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Sophia Liu: From Interpreter of the Spirit World to Female Home-Plate Umpire | Series Guide

A guide to the Sophia Liu series, from student mediumship, leaving temple life, and embracing Islam to baseball umpiring, social service, and equality in sport.

MediumshipFolk BeliefIslamGender Issues

Sophia Liu, also known by her Islamic name “Sophia” (Sophiyah Liu / Sophia Liu), is recognized by many readers. Some know her through the *Interpreter of the Spirit World* book series, discussions of her as an inspiration for the HBO Asia and Taiwan Public Television co-production *The Teenage Psychic*, or her experience as a Taiwanese female baseball umpire.

Her life is hard to summarize with a single label: student medium, temple practitioner, writer, Muslim, baseball umpire, translator, and women’s sports advocate, later extending into sports diplomacy and public service. If we treat her only as a protagonist in a “spirit-communication story,” we miss the most thought-provoking part: her real turning point was not simply “seeing the spirit world,” but how, after leaving the folk ghost-and-deity system, she later reinterpreted faith, the body, women’s conditions, and so-called “fate.”

It should be noted that this article involves many paranormal experiences and religious encounters. The material comes mainly from Sophia Liu’s own books, interviews, and media coverage. It is best read as personal life narrative and religious experience rather than as empirically verifiable scientific fact.

I. A Childhood Deprived: From “Seeing the Unseen” to Being Used by Adults

In Sophia Liu’s own account, she had experiences of perceiving the unseen world from a very young age. For a child, this ability did not come with romantic fascination, but with fear, confusion, and rapid appropriation by the adult world.

1. Unexplainable Childhood Experiences

She has said that when her grandmother died when she was about three and a half years old, she did not go back home for the funeral, yet she could describe to her mother the purple qipao and its pattern that her grandmother wore while being prepared for interment. This experience deepened her family’s belief that she could “see things.”

From then on, she was no longer just a child in the family; she was gradually placed into a role woven from folk belief, the dead, deities, and adult needs. Adults needed answers, so she was pushed to the front; others needed comfort, so she was asked to translate for the “unseen world.”

2. Becoming a “Shoujing” Practitioner at Five or Six

In interviews and her books, Sophia recalls that from about five or six years old she was forced to perform “shoujing” rituals for others. Because she was so young, she was sometimes literally carried onto a chair by adults to complete the ritual.

Taiwan once had a widespread illegal lottery craze around “Great Happiness” betting, where many believed deities, spirits, or mediums could reveal winning numbers. This pulled Sophia into the frenzy as a tool through which people sought certainty and answers.

This was not a path she chose, but one in which adults projected mystical demand, money fantasies, and faith anxiety onto her.

3. “Divine Decree” for Guavas: Seeing Blind Obedience in Folk Faith

She later reflected on how early she noticed blind conformity within folk belief. In some Taiwanese worship traditions, guava was considered unsuitable as an offering. When she wanted to eat one, however, she pretended to relay a divine instruction: “The Third Prince doesn't like pineapple; he likes guava.”

Adults then went to great lengths to offer guavas, and as the “spirit medium,” she could be the first to eat them, with full legitimacy.

The scene is absurd, and painful. It shows that what “the spirit said” often depends on who has authority to interpret it. If a child is given the role of medium, that child can easily mobilize a crowd of adults.

4. The *Ba-wan* Ruse and Questioning the Dead

She also described a representative scene: adults often deceived her at three or four in the morning, saying they were taking her to Changhua for its famous *ba-wan* meatballs. But when she got out of the car, she found not a food stall but a series of eerie funeral halls.

Adults then asked her to question the recently deceased: “Where is the money hidden?” even asking the spirit of a grandfather who did not know even the 26 English letters to bless his granddaughter for high TOEFL scores.

These experiences gradually made her realize that she was not carrying out some lofty “heavenly mandate,” but functioning more like a “human translation machine” kept by adults. Her childhood was wrapped in religion, but at its core she was being used, consumed, and forced to grow up too soon.

II. Opening a Shrine at Fifteen: Seeing the Dark Side of the Religious Service Economy

At fifteen, Sophia Liu began operating her own temple altar. This period marked her transition from passive participation in folk belief to a deeper entry into structured religious service systems.

1. Diagnosing with a “Ghost Doctor”

She says in books and interviews that at fifteen she rented a place, established an altar, and worked with the spirit of a Qing-era divine physician named Li Baoyan, whom she associated with Baosheng Dadi. In her account, modern medicine had left this “spirit doctor” almost “unemployed” in the unseen world, so they divided the work: she translated while the spirit diagnosed and prescribed.

Although she knew nothing about Chinese medicine, she says she was able to write herbal prescriptions. This briefly caused a local sensation, with a Chinese medicine pharmacy specifically cooperating to dispense them.

Whether or not one believes these experiences, one thing is clear: folk faith is not only a matter of belief; it is deeply entangled with medical anxiety, family distress, local social networks, and economic interests.

2. Temples as a “Religious Service Industry”

Sophia later gave a direct critique of temple systems. She argued that many temples, in practice, have become a “religious service industry.” Devotees come to temples expecting causes explained and solutions found; to sustain income, temples must continuously generate problems.

She acknowledged that some devotees were not ill, but might still be told they had a “spirit attachment” or other spiritual interference so that a consultation fee could be collected.

The sharpness of this claim is that it is not a detached outsider’s contempt for folk religion, but the reflection of someone who once worked inside the system on its own logic of profit.

3. Joss Money and the “Protection Fee” Logic

She also criticized the relation between burning joss paper and spirit expulsion. In her view, using joss paper to send spirits away addresses the symptom, not the root. If spirits benefit from this, they can return like extortion rackets collecting protection fees: from every six months to every month, and then even more frequently, haunting followers.

Later, new labels emerged—“prosperity gold,” “yin gold,” and other terms. In her view, these easily become commercialized rituals that trade offerings for cash.

This critique is not aimed at one specific ritual alone; it points to the larger mechanism whereby fear gets priced, unease gets packaged as service, and religion slides into extraction.

4. “Killing” a Spirit and Life in Collapse

She has mentioned that temple life also involved complex financial interests and factional competition, including entanglements with direct-sales and pyramid schemes. Later, another medium allegedly “killed” her long-time spiritual collaborator Li Baoyan through ritual combat.

From her narration, this was devastating. Without that unseen helper, she suddenly felt unemployed. The meaning structure built over two decades around her medium identity seemed to collapse.

She developed deep guilt and moral anguish and once stood on the ninth floor of her university building, contemplating suicide.

What matters here is not whether spirit combat was real, but what happens to someone who is forced from childhood to believe they carry a destiny, and then faces emptiness, blame, and self-reconstruction when that identity collapses.

III. Breaking With Folk Spirit Systems: Finding Another Religious Order in the Mosque

Sophia Liu’s true turning point was leaving the temple system and finding a new interpretive framework in Islam.

1. Conflict When She Left the Altar

When she decided to leave the altar near the end of her university years, she faced threats from temple-side actors. They circled her with one hundred and eight incense sticks and challenged her: “Will you accept your heavenly mandate?” She replied: “Accept it how? Should I use a water barrel to catch it?”

The force of that line is that it brings the seemingly sacred term “heavenly mandate” down to material reality. If a mandate requires threatening, intimidating, and controlling a person to complete itself, is that truly sacred—or a human-made power structure?

She also says they threatened to send “twelve white-robed Guanyin bodhisattvas” to her home that night to punish her. She later saw twelve ugly female ghosts enter the room and, enraged, pointed at them and cursed until the alleged “deities” fled.

In narrative terms, this was symbolic: she no longer responded to the invisible world with fear but confronted it first with anger, judgment, and agency.

2. A Mosque with “No Ghosts”

Around 2005, while studying at National Chengchi University’s Religious Studies Institute, Sophia encountered Islam. She visited Taipei mosques and was struck by how different they felt from many places she had known. She felt there were no ghosts in mosques, and even no familiar “space for the dead” where spirits gathered.

This experience became a major turning point for her shift in faith.

For her, a mosque’s order—“no idol worship, no burning of joss paper, no trading offerings for spirits”—broke the interaction pattern of spirits and deities to which she had long been accustomed.

3. Jinn, Ash, and Her Understanding of Islam

After consulting an Islamic religious teacher, she encountered the Quran and Islamic teachings about Jinn. She found that accounts of the times when Jinn appear and their dietary preferences corresponded with parts of her earlier experiences.

This also led her to reinterpret folk notions such as “ghosts like joss-paper ash”: if a spirit prefers ash, then burning joss paper may not simply honor the dead, but feed a kind of being that should not continually be fed.

This framework overturned many explanations she had heard in Taiwanese folk belief, such as “ghosts are most numerous at eleven at night,” “seeing the spirit world means carrying heavy karma,” or “someone with a heavenly mandate must serve the deities.”

She eventually accepted Islam and became a Muslim. For her, it was not a move from one mysterious system to another; it was a shift from systems organized around fear, transaction, and ritual control toward monotheistic order with clearer boundaries and structure.

4. “You Have Light”: Faith and Boundaries

She once recounted a symbolic detail: after conversion, the spirits that had long harassed her gradually disappeared. Later, when visiting her brother-in-law’s home, the “Earth God” spirit who once frequently appeared and talked to her kept its distance and told her: “You have light; I’m afraid to come near you.”

Regardless of how readers interpret this, the account marks a key change: she began to have boundaries. Once, she had been made perpetually available to invisible entities; now she could finally say “no.”

This is one of the strongest parts of Sophia’s story: redemption is not merely obtaining an answer, but finally no longer being driven by fear.

IV. From Medium to Author: *Interpreter of the Spirit World* and the Public Narrative of *The Teenage Psychic*

Under the name “Sophia,” Sophia Liu later published the *Interpreter of the Spirit World* series, turning her early mediumship, temple experiences, and life turning points into writing.

1. The *Interpreter of the Spirit World* Series

Public bibliographic records show that *Interpreter of the Spirit World: A Mediumistic Journey from Student Medium to Female Home-Plate Umpire* was published by Suncolor Culture in 2009. She later published *Interpreter of the Spirit World 2: Forty Questions and Answers Across Life and Death*, *Interpreter of the Spirit World 3: Reincarnations of Affection and Love*, and, in 2019, *Interpreter of the Spirit World 4: My Life After Mediumship*.

These books are not merely collections of supernatural stories; they are her way of processing death, family ties, folk customs, emotional relationships, and crises of faith.

2. Inspiration and Cultural Consultant for *The Teenage Psychic*

Her experience also became an important reference for screen productions. Media reports often describe her as one of the inspirations for *The Teenage Psychic* and note that she served as a cultural consultant.

Still, as with all screen projects, artistic adaptation is inevitable. To understand Sophia Liu herself, one should still return to her own books, interviews, and public talks, rather than equating her with a character alone.

3. From Ghost Stories to Critiquing Folk Religion

What sets her apart is that she is not merely someone who tells ghost stories. Her sharpness lies in identifying control, profiteering, intimidation, and gender oppression within folk religion.

She speaks of spirit realms not to intensify superstition; she speaks of ghosts and deities in order to dismantle blind fear of the unseen.

This makes her story not just lurid material, but one that can be read within the contexts of religious studies, folk culture, women’s experience, and social observation.

V. Breaking Gender Discrimination: A Baseball Umpire on the International Stage

After leaving temple life, Sophia directed her energy toward her beloved baseball. She has said that if someone truly has a heavenly mandate, hers was never to pretend to be divine in temples; it was to ensure Taiwan no longer pushes women out of baseball fields because of gender.

1. Gender Discrimination on the Baseball Field

Baseball has long been treated as a male-dominated sport. When Sophia entered the umpiring system, she encountered direct humiliation and exclusion. She has said that when taking umpire certification exams, someone told her to withdraw and become a scorekeeper; male umpires did not allow her to sit in the chair reserved for men; and some even used men’s protective gear to harass her sexually with words.

These experiences show that for women entering traditionally male spaces, effort alone is not enough. They must confront institutional, linguistic, bodily, spatial, and credential-based exclusion simultaneously.

2. Custom-Fitted Equipment and International Training

Later, when she served as interpreter during a visit from a New York Yankees coach to Taiwan, Sophia gained greater exposure to international baseball systems. Public reports say she received corporate sponsorship for custom-made female chief-umpire protective gear and trained at a professional umpire school in the United States.

She later officiated or trained in Hong Kong, Australia, Korea, the United States, Canada, and elsewhere, gradually moving from Taiwanese fields to the international stage.

3. A Flagship Figure Among Taiwanese Female Baseball Umpires

Public records frequently describe Sophia as Taiwan’s first female umpire certified by the national baseball association and a pioneer among female home-plate umpires in national competitions. She later received the 2019 IOC Women and Sport World Trophy and is regarded as an important representative of women's participation in Taiwanese sport.

Her significance is not simply that “a woman succeeded.” It is that she transformed personal injury into institutional breakthrough. Her presence showed those who came after that women can stand behind home plate, wear home-plate gear, and be called “the umpire” by players.

4. Redefining “Heavenly Mandate”

She later recalled that when she was preparing to leave the field, the players who had once chased and excluded her took off their caps and said, “Thank you, umpire. See you again.”

In that moment, she reinterpreted “heavenly mandate.” A mandate is not something imposed through temple coercion, spirit intimidation, or adult elevation to spiritual authority as a cash source; it is a person, through their own choices, blood, sweat, and persistence, opening a path for those who follow.

If there is a true religious significance in Sophia Liu’s life, perhaps it is here: she moved from having her destiny explained for her, to explaining her own destiny; from being represented by deities, to speaking out for herself and others.

VI. Why Sophia Liu’s Story Deserves to Be Recorded

Sophia Liu’s life can easily be consumed as “paranormal gossip,” but what truly deserves to remain is the deeper material embedded within it.

1. She Exposed the Shadow Side of Folk Belief

Folk belief does not automatically mean superstition, nor is it inherently harmful. It carries local order, family emotion, death ritual practice, and psychological comfort.

But Sophia’s experience reminds us: when faith loses limits, fear becomes commodified; when a medium is sacralized, a child can be exploited in a socially acceptable way; when “fate” becomes a tool of control, a person can be forced to surrender their life choices.

2. She Transformed Religious Experience into Self-Rescue

Her later choice to embrace Islam was not simply changing religious labels. More importantly, she found a framework that allowed her to escape invisible entanglements.

For her, Islam offered order, boundaries, and stability, rather than further transactions and intimidation.

That is why her conversion is distinctive: it was not an abstract theological debate, but a concrete choice of a different religious order by someone who had long lived inside a Taiwanese folk spirit system.

3. She Turned Personal Trauma Into Public Action

From medium to baseball umpire, these seem like entirely different life phases. But the inner logic is consistent: she has continuously resisted roles imposed by others.

As a child, adults wanted her to be a medium; temples wanted her to shoulder a heavenly mandate; baseball wanted her to step back because of her sex. But she ultimately chose not to step back.

Her strongest source of power is not “seeing things others cannot,” but seeing how power operates and deciding not to obey it anymore.

Related themes can be found in the Yu Bin Spirit-World Series.

FAQ

Which religious traditions does this article discuss?

Refer to the specific explanations in the main text. The Religion section on this site covers Christian traditions (including Catholicism, Protestantism, and charismatic movements), Eastern religions, esotericism, and other traditions; each article has its own position and perspective.

Is this a religious promotion or an academic discussion?

Articles here focus on cultural observation and scholarly introduction. They do not represent any single religious position and do not constitute religious proselytizing. Readers should approach them with their own faith background and critical thinking.

How can I deepen my understanding of the religious topics discussed?

It is recommended to consult the “References” listed at the end of the article, including primary texts, scholarly papers, or course resources. Readers interested in the intersection of Eastern traditions and divinatory culture may also refer to the site’s I Ching divination tool as a cultural entry point.

Where can I find related series mentioned in the article?

The Religion section has multiple series, including the nine-part “Yu Bin Spirit-World Series.” Complete indexes are available through the character-series entry pages.

References

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