None of us had ever heard of feng shui in the 1980's. But then the 1990's hit, and suddenly feng shui was everywhere. It remains popular, which is more than I can say for a lot of crazes that swept America in the 1990's!
Has anyone traced the popularity of feng shui in America? Surely there must have been a Patient Zero. I wonder if it was Donald Trump, as the Wikpedia page on feng shui mentions that he is an avid follower of the practice. (Or that he is business-savvy enough to make his buildings feng shui-compatible, in order to win the approval of Chinese business partners.)
It seems like one day we were just living our lives and minding our own business, and the next day we were poring over charts of numbers, debating which number and shape of "lucky bamboo" to get (curly or straight? Three, or five?) and hanging octagonal mirrors over our front doors. I feel like Madonna's interest in the Kaballah is tied up in there somewhere - all those red string bracelets everyone suddenly started wearing.
The first time I heard of feng shui was when I started working at an unaccredited "college" which offered three-hour seminars on various topics for a fee. We called them "classes," which struck me (a recent college graduate) as somewhat disingenuous. But they were willing to pay me to take phone calls and rearrange chairs after each class, so I wasn't going to argue.
One of our most popular classes was the series on feng shui. I remember my new boss coaching me on how to pronounce it. This would have been about 1994. I was curious, because I was living in a 200 square foot studio apartment in a third-floor walk-up, and who wouldn't want to increase their wealth just by putting a small pile of coins in the right corner?
Later, one of the baristas at the coffee shop I worked at on weekends offered to feng shui my apartment. (I had moved to a nicer place. Maybe that little pile of coins really helped!) She repositioned my couch diagonally, and insisted that it would be necessary to set my TV directly atop my VCR. It would be fine, she said. She did this all the time. (P.S. that VCR died about two weeks later. Burnt out from heat built up by the weight of the television pressing on it. I never had the heart to tell her.)