Technologies of the Hungry Ghosts and Underworld Gods

Abstract

During the seventh lunar month, many Chinese believe that the gates of the underworld open and the spirits return to dwell with the living. During this month, concerts and performances, colloquially known as getai (English: a stage for songs) or kuatai, are staged for both the dead and the living in Singapore and Malaysia. Many Chinese temples and professional videographers in Singapore now provide live streaming of getai performances and spirit possessions during the Hungry Ghost Month. These videos are hosted on Facebook, such as on ‘Singapore Getai’, ‘Singapore Getai Fans Page’, ‘Lixin Fan Page’ and ‘LEX-S Watch Live Channel’. Temples also create Facebook pages where posts of video recordings and live streams of spirit possessions appear. Conventionally, hell and its inhabitants are transported during the seventh month to confined spaces such as private temples, factory sites, ‘void decks’ (a colloquial term for the ground floor of a public housing block), basketball courts or open grass fields where a makeshift stage is erected for the getai performance. Now, with the increasing use of digital technology, deities and spirits perform to the digital camera in ways that extend the performance stage to the digital platform. This suggests that ‘hell’ can shift from a vertical axis (Chinese: 天地人; the realms of heaven, hell and human) to a material stage, where performances of hell percolate as digits on a network that consists of nodes, machines and technologies that mediate the spiritual.

Notes

1 Malaysia’s partial lockdown in response to the COVID-19 pandemic began on 18 March 2020 and was subsequently extended to 9 June 2020. Singapore’s lockdown or ‘Circuit Breaker’ kicked in on 7 April 2020 and was extended to 1 June 2020. This was followed by the easing of tight measures over three phases.

2 The video described here can be viewed on the temple’s Facebook page, ‘’, available online at https://bit.ly/34TikDk, accessed 29 May 2020.

3 The video referenced here can be viewed on the temple’s Facebook page, ‘’, available online at https://bit.ly/3pxMKmi, accessed 29 May 2020.

4 The Minnan people speak Southern Min or Minnan, which includes several variants such as Hokkien-Taiwanese, Teochew and Hainanese. The migration of Minnan communities to Southeast Asia led devotees to call their gods in their Minnan language to this day.

5 According to the background folklore, Dua Ya Pek and Di Ya Pek were constables in a magistrate’s court. They were escorting a convict when he escaped. They split up to search for him and vowed to meet again later under a bridge (Nantai Bridge) at a certain time. Di Ya Pek returned on time and waited under the bridge until there was a heavy downpour, flooding the area. He kept his promise and waited for Dua Ya Pek. Eventually, he drowned. Delayed by the heavy rain, Dua Ya Pek finally arrived but he was too late. Remembering the promise they had made, he committed suicide in grief and guilt by hanging himself.

6 In the following paragraph on the same page, Victor Turner discusses the difference between linguistic and anthropological definitions of performance. His example of Noam Chomsky’s competence/performance dichotomy – ‘competence being mastery of a system of rules and regularities underlying that kind of language behavior which, for example, we call "speaking English"’ – leads into Dell Hymes’ unveiling of the hidden Neo-Platonism or Gnosticism in Chomsky’s approach, which ‘seems to regard performance as generally ‘a fallen state’ (Turner 1987: 90). This metaphor of height and falling is what I will also explore in this article.

7 This is from 19 August to 16 September in 2020 and will be from 8 August to 6 September in 2021.

8 The translation of Zhuangzi is taken from the digital library ctext.org, available at https://bit.ly/37VZVHS, accessed 31 May 2020. The source text comes from Zhuanghzi 1891.

9 The full video, ‘ Zhu Feng – (18.08.2018)’, posted by Zhu Feng, can be viewed on Facebook at https://bit.ly/2L4jQLA, accessed 29 May 2020.

10 The full video, ‘HD Getai Live Broadcast’ can be viewed on Facebook at https://bit.ly/38LdZDc; see video at 1:37:11, accessed 29 May 2020.