"Waking of the Insects" Holiday

     Today was Jingzhe, a lunar holiday in the Chinese calendar.  According to traditional folklore, this is the day that insects wake up from hibernation and the mythical white tiger is out looking for prey, so people perform a ritual to appease the tiger.  Somehow appeasing the tiger got connected with the "beating the petty person" ritual, also called the "villain hitting" ritual, which I mentioned in my Feb. 11 post.  Most likely this became a two-for-one deal:  I could get rid of the negativity caused by an enemy by feeding the enemy to the tiger, and by doing this I'd placate the tiger so it would leave me alone.

     The first indication that something was going on today was when I ran into 3 groups of women on the Belcher's Street sidewalk about a block from out apartment, like those at the right.  They were sitting on low stools with a very curious assortment of stuff:  canisters with burning paper, burning joss sticks, makeshift cardboard altars, baskets of eggs and oranges, and some small yellow paper cut-outs of a fierce looking beast that sort of stood up.  Most curiously, a piece of what looked like raw chicken sat on top of some of the paper beasts.  After I got home I read online about Jingzhe, the paper tigers that are used in the rituals, and the salt pork that's used to feed the tigers.

     Late this afternoon I got off the tram close to the Canal Street flyover and walked through the underpass area where the elderly women who are the professional petty person beaters sit on their stools and beat a paper cutout of your enemy with a shoe.  (The woman in the center of this photo is holding a red shoe in her right hand.) The stools were full of customers today, the shoes were beating paper fast and furious, there were paper tigers all over and some meat for them, too, joss sticks and paper were burning at all the beating stations, and clients were handing over bills to the beaters for their services. I read that the standard fee to have a ritual performed on your enemy is $HK50, or about $6.50, and that this is a huge money-making day for the pros.  There were hoards of people milling around this spectacle and a few police were wisely stationed here, as well.  Because the air was very unpleasantly smoky and I didn't especially like hanging out with this crowd,  I didn't stick around long enough to watch a client getting the full ritual from beginning to end.  If I had, maybe I'd understand better how all of these parts of Jingzhe and villain beating fit together. (Where do the waking insects come into all of this, anyway?)
     The Jingzhe ritual used to be observed in the Pearl River delta region of southern China until the Communist takeover in 1949.  Now it's mostly just found in Hong Kong.
     I would say that it's a fair generalization that most Hong Kongers think that this is a more sophisticated place than anywhere in mainland China. If you were visiting Hong Kong today on Jingzhe, however, you might question that presumption.