9/20

9/20 7:34am CST

http://picasaweb.google.com/105909573807230408134/9_20?authkey=Gv1sRgCN2Nqdqm9fCgNg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_GnhRJ-umnE

Got up early to work out a bit and burn off some of the eating out fat. Also I'm worried I'm gonna lose all my progress with kickboxing when I get back. Once we were all set, we took a taxi to the cemetary a ways from the apartment. 1st and 2nd Uncle came with us. When we got the taxi, we got a big stack of fake money, many sheets of paper coins, and some incense.
My mother's parents' ashes are in a shared grave. The tombstone is carved with their names and dates of birth and death. Pretty typical stuff. The cemetary is very tightly packed, but otherwise looks pretty recognizable. There's patches of dirt where you burn offerings to send into the afterlife. We emptied the incense pot on the grave, filled it with new sand, and then stuck in the incense. We unpacked the paper coins, which are simply stamped outlines on sheets of paper. In the old days they would have taken care to cut the coins out, but now the coin outlines are firmly attached to the paper, so that you're basically burning a solid sheet of paper. Even in 1995 I remember the quality being better. But it's the tradition that counts. We had a couple pounds of paper to burn so we had to get a serious fire going. As my 1st and 2nd Uncle put paper onto the fire, they said, "Mom, Dad, tuck away this money." Just a traditional utterance for sending the money to heaven. I had the set of paper bills with me. It seemed like it was 10 bills to a plastic wrapping, so I unpacked them all and stacked the bills together. I think the denomination was 1,000,000,000 or something. I saw some bills of the same design with 50 lying around the burn area. Of course, it's difficult not to hold back the tears at a memorial like this. I carefully fanned and refanned the money until it was really spread out, and then threw it onto the pyre. The fire was shooting ash several feet into the air, only to have the bits fly back down all around us. The air was cold and threatening to rain. Neither my dad nor I managed to say anything during the ceremony. He because the southern traditions are different; I because the ceremony was so serious to me. My mom talked to her parents some at the grave, and then spruced up the area around it. When the fire went out and all of the paper was burned, 2nd Uncle led a formal bow in front of the grave. And with that, we were done.
My grandfather died when I was still very young. I'm told he got to hold me, but I have no recollections of the man. My grandmother died in 2006, very shortly after my mom visited. With some years intervening, I think she and her brothers have come to peace with their deaths, so even though it was emotional, burning the paper coins was not a painful experience. A family beside us was also mourning their parents. There was a lot of crying and anguish, but after the paper was burned, cell phone calls were made and cigarettes were lit as the family made their way out. As meaningful as it can be, the event obviously has mostly ceremonial significance to some. I didn't take any pictures of the burning. But as we were walking out of the cemetary, I saw a dog curled up and sleeping on someone's grave. That was a message to me that there's life after death, perhaps not in the way the phrase is typically meant, but still nice to see.

After that, we went to a Bank of China branch to get another stack of cash for our upcoming costs. Because of however it is that foreigners open and maintain an account with BoC, the already surly tellers became even meaner and it took forever. I walked around on the street and went into a supermarket. I told myself I should try something I couldn't get in the US. And while there were a lot of things, one of the ones that stood out was this snack called Cat Ears. It was the spicy flavor. It was only 2 yuan so I got it and tried them out. It was pretty interesting -- a sweet and only mildly spicy chip. I would eat them again.

From the bank, we went over the home of Cao Ruiling, one of my mom's good high school classmates. We chatted for a bit and waited for our lunch party to show up -- Ruiling's husband, and Huo Yongjian (another classmate) and her wife. Once we were all assembled, we drove over to a nearby restaurant and had lunch. It wasn't amazing, but it was still pretty interesting. Cao Ruiling's daughter, husband and their baby son also came. While my mom is pretty close to these folks, I don't have but a few memories of hanging out with them. In fact, every time I see Cao Ruiling, I re-remember that she has a lisp. Since s is only an initial sound in Chinese, she'll say those words as starting with th. Since there is no th sound in Mandarin, it's probably a bit less noticeable than a lisp in English is.

After we got out of lunch, we went over to 3rd Uncle's. Even though it continued to drizzle slightly, we stuck to our plan of going to Baiyang Yu, the White Goat Mountaintop. This was about 100km outside of Tangshan, to the east. It had the ruins of some of the Ming-era Great Wall, and it'd be nice to do a hike to see it. 3rd Uncle was friends with a guy who'd started a facility that hosted motivational training seminars and the like, right by the mountains, so it was yet another free trip. The same driver who'd been ferrying us around the previous couple days was back in the saddle, and his loaf car looked spotless despite the adventures it'd been through. Because of the number of relatives going, one of 3rd Uncle's friends was driving his Jetta as well.

When we got there, we ate some a dinner prepared using mostly stuff grown on the mountain. Because of the relative lack of pollution, everything was grown without pesticides or chemical fertilizer, so it might be as close to 'natural' or 'organic' food as you could get in China. The dishes tended toward the rustic, like stewed julienned potatoes, but it was obvious the vegetables were fresh and things tasted good. Whiskey was served out of a teapot and once again 2nd Uncle got pretty drunk. His desire to do karaoke and self-judged ability increased as the dinner wore on, until we concluded and got up, at which point he said, "alright let's go to the karaoke hall."
Sure enough, the facility has a huge room dedicated to karaoke. When 2nd and 3rd Uncle do their first several songs, they're really bad as the alcohol was still in full effect. 3rd Uncle actually got better and better as he recovered a bit. I got pressed into doing a couple songs. Actually, I really only know 2 songs well enough to sing all the lyrics. The English songs were all crappy ballads that I didn't know, so I did Crescent Moon, classic love song, and Possessed of Nothing, a pioneering Chinese rock song that I learned somehow. I think I impressed my parents with the second one. That's just not that popular a song, especially on the karaoke scene. My dad got carried away with a slew of traditional songs about Tibet. Though Tibet is its own world, there are a surprisingly large number of classic Han songs about it. I'd say my dad ended up doing about 50% of the songs that night.
When he eventually gave up the mic, we all turned into our hostel-quality quarters.

A note on our driver:
As a driver who hires himself out for these everything-included day trips, it's conventional to include him in lunches and dinners. So whereever we went with this guy, we'd ask him in to have meals with us. I'm sure in most instances he'd be fine with getting food on his own, but in some cases, like when you're in a remote mountain retreat, it'd be putting him out of his way to feed himself. At this point, I think he'd gotten in 6 really good meals with the rest of us. I'm not complaining -- he's professional, doesn't barge into conversations at meals, hasn't drunk a drop when driving remains to be done, and only smokes outside. When we're doing something, he either hangs out outside or naps in his loaf car. To address someone like this, who is a hired hand, you use the term shifu, which is exactly the term you see used to refer to kung fu masters and the like. In this context, it is probably best translated to something like maestro. Anyways, for dinner tonight Maestro Liu got to have a bit of whiskey since he wasn't driving til the next morning. He seemed to enjoy it.