Hungry Ghost

Michael’s favorite snack has always been popcorn. Almost every evening after dinner he’d make microwave popcorn, or use the stovetop if he was feeling fancy. One year for Christmas my Mama got him an extravagant collection of different types of gourmet popcorn kernels from Amish Country Popcorn, a gift he spoke of for years as being the best he’d ever received.

His favorite meat has forever been bacon. For nearly a decade he’d fry up some bacon and eggs every morning. Then he started getting fancy with that too, and would coat the bacon in brown sugar and bake it in the oven for a salty/sweet caramelized treat. During Covid when our active life slowed waaaaay down, he swapped the fried eggs and bacon for oatmeal and bananas, saving the bacon for just the occasional indulgence, which he savored.

One horrible thing about the last year of Michael’s life was the very restricted neutropenic diet he had to stick to because of his severely immunocompromised state.

Bacon was 100% off the table because there was no way to cook it enough to make it safe. Popcorn was tricky because as everyone who has ever dieted knows, it’s a “healthy” snack when prepared without heavy butter or oils, which can make you feel full and therefore eat less other stuff. And in Michael’s case, we desperately needed him to not fill up on something with so few calories. Every single thing he consumed needed to be high in both calories and protein to stop the free fall of weight and to provide enough fuel to keep fighting. So popcorn was still an end of the day snack, but only after he’d already met the rest of his nutritional goals. You can read Michael’s own words in post he wrote about his diet by clicking here.

I almost never have popcorn (it hurts my stomach) and only very rarely consume pork products (I’d been a vegetarian for years when I met Michael and though I did begin occasionally eating meat after he grilled it for me, I’d raised pigs through the 4-H program while in middle school, completely naive to the fact that when you sold your pig at auction during the fair, the person who bought them was buying them for the meat, which would be consumed. What can I say… I was a city girl who was relocated to the country at age 13 and there was a LOT I didn’t know about where our food came from. But once I did know, pork was off the table, much to my meat-and-potato-loving parents’ chagrin). The point being that we have a cupboard full of popcorn which no one is eating and no reason to be buying bacon. Until this week.

Benjamin loves popcorn almost as much as his Dad, but his preference is always to have someone else make it. Without Michael (or his Auntie Heidi, another popcorn connoisseur) here to do it, he hasn’t had much lately. But Wednesday night he decided it was time, and popped one of the microwavable Amish Country Popcorn packages we found for Michael into the microwave. Our microwave is brand new and rarely used. The first bag of popcorn burned pretty bad. So he tried a second bag on a lower setting for less time, only to find it came out so much worse. The kernels popped but then charred, immediately filling our whole flat with thick smoke. I turned off all the lights (to not attract mosquitoes) and opened wide the windows and balcony door, allowing the hot, humid air from outside blow through and take the smoke (and our cool, air conditioned air) with it. Ben gave up on popcorn and had ice cream instead, tossing the noxious black clumps of organic material into the trash bin after dousing the smoldering mess in water.

And then last night, while Ben was at a late night work rehearsal, I noticed we had a pack of bacon in the fridge. I didn’t remember buying it, but when I checked the date, it was getting toward the end of its useful period. I told my older son I’d cook up bacon and eggs for dinner since it would just be the two of us. Unfortunately the bacon unexpectedly joined the smoky trend and came very close to catching fire, with the edges turning black while the center was still raw. It happened incredibly fast, while I was standing right there at the stove.

I turned off the burner and plumes of smoke started spewing while I quickly snatched the bacon from the pan. I took a photo to text Ben (“I guess it’s my turn tonight?”) then ran through the same routine of turning off the lights and pulling open all the windows, feeling completely stunned at the stack of inedible bacon. I have cooked dinner for my family nearly every single night for the last 15 years and have improved my cooking skills so much in that time that I truly cannot remember the last time I burned food. And definitely can’t remember a single instance where I burned anything at all while standing right there paying attention to it!

After clearing the flat of smoke and tossing the mess, I scrambled my older son some bacon-free eggs then took myself to bed for a small cry in the fetal position. I missed Michael’s passionate and well-known love of bacon. I missed the way he cheerfully celebrated my mistakes as evidence of trying and learning and growth instead of the catastrophic failures my brain tells me they are. I even missed him complaining over the bland and repetitive diet he was forced to consume, with me presenting the exact same series of Michael-safe meals over and over but with wildly creative descriptions of each dish until a bit of sparkle would come back to his sad eyes. I just missed Michael himself, my Beloved who is not here with us while we are all struggling with so many things, the largest of course being this terrible absence we are forced to endure.

Hong Kong has several unique festivals which are considered part of its “intangible cultural heritage.”

This month, the seventh on the lunar calendar, is considered Ghost Month, where tradition says the gates of the spirit world swing open and dearly departed ancestors roam among the living. Among other activities, families who observe this will leave out food and coins and burn paper items like fake money or luxury goods as an offering to the ghosts of their loved ones as a way to honor them and keep them comfortable and pleased in the afterlife. Often this is done right at the curb of busy streets and if you don’t know what is happening, it can be very confusing to see so many huge open flames out in public in the city.

The whole month has many activities and various superstitions attached to how to behave during this time: don’t swim, don’t tap your shoulders, don’t leave your laundry hanging outside overnight, don’t pick up any coins you see on the ground, don’t take the last train or bus home at night. The centerpiece is the 15th of the lunar month, the Hungry Ghost Festival. With a full moon and a belief that it brings the peak of spirit activity, it’s the evening where you will see these little fires everywhere.

After my good cry in bed following the burnt bacon debacle, I pulled out my phone to mindlessly scroll Instagram. After seeing post after post of Hong Kongers standing in front of open flames, I realized it was in fact the evening of the Hungry Ghost Festival. And like every other time when something uniquely particular to our experiences with Michael happens, I began to laugh. We don’t participate in this festival of ancestor worship, nor are ghosts necessarily part of our belief system, but the idea that in 24 hours we had burned both popcorn and bacon to a point where we mortals could not consume them felt like a little wink from a happy Michael, now free from all dietary restrictions.

Once again I texted Ben, this time pitching a new angle to the story… the burning of the popcorn and the bacon weren’t operator error or equipment failure, they were just inevitable events to remind us of our missing father and husband, events which were always going to happen in this particular 24 hour period, and likely won’t ever happen again as long as we agree to wait until next month to try once more. Let’s just go with that, I told him. Yes, he replied, after a string of crying emojis.

If you’d like to see some photos of what we see each year on the evening of the Hungry Ghost Festival, scroll through this post on Instagram from SCMP. When Benjamin left work late last night, this is what he saw on the way home. When he made it home, there was a fire truck parked across the street from our building. I heard a lot of sirens last night, but didn’t put it together with the possibility of people calling emergency services if they saw open flames in our quiet little beach community. If you’d like to read more about Ghost Month, here is a short article, and here is the Hong Kong Tourism Board’s guide to Hungry Ghost activities this month.

More soon.