A City of Festivals

This land is a city of festivals, festivals of ethnical, cultural, religious, commercial and political origins. Unfortunately, some people just don’t enjoy them and I am a member of this hidden minority.

“Having said that, there’s a festival which still fascinates me.”
“What is it?”
“The Ghost Festival of course!”
“Gee! Morbid!”
“Well, your reaction doesn’t surprise me.”

My early memories started in a bygone area of the city - San Kok Ma Tou (三角碼頭), which literally means Triangle Wharf. What remain in my memory reel are skinny and heavily tanned coolies with big hemp sacks on their shoulders walking on narrow planks that linked barges to the sea front, big brown cockroaches cruising hastily on the tip of their six pointed legs around the openings of the sewage pipes near a hole through which I could see the moon at night time, a neighbour with sunken eyes above his protruding cheeks sucking with a match box the smoke from a big drop of moving liquid on a tinfoil that he kept moving above a burning candle, my mother carrying up water from the street in two metal tanks hanging on the ends of a beam, my father pushing us down the steep dark narrow staircase as the metal sheets of our squatter’s roof shrieked and pounded against each other before they were ripped away by a storm, and me running around the rooftop trying to escape the swaying cane in my mum’s hand – she always cried after she got her job done.

All these memories are black and white because life had few colours in those days except two weeks in every summer. I learned that it was called Yu Lan Jie several years after we had moved out of the area. Before that my parents always called it the Ghost Festival but forbade us to mention it at home lest ghosts would come and stay with us. Well, I didn’t think we had any more room for a ghost to have a lie-down though. Those two weeks were the best time of the year and was my only exciting childhood experience of a festival.

“That can’t be possible! It’s the only festival? How about the Lunar New Year and the Mid-Autumn Festival?”
“They only became festivals years later! But then, I was no more a kid.”
“Huh?”
“Well, I didn’t have any proper Lai See until the first year I received monthly salary; the mooncakes with egg yolks were always given to other people we did not know or like. So, they were never great festivals to me.”

Ghost Festival was colourful and musical to me then. The streets were converted into a massive carnival. Colourful shrines with gigantic effigies of fearful and awesome demigods, deities and legendary figures were erected along both sides of the streets. Ritual objects, utensils and plates of food offerings in red, yellow and white filled up the top of decorated altars in front of these giants and racks of paper made objects clustered around the interior of the shrines. Some of the bigger giants had three huge incense sticks planted in a metal urn in front of them. These mega incense sticks were like ten feet long and six inches wide and were decorated with dragons, phoenixes and figurative reliefs and they kept burning for days. All these were like great works of art that could easily fill up an exhibition hall in the British Museum. I loved watching them although I was so frightened and believed that some of those hellish figures with bulging eyes and long pointed fangs would creep up my bed if I felt asleep.

There wasn’t anything called television at that time but in that fortnight we had free operatic shows that staged in a huge hall constructed of bamboo. They were proper operas with beautifully dressed actors and a live band of traditional musical instruments. I could not understand a single word of the songs, not because of the loud and shrieking accompaniment music but the language. Mum told me it was the dialect she and dad spoke but I wondered if she was telling me the truth. She was, of course! It is a shame that I still cannot understand the lyrics. However, even now I am not interested in learning what the black-cloaked priests were chanting about in a temple, which was heavily decorated with all sorts of paintings and embroidered banners, draperies and sunshades.

The most exciting part of the festival was the incendiary activities throughout the fortnight. Candles and incense sticks were lit nearly day and night; paper objects, mostly clothes, daily household furniture and folded origami, supposed to be golden nuggets, were burnt like mountains of flame everywhere in open air. It was both delightful and treacherous to fool around in these burning sprees. I once got caned by my father who was also swearing in the dialect I was supposed to speak after he caught me picking up silver paper coins near a burning hill of paper objects and nearly got my hands burnt. I cried and I understood every single word he swore at me then! That was why I could not join the others to scramble for the 5 cent coins people threw into the fire on the last day of the fiesta.

 On the 15^th day of the 7^th month of that festival, we would have once in a year food that could feed the whole family for a week to eat as we liked. Before we could lay our fingers on them, they were displayed all over the ground outside our squatter. Thus, we had to stay in the only double decked bed in the squatter to avoid kicking the dishes over when our parents prepared and carried out the ceremony. My father would borrow money, more than often, to make sure the ghosts were satisfied with the amount and variety of food they prepared.

After we moved to a public housing estate, I found the Ghost Festival became increasingly intolerable as my parents tried to preserve their rituals; the scale and manner of the ceremony. It became an annoying activity after I moved to study in a secondary school that taught Bible as a subject and the family was often in debt around this festival. “Why still making such a display when you’re borrowing money from others!” I once grumbled and my father grunted, “Shout up your foul big mouth!”  I tried my best to avoid helping out or joining their ceremony and hardly joined the family evening feast on that day after I started working.

Decades have gone and I know my father still keeps the tradition going on but now the scale of the ceremony is much smaller and he cannot bend his knees to the ground either. In the past ten years, a voice in my heart kept calling me to visit a site for the Ghost Festival celebration whenever the bus taking me to my parents’ home stopped by it in the 7^th lunar month.

“Go in there for a stroll, you liked it before and it’s still fascinating.”
“I can’t afford the time and I’m a stranger to those in the ground,” I tried to silence the voice but the memories of my childhood Ghost Festival disagreed.
“Maybe some other time.” I told myself.

Saturday evening, the 8^th of August this year, I took a bus home after visiting my parents and saw several young ladies burning paper offerings at the curb as I got off the bus for the train. On the other side of the road were two big red floral sign boards of the Ghost Festival ceremony and they reminded me what was going on in the park behind the buildings. I checked the watch and it was a quarter to nine and convinced myself that it would not take much time to have a quick look and everything in there would come down the next day afternoon as it was already the 14^th day of the 7^th lunar month.

Several middle aged folks examined me from head to toe as I gingerly walked through the entrance to the venue. They did not ask for an admission ticket or interrogate me for the reasons I came but they gave me a what-is-he-doing-here look that made me feel I was not expected here.

The ground was smaller than I expected and was empty at the centre because visitors or worshippers were scarce. The colours, scents and sounds in this temporary world seemed familiar but distant and cold even in this hot summer evening. Several shrines half-circled two sides of the rectangular venue, which was a football field in other days. They were much smaller than those in my memory and they looked shabby and cheap. Apart from a silly red horse I could not find other familiar effigies of demigods or generals from the other worlds. I wondered if they were taking vacations in some cooler countries or they thought they had no place or say in this city of not-believe. There were no burning of paper offerings and the shrunken mega incense sticks were not burning either. Was it because of practice economy, environmental protection restrictions or the ghosts were too rich these days that they did not want more? I thought.

A stage and a temple took up the other two sides of the ground. The black-cloaked priests still chanted the same way but stopped occasionally to beckon worshippers to come forward but there were few. The stage was made of bamboo but was flooded with theatre lights. The actors still sang in the dialect I could not understand. Never mind, mum told me that the operas were for the ghosts, so probably I will understand the songs in the future. Their costumes and acting were more artistic, sophisticated and refined now. I liked them then and I like them now but I must admit that I was judging and measuring the jewels on their hair sets, the embroideries on their costumes and the make-up on their faces instead of appreciating the performance as an art or a ceremonial centrepiece.

I hanged around the stage for a while and an uncontrollable sadness started simmering between my eyes. Apart from a few kids, a couple of tourists and several photographers who were seeking opportunities for their salon-class master pieces, most of the audience were older than me or at least I believed. They must be in their seventies, eighties or even nineties and some seemed to have made a great effort to come seeing the operas that were for the ghosts.

Suddenly, I felt as if my parents had been there. But, of course that was impossible as my mum cannot make the journey to go there even in a wheelchair and my father never likes operas. Some old folks took distant seats or stood afar from the stage as if they were not connected to the ghostly activity but their eyes seemed to have frozen in space and time with deep sorrow and anticipation. My old man would have done that if he were there, I am sure.

I was puzzled and troubled. Were they deeply absorbed by the acting or were they taken to a psychic world only they would know? Were they listening to the singing or were they hearing the unspeakable words of their own? Were they enjoying the operas or were they trying to make sense of what went before that evening in their life? Were they giving thanks to the ghosts who listened to their prayers and kept their families well or were they moaning or even mourning for the loss or non-occurrence of love and laughter in the years they had lived? Were they wishing the best for their sons and daughters; grandsons and grand-daughters or were they asking themselves why their sons and daughters never understood their love for them? Were they following the beats of the music or were they counting their days? These thoughts lingered on for the rest of my journey home.

Now that the request of the voice is fulfilled, I finally understand why my father always borrowed money to perform his tradition in Augusts, why we were forbidden to talk about Ghost Festival at home, why we did not have moon cakes with egg yolks, why we did not have Lai See with real money and why my parents still insist on practising the ceremony even though they are physically incapable now. I can now appreciate that the five of us always had new books when the new school started in Septembers, that the moon cakes with egg yolks were gifts for our granduncle and my father’s friends from whom he borrowed money year after year until we finished school, that we all had new pyjamas on Lunar New Year Eve, that they did all these to the ghosts to keep the family well and blessed.