https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/10/28/vietnam-america-halloween-trick-treat/
Holidays are windows into a new culture. When my family arrived in Texas 40 years ago, we learned this firsthand as new immigrants. The adults loved Thanksgiving, a day of gratitude centered on food and family, but for us kids, nothing compared to Halloween, a night of knocking on doors and getting candy, sometimes even a homemade cupcake, almost always offered with a smile.
A year earlier, we had been living in Vietnam, where food was scarce and trust even scarcer under communist rule. Even as children, we knew to be cautious; anyone could be a spy for the government. Yet here, strangers handed out treats, and all I had to do was say a few words, a phrase that didn’t fully make sense.
Other sights and sounds were equally puzzling. Toilet paper draped across trees — what for, and why waste something so precious? And pumpkins carved into jack-o’-lanterns — food used only for decoration? Having lived through severe food shortages under a communist government’s disastrous agricultural collectivization, I couldn’t fathom such extravagance, or that the pumpkins I was familiar with could grow so enormous, meant not to be eaten but simply admired.
But most unsettling were the skeletons. In Vietnam, where ancestor worship is woven into Buddhist culture, the bones of the dead are treated with solemn reverence. A few years after my grandmother died, her remains were exhumed, the bones carefully washed and dried, and reburied in a family plot among other relatives. This second burial was meant to ensure that the dead found a lasting peace and could continue keeping a protective watch over the living.
In America, seeing skeletons dangling from porches, some in silly hats, some dripped with fake blood, horrified me; the idea that they weren’t real and were merely decorations, casually accepted by everyone, was completely baffling.
Ruff blames Kulich on the ot goal
