Migrants embrace a burning desire for tradition
As night falls, mourners emerge at crossroads in twos and threes. They draw a circle on the ground using whatever is at hand to separate the “two worlds”. Then, within the circle, they set light to wads of imitation paper money.
As the offerings burn, people murmur, urging their ancestors to treat themselves well in the “other world” and not be as thrifty as they were in life.
They usually assure deceased relatives that they can send a message via dreams any time if they run out of spending money or need new clothes.
That is a common scene in Chinese cities during the weeks straddling the Tomb Sweeping Festival, which falls during Qingming, a springtime solar term in the Lunar Calendar.
The participants are mainly middle-aged people or seniors, who have migrated to cities far from their home provinces, where ancestral graves are usually found.
Li Aiqun, a truck driver in Beijing, normally burns offerings for his late parents ahead of two death-themed festivals — Tomb Sweeping Day, which usually falls in April, and Zhongyuan, the “ghost festival” that is celebrated on the 15th day of the seventh month of the lunar calendar, usually in August or September.
Li said he is busy all year, and it is time-consuming to make the journey to his home village in Baoding, Hebei province — 150 kilometers from the capital — to make the offerings. Therefore, he and his wife choose a crossroad to make the offerings, in accordance with instructions from seniors in Li’s village.
“All the people working outside do this. I followed suit. I do it as a comfort, knowing I am doing something for my parents,” he said.
The superstitious belief is that crossroads are the places most frequented by the postmen of the “other world”, and burning offerings — from joss paper to paper imitations of quilts, cars and even iPads — at them allows the “ghost postmen” to deliver the cargo to their loved ones accurately.
Yang Anrong, a veteran cemetery manager in Kunming, Yunnan province, said that in Hubei, her home province, people draw the circle with rice. The rice is intended as a token of goodwill and a tip for the ghost postmen so they will not be tempted to steal the items to be delivered.
“We used to place the joss paper in an envelope with the address of the dead relatives’ ancestral home written on it to avoid errors,” she said.
Burning offerings is an age-old tradition, but it is banned in most commercial cemeteries in accordance with fire safety regulations.
Some local authorities have also banned the practice at undesignated places and introduced policies to allow mourners to exchange joss paper for bouquets in a bid to promote “civilized mourning” and curb air pollution.
Urban residents can also seek comfort by presenting chrysanthemums and sweeping away the debris at relatives’ tombs.
But the tradition lives on for migrant workers — who are usually from rural areas where traditions run deep and whose homes may be hundreds or even thousands of kilometers away — and seniors who have moved to the city to be with their children.
Yang said migrants have made a great contribution to China’s urban growth, but some of their needs are overlooked, including the need to worship their ancestors on special occasions.
“There are few relevant public services,” she said, referring to facilities that allow migrant workers to remember their loved ones in safe, modern ways.