On Halloween, be afraid, be very afraid … but not really
Halloween hasn’t truly arrived in China — not yet, anyway. Chinese people shy away from ghosts, which is unfortunate, because they’re missing out on a lot of fun.
While the holiday traces its roots to pagan and Christian rituals honoring ancestors or cheering up departed spirits, it has long since lost those connotations — in the United States, at least.
It has become a playful excuse for turning the imagination loose and laughing at the macabre. Kids love it, and adults never seem to outgrow it. It’s common in the US to find business offices decorated with cobwebs and graveyard headstones. Staff members dress up as witches, sorcerers or ghoulish creatures from the grave. And customers play along.
Costume parties are common at Halloween, complete with dry ice smoking from “poison” punchbowls. Hollywood’s latest horror movies are released.
Children roam the streets at night on Oct 31 dressed as pirates, princesses, robots, superheroes, clowns, skeletons and headless horsemen. Inevitably, you’ll run across a Richard Nixon or Winnie the Pooh. Children are terrified — but not really, because they know it’s all just a game. You’re supposed to be scared for a minute, and then go home to eat the candy you collected from friendly neighbors who appreciated your creative costume.
Halloween has produced some memorable moments for me. For example, there was the time when my 5-yearold son dressed up as a pirate, complete with eye patch and wooden sword. As he and some other kids were traversing a neighbor’s lawn, heading for the front door of the house to collect their “trickor-treat” candy, an adult-sized ghoul suddenly sprang from the darkness, howling eerily. The other children skittered away in fright, but my son stood his ground. He pulled his sword and whacked the ghoul in the kneecaps. The poor costumed man quickly retreated, pursued by the triumphant little swashbuckler waving his weapon. I must admit, he made me proud.
One Halloween, I visited a spook alley with crowds of other holiday revelers. It was a sort of horror museum, a maze of shocking displays of blood, death, mayhem and crime (all pretend, of course) set up in an abandoned threestory school that had fallen into disrepair. It was a perfect haunted mansion.
In the crowd was a young man dressed like the Joker in a Batman movie. He brandished a gasoline-powered chainsaw and charged at visitors with the engine roaring.
Trouble is, you never can tell about teenagers: Was this chainsaw really safe? Was the cutting chain operable? I decided I didn’t want to risk it, so when the young man lunged at me and revved the engine, I did the natural thing and kicked him in the crotch. He doubled over and protested that there was no chain attached to the tool. It was only a joke.
Uhh … sorry, dude. But that’s the price you pay when you get too realistic.
Nowadays, one can see a little bit of Halloween here and there in Chinese supermarkets and convenience stores — a plastic jack-o-lantern or an occasional witch — but not the all-out playful embrace of death found in the US and other countries, particularly in Latin America, where the Day of the Dead is a major tradition.
Two weeks ago, I traveled to the US and found Halloween in full swing. Since my wife, who is Chinese, had never carved a jack-o-lantern, I set about introducing her to the art. You zigzag a knife around the top of a yellow squash and lift the “lid”. Using a spoon, you scrape the inner shell and pull out the slimy “brains”. Last, you carve a face and put a candle inside to make it glow. My wife was delighted.
And then, in true Chinese style (“Don’t waste food”), she collected the pumpkin seeds and fried them to eat later.
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