Special to the Kemptville Advance
November 2005
In order to avoid
the noon-hour traffic, we were walking the back alleys to our favourite Indian
restaurant. Meredith rounded the corner up ahead of me and quickly jumped to
the side. “Watch out for the mourners,” she muttered over her shoulder.
Following her around the bend I met a man on horseback, draped in a white paper
robe and a peaked white hood. The horse was white too. A small group of
similarly dressed people followed him, shuffling along, singing a mournful
Chinese song under their breath. I smiled at them and stepped to the side to
watch for a moment, humming along respectfully. Meredith’s head whipped around
to see what had happened to me: “Don’t look at the ones in white!” she hissed.
I averted my eyes
to the ground, scolded, and continued toward the curry café, dodging horse
droppings along the way.
In Chinese
culture, red is for weddings, white is for funerals. The flowers are white, the
cars are white, the grieving families dress in black with white robes and hoods
over top. To the uninitiated, the entire spectacle bears a frightening
resemblance to a Ku Klux Klan parade. Most people, no matter where they spend
their last days, like to think that their funeral would be well-attended. In Taiwan,
they aren’t taking any chances. Families of the deceased pay complete strangers
to come to their loved one’s funeral, so that the soul will have a proper
farewell. These professional mourners often ride on parade floats decorated
with colourful figures of folklore, bands of Chinese drummers and horn players,
and singers in scant costumes. Funerals are not quiet in this part of the
world: they are loud, raucous events, designed to scare off evil spirits. Many
families are too numb from shock or weary from the effort of setting up the
elaborate funeral to cry real tears. One of the hired mourners will fill the
void for them, getting up on stage at the funeral hall, singing songs that
honour the deceased, and taking on the role of a loved one left behind, wailing
and crying, dropping to her knees and pounding the stage floor with her fists.
Often, this is all the real family needs to get actual tears flowing. The
family is willing to pay up to $8,000 Canadian for the ceremony with all the
trimmings. This expense makes the funeral with professional entourage quite a
status symbol, and the family doesn’t want to ‘lose face’ in the eyes of their
peers by hosting a cheap event.
Part of the
Taiwanese funeral ritual involves the creation and burning of paper symbols in
the shape of luxury cars, expensive appliances, clothing and houses. These are
representations of what the family believes their loved one will enjoy in the
afterlife. Paper ‘ghost money’ is also burned, for their dead relative to spend
in heaven. At some funerals, you will see towers of beer cans or whiskey
bottles (indicative of what the deceased was fond of while still on Earth)
decorated with flowers, colourful ribbons and bows.
One interesting
feature of more than one third of all funerals in Taiwan is a performance by an
exotic dancer. Perhaps this tradition arose from the scantily clad singers
taking their performance one step further. In any case, it isn’t unusual to
honour the dead with the entertainment of a woman (or a man, in some cases),
shedding clothing and dancing nude. There are even reports of soft-porn videos
being shown at these events, perhaps as a means of celebrating life and
reminding mourners that it must go on.
According to
Malcolm McLean, Lecturer of Religious Studies at the University of Otago in New
Zealand, this type of funeral ritual with erotic overtones is typical of both
mainland China and rural areas of Taiwan. Researchers in religious study from
universities in Canada, the U.S., U.K and Sweden debate the possible reasons
for bringing sex into Asian funeral rites.
The Asian
approach to death is very different from the Western approach, and it varies from
one religion to another. In Japan, there are temples for those who have
suffered a sudden death of one kind or another.
There is also a
Buddhist ceremony specifically for the purpose of recognizing the soul of the
aborted or miscarried child. The common theme is most Asians believe that their
dead relatives will go on to another plane of existence and need to be
honoured, even after their lives end.
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