Double Handshake

If he’s working, you can’t miss seeing Francisco Choy on the main street of Lima’s Chinatown. If you don’t see his red booth with “Horoscopo Chino” painted in black letters, you’ll at least have to skirt around the dozen or so people crowding around it, straining to hear his words. Francisco has been telling fortunes, advising on spiritual matters and selling Chinese spiritual goods in Lima for the last thirteen years.

Born in Peru of a father from Guangdong and a second-generation Chinese-Peruvian mother, Francisco himself is likely in his forties, with long shoulder-length hair and balding on top. When I saw him last week, he was wearing a white button-down tucked into jeans and a pair of magnetic bracelets – like the ones he sells for ten and fifteen soles a piece – on both wrists.

There were other Chinese spiritual goods and knickknacks on sale: gold Buddha sculptures, felt posters with calligraphy, ginger in plastic bags, fake jade, dolphin wind chimes made out of blue glass. Incense smoke blew across the fifteen people crowding around the booth, making this section of Calle Capon smell like the inside of a Chinese temple.

Francisco would press his thumb into the customer’s palm and immediately began speaking – “There is a big financial opportunity coming for you,” or “Be on the lookout for love.” He’d speak for a minute or two, quickly. He had a silver engraved bowl that he would strike with a stick when the reading was finished, making circles around the readee’s face with it. Then, he’d ring a bell, holding his palm out in front of him, eyes shut. Both he and the customer would open their eyes and he’d dispense change for the transaction. Three soles (US$1) for your future told.

When I checked back with the booth three hours later, the group had swollen to thirty. Business was good.

The video above, care of the Lima newspaper El Comercio, is a little more than a year old. In it, Francisco introduces himself and talks about the then-upcoming Chinese New Year (Year of the Rat). It is now, of course, a “niu year,” but Francisco and his business haven’t  changed too much in the meantime. Enjoy!

I first met Roxana a month ago, on a stuffy Saturday afternoon at the Beijing Centro Cultural in Lima’s Lince district. Roxana stood out in the crowd of mostly teenagers and college students who were listening to two Peruvian students talk about their semester at Peking University. She and I got to talking – her Mandarin colored with a strong southern accent – and after an hour or more of listening to her stories, I joked that she had better get started writing her memoirs. She smiled and shook her head.

“If you don’t, then I’ll have to do it, but in English. In fact, I’ll invite you out for dinner and you can tell me your life story,” I said.

“It will take a lot longer than one day,” she replied.

Though Roxana was born in China’s southern Guangdong province, she traces her connection with Peru to her paternal grandfather. He moved to Lima as a young man, worked for a few years in a small shop in Chinatown and returned to China to raise his children there. “He wasn’t going to stay in Peru; he wanted them to have a Chinese education, speak Chinese.”

Roxana’s father had similar ideas, and family’s members didn’t stray far from home. In her late twenties, during the Cultural Revolution, Roxana worked as a middle school math teacher at the same school she had attended as a student fifteen years earlier. She found the work mindless, but there was nothing to be done about it. With China’s Reform and Opening policies taking hold in the late 1970s, Roxana, still unmarried in her 30s, started thinking about her grandfather and his time in Peru. In November 1981, she flew into Lima’s Jorge Chávez International Airport with her younger sister.

Roxana didn’t speak any Spanish, but through the city’s Chinatown network, she found work as a receptionist. And then, with a bit of the language under her belt, she got work at a Chinese newspaper office. Within three years, her Spanish language ability was good enough for her to help translate and edit a book written about Qi Gong, written by a martial arts instructor named Alex Li Chang, also from Guangdong, who had come to South America to teach and popularize Chinese martial arts. The book project went well: the book was published, and the two married in 1984.

Roxana and Alex had a son, and the couple had ten good years together. Alex often traveled around South America for martial arts competitions and demonstrations; Roxana, like her grandfather, found work a small shop in Chinatown and watched after their son. “I’m very lucky when it comes to business and work, but very unlucky when it comes to love.”

In 1994, while he was in Argentina, Alex went to the hospital with cerebral hemorrhaging, likely the culmination of years of head injuries. Roxana flew to Buenos Aires and found the situation was not as grave as she’d imagined. Alex flew back to Guangzhou for treatment and called her in Peru, telling her that he could barely recognize the city he’d left years ago. Roxana’s husband died in 1997.

She shows me his picture from the inside jacket of La Energia Vital y La Fuerza Interna – the book that brought them together. He’s thin with a flat-top, in a white gi, standing battle-ready. She slips the book back in its plastic sleeve and we both make intimations to leave the restaurant. She brightens and tells me that she’s started teaching Chinese to some Peruvian students on top of her six-day-a-week job at the shop. She’s tired after her twelve-hour shifts, of course, but she enjoys it. “It’s always good to be busy,” she says.

I nod and smile, thinking of the dozens of questions and clarifications I still have for her, but which we don’t have the time for now. We shake hands and walk outside. I head left, she right.