Rants & Raves of Jasmine’s Fiction

These two weeks will mark the annual Chinese Cheng Meng Festival – or basically the festival of the dead.  It’s a time where families gather together to visit the final resting of ancestors long past and generally to eat drink and be merry. 

For quite a while in my life I though this practice was a little bizarre to say the least; we would pack for a picnic, drive to a cemetery and set out candles, joss sticks, paper ‘hell notes’ (pocket money to spend in the afterlife), roasted pork and steamed chicken with glutinous rice, fruits, sweet cakes, brandy and tea.  Then we would proceed to clean up the marked area and set out everything in its proper place.  As a small child my only job was to wave a plastic baggie around the food to keep the pesky insects away.  As I grew older that baggie waving task was given to my smaller cousins.  My job now is to provide shade; as in hold 2 ginormous umbrellas up and out of people’s way so that everyone can be sheltered from the unforgiving tropical sun. 

When everything is set out in the proper place, we will distribute the joss sticks (prayers for the deceased as the smoke rises to heaven) among the present family members and everyone will take turns (in accordance to age and rank) to ‘offer’ these prayers up.  Oh and someone in the family will also distribute joss sticks and sweet cakes to the ‘neighbours’…  And after all that is done, we join in the feasting.  When everything is eaten we then pack away the remnants and go home but before we enter the house we have to ‘cleanse’ ourselves with water purified with pomelo leaves and chrysanthemum flowers.  This whole scenario takes about 3 hours, tops.  Easy.

Technically our little ritual is generally quite simple.  Some families seem to prefer a more elaborate setup.  We have seen some families with various types of offerings from an ENTIRE roast pig to giant candles the size of large tree trunks to 20 metre long firecrackers!  We’ve also seen some larger families with the rented circus tent sized umbrellas complete with the industrial misting fans.  Some other families also bring ‘supplements’ to the ‘hell notes’ like paper ‘TVs’, ‘cars’, ‘cell phones’, ‘trophies’, ‘brandy’, ‘beer’, ‘magazines’, ‘DVD machines’ etc. all made from coloured paper to look like the real thing.  The companies that make these paper offerings normally make a killing, pardon the pun.  Those paper replicas are expen$$$ive!!!  A paper TV set can set you back a very real US$75, and a paper Mercedes can be about US$130 and houses with swimming pools, fully furnished can be up to US$1000!!!  It’s a serious business death.

I think it’s all good if your family can afford it.  Personally when I’ve shuffled off this mortal coil and kicked the proverbial bucket, I want to be cremated.  It’s a slightly less expensive affair and I do not need to suffer my next of kin to the annual clearing of my grave site.  I shall have it in my last will and testament that when I’m ashes to ashes and dust to dust, each year my next of kin shall take a small vial of my charred remains and go to a different Disneyland around the world and sprinkle it there.  All they have to do is to discreetly open the vial when they’re on the top of the Rolling Thunder Mountain rollercoaster and whoosh!  I think it’s a great way to spend my afterlife listening to the sounds of laughter and strains of “It’s A Small World”. After all, it is the happiest place on earth.  If all else fails, I can always be one of the ghosts that haunt the Pirates Of The Caribbean ride!  ARRR!!!  Yo Ho, Yo Ho, It’s A Pirates’ Life For Me!

Drink Up Me Hearties, Yo Ho!

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 2nd, 2006 at 11:52 pm and is filed under Current Affairs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.