Lily Lau

BaZi, the Four Pillars, is Lily's home ground: the stems and branches, the Day Master, the Ten Gods, the luck pillars and the parts of the system that practitioners disagree about. She writes the journal's BaZi and Chinese zodiac pieces, including the ones that explain why the animal on the placemat is one character out of eight.

She has spent years around traditional Chinese medicine, and that shows in how she writes about the five BaZi elements: as a working vocabulary shared between the chart, the clinic and the kitchen, and not as a set of magic labels. She is careful to say which claims are structural to the tradition and which are modern gloss.

Dreams are her other interest. She writes about what different traditions have said dreams are for, and where the modern science parts company with the old dream books.

Lily Lau is a pen name. She writes privately, and reads her own chart less often than you would expect.

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