The first time that I celebrated Halloween in China, I was walking down a street of bars and nightclubs. I was carrying a walking stick while wearing a long black leather overcoat and a rubber mask that I had just bought. The mask looked like the face of a withered old man with stringy white hair, so that I must have looked like an undertaker.

As I passed the open doorway of a small club I stopped, turned, and stared into the eyes of a hostess. She screamed and ran inside. So, I followed her into the club, behind the bar, through the kitchen and out through the rear door into an alleyway, with her running and screaming the whole time.

Now, I am not proud of doing this to the poor woman, but the point is that somehow Halloween gives you an excuse to be something you're not, usually something dark, scary and powerful. It's a difficult temptation to resist taking it a little too far sometimes.

China has a long history with ghosts. For many people, these spirits are a very real part of the world and are treated with wary respect and fear.

In China, most such apparitions are the spirits of dead ancestors who must be constantly appeased with votive offerings of food, incense and paper money. This is no laughing matter, and tending to the needs of the departed is one of a family's biggest social responsibilities.

In the US, we are more playful with our ghosts and our superstitions. We treat Halloween as a time of macabre celebration.

Children in school make their own crazy costumes and have various contests for which one is most creative, or scariest, or best overall. There is candy and trick-or-treating, of course, and lots of pictures of black cats, witches riding broomsticks, skeletons and jack o'lanterns.

Like so many other things, most of the costumes and masks used for Halloween are made here in China, but the Chinese themselves don't celebrate it in the same way.

The idea of having a costume party is being imported to the larger towns and cities by Western influence, and so far it's almost exclusively an "adult" thing.