Pirate Halloween

Us kids had heard about All Hallow’s Eve—that it was a dress-up holiday and we could get free candy if we went door to door.  All the kids at school had been wound up tight, yapping away about it.  All you needed was some imagination and a pillow case to snatch up the loot that seemed littered everywhere in the streets of America.

It seemed like a no-lose social contract.

On the appointed day, I dressed up as a pirate.  I ripped up an old T-shirt and spent a dollar on an eye patch.  I sketched in a nice five o’clock shadow and mustache with an eyeliner pencil.  A red bandana on my head completed the look.

johnny depp pirate 01

Both a sword and a hoop earing were impractical.  I could not hold the sword.  And I did not have a piercing.  “We can make a piercing for you,” my brother told me, describing the cork and needle that would do the job.

Ear piercing

He liked yanking my chain.

My mom made me wear a jacket over the costume because, still, she thought the Los Angeles night was frightfully chilly.  “You’ll die out there in all this cold.”  I remember the disappointment–the hours spent on my costume, now ruined.  A hoop earing, catching the glint of a porch light, might have rescued it—made it recognizable–but, now, it was too late.  We were already out the door, all six of us, a herd.

My mom had told me in great detail about Thai pirates who would board a ship full of Vietnamese refugees—usually small vessels–and steal everybody’s gold and rape the women.  It had not happened to us but it did happen to many friends or friends of friends—enough so that it took on that quality of the legendary and real that is so important for a truly bone chilling tale of terror.

boat people

Now I know that Thai pirates look nothing like those cartoon buccaneers that we think of as romantic.  Modern day pirates are more likely to wear flip flops rather than boots.   But in the stories my mother told me—and for a long time thereafter when hearing of other Vietnamese people’s encounters with pirates—I could only imagine a man in a hoop earring, a bandana and sword, like that Captain Morgan who stands proudly on those bottles of rum.

Captin-Morgan

No matter.  You soon forget whatever you’re supposed to be in the greed that comes of Snickers bars and gold wrapped Almond Rocas.  Adults may ask you “what are you dressed up as” but you know that you are in your heart of hearts a snatcher of candies.  There were six of us out there trick-or-treating and our hearts beat with that one thought of more and more and more.

After a half hour of trick or treating, my mom found us.  She had a panicked look on her face.  Our folks had not taken into account the fact that neighborhood kids would knock on our door, begging for treats.

Trick or treaters on the porch

From candy snatchers to candy recyclers, we became an engine of redistribution.  While five of us trick or treated, one of us served as runner, bringing a sack of candy back to the house and pouring it out on the dining room table to be redistributed to our neighbors. I can laugh at this now but it wasn’t that funny at the time and I did not quite realize that fantastic cosmic joke that was embedded into my costume:  a tribute to the act of piracy.  It has taken three decades of life and only now do I realize how wrong it was—that costume–and how absolutely right it was, too.

4 thoughts on “Pirate Halloween

  1. Khanh – Costumes are absolutely fascinating aren’t they? They tell us about the way we would like to see the world. They also remind us that the world isn’t always the way we would like to see it. And that’s not so wrong in an odd way. As much as we need to face and accept reality (after all, most pirates are pretty nasty people), it’s fun to dream of ‘fantasy pirates’ and such like as well. It’s good for the imagination.

    • Margot–Halloween is the closest we get to Mardi Gras. And since Americans never get a real holiday–a chance to go to a different place–than Halloween is our release valve. What is amazing to me is how costumes dwell both on the surface and also have depth, no? And part of the thrill is to try to figure out how much a costume truly speaks to a person, whether by accident or on purpose.

  2. How everything gets lost and found in translation Khanh:)

    Here’s a quote from Julia Kristeva in Strangers to Ourselves: Living with the “other”, with the foreigner, confronts us with the possibility or not of “being an other”… not simply a matter of our being able to accept the other, but of being in his place… to imagine and make oneself other for oneself…
    I guess it’s this re-imagining that makes it possible to write. Or more basically, to be, in our modern cosmopolitan era.

    High on sugar and words

    • Audrey–You are so well read. A quote from Julia Kristeva! Gosh, she had such an impact at a certain point in my life as a grad student. I cannot look upon anything she writes without feelings of nostalgia.

      I guess your quote begs this question: who is this “other”? who is foreign? For a long time, everything American was exotic and otherized–including school lunches–so for me, the world of mainstream America was the “other.” This, despite the fact that I was clearly the foreigner. Maybe growing up in a part of the country that is extremely cosmopolitan–filled with Persians, Jews, Japanese, Chinese, Arabs–had something to do with it. But what is great about the quote you choose is its ambiguity–the fact that the otherness always has two valencies.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *