Yeoh Siew Hoon has death on her mind. Yes, it's that time of the year.
The work ahead
I have been thinking a lot about death lately.
It started when I watched the Japanese movie “Departures”, which won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.
It’s about an out-of-work cellist who returns to his hometown, sees a job advertised, called “Departures”, thinks it’s for a travel agency and finds out it’s to work as a mortician whose role is to prepare the dead for burial.
I loved the movie. As much as it was all about death, it was neither morbid or depressing. Indeed, the more our hero encountered death, the more he celebrated life. And the more he got into the job, learnt from his master and met families of the bereaved, the more he took pride in his new profession.
With the movie still resonating in my head, I went home last weekend to Penang to observe the Chinese Qingming festival. That’s the festival when families get together to remember our ancestors and we clean their graves, make offerings, pay our respects and wish them eternal rest in peace.
It’s been nearly 15 years since my father left us and each year, we return to his tomb which, by the way, gets a bit harder to locate with time because well, the legions of the dead groweth with each passing season.
It also gets harder and harder to clean each year because unlike those well-kept, well-manicured cemeteries I see in Western countries, Chinese cemeteries tend to get left to the forces of nature, and goats and cows.
So each year, we bring along shovels, brooms, spades and other implements to dig, pull out the weeds and sweep the area around the tomb, except that each time we come woefully unprepared because someone always forgets something because someone always thinks someone else has taken care of it – you know, the family thing.
Left: An entrepreneur in action
Anyway, this year, in the midst of our rather pathetic cleaning efforts, a man carrying a shovel and a bucket came up to us and asked if we needed help. A true entrepreneur who works the cemeteries every Qingming, he could sense we were good potential customers.
How much, we asked? He said we could pay him what we wished after the work was done, which is never a good thing. Too little and you end up insulting him; too much and you end up feeling silly. We agreed on a price.
And so while we kind of worked away at the edges of the tomb, this man dug and shovelled away in earnest.
It got me thinking about motivation. Which is the bigger motivator? Families gather for Qingming for a variety of reasons – love, respect, duty, guilt – but this man was motivated purely by money. The less time he spends at each tomb, the more tombs he can clean and the more money he makes.
And, just as with our hero in “Departures”, the pride he took in his job was evident. He wanted to make sure we were satisfied customers. He even offered us added value – to bring fresh soil to cover my father’s tomb.
By the time he was done, the tomb looked as new as the day my father was buried and the engraved words – a father’s love is as high as the mountain and a mother’s love is as deep as the ocean – were as clear as my memories of my father.
As we thanked him, he looked at the tomb number and said, “223. I come next year. OK?”
My father would have been proud of him.
