EIGHTEEN - A rousing requiem ritual

 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.