'AYE, THAT'S BETTER,' says the fish and chip shop owner from Scotland, 'there's a wee bit of breeze blowing now', as he sweats his way through a Taoist ceremony on a balmy summer's night in Hong Kong at the village of Ko Lau Wan.
There was a time when the humidity may not have bothered him but he's been gone a long time. Robert Chan Koon-sang, 43, grew up in this New Territories fishing village adjacent to Tap Mun but left 35 years ago with his mother and siblings to join his father thousands of kilometres away in the rainy, chip-fat aroma of Perth, where a thriving community of former Ko Lau Wan residents-turned-caterers these days supplies an eclectic mix of deep-fried standards and Chinese food to nourish the television takeaway needs of Tayside.
But for the past two weeks the shutters have been down on the chip shops as the families have flown over to Hong Kong. The diaspora that dispersed to Perth in Scotland and west to Donegal in Ireland has gathered here for a few days to go back to their roots and spend time with old friends, re-acquaint themselves with who they are and where they come from, at the Ko Lau Wan jiao festival which takes place once every seven years. Chan is a regular visitor to the festival but some former residents have not been back for 15 to 20 years.
The festival is a 'cosmic renewal' for the community - an opportunity to wash away the sins and pollution of the past seven years by hiring ritual specialists in the form of Taoist priests who perform hours of ceremonies to take care of the ghosts so that in the next seven-year period they do not come back to hurt the villagers.
The ghosts are given food and 'clothes', ghost money is burned on a huge bonfire, and a beautiful brightly clad effigy of gwei wong or devil god is burned amid clashing cymbals and beating drums to see him on his way.
Huge effort has gone into the festival with a mat-shed erected for opera shows where pyjama-clad old women in gold and jade earrings chatter through the nightly productions. A smaller shed has been built to house gwei wong. About $2 million has been raised from a thousand donations and there is obvious pride in the village over the most impressive festival to date.