Thread by @chowleen

Tonight is #GhostFestival (#中元普渡, #鬼節, #お盆) in Asian Buddhist/Taoist/folk traditions.

Don’t drink, don’t swim or go near bodies of water, don’t wear all white, don’t shave your legs, don’t touch walls —lest you walk into hungry ghosts

[Anita Mui in 胭脂扣 Rouge, 1987]

The 7th full moon of the lunar calendar marks the moment that all hungry, discontent ghosts are let out to roam the human realm #鬼月 #中元普渡

[Spirit Traces 仙跡, Yeh Wei-li 葉偉立, 2019 at Taipei MOCA - photos of
ghostly, abandoned places]

Ghost Festival #鬼節 always fascinated me as a kid: the idea that, while one honored and fed respectful ghost elders on Qingming (Tomb Sweeping, in April), one needed to appease and avoid hungry, abandoned ghosts in August. The edict against swimming was the hardest to obey.

This year, I happen to be back.

Ghost festival day in Taiwan, where outside every building and storefront, sumptuous feasts await 「好兄弟」, these “good fellows and brothers” — stranger ghosts made temporary kin and fed on this day #中元普渡

Last year I spoke with @heldavidson on ghostliness under the spectre of a global pandemic.

Thanks to Helen Davidson and Chi Hui Lin’s attentive @guardian piece, on the enduring power of #中元普渡 Hungry Ghosts days in Taiwan.
theguardian.com/world/2021/aug…

And finally, a forever favorite poem for Ghost Festival night #中元普渡

“but the rain
Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh
Upon the glass and listen for reply”

-Edna St. Vincent Millay, Sonnet XLIII (1922) #everynightapoem

[Portrait by Arnold Genthe, 1914]