‘Tweaking’ Feng Shui to Her Way
By Janet Dang

Before feng shui became the hottest trend for everyone from Silicon Valley millionaires to Hollywood celebs, Angi Ma Wong was on her way to becoming an authority on the ancient practice of the Chinese environmental art.

Wong, 53, owns and runs her one-woman feng shui and intercultural consulting company and has close to a dozen books on business relations with Asian and Asian Americans worldwide.

As Wong continues to go on her book tours, she has been bombarded with interview requests, demanding her expertise. Already, she has appeared in USA Today, New York Times, and Los Angeles Times, to name a few. But perhaps her biggest claim to fame is her appearance on the Oprah Winfrey show.

“My life is great right now!” she exclaims.

Wong’s life hasn’t always been so great, however. Eleven years ago she was diagnosed with breast cancer. But while undergoing chemotherapy, radiation and a lumpectomy, Wong also had a life-altering epiphany.

“I was redirecting my life, reevaluating my life,” she remembers. “Life is too short not to do what you really want to do. I kind of sat and meditated and thought about my life, my education and my upbringing, and decided that I could be a cultural bridge.” That was in1989.

Today, her mantra is: bridging cultures for better business.

Wong puts major corporate players in the know when it comes to marketing to the Asian and Asian American markets. With 8 million Asian Americans in the United States, their purchasing power alone is estimated to be in excess of $225 billion.

Wong lectures about the blunders commonly committed by well-intentioned but clearly uninformed decision makers who market to Asian Americans—things as simple as, “calling someone Japanese when they’re not,” or “putting Korean characters on a brochure upside down.”

How Wong became an “authority in intercultural training” was serendipity.

In the late ’80s and early ’90s during California’s economic slump, she says, the real estate developers “discovered that no body except Asians were buying [homes] and they were buying with cash.” But, she says, many prospective buyers “didn’t like the homes that were being built.”

She knew why: they weren’t feng shui compliant.

Around that time, Wong accepted an invitation to speak at a homebuilder’s conference, lecturing to a largely white crowd of real estate developers and investors on how to appeal to Asian and Asian American homebuyers. Included in her speech was information on feng shui influences.

“After the talk,” Wong remembers, “this man came up to me and said, ‘All I want to know is how much do you charge an hour and when can you come over?’ and he was the VP of Lewis Homes, a major builder in California,” she says. Wong’s success took off from there.

Through word of mouth, she soon secured speaking engagements and training seminars for real estate development firms. She’s trained over 90 major development firms to date.

Her expertise soon expanded to cover cultural sensitivity issues.

Instead of competing with giant PR and marketing firms that also tackle cultural barriers within business relations, Wong says she focuses on direct marketing and sales training to corporate employees. Her commercial clients have included Universal Studios, Motorola, Nordstrom, Ford Motor Company, AT & T, Bank of America, New York Life Insurance, to name a few. And every year her list of clients, continues to grow.

With the explosion of feng shui’s popularity, especially among the rich and famous, her list of celebrity clients has also expanded, though Wong explains that client confidentiality prevents her from divulging who’s doing feng shui.

Having grown up in Taiwan and Hong Kong as a daughter of a diplomat, Wong says feng shui was a natural part of her upbringing.

“I think I have a wonderful gift for it,” she says. “It seems to come easily for me.

Feng shui is very hot right now. [It] is just now beginning to form, it can get bigger. I’m in great demand right now, as a speaker, a trainer. Isn’t that everyone’s dream? I guess I tweaked the feng shui.”