www.Go To The Mountain - Musings of a Potential Guru

This time of the year is terrible for me. First the haze then at times the Sumatran squall. Now it is the Hungry Ghost Festival with burning and all. Haze, smoke, weather change is killing me through my ultra-sensitive nose. Fortunately, Indonesians do not practise burning during the 7th month or we will become the walking dead. If I got hit by a bad bout of allergic rhinitis and you saw me on the street, you might think I just walked out from the gate of hell. Then you see me holding a glass of beer and you know I am human.  Those who drink too much are called 酒 鬼 (jiu gui). They say you should not go swimming around this time because the 水 鬼 will drag your leg and pull you down to drown you. Then those who were DOM (dirty old men) may have become "hum sup kwai". Then you have the hungry ghosts or yao gui - words used to describe greedy people.  You see some Chinese people like to have a lot of Gods as we have many types of ghosts. I wonder if Chinese ghosts wi...

Since I'm getting you on with ghostly encounters, I might as well not let up.  It is not hungry go where but hungry ghosts eat what. In the old days when dialects were commonly spoken, the description of people who eat a lot is simply "yau kwee" or hungry ghost in Hokkien. The Hungry Ghosts Festival or Zhong Yuan Jie has begun. The Gates of Hell has been opened.....watch out! Ancestor Worship  Frequently, foreign visitors or non-Singaporean friends would ask me why they see people burning during the 7th Lunar month because they have never seen these things but actually they do not even do these things in China even though the Chinese practised ancestor worship . So this is a Singaporean invention? I have seen us practising burning hell notes for the longest time and if Singapore is 47 years old, we could be doing this for more than 50 years? No wonder economists and experts are saying that it is an Asian era. As the Western world does not do this, all the money...