The Korean Wave 2006 - Korean Cultural Service

The New York Times, friday, december 22, 2006
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On His
Ancestors’ Wings,
a Korean Soars
to the U.N.
By MARTIN FACKLER
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.
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“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.