The Hungry Ghost Festival (also known as Zhongyuan Festival or Yulan Festival) is a special celebration for the Chinese diaspora, observed with unique interpretations worldwide in places like Hong Kong, Singapore, and beyond. Marking the fifteenth day of the seventh lunar month, this festival signifies a time when the boundary between the living and spiritual realms blurs. It is a day when the most hungry and angry ghosts come to the human realms to seek solace–and yes, it can be scary. Rituals surrounding the Hungry Ghost Festival would seek to distract, exonerate, or calm these restless spirits. There would be foods, performances, and other offerings to the spirit world, and in turn, it can be a healing way to combat both our seen and unseen grievances and rage.
A little-known history is that before the 1920s, Chinese rituals that sought to pacify angry spirits such as Da Jiao and the Hungry Ghost Festival were some of the most important and deeply relevant celebrations in early Chinatowns, where over 350 of such festivals were documented throughout California Chinatowns between the 1860s and 1920s. Perhaps, amid migrations, wrongful deaths, and exclusions, that was a period where Ghost Festival and Da Jiao rituals offered a sense of peace to those grappling with grief, generational traumas, and the ache of familial separation. However, after the 1906 Earthquake, with the tabooing of superstitions and non-Christian practices, many of the temples that sustained this tradition were closed or never rebuilt. Despite that, the Hungry Ghost Festival in the American context endures as a key Chinese cultural heritage that embodies notions of resistance and resilience–with many iterations reviving today that continue a legacy of reconciling with anger and sadness.
In 2023, the Chinese Culture Center of San Francisco (CCC) refreshed the decade-long Chinatown Music Festival into the 1st Annual Hungry Ghost Festival–a contemporary neighborhood interpretation of this important holiday. The Festival brought together the Chinatown community, Indigenous community, Latino communities, queer communities, international communities, and over 10,000 visitors in shared dialogue with the themes and spirit of the Hungry Ghost Festival. The night-time celebration included a diverse performance line-up, large-scale public art, altars, and a traditional “Ghost King” parade that blessed the Chinatown neighborhood and beyond.
To reach Citywide communities and their ghosts, the festival involved a sense of playfulness, humor, grassroots vibes, and a whole lot of artists, partners, and cultural practitioners. For the 3rd Annual Hungry Ghost Festival in 2025, we embraced the theme, “Demons of Our Times,” as marginalized communities face relentless attacks from demons wearing new faces, we confront them through remembrance, resistance and cathartic release.
