Service Interrupted (1)

Merry Christmas! Joyeux Noel! Sheng4Dan4Jie2Kuai4Le4!

If you search Google for information regarding Taiwanese funeral customs, you see a fair mix of information. Here is one site that I have found that accords with some of my family's practices. Practices and beliefs differ from group to group (even from family to family) within Taiwan due to the wide mix of people on the island (they may all look the same to you, but to me there are Taiwanese, Chinese, the indigenous peoples and others). I thought I would blog about my experience to share a little about my experience with Taiwanese culture and also to document it for my own sake.

General things you should know about my family and me. My parents immigrated from Taiwan before I was born. For the most part, my family (grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins) lives in Taiwan. More so on my mother's side than my father's side. When together, my family speaks a mix of Taiwanese/Mandarin/English/Japanese (due to the Japanese influences on Taiwan). I am practically illiterate. I attended Chinese school for a few years as a child. I can write my name, numbers, and a handful of basic characters. I figure out pinyin/characters through a combination of the internet, phonetics, vague memories and the power of deduction.

My grandfather's funeral rites follow a mix of Buddhist and Taiwanese traditions. Since he passed away, my relatives have been going to the temple to pay respects to my grandfather. Each morning, they go to bai4bai4. This involves burning incense and giving thanks or offerings and general respect paying. According to Taiwanese beliefs, he is ascending to the afterlife but he has not taken anything with him. Each morning, after paying our respects by burning incense at his soul altar, we burn paper flowers (the steps for him to reach the afterlife) and sacrificial money (money for the afterlife). Basically, my grandmother's apartment is reminiscent of a paper/origami factory.

An auspicious day was chosen for my grandfather's funeral (07/01/08), unfortunately it is not so for my uncle's wife. A Buddhist ritual, two wooden-pieces are tossed to the floor. If they both land face-down, the answer is "No". One-up and one-down means "Yes". The internet (i.e. I don't know this person) tells me that having both face-up means that the spirit really approves. Though my family believes if they are both face up, the answer is also "No". Of all the days suggested to my grandfather (each one inauspicious for each of his children and his daughter-in-law), he selected the one that was inauspicious for my uncle's wife.

Yesterday, we went to select my grandfather's urn. Well, really my grandfather had already "selected" (same eight-ball method) his urn, but we went to inspect it for flaws. My grandmother and mother wanted a perfect one of course, but after much careful inspection, they realized that all of the urns had their own particular flaws (of course, you can't expect anything human-made to be perfect - that would imply that humans are capable of perfection). So, the family decided on the original urn.

Ancestor worship may be unfamiliar to some of you. The concept is even more difficult to explain in French to HCNs who for the most part think the three choices for religion are Christianity (Catholic or Protestant), Islam, or Animist. In fact there is a joke that the sum of the distribution of religion is 2 (and not 1) because everyone is animist. Really the closest in village I could come to describing it was animism.

Anyway, speaking of respecting my elders, it is getting late and I need to go to bed.