Bling up your dead

You’ve probably read in one of the national rags that it’s tomb sweeping festival this weekend. Time to get the diesel generator out the garage and wheel it down to the local graveyard first thing in the morning along with the high pressure hose you bought for cleaning the lawn furniture. Best to beat the crowds; rest assured, it’s going to get busy down at the cemetery this weekend.

Even after being here a while, I’m still a bit confused by this holiday. Sure, I can read the stuff on the internet to get the scoop on what’s going down, and I like the idea of having a festival to remember those family members who are no longer with us, but it seems that the reality is somewhat removed from the official explanation.

The only graveyards I’ve come across here have been small clusters of graves tucked away on the hillside inside the forests on the outskirts of town I stumbled across these while out on my mountain bike. At first I wondered whether it was considered bad form to go rattling past someone’s final resting place, gasping for air on the steep climb, but then I noticed the restaurant that had been constructed on the lake at the base of the hill. If they can put up with the drunken revelry of Wuhan nouveau rich, they can surely suffer the pained exertions of a solitary biker.

But there was a story on the local news site saying that they would be running a bus service to the local graveyard. Note the use of the singular here. And they won’t be running a bus straight to the graveyard; the first bus will take you halfway and drop you off before turning around and heading for home. You have to wait for a second bus to take you the remainder of the way. One large graveyard so far outside town it was too far to walk, two buses to get you there; if I wasn’t living in a country that is still run by a Communist government I would think it sounded suspiciously like Tescos was running the show.

I went out on the bike this afternoon to see what was going down at the graveyard. It turned out to be quite a shindig. I’m a reasonable bloke, I don’t have a problem with women dressing up for a night on the town. If a woman wants to wear a cut off top, clinging denim shorts, black stockings and high heels boots that’s fine with me, but I did find myself wondering whether it really works at a graveyard. Similarly, I know there is a gaping cultural gap between East and West but would you want to buy lambsticks on the way in to pay respects to Grandad? It seems the ceremony would lack a certain solemnity if one hand is preoccupied with ripping the scorched flesh off a stick while the other is haphazardly sweeping the crap from the grave.

There was even a fight brewing at the cemetery gates. Two middle aged blokes, cigarettes in hand were shoving each other while their wives were mouthing off and trying to provoke the situation further. This seemed a little more in keeping with the Wuhan way. The locals are famed for bringing it on in any situation and starting a scuffle over grandma’s remains might, in a weird kind of way, actually be paying some form of respect. There are probably many Wuhanese who could walk away with bloodied lip or blackened eye and say “it’s how she would have wanted it. Old grandma always felt she hadn’t had a good evenings mah jong unless she’d broken someone’s nose or glassed someone with a bottle of bai jiu”

Author: cyanide bunny

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