That Sunday morning, my phone rang early. It was my friend, her voice hesitant and halting, until she finally blurted out something astonishing.
She explained that the night before, just as she was about to sleep, her father knocked on her door.
“Are you bringing someone to check our house tomorrow?” he asked, his face stern.
“Yeah,” she replied, confused. “Didn’t you tell me to find someone?”
Her father glared at her. “Tell him not to come. I won’t allow it!” His tone grew sharper, almost snarling. “If he dares show up, I’ll chase him out with a broom!”
Over the phone, she kept apologizing, and I didn’t know what to say. Teacher Ji arrived as planned, but I fumbled through an excuse: “Uh, that family had something come up, so…”
To my surprise, Teacher Ji just smiled and said it was fine. In the world of feng shui, he explained, this sort of thing was perfectly normal.
The One-Fifth Rule
Over his years of practicing feng shui, Teacher Ji had uncovered what he called the “one-fifth rule.”
In simple terms, even when someone is willing and the right solution is available, the odds of successfully resolving a troubling or negative situation through feng shui are only about 20%—one in five. Out of every five requests he receives, only one typically comes to fruition.
The reasons behind this are intricate and could fill pages, but one example he shared paints a vivid picture of the mysterious forces at play.
A client once approached Teacher Ji about his home. The man suffered from kidney disease, and after reviewing his details, Teacher Ji determined that the house was exacerbating his condition to a deadly degree. He urged the man to move out immediately, warning that staying could lead to a rapid decline and death.
The client took it seriously and promptly bought another house to relocate. But during the process, the government vehicle transporting the new property’s paperwork caught fire. All the documents were destroyed, and reprocessing would take another three months. Left with no choice, the man stayed in the old house—and within those three months, he passed away.
Hearing about this “one-fifth rule” shifted my perspective. I began to see how human efforts can’t always bend the laws of nature. Gradually, I stopped dragging Teacher Ji around to fix everyone’s problems.
A Follow-Up and a Mystery
As for my friend with the string of family misfortunes, there was more to the story. She told me that later that Sunday night, her father came to her again.
“I’ve thought it over,” he said. “Why don’t you ask your friend to come after all?”
She brushed it off, saying she couldn’t possibly ask again after everything. Then she pressed him: “Why were you so furious about him coming last night?”
Her father paused, bewildered. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “I have no idea why I reacted that way.”
When I shared this with Teacher Ji, he gave a faint smile, then casually changed the subject, leaving the matter behind.
In the realm of feng shui, Teacher Ji possesses a skill I’ve never seen in any other expert—a remarkable ability to pinpoint a problem in your home based solely on where your body aches. He can tell you which direction in your house is off, often because someone’s been digging there or something has disrupted the energy flow.
I’ve witnessed this uncanny technique a few times. Once, when Teacher Ji came up to Taipei, he met an assistant to a big-shot variety show host. (At the time, he’d been helping some entertainment industry folks with their home feng shui.) The assistant mentioned that the host had been suffering from a stiff neck that wouldn’t go away.
Teacher Ji did some quick calculations and declared that there was construction happening in a specific direction from the host’s house. The assistant was skeptical—after all, he picked up the host every day and would’ve noticed any nearby digging. But Teacher Ji stood firm. So, the assistant made a call to check. When he returned, he stuck out his tongue in disbelief: sure enough, across the street from a window in that exact direction, a renovation was underway, complete with hammering and banging.
My own closest brush with this skill involved my chronic hives.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve considered myself allergy-prone. When I lived abroad, spring and summer brought pollen-induced misery—sneezing, stuffy nose, the works. Back in Taiwan, the hay fever vanished, but something worse took its place: severe hives. They’d strike shortly after noon, erupting on my limbs—sometimes starting at my feet, other times my arms—hot, itchy, and unbearable.
Doctors offered the usual advice: take meds, exercise more. But the kicker? They’d always add, “This won’t go away. You might need meds for life.” It was disheartening, to say the least.
Then one night, I was on the phone with Teacher Ji—I don’t even recall why I called. As we chatted, my hives came up, and I couldn’t help but vent about this annoying, prickly curse.
“The doctor says I’ll be on pills forever!” I grumbled.
Out of nowhere, Teacher Ji said something cryptic: “Check the southwest corner of where you’re living.”
I was staying in an apartment then, and the southwest was a small, rarely used room.
“Check what?” I asked, intrigued.
“Look at the corner where the walls meet the ceiling. See if anything’s off,” he replied, as concise as ever.
I’ll admit, I was skeptical. I’d lived there long enough—wouldn’t I have noticed something odd? But Teacher Ji insisted: “Just go look.”
So I did. In the southwest corner of that room, right where the wall met the ceiling, I saw it: a patch of peeling paint, maybe wall cancer, about 30 centimeters wide, mottled and crumbling. Touching it kicked up a cloud of dust.
“Now what?” I thought. My first instinct was to call someone to repaint it.
“No need,” Teacher Ji said. “Just sweep away the dust and sprinkle some rice-washing water on it.”
It was past midnight by then. A bachelor like me didn’t exactly keep rice on hand, so I trudged downstairs to the convenience store and bought a bag of white rice.
“The whole bag?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “Take a small fistful, rinse it in a bowl, and use the cloudy water that comes off. Sprinkle that in the corner.”
Even then, I was dubious. A tiny handful of rice? It seemed so insignificant—something you’d cook and eat in a few bites. How could it possibly do anything?
Still, I followed his instructions: swept the corner clean, then flicked the rice water over it with my fingers—not dumping the whole bowl, but sprinkling it like tiny droplets. He told me to say firmly as I did it: “Dispel the evil! Dispel the evil!”
True TAIWAN Horror story 
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