Young people are out in drove, that is, if they were not already on bikes, racing like mad on weekend nights.
This time around, in costume. Halloween costume. In Vietnam, of all places.
First, the masks trickled in at tourist and expat hot spots. Then, wider adoption is made possible by cheaper goods from next door China . No stranger to superstition and spirits, Vietnam has always opened to trying new things, from Tango to Hip Hop, Vespa to Roll Royce.
Only this time, young people agree with their elder generation: the spirits world.
Their parents would burn incense on the 15th of July, Lunar calendar, and the younger generation dress in costume, Twilight style. Long held reverence for both the living or dead (animism and ancestral worship), Vietnamese are no strangers to para phenomena and cyclical lives. In contrast, to be consistent with their linear and industrial model, Westerners have tried to suppress witchcraft and superstitious belief which gained popularity in revolt of Darwin and the rise of science and technology.
That can’t explain away Twilight, the Blair Witch project and tons of Halloween candies and candles flickered inside pumpkin shells on US front lawns.
But in Vietnam, year around, in any household, one finds incense burning at the family altar. Even in Catholic households.
In fact, Cao Dai ism accommodates all spiritual traditions under one roof (Victor Hugo was one of the saints).
Caodaists wear white, symbol of purity. Another striking contrast in how funerals are conducted. White robes in Vietnam, all Black for the West (this tradition is widely adopted by Vietnamese overseas who attend Chapel services in Rose Hills, a popular cemetery in Los Angeles, California. The Buddhist Vietnamese in the US struck a compromise when colliding with public ordinance and traditional mourning practices: they brought in the monks,
then the limousine people take over.
So, the children in Vietnam got both Moon Cake last month, and Halloween candies this month.
Halloween allow both adults and children to take on an alter ego. Someone said aptly that “give me a mask, I will tell you the truth”.
Actors do that all the time, and get paid handsomely.
Halloween, it’s one day out of the year, when the bad and ugly feel accepted at the table, or a bar stool in Vietnam. Westerners are welcome to join in what had already been a built-in practice in this culture: a reverence for the non-living.
Thang Nguyen 555 