A very long Wednesday

It’s Wednesday morning and it is going to be a long day of prayer and different activities. They have taken down the original tent and set up another that is even bigger and blocks the entire road. A large portrait of my grandfather hangs on the far end of the tent with an extraordinary display of flowers. As we quickly eat a breakfast of “man tou” and soymilk, several relatives arrive from out of town. Family by family, each of them arrives.

I see my Aunt Two and her family. I have very fond memories of visiting her in her house in the big city of Tai Chung. Her family owned and still operates a Fuji Film shop, printing photos all day. The front of the store would be the shop and the back and upper floors (there were 4 or 5 floors if I remember) would be their house. This was a very typical set up in Taiwan. She would let me operate the printing machine, brightening different photos and correcting others for different customers. My brother and I would constantly run next door to the supermarket and buy this orange/carrot carbonated juice or across the street to the dominos pizza to get a pizza for dinner.

The neighborhood is alive with activity with a lot of the neighbors helping out. Everyone helps cut vegetables and meats as they prepare lunch. The smell of delicious foods permeates the air. Neighbors cook the food together in very large woks outside in the courtyard across the street. Back inside my grandfather’s house, the family starts to prepare all of the traditional dresses for everyone. Each family member is given a white outfit, essentially made up of white exercise pants, white shoes, and a white polo. It’s actually pretty comfortable. Along with this, we are given different pieces of clothing and headgear depending on who we are in the family. As the eldest son of my grandfather’s eldest son (my dad), I wear a vest made of woven twine, and white headband with some more of the woven twine and a yellow piece of cloth. Everyone quickly changes their clothes and tries to get some rest before all of the activities begin.

I go upstairs and my dad and I Skype with my mom and brother (and our cat Olive) back home in Milpitas, California. Since I was in high school, my mom has had end-stage renal failure, which is essentially completely failure of the function of both kidneys. For about eight years, she had to go to the dialysis center, connecting tubes into her body to perform the function of her kidneys and clean out her blood. This process would take about 3 hours every other day. We waited for a very long time on the organ donation waitlist at UCSF because of her rare O blood type. Because of this, she needed to stay nearby at all times in case a match came up. This meant no travel and indeed, my mom has not been away from the San Francisco Bay Area for any more than two days at a time for the last decade. Last year, we suddenly got a call saying that there was a kidney available and that she needed to come in immediately for the transplant operation. It was a very exciting development for my family and the operation went very successfully. She no longer had to go to dialysis and she looks a lot healthier. However, she is not allowed to travel for a year after the surgery and therefore she was unable to come to the funeral in Taiwan. My brother also stayed behind to keep her company. Luckily, though, it will be more than a year since the surgery and she will be able to come to my graduation in May in New York. It will be her first trip anywhere in a very long time.

As my dad and I say goodbye to my mom, we suddenly hear a very loud cry and intense crying downstairs. My dad and I look at each other and he immediately knows that Aunt One had arrived. Her family has five children, including four sons (Tony, Peter, Willy, and Jack) and one daughter (Eno). Each of the kids has grown up in Vancouver and Tony and Peter have a business in Irvine, Eno lives in Seattle, Willy goes to UC Santa Barbara (where both of my parents went to graduate school actually), and Jack is still in high school in Vancouver. Tony had come by a few days ago to pay his respects, but had to back to Irvine to take care of some business. At noon, we all get together at different tables in the tent and eat lunch together. Its sort of amazing see all of my family members together at the same spot, all sharing the same grandfather and grandmother.

After lunch, the ceremonies begin. In the local Dao/Buddhist religion, there are many hours of praying together and different things that must be done to ensure my grandfather’s wellbeing in the afterlife. A local group has come to perform the different services and lead up through the prayer. I won’t get into the details here, but it is a very long process. The prayers last from 1 PM in the afternoon all of the way until around 11 PM at night. We proceed in different sessions, following along with the performance and prayer. Because I am the eldest son of the eldest son, my uncle and I are given some special paper money to burn outside of the tent so that my grandfather can use it in the afterlife. Each session is intense and incredibly tiring. Between each one, we have about a fifteen-minute break to run into the house and get some rest before the next. The breaks after a nice chance to catch up with family with light-hearted conversation before being serious again with the next prayer session. In all, there are four afternoon prayer sessions, lasting until about 6 PM. I am not going to get into the details of much of the prayers as I either don’t really remember, did not understand (the whole thing was in Taiwanese and I could not understand), or I was out back by myself burning the paper money and did not see.

After the end of the first day of ceremonies, my family retired into the house and sat around talking to each other. The lighthearted talk and joking around stood in contrast to the sad and emotional ceremonies that had taken place. It is too bad that everyone was brought together by such unfortunate circumstances. Everyone looks forward to a happy event to get together again. There is joking around about who is going to get married next and how they should hurry up so that we can get together again at their wedding.

For me though, the night is not over. The immediate family: my dad, my uncle, my five aunts, and I gather in the living room to place my grandfather’s body from the refrigerated box to a large orange, wooden casket. As the eldest son of my dad, I am regarded as a member of the immediate family for the purposes of all of the funeral ceremonies. There is some prayer and a lot of emotion as my grandfather laid on a metal platform on the floor next to the casket. My father cleans off my grandfather’s face with a towel and then we lift him into the casket carefully. I hold his feet as we put him in the casket. I feel a mixed feeling of sadness and closure as his body lies in the casket. My aunts fix his clothing and the funeral directors fill the empty spaces of the casket with the special paper money. We then cover his body with a cloth and rip off the ends of the cloth for our own safekeeping and memory. We say goodbye to my grandfather one more time and the casket is then nailed shut. It is nearly midnight and we hurry to get to sleep. There is a long morning ahead of us tomorrow.



Post-edit: For anyone who is interested in learning more about Taiwanese funeral traditions, I would recommend this article that I found online!