Drama Reference To The Implications Of Ghost Contracts In Mind-Singing And SM Entertainment: Crouching Tiger Hidden Ghost 卧虎藏鬼

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Following Mind Jumper’s broadcast on Channel 8 last year (2021) was another drama titled “Crouching Tiger Hidden Ghost”. It is a supernatural suspense comedy whose story revolves around a ghost and three humans.

Synopsis

The ghost named Lin Xiao Fang found herself dead one day at a building where she lived but she could not recall how she died. Since then, she was trapped in the building where no one could see her. She tried to catch the attention of the other residents in her ghostly ways, leading everyone to believe her unit was haunted. Until a year later, Xiao Fang met the trio (Ma Da, Ah Lun, and Angie), who stumbled upon the haunted unit by chance; and she realises that they are the only ones who can see her and communicate with her. Xiao Fang seizes the opportunity and threatens the three of them with her ghostly powers to sign a “Ghost Contract” with her. They are bound by the contract to find out the cause of her death or else bad things will befall them.

As time goes by, friendships are forged. However, the trio soon discovers that they were somewhat related to Xiao Fang’s death. They can see Xiao Fang’s spirit because they are fated to from the start. Lots of comical scenes play out as the trio tries to unravel the mystery and investigate who the real murderer of Xiao Fang in the building actually is.

The Post-Drama Revelations

It is actually such a lighthearted and funny drama which I really enjoyed a lot. It was like much needed laughter-inducing kind of serotonin for me during the tiring and stressful times amidst tons of COVID restrictions that kept changing back and forth. I fondly remember watching few episodes in one shot on mewatch because I was so eager to know how the drama would unfold in advance and I found myself finally having a good laugh after a long period of depression. It really helped to release some tension and pressure I felt while working mostly at home during that time.

Laughters aside, the drama also introduced me to the idea of ghost contracts for the first time. Not sure if such thing is really legit or does exist in real life, but I began to think it could be a plausible explanation to certain strange events that had happened in the past 10 years of my life and the feeling of being “obliged” to do certain things that I don’t really want to and even though nobody had specifically asked me to do it. 

It made me reflect and wonder if ghost contracts had been signed on my behalf without my conscious consent in the past, resulting in bad things to happen if I didn’t honour the terms in the contract (whatever they were). This revelation leads me to the following propositions:

1. Mind-singing was a form of ghost contract?

In 2013, when I first started mind-singing for SNSD’s I Got A Boy, I had no intention of continuing this so-called newly discovered magic of mine after their promotions for the whole month of January ended. What I had in mind was I would activate it again only when SNSD comes to Singapore for concerts or performances. Meanwhile, I would return to my normal life as a university student. I also didn’t take the special connection that I began with Taeyeon during that time too seriously. I thought it was just a special piece of memory that I would just keep in my heart as I didn’t think an idol-fan relationship would work out anyway, what’s more a girl-girl relationship.

Little did I expect I would still hear bits and pieces of my voice happening even at their Japan concerts in February even without me consciously doing it. That’s when I realised that it wasn’t something that I was in full control of. Due to arising fear of this unknown new world that I didn’t quite know about, I started to get paranoid and suffered what later became known as symptoms of schizophrenia. But the more the voices and spirits were trying to get their way to me, the more I wanted to get away from them and Taeyeon for fear that they would get to her through me too. I never did continue mind-singing the whole time I was down with schizophrenia and even during the several months of recovery that followed. I had only been quietly observing until 2014 when Taeyeon was affected by some bad scandals. I had an unexplainable guilt, feeling like I was partly to blame, and because of that, I was compelled to begin mind-singing for her again and even other idols this time.

But mind-singing wasn’t exactly an enjoyable thing to do for me. Many times after singing late into the night, my body would be aching in pain and my muscles would get really stiff. Sometimes, the voices in my head would get more severe, which made me dizzy and my energy was sucked out of me so much that I would collapse on my bed in exhaustion thereafter. Despite of this, I was often brainwashed by those voices and the artistes into believing that I was doing this for the good of others, yet there were barely any tangible benefits for myself.

In 2016, when I started working full-time as a IT Developer upon graduation, I couldn’t commit myself that much to mind-singing as before, only selecting few songs to sing every night. It seemed like these were no longer enough to fulfil this so-called ghost contract that I was unaware of back then. In mid 2016, on the last day of Taeyeon’s Butterfly Kiss concert in Seoul, my father suddenly suffered a stroke and was sent to hospital. Later in the same month, my mother also suffered panic attacks and was later diagnosed to have some anxiety issues. This prompted me to start writing actively on my own Twitter and Instagram accounts and even set up this blog to share my stories online while trying to unravel this mystery about mind-singing among other personal topics, hoping to reach out to those artistes more directly to reveal my side of the story.

Over the years, as I tried to avoid doing mind-singing a lot more and more, what I did realise was that bad and unfortunate things do happen as a result, like a form of retaliation, either to me or Taeyeon. It was almost exactly like what happened to the 3 characters in the this drama when they failed to abide by the ghost contract. After having experienced so many things that happened to me over the past several years, I have now stopped trying to glorify or justify the act of mind-singing and rather accept the fact that mind-singing is actually a phenomenon of a spirit possessing my human body to use my voice or manipulating my mind to achieve whatever agenda it has (just like how Xiao Fang and another bad spirit would possess humans to do certain acts in the physical world in the drama). And this could be a dangerous thing to do for me who wasn’t professionally trained on how to psychically protect myself while performing such spiritual rituals. Therefore, I have come into conclusion that mind-singing could be a form of ghost contract that I had reluctantly and subconsciously been obliged to from the start, which could explain certain occurrence of ghostly events that followed.

2. My previous job employments were ghost contracts?

When I was in my final year in university, I worried a lot about what I would be doing in the future. At the time when my future was so uncertain, I did fantasise over having a real job as a full-time mind-singer for the entertainment industry. I even heard the voice mention the name “Lee Soo Man (the founder of SM Entertainment)” often recurring in my mind at that time. But in reality, it was not made possible.

In 2016, my first full-time job after graduation was a really bad one. A small company with only 2 employees, lower than average starting pay and a micro-managing boss… This made my quest in juggling both a full-time day job as a IT Developer and my own “charity” of mind-singing at night really challenging and tiring. I was really unhappy and complained a lot about my situation. Things got worse when this bad energy also affected my family with my father getting a stroke and my mother, anxiety. Somehow things got better when I decided to open up on social media and I believed it was with the help of a spirit (at that time, I didn’t really know who she was and whether she was good or bad…) that I managed to quit my first job and find another one within a matter of few weeks. My second job was a huge difference from my first with a great deal of work-life balance and freedom. But what I didn’t know was it came with a price to pay. I would often hear voices mentioning the words “鬼老板 (ghost boss)” which I didn’t think much of initially. Instead of committing more time to mind-singing, I focused more efforts on writing my personal stories and reflections, sometimes even the dark truths about the entertainment industry. I guess this didn’t go too well with the so-called ghost contract either. My company was forced to shut down after 1 year and few months following the sudden passing of my Russian CEO to throat cancer and I lost my job as a result. Subsequently, similar bad things also happened to me and the people around me when I refused to “recontract” myself to this so-called ghost contact and abide by its terms.

3. SM Entertainment deals with ghost contracts?

Something that got me perplexed for years was how SM Entertainment seems to be linked to my condition of schizophrenia and mind-singing. It’s been like whenever there were changes in the management of the company or when their artistes’ contracts were due for renewal, my life would be implicated in the process. Remember somewhen during the middle of the year 2017, I had a brief period of relapse in schizophrenia. Nothing could quite explain my sudden severity of voices and me losing sleep at nights given my fairly stable and uneventful life back then until around a month later the news finally came out, revealing that 3 of the 8 Girls’ Generation members had decided to leave SM Entertainment while the others, including Taeyeon, had chosen to stay and renewed their contracts. In March 2020, during the time when I was facing difficulties with securing a new job amidst the early outbreak of COVID-19, Taeyeon’s father suddenly passed away due to a heart attack on her birthday. On the very next day, SM Entertainment revealed news of newly-appointed CEO and CMO…..

All these events made me join the dots and the links between my above 3 points together and come to this astonishing conclusion: Did SM Entertainment sign a contract with the ghost that uses my body for mind-singing as a deal to profit their own entertainment business through mind-singing in exchange for my previous job employments in disguise? But how was that possible that I had been unwillingly obliged to their ghost contracts without anything inked in black and white or even a tablet with the electronic contract (just like in the drama) for me to sign on directly? This also brings another important issue of a possibility that I discovered during a theta healing session a few years ago into question: Has SM Entertainment been using dark magic for their entertainment business and unethically enforcing ghost contracts on their artistes and other people including myself…??