers responsible for their promotion of racism.
- Publishers sell what they think will make them money. If lies are selling a lot of books, then there will be more books that contain lies. Racism will remain in feng shui books until people complain, and until people stop buying the books that contain these vile ideas.
People are pretty much alike. It’s only that our differences are more susceptible to definition than our similarities. —Linda Ellerbee
It all comes out in the wash
In early America, entrepreneurial Chinese had to earn their living as laundry owners and workers, or domestic servants. American culture at that time defined laundry, like domestic service, as yin. This was “women’s work,” often that of Irish women (or immigrant women in general). A Chinese laundry typically did not threaten white males, because laundry was “beneath” them. No “red-blooded American male” would dare go into the laundry business. It wasn’t manly. As Irish women wedded Chinese men, American culture grew suspicious of the laundries.Advertisements from the same period depict Chinese as distorted caricatures in servile roles and associate them with laundry products, but never show them actually purchasing the products.
References
- Beck, Louis J. New York’s Chinatown: an historical presentation of its people and places. New York: Bohemia Publishing, c1898
- Culin, Stewart. China in America: a study in the social life of the Chinese in the eastern cities of the United States. Philadelphia: [s.n.], 1887.
- Culin, Stewart. The gambling games of the Chinese in America: the game of repeatedly spreading out, or, the game of white pigeon ticket. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1891.
- Denslow, Van Buren. The Chinese question. [New York: A.S. Barnes, 1881]. Also Condit, Ira M. The Chinaman as we see him and fifty years of work for him. Chicago: F.H. Revell, c1900; and Genthe, Arnold. Pictures of old Chinatown. New York: Moffat, Yard, 1908.
- Gibson, Otis. The Chinese in America. Cincinnati: Hitchcock & Walden, 1877.
- Stoddard, Charles Warren. A bit of old China. San Francisco: A.M. Robertson, 1912.
- Read The Unwelcome Immigrant by Stuart Creighton Miller. Also see John Kuo Wei Tchen, New York before Chinatown: Orientalism and the Shaping of American Culture, 1776-1882.
