articles
China Elevator Stories
My Friend, The Palm Reader
A friend from Yunnan reads my palm and tells me about my future.
09/04/2013
Ruth Silbermayr
Author
One evening in July 2012, rain drops are pounding heavily against the windows as we sit in a friend’s living room in Kunming. We are happy for the rain, because Yunnan province has suffered severe droughts for a period of over 3 years. We have just finished a home-cooked dinner, and are now chatting and making music.
A while into the conversation, Little Stone, a young lively Chinese woman my age, suggests that she would read our palms. Palm reading is a skill going back some generations in her family. Little Stone has learned it from her mother, which in turn has learned it from her mother, and so on.
Zhen comes first. Little Stone predicts that he will have trouble staying calm when he is 28, and if he isn’t careful, many clashes will await him, not only in his professional life, but also in his private life.
The next one is Jin. Little Stone tells him that he’ll fall in love with a person, but this person doesn’t reciprocrate his feelings. On the upside, Little Stone tells him, there will be eight women who will have feelings for him, and he can choose any one of them. Also, he will not get divorced in the future.
She then reads three other friends’ palms.
I’m the last one. Little Stone looks carefully at the palm of my left hand. She then tells me that the relationship I was in up until the age of 24 would not work out. In the future, I would have kids. I would not get divorced, but I would be with another man. Concerning work, there would be no major problems and I would be successful in this regard.
After she tells us these things, I jokingly say to Jin: “She said you won’t get a divorce. But she didn’t say that you’d get married either”, to which Little Stone is fast to reply: “The ones who won’t get divorced will get married”, which leads me to think that maybe the ones where she didn’t mention marriage might get married, but would have a divorce.
It seems to be an unspoken rule that there are some things the palm reader does not mention so as to protect the respective person.
We ask her if she is able to read her own palms. She says she is, but that her life will be quite normal compared to ours.
As I am lying in bed later this evening, I wonder if what she says will eventually hold true.
Has anyone ever read your palms?