2
Hell Money
Value Across the Paper Horizon
A descriptive analysis of bank notes is needed . . . for nowhere more naively than in these documents does capitalism display itself in solemn earnest . . . ornamenting the façade of hell.
—Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street
It is said that in antiquity when the sage Cang Jie invented writing, “all the ghosts wailed in the night.”
—Wu Hung, “A Ghost Rebellion: Notes on Xu Bing’s Nonsense Writing and Other Works,” Public Culture
We have now seen, in outline, the potential of ghosts to liberate speculative practices—as partners in the realm of freewheeling exchange. This gives rise to a space of radical possibility, freed from the strictures of formal economy. The wildness of such spectral traffic is expressed, in no small part, through the imaginary of money—itself a near-magical medium with an unruly and proliferating aspect. Spirit-bills, of varying kinds, give rise to transactions that inhabit the monetary as an imaginative space: novel modes of currency manipulation, investment, and hedging. In these, value is dramatized as a cosmological essence. It is a coursing stream of energy, channeled by faith and technique, no longer yoked to labor and production. Given care for protocol and the correct environmental setting, its flows are subject to spectacular increase.
While ghost-bills might seem to be purely fictitious repositories of value, their invented status differs very little from accounts of money by theorists, historians, and critics of speculation over the ages.1 The connective, proliferating character of hell notes mirrors long-standing, general perceptions of paper currency as dangerous, artificial, and promiscuous. As Jack Weatherford has noted, each variety of money gives rise to its own “culture” of practices, its own value-logic, modes of use and circulation, and even metaphysics.2 Bills and notes represent a young and unruly strain, as mutable as paper itself—and, unsurprisingly, have conjured unseemly and infernal associations.3 Satanic origins were most explicitly articulated in Goethe’s second Faust, in which Mephistopheles offers a fictional emperor the alchemist’s formula for turning paper into gold.4 The latter is merely a guarantor’s scrip for a thousand crowns, signed by the ruler himself. This “great secret” allows the note in the present to represent future gold not yet mined; it was, in effect, a futures product.5 The production of bills has also been viewed as hazardously democratic—in a sense, anyone can conjure them out of thin air. Prior to nationalization, in most places, this process was largely decentralized. In the United States, for example, there have been more than eight thousand varieties of tender in circulation in a single year. Such tendencies fueled the perception of currencies as instruments of speculation—“impossible conjunctions of disparate parts, monstrosities of human thought.”6 These were able to draw incommensurate objects together and make equivalences among them, compounding the unnatural associativity of exchange-value observed by Marx. In spectro-economy, this worrisome vision is taken yet further. Spirit money is money with an almost unimaginable degree of combinatorial power.
Chinese have long offered proto-monetary “gifts” to the afterlife. These yin zhi were made from joss paper of various colors, sometimes printed with the image of the object(s) to be transferred in the offering—for example, cloth and clothing or medicinal plants and foodstuffs. Here the paper itself served as the medium, and the gift was captured through representations. These should be understood as abstract material qualities and affordances, not as amounts. Among these, money is a subset, appearing as rectangular sheets with printed rectangles of red or circles of gold foil. The foil region grows larger and thicker as the earthly cost of the bills increases, and the papers are of heavier grammage. This is said by many to be most valued by ghosts and thus most efficacious. High-end variants come in smaller stacks and may fetch as much as a dollar apiece. Unlike more recent forms of spirit currency, older yin zhi are not typically printed with a specific face value. A wide variety of these are still in common use. In the market stalls near hawker centers and housing estates, there are multiple versions to choose from, and those in the know offered many “rules of thumb” regarding which to purchase.
I was told, for example, that the purchase price of yin zhi money, alongside the heft of the paper and the amount of foil, was a deciding factor. Those that are evidently of better make and cost more are assumed to remit more in the afterlife. Mei Zhen Jie claimed that “so long as there’s more ‘gold’ on the paper, then it will be more expensive. Also, if the paper is better quality, it would be more expensive.”
I asked, “Does this mean that it’s up to you to judge the quality of the paper money?”
“Yes,” she replied. “You look at the paper and decide. If it’s good, then you spend $2.50, or $3. If it’s not so good, you spend about $1.20.”
“What about fake versus real paper money?”
“There’s no such thing as fake, lah; it’s really just a question of quality of the money. The quality of the paper.”
Similarly, others noted that there is no counterfeit yin zhi—simply shoddy goods that the buyer can freely assess. If the product is of good make, it will be in demand; if evidently poor, it will not. It is a relatively straightforward calculus: the spectral power of the bills arises at the moment of purchase, from their exchange for Singapore dollars. It had been my assumption that some appropriate authority, most likely a Taoist priest or medium, would be responsible for blessing the notes and making them legal tender. In fact, informants were quick to clarify that there is none. They are simply made in a factory and shipped to the point of sale. And like most unregulated goods, their value is set in the market. For example, they are marginally more expensive in the seventh month, when demand is at a peak. Their quality is evident to the canny consumer; there is simply higher- and lower-quality merchandise. In this sense, I was told, buying ghost-money is like shopping for produce. One has to “squeeze the vegetables” and buy observantly.7
However, Singaporeans also increasingly enrich the dead with another type of printed bills: hell money or hell bank notes. As the name suggests, these are a form of tender for the netherworld. In contrast to the calm abstractions of older yin zhi, they are covered, on both sides, with a riot of graphics and color. Many bear the endorsement of the “Central Bank of Hell.” This formidable institution is depicted as a gigantic and somewhat nondescript pagoda or, in some designs, as an American Federal-style megalith.8 This is interesting in light of Benjamin’s characterization of the design of paper money as ornament on the “façades of hell”—in fact, most of these notes literally depict the frontages of di yu, to which they are thought to be able to open a portal.9 There is quite a bit of imaginative leeway here; for example, I have seen a version emblazoned with “Federaerreserve [sic] Bank of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania” (apparently the location of the infernal mint). These bills come in staggering denominations, with eight figures being the norm.
Singaporean conceptions of hell money, its production and the source of its value, vary greatly. It was a common assumption that none of the forms of paper ghost-money are printed in Singapore for the local market. Some items were said to be imported from Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Malaysia, but the vast proportion is thought to hail from the PRC.10 Mrs. Tan, who frequently uses hell money during Zhong Yuan, noted, “All this paper comes from China. But last time when Mao Zedong time, they banned. Banned people from praying. But still they pray. Quietly. The ancestor’s anniversary, they also burn. Close the door and burn.” Other informants, including Chee Wai, Harry, and Mei Zhen Jie, also believed China to be the largest source of the bills, “as it is with everything else.”11 A few cited Taiwan as another origin, as many of Singapore’s ghost-practices are thought to have originated at least partly in Fujian Province.
Unlike the older yin zhi, hell money is a rapidly evolving aesthetic medium. A few tropes have become established in recent years. For example, many copy the iconography and visual language of U.S. dollars, as a kind of universal tender.12 These include serial numbers and signatories—often none other than Yan Luo, the chief magistrate of the netherworld’s courts, or the Emperor of Heaven Yu Di—as well as the familiar matrix of curved lines seen on the greenback. The protean character of paper and print allows for endless addition and recombination of forms. New bills are printed with whimsical flourishes and expensive associations: logos of famous fashion brands and cars, images of Singapore’s tourist attractions, hybrid orchids, and “iconic” birds. Benjamin’s sinister description perhaps fails to capture the explosion of pictorial imagination on the faces of this phantasmal currency or the ludic aspects of its theater of inventive capital.
Figure 4. Hell note depicting the Central Bank of Hell. This is a common motif and appears typically in traditional Chinese architecture or American Federal style.
Figure 5. Hell notes that mimic U.S. dollars are of the most common, and least expensive, varieties.
Notes that mimic familiar national currencies are relatively cheap. A thick stack, wrapped in a rubber band or plastic sleeve, can be had for a few Singapore dollars. This stands in contrast to more traditional spirit money, which is typically more expensive and uses joss paper of different weights. The role of pricing here is similar to that of yin zhi and ghost-auction items (discussed in the next chapter). Value is not understood to originate in an officiating body but from the market itself. In this way, it appears to be rather demotic. Hell money, like anything else, exchanges for whatever we are willing to pay for it. This commodity logic struck most informants as self-evident, and there was some amusement at my assumption that legitimacy would need to be vested by any official party—an idea that smacked, perhaps, of more hierarchically institutionalized religions. The same logic goes for the notes’ production. Office worker Nelson noted, for example, that homemade ones from an inkjet printer would likely have little worth, as they would be cheap to make and (probably) shoddy looking.13 Ghosts might see this and refuse the offering. On the other hand, if one were to pay for materials and perform the labor necessary to create beautiful hell notes, these would have automatic value due to the time and cost sunk into their production.
Irrational Money and Fluid Value
As with all speculative instruments, hell notes contribute to flows of increasing value, in this case via passage to hell and back to Singapore. As we will see later, surplus—in the form of overpayment, gift, or unproductive expenditure—is seen to solicit ghostly attentions and favors. This power to instigate a quid pro quo lies here and hence is at the core of all local spectro-economics. Symbolism of excess is a recurrent motif.
The actual value of a bill of hell money as an input to reciprocal exchange, however, remains ambiguous. There is the problem of denomination: those huge numbers printed on the front and rear, which ostensibly connote its worth. This is hard to understand in rationalist economic terms. Clearly it goes against any logic of currency; one could vastly increase the value of a bill simply by stamping a larger figure on it, leading to immediate hyperinflation as sellers pump up their face values. Certainly this fact is met with skepticism in some quarters. As Harry complained,
you find that a lot of [burnt offerings] are very commercialized. So commercialized that . . . it’s exploited by people. They go and burn money, hell bank note. And all have so much zeros! Inflation so high. Hell is worse than Zimbabwe now.
Certainly the zeros appear to have been increasing annually, although not to the degree of the “Zim dollar” or the pengö.
Interestingly, this does not mean that paltry hundred- or thousand-dollar notes go unsold. I was told repeatedly that the power of a burnt offering to please the spirits ultimately derives from the Singaporean currency spent on it. Here, as in other modes of ghostly exchange, value and power arise from “real” expenditure (especially on items with no apparent use-value). Regardless of what may be printed on one’s hell notes, a sacrifice worth S$500 is considered more efficacious than one of S$50. This is why bills marked with six zeros may cost the same in the market as those with ten. Some of the most sought-after and prestigious yin zhi notes have no denomination whatsoever.
Figure 6. Joss paper money, of a more traditional design, is sorted before burning. The spiral is created by gently kneading a stack of sheets with the thumb and three fingers.
If this is indeed the “true” value, then the utility of the huge numbers must be explained. Several accounts make sense of this phenomenon. The simplest, and by far the most common, is that large figures simply signal largesse: a spirit of dafang (generous) intention is thought to add efficacy to the rites and to the social relationships that they would augment.14 The dominant logic, in this version, is addition: more, of both quantity and kind. When asked about the most powerful of hell notes, office manager Huey Ling replied that she would “burn all the denominations, from two to a trillion, and many different designs . . . better to have all.” In spectro-economic bricolage, value is always additive and prone to multiplication—a logical extension of its underlying cosmic energetics.
Figure 7. A larger, more extravagant and expensive version of hell money, printed in color and with even greater denominations.
A differing (although not contradictory) account, offered by banker Edmund, is that paper bills embody speculative values that are real but unknown. Although their exact denominations may be understood by believers to be symbolic—or as stand-ins for flows that cannot quite be quantified—the fact of their value is not. The outré figures may thus serve to underscore the magical character of this trade: as surplus that is produced in a manner not limited to worldly economic rationality. The phrase “one billion dollars” suggests disproportionate returns available not from a given note but from commerce with the spirit world in general. The ostensible values thus lend the rite a recursive aspect: the single act of burning is an individual investment that dramatizes the power of investment itself.
The nonquantification of such exchanges, importantly, deemphasizes the individual ritual instance. Burning is understood not as an intercourse among sums but as the originating moment of a social relationship or channel. The dead are not obliged to return donations immediately or equally. Tradition simply holds that a happy ghost is a generous one. Believers certainly expect their remittances to be rewarded—often disproportionately—but only through sustained engagement, at unexpected times, in unpredictable ways, and with unspecified interest. These rewards are likewise not “in kind”: a spirit does not directly refund but rather works to improve luck in business or games of chance. Payback is thus highly variable. Offerors may ask for more specific favors, like lottery numbers, or they might court particular kinds of success at a Zhong Yuan auction. Here, also, however, the focus is not on precise returns but on the modification of futures (see my discussion about luck, later).
Hell money thus connotes not specific values but rather value in motion; in essence, its use signals the intention of the offering, at least in part, as capital. The logic of this is the opposite of sacrifice or potlatch, in which excess value is alienated.15 Rather, its burning provides an opening into circuits in which value is imagined as increasing through a variable sequence of mediated and unmediated instances, embodied and “free” forms. Fiat currency is exchanged for spirit money and (via offering) for credit in hell.16 The favor of ghosts causes these to yield, in futurity, manifold lucky returns: more Singapore dollars, or success in career or schooling. Remission to di yu works like currency trading or financial arbitrage—the transfer of an object across two markets through simultaneous purchase and sale—in which value increases by instantaneous movement across space.17 The return loop is likewise polymorphic, typically involving not sums or substances but a manipulation of events and outcomes.
As a result, the use of given types of spirit money will reflect upon nuances of social relation and familiarity. Like many exchanges of value within kinship networks, the offeror walks a fine line. Gains from ancestors are acceptable if approached first and foremost as filial duty. But the use of hell notes would be considered highly inappropriate, crass even, in this context. These are associated with nakedly transactional intent and thus the financialization of family relations. Unfettered speculation is seen as less problematic when it involves unrelated ghosts. As a result, these two engagements are approached differently. Those who burn for recent ancestors will opt for their preferred foods, liquor, and goods. In the case of the more remote dead—those Mrs. Tan refers to as “passed away long already”—typical items are tea, brandy, rice, and fruit or the diverse colored joss papers that translate to specific materials, like cloth. By contrast, denominated bills and likenesses of ingots and coins are offered mostly to unknown and homeless gui. Yin zhi, as a relatively abstract form, could be used in both. In contrast to the recently departed, other dead have unknown preferences, and consequently the gifts become increasingly fungible and anonymous. This reaches an apex in the impersonality of cash. Attention to such nuances is important, as inappropriate offerings can easily cause umbrage for the would-be recipient.
Free Value and Associative Magic
The horizon for all types of spirit money, however, is the act of burning. This is the moment in which value is released into its free-flowing phase and assumes a sudden power to bring things, even the most distant and numinous, into direct contact. Spatially, this causes a localized collapse in which Singapore and hell are brought to one another. A ghost is “present” at the burning, as the destruction of the medium draws them to the site and transfers the monetary essence into them.18 Informal tender thus mimics the ability of capital flows to alter the nature of space and time, to bring the remote near and transact among the incommensurable. In accounts of this moment, the stream of revenue is like unchanneled electricity: connective, generative, and dangerously fluid. Infection by death and the netherworld is possible in this process—hence the chalk outlines drawn around sacrifices, as well as the strict rules about the positioning of ritual paraphernalia and the presumed secondary contagion of ash and other detritus (see chapter 5).
As with Huey Ling’s statement about denominations, the logic here likewise emphasizes addition and association. We might think, for example, of Singapore dollars exchanged for a Chinese-made paper note depicting a Louis Vuitton boutique that is burned in exchange for lucky lottery numbers. These in turn generate winnings that help to pay for a real “LV” purse, which is then used to hold Singapore dollars (an actual case).19 The hell note is a microcosm of the process itself: its stolen luxury iconography is understood to literally and figuratively combine disparate objects—money and branded consumables—which are conjoined in a common circuit when its value is unleashed. The moment of immolation also puts the power of selected representations (the fetishistic character of the notes and their ornament) into play.
For value to be “healthy,” for productive associations to occur, it must cycle with regularity through phases of freedom and incarnation. This includes occasional instantiation, but it will become stagnant if imprisoned for too long in a single form. Destruction must also occur for the process to continue. The materiality of sacred value is continually being written and reversed: meaning reduced to ash and reinscribed. As in the history of money more broadly, practitioners of these rites express a clear discomfort with hoarding, with value that is kept out of the stir of motion. This aligns neatly with aspects of capital aesthetics as demonstrated by Elizabeth Helsinger and others.20
As described to me by neigong Master Timothy, the logic of this system mirrors geomantic notions of flow in air, water, and temperature, and of qi and blood in Chinese medicine. In these fluid models, energies must move. Qi can flow through the body and interact with other beings through expanding social and natural conduits. Trapped or impeded flux lies at the root of most pathology. Illness or ill luck, in this system, is often a symptom of a common abnormal etiology. The movement of value through channels and instantiations is similar. This passage is akin to jing in the body or language in calligraphy and publishing. These currents are not the same as their embodiments: the written word is not language, in the sense that a dollar is not, by itself, value. Each of these is merely a temporary reservoir, imbricated within ever-larger circulatory systems.
In this respect, value also resembles language, which courses through speech in a manner unlike the written word. Understandably, there is great concern regarding entrapment or ownership. Meaning become disproportionately textual is degenerate and deathly. Ideas demand a certain freedom and are prostituted by being held to ransom for money. For this reason, neo-Confucian thinkers have condemned Western notions of intellectual property as “whorish.”21 The wise ghosts of Wu Hung’s epigram, as beings of peripatetic energy, bemoan the technology that would force discourse into fixity or exclusive possession. Wealth, likewise, must be predominantly in motion, and joss paper notes or hell bills stored at length without burning are said to be unlucky. They represent an unwillingness to put value in motion, to reciprocate with ghosts and ancestors, and may even cause financial loss.
The process of embodiment and disembodiment, of capture and release through forms, allows money to operate as the associative medium par excellence. Paper untethers its infernal magic. As yin zhi and hell notes are “money to burn”—that is, simply a vehicle that enables value to be sent across the spectral frontier—they are also, inherently, speculative technologies. The unit of currency thus serves as both temporary holder of abstract value and a vehicle by which this value itself may increase, through destruction. We see here the appearance of a paradoxical union between cash and abstract modes of investment—which most commonly occur in computerized ledgers. Through the common medium of paper, there is a kind of playful equivalence, in spectro-economy, between bills of tender and other specie, such as gold bars, ingots, and silver and gold pieces. Because today’s thin card can be both planar and volumetric, it can be a surface for symbolic projection or a cunning three-dimensional approximation of objecthood. This playfully bridges traditionally opposed economic realms: where finance is money that is elite and rarefied, notes and coins are typically associated with trade at its poorest and most informal, those “cash ghettoes” of political-economic theory. Recent years have also seen the incursion of other monetary instruments, resembling credit cards from local banks, which ostensibly allow ghosts to charge indefinitely. This is a chain of association seemingly without limit; in the next chapter, we will see cash merge with the commodity via this same associative logic.
Making Luck
Despite the dramatic elevation of value within spectro-economy, it is a subject that, perhaps oddly, goes unmentioned when one asks Singaporeans about their exchanges with ghosts. Many will first emphasize the moral aspect: intentions to be filial or to continue long-standing cultural traditions. Many, of course, do describe desires for compensation, but they do so in nonmonetary terms. “Prosperity” is one—a concept that connotes a general well-being extending beyond the financial (explored in chapters 5 and 6). Even more common is the invocation of luck or that which is huat (lucky).22 Luck must be understood as the return flow of value, as that which “comes back” from the spirit realm. This implies a kind of convertibility, but not one that is subject to notions of strict quantification.
Others underlined this same idea. Gui may command the currents of earthly fortune—they can give us winning numbers and improved rates and margins. They do not write checks or provide direct windfalls. Ghostly deals thus centralize luck in facilitating returns; it is the spectral medium par excellence. In many walks of Singaporean society, this is perceived merely as a form of nicety or “doublespeak.” Jean spoke of luck in rather skeptical terms, noting,
Chinese will always pay homage to anything that gives them money. They are not talking about spirituality or eternal life. They are very temporal. As long as you allow them to “touch” 4D already they will pray to anyone.
Such a view perhaps simplifies the degree to which exchanges like auctions (see the next chapter) and the burning of hell money create moral forms of speculation in which luck puts the pecuniary at a distance. Of course, Chinese religion does not strictly prohibit monetary dealings in social life or even within the family. This reflects the significant admixture of Confucianism in Chinese popular religion—as well as in Singapore law, under which older adults can demand maintenance payments from grown children.23 Regardless, the numinous mode of speculation is one in which participants are careful to maintain respectable social and spiritual motives, and avoid the stigma that lingers over high-risk “quick money” schemes at the margins of business practice.
Here, too, however, there is significant polyvocality: while respondents were quick to emphasize the importance of protocol, each seemed to have a different account of the “correct” procedure. Many were quick to warn, for example, that reciprocal divination practices—those that involve the possibility of creating luck—could not be attempted with just any ghost or deity. Rather, specific conventions dictate which may be approached. I asked a number of regular lottery players if they felt able to pray to Buddha for luck; all of them answered that this would be a shameful practice. This did not rule out Singaporeans going to Thailand to pray to Buddha for luck, which they would not do “at home.” Harry pointed out,
You find a lot of [Singaporeans] go to Bangkok, they do this in Bangkok year after year. They pray to the Four Faced Buddha, pray that OK, if you give me a good life and so on. And I will come back a year later and make offer. Same thing. Next year, somehow you must return the favor.
Gardener Mrs. Tan had undertaken this trip herself. When asked why Thailand was preferred, she cited its heightened state of paranormal activity. Thai temples are considered places of uncommon mystery and power, where occult dealings produce both wealth and misery. It is assumed to be a place where anything is available, at a cost. For Mrs. Tan, this was true in the search for luck, as well as for health and healing. She noted of a Thai temple near the Malaysian border,
That’s why we go! We thought this type of thing, movie only got. . . . Yeah I go there, there were every time those people I was, “Eh, ask one, ask for luck! Can you give me luck?” He said, “Money, ah? 4D, is it? No, now you got sick, we are curing your sickness first. After, when you cure ah, you sure have one.” Really! After I cure, I come back, I strike twenty-five thousand dollars. [Laughs] Really. But true, lah, I believe in all this. Really have one. Every time we go, ah.24
Closer to home, Harry noted that specifically Taoist shrines and temples (sin tua) as well as some Buddhist organizations within Singapore will make small loans in the belief that this produces luck. These nominal amounts serve as a form of speculation similar to the use of spirit money. He notes that “they even have these temples where you can borrow money.” This is not large sums but token amounts “for good luck only, [like] a couple of dollars, ten dollars or so.” The following year, the borrower will return double the amount. Like bank loans, he says, this convention is “generating money!” Overhearing the latter, another contractor was quick to describe this practice in less venal terms, noting that “[whatever luck or profit you receive] is for thanks. It’s a token of appreciation” for the spirit of charity.
In response, Johnny pointed out that if “you want number, you must go to Toa Pek Kong; that’s the one in charge of wealth, 4D number, and all that.”25 Construction sites make use of a rather strict division of labor of different kinds of luck among various ghosts and deities. Toa Pek Kong (“Grand Uncle,” or the god of prosperity) is responsible for wealth generation, whereas Tu Di Kong (the earth god) is in charge of accident prevention.26 Hungry ghosts and resident spirits are the “gatekeepers” who must be appeased to avoid bad luck and negative energies. Many stories of such exchanges have nothing to do with the lottery, and many individuals evidently feel some discomfort in admitting to gambling. Other iterations of this trope involve different conceptions of luck: promotion at work, an ability to find lost items, aversion of accidents, and the like.
While luck serves well to explain the backflow of value, it does nonetheless raise some thorny questions of evidence. Nonbelievers would naturally assume that the outcomes of national lotteries still obey typical probabilistic distributions. For this reason, a person who enlists the aid of gods or ghosts may very well continue to lose. Business ventures, likewise, fail as well as succeed. How, then, is stubborn reality of bad luck accounted for? If someone engages the spirits with the correct protocol and does so unsuccessfully, how do they justify continued belief?
I encountered several modes of explanation when things do not go as expected. The first arises from the fact that the faithful appear to dismiss isolated events in light of larger beliefs. They maintain confidence that, sooner or later, the ghost will get around to making good on their reciprocity. This is consistent with the nature of spectral economics writ large—that is, as a faith-based practice, and not an immediate transaction. Here the logic does not differ dramatically from the prosperity gospel preached in many of Singapore’s megachurches: the higher power’s doings are mysterious, and the greater plan is beyond human understanding. This is reinforced by discursive characterizations of ghosts themselves, who are thought of like irascible, willful older relatives. Their behaviors are not expected to be rational or systematic—and this is part and parcel of the danger in courting them. They will improve one’s luck when they are good and ready, and sometimes not at all. The consequence is that gifts may be late arriving. This is seen, simply, as a cosmic fact that requires patience and undiminished conviction.27
A second mode of explanation arises from the nature of betting systems. Punters do not play a chosen number once. They do so multiple times, often until it comes up in some form, either in whole or in part. Almost all gamblers have lucky or favored combinations, and a common local saying when something unusual happens is “buy 4D!”—meaning, play the current date as a number, as divine forces are clearly at work. Important, in this regard, is the fact that 4D also pays out smaller stakes for partial combinations. The game is structured such that many winners get smaller amounts. Regular bettors commonly have stories of winning a few hundred or a few thousand. Interestingly, this system designed to keep punters “on the hook” also keeps them engaged with spirit practices. A divined number serves not as a single test of faith but as a prolonged, sustained commitment. When eventually a combo does win, it is understood as spectral reward.
Anecdotally, there also appears to be a great deal of confirmation bias at work. Those who followed these practices emphasized successes and dismissed failures. Fortunate attempts were understood as proof of faith, but no one seemed to believe that ghost-reciprocities guaranteed success at every offing. Rather, the expectation was that luck would be generally more in their favor, and that sooner or later their practices may be rewarded with a big payout. As with gardener Mrs. Tan and husband, Tony, many attributed gambling wins (for themselves or acquaintances) to sacrifices long past as well as recent. Contractor Mr. Ong claimed that one divined lottery number failed, but his firm was awarded a sizable commission on the next day.
Last, as we will see in the case of ghost-auctions (in the next chapter), there also appear to be self-fulfilling wealth effects at work here. Those who dutifully perform rites are presumed, in this climate of faith, to be prone to better luck and more successful outcomes. They are thus thought to be more reliable partners in trade and are sought after and trusted in business dealings. It is thus not hard to see how offerings can produce luck, also, via explicable processes that are beyond their immediate explanatory frameworks of cause and effect.
Ghost-Money and the Financial Imaginary
For participants, the exchange of spirit money is no less genuine that the other “immaterial” economies that have made Singapore a locus for abstract forms of multinational finance—and in which many, themselves, participate. It is thus perhaps unsurprising that exchanges based on spirit currencies appear to mimic the logic of many forms of capital so central to the island’s wealth. These draw on a complex and sophisticated understanding of money in which cash is but one form. In the realm of gui, however, such operations are democratized and liberated from regulators and larger institutional players. Government and brokerages, managers, and funds—and even religious authorities—are largely eliminated. Spectro-economies imagine speculative finance from the standpoint of the individual punter; the majority of transactions occur directly between the citizenry and the ghost-world. While they embody actual economic activities, the practices described earlier have the quality of market ethnography—authored via the circulating narratives of those who are deeply affected by a world in which sources of wealth become increasingly remote and removed from deterministic factors. In its double role as economy and contemplative mechanism, ghost-worship is not unlike the tradition of American “bucket shops,” where the working class made bets on the rise and fall of stocks that they could not afford.
In conclusion, then, we might ask, how do the economic presumptions of hell money and other paper offerings mimic, invert, or distort this world of speculative practices? Where are the parallels and analogisms?
Monetary ghost-economics, what we might think of as spectral finance, does not traffic in the arcane detail of equations or operations but exists in the slipstream of the imaginary: via symbolic, systematic relations of risk and value, security and surplus, futures and presents. The burning of money adopts the operational forms of Wall Street (or, more locally, Shenton Way), albeit combining their tricks in ingenious and unorthodox ways. It is possible herein to identify certain tropes of the speculative that recur across the field of ghostly monetary practice.
Most clearly, spectro-capital resembles the cyclical process of investment. The believer who exchanges her “real” currency for hell notes and burns them sees this as (among other things) the opening of a sequence that can realize more money over and above her initial input. This act takes a given amount of value and puts it in motion. It is not important what the exact nature or quality of the investment might be; the medium of spirit agency can turn bad debt into good—as ostensibly could subprime collateralized debt obligations. Spectral investment is determined by expectation and not by effectiveness, and it is the nature of markets that some deals will be more efficacious than others. As noted, ancestral observance constitutes a special case in that it is understood as ethical finance, tied to filial piety, as well as a circuit of exchange.
Here, as noted earlier, investment achieves a kind of exaggerated freedom. It is liberated from association with any specific venture or event and rather becomes a wager on one’s financial futures in general via the medium of “luck.” Investment is made not in a given “vehicle” but in the person of the investor—a kind of individual magic or mana thus arises as the effect of social magic.
A second parallel is with insurance. Reciprocal deals to get hold of winning numbers, like uncannily effective commodities (see the next chapter), clearly attempt to realize a degree of added certainty. They are instruments to intervene in the normal working of chance: to alter the flow of luck in favor of the offerer and hedge against the normal course of enterprise. Many who utilize these have “skin in the game”; that is, they are tradespeople, of various kinds, with capital at stake.
The huat potentials offered by spirits are expected to act upon luck generally and not upon a given venture—the negative potentials of life are generally “covered” (one hopes) by a deal with ghosts or ancestors. This is an attempt to protect against specific as well as abstract threats, not least from the vengeful acts of wrathful ghosts. Burning remains a propitiating act, and hopes for improved fortunes stand alongside obviating setbacks or disasters. Like insurance, increasingly, this is seen by believers as an obligatory social responsibility. Life’s risks are not necessarily financial, but are offset by financial means—that is, by the conversion of Singapore’s “real” dollars to spirit money.
This imaginary of cover is most clear in the construction and development sector, which is the subject of chapter 6. Here it is common to hear of a kind of Pascal’s wager among nonbelievers. It is better to make offerings out of respect—for cultural tradition, for others’ beliefs, for the unknown in general as a catch-all category. Building sites are often the locations of violent accidents, and spirits are understood to make these more or less likely to occur. Different deities are solicited for different types of protection, but ghosts remain the wild cards; those who “receive” sacrifices on sites may be the nomadic and the hungry or historical residents who are assumed to take a dim view of the arrogance of changes made to their property. The insurance offered on-site thus melds the idea of coverage with a kind of protection racketeering; ghosts may stop normally occurring construction injuries as well as those potentially inflicted by the ghosts themselves.
Last, the potentials of spirit tender replicate monetary play: financial operations that would appear to make money from money, without engaging in either production or the buying and selling of physical things—for example, through the conversion of “forex,” or complex traffic among bank and money market accounts with differing rates and conditions. Herein, value seems to arise through the inherent properties of money itself. Such activity is very common in the higher echelons of “personal” retail banking as an incentive to high-net-worth customers. Such clients typically reap lucrative rates and amenities for providing liquidity to banks, which draw upon their retail arms to buy investment products, currencies, and corporate debt.28 Private subsets of banks that offer such deals, alongside luxurious consultation rooms and concierge services, have made themselves visible as aspirational spaces in the nation’s upmarket malls and hotels.
Here hell money merges largely abstract and digitized modes of exchange with cash—both of which have a reputation for replicating dangerously, for enriching and destabilizing by turns. Age-old associations with devilry and alchemy tap into a vein of (largely antispeculative) cultural paranoia in which bills, notes of credit, stocks, and debt are all related forms of unholy and unreliable wealth. In fact, corporate debt is still called “corporate paper,” though it now exists mostly as blips in digital ledgers. Here, also, the postcolony’s shared Anglo-Chinese visions of paper as a powerful but unstable medium of transformation echo monetary history: from the earliest days of Chinese mulberry money under Kublai Khan to letters of exchange and bills, paper money was seen as an instrument of speculation. In reality, both paper money and coins, for most of economic history, have traded for amounts different than their face values.29 Here, as in many other aspects, the phantasmal properties of hell money seem more like hyperbole than pure invention.
Not least, the playful freedoms of spirit money must be read against conservative Singaporean policy positions that maintain a dogged focus on the stabilization of the SGD’s exchange rate—even to the exclusion of conventional Keynesian monetary strategy.30 The PAP, from the days of its early financial architect, Goh Keng Swee, worked primarily to secure the purchasing power of the public and against the threat of currency traders. While the nation offers a staid and technocratic vision of currency, the ghost-world tantalizes with ineffable gains and “notes” that grow in value at the moment of their purchase.
How might this be understood as a “social fact” of the spectropolis? Neither the use of spirit money nor the idea that gods and ghosts exert numinous powers over wealth is new—in fact, these predate the rise of modern speculative financial practices, in Singapore and elsewhere. However, the rites and their paraphernalia have clearly kept pace with the times. Yin zhi, which has been used among southern Chinese for centuries in one form or another, is notably more abstract than hell notes, which are a relatively recent innovation. The current versions, with their vibrant graphics, have emerged only with the rise of cheap, high-resolution digital color printing and are even newer than many of the monetary products that they have come to mimic. Where yin zhi creates a diffuse reciprocity of unquantified value for unspecified prosperity, hell money has introduced a symbolism of dollar amounts. As we have seen, a radical elasticity and unpredictability still permeates the conventions of its use. Chinese spectro-economies have long replicated investment; it is only recently that explicit mentions of “venture capital,” “funds,” and “money markets” have entered the discourse.
This financialization is influenced, also, by changed understandings of volatility. Older respondents in particular noted a marked shift in discourse, in which luck serves as a hedge against economic downsides in particular. This stands in opposition to more generalized notions of one’s life faring well or poorly, which might encompass considerations like health and social standing or a negative logic of narrowly missed accidents or setbacks. Here ghost-practices may be following a broader drift toward the ascendance of a commercialized cultural sphere. At the same time, such a preoccupation may represent increased unpredictability in Singaporeans’ personal wealth. As economists Tan Kim Song and Manu Bhaskaran have noted, the public has recently begun to experience more frequent downturns, and the high capital investment in specific sectors has exposed the national economy to more volatility in general.31
Not least, the last few decades have seen a relative stagnation of economic advancement for many Singaporeans, in particular those in the middle and lower tiers of the class system. Overall wealth inequity has skyrocketed. Government-sanctioned expenditure on housing, a relative lag in the expansion of “adequate social security against the volatility of an open global economy,” and the depressive effect of foreign labor on wages relative to gross domestic product have all been cited as contributing factors.32 Concerns about the CPF model have caused a number of older adults to return to work in low-end service positions. In the shadow of the Singapore miracle, macroeconomic forces become more mercurial and individual futures more precarious. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the notions of prosperity imagined in ghost-exchanges reflect this larger financial fate, in which individuals have increasingly been subject to diminishing returns on labor and to the ups and downs of remote forces. Hell money represents, centrally, an opportunity to bypass earthly titans and appeal directly to spirits who are far older, and far more accessible.