So the day before the 15th day of the 7th lunar month I happened to stop by Jennifer’s bar in the evening, a not unheard of occurrence (especially now that I live a five-minute walk away) and sat around chatting with her and two of her bartenders, Vany and Little Wai. Vany is currently our resident expert on all things slang and Taiwanese. The relationship between Taiwanese and Mandarin, especially in her demographic of twenty-something nightlife kids with a pre-college education, is very lively: Mandarin on Taiwan gets so much of its slang from Taiwanese that non-Taiwanese speakers often don’t even realize that that’s where it comes from. I like Vany a lot partly for personality reasons but partly for foreign-speaker reasons: she doesn’t seem to modulate her language around me at all, and she never acts like she thinks I don’t understand something, but when I tell her I don’t understand something she lets out this cute little thinking-it-over grunt, stops what she’s doing for a second, and then comes up with a succinct, dependable explanation of what the expression means and where it comes from. This happens pretty often, as I am better trained in formal city-government Chinese than normal-people that-rocks that-sucks Chinese. Anyway it was Vany who suggested that we might want to go to Jilong the next day and watch the festivities; though it was Vany who then, when the time came the next day, backed out of going. But Yushou, my friend who used to be at the city government and has recently moved on up to the Economic Reconstruction Council but still, happily, spends most of the day logged in to msn messenger, said he would join us.

So we took off for Jilong, about a forty minute ride, and first walked around the night market (hence the squid on a stick). One very satisfying thing about this evening for me personally was that I felt like my Chinese abilities recovered a bit—every time I go away and then come back, a piece of my Chinese gets chopped away, and it always takes a while to reconstruct it. (In fact I don’t think it ever gets fully reconstructed—I peaked around two years ago and it’s all been a big attempt at recovery since then.) This kind of context, though, seems to be one that considerably aids the recovery process: out with two good friends eating all sorts of delicious snacks and having a long, uproarious conversation that starts out at innuendo with the chewy noodle soup,[i] moves into hijinks at the grilled dried shredded octopus with bar-b-q sauce,[ii] becomes definitively ribald around the shredded ice with four toppings and condensed milk,[iii] and has become so unabashedly dirty by the grilled crabs and Hong Kong shrimp to be pried open with a long toothpick that one of us actually says at one point, “there are other people around,” before continuing merrily along in the exact same vein. Something about the challenge of being cruder and slyer than the other guy that pries my mouth open, along with all the great tastes passing through it. So as usual with activities in Taiwan, it turned out that the actual, main activity of the evening was eating (and talking); the actual ceremony was a kind of visual dessert.

After stuffing ourselves silly on the foods enumerated above, we moved towards the park where the ceremony was to take place. Actually the middle of ghost month is the time of a number of several different ceremonies. Originally all of them took place on the 15th day, but, as the Jilong city website informed us, recently they had been schedules for slightly different times in slightly different places: thus the ceremony of floating paper lanterns out on the water had already taken place the night before, as had the ceremony of sending lighted paper lanterns floating up into the sky: one had been at the harbor and the other in a park. There were a couple of other pieces of ceremony that had been similarly re-allocated. The finagling with the dates was presumably for the purpose of lessening congestion, but maybe it worked too well because by the time we got up to the top of the hill in the park where this thing was supposed to take place it looked like there was barely anyone there—maybe fifty people total milling around aimlessly in front of a huge temple, whose facade was decorated with the family name Xu. (The responsibility for organizing the ceremonies rotates among the big Jilong families, and this year it was the Xus’ turn.) There were little stages covered with protective tarp set up on your right- and left-hand sides as you faced the temple; the stage to your right gave way to a nice little cliff. In front of the temple façade, a bunch of paper gods were lined up in rows on mini-god-sized bleachers, and in front of that, in the courtyard that had been effectively created by all the structures, was an enormous installation featuring the king of hell, maybe ten feet tall, and many of his companions.



hellking



[i] The noodles are made by lathering a layer of batter around the sides of a wok big enough to boil me plus your chicken soup chicken and covering it with an enormous wooden slab. There’s some water boiling in the bottom fourth of the wok; so the batter is crispy-fried from the outside but steamed from the inside. It comes out as a porous white bandage, which is then cut up into small pieces and put in a fishy soup. A Jilong specialty.
[ii] YUM!
[iii] Topping choices include sweet red or green bean sauce and about a million things I don’t understand but whose main characteristic is that they are Q, a particular kind of resistant chewiness that is the main contribution of a whole variety of Taiwanese foods.