vietnam china same same but different

Christine and I were at the "Chinese Pagoda," in the old French getaway town of Dalat, in the mountainous central highlands of Vietnam. From the main hall of the temple I could hear what sounded to me like the din of Chinese chatter. As opposed to Vietnamese chatter. "You zhuan! You zhuan!" is what I thought I heard. So as we headed back out, we stopped in the hall where all the commotion was coming from. All that was there was a small wooden table with a round top. Suddenly the bunch of Chinese people, who of course to my endless embarrassment turned out to be Taiwanese people, who were walking away as we came up ran over to us. In broken English they explained to us that we just had to put our hands on that table. Actually, hold them just above the table, with a little space between, see, because the table will move by itself. So we put our hands over it, and the Taiwanese lady put her hands over it, and she started saying "You zhuan, you zhuan" again, and was reminded by her friends that she should speak English, and because she was faltering over "Turn right" I graciously explained that it was OK to speak Chinese with us. Besides, the table might not understand English, it was a Chinese pagoda afterall. So we all shouted "you zhuan you zhuan" for a while, and nothing moved. "It doesn't work sometimes, we don't know why," they said. "Let's call over that Vietnamese lady who works here, she can get it to move because she can speak Vietnamese to it." The Vietnamese lady who works here. So she comes over, puts her hands over it, tells us to do the same, and then lets loose with the Vietnamese, and sure enough, the table starts moving. It starts moving so fast that the three of us are running full speed in tiny circles around this table. Only the woman's hands were clearly on the table! Christine and I were looking at each other, "Is she for real?" The Taiwanese people were eating it up- they totally thought the table was moving on its own. It was one of the most ridiculous things I've ever been involved in. And when she stopped spinning the table and lifted her hands, there were even greasy thumbprints left on the table from where she had been touching it! When it was all over with we discussed and agreed with the Taiwanese that it was, pretty much, the most amazing thing we'd ever seen.