Andelu’s Rants from Shenzhen

About ten years ago, the Chinese government instituted three one week holidays in an effort to encourage Chinese to travel domestically and return to their hometowns to visit their families. These weeks were the Lunar New Year, May 1 or Labor Day and October 1 which is National Day. These weeks became known as “Golden Weeks”. Golden because of the money that the traveling Chinese spent and the boon to the economy these periods had not only in mainland China but increasingly throughout Asia as Chinese became able to travel easier. This year the government decided to break up the May 1 golden week into many one day holidays that would begin to reestablish traditions that had been frown upon and even outlawed during Mao’s reign.

The first weekend in Aprils was our first long holiday weekend in celebration of Qing Ming, which means clear and bright in Chinese. It is a festival to hold memorial ceremony for the dead and express one’s grief for his lost relatives. People often go to sweep and weed graves with whole family which are often in the countryside. Hence the English name, Tomb Sweeping Festival. Since Pei Lin and I weren’t able to make it back to his hometown for Chinese New Year this year we decided to return for Qing Ming and spend the weekend with his family.

It had been over a year since our last visit but the neighbors were as excited to see me as the first time I visited Pingtan. Or at least that is what I thought, actually they were excited because Pei Lin drove up and parked in front of his parent’s home. We had rented a car in Chongqing and drove home rather then take the bus and taxi route. Let me tell you, much much more comfortable!

The next day we drove further into the countryside and hiked a couple of hours to Pei Lin’s great-grandfather and grandfather’s tombs and while we didn’t do any sweeping we did give some offerings. We carried in fruit, wine, firecrackers and paper money that were ceremoniously left at each of the tombs. The paper money is burned so that the dead have money in the after life, to buy the things they need I suppose. The firecrackers are to scare away evil spirits. The fruit so they aren’t hungry and the wine to quench their thirst and have a good time. Several of the tombs were very similar to crypts found in traditional American cemeteries and several weren’t marked at all.