What the living do during the Hungry Ghost Festival

I’m guessing some foreign readers had their interest piqued by my mention of the Seventh Month in the previous post – quite a number of clicks for the wikipedia link!

You may be interested to see how it is celebrated then. (I’ll admit, I don’t know much – a lot of it are just practices I observe year after year without understanding the symbolism behind.)

There’s usually entertainment put up for the visiting souls – the traditional one being Teochew street opera on make-shift stages.

When there are seats laid out, the first row would be left empty for the ‘good brothers’. In this case, no seats were laid out, but there were decorated joss candles (sustenance for the spirits) and offerings being burnt.

There would be a big (again, make-shift) altar for deity worship –

The gods depicted on the banner are FuLuShou – Prosperity, Status and Longevity. This particular ceremony was organised by the Redhill Market association. The evening would begin with prayer and invocation of the spirits for their blessing and continued support, thereafter the hawkers gather for dinner and a very noisy auction of auspicious objects.

Those objects would have been blessed earlier at the altar and include things like deity statuettes made of gold and pots of blessed rice that you can choose to display or cook. The proceeds from the auction will go toward funding entertainment like the street opera and getai (lit. song stage) for next year’s seventh month.

While the living enjoy their food, nobody forgets about the invisible guests. Dinner is set aside for them too –

Note the joss sticks sticking out of the rice bowls. This is why we Chinese, no matter what religion we may subscribe to, think it rude (some say inauspicious) to stick chopsticks into rice bowls. It is customary to lay them flat on the rim of the bowl.

Hope you enjoyed this slice of old Singapore, with rituals that have since died out in China under communist rule.

Much Beloved Singapore Buildings and Monuments

I visited one man’s passion project for Singapore today and was enthralled by it. Teo Yu Siang, a designer and an accountant, decided that he didn’t like the self-congratulatory tone of many a government-initiated SG50 project, and decided to create his own birthday card(s) to Singapore.

Here are my personal, sentimental favourites from his website, Building Singapore.

You may want to check out my post on Bukit Brown.

I spent a lovely holiday interning as a docent at the Old Supreme Court before it was shut for renovations. It is now the National Gallery – many local works of art have been transferred here from the collection of the Singapore Art Museum. I loved exploring the Old Supreme Court with my colleagues then – we pretty much had the whole place to ourselves during breaks, and we explored various nooks and crannies, including the dome! The National Gallery opens this year on 24th November and I am looking forward to seeing both the art and the conserved building.

Well, the Esplanade. I guess I chose this for sentimental reasons – the greatest love of my life my ex and I took a walk along the Esplanade waterfront on our first date together. Yes, a complete cliche, and now a bittersweet memory.

But enough of me, now. Do head over to see all the buildings that Teo Yu Siang has painstakingly drawn! The drawings are also available for sale as postcards – this sounds like an interesting gift!

Bukit Brown

I’ve been trying to persuade my colleague to visit the cemetery with me, and while I’ve since won that battle, it seems the harder one is actually finding the time to head over.

Some photographs from earlier visits…

a broken gate to mark the space

nature taking its course, as always.
broken stones in shade, in shadow

‘flatmates’ in life, now forever neighbours after.
or perhaps ‘forever’ spoken too soon, when an expressway threatens their rest.

nevertheless, accompanied in the afterlife by pets, illegally perhaps

but always in style – only pretty tiles, please, for our dearly departed.

guarded by perpetual sentinels, one for the house, another to patrol the grounds

some of whom are not averse to the occasional selfie, or we-fie.

till next time, then.