Entertaining Ghosts in Hong Kong: Spectral Mapping
By Samantha Culp
To get to the Yue Laan Jit (Hungry Ghost Festival), you have to go through the mall. This is not surprising. The journey to most destinations in Hong Kong requires some portion of mall navigation, as nearly every subway stop opens directly onto one. The Shatin KCR station is no exception, but fording the labyrinth of New Town Plaza Phases I, II, and III seems a small price to pay to get to the Yue Laan Jit festivities. After all, the ghosts have come all the way from hell–humans just have to pass through the gauntlet of KFC and Starbucks.
Outside the mall and a few blocks away, a generic neighborhood sports field has been transformed into someplace special. Bamboo structures rise into the incense-clouded air, Taoist priests chant liturgies under a canopy while on a makeshift stage, women with white and red makeup and bobbing metal hair ornaments sing in unearthly high-pitched cries. It feels eons away from the hype and hustle of contemporary Hong Kong, and might as well be, considering this is a festival that dates back to the 6th century.
For fifteen nights of the seventh lunar month, when the gates of the underworld are said to open up and let ghosts loose to roam the earth, this Shatin Park and other nondescript spots around Hong Kong become crucial sites in a landscape of spiritual appeasement. These ghosts are "hungry" from their time in hell, and must be placated to prevent them from harming the living. Some Hong Kongers burn paper money ("hell currency") in the streets, as well as paper replicas of cell phones, Rolex watches, even tiny cardboard Ferraris, in their efforts to satisfy the unseen phantoms around them. But the biggest and brightest way to appease ghosts is the Yue Laan Jit: temporary open-air bamboo complexes erected in local parks, where the aforementioned priests intone scripture and make offerings, and traditional Chiu Chow Opera singers perform in nightly marathons for an audience of specters. Living people can attend as well, as long as they don’t sit in the first few rows (which are reserved for the invisible guests).
In 2004, however, not that many living people want to attend. The audience is comprised of old people and toddlers, the former being actually interested and the latter not really having a choice in the matter. Young Hong Kongers are out singing karaoke or shopping for a new cell phone or watching pirated DVDs, but the old folks of this old quarter are here, burning joss sticks, chatting with friends, and most of all, watching the opera. They are planted patiently in their seats (or wheelchairs), watching the ancient drama unfold on stage, in shrieks and wails and neon makeup. They spend the 6 or 7 hour performance fanning themselves and each other, drinking tea, occasionally dozing off and waking up again, bouncing grandchildren in the lap before the children scamper off, and staring unabashedly at the gwei mui (white girl) in their midst.
For the few nights before the festival ends, before the bamboo rafters come down and the park is just a park again, the elderly, working-class citizens of Shatin (and many other HK municipalities) have a place just for them. This space is overlaid onto the real geography of Hong Kong as tenuously as the ghosts’ realm overlays our own. In a city where new skyscrapers soar up almost daily, and Victoria Harbor is rapidly disappearing due to reclamation, little of the physical past (neither architectural, nor natural) remains. History, tradition, community, are all rendered spectral. The Yue Laan festival sites, temporarily superimposed on the urban map, serve almost as tesseracts or time machines, forming a link to religious tradition and the distant memory of Southern China village life. Then, after the last paper effigy is burned and the last opera gong is struck, the worm-hole closes up again as tightly as do the gates of hell. The ghosts return to the netherworld; the old folks, to a city that seems less familiar with every passing day.
