Hungry Ghost Festival Was An Inspiring Event

Food, plants, birds, stories and cross-cultural connection

Sep 03, 2024

As we shared with you previously, we were honored to be invited to participating in the 2nd Annual Hungry Ghost Festival in Chinatown this August. The event was a wonderful success. It was so inspiring to be among all of the diverse creativity and cultural festivity offered there. Plus, it was a chance to try out a new approach to In My Fluffy Pajamas, and we were happy to see that it was a success.

Also, I want to give a big shoutout of gratitude to Yunfei who assisted us with translation, interacting with the community, and guiding the art activities at this event. Her assistance was invaluable.

In My Fluffy Pajamas: Hungry Ghost

This was our first opportunity to turn our approach in our workshops into a version that would work at a big public event. In our workshops, we spend three hours in a very small group doing trauma-informed guided art exercises. We wanted to see if we could bring a snippet of that to the public and we were pleased to see that not only could we do so but the impact was really powerful.

In this iteration of our project, we provided colorful fabric and Sharpie markers on two tables in Portsmouth Square along with three prompts for people to draw:

Our hope was that even with these few questions in a short activity, people would be able to tap into their histories, connecting to their heritage as well as their senses. We were thrilled to see that this is exactly what happened. And we loved when people shared some of their stories and memories with us.

For example, this participant remembered how her grandmother, a diabetic, really loved Peeps marshmallows and would hide them behind her back from the person’s mother because, of course, she wasn’t supposed to be having sugar.

And in this one the participant remembered older family members sending kiwi fruit which was not so common to see in the US at the time.

And we learned a lot from people, like about this “belly button tree.”

We loved seeing the combination of words and drawing that people included. Some were very organized, like in the above example where they answered the three questions in order.

Additional Images From In My Fluffy Pajamas: Hungry Ghost

We had such a wonderful experience bringing this project to Hungry Ghost Festival. We are exploring opportunities to display the art created at this event in a public space. And we are excited to begin thinking about other events where we might want to bring our project to life in a similar way.