"Page of Wands" by Yoojin Na
Most people seek out fortune-tellers. Mine came to me.
Many years ago, I was spending my free Saturday afternoon at Good Karma, a café in Philadelphia full of plants and natural light, when a young woman with strawberry-blonde hair walked in. She took a table by the window and put up a sign: Tarot Reading $20. Immediately, I felt a resistance building inside me. It seemed ludicrous to entrust a person with no quantifiable qualifications to tell your future. And the method seemed even more ridiculous—how could a few cards reveal the arc of one’s life? Didn’t people decide their own fate? Yet a part of me was at the time aching over a man who had unwittingly followed me to the East Coast, and I needed to talk to someone that was neither a therapist nor a friend.
After stalking the strawberry-blonde from afar, I finally mustered the courage to approach her. I dropped some money in the clear jar and sat down across from her. She asked me what I wanted to know. Both embarrassed and skeptical, I tried to stay as vague as possible, but she finagled out of me that my question had to do with a specific relationship. She shuffled her deck several times and had me choose three cards. I don’t remember what they were, but I remember being shocked by their dramatic flair: swords, towers, and tears.
“The relationship in question has love and passion, but it also comes with a lot of suffering. I’d move on if I were you.”
It unnerved me to receive the same advice from a stranger that my close friends had given me. Maybe, there was something to these cards.
#
I didn’t think much about Tarot again until Alexander Chee’s How to Write an Autobiographical Novel came out in 2018. Of the many thought-provoking and evocative essays in the book, “The Querent” stayed with me the longest.
Chee defines the querent as “the person who’s having the reading done.” But the querent is also a student, a seeker, a sojourner of the space between known and unknown. Chee’s journey as a querent aptly begins at school.
In 1980, the parapsychologist Dr. Alex Tanous tested my seventh-grade class for psychic abilities, an event so clear in my mind, and so important to me, that I have questioned whether this actually happened, or whether I simply invented him . . . Tanous, when he arrived, was a handsome man—friendly, charismatic, yet strangely, utterly ordinary in his carriage.
Chee does remarkably well on Dr. Tanous’ tests and waits for an invitation to “a government-funded psychic warfare program”—his own version of Hogwarts—but such innocence does not last. When Chee is just thirteen, his father gets in a catastrophic car accident that leaves him paralyzed. At sixteen, he loses his father altogether. From then on, his relationship with the occult evolves.
After my father’s accident, I wanted to know how to tell the future. I never wanted to be surprised by misfortune again. I wanted one of those mirrors that could be used to see around corners, and for my whole life that’s what I believed Tarot could be.
#
As a freshman at Cornell, I participated in psychological experiments for extra credit. One of these experiments was designed by a famous parapsychologist Daryl Bem. At first, his study didn’t seem any different from the others. I showed up to a computer lab and a lab assistant informed me that, based on me arbitrarily choosing between A and B, I would either be shown a new image or an image I had seen before. The part he failed to mention was that these images would be pornographic.
The lab assistant explained afterward that the experiment was designed to test the subjects’ psi or precognitive abilities. Bem hypothesized that students would use their ESP (extra-sensory perception) to pick out a new erotic stimulus over one they’ve seen before. Except in my case, the pornographic images served as a negative stimulus. More often than not, I chose an image I had seen over a new one.
Bem published the findings of such experiments in a paper titled “Feeling the Future: Experimental Evidence for Anomalous Retroactive Influences on Cognition and Effect” in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. It provided statistical evidence of psi based on data collected from 1,000 unsuspecting subjects like me. The scientific community, however, remained unconvinced. It did not matter that Daryl Bem was a respected researcher with roots in MIT physics or that his study, for the first time in history, tried to quantify the inexplicable. Serious scientists did not believe in ESP or telepathy or fortune-telling. For a long time, I too bought into the dichotomy.
#
In his teens, Chee started out by reading Tarot cards for his friends. It wasn’t until he was in his early thirties that he began reading for money at a yoga studio where he worked as an instructor. Just as he excelled on Dr. Tanous’ tests, he often succeeded in divining the future for his querents. Hearing how his readings have helped others, he couldn’t help wondering about his own future.
For all that I wanted to be extraordinary, I was no different from those I read for. I was sending my first novel out to publishers, and wanted to know if it would be sold. I was dating a man I felt seriously about for the first time in five years, and became obsessed with knowing how the relationship would turn out. Was I really going to sell the novel? Was the man really over his ex-boyfriend? Where was he the other night when he didn’t want to come over? I might take the cards out to be reassured, but midnight, when you suspect your boyfriend of cheating, or of still being in love with his ex, is, shall we say, a bad time to draw the cards. I acted badly, I suspect, because of the cards, becoming more jealous or apprehensive than I might have if I’d only seen things as they were, if I’d only stayed within the bounds of what we experience of the world.
#
The Alexander Chee that I met in 2016 was quite different from the Tarot-obsessed man he once had been. As my workshop teacher at Columbia, he asked probing questions that challenged my falsehoods as a writer. He called me out when I used time jumps and flashbacks to make up for a lack of interest in the present. He also kept me in check when pettiness and jealousy got in the way of my giving a fair critique to my classmates. And he did all that without ever making me feel inadequate. So, to me, he was often the most clear-headed and serene person in the room. After our workshop ended, I lost the benefit of his weekly presence, but I still had his essays.
When I was self-quarantined for the second time this year and feeling despondent, I reread “The Querent.” It seemed like the perfect piece to ruminate on as the world around me fell into a slow apocalypse. If someone as intelligent as Alexander Chee could believe in the occult, why couldn’t I? Perhaps the supernatural was not the opposite of natural, just the part of it that was yet to be explained.
I did everything Chee warns against in his essay: In impatience, I bought myself a Raider-Waite deck off Amazon instead of waiting for a deck to find me. I read for myself. I repeatedly asked the same questions.
#
And the reader sits there, trying to read for himself, alone with a deck of cards as his life moves on in ways he can’t see for looking at the cards.
If I could, I’d go back in time and tell myself, ‘This is how it turns out. You, sitting here, alone in your apartment, reading cards.
#
When I asked the cards whether the worst of the pandemic was over, I drew the following:
Past: The Five of Cups depicts the back of a man in a black cape. His head tilts downward as though he’s weeping over his spilled cups. The ground near his feet is stained with blood. In the distant background, there is a fortress surrounded by greenery, but a river separates the mourning man from this safe haven.
Present: The Two of Cups depicts a couple, clanking their gold cups in premature celebration. A caduceus, the symbol of medicine, protects them from above.
Future: The Eight of Swords shows a blindfolded woman surrounded by a fence made of swords. The ropes that bind her appear loose and the space between the swords wide enough that she could escape, but she seems to have no resolve to free herself.
Loss, reprieve, self-entrapment. It was not the story that I wanted, but it rang true. That was the strange thing about the cards. Despite all my errors as a querent, they never lied, and it was weirdly comforting to see the truth of our pain, the truth so often glossed over by politicians and certain media, reflected back to me in its full gore.
#
Chee’s essay ends with a cautionary tale about his uncle, who spent his whole life avoiding a destiny foretold.
. . . the mirror I wanted, back when I wished to see around the corner into the future, was never possible. The only mirror to be found in the cards was something that could show me the possibilities of the present, not the certainties of the future.
#
In my desperation, I was looking for the same mirror that Chee had been looking for. I never wanted to be blindsided again by another wave of disease, another fever, another romantic failure. And no amount of sage words from my former professor was going to cure me of that desire. So, I spent all summer in a feverish pursuit.
If a date did not go well, I consulted the cards.
If a date did go well, I consulted the cards.
If I felt slightly unwell, I consulted the cards.
If I felt unsure about my writing, I consulted the cards.
If I felt worried about my family, I consulted the cards.
If I felt lonely, I consulted the cards.
Then, one day, I drew The Page of Wands, and all the questions became irrelevant.
The Page of Wands is depicted as a smartly dressed man in an arid desert. There is nothing around him except for sand and sky. He has no house, no water, no forest, no friends. There is not even a sun in his heaven. Yet he is not discouraged. He holds a wooden staff taller than himself, and miraculously, leaves sprout from its apex. It’s as though the man has simply willed life into being.
I wrote the word “courage” across The Page of Wands with a Sharpie and taped the card in front of my desk.
Each time I look at him, I am reminded: I am the maker of my own fate.
Yoojin Na is a writer and an ER doctor. Her work has appeared in Joyland, Quartz, The Rumpus, and others. She is working on a memoir that explores her identity as a 1.5-generation Korean American and a formerly undocumented immigrant. She currently lives in New York City.
