The Seeing Off
The dead woman’s picture was on the mantle place beside the door. The frame was a simple, light wood, and it was topped with an elaborately tied black ribbon. I hadn’t noticed it when I first walked in and no one seemed to be paying any particular attention to the smiling face. Bright flowers stood on either side.
I shuffled in behind the florist and bowed my head as people stared at me, blinking hard against the grief and the early hour. Eyes drifted from floor to ceiling and no one said much of anything except for the florist, who pointed down into a huge black bag of ceremonial necessities. A young woman with a round face and massive eyes (the dead woman’s daughter) reached down into the bag, and drew out a long, thick cylinder – incense, to guide the spirit, and the family, on the long path to the crematorium.
But it wasn’t quite time yet, and everyone stood around looking at each other, and at the young woman with the incense. I sat on a chair next to the dead woman’s brother, whose hair piled upwards like a troupe of silvery brown acrobats. He slid across the grey pleather of the oversized armchair, but I waved him off and said he should be comfortable. He asked me why I was there, and I worried that my answer, “I was curious,” would cause anger on this sacred day. But he smiled and said that theirs was a small family but one full of love. He said that tradition had long ago faded from the life of the Chinese city dweller, but that it wouldn’t matter much anyway even if it hadn’t. He and his sister weren’t from Guangzhou originally and traditions varied so much from place to place. He said he was about as lost as I was.
Beside him, slouched on blankets of lime green and fronting a TV (shrouded, to keep away the dust) were other family members, silent and expectant in the early morning heat. The day was mercifully overcast, damping slightly the scorching humidity. But it made the city, the perpetually grey city, all the greyer, and even the extraordinary lime-ness of the lime green blankets and curtains was muted.
It was early, about eight in the morning, and people moved and spoke with the hush of interrupted sleep. Family members were still arriving, quiet and somber but clad casually, some in t-shirts and jeans. They came and greeted the daughter and the harried husband, soft spikes of Cantonese lofting through the living room before new arrivals searched for some unoccupied bit of wall to press themselves against and disappear.
Outside on the balcony, in front of the numerous spindly green plants spilling over their pots, a space had been cleared for a small shrine on a stone pedestal. When the last of the guests arrived, the florist reached into the bag and produced strands of incense. Lighters emerged from pant pockets and shirt pockets and countertops and thin snakes of smoke soon curled towards the ceiling. People rotated through the balcony, igniting sticks and facing the world, waving three times up and down before nestling them in gravel. Then the husband closed the balcony’s huge metal grate and padlocked it shut.
And, then, it was done. It took a long time for the top of the massive lead incense stick to ignite, and when it did, all talking stopped. The front door was opened. The daughter turned and looked at her mother and shattered the silence with choking sobs. Moments later, the husband stared into his dead wife’s eyes and convulsed, briefly, from crying. Then the daughter picked up the picture, and everything was quiet again.
Silent save the patter on the stairwell, we followed her out, and soon we were in the lobby of the building, stark white but for the outline of a tree glued to the wall in stones. It was one of the older high rises, probably from the 90s, when speckled bathroom tile seemed to be the only building material available. We paused by the call box while the husband and the florist carted the black bag down the stairs. And then we walked, groups of twos and threes behind the daughter lofting the tall incense, wrapped in its smoke. The daughter clutched her mothers’ picture against her chest while the husband, her father, tore paper money from a pad, creating a trail back to the apartment door for the dead. We stopped before a mini touring bus, a white shuttle like the one you might take to the airport, with high straight cloth backs and video screens, which remained black and unused. We boarded behind the daughter, who sat up front still holding the incense and the picture. I sat next to the brother and we chatted as the city rolled by.
Death has a way of cutting through pretense and the brother turned to me and asked if I believed in anything. I wasn’t sure what he meant so he asked again. Believe in anything, he asked, anything at all. God or something after death or a soul. Anything. I was wedged in next to the window, and the bus was smoky-sweet. I said that I didn’t but that I was Jewish by birth, though for me that had more to do with history than anything else. It was still early, and my Chinese lurched in and out of coherence. He nodded his head and said he was surprised. Foreigners believed, and he thought that would be a nice thing to have. It just, he said, never really occurred to him to believe. There were customs, he said, but those varied by region and only farmers really care about that stuff anyway. And after death? He looked at me and smiled. What do you mean? There is nothing. I was born, I live, I die. He smiled. It’s not a bad thing.
We rode on through the Guangzhou highway, swooping down overpasses that sliced through forests of tiled high-rises. Sprinkled throughout the city are decrepit pockets of the old town (or what passes for old here): close together warrens of crumbling buildings streaked with the dull green of climbing vines. It’s hard to know whether to be nostalgic for their disappearance, pleased at their impending eradication, or depressed at the graceless sky rises that will replace them. Slick new boxes that the original residents will never be able to afford to live in. And they’ll come. The newly moneyed from Sichuan or Guangxi or anywhere, and then the hike begins to the outskirts.
