Since it’s Halloween, I decided to let you all know about the local Taiwanese/Chinese festivals I’ve been able to experience here. (I’m sure those of you who know about my trips to Kenting and Hong Kong are anxious to hear about them, but at the moment I’m frantically running from class to work to home where I fill out grad school applications and do homework…fun fun fun. I already had this one mostly written, so you’re just going to have to wait ‘til I get some free time for the exciting stories!)
August, the seventh lunar month, was Ghost Month; in some ways the theories behind this are similar to the original Halloween theories in that it’s the time of the year when the souls of the dead can come back from the grave and/or hell to visit the living, but it lasts for an entire month not just one candy-crazed night. During this month, you want to avoid ghosts and their pranks; to do so, you’re not supposed to cut your hair, possibly because it cuts your lifeline (but I may be taking that from the Greek Fates…) and you shouldn’t look in a mirror (or peel an apple while looking in a mirror because you will see your own death). There are loads of these superstitions, but the main one you really have to look out for is swimming, especially in the ocean. The whole point of avoiding ghosts is to not encourage their wrath, but swimming has more sinister consequences because, apparently, ghosts will swim up underneath you, pull you underwater, drown you, then their soul gets to go free from hell and yours takes its place (the ol’ soul-switcheroo).
The Taiwanese ‘soul’ is a bit different from ours in that it isn’t just one soul and one body, there are several spirits in you, one goes to heaven, one goes to hell (I think…). My teacher tried to explain it to us, but I’m not sure we ever quite figured out what she was talking about because soul and spirit are the same word and the terminology for ghost or soul was confusing as they can all be intermingled. From what I did pick up, however, if you’ve suffered a ‘bad’ death then one part of your soul will go to hell for a certain amount of time, so you become a ghost. (This is kind of like how our ghosts are the souls of those who have unfinished business or suffered in their final moments and are doomed to wander the Earth, etc, etc.). The ghost-souls aren’t necessarily bad, you can have some Caspers in the mix, but they aren’t all good either as demonstrated by the drowning discussion.
In order to persuade the unfriendly ghosts to leave you in peace, you have to give them food/drink/money offerings. While I have seen people burning paper money for their ancestors outside their houses since the day I arrived in Taiwan, the scale of those offerings was nowhere near that of Ghost offerings; the most surprising thing was that there was an official school sacrifice performed in front of the humanities building where I take my classes. One of my teachers is a believer, so we were all paraded down to catch a glimpse of them burning incense (my two classmates and I were also offered incense sticks, but we declined). 
The teachers set up a big table and put on it anything that you’d want in real life (usually your favorite foods) including cans of Coke, boxes of Oreos, and fruit. All of those are optional, but every sacrifice must have fish, chicken, and beef (I don’t know why). Then you put incense sticks into it 
and light them as an offering to the dead spirits. During this big celebration at the school, the teachers all grabbed their individual incense sticks and lined up in front of the tables; they bowed then stepped forward three times till they reached the tables then stuck them into the food.
My classmate and I (the only white people standing confused on the sidelines) were trying to figure out what they did with all the food afterwards. We both had the same thought: if they just throw it all away it’s gonna sit in a landfill for decades (and could we eat it instead, perhaps?). Finally our teacher over heard us debating it and explained that it’s not the actual products which are offered to the ghosts, ghosts are spirits they can’t eat or drink the food; it’s the SPIRIT
of the food which is given to them, so by burning the incense it releases the essence of the food which is what they then eat. (Then the worshippers get to eat the actual food. Maybe that’s a clever way to make sure you don’t just offer the last tin can of sauerkraut you found stuck in the back of the cupboard like during Christmas canned food drives; whatever you offer you eat, so it makes you offer the best!)Since the Chinese and Taiwanese prefer even numbers and believe they are more auspicious (in direct contrast to my own Pretty Number Scale), Ghost Month was in lunar month seven (our August this year) which gave way to the luckiest month, eight (September), which is the month of the Mid-Autumn Festival or Moon Festival. For the entire month there were firecrackers popping on every street corner and talk of moon cakes lingering in the air. The Moon Festival commemorates the legend of a woman called Chang’e who drank an elixir of immortality by accident and discovered she could fly. Her immortal husband, Houyi, was angry at her so she flew through the heavens to escape his wrath and ended up on the moon where she coughed up half of the elixir. She asked the rabbit who lives on the moon (I’m not making this up) to make a new elixir for her, which it is still doing to this day. Houyi ended up living on the sun (so man is sun or yang and woman is moon or ying) and once a year they get to be together, which is the day of the Moon Festival. (I don’t know why he can’t just live on the moon with her, but whatever; far be it from me to criticize others’ cultures or their stupid traditions.)
The actual Moon Festival date was Monday,
September 12th. While the meaning behind the festival couldn’t be more dissimilar, the festivities themselves remind me a lot of the Fourth of July, i.e. sparklers, family barbeques, and lots of fireworks! I’m so glad I live near the mountains and the temple because I had a great view of the fireworks shot out over the mountain tops, though I was wary of all the firecrackers being
flung aimlessly in the street (one actually hit my shin and I had the black marks to prove it). In the actual temple, there was a stage set up with comedians performing in Taiwanese and kids with sparklers running around the booths. Since we didn’t have any family members nearby, all
of the foreign people
I’ve met through church gathered in a Japanese BBQ house and we spent two hours cooking the ‘all we could eat’ meat, including sirloin steaks and tiny little octopi, on the grills. We were also offered vegetables in the form of a soup, but the 
guys at the table were only interested in things they could grill, so we convinced them to grill the 
mushrooms and corn cobs we fished out of the soup so we could pretend we’d eaten something nutritionally sound.After the BBQ we headed over to Ansy’s to play
dominoes and Mafia, then we had some fancy moon cakes to celebrate the occasion. While I had experienced moon cakes in Beijing when my roommate, Shuxin, bought me one, I didn’t realize there were several different types. There’s a café down the street from my house where I always buy my dumplings, omelet burritos, and weird sandwiches (double-decker breakfast sandwiches: the outside layer of bread is 
dipped in egg like French toast; top layer has hash browns; piece of white bread; ham, American cheese slices, and 
occasionally small bits of hotdogs in the middle; another piece of white bread; chicken breast; final piece of egg-bread. In Asia, sandwiches are breakfast foods but this is so big I eat it for dinner instead!). The ladies there are really nice and talk to me about Taiwan culture and festivals and teach me new food words every time I come in. On one such occasion, we were chatting when a blast of firecrackers went off about ten feet from where I was standing and I jumped in spite of myself. They laughed and started telling me about the lady in the moon and told me I should try some moon cakes. When I came back the following day, I told her casually I hadn’t been able to find any as it was too early.
The next day, after I purchased my sandwich, she handed me a little moon cake and told me she brought it for me! Then she said to come back on the actual day and she’d bring me a different kind. The first one was sweet, it had an amber colored soy bean paste in it (note the seals on the top, like the calligraphy seals!). The second one is more traditional, a better brand, and like the one I had in China; on the inside there’s
bean paste but in the very center there’s a boiled egg yolk which represents the moon. While I like the pastry on the second one better, sort of in the shape of an English muffin but fluffy like a croissant, the egg yolk is really salty and isn’t the sort of thing I like in my desserts. At Ansy’s house, we had ones with bean paste and little chopped nuts. I think the first one the lady gave me was my favorite. 
To confuse matters, I was innocently meandering down the alley towards a 7-11 when all of a sudden I found myself lodged in the middle of a parade! I thought that this was in honor of the Moon Festival, being the Sunday before the actual day, but it turns out I wandered into yet another celebration for the birth of some god. This time, rather than having huge speakers and obnoxious music five feet from my room, they had little performances (two guys pretend fighting with knives, I dunno why) and a little alter on two poles they carried down the street. There were marching bands and fire crackers. I noticed another 
confused foreigner in the mix, Martin from Mexico, and we huddled in the corner and tried to take pictures (my camera doesn’t like night or smoke, so they aren’t very good, apologies). Apparently he was trying to get to some restaurant and got swept up in the festivities as well. I saw him later at the school office registering for classes, but he’s in the beginner’s class in the mornings so I won’t see him very often.
After reviewing my posts, I have just discovered that I never actually told you about the first god’s birthday bash I wasn’t invited to (though I was ‘fun’ adjacent for three whole days!). One weekend during the summer when I first moved in next to the giant temple, I woke up at 9 am on Saturday morning to loud obnoxious drums and a shrill woman ‘singing’ (and that’s being very generous of me) into a microphone at the top of her voice. I decided I may 
as well investigate since it was impossible to get back to sleep. I wandered groggily down the stairs to discover the little alley next to me was blocked by an enormous tent-on-wheels which housed a stage on which people were dressed in bright 
costumes and acting out a story in Taiwanese. This was extremely fascinating, apart from the two foot speakers lodged right next to my head. They had a tent set up with a whole hog offered as sacrifice and a bunch of people bowing and burning incense. I asked one of the passers-by what it all meant since the stories were somewhat less than helpful and he said that it was ‘like Jesus’. Now, from my history classes at CC I remembered that anti-imperialists who hated the missionaries in southern China often depicted Jesus 
as a pig being tortured to death in really unsavory fashions (a pig because it’s insulting and because the 
words ‘pig’ and ‘Jesus’ have similar sounds in Chinese). I assumed that this was probably not what he meant, but the images of tortured pigs were difficult to escape. I asked him to explain that and he replied, ‘we’re celebrating the birth of a 
god, like your Christmas’. AHHHH. Cultural misunderstandings are fun! And the fun continued from 9 am to 9 pm for three days straight; I swear they found every single person in Taiwan who could neither sing nor dance, then threw them on a stage and made them sing and dance. Still, that’s what you get for living next to a giant temple! Actually, I'm glad I do because I never would've come across these festivities otherwise!Well, I think this is long enough. I will talk to you all soon; my class ends after Thanksgiving so I will have a few days when I can hopefully catch up on all the blogs I’ve wanted to write. Looking forward to hearing from you all, and I hope you’re all well!
Love,
Amanda
No comments:
Post a Comment