While everyone was milling about, a spirit medium came out on the stage to the right to do a little dance in preparation for the real ceremony, which was to be the lighting on fire of the hellking installation—things that burn up make their way straight to the other world, it’s the most direct route, like injection. (When my former landlady inducted me into her weird Buddhist-Confucian-Christian fusion cult a few years ago, my request for induction—for which I was neither actor, author, nor principle but merely a lame-duck stand-in for someone who might have actually known what was going on—was written on a piece of paper along with my name and vital statistics. The piece of paper was then addressed to Guan Yin, goddess of mercy and all good things generally, and burned. Supernatural Fedex.) I didn’t get a very good look at the medium because what crowd there was, was gathered in front of the stage—among them were maybe thirty people who had come to actually participate in the ceremony, around ten journalists, and maybe another ten people with cameras, most of them obviously foreigners. (Among the foreigners was one Jennifer knew, a Dutch guy studying history who is affiliated with the History Institute at Academia Sinica and had dragged his (Taiwanese) girlfriend to this event. It turned out that none of the Taiwanese people he and I were with had ever been to this ceremony or any ceremony like it.) I did see though that the medium first did some moves by himself, then with a twirling long pole, before finally coming out with the chicken.


medium with chicken