Letter 7 — The Fortuneteller Who Was Right About Everything
He told us the truth. We heard every word. I asked him for the moving-in date anyway.
There were two warnings.
Not the shaman. Earlier than that — before the system, before the ceremonies, before any of it had started. Two people looked at what my ex and I were and told us, clearly and accurately, exactly what was coming. One was a therapist. One was a man who read Chinese birth characters the way an engineer reads load-bearing data.
Neither of them was wrong.
The truth arrived on time. What happened next is a matter of what I chose to do with it.
There was also a warning before the two warnings:
Early in the relationship, my aunt visited a monk who reads saju. He told her, without being asked: Suin is dating someone younger than her. This person is an empty head of grain — the husk, nothing inside, nothing that will nourish. This person will take everything from her.
My aunt passed this on to me.
I heard it and said: whatever.
Then I told my ex. Not as a warning, as a joke. I repeated the prophecy to her because I found it funny; because I was completely confident in what we had, because nothing in me associated anxiety with what I was looking at.
My ex was immediately worried. What if it’s true?
I told her: I don’t believe it. And even if it’s true, just be a gold digger. I don’t mind.
She laughed.
That was who I was at the beginning. Confident enough in the love to make the doom reading into a punchline. Not reckless — just certain. The kind of certainty that has no framework for the thing it’s walking toward.
The monk was not wrong. He just had a narrower definition of empty than the one I would eventually learn.
The Man with Eight Characters
The realtor couple — the husband and wife who had known my parents for years through property work — practised saju. Not spirits. Not ancestors. Just the architecture of your birth timing translated into eight Chinese characters, analysed the way you’d analyse a structural report.
Over three sessions, the husband told us we were a match from heaven. You could get married with this compatibility, he said.
Then he told us the rest.
There will be a large conflict in 2025. A threat. You may go through a break-up unless you have enough financial stability. Money trouble will cause a whole scene. Don’t get married before thirty — that could cause a catastrophe.
My ex asked immediately: “Would living together be considered as a marriage?”
It was 2024. We had already signed the lease. We had planned everything.
I said: “We already made a contract with the landlord. We planned everything. And now you want to cancel? Fuck destiny. I live with my own direction and my own narrative. If we go through hard stuff — that’s destiny doing what it does. But we live by it. We can fight against it. You are thinking too much. If it happens, we go through it together.”
Then I asked the husband to give us a good date for moving in.
I want you to see who that is. Someone who pushes back against a fortuneteller in real time, refuses the frame, names what she’s doing — I live by my own narrative — and then, in the same breath, asks for the practical help. She holds both without contradiction. She doesn’t believe in the prediction. She believes in the relationship. She knows the difference. She books the date.
The knowing and the not-knowing existed simultaneously. I could sense the shape of the real reason underneath all the rational ones — the fortuneteller had named something true, and some part of me registered it. I chose, very deliberately, not to look directly at it. Not unconsciously. Not passively. I chose. I picked the relationship over the warning because the relationship felt more real than the risk, and because I had always loved more easily than I had ever been careful. That’s another well-known plot for Greek tragedy.
That is who I was. I am not embarrassed by that person. She was right that the relationship was worth fighting for. She was also, in that moment, showing something the shaman would later find and use: I am constitutionally unable to let a warning stop me from loving someone. I hear the danger, and I move toward the person anyway.
The shaman called I live by my own narrative a misjudgment.
She told me not to follow my instincts or my innate nature — because mine were wrong. Corrupted. Evidence of the same fundamental flaw she had been mapping since the first consultation. And to my ex, in the same sessions, in the same room, using the same word: your innate nature is right. Trust it. Follow it.
Same word. Two people. Opposite instructions from the same authority.
I noticed the asymmetry at the time. But at the same time I had been so thoroughly taught that my instincts led me wrong that I received the instruction as reasonable. Of course, I shouldn’t trust myself. The evidence was everywhere — the shaman had been cataloguing it for months. My nature was the problem. Hers was the solution.
That is what was done with: I live by my own narrative.
It was taken, named as misjudgment, and used to dismantle the only thing that might have protected me: my own confidence in my own direction.
The husband’s money warning arrived later on already-prepared ground. By then, the shaman had been building the financial case for months — the fabricated debt, the grandmother’s $230,000, the ceremonies reframed as spiritual investment. When money trouble finally came, it didn’t arrive as an ordinary relationship difficulty. It arrived as confirmation of a verdict that had been running in parallel, waiting for the prediction to land.
He told us the truth, as far as his reading went. The truth got used.
The Rat Surrounded by Cats
His wife saw something else.
On our last visit to the realtor couple, she followed me to the bathroom. She asked if I was okay. I said I was fine. Just sick.
She asked if I had called my parents over the last few months.
I said no. And I asked her not to tell them I had visited.
I was protecting the system from someone who could see me clearly enough to follow me to a bathroom and ask directly. I was managing her concern rather than receiving it.
She went home and called my mother anyway.
Suin looked like a rat surrounded by cats, she said. She looked like she was on the verge of a cliff.
That is what I looked like from outside the system, to a woman who had known my family for years and had nothing to gain from lying. A rat surrounded by cats. On the verge of a cliff.
I was so far inside it that being followed to a bathroom felt like something to manage, not something to receive. Her worry was information I couldn’t let in. The system had already installed the explanation for anyone who expressed concern: they don’t understand the work we’re doing. They can’t see what the shaman sees. Their worry is ordinary vision, and we are operating at a different level.
My mother heard what the realtor wife said. My mother, a territorial feral cat in her own right — capable of sudden precision when triggered — filed it. Waited.
And the information went nowhere, because by then the exits had been narrowing for months.
What the Two Warnings Have in Common
The monk and the realtor husband told us the truth about the future. The realtor wife saw clearly what the present looked like. Neither warning reached me.
Their warning didn’t reach me because I believed in the relationship more than I believed in the prediction. That is not stupidity. That is love doing what love does, constructing a narrative around danger and continuing anyway.
The wife’s warning didn’t reach me because the system had already closed the channels through which concern could arrive. I was managing her worry. I had been trained to manage it. To receive it as ordinary blindness rather than as information.
Both warnings were accurate. Both arrived on time.
The shaman’s first task was not to build the system. It was to make the truth unbelievable before it could arrive. By the time anyone with clear sight tried to hand me what they saw, I already had an explanation for why they couldn’t see clearly enough.
A rat surrounded by cats. On the verge of a cliff.
And I was asking the man with eight characters for a good date to move in.
I want to enter something into the record.
I found it recently — a letter I wrote in January 9th 2023, a few months into the relationship, handwritten, on the night of the day we said goodbye at the terminal. I had missed her so badly that I picked up a pencil first, then pressed a pen to paper. I have never written a love letter before or since.
I wrote to her: The fact that you exist in my life — I’m genuinely grateful for it. I sometimes think I used up all of last year’s good luck just by meeting you.
From a temple where I’m learning that refusing a warning is not always blindness — sometimes it is love, and sometimes it is a closed system, and sometimes it is both at once,
Emotionally yours,
Suinny
P.S. The husband was right about 2025. The money trouble arrived. The big conflict arrived. He had read the architecture of our birth timings and seen it coming from years away. I wonder sometimes what he thought when it happened. Whether he remembered his previous readings. Whether he knew, when we left his office asking for a good moving-in date, that we had already decided not to hear him.
I treated it like a case study. It was a breakup.
Next week: The visa rejection. The mother who went silent. Two years of therapy. And then I suggested we go see a shaman.