Before I start babbling, I want to tell you that I’ve compiled some Salve #promo materials in a google drive folder. They’re cute, colourful, fun and formatted in IG story size. If you’d like to save one, tag me, and share that you’ve been reading Salve, I’d be so chuffed.
Dear friends of Salve,
I’ve mused from a prompt this week. How fun! Writer’s block can be paralysing. I can recall at least 20 breakdowns that were sparked by an inspiration drought. I know my readers are creative and smart—so if you’d like to exercise that brain muscle of yours and cook up a response, I’d love to read it, or like, talk about the process with you. Email me, baby! No pressure of course, but I’m around. Here’s what I worked with:
“Maybe that is the loneliest kind of memory: to be forever altered by an invisible kiss, a reminder of something long gone and crumbled.”
What belief, family story, or past event do you feel inexplicably tethered to? Write an essay that draws the connection between your physical reality and the unseen forces behind it.
Hungry Ghosts
Next week the dead are coming. During the hungry ghost festival in Singapore the realms of heaven and hell open for the ancestors to coalesce with the living. Ritualistic offerings (hell bank notes, paper houses, joss sticks) are burned to appease the famished souls that were forgotten by families or buried unceremoniously. Lotus shaped lanterns are cast afloat to guide the disoriented through the afterlife, lavish meals are prepared for empty chairs, altars are built for monks and priests to offer prayers.
There are no seasons in the tropics. It is simply wet or dry. As a child, I learned to denote the passage of time by ritual. Spring was mandarin oranges and lion dances for lunar new year, fall was the ashen smell of offerings set ablaze for the hungry ghosts. I found makeshift altars in peculiar places—next to a storm drain behind a community centre, in front of a hawker that served congee and small intestines, behind an office building on Hong Kong street in between dumpsters.
The offerings were always fresh— no easy feat in mangrove-land, where more often than not, humidity rots the produce before it is sold. The fruits were unbruised and the incense burned eternally, but I never saw the altars tended. I imagined the spirits setting out plates of biscuits and sweets for themselves: fussing over the talismans and making sure that everything was arranged to their liking. The ghostliness of the tableaux felt like divine intervention.
An altar for hungry ghosts on a void deck
The small gifts were benevolent, of course, but also preventative—more of an exchange than a gift. The presents and prayers are offered for protection, to avoid the misfortune that befell aggrieved ancestors. The protocol was specific and important. Ignoring the due process of honouring the dead would boomerang their calamity to the living. I hadn’t know this, of course, when I was living in a haunted house. It was not my first home, but it is the first home I can remember.
The house was large and oddly laid out. There were two sitting rooms on the main floor, behind a sprawling veranda where wild monkeys would lounge and pelt rambutans at the sliding doors. The back sitting room, which was brighter and bigger, was never used. Even when my parents hosted parties with a hundred people, the back sitting room stayed empty, like a soundstage surrounded by actors on break.
There was nothing special there—no furniture that was too nice to disturb. But still, even at golden hour, when I longed to sit in front of the floor-to-ceiling glass windows and watch the sun depart, I couldn’t bring myself to cross the threshold. The dog couldn’t either. My parents were ambivalent, I suppose adults are more wise to the feeling of a place. They avoided the room without verbally declaring its eeriness.
We had been living in the haunted house for a couple of years when things started to go missing. The tarot cards were the first to disappear. My mother had taken up the craft out of boredom, and that’s when things changed. I slept terribly, disturbed by the man who would sit on my bed in silence after dark. He was not unpleasant, but he did keep me awake, tapping his foot so I couldn’t nod off. Then came the sparklies: my colourful friends that lived in the ceiling fan, they were ethereal speckles of rainbow light I could only see at night. I pointed to my mother and said—can’t you see them? She could not. I stayed awake until the sun came up and my friends left the room.
One day in August (when the hungry ghost season started) my mother swept the veranda on an endless summer afternoon and a monk wandered into the house. We knew of him, he visited our local neighbours often. The monk told my mother that the house was built on an exhumed burial ground. The spirits are disturbed he warned. For weeks after the tarot cards disappeared she saged the house and rearranged the furniture—hoping to redirect the qi and shoo away the bad energy. They won’t settle, he said, leaving the stolen land with a resigned hand in the air, the orange robes swished behind him.
We left shortly after pictures came back from the Kodak shop after a big house party. In one shot, my mother is smiling wide with her friends at the lip of the back sitting room, and there is the distinct shape of a face behind her. It could have been a trick of the light, a smudge on the lens, a mistake in the darkroom. But it was enough to move us out of the haunted house. I ask myself now, after so much time has passed: if I had known how to appease the spirits—could we have reached an understanding? I feel that I’ve angered them somehow. In the thick of a bad spell or a brain glitch, I wonder if it’s the man who sat on my bed or the sparklies exacting revenge because I lived in a burgled rest.
Do the ghosts linger like cigarette smoke and curl in the air around me? The bad qi has waned over the years but I’m not sure its gone. I say my own prayer now, when I stumble across an altar in late August or early September—just in case.
Xoxo,
Z
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Salves for your sorrows
A fascinating and well reported inside take on the collapse of the fashion industry as we know it.
How the gay man’s fixation on masculinity is decaying mental health.
This really cool retailer of one-of-a-kind creations from fledgling designers.
SLAYN’s excellent new album (a snippet of a single was in a Salve podcast a few weeks ago.)