Asia Sentinel

To a five-year old, what does death mean? Some images that gave me a first taste of it just got forever stuck in my mind since that day when my adult relatives gathered in my (maternal) uncle’s home to mourn the death of my (maternal) grandmother.

My mother was trying to hoax me to sleep on my uncle’s bed in the bedroom, which was right next to the room where the corpse was laid. With the deafening noise of people crying and talking all at once in the living room, and the horror of being so close to a stiff dead body that I had earlier had a sneak peek on, how could a mortified small child of five be expected to think of peaceful slumber at such a time? But perhaps my mom could be tricked….

As soon as she walked out of the bedroom, thinking I had succumbed to her hypnotizing lullaby, I glided down the wooden framed bed noiselessly and tiptoed out into the incense-filled corridor. The smoke from burning joss sticks and other paper offerings was making my eyes burn and choking me to tears. The adults, being preoccupied with whatever they were doing, hardly paid any attention to dwarfish me, as I snaked my way to one hidden corner of the living room, behind an old sofa, which provided me with a perfect cover. The sofa’s back was about two inches above my eye level, so that I had to stand on my toes in order to get a glimpse of what was going on in the room.

From my newly found perch I could see a big photo of my grandma placed on top of a makeshift offerings table. My whole body shivered when I looked into her eyes – they were lifeless but scornful and seemed to be staring right back at me. Luckily, there were other things that distracted me. Home-cooked dishes, fruits, rice wine in small porcelain cups were placed neatly in rows behind burning joss sticks on the table. On one side of it stood a paper maid with braids and on the other a paper boy servant. Both had morose facial expression, as though they were aware of their immolation destiny. There were other paper offerings strewn all over the place, like a paper mansion filled with furniture, a paper rickshaw, paper clothes, paper gold, paper silver, and you-name-it. Anyway, it was that pair of paper dolls that really gave me the creeps.

What scared me even more was the strange ritual of having a woman (a hired professional) incessantly crying in a frightfully high-volume voice and seemingly being in excruciating sorrow. They called such a person “the crying woman” 喊驚婆 and her thunderous mourning was supposed to call back the soul of the dead from the twilight zone. She apparently had a script to follow while bellowing out what seemed to me then to be unintelligible gibberish. At the same time, she was continuously burning paper money, which was supposed to be in exchange for the return of my grandma’s soul (as I was later told). Whether it was a result of her good performance, or of dense smoke from the joss stick and paper burning that the adults were all effusively tearful, I was not entirely sure.

When I grew older, I thought that the ritual was conducted, by way of inducing onlookers, to help them release their deep pain and grief. But a recent search for information on the internet indicates that 喊驚 is a long held tradition of places like Chang Ping and Huizhou in Guangdong province and is used to call back (telepathically) folks who have left town and not been heard of for a long time (apparently in the same way as calling back the soul of the dead), as well as to calm down frightened children or heal children who have been sick for a long time. The ritual is usually performed by a woman and is said to have worked magic. I suspect that the belief is that people want to touch the gods by ostentatiously displaying their deepest emotional yearnings, in the hope of getting the gods to come to the help of those in need.

The concept of “calling back the soul of the dead” (招魂) was actually introduced way back in ancient times. Famous poet of the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods, Qu Yuan (屈原), wrote (招魂) in a collection of poems called Songs of Chu (楚辭) and it was about calling back to his home country the soul of his emperor 楚懷王, who unexpectedly got detained and died in a foreign country Qin (秦).

As superstitious (and scary) as the ritual might seem, it may still be therapeutic for some in the sense that it seems helpful in instigating the outpour of grievous sentiments of those who suffer from deep pain or emotional stress over loved ones who have departed. But this is one part of the Chinese culture that is fast fading away, if it has not entirely vanished already. People from the younger generations may never have heard of such a ritual.

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