33. ONE FAMILY'S CHINESE CULTURE PART III: Death & Funerals

Culture is a fabric woven from the yarns of tradition, beliefs and values. The fabric may fade over time as well as be altered when fashioned or worn by others.

The fabric in this post is bleached white . . . White is a colour of sorrow.

February 15^th: Anniversary of a Death – metal white.

As a child, I did not wear white. I thought my mother did not dress us in white was because it was difficult to keep white clothing white. And it was. As an adult that has been my reason for avoiding white.

Somewhere in between I learned that white in Chinese culture is not auspicious. It’s the colour of death and mourning.

My mother must have known about this Chinese symbolism. After all, she had lived in China and Hong Kong for about 36 years before coming to Niagara Falls.

When her mother died at the very old age of 102 in China, neither of my parents travelled back to China. Perhaps it was due to their age and frailties, or perhaps it was due to the expense. Or, perhaps it was due to some other belief.

During each of my annual visits back to Niagara, my mother would seize a fleeting moment of silence in the house and break it with a mini-lecture. Inevitably, I knew it was coming as she always started her delivery in the same way:

Mei, teng ngo gong . . . Mary, listen [obey] my talk.

Mother reiterated the same points that she covered on earlier visits.

They appreciated seeing me/us. Travelling with a child is hard on the child and expensive too. We should save our money. If something were to happen to them, my brother was here to look after things. There was nothing I could do. Stay safe at home and live our lives. They had lived theirs.

She must have thought I wasn’t listening because I would re-appear the next summer and she’d have to tell me again.

A cousin in Hong Kong arranged for my grandmother’s funeral on my mother’s behalf. Musicians on gongs and drums preceded my grandmother’s wooden coffin painted red. Hired professional mourners dressed in white trailed behind the procession to the burial grounds. Ten tables each seating ten held a feast for the guests.

On one of my Niagara Falls visits, my mother showed me my grandmother’s funeral photos so that’s how I know what happened. I saw the photos once and then there were gone: not to be found again.

Some elements of my grandmother’s funeral are similar to what I’ve read about traditional Chinese funerals in China: others not. For instance, some times guests give a donation to pay for the funeral. In my grandmother’s case, my mother spent years paying for the event since most of the village attended and, with Mother being overseas Chinese, no expense should be spared.

When it comes to funerals, there is obviously variation attributable to local area, time period, deceased’s age, position, community status, the deceased wishes, as well as the organizer’s biases.

For those reasons, the following are not pan-Chinese funeral customs. They are my account of three Chinese funerals in Niagara Falls.

Sam Min Lee (b.1901, d.1990)

In the years following Father’s retirement, he suffered a number of strokes. He never recovered from the final one.

My husband, son and I were living in Courtenay on Vancouver Island at the time and had just returned from an overseas trip sponsored by Pacific Rim Education Grants. We were to have come for our annual Niagara Falls visit the very week Father died.

When we arrived in Niagara Falls, funeral arrangements were well in hand. In fact, my parents had prepared for their funerals many years in advance. Their burial plot in Fairview Cemetery had been purchased before any signs of illness overtook them. In addition, coffins and service arrangements through Hetherington & Deans Funeral Chapel had been made.

In spite of the gravity of our father’s death, my brother and I locked eyes when Mother decided to purchase a supplementary liner that guaranteed Father’s coffin would not leak for an additional number of years.

In our smugness, we thought, “What difference did it make?”

No matter, Mother wanted another level of “protection.” All there was to do was go along with her wishes and move onto the next item – a headstone.

That, too, had been thought about.

Father did want his picture on the monument she told us.

Mother wanted the monument to be a red stone. Red granite it was to be.

Family friend Robert Wong (Post 21) provided the Chinese inscription to be carved into the stone.

I remember more about the day of the funeral rather than the day before when visitations happened. There were many visitors – Chinese and non-Chinese – and keeping my tears in check was a challenge.

On the day of the funeral, our family, including my mother, dressed in black, mainly. My brother, husband, and six-year son donned black armbands as well.

Three remarkable occurrences happened that day: only one I had previously known about as a custom.

After service at the cemetery, guests were given a coin and a piece of rock sugar. This kind of offering was a common practice that I was familiar with.

I like best how my brother explained it to a non-Chinese attendee:

The candy is to take away the bitter taste of death and the money is for luck.

Of the two surprise events, the first was resolved immediately and the second, I have wondered about for years.

Leaving Hetherington & Deans Funeral Chapel en route to the cemetery, a funeral director asked if my mother wanted the hearse to drive by the house so my father could say farewell. My mother declined. Obviously, the funeral director was acquainted with this Chinese practice.

The second incident has required more deliberation. Some time during the proceedings at the cemetery, my mother cast herself to the ground and cried loudly and long.

I was shocked.

Someone helped Mother back on her feet.

While growing up, the public face of both my parents tended to be one of indifference and acceptance: perpetuating the stereotype of Chinese as “inscrutable Oriental.”

We kept what we felt to ourselves and were expected to do so. So, Mother’s public outburst set me farther off-kilter.

When we got back to the house, Mother’s eyes were puffy from crying but she was composed. She told me that she was not going to Father’s post-cemetery meal. Instead, I was to approach each table of guests at the restaurant where the meal was being hosted and thank them for attending.

I wondered about this instruction as my brother would have at least recognized the guests and his Chinese was much better than mine. Nonetheless, I bungled through it.

I have wondered if Father’s death entitled Mother to show her grief in public and custom dictated our duties.

As with any research related to Chinese culture, a range of practices for mourning exists so I remain uncertain as to whether custom was being followed or if Mother was just too overcome.

My husband wonders if this reaction was more of Mother’s idea of filial duty – first to her parents, then to her husband. Did this allow her to feel more Chinese in the western world?  Did it help her make peace with the events?

May Kam Lee (b.1912, d.2010)

Mother had been prepared for her funeral decades before it happened. Each year when I came to visit, she spoke as if it might be the last time I saw her which could have indeed been true as no one knows with certainty when death will come.

When Mother was in her seventies, she dispatched me to buy her a dress to be buried in.

Nothing somber. A pattern - OK and of course, low price.

I returned with a floral print with red flowers. Surprisingly, Mother liked it.

She spent that evening re-stitching and overcasting the seams so the garment would last. 

Mother had no intention of wearing the dress while she was alive so her reasoning eluded me.

Mother also reminded me about taking nylon stockings to the mortician when her time came. She didn’t think she needed shoes, though.

Since Mother did not pass for more than two decades later and by then had dementia, she did not recall the dress nor do I remember if she was actually buried in it.

My brother had looked after any funeral arrangements that had not been previously planned.

When the call about Mother’s death came, my husband and I were living in Courtenay, our son in Victoria.

I didn’t fly out to Ontario right away as the next day I had to be in Nanaimo. I was the lead on the launch of Vancouver Island University’s Master in Special Education Degree Program.

The decision not to go to Niagara Falls immediately was not a difficult one. I heard my mother’s words: Mei, teng ngo gong . . .

Year after year, decade following decade, she had exhorted me to not bother in the event of her death. Accordingly, I completed my work responsibilities and delayed my return to Ontario until the next night.

In essence, I was complying with her instructions.

Mother was days shy of her 98^th birthday when she died. She had had a long life. As to its fullness, I cannot really say.

However, when I read about the horrors that my parents’ villages went through and know how Mother was able to help by sending remittances back to her mother, as well as aid her extended family in their home village, Mother may have believed her Niagara Falls life was more comfortable, safer and fortunate than the one she would have experienced in China.

Mother never spoke of wanting more than she had.

I am saddened by the fact she was more generous in her spending on funerals than she was on herself when alive. Even the dress she had sent me to buy was atypical as she sewed her own clothes, often re-making them from pieces of old garments.

But I am looking at life, death and funerals through my eyes, and not hers.

I believe my parents saw their role as raising my brother and me, and their worth in enabling us to have/be more than they were.

When Mother was around 80, I found out that she saw herself and Father as successful in these goals.

Like many older people, Mother was relating about times in the past. She talked about when I had graduated from high school as the class valedictorian and won some scholarships.

She told me it wasn’t that she and Father didn’t feel proud at the time, it was that they were angry and ashamed: I had married a non-Chinese man.

I was taken aback. Up to that point, I had believed my one redeeming accomplishment was giving them a grandchild. When my parents looked upon their grandson, happiness beamed from their faces. I had seen no such light from them as I grew up.

Pride and shame. . . Like most opposites, it is hard to know one without knowing the other. Sometimes, one can’t tell by just looking and has to be told.

Jack Min Lee (b.1949, d.2012)

Jack, my brother, was talented in ways that I was not and those strengths were reinforced relatively early.

The photo below is of a mural of Maple Street Public School (now the site of Maple Street Park, between 4^th & 5^th Ave. on Maple Street). Jack did the central building. He was in grade 6 at the time. There was a kind of unveiling at the school and a write-up in the local paper.

After my brother finished studying graphic design at Ryerson in Toronto, he returned to Niagara Falls and lived with my parents. What began as a matter of convenience and economy became a vocation of duty.

Jack had had a number of graphic design jobs in Niagara Falls but when the work moved away, he did not follow. He stayed to look after our aging parents.

That was another way that his character differed from mine. Jack was the good child. He was an example, but not model, of filial piety.

A Chinese concept, filial piety requires obligation and obedience to one’s parents. Jack demonstrated these attributes of caring but not always without protest.

I, too, had a sense of filial piety but not to the degree Jack did.

When Jack died, all his personal papers had been left behind. I discovered he could have had a different life than the one he lived. That alternative life would have excluded the care of our parents and given him the intangible rewards that flowed from having a family of his own and the freedom to pursue his ambitions wherever they led.

Jack chose our parents. And in doing so, I recognize and appreciate how his sacrifice made my path freer.

Since cancer overtook Jack so quickly, he and I did not have much time to talk about what he wanted for his funeral. Unlike our parents, he wanted a cremation. That was as far as our conversation got before he entered coma and died a couple days later.

His remains were not interred in the family plot until the spring. During the interval in between, I came across an old metal fishing tackle box. I was surprised and pleased to find it.

One summer as we were growing up, Jack and I had collected the special stamped cork liners from Pepsi bottle-caps. My role in this endeavour was to empty the box beneath the pop cooler bottle opener in my parents’ restaurant and help pry and paste the liners onto the Pepsi offer sheets.

Jack redeemed the required number of liners for this metal tackle box.

In the beginning, he used the box to store his art supplies and tools in. Later, it became a catch all for whatever he had kicking around.

Like my parents, Jack seldom threw anything away. I was glad, though, to see the box. He had valued it once: enough so, to paint the stylized logo of his name on it.

The box had meant something to him and when I found it, its significance came back to me.

Jack’s ashes are buried in that box. Mother would never have approved: for sure, the box was not element-proof.

Some Chinese have a tradition of burning joss paper and papier-mâché items shaped into houses, cars, clothing, etc. at a gravesite to provide for the deceased spirit in the afterlife.

In my brother’s case, there was no burning of offerings. With his ashes, I sent tokens of times shared: a miniature camera from childhood, a Star Trek badge, Canadian Tire money, a couple of tools, fast food coupons, art supplies, his old business cards, a set of keys.

Looking back at this list of burial inclusions, I note that no readily identifiable Chinese items were present. There were very few pieces of Chinoiserie in our home when we were growing up and certainly none that I associated with Jack.

The tokens accompanying his ashes are symbols of his interests and attitudes. At the same time, neither Jack nor I developed independent of my parents' beliefs in: creativity, resourcefulness, industry, curiosity, economy, care and caring.

The tokens embody my parents' values. The items, themselves, are tools in the practice of these values.

I do not think these values are necessarily specific to Chinese culture, but they were evident and palpable in the daily lives our Chinese parents.

This year, the anniversary date of my brother’s death falls right between Valentine’s Day and Chinese New Year. I think how apropos as that’s how Jack lived his life – slipping between western and Chinese ways.