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SCMP Reporter

Many restaurants aim to deliver an out-of-this-world gourmet experience, but a new one in Wan Chai takes the idea a little further. 
The Supreme Master Ching Hai International Association has opened The Loving Hut in Johnston Road,  a vegetarian restaurant promoting a way of eating  that the Supreme Master says will help save the planet. 
All good so far. But then things take a galactic leap.
Supreme Master Ching Hai, a 58-year-old Vietnamese woman, claims to have had contact with Martians, and she says they want us to 'save your home before it's too late'. 
The Supreme Master, or Suma Ching as she is also known, is no stranger to Hong Kong. Clad in white, she stood at the gates of Whitehead Detention Centre on April 29, 1994, as her disciples wept and sang peace songs in the hope that detained Vietnamese boatpeople inside would not carry out their threat to commit mass suicide. They did not. 
Her association was banned by Beijing as an evil cult in 1992 but has been a legally registered organisation  in Hong Kong since the early 1990s. She also appeared before thousands  at Queen Elizabeth Stadium in Wan Chai on her The Ocean of Love global tour in May 2000. 
When the Sunday Morning Post visited the restaurant last week, a videoconference between Suma Ching and an audience of people of different ethnicities  played continuously on a couple of video screens. 
In the video, she answers questions relating to Martians in English. She also talks about how the earth can avoid a global-warming disaster similar to one that allegedly occurred on Mars. 
According to SupremeMasterTV .com,   the Supreme Master Ching Hai 'is a world-renowned spiritual teacher, artist, and humanitarian, whose loving assistance extends beyond all cultural boundaries'. 
It says Ching Hai, whose Chinese characters mean 'pure ocean', was born Hue Thi Thanh in central Au Lac (Vietnam). She studied in Europe and worked for the Red Cross. Her 'yearning to find a remedy' for suffering led her from a marriage to a German physician to the Himalayas, where 'she received the divine transmission of the inner Light and Sound' from a True Master and 'attained the Great Enlightenment'.
However, her association has been linked to a high-level financial scandal in the United States. 
According to the Los Angeles Times and testimony by New York Ching Hai Association leader Zhi Hua Dong before a US Senate committee, Suma Ching presented blank money orders to members to give to the fund set up to defend Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton over the Whitewater scandal in the 1990s. 
Clinton fund officials eventually returned more than US$600,000 after sequentially numbered money orders landed in the fund. As US president, Bill Clinton lifted a trade embargo on Vietnam in 1994.
According to a story in the London newspaper The Sunday Times,  the money was  delivered to the fund by Yah Lin 'Charlie' Trie,  a US citizen born in Taiwan,  who used to serve food in the Fu Lin restaurant in a run-down section of Little Rock, Arkansas. One of his frequent customers, and an eventual firm friend, was Mr Clinton. 
The Los Angeles Times reported that  Trie was sentenced in November 1999 to   four months' home detention and three years' probation for violating election-campaign finance laws. At one stage during investigations into the fund scandal, Trie apparently disappeared for some time into mainland China.  
The Los Angeles Times also says Suma Ching has tens of thousands of disciples worldwide  and raises money through  clothing (Celestial Clothing), jewellery and dinnerware lines as well as a global string of vegetarian restaurants.
At The Loving Hut, staff were apparently happy to talk about the Martian thing. 'No one has asked me about Martians but have asked questions about global warming,' said a woman who would only identify herself as Liu, a devotee  and spokeswoman at the restaurant.  
The restaurant owner, who is also a  devotee of Suma Ching, declined to be interviewed but confirmed that more such restaurants would open in Hong Kong.  
'It is just normal,' said another devotee named Liu,  a man in his 40s, opining on Martians. 'There might be extraterrestrial creatures living around us.  It's impossible to explain everything only by what we see.'
However, another long-time follower, Tung Yan-wai, 36, said people should not make too much of the Martian issue. 'The master is just using different ways to express the message to protect the earth.  The message from Martians may only be a metaphor.'
Both Liu and Tung agreed  it was much more important to tackle the climate-change crisis  than focus on  messages  from outer space. 
And you can't argue with that.



It's true, Martians don't want us to repeat their warming disaster