My friend Thi does, though I doubt she would admit it in public. Thi was born here, and when she speaks she sounds about as Vietnamese as I do, but when it comes to the traditional customs of her family … Well, I guess she’s as susceptible as any of us. Her grandmother is to blame, of course. The old woman’s life is ruled by the orders of the feng shui master, as she attempts to control her luck and cheat the destiny that another part of her -the one that spends all those hours at the temple – knows is essentially uncontrollable. ‘In the end, you can’t cheat fate,’ Thi told me once, when I was having a particularly tough week, with Ty sick and my Design assignment way past due. I’d been using her as a wailing wall in the break between classes, expecting at least the pretence of sympathy, but all she could manage was, ‘Everything happens for a reason, even if we don’t see it that way at the time. It’s fate. Karma. And in the end, you can’t cheat fate. Your path was decided for you before you were born and you have to walk it in order to work out why it was the path chosen for you.
