The festival for hungry ghosts

On a Penang stage tonight, a scantily clad Chinese Venus is seeking some serious attention. Cheeky spotlights play hide and seek around the tiny skirt that hugs her long, sexy legs, which bend passionately as the foxy lady blows pure pop sugar into her microphone.

In a perfect world, such a well-attuned beauty queen would have encores and buckets of flowers landing at her feet. At a minimum, she’d deserve some fans cheering her efforts in the first rows. But not tonight: this modern Suzie Wong performs to empty seats, prompting curious passers-by to wonder what’s going on, take a closer, curious peek, and maybe decide to have a sit and give the lady some love. “Do not sit at the front rows!” screams Ang Hoi over the pounding beats of Chinese techno. Hoi is a Malaysian Chinese shop owner who turned medium for the occasion. “You can’t sit there,” he says, “those chairs are reserved to the ghosts,” he insists. It is hard to believe, but tonight demons and spirits are fluttering all around us. This is not the kind of superstition you would expect to find in Malaysia and Singapore, the former too-fast-developing, and the latter leading South-East Asian nations, where technology and luxury comforts have steamrolled traditions and folklore into a steel and concrete mass grave.

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