After a failed attempt to do a day trip to Guangzhou and deciding to pass on a Macau day trip this time around, we spent our last full day in Hong Kong at Disneyland. The city makes it so easy for you to get there on your own, with an incredibly affordable train trip to get there, its own separate train that even has windows in the shape of Mickey Mouse heads, and clearly marked signs denoted with Mickey heads so that you know exactly where you are going and how to get there. My two favorite rides, Space Mountain and It’s a Small World were there, and much to Chris’s disgust and embarrassment, I made him go on It’s a Small World with me (we were lucky and got to ride Space Mountain twice, along with Grizzly Mountain, a combination of Thunder Mountain the U.S. and another ride I can’t remember). I don’t care what anyone else says about the Small World ride and how “kiddy” it may be. It was my favorite Disneyland ride when I first went to Disneyland Anaheim when I was five, and it will continue to be one of my top two favorite Disney rides. I love that it teaches young children about the world outside of what they know, other cultures, other languages, and other traditions. And I love the cute depictions of people dancing, singing, and living life in their different daily environments. And it’s just such a happy ride. You can’t help but get the song stuck in your head at the end, or at least the tune.
A major difference between this theme park and the Anaheim and Orlando locations I’ve been to, other than the variety of food (who would have ever thought I could get salted egg, bok choy, cha siu, soy sauce chicken over rice with a side of curried fish balls and turnip at a Disneyland?!) and the smaller size (there are rides that are very mindfully overlapping each other), was the difference in the haunted mansion ride. When I was five and sat on this ride, I was immediately spooked that we were all seated in what appeared to be a coffin seat. At the end, I was half scared and half laughing at the image of the fake ghost that appears in the mirrors between me and my ride partner. As soon as we got seated today, I knew the ghost image would not happen; the seats were not high enough for an image to appear that would sit taller than me, and the seat itself was not the coffin shaped seat I remember vividly from Anaheim and Orlando. And lo and behold, it was exactly as I suspected; the end had no ghost appear with us in our seat, no mirrors at all!
The thought that instantly came to me was that because Chinese people are traditionally so superstitious about death, Hong Kong could not handle it if they were seated in a coffin shaped seat, even if it was just for an amusement park ride. They would think it would be bad luck. The same goes for having a ghost image appear next to them in a mirror, as that is what happens on the haunted house ride back in the U.S. References to departed spirits or the afterlife are very bad in Chinese culture, and this appears to be the rationale for having a more “mystical,” fantasy-based theme in the Hong Kong equivalent of the haunted mansion according to all the online sources we read that compare the differences among the Disneyland theme parks across the world.
I guess even at Disneyland, you can’t have fun with death among the Chinese.