Hungry Ghost Stories

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Welcome to the Western Australian Museum Boola Bardip Talks Archive. The Museum Boola Bardip hosts a series of thought-provoking talks and conversations tackling big issues, questions, and ideas, and is delighted to be able to share these with you through the Talks Archive. The Talks Archive is recorded on Whadjuk Nyoongar boodja. The Western Australian Museum acknowledges and respects the traditional owners of their ancestral lands, waters, and skies.

Host: Good evening everybody. Welcome to the WA Museum Boola Bardip, this Jade Nights event, and the Terracotta Warriors exhibition. Before we get started, I’d just like to take a moment to acknowledge the lands on which we are gathered and learning on here tonight: the lands of the Whadjuk people of the Nyoongar nation. I would like to pay my respects to Elders past and present, and extend those respects to any First Nations folks joining us tonight.

Each week here at Jade Nights, we have different activities. We have different talks. And tonight marks the start of Ghost Month. And tonight’s talk is presented by Caleb Kelso-Marsh, associate lecturer in Korean Studies and Asian Studies at UWA [University of Western Australia]. Over the next 30 minutes, Caleb is going to be discussing the role of ghost stories in Chinese society and how they have both shaped and been shaped by the country’s history and politics.

Folks, if you are coming to join this talk, we do have some standing room here, or there, if you’d like, as well; or we’re also delivering the same talk at 7:30, if you'd prefer to come back then. For everyone, enjoy. Thank you.

Caleb Kelso-Marsh: Hi. My name is Caleb Kelso-Marsh and as you’ve just found out, I’m an associate lecturer in Asian Studies at UWA. So, I recently submitted my PhD in Asian Studies. Prior to this, I have a background in law and English, and my focus in that area of studies was Chinese law. And so that’s sort of why I’ve been, was first invited to come and talk to you tonight.

In terms of what I do as an academic in my area of research, I suppose what I do is quite interdisciplinary, and it was funny— When I was planning this presentation I was thinking, how can I actually sort of encapsulate what it is that I do? And so, I suppose my research combines film, cultural studies, a little bit of literature, history, and politics.

And my interest is really in, and what I study, is how cultural products are historical sources that provide insight into Asian societies.

And my focus, like at UWA, our Asian Studies program is focused on modern Asia rather than ancient or antiquities, and so that’s my focus as well. And look, on the one hand, I understand this sounds quite trivial. And my father used to tell me all the time, he’d say, “Caleb, all that you do is you watch movies and call it a job.” Now, I admit there is an element of that, but there is a little bit more—and hopefully you leave tonight with a bit of a sense there is a bit more to it than just that.

Amongst historians, at least, there’s very much a profound sense that cultural products—cinema, television, literature, popular culture— are important historical sources because they provide insight into societies in a way that perhaps more traditional or official historical records don’t.

And they particularly sort of show a subversive side or an underbelly to various societies. And so that’s sort of what I do, and that’s what today’s lecture is going to really focus on with regards to ghosts.

The reason that we, I guess, settled on this idea or this theme of ghosts is because right now it is currently what’s referred to as the Hungry Ghost Festival.

Out of interest, who here is familiar with Hungry Ghost Festival?

Some people are, some people aren't. Cool. So I’ll explain a little bit about what Hungry Ghost is, and then we will go from there. So basically Hungry Ghost is on the 15th day of the seventh month in the lunar calendar. So, that’s different to our Roman calendar, but it roughly falls in sort of— September, late August, give or take, is the Hungry Ghost month.

And the idea is that during this month, ghosts emerge from the afterlife and they come to visit the living in the world. And it’s during this time that a lot of relatives will really try to relieve the suffering of their ancestors who are stuck in purgatory.

And there’s particular concern during this month over what are called hungry ghosts.

And these are people that either lived bad lives, villains, criminals, or people that suffered particularly horrible deaths. And there’s a sense that these hungry ghosts are hungry during this month. When they emerge, they’re going to come out and wreak havoc on the world. And so things need to be done to sort of prevent them from causing too much chaos.

In terms of, I guess, a belief system, this stems from a combination of things. It sort of has its roots in Confucianism, particularly this sort of respect for one’s ancestors, both in the living and also, you know, that have passed on. There’s some Buddhist roots and some Daoist roots, too.

This festival is celebrated across Asia. We see now, China, I’ve got a question mark, there for— We will come to that in a moment. So, keep that in the back of your mind. It was celebrated in China, but today, less so, and I’ll explain why later on.

But we see Korea has a version called Baekjung. There's a version in Japan as well. Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Vietnam celebrate these as well.

Where Hungry Ghost is particularly prominent are in places in Southeast Asia that were once colonies.

The reason for this is that these places, when they were colonised, the colonisers, in order to exploit sort of the resources and the land, required cheap labour. And they looked to China for a lot of this, and these people are called sojourners. And the reason they were called sojourners is because they never intended to move to these places permanently. It was always just meant to be temporarily in search of work.

But over time, a lot of people got stuck and established their own Chinese communities there.

And so we see Hungry Ghost celebrated in Southeast Asia, particularly amongst Chinese communities. So, if you go to Singapore right now, for example, this is a really big thing and you’ll see right across Singapore sort of effigies set up, people burning incense, things like that.

So, a few do’s and don’ts during the Hungry Ghost month.

Some things you can do, you can provide offerings in the form of food or paper money. You can use real money to buy paper money which you then leave for the ancestors. Joss paper and incense are often burnt. People will visit their family members’ graves. Sometimes people will let floating lanterns out in bodies of water.

And we even see, during this period, ghost operas, which are operas that are performed to entertain the ghosts that might be roaming around. And so, if you go to one of these ghost operas you’ll see there’s a row of seats at the front that are left empty. This is for the ghosts to sit in and enjoy the performance.

There’s a whole bunch of don’ts during this month as well, things you shouldn’t do.

Kick offerings. Hang clothes outside at night. Go swimming. Get married. Buy a new car. Move house. Go out at night. Wear red. Drink alcohol. Cut your hair. Or hang chimes next to your bed.

Now, I admit these may seem somewhat trivial in our context. But there’s a little bit more significance to the history of ghosts in Chinese culture. So, I guess, I’ve broken this down to— In preparing for today, I tried to kind of come up with three ways of sort of describing or articulating why ghosts are so significant or important in Chinese culture. And I’ve broken these down into three.

And one of them is sort of, I guess, for spiritual reasons. You know, within Chinese culture, there is very much a recognition of the spirit world. And scholars argue that this is what defines the Chinese worldview.

And I think in our Western context, where we very much are sort of focused on the material world, and there is perhaps less of a sense of the, I guess, the relevance or the presence of a spirit world, in Chinese culture that's quite different.

And so, ghosts, on the one hand, go some ways to, I guess, dealing with these questions of, what is their afterlife? You know, what does it mean to be human?

Another significant thing is that ghosts have strong links to, and particularly in ancient Chinese culture— A person’s success was very much reliant on their family. And that family was also very much a patriarchal and a patrilineal family. And I’ll come to that in a moment as well. Someone’s wellbeing was ensured by their family. They were reliant on their family for their wellbeing. And in that way, the seniors’ wellbeing affects and trickles down to younger people within the family as well. And so a central tenet to families was respect for one’s elders, because that’s where your livelihood came from.

And this again began to— I guess we can see this, in a respect, for one’s ancestors that have passed on too, and this idea of ghosts links to that, and the fact that wellbeing comes from there.

Of particular concern as well is the death of a young, unmarried woman. The reason for this was that in ancient Chinese culture a woman didn't gain agency or didn’t become a human, you could say, until they were married. And upon marrying someone, they would enter into their husband’s family and suddenly gain agency.

So, there was also, because of this as well, there was concern over if a young woman passed away when she wasn’t married, she hadn’t truly become human or hadn’t truly gained agency, and for that reason, wasn’t entitled to a proper burial place. They would have an unmarked grave quite often. And there’d be no one to remember her as well. And I’ll come to this in a moment, too.

Finally, and the third thing I think that we see in a lot of the, I guess, stories and myths and legends about ghosts is quite often the character of the ghost provides a voice for sort of the downtrodden. Often ghosts in Chinese literature, Chinese folktales, are social outcasts and in this way it provided a voice to people that didn’t really have a voice in society at the time.

So, the main record that we have when we’re talking about ghosts, and we're looking at the figure of the ghost in Chinese history and culture, the main record that we have of this is from literature, from ancient ghost stories. And a little bit more recently we see these begin to be translated into television and film too, and I’ll talk about that a bit later on.

I’ve got on the screen there a number of quite famous ancient ghost stories. Some of them, you may be familiar, and you can see these go a long way back as well. One of the, the most, probably the one that people may be most familiar with is ‘A Journey to the West’.

I don't know if anyone here remembers from the ‘80s, a TV show called ‘Monkey Magic’ was on ABC? I can see some people going, “Yeah!” My parents’ generation. This is based on that story, ‘A Journey to the West’. And again, this was a story that sort of had these supernatural elements and these ghost characters.

By far, though, the most, I guess, famous set of ghost stories were written by a guy called Pu Songling, and these were called ‘Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio’.

There were, more or less, in this compilation about 500 stories and these have been adapted time and time again in Chinese history. They've been rewritten as stories, they've been adapted into plays, television series, films as well.

Pu Songling is a really interesting character because he was writing at a time where China was very much a Confucian society. What this meant was that there was a very, very— Society was very much hierarchical. You had a group of elites, and to enter that elite you had to be a scholar, and you had to be able to pass the exam required to do so. Pu Songling was a scholar but he was never able to pass that exam and he went to his grave sort of seeing himself as a complete failure.

Ironically, though, the thing that he is now most famous for is writing these ghost stories and these, at the time, were sort of like pulp literature.

They were looked down upon. They were sort of considered a bit trivial, a bit silly, and sort of, you know, they were lowbrow. And they weren’t really sort of the, I guess, the highbrow sort of literature that he and the crowd that he was aspiring to become a part of.

But these are really significant, too, because these were also the stories that everyday people could understand. And these stories sort of came from where people would sit around in tea shops, they’d share stories with one another, and Pu Songling put these into a written form.

And bear in mind too, this is a period in time where a lot of people are illiterate, and so they can’t read literature. But they can understand and share and spread these stories, and so, Pu Songling compiled these and wrote this book.

These stories were significant because they deal with, with age-old fears that people have. These questions about the afterlife. These questions about, you know, what does it mean to be human. And they also gave voice to the downtrodden at this point in time.

As it says on the screen— One characteristic of Chinese myths or legends, these sorts of ghost stories, is that they have the potential to challenge the social order and challenge authority, and they can be sort of subversive.

Traditional China, when Pu Songling is writing, when all these other stories are being written too, was very much characterised by being, like I said, very hierarchical. And with that came a lot of inequalities, a lot of exploitation, and a lot of injustice. Because of censorship, people couldn't openly express their dissatisfaction with this directly. But these sorts of trivial cultural products, ghost stories in this case, provided a framework that they were able to actually do this.

And so we see this in a lot of these ghost stories. They’re these revenge narratives where someone comes back from the afterlife to seek revenge for a wrong that was committed against them. We also see a lot of these ghost stories, as well, talk about, you know, these lovers that were torn apart—kind of like a Romeo and Juliet thing—torn apart because society wouldn't allow them to be together and as ghosts they come together.

More often than not, the ghosts that we see in in Chinese stories are foreigners, they’re poor, they’re females, they’re social outcasts, they’re downtrodden.

So, I’m just going to talk about two really, I guess, famous ghosts. There’s lots of different types of ghosts, and I can’t go through all of them. But I’ll come back to these, so again, keep these in the back of your mind as well.

One of them, and my favourite, is one that's called the ‘Jiangshi’ and this was basically a— People talk about it as being like the Chinese vampire, but it's probably more correct to say it’s like a Chinese zombie. So, it’s a corpse that comes back to life and is bloodthirsty and sort of runs around with its arms out like this.

Now, there’s a bit of a backstory to this, though. So, the Jiangshi, when it came about in Chinese literature was, it was around a time where China was expanding quite rapidly. Poor people were moving around the countryside in search of work because they needed work to make a living.

However, a lot of these people, when they were abroad, would pass away. And under Chinese tradition you ideally want to be buried in your hometown, nearby to your family. But to transport a corpse from one side of China to another is incredibly expensive. You know, to put someone in a coffin and carry them. And it really was something that only the wealthy could afford.

So, what this meant was that poorer people, social outcasts, prisoners as well, if they died, wouldn’t have that opportunity to be buried with their family.

And so what came about was this thing called corpse herding or corpse driving. And what they would do is, it was a cheap way of exporting multiple bodies all at once. And so, they’d get the bodies or the corpses. They put them on these two bamboo rods with their arms up. And then two men, one at the front, one at the back, would carry the poles. And that way they were able to carry a number of corpses at once. And they’d only do it at night, because it’s quite scary seeing a bunch of dead bodies.

But the thing that happened was that, if you saw this happening, you’re seeing all these bodies bouncing up and down like they’ve come back to life. And so out of this, the myth of the Jiangshi was created.

And another thing that we see that’s quite common is that often ghosts in Chinese stories are female. And scholars have referred to these as the phantom heroine. These are typically females who have died unmarried; therefore they don’t have agency. They’re not truly human, perhaps you could say. Social outcasts.

But at the same time, these stories depict these women as being powerful, vengeful. They seek vengeance, and particularly towards the men that have wronged them as well. And so in this way, we see these female social outcasts getting given a voice that they didn’t have in society at the time.

We’re going to fast forward a little bit and look at a little bit of modern China and see sort of how these traditional ghosts manifest today. So, a crash course in Chinese history. I admit this is going to be very, very quick.

In 1911, we see the Qing dynasty is overthrown in a revolution. 1912, the Republic of China is formed. This is ruled by a political group called the KMT, who eventually fled to Taiwan. They’re in charge of China, but they don’t have complete control. It's very, very unstable. Many parts of China are actually controlled by sort of these warlords. And on top of that, you have a communist movement that’s starting to gain traction.

Also, at this point in time, China had for a long period been subjugated by imperial power. China was never formally colonised. But what happened is that you had a lot of Western powers actually talked about going in and carving China up. And they established various trading ports—you know, there was a Russian one, a German one, a British one—and subjugated China. And this is what things like the Opium Wars came about as a result of.

1919, there is the May 4th movement. This is a student protest against the government. They’re not happy with the government’s weak response to the presence of Western powers. One of the things they cite is China needs to modernise. We need to break from the past. We need to break from tradition if we’re going to be able to compete with the West.

So these students, many of whom were, I guess, writing stories, were part of the, I guess, various literature movements and would go on to become quite famous writers at this point in time. One of the things they advocated for was the rejection of ghost stories, and it was called the anti-ghost literary movement. And so we see in this point in time, ghosts fall out of fashion. They sort of disappear in literature.

Following this, the Chinese Civil War erupts, the KMT start fighting the Communists. We then see, as well, Japan invades various parts of China, too. So it’s a very unstable period of time, and it’s a period of time where we see sort of ghosts exorcised from China.

However, following what we do see, though, is a change, and we see ghosts then go into the movies.

So while they’ve fallen out of fashion in storytelling in terms of written form, they start to become popular at the cinemas.

Initially, because of the instability in China, not many people were going to the movies. On top of this, there was really strict censorship from both the KMT, and also Japan. And this meant that sort of any sort of story that was seen to be critical of either the KMT or the Japanese colonial authorities was not allowed.

1930s, though, their attention shifts towards censoring the Communists. What happens is this means that ghost stories can stop being made again. We see this arrive in cinema and these traditional ghost stories that I mentioned earlier start to be adapted into film.

The most famous director is Ma-Xu Weibang. I’ve got on there a bunch of the ghost stories that he made, but by far the most famous one is this one, ‘Song at Midnight’. This is the first Chinese ghost film that draws on and references earlier Chinese ghost stories.

But on top of that, it also sort of has a lot of Western or international elements to it. And if you watch it, I think it's actually available on YouTube with the subtitles. It is available, I know that. It kind of has elements of ‘The Hunchback of Notre Dame’, ‘Phantom of the Opera’, merged with this traditional ghost story.

Interestingly though, it was very, very political. The director himself was very involved and engaged in left wing politics and he basically wanted to sort of make this, a ghost [story], like a genre film that was easy to watch, but that had a political message and that sort of highlighted the inequalities that existed in China at the time.

And so, for this reason, it was a massive success. There were lots and lots of sequels. And the reason why it was such a success is because it sort of, as the quote on the screen says, it lamented China’s difficult position, in that sort of environment, that socio political context that it was made under.

Now, this is my favourite part of researching for this whole project, is this idea of “ghosts go communist”.

So, 1949 the Communists win the Civil war. The People’s Republic of China is established. I'll come back to this idea of censorship at the end but what we see is, from this point in time, the Chinese state monopolises the film industry. It comes under state control. I’ll return to that at the end and explain a little bit more why.

Initially, one of the aims of the Chinese Communist Party was they also wanted— Like the May 4th movement I mentioned before, they continued this ethos: they wanted to modernize China quite rapidly. And so one of the things that they wanted to do was break from the past, break from superstition. And ghost stories weren’t particularly popular.

So what they sort of did is they encouraged these what were called anti ghost stories. And so they were these you couldn’t make a ghost story, but you could maybe make one if it turned out the ghost wasn’t actually a ghost. They were just a psychopath or a criminal that was pretending to be a ghost. That was okay.

But anything with an actual ghost wasn’t allowed to be made.

Interestingly, though, and like, Chairman Mao— Really, one thing I give Mao credit for is he was very savvy when it came to culture. And he recognised the fact that ghost stories— Because at this point in time much of China [is] peasants unable to read. They’re illiterate, and the Communist Party is trying to create a message and narrative that resonates with these people as well.

And so Mao recognised that ghost stories were a way of communicating his political message to the peasantry. And so in his political speeches, he began referencing Pu Songling’s stories. He’d talk about ghosts. In a lot of political speeches, he would make reference or talk about political enemies or foreign powers as being ghosts as well, and would draw on these stories as a way of providing a metaphor.

Mao even went— It was really, really interesting. In 1961, he himself commissioned a book called ‘Do Not Fear Ghosts’, and it was published, and it was a retelling of Pu Songling’s stories but in a way that meant that the ghosts weren’t actually scary anymore. And again, it had all these political messages embedded within it as well; but again, it was a part of this effort to sort of modernise China by breaking from the past but using this figure of the ghost as a metaphor to do so.

In 1961, though, there was a really, really successful opera that was performed, and it had some ghosts in there. And that’s on the screen there. Initially, there wasn’t too much concern, but as it gained popularity, the Communist Party became more and more concerned that this was an opera that was critical of the state, the Chinese state. And so it was outlawed. And we then see a shift in the narrative, and suddenly there’s a lot of campaigning against ghosts again.

Cultural Revolution arrives in the late ‘60s.A big part of the focus of the Cultural Revolution was breaking from the four olds, breaking from the past. And so ghosts yet again are exorcised from China. They’re no longer able to be talked about. And one of the famous catch cries during the Cultural Revolution was, “Down with the ghost and the snake demon”. Okay. And this was again a way of sort of saying, this is the past. We need to break from it.

At the same time that this is going on in mainland China, though, we see something different happening in Hong Kong. And ghosts now become a way of creating a film product that can enter a Western market. So we see, initially, Hong Kong filmmakers make these non-ghost films as well. And a lot of them are sort of imitations of Alfred Hitchcock’s films, because these films were popular at the time and it was a way of making a version that perhaps could be sold abroad. None of these were particularly successful until we see the Shaw Brothers, who were a big, big film studio in Hong Kong.

And they created a particular film with a British studio called Hammer Studios. I don’t know if anyone knows [it]. There were really, really big British film production studio that focused sort of on horror at this point in time. And Shaw Brothers, what they did is they collaborated with this studio and they created a sort of cross-cultural Chinese ghost film.

And so it was based yet again on another Pu Songling folk story, and it was called ‘Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires’, and it was played on the screen a little bit earlier if anyone was here. Really, really interesting.

So, the story is that Dracula goes back in time to a Chinese village and he creates all these Jiangshi who terrorise the village. And then Van Helsing, played by Peter Cushing, who is on the screen there, and you might have been familiar with him— He was in one of the ‘Star Wars’ films, I believe. Van Helsing goes to China, recruits a bunch of local martial artists, and together they, using kung fu, fight off Dracula and all the Jiangshi that he’s recruited to his army of the undead.

The film was terrible. The director himself described his own film as a terrible film, but it was incredibly successful in Hong Kong. And what we see is this inspired a new era or a new generation of ghost stories that incorporate comedy, martial arts, and was sort of packaged in a way that was more relevant to an audience outside of China.

By far the most popular of these was one from the late ‘80s, and it was called ‘A Chinese Ghost Story’. Again, this is based on a Pu Songling story. The person I mentioned earlier. It was a really weird blend of horror, comedy, martial arts, wuxia, which is like Chinese fantasy. It's really quite campy because it's before CGI. And so it’s everything— I think it's better than CGI, to be honest.

But it’s like this phantom heroine who’s controlled by an androgynous tree demon that licks people to death with its long tongue. It’s really quite zany, but incredibly popular. And this film, as well, was particularly popular, surprisingly, in mainland China.

And this is really significant because it wasn’t actually allowed on mainland China at this time.

At this point in time, Chinese cinemas aren’t open to foreign films and so this film was accessed by [the] Chinese audience unofficially. Really popular. And it’s often described as being one of the key markers of the people in mainland China that were in their teens and young adulthood in the ‘80s, is their love of this film.

And it was only in 2011 that it actually screened in mainland China. The popularity meant that there were a number of sequels. There was an animated version. There was even— They remade the original Chinese ghost story in a Hong Kong-Chinese co-production. Was not successful. Everyone on mainland China particularly wanted this one.

And I guess the question is, why so popular now?

Look, to be honest, I mean, I’m an academic, so I shouldn't criticise what we do, but I do sometimes think some of my colleagues have way too much time on their hands, because a lot of academics have spent a lot of time debating over why exactly this obscure Chinese ghost film was just so popular.

Some of the reasons are that it was, you know, it was innovative. It had a blend of genres. Some scholars argue that it was, you know, a critique of a period in time where Hong Kong was about to be handed over from the British to China, and so the ghost was representative of sort of the lingering fear around this. I don’t love that one, but that’s one explanation.

But, and a more important question is, why was it so popular on mainland China? One of the reasons is that it was sort of edgy. To watch it you had to, you know, go to an underground screening. It explored sort of taboo subjects. It was a form of rebellion. And that’s why young people liked it.

Another reason as well was featured Leslie Cheung who was, I guess at the time, like the James Dean of Chinese cinema, and so this added to that edginess.

One of the things that I think made this popular across both of these places, though, is again, it’s dealing with these age-old questions about what does it mean to be human? Is there an afterlife? What is there beyond this world, if anything? And it provided a way to sort of grapple with these pre-modern beliefs that for a long time had sort of become obsolete.

So I’ll finish up with this one, and then I’ve just got a brief conclusion. Then I’ll let you get back to the, the bar.

So the 1980s, we see Chairman Mao passes away. China undergoes a period of liberalisation. We see ghost literature for a little bit re-emerges on mainland China. 2008, though, censorship comes in, a films, television, things that deal with terror, ghosts and the supernatural, are banned. Initially film, and then this was extended to television. And we see [films like] ‘Ghostbusters’, ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ can't be released in China.

Now, I just want to be clear: I think censorship often is a dirty word. It often carries negative connotations. But from the perspective of the Chinese state, it is slightly different.

In the view of communist states, cultural products are there to serve the state, and so from the perspective of the Chinese state, culture should be there to support the state itself. And so, you know, in China they very actively have a propaganda department. And that’s not a negative thing. That’s just how communist states work. Sometimes.

Because of this, we also see in Hong Kong ghost stories and ghost films disappear because the Hong Kong film industry became beholden to China. In order to make money, films had to be screened in China, and so they stopped making these films as well.

Why ban them?

On the one hand, in the official narrative is that the Chinese state still is trying to eradicate superstition, tradition, break from the past. These films, these stories, or banning these stories helps that. But there’s also, I suppose, a political aspect here, too.

And the fact is that, hopefully as you’ve got a sense of, these stories have the potential to be subversive, and that’s a concern for the Chinese state.

However, they’re not always banned. ‘Harry Potter’ was allowed to screen, and that was because it was considered to be in the public interest because it was just so popular globally. Internet streaming has been a way of retelling ghost stories. And often, as well, if you tell it like a story within a story—so it turns out that the ghost isn’t actually a ghost, it was just a dream—this can bypass censorship.

So, to conclude and to sort of finish up on this auspicious night, the sort of the high point of the Hungry Ghost Festival: undoubtedly ghosts are an important part of Chinese culture, and we see these sorts of ghost stories provide the official record of that.

Ghosts of the story serve many functions from a spiritual, a social, and a political sense. And I think, most importantly, you know, these stories are a way of dealing with these questions, the meaning of life, and I think that’s where, in my opinion, that’s what makes these stories valuable. So, I’ll wrap up there. Thank you very much for coming.

(Audience applauds)

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