In an achievement- oriented society like Singapore, talent like that can be a real plus. Drawing a bead on parents, Ms. Chen has set up an after-school academy here to teach children the abacus. Five-year-old pupils, their little fingers flying on plastic abacuses, zip through 40 problems in less than 1- minuets. Most of the addition Ms. Chen does now is of the $136 tuition the parents of her 1,100 students each pay for 12 abacus lessons. She employs 25 teachers.

After years of decline in modern Asia, the world’s oldest calculator is enjoying a revival. Its flat, rectangular frame and rows of beads offer a tactile, visual and wonderfully noisy way for children to grasp arithmetic.

Spurred by the success of abacus academies such as Ms. Chen’s, Singapore and Malaysia are experimenting with teaching the abacus in public schools. Abacus aficionados in Taiwan and South Korea compete to see whose math is faster. Even in Japan, where electronic gadgets fill stores, accountants must know how to use the same device (wooden in their case) that their ancestors did.

The resurgence of the abacus is more than a triumph of tradition over technology. It is a trend born of some trepidation: Some parents in flourishing Asian nations fret that youngsters are losing their edge.

"Test scores are not actually going down, but all parents want their child to go to university." Says Tay Lai Ling of Singapore's Ministry of Education, which is thinking of adding the abacus to its primary-school curriculum. The 35 years-old honors graduate in math from Singapore National University knows its value: Her 65- year-old father got no further than primary school, but he is an arithmetic ace with an abacus, much quicker at calculation than she is with pencil and paper. Miss Tay says the abacus may be the great equalizer of such generational division: "Parents will know their children are not going to be lazy in math."

In a sundries shop just down an escalator from the fluorescent-lighted class where Ms. Chen's pupils clack through their computations, Jean tan admits to the nefarious habit that feeds such parental fears: She is calculator-dependent. A storekeeper in her twenties, she keeps two battery-operated models beside her cash box. Without them, Ms. Tan says, she would be lost: "I am so used to calculators. If you ask me to add six plus six, I just punch it in."

The young abacus wizards from upstairs might do it differently. A Chinese abacus (as opposed to a differently configured Japanese abacus) consists of two groupings of beads on rods. The separated section of rods at the top has two beads per rod; one bead represents a unit of five. At the bottom, the rods have five beads apiece, each bead representing a unit of one. Each rod is the equivalent of a numerical column -- the third rod) from either right or left depending on how you use the device) is ones. Next TO IT IS TENS, AND SO FORTH. The two rods on the far right (or left) are considered fractions of a unit, tenths and hundredths.

To add six and six, Ms. Chen’s students would move up one of the five beads from the single-unit ones column and one of the two five-unit ones beads. That’s six. To add six more is complicated. Only one of the five-unit beads is normally used on an abacus. That means the tens column must come into play. Six is – minus four. So the students would move up one bead from the tens column. Then they would move down four from the ones column. To that, they must move down the five-unit bead and move up another single-unit bead-five minus one, or four. That leaves two single-unit beads In the ones column and one single-unit bead in the tens column. Ergo, 12.

It is no wonder that to learn the abacus is to know math. Subtraction works the same way addition does, but in reverse. Multiplication, division and percentages can be figured out on an abacus, too, but such procedures involve memorized formulas. “The key is that you learn complementary numbers, two and eight or three and seven.” Says Goh Sing Yau, a 52-years-old professor at the University of Malaya in the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur. “That makes children more comfortable with numbers. It stirs up part of the mind.”

Indeed, his 11 years-old son, Goh Shu Jin, displays a high comfort level as he clatters with an abacus. “It is so simple.” He explains. ‘Six plus seven is actually six plus 10 minus three. And plus 10 is easier to add.”

Simple to him, maybe. To make it simpler to other students and to teachers who in many cases are just learning the abacus for the first time themselves, Prof. Goh and a 72 –years –old colleague, former university Chancellor Ungku Abdul Aziz, decided they would improve on the abacus’s design. Prof. Aziz admits the idea was audacious: One of man’s earliest intellectual tools, the abacus was devised by Assyrians more than 2500 years ago, before it came across central Asia to China and Japan.

But Profs. Goh and Aziz had experience making socially useful products. Earlier inventions of theirs included plastic water pumps and bone extenders for broken legs. To improve on the abacus, Prof. Aziz says, was “Really something of a challenge.”

But :Prof. Goh, the designer, met it. His unbreakable plastic abacus has rails instead of rods; snap-off beads in a range of colors, so students can make different columns different colors; and tiny Braille markings for the blind. So far, the professors have produced 30000 abacuses, retailing at about $2.50 a piece. They hope sales will soar after Malaysia introduces the abacus into its primary-school curriculum later this year.

Not everybody in Asia is nostalgic for the abacus. In part, that is because some people never gave it up in the first place: Haru Ikuta, the 58-years –old manager of a Tokyo laundry, uses a high-tech cash register to enter a record of client names and details. But when it comes to bills, Mrs. Ikuta looks at a printout – and tallies it up on an abacus.

Other Asians – like many in china, where the abacus is still taught in public schools – are in a slightly different developmental phase and want to jettison the old and acquire the new. To them, an electronic calculator is a sign of modernity. At a cake and candy shop in the eastern port city of Tianjin, 30-year-old Shi Ling was delighted at the prospect of using her employer’s Sharp calculator when she started work a year ago.

But she soon found that it was too much trouble to punch the keys with the plastic gloves she wears to pick up sugary cakes from their bins. So she reverted to an abacus.

“It is more convenient than calculator.” She says. “But in term of thinking, maybe it is not as easy.”