Kim Hye-yoon's SajuA Jewel Born on the Day of First Snow, Shining After Seven Years of Bit Parts (Metal Pig)K-Drama · November 10, 1996

You are a small jewel sunk at the bottom of a winter sea. Water fills every side, yet the earth that should hold that jewel up is thin, and the sunlight that should warm it from above hangs far away. The world will remember you as a cheerful, hardworking actor, but to my eye that diligence is not ground you were born with. It is a levee you have raised by hand, one day’s worth at a time, against the water that overflows.

In Nagasaki, in the days when Dutch ships came and went, I saw a young physician. He held the same Metal Pig Day Pillar as you, and in him the Performer ran deep, the star that draws up other people’s words and gestures just as they are. Running errands as an interpreter beside the Dutch doctor on Dejima, he copied that man’s hand movements and prescriptions with his eyes and made them his own skill. Yet in that age, learning could be put to use only under the name of a licensed physician, so for a long time he healed people standing behind another man’s prescriptions.

Metal Pig — A Jewel Born on the Day of First Snow, Shining After Seven Years of Bit Parts

You are clear and keen-edged. Your Day Master, Yin Metal, is metal already refined, an energy like a gemstone or the tip of a needle, and the Needle Star sitting on your Day Master sharpens that edge once more, so you dig into even the smallest grain. Yet you were born in the Pig month of early winter and lost the help of the season, and in none of the three known pillars does your Day Master have a root. The Rat Water of your year branch and the Pig Water of your month and day branches make all three branches water, and the only earth to give birth to metal is the Yin Earth of your month stem, so the chart as a whole has a weak Day Master, and a very weak one at that. The introversion of the ISTJ you have named as your type points the same way as this chart.

This water is your talent. The water that metal gives birth to is the energy of expression, and with two Performer stars sitting in your month and day branches, you were born with the power to carry other people’s feelings out through your own body. Only, when water is abundant, weak metal pours out its energy without rest, and the Pig–Pig Self-Punishment, in which your month and day branches overlap as the same Pig Water, easily shows itself as a habit of chewing over the same thoughts and whipping yourself on. The anxiety you once voiced, that with no answer to whether you were acting well you would rather be sorted by a test score, must have risen from exactly this seat. You have said that in those bleak years you held on by setting only one day’s goals at a time, such as watching one film and writing down your thoughts, or exercising for an hour.

This chart takes shape as a Steady Wealth Structure, and Yang Wood, the Steady Wealth, hides inside the Pig Water of your month branch. It is a structure that gathers faithfully, so your way of stacking one day’s goals until they make ten years was the road this structure uses best. The Noble Authority of Yang Fire in your year stem meets your Day Master in the Yang Fire–Yin Metal Combination, so there is also a grain in which your heart binds itself to an upright frame and a recognized place. The Literary Star and the Scholar Star in your year branch add a mind that learns and puts things in order, so the college days you spent up all night in the library to win a scholarship were no accident either.

You are someone who lives by becoming someone else. The Performer is the star that breaks frames and brings out another person’s way of speaking and breathing as if it were its own, so your acting method, in which the whole inside changes once you first build a character’s speech, little interjections and habits, is exactly how this star is used. That those habits linger for a while even after a project ends is also a mark of a chart where the Performer runs deep. The Mystic of Yin Earth in your month stem is the seat of inspiration that draws up unusual interpretations, so writing and shooting your graduation film yourself is a trace of this Mystic and the Performer working together. Rather than an office job, a place where the board changes with each project, that is, a place where the Performer moves freely inside the frame of Noble Authority, is the garment that fits you best.

Your Vital Element, Earth, is the people, systems and habits that hold you up. The old books say that winter Yin Metal shines only when it is washed by water and warmed by sunlight, and since the Yang Water to wash it is already ample inside the Pig Water, what this chart wants now is sunlight. That sunlight, Yang Fire, shows in your year stem, but it is bound to your Day Master by combination and stands far off, so warmth always comes to you in the form of position and recognition. Only, when fire overflows, it becomes a burden that presses straight down on a weak Day Master, so keep both faces in mind together, that sunlight is needed and that too much of it is a load. Your Avoid Element, Wood, is not always harmful either. It is a conditional energy that wears your earth down only when it comes in with no way to secure the earth that holds you up.

Where you get stuck is clear. With a weak Day Master and the water of expression overflowing, the trap of this chart is overload, pouring out all your energy in each project until you are emptied. The remedy is to fill the space between one project and the next with earth, that is, to set first a place to come back to and a fixed daily routine. From around November 2017, when your present Fire Monkey Decade Luck came in, the Monkey Metal, a Rival, became a root of metal in the branches once again, and in 2018 you broke through an audition at odds of two hundred to one and stood on screen by the end of that year. Your wish to play a character who has a profession also meets the grain of the Steady Wealth Structure, which ties work built with sweat to its reward.

Your money comes from your talent. The current in which the energy of expression flows into wealth, as water feeds wood, is already laid inside the Pig Water, and as a Steady Wealth Structure you are a vessel that keeps its credit, builds steadily and in the end makes room to spare. Your strength to carry wealth is middling, so it is enough to know exactly one place where it grows and one place where it leaks. Where it grows is the credit of keeping your promises, and where it leaks lies in this, that the bigger the tree of wealth grows, the more the earth holding you up is worn away. It is a structure in which rest and the body run empty first precisely when work piles up and money comes in, so in this chart your greatest capital is not your bank account but your energy.

I will name the years when wealth stands firm plainly. The Earth Monkey year of 2028 and the Earth Rooster year of 2029 bring your Vital Element, Earth, together with your Support Element, Metal, so they are when the power to guard and to grow stands firmest. That flow carries on through the Metal Dog year of 2030. On the other hand, in the Wood Rabbit year of 2035 the Rabbit Wood of the year joins the Pig Water of your day branch in the Pig–Rabbit Half Combination and swells the energy of wood, wearing your earth away, so it will serve you better to set any large contract or any decision that ties up a lump sum before or after that year rather than in it. Which assets to hold and how is yours to choose. What I tell you reaches as far as the times when wealth stands and the times when it leaks.

Here is one thing to do from this month. Before you take on the schedule of your next project, make it your order of things to first mark on the calendar the stretch of rest between the end of this project and the start of the next.

The star that means a partner for you is fire, that is, the Authority star, and it shows clearly in your year stem as the Noble Authority of Yang Fire. Noble Authority is the grain of someone upright, warm and steady in their place, so you are easily drawn to someone as constant as sunlight. That Yang Fire meets your Day Master in a combination, so once your heart goes out you are the kind who binds deeply, and because the star sits in the outer seat of the year stem, bonds tend to reach you through work and social ties. Just as a winter jewel longs for sunlight, the partner who suits you will be someone who warms your cold water.

In your spouse palace, the Pig Water of your day branch, the Performer, the Golden Carriage Star and the Lonely Swan Star sit together. Because the Performer sits there, even in close relationships your words and feelings run rich and you keep a finely measuring eye on the other person, and the Lonely Swan Star adds a grain of long stretches spent alone and bonds that settle slowly. In return, the Golden Carriage Star has fastened help to that same seat, so the later a bond arrives, the more generously it will hold up your life. The Peach Blossom Star in your year branch, an energy that gathers people’s eyes, is already at work in your career, and as a year when the energy of bonds moves, the Fire Goat year of 2027, when fire and earth come in together, is named first.

Here is one thing to do from today. When you sit face to face with someone close, before you read their heart for them, try first putting your own heart into a single sentence.

Yours is an early-winter chart brimming with cold water, so your energy tends to drain away along with the water. They say the first snow fell on the day you were born and that you love winter, the season of your birthday, most of all, but the season you love and the energy you need are not the same. Love winter with all your heart, yet in that season above all, warming your feet and belly and never skipping a meal is how you keep your body well. The times of earth are mealtimes and the turning of the seasons, so even when filming days pile up, hold your mealtimes fast so they do not waver.

The energy of the mind leaks along the same road. A chart with a deep Performer and the Pig–Pig Self-Punishment tends, after pouring out great feeling, to chew over the same scenes and thoughts for a long time, so a body that has come through a series with ninety-five crying scenes in sixteen episodes ought to put the recovery afterward on its schedule too. Enjoy your water-loving pastimes such as swimming and the sea, but when you come out of the water, warm your body at once and linger a while where the sun falls. As for sleep, drawing it earlier so that you fold up the day before it passes midnight is the way this chart nourishes life.

The Fire Horse year of 2026 is, for you, a year of position and recognition. The Yang Fire in the stem comes in as Noble Authority and the Horse Fire in the branch as Fierce Authority, a sunlight that raises your name and at the same time presses on a weak Day Master, and the Yang Fire of the year meets your Day Master, Yin Metal, in a combination, making it a year that binds you deep into your work. The key word of this year is recognition. This year you stepped out as the nine-tailed fox Eun-ho in No Tail to Tell and in your first horror film, Salmokji, and you rose to Best Actress at the Korean Broadcasting Awards. It is as if your efforts came back as a name in a year of Noble Authority, yet this is a year in which the good and the cautions stand against each other and lean far neither way.

Let me mark the headwind clearly. The Horse Fire of the year confronts the Rat Water of your year branch head-on in the Rat–Horse Clash, and since both are cardinal branches at the height of their power the collision is large, and it is a year in which the force of water presses down on fire, so passion and drive easily sag. The year branch is the seat of the background you grew up in and of your social ties, where the Peach Blossom Star and the Literary Star sit, so the face you show outside and your ties with people would have shaken, and you would have tired as much as you were busy. In a year like this, nothing serves you better than setting time aside to warm your body and keep it moving.

Spend the two months that remain this way. November is a favorable month when the energy of earth comes in, a fitting time to calmly prepare for your next project, Good Partner 2, and to put your coming contracts in order. December is an even month when metal and water come in together, so it will serve you better to cut back on year-end events, warm your body and keep to quiet care that gathers in the year.

Let me first trace the road behind you. Your first Decade Luck, the Earth Dog, was a time of support with earth in both its stem and its branch, and the Fire Rooster Decade Luck from age eleven was a time when, under the pressure of the Fierce Authority of Yin Fire, the Rooster Metal gave you a root of your own metal for the first time. In the Water Dragon year of 2012, the Dragon Earth of the year joined hands with the Rooster Metal of that Decade Luck in the Dragon–Rooster Combination and lent strength to what you were doing in that decade, and that year you raised your grades and opened the door of an acting academy. The next year, the Water Snake year of 2013, was a fierce year in which the Snake Fire of the year struck both Pig Waters of your month and day branches in the Snake–Pig Clash. In a year when your place of work and the ground of your daily life shook, you made your debut, and after that you went on with bit parts without a single line, traveling alone to sets by bus and subway, so the weight of reality must have been no small thing.

Now you stand at the tail end of the Fire Monkey Decade Luck, which runs from age twenty-one to thirty, from around November 2017 to around November 2027. It was a decade in which the Noble Authority of Yang Fire opened position and name, and the Rival, the Monkey Metal, once again gave your weak Day Master some metal to stand firm beside it, a stretch in which support and caution were mixed in about equal weight. Right after winning Best New Actress at the Blue Dragon Film Awards in November 2022, you said your acting life had turned from a question mark into an exclamation mark, and those words hold the very nature of this Decade Luck.

Next comes the Wood Goat Decade Luck from age thirty-one to forty, from around November 2027 to around November 2037. The Goat Earth in its branch comes in as your Vital Element, Earth, making it a good decade in which ground of your own settles under your feet for the first time, while the Yin Wood in its stem is Dynamic Wealth, an energy on the side of your Avoid Element that widens your board but can wear that earth away. Within it, 2028 through 2030 are years to push forward, and the Metal Pig year of 2031, with the self-punishment of three Pig Waters overlapping, makes your thoughts go round and round, so you must write your priorities down. The years 2033 and 2034 are a gentle flow again, but keep the Wood Rabbit year of 2035 apart in your memory as a year of caution when the energy of wood grows. After that, the Wood Horse Decade Luck from age forty-one to fifty, from around November 2037 to around November 2047, brings the Steady Wealth of Yang Wood and the Fierce Authority of Horse Fire, a good stretch in which your board of wealth grows and sunlight falls on you directly, though responsibility grows just as heavy. From fifty-one to seventy, the Water Snake and Water Dragon Decade Luck periods lay water down as the base and bring in fire and then earth, a time when teaching what you have built and leaving it in writing comes easily. So what to do now is to clear a place, in the one year left of the Fire Monkey Decade Luck, to receive the new earth.

Let me set the ISTJ you have named beside your saju. On the axis of Introversion and Extraversion, both of the saju’s calculations point clearly to Introversion, so even though you were a bright student who went as far as becoming class president to get into the talent show, yours is the kind of energy that fills up when you are alone. The axis of Sensing and Intuition is where the two lenses part. The saju leans clearly toward Intuition, following the inspiration of the Mystic of Yin Earth, while your type is known to have been INFJ at first and then changed to ISTJ. To my eye, you have grown Sensing and laid it on top of an inborn Intuition. Your acting method, building first what the hand can grasp, a character’s speech and habits, to catch hold of the unseen inside, is the very scene of the two sides moving together within one person.

On the axis of Thinking and Feeling, the saju too points toward Thinking in both calculations, so however the Performer’s feelings overflow, the judgment that handles them is held by cool reckoning and the standard of Noble Authority. On the axis of Judging and Perceiving, a single calculation, that of the ten gods, points toward Judging, and your way of setting one day’s goals and keeping them every day shows that direction just as it is. In a magazine interview in May 2022 you said of yourself that once you are hooked on something, you think of nothing else, and that immersion, where Introversion, Thinking and Judging gather in one place, meets exactly the Steady Wealth Structure of this chart.

True to this type, the way to use your Vital Element, Earth, is to keep a ledger. Take out again that daily record you filled with one film and one line of thoughts in your bleak years, and make it a ledger of earth in which, for each project, you write down the habits you borrowed from that character and the habits you will give back. The ISTJ grain of running daily life on checklists will itself become the ground that holds you up. In the next Decade Luck, when the Goat Earth arrives from November 2027, this ledger will become a vessel that keeps what you have built for a long time.

That physician of Nagasaki died without ever having his name entered in the register of licensed physicians. Yet the records of treatment he wrote down every day stayed in the hands of the young physicians who came and went at his house, and the skill he had copied with his eyes and made his own became, without his name, the prescriptions of those who followed. In that age, the Performer’s gift of carrying other people’s movements out through one’s own body stopped at the door of recognition, but does today’s world not open screens, stages and awards to that same gift? In May 2024 you said you would become not the number one but the only one, and since what that physician never had was a name of his own, you are walking the road of being remembered by yours. Only, you too, like that physician, must become someone who writes every day.

First, in work and money, put your weight on the years when earth and metal arrive. Within 2027, choose the one project that will open your next chapter, and in the Earth Monkey year of 2028 and the Earth Rooster year of 2029, widen your board with roles that stand on solid ground, like characters who have a profession.

Second, in people, go beside those who carry the grain of earth. People who keep their promises and show it in deeds rather than words, steady as a prop, and the production crews and veteran staff who have long held the same sets, carry the energy of your Vital Element to you. Before your Decade Luck changes in November 2027, sort out by this grain the people who will go with you through the next ten years and keep them close.

Third, guard body and mind by fixing a place to come back to. Since you change perfume with each project, keep one ochre ceramic cup at home, always in the same spot, and make the first few minutes of the morning with a warm cup of tea your sign of coming back to yourself. If you begin in December this year, it will settle into your body before winter is over.

Fourth, smooth over in advance the stumbling stones of the Decade Luck to come. In the Metal Pig year of 2031 your thoughts will easily go round in circles, so firm up the habit of writing your priorities before that year comes, and pulling the big contracts and decisions of the Wood Rabbit year of 2035 forward into the gentle flow of 2033 and 2034 to settle them there is highly auspicious.

The Fire Goat year of 2027 brings sunlight and earth together, and around November of that year comes the threshold where your Decade Luck changes. Once that year has passed, come and tell me what character you chose as you crossed that threshold, and how the earth felt the first time it settled beneath your feet. To the jewel beneath the winter water, may a sunlight that stays long take the place of the cold.