- By Greg Wong | Examiner staff writer |
- Aug 14, 2024 Updated Aug 14, 2024 (SFExaminer.com)
San Francisco is gearing up to celebrate one of the largest Chinese cultural festivals.
Chinatown on Saturday is hosting its second annual Hungry Ghost Festival, the neighborhood’s contemporary spin on one of China’s most historic traditions.
Organizers claim the event is the only citywide Hungry Ghost Festival in the nation.
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The festival is celebrated through different interpretations across the Chinese diaspora, which includes mainland China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan and the Philippines.
In Chinese culture, the Ghost Festival signifies a period when the boundary between the living and spirit realms are obscured. Hungry and angry ghosts — spirits of people who were forgotten or have a grievance with their death — seek solace by entering the space of the living.
Chinese people attempt to heal and reconcile with these “restless spirits” through offerings of food, performances and art as a means of combating their rage, said Hoi Leung, curator of the Chinese Culture Center of San Francisco, which organizes The City’s event.
It’s annually celebrated for a month starting on the 15th day of the seventh month on the lunar calendar — which is August on the Gregorian calendar.
Leung said the tradition, practiced by Chinese Americans as early as the mid-1800s, is a way to show how “resilient the community is” and “how they deal with generational trauma when it comes to wrongful deaths of family separations.”
For Chinese Americans, it’s an opportunity to honor ancestors who have been “forgotten,” such as those affected by historically racist policies such as the Chinese Exclusion Act, the late 19th-century federal law which heavily restricted Chinese immigration to the United States.
The theme of this year’s Ghost Festival is “Downpour, Uproar,” which Leung said is about “energizing the community against all odds.”
“We’re trying to still build up to that sensation where the community is like, ‘I suffered through this, or I’m feeling really angry about that, but today’s the day I let it all out,’ — and doing it in a matter that is still very safe, family friendly and a good time all around,” Leung said.
Last year, CCC started the Ghost Festival as an evolution of the Chinatown Music Festival, which the organization had been hosting for more than 10 years by turning Porstmouth Square into a music venue.
Leung said the motivation to reimagine the music festival was partially because of the COVID-19 pandemic, which brought grief and loss to the forefront of many people’s minds, including those in The City’s Chinese community.
“Since the pandemic time, a lot of the community has personally witnessed death and grieved in lots of different ways,” she said. “So we were really conceptualizing a festival that would be even more relevant for the present time.”
Last year’s inaugural event drew roughly 10,000 people to Chinatown, organizers said.
The celebration will take place across the neighborhood from 4 to 9 p.m., highlighted by the Ghost King Parade, which will begin on Stockton Street and wind all throughout Chinatown. The parade’s defining float is a 16-foot-long, paper-crafted Ghost King sculpture.
Like its predecessor, the festival will be centralized around Portsmouth Square, where there will be on-stage performances from an array of artists including the Chinatown Portsmouth Square Dancing Club, a Cantonese opera, and California-based Latin American electronic musician Anais Azul.
Leung made clear that the celebration is not just for Chinese people. She encouraged San Franciscans of all different backgrounds who think they have “angry ghosts in their community to come out and really heal. It’s an open invitation for everyone.”
The event will also feature art pop-ups along Grant Avenue, a market place on Waverly Place and a play area for kids at Rose Pak Station.
Organizers encouraged attendees to take the Central Subway to and from Rose Pak Station, which is located at the heart of where most of the festivities will take place.
Leung said part of the goal is to create a Ghost Festival that both stays true to tradition and is also “so truly San Francisco Chinatown.”
She said that it’s part of Chinatown leaders’ continued efforts to revitalize the neighborhood into the future while keeping the past front and center.
“As curator, I really look for these moments where we can feel more rooted into the American context, and also looking for ways where we can have a lot of collaborations both within the Chinese community, but also throughout the different communities of color,” Leung said. “After just developing through different kinds of projects, this festival emerged as a very strong opportunity to really tie The City together and really tell a piece of untold history.”
