The Peculiar American

The Weight of the Dead

China
I met a guy in Beijing a few years ago whose best friend had gone to Japan to make money. Migrants the world over do the job no one else wants to do. He said that in Japan there are a lot of high-rise appartment buildings. And a lot of old people. It follows that there are a lot of old people dying in high-rise buildings, not all of them with elevators.

Somebody has to carry the bodies down. No one wants that job, so migrants do it. This guy said his friend lived in Japan for a year and, by Chinese standards, made a ton of money. When he returned to Beijing he threw a big party, lots of booze and food, all to show his friends how successful he'd become. At the end of the night, most partygoers gone and the host drunk, he confides that sometimes he still feels the dead people on his shoulder and sometimes he wakes up at night imagining there is a dead person on top of him.

It's hard to know with the language barrier if the guy who told me this story understood it to be a meaningufl story or not, but it struck me as the perfect metaphor for where China is right now: booming with new wealth but the weight of the past still very much a burden on its shoulders.

I asked this guy if he was planning on getting married. He said no, not until he made lots of money first. The people I met in China were obsessed with making money. He told me that, growing up very poor, his mother promised him as a child she would give him a hard boiled egg for breakfast for his first day in high school. He remembered this promise years later when he woke up for his first day in high school. There was no hard boiled egg. He doesn't know if his mother forgot or if they were still too poor to afford the egg. But he has been craving that hardboiled egg ever since. Of course now he has enough money to buy as many eggs as he wants. "I will never make a promise like that to my children I cannot keep," he said. "I would rather not have children."

And so he works and saves, dreaming of a hard boiled egg while his friend works and drinks to forget for a moment the weight of the dead.

Vietnam
Driving across the Vietnamese countryside one of the first things I noticed, aside from the Fedex and Oracle billboards coming out of Hanoi's airport, were the tombstones that appeared every so often in rice fields and backyards of homes. Often it was a solitary stone slab, other times a cluster of two or three. I saw too many of these gravemarkers for it to be a coincidence so I asked my driver who spoke some english about it.

He explained that Vietnamese tradition is for a person to die at home, with family. It is considered a good omen for the family to be looking into the eyes of the person as they die. And it is also tradition to bury the deceased at home, on the family's land. He explained that the first three years after a person die are critical in making sure their spirit is happy in the afterlife. An elabaroate set of rituals ensure with special ceremonies ocurring periodically during this time, especially on the 49th and 100th day after the death, and culminating on the three year anniversary when the body is dug up, washed and prepared anew for its final resting.

If the family is diligent in observing these rituals then at the end of the three years the spirit is not only happy and peaceful but will also bless the living family members and offer good advice when consulted. If the rituals are not observed, or it the person dies violently away from family and the body is not properly treated, then the spirit is said to be a wandering spirit, ever restless and haunting the living family members. It is so important to take proper care of a departing spirit that traditional vietnamese families will borrow heavily to pay for the proper rituals. In many rural cemeteries in Vietnam there is a special temple set aside for wandering spirits who have no family to care for.

During my brief passage through Vietnam I raised the issue with several people, as I found it fascinating. These familial burial plots are becoming a real problem as the country modernizes. Any time a family has to sell their land and move they must dig up their dead and take them to their new home for reburial. The ultimate land title are the remains of your ancestors on your land. That, more than any legal document, is proof that the land is yours. So it is that the gravestones are also cadastral markers for the living. As Vietnamese cities grow and expand into rural areas, generations of peaceful souls suddenly become restless again as their remains are disinterred.

The government of Vietnam has passed a law making it illegal to bury someone anywhere outside of municipal cemeteries. For the residents of Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City and other cities the decree makes sense and is hardly an inconvenience. But the legions of rice farmers must decide who they fear more: the bureaucrat in Hanoi or the spirits of their fathers.

Korea
Ancestor worship runs deep in Korea. One of my best friends in high school was Korean. He was valedictorian of our class, went on to Brown and then Yale for a master's degree. His father was chairman of Daewoo in Mexico, one of the top chaebols or industrial conglomerates in Korea. The family had been posted to Miami before moving to Mexico City. My friend and his younger sister were trilingual. In other words, as modern a Korean family as you can get.

And yet during our junior year in high school my friend's grandfather made the 14 hour by air journey from Seoul to Mexico City to deliver an important message. He was soon to die, he could feel it, and he was very worried that my friend would not properly worship him as he had worshipped his father and grandfather. He feared a lonely eternity, without the living to keep him company.

I remembered the incident years later when I was in Korea and visited the DMZ or demilitarized zone that separates South Korea from North Korea. The most interesting stop on the tour is a shrine located at exactly the northernmost point in South Korea where people who were separated from their families during the war can go pray for their ancestors, stuck on the other side of the DMZ. It is one of the most poignant monuments to longing I have ever seen. The famiily members go to the shrine in grief and hope their prayers can reach across the border and find the wandering spirit of their forefathers.

Cambodia
Like Mao and the Cultural Revolution in China, Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge set out to erase the past. In China I came across temples and palaces where paintings and murals depicting what were considered scenes of feudalism and capitalism had been painted over with plain white. The past literally painted over.

The Khmer Rouge took this one step further. Cambodia is a society that tore itself apart and consumed itself. Doctors, lawyers, professionals, anyone who wore glasses, anyone who spoke another language--all suspected members of the intelligentsia-- were killed. Between 1.5 and 2 million people were murdered out of a population of approximately 7 million, proportionally the worst of the 20th Century's many holocausts.

This wasn't the case of one group turning on another, Cambodian society is pretty homogenous. There is a pyramid of human skulls at the entrance of the killing fields and a sign next to it that reads, "Who were these people who had the face of the Khmer (Cambodian) but the heart of devils?"

In order to create a future, the communists believed you first had to destroy the past and to do that they recruited the people with the least loyatly to the past: children and teenageers. What makes the Cambodian tragedy so horrific is that many times it was the young killing their own family members at the behest of their revolutionary masters. And the preferred method of killing was no accident. In Asian cultures the head is sacred, the temple of the body. In places like Thailand you could be beaten or killed for accidentally touching someone's head. So the Khmer Rouge's preferred method of killing was to bash someone's head against a tree or to decapitation. These were mass executions in faraway fileds in order to ensure maximum anonymity.

In other words, every taboo surrounding death that had built up over centuries was consciously violated. Not only was a whole generation of Cambodians killed, they were killed in such a way that guarantees their spirits would never be at rest. Spend five minutes talking to anyone in Cambodia and you will soon hear their particular version of the Cambodian tragedy, of their own family members who died. Even if now, years later they want to pay proper respect to their ancestors and give the spirits some rest, they cannot. There is no way to know which of the myriad skulls was once their fathers.

Rather than kill the past, as they'd hoped, the Khmer Rough guaranteed that it is more alive than ever, wandering the countryside looking for peace.


Macau
I found home where I least expected, in the Old Protestant Cemetary in Macau. I spent a month travelling around Asia a few years ago and Macau was one of my final stops.

Though I wasn't homesick, I did have a sense of alienation after days and weeks in a land where, not only did I not speak the language, I couldn't even make sense of road signs and shop windows. Its a sense of otherness that accumulates so gradually you don't even realize it until you come into contact with something prosaic, when the common is now exotic.

So it was that as I walked through the gates of the Old Protestant Cemetary in Macau I was jolted by a sudden familiarity, a sense of belonging. Which is odd, because on the face of it I had nothing in common with the men who were buried there. The cemetery was founded by the British East India Company in 1814 as a place to bury protestants who died in the Portuguese Catholic colony of Macau. Before that, any British, American, German, Dutch or Scandinavian who died in this oriental outpost was burried between the walls that separated the catholic colony from the confucian mainland, as neither society would acommodate the bones of apostates.

The sense I got in the cemetery was a sense of freedom, which is an odd thing to feel in place of the dead. But here was a place where death was final, it did not exact a toll on the living as they travelled down their own road to the thereafter. Tombstone after tombstone proclaimed that the dead were no longer with us. A typical marking on tombs of a missionary or preacher might read "here lie the mortal remains" of the person and that the deceased were no "in the company of the Lord". For those who believe in heaven, death is a sweet release and the writings in granite reflect that relief and joy.

But it wasn't only men of faith buried there but soldiers and mercenaries and opium traders too. There were several tombstones to fallen sailors (the US navy had a hospital in Macau for much of th 19th Century) "erected by his shipments out of respect" as if the mates had taken up a collection, bought a marble marker got very drunk and were now back at sea awaiting the next adventure. Solemn, yes; sad, no. There was none of the anxiety over the dead I had seen in so many other places.

Along with the sense of freedom and liberation from death's grasp was a profound sense of optimism that permeated the cemeteray. A very illustrious selection of men are buried there: the first person to introduce the telescope to Japan, the first person to write an English-Chinese dictionary and toto translate the Bible into Chinese, the naval officer who negotiated the US-China trade treaty and countless other notables who fought battles, made first voyages and introduced western technology to the East. These tombs celebrate the life of the dead, they do not mourn their passing; they are resumes etched in granite, not lamentations. And they pose a silent challenge to the visitor: this is what we did with our lives, what are you doing with yours? The focus somehow returns to the present.

Leaving the cemetary I had the feeling that every grave, every memorial and masoleum on that plot of land that felt so much like home was echoing the words of John Donne: "Death be not proud."