A Bit Hard To Explain

It’s Halloween in Beijing but you wouldn’t know it.  There cabs are partly painted orange.  Somewhere to the south of the city there is a grove of persimmons that is no doubt in bloom with bright orange fruit.  But this has nothing to do with All Hallows Eve.  The club house at our compound has seasonal decorations but the big celebration was held last Saturday night.  There won’t be much evidence of the day as we head down town. 

But it is the season, certainly.  The leaves on the trees out the window are all yellow.  Not a particularly compelling yellow like back home.  The leaves just look dead.  The tall poplars that frame Jingmi Road, they are still green.  But not for long.  The next cold night will wind them up.  I notice that the on line news outlets I read have all pepper their pages with ghostly stories.  It must all seem rather odd and crass looked at from afar.  The bloody zombie masks all over the club house are a bit hard to explain.  “It’s for the kids.  It’s for the kids.”  What else can you say?

When I was a kid we loved the day.  And it was a day when I always got sick, year after year.  The air was turning and germs were in ascendancy.   But it's not as though a cold could stop you from candy.  The other night my friend brought his four-year-old niece and two-year-old daughter over.  They’d been out trick or treating.  They were happy.  Surely it is for the kids. 

The counterpoint of Christian culture that needs an evil to combat and define itself as in opposition to.  There must be an evil that lurks the earth and gets the upper hand once and a while.  China understands evil but apparitions aren't tied to the calendar the same way.  Here foxy fox spirits come and corrupt unsuspecting young intellectuals.  I haven’t read Pu Song Ling in a while but I’m sure they operated as the horror stories in their day.   But Horror (nor candy) doesn't get its own day of the year.   Horror is a hard one to reconcile with the Chinese national agenda.  The CCP will be unlikely to ban Halloween as long as its a fringe affair.  But it's hard to see how they'd manufacture a national, patriotic alternative.  Perhaps, at this very moment they are considering how to reclaim horror with Chinese characteristics.  

Tuesday 10/31/17