This past Halloween night some friends and I checked out the scene on Suzhou’s Bar Street, Guanqian Jie. Pulp Fiction, an expat bar, was offering discount beers to the guys and ghouls bold enough to dress up in costume. The crowd that spilled out the door across the sidewalk and slopped along the bicycle lane was a motley assembly of gallant gladiators, delicate damsels, comely catwomen and tentative teenagers.

My award for most creative costuming goes to the foursome that dressed as The Ghostbusters, replete with drab-gray jumpsuits and heavy packs with extrusions that included blinking computer hard drives. My favorite character was the bloke that played the black guy from the movie series: the tall European had an afro [wig] five times the size of anything I ever dared wear twenty-five years ago, a fake mustache and – yes, Whoopee – black face. It was funny as hell (remember, This is China!).

An American friend of mine dressed as an old Chinese beggar draped in an old Mao jacket a Chinese acquaintance lent him, Greek cap, black baggy pants and black-cloth shoes. He carried around an old tin cup from his workplace. He said he had already collected eight RMB from the crowd. The Chinese friend I was with thought he was cute. Which he was.

The following day my Chinese friend told me she overheard a number of Chinese passersby uttering how insulting it was to them that a foreigner would be dressing as an old poor Chinese man. Clearly, they’re not clear on the concept of Halloween; or of irony or of Fun!

I explained to my Chinese friend the origins of Halloween: essentially, it started a couple thousand years ago to mark the co-incidence between the world of the living and the dead – the material and the spirit. People would wear costumes of the various spirits that would either bewitch them or protect them. In many Western countries All-Hallows-Eve became a time of mischief-making and identity theft, in a manner of speaking. Today, of course, costumes can be pretty much anything that strikes the wearer’s fancy: ghosts, of course, are big with the little ones, as are masks that squirt blood, super-hero costumes and fairy princesses. Dead and living presidents of the United States are popular, too.

So I asked my Chinese friend if she could ever envision a Chinese at Halloween wearing a mask of Hu Jintao. “Of course not!” she replied without hesitation.

“Mao?”

“The police would come and put him in jail.”

“And that is a major difference between Chinese and Western societies,” I proffered. “We don’t take our jokers-in-office as seriously as Chinese people do. That’s part of our social system: we make fun of them when they’re doing a bad job and throw them out when they’re doing an awful job.”

After all, we’re all just wearing masks.