Singapore | May 2023

When I was growing up, the red light district of Geylang was a no go zone. Even as an adult, the only times I ventured into the area was when I was in university to dine at several 24 hour eateries in the area. Those eateries, which were located along the main road, made for fascinating people watching as there was an interesting cast of characters coming in and out of the dark side lanes.

One evening, I had dinner with my classmates there, and we wandered around the area after eating. It was quite an eye opener. There were, of course, various establishments of questionable repute, including hotels and barely-disguised brothels. But, we were also taken by surprise at the number of clan associations, small shrines (mostly Buddhist; oddly, these featured figurines with black faces. There was also one church and one mosque thrown in for good measure), and ornate shophouse facades. Each of the shophouses had three upstairs windows - the middle one was always the longest and extended all the way to the floor. One of my friends, whose mother is a tour guide, explained that the middle window extended downwards close to the floor because the shophouses were built before modern sanitation, and waste (colloquially known as "nightsoil") was collected in buckets. The middle window was low to the floor so that the occupants could lower the nightsoil pails to the collectors below.

Our most significant discovery that evening was also the most bizarre. We thrown for a loop by the sight of two trucks with flashing lights blaring loud music. At first, we thought these were mobile karaoke trucks, but we realized we were wrong when we saw figurines on the trucks. One member of our party is fluent in Mandarin and she could read the Chinese script, but she could not figure out what they were for. We stared in fascination as we walked past the trucks. Soon after, groups of Chinese people (mostly men) walked past us. In each party, there would be one costumed man with five long skewers pierced into his exposed back. They wore odd costumes, and one of them even moved like a primate. They all looked like they were in a trance. At the end of the procession, there was a man and a woman with pacifiers in their mouths. We couldn't make head or tail of this.

Our research later revealed that these were spirit mediums, colloquially known as tangki in the Hokkien dialect. Tangki are possessed by spirits (sometimes even gods) and they serve as vessels for them. Some of the key characters include the monkey god, which explains the main walking like a primate, and even child gods, which explains the people with pacifiers. Rather disturbingly, some of them are believed to be possessed by deities from the court of hell. In my western-centric worldview, my immediate thought was that this almost amounts to devil worship. But, there are, of course, nuances: in Chinese folk religion, these deities are charged with escorting spirits of the deceased to the underworld. The white faced ones keep track of deaths, and they then send the black faced ones to fetch the deceased to the underworld. This aligns with the many white and black faced deities we saw among the small shrines.

This was an interesting cultural encounter that I never expected, especially not in the red light district. More information on tangki may be found here:
https://biblioasia.nlb.gov.sg/vol-16/issue-2/ju…Read more