Memory as Healing: What the Asian Ghost Festival Teaches Us

Today is the Ghost Festival, celebrated across in many Asian countries. In China it is known as Zhongyuan（中元节）, in Japan as Obon(お盆). Though the names differ, the essence is the same: families pause to honor their ancestors, to light incense and offer food, to remind the living that love continues beyond death.

In Singapore, the festival is hard to miss. Metal bins glow on sidewalks with the fire of paper offerings, and temples overflow with ancestral tablets, smoke rising in slow, curling ribbons into the night sky. Yet beyond the public rituals, the day always brings me back to something more intimate, a reckoning with memory, and with the way remembering itself can be healing.

Memory as a Form of Healing

When I was a child, our family was enormous. Every Lunar New Year, over fifty of us crowded into one photograph, cousins spilling across rows, grandparents seated proudly in the front. Today, many of those seats are empty. My grandparents' generation, two uncles and a cousin, have passed away. Life changes the landscape quietly, until you look back and realize how many faces have disappeared.

During the pandemic, when we were scattered across the world, our family held a reunion over Zoom. We decided to compile a family memoir and I became the editor, collecting photos and stories from every household. It was one of most meaningful projects for me. Each time I typed the name of someone who had passed, I paused. Names seemed to carry warmth, as though the act of writing itself called them closer. I realized then that memory is a kind of healing. Every photograph scanned, every story shared, stitched back together the bonds that death had frayed. Through that book, the dead re-entered the room not as ghosts in the frightening sense, but as presences, still cooking, still laughing, still speaking in the fragments of memory we chose to preserve.

I was the youngest in my extended family, often spoiled and protected, and perhaps slower to grow into responsibility. Many relatives died while I was still in school. I regret that sometimes. Yet what lingers are the small gestures: the conversations with my grandmother, the rabbit-fur hat I bought for my uncle, the afternoon I sat by the bed with my grandfather, making him laugh like a boy. They are ordinary things. Yet in the end, what stays with us are not grand acts but the fleeting kindnesses we offered. Healing, I have come to believe, comes in fragments: a smile remembered, a gesture of care, and a moment that outlives its hour.

What Our Ancestors Teach Us

These days, it is my parents’ generation who are aging in front of my eyes. Each time I see them, they seem a little weaker. My aunt, who once exercised with me, has been in and out of hospitals. My uncle, a TCM doctor who used to check my pulse every time, is no longer as strong. Meanwhile, my nephew is already in university, stepping into adulthood. Life feels like a river: one wave receding, another rising. To heal, perhaps, is not to resist this flow but to move with it, and to accept that tenderness can live alongside loss.

Not long ago, a doctor who faces life and death daily told me, “There are only two things you cannot delay: being filial, and being kind.” The words stayed with me. Filial piety is not just duty. It is remembrance, gratitude in action, a way of carrying forward the spirit of those who came before us. Kindness is its twin, ensuring that what we pass on is not just survival but warmth. Together, they form the inheritance of Chinese culture, a wisdom that festivals like this one embody.

To honor the dead is also to honor the living.

So tonight, as candles flicker and smoke curls toward the sky, I whisper a blessing to my loved extended family members in heaven. May they be at peace. May they know they are never forgotten. And then I turn back to the family still beside me. Healing is not only for the past; it belongs to the present too - in the meals we share, the conversations after dinner, the chance to hold someone’s hand before it is too late.

Perhaps this is what the Ghost Festival teaches us: the thread between the living and the dead is never broken, remembrance is love carried forward, and in the long river of time, healing is found not in clinging to what is gone, but in cherishing what remains