Hungry Ghost Skeletons

A "hungry ghost's" big red hands

The god's legs & feet before decoration

Now he's on display at a local street temple

    What a charmed life I lead!  I had a marvelous trip back home with friends and family and returned to this -- a behind-the-scenes view of the Chinese Hungry Ghosts Festival, which is going on now.  


        It was another of those great outings organized by  Spiral Synergy, with Michelle Grimsley at the helm.   She certainly has identified a niche and is busy filling it:  showing us parts of Penang cultural life that we'd have difficulty discovering on our own.  And today's visit was no exception.  It was a visit to a workshop where a Chinese family fills orders for effigies made of bamboo sticks covered with paper.  These are displayed during the Hungry Ghosts Festival, then burned at the end.  They can cost a fortune--more than our living room sofa--but they're ordered up by neighborhood associations, so the cost is shared.  These big feet to the right are just the beginning of a 12-foot paper "statue" that will be delivered to a temporary streetside "temple" bigger than a garage.  But more on that later!                                     


Anyway, those feet will, in the course of two days, be added to a huge effigy of one of the "hungry ghosts," who come out in the seventh month on the lunar calendar to cause trouble--unless they are treated to lots of food, entertainment, and such.  They definitely need to be placated, big-time!

A stockpile of horse effigies

   During the "off-season," so to speak, the effigy-making workshops produce smaller paper items that the deceased might need in the afterlife, things like cars, pets, cell phones, money, etc.  These are burned at the funeral so they can go along with the person to be used after death.
      
These effigies take a long time to make and cost a lot of money, but the local associations are only to happy to collect money to buy them, get them blessed, display them for a while and then watch them go up in smoke.  It's kind of like what happens to my money when I travel abroad.


    Next blog post:  the displaying of the effigies.  Watch for it!