发表于 2006-12-24 17:38:26
SANGDONG NO. 1 VILLAGE, South Korea, Dec. 19 — Standing amid snow-covered fields and squat white farmhouses, with fingers chapped from years of planting red peppers and ginseng, Ban Ki-jong proudly traced his village’s destiny in the shape of a nearby mountain.
Generations etched in stone. Ban Ki-moon’s name is third from the left.
“See how it looks like a crane,” he pointed, “with its wings spread open, ready to fly?”
“Feng shui tells us this is a perfect shape for funneling natural forces into the village,” Mr. Ban continued, referring to an ancient belief that some sites are blessed by geography. “So we’ve known for three centuries that a great man would emerge here. Now, he’s finally come.”
That man is Mr. Ban’s cousin, Ban Ki-moon, who will take the reins of the United Nations as secretary general on Jan. 1. He was born 62 years ago in this tiny village of about 100 residents in South Korea’s rustic center. (The village is called No. 1 to distinguish it from another nearby village, Sangdong No. 2.) As the villagers celebrate their native son, they are not alone in turning to traditional ideas to explain so august a birth in such humble surroundings.
Since Mr. Ban’s selection by the United Nations in October, almost 2,000 practitioners of feng shui, or pungsu in Korean, as well as a few Buddhists, have descended on the village, trying to divine the source of its good fortune, local officials said. So a host of stories and accounts of Mr. Ban’s birth and childhood have emerged, many that make him sound like a sagacious Confucian scholar out of Korea’s dynastic past.
Geomancy and divination may seem out of place in a nation leading the charge into the information age with the world’s highest Internet penetration rates. But like many countries that have experienced rapid economic growth in recent decades, South Korea has been grappling with how much of its traditional culture to give up in the name of modernity and higher living standards.
At the same time that Mr. Ban’s appointment marks South Korea’s emergence as an economic powerhouse and robust democracy, the reaction here attests to the tenacity of many old beliefs. To many local residents, his success stands as an affirmation of those ways.
“We now live in a global era, but we are still Koreans,” said Han Sang-youn, principal of Chungju High School, Mr. Ban’s alma mater. “Mr. Ban shows our values should be kept for future generations.”
The school, in the nearby city of Chungju, where Mr. Ban and his family moved when he was 3, has begun incorporating stories of Mr. Ban’s life into its curriculum, Mr. Han said. One recounts how, in the aftermath of the Korean War, Mr. Ban learned English by walking six miles to a fertilizer factory to converse with its American advisers.
In another, he is a young diplomat turning down a prized posting in Washington in favor of cheaper India so he can send money back to his parents. Many stories mention that he spent evenings and weekends studying, and that he was always at the top of his class.
“Mr. Ban is a role model, like an old-style Confucian scholar,” Mr. Han said. “We exhort our students to produce a second Mr. Ban.”
But in a reminder of how hard it is to build legends about the living, friends and relatives question some claims. Jeong Mu-dong, 66, a former classmate, said Mr. Ban was only an average student, at least until sixth grade. Mr. Ban’s mother, Shin Hyun-sun, 86, said he walked only three and a half miles to the fertilizer factory.
Chungju officials say they are struggling to balance modern tributes with ancient precedent in honoring Mr. Ban. In October, 50,000 people gathered in a soccer stadium for a celebration. City officials also want to name a street, a park and even a restaurant after Mr. Ban, but some fret that notables of yore were honored only after retirement, or death.
“In old times, we used to put up stone tablets in front of city gates to honor great men,” said Kwon O-dong, the city’s planning director. “Should we do the same now?”
Cho Jun-hyung, a retired television station manager who is now a feng shui master, said Mr. Ban’s appearance fulfilled a 2,500-year-old Chinese prophecy, first uttered by Confucius himself, that a “world dominator” would emerge from the northeast, meaning neighboring Korea.
Sangdong, the village where Mr. Ban was born, now gets so many visitors — regular tourists as well as feng shui masters — that it plans to install a parking lot and rebuild Mr. Ban’s birthplace, a farmhouse that collapsed 30 years ago.
Mr. Cho says Sangdong has exceptionally good feng shui because it sits at the navel of the Korean Peninsula, and a nearby row of three mountains channel in natural forces.
“This is very rare geography,” he said. “In America, Massachusetts and Ohio have similar alignments, which is why they produce so many presidents.”
Another feng shui master, Choi Young-ju, offers a different explanation: a mountain near Chungju is shaped like Mr. Ban’s face, a sure sign of good fortune. A Chungju city official, Jeon Dong-cheol, said Mr. Ban should have appeared 1,000 years ago but was thwarted when a rival kingdom built a stone pagodalike tower that blocked natural forces from reaching Chungju.
Mr. Ban’s mother, Ms. Shin, a Buddhist, said her son succeeded because of hard work and good karma built up by a lifetime of generosity. She said her son gave her money to buy meals for the elderly and even for the security guard in her apartment complex. “Good fortune has come back to him,” she said.
In Sangdong, where a third of the residents share the Ban family name, Mr. Ban is seen as the fulfillment of a prophecy uttered by the family ancestors who settled the village around 1700.
On a stone wall in the village’s center are etched the names of 22 generations of Bans, including the new secretary general. Overlooking the village are rows of small earthen mounds, the Ban family tombs.
It is here every October that the Ban family gathers to worship their ancestors and retell stories of their deeds. Until now, the most revered ancestor was an 18th-century government official praised by a king.
“One day, Ban Ki-moon’s story will be the most honored one,” said Ban Ki-jong, the ginseng farmer. “He has brought honor and good fortune to his village.”
