Three Birthdays: The House of Exile. Ii

I

‘WE know not the beginning nor the end of life.’ So Sou-mai’s mother spoke on the day when it was known that her daughter carried a new life under her heart. ‘Philosophers in China have been busy for centuries divining truth to satisfy the intellect. Doubtless philosophers in all the other lands have been busy in the same way. There are many creeds and many religions. But we do not know what is really helpful to the soul about to be born. So it is best to use all the advised methods to safeguard a child’s entry into the world.’

Then she took from a basket she had brought on her arm all the things that had safeguarded her when she carried Sou-mai.

She placed a long sharp knife, blade upward, under Sou-mai’s bed, and laid a sword, fashioned of cash strung together with red cord, beside it. She pinned two pairs of scissors, cut from red paper, on the bed curtains, and stretched a tiger skin in the mattress. Pictures of fierce wild animals were pasted on the surrounding walls, on the doors, on the windows, and above the courtyard gate. She purchased two sets of charms against evil, one prepared by the Buddhist and the other by the Taoist priests, and hung them under the eaves of Sou-mai’s dwelling.

During the time of waiting, each mother in the House of Lin went to the Temple of Motherhood by the South Gate of the city, and prayed for Soumai’s child. Sou-mai made sweetmeats of pure honey, white rice flour, and jasmine petals for the God of One Hundred Happy Children, whose image has always a great knapsack on its back from which adorable children are peeping. She stitched a pair of tiny baby shoes of bright red satin and laid them on the lap of the Goddess of Mercy. She lit tall tapers, in holders made from the root of the sacred lotus, at sunset each evening before the portraits of the Mother of Heaven, of her Lady of the Compassionate Heart, and of the friendly Madonna of the Chair (which Shun-ko bought in Rome when on her world tour).

The child entered the world at dawn on the Birthday of the Sun, after distress, alarm, and delay so prolonged that the Family Elders had met in the Hall of Ancestors to consider the wisdom of sending to Peking for a Western-educated woman doctor to assist.

For a day and a night of Sou-mai’s pain, her husband waited before her door. As Mai-da and I were dispatched here and there to various parts of the homestead on errands for the women who attended Sou-mai, we were awed by his stillness. He stood hour after hour, refusing to sit or to partake of refreshment, clutching a fold of his gray gown in the fingers of one hand.

Then when Sou-mai’s mother came to the door, just as the sun rose, and announced, ‘A man is born,’ he disappeared. He returned some time later dressed in his ceremonial robes. After another long wait at the door, his mother opened it and told him to come in.

Sou-mai was wrapped in the robe of apple-blossom silk which was her marriage-bed nightdress. She held the child against her breast. I saw her smile as her husband came near to her. Before he took the child she offered, or looked on its face, he put on her pillow, as thanks-gift, a gold hairpin such as each mother of a son wears in her nape knot. In his wife’s pin he had had set an oblong of clear green jade.

Then he took the child in its warm wrappings of rosy satin into the palms of his two hands. He knelt to his own mother. He knelt to his wife’s mother. He carried his son through every court in the homestead making the new Lin’s arrival known, with ceremony, to all the family — men, women, and children — and to the God of the Hearth Standing under the ‘lamp of continuous life,’ he told the glad tidings in the Hall of the Ancestors.

Then he gave his son back into his wife’s keeping for the ‘three days of quietness’ when her own mother and her serving woman, Little Tiger, were the only persons permitted to enter the court of her dwelling.

When the sun was high overhead, the Family Elder dispatched couriers to the relatives and family friends with small boxes of fruit, thus without words announcing the arrival of a son in the House of Lin. The relatives and family friends responded with gifts of millet, eggs, brown sugar, and walnut meats, which are the only foods a mother in the Lin clan is permitted to eat during the days that a carpet of sawdust stills the sound of footfalls on the stonepaved courts.

On the morning of the fourth day, Little Tiger brought me a red card brushed with gold characters and translated it as the invitation to attend the ‘Bath in the Hour of the Sheep.’ She explained to whom each of the similar cards she carried was addressed, and how difficult it had been for Soumai to make selection of a ‘goodfortune eight’ from her host of loved relatives and friends. We eight were the Family Elder’s wife, the baby’s two grandmothers, his pretty fiveyear-old girl cousin, two boy cousins of five and three, a maternal aunt, and I.

As gifts we took white eggs, symbols of long life; red eggs, symbols of happiness; bunches of acacia incense, symbols of health; bowls of uncooked rice, symbols of prosperity; and flower seeds, symbols of lovely children. Sou-mai sat propped up on her bed with a heap of lavender and blue silk cushions behind her, and dressed in a pale pink gown embroidered all over with plum blossoms. The black wings of her hair were brushed to a gloss. She wore no jewels except the gold and jade pin in her nape knot. The dimples danced in her flushed cheeks as she unfolded the quilt to show us the little son who slept at her side on his own tiny mattress.

We placed our eggs in a chip basket which stood ready to receive them. We laid our flower seeds on the little boy’s bed, asking his mother to plant a garden for him. We thrust our bunches of acacia incense into our bowls of rice and brought them to the child. Soumai took the torch that Little Tiger had ready, guided the baby’s hand to light them, bade us carry them to the Hall of Ancestors, and there to leave them on the altar.

The maternal grandmother boiled water for the bath, putting in locust leaves as a disinfectant and artemis flowers to give a pleasant perfume. Little Tiger brought the polished copper basin which had been turned upside down and used as a table for Sou-mai and her husband’s marriage-night supper, and poured the bath water in. Sou-mai tested the water with her finger and let the little children help to take away the baby’s wrappings.

He kicked his fat legs and wrinkled his round face, but did not cry, when Little Tiger held him over the water. His mother told us that his milk-name was Shao-jo. She bade each of us put a handful of water over his chubby pink body. The bath was but a ceremony quickly finished. After it, Little Tiger rubbed him with sweet-smelling oil and we helped to robe him in a soft vest, a ‘tummy’ binding, a napkin, and a quilted robe of scarlet silk filled with duck down. Then he was put away to sleep at the back of the great bed, on his own mattress, with a tiny screen placed around him to shut out the light.

Then we arranged a papier-mâché sedan chair with its eight bearers and its attendant phœnix, unicorn, tortoise, and tiger, outside Sou-mai’s door, so that she could see the Mother of Heaven go back into the sky. The two grandmothers put a trunk filled with gold and silver imitation money under the seat of the sedan chair. Little Tiger took the portrait of the Mother of Heaven from the niche in the wall whence it had watched over the child during the nine months of germination and the ordeal of separation, and placed it in the chair.

Sou-mai said, ‘Thank you, Heavenly Mother, for much kindness.’

And we each lit the fuse assigned to us. I had the one in the tail of the unicorn. The heavy procession, built in full life-size papier-mâché, started slowly, gaining momentum as the fire spread its wings.

II

The pear trees were in ivory flower. It was Mai-da’s quarter moon of kitchen service, but before she went to help prepare the evening meal she had rolled up our bamboo-paper windows. Tired, I stretched out on our bed to rest for a few minutes before bathing and changing.

With three wives and four serving women, I had been down by the Lotus pond, assisting to rub, blue, and bleach the family wash since sunup, with an interval for only a brief basket lunch at midday. Three courts away Sou-mai was singing to her baby. The contralto lullaby drifted on the perfumed air.

It was the eve of the eightieth birthday of Wei-sung, the Family Elder. Invitations had not been sent out, as it would be bad taste to ask folk to come with congratulations, but the homestead had hummed with activity since the new moon.

Wei-sung was an official of the government during the Ts’ing dynasty, having won the position by excellence in the literary examinations under the system of the ‘Forest of Pencils.’ But his posts were always minor ones, in places far distant from the capital. Posts of exile, to which he was appointed with the flowery words of sham honor — as the House of Lin, of Canton origin, was continuously under unproved suspicion of disloyalty to the throne for the last century of the dynasty. He succeeded to the Eldership of the family when his father plucked the flower of life; but he had to wait three years before he was permitted to resign his government appointment. On coming home, he settled into the routine of the House of Exile in quiet contentment, although he had spent only a few days at home since the time he first went to Peking, at eighteen, to sit for his examination.

He was sixty when he came home. In the years since then, so he told me, he had passed through the To and From the World Gate only to perform the Family Elder’s duties at the Spring and Autumn Services; and he planned never to go out for other purposes until his body was carried to its final resting place in the Eastern Fields — unless it should happen that he survived the Elder of Wong, in which case he would of course escort the funeral procession of his loved friend.

Once, when his wife urged him to travel, I heard him say, ‘Go and see the world if you like. You will soon come home again. I was abroad for forty-two years, and I know that the best of the world is inside our own homestead wall.’

He was sorry for anyone who had to go from home, and slow to complete marriage contracts for the family daughters, as he was sad to break the home circle. It was Mai-da’s duty to receive for distribution and to collect for dispatch the letters which came and went by government post. So I knew that he received fat letters frequently from the places where daughters had gone in marriage or where members of the family were staying for study or work, and that he always sent a fat letter in prompt return.

In the weeks preceding his birthday, letters with the same postmarks as those he usually received came addressed to his wife, who seldom had letters. Mai-da lingered with each to learn its contents. Thus we shared in the secrets: that Su-ling had decided not to accept the scholarship for further study at the Sorbonne, but was returning from Paris in time for the Elder’s birthday; that the husband of Fu-erh and the companion she had chosen to accompany him to Malay were coming home, bringing two young sons who had not yet bowed to the Ancestors; that a great-grandnephew would come from San Francisco, leaving a maternal cousin in charge of his business there; that Wen-lieh had been granted leave of absence from his army command to honor his Elder; that the granddaughter, married away to far Szechwan, would come, accompanied by her husband; that Wei-chun was arriving in time from Canton, flying home by airplane; and so on with each day’s mail, until the personnel was more than I could remember.

Consequently, we were not surprised when orders were given to clean the homestead, to cook foods for the lunch baskets of those who were going to meet the voyagers, to prepare the boatmen for travel, to ask Hau-li for ‘welcome’ flowers from the hothouses, and to launder all the family linen.

As members of the family arrived, they joined in the preparations for celebration. The courts echoed with the swish of brooms, the beat of flays on dusty shutters, the tap of hammers. By the birthday eve, the interior of every dwelling house had reached a perfection of tidiness. Pillars and eaves shone with new paint. The sandscoured court paving stones reflected a white radiance. Even the goldfish in the cleaned pools seemed brighter. The hothouses were filled with an abundance of plants ready to distribute through the dwelling at sunrise the next morning. The carpenters had built a stage for the birthday actors, opposite the Hall of Ancestors.

The birthday dawned bright and clear. The children of the family, dressed in lovely new birthday clothes, accompanied the Elder’s breakfast tray caroling greetings, and each dragging a red carpet piled high with cards of birthday greeting. When he had breakfasted, the Elder opened his gifts in the Court of Sunrise, where all the maidens of the Springtime Bower helped him to arrange them on satin-covered tables in front of the Wall of Heaven.

Usually in the House of Exile we dined in small groups, each in our own court. But on the Elder’s birthday, and by his request, his wife gave the order that the meal in the Hour of the Snake was to be a joint family meal. Since the weather was unusually mild, the table was not set in the Hall, but in the court, where the pear trees were in ivory flower and the orioles were making a silken hammock nest.

We could all sit down, because the Elder had thoughtfully arranged for a restaurant keeper to take charge of the homestead kitchens from sunrise until sunset on his birthday, as he said he wanted the women of his family to be free that day from domestic concern.

III

Shortly after this meal, guests began to arrive. The eldest grandson received all callers first in the Hall of Dignity, acting as proxy for the Elder, and in this way saving the honored one much fatigue, as the ceremony of congratulation includes the exchange of three kowtows. The guests then passed on through the intervening courts to the Three Eastern Courtyards, where they talked with the Elder as though they had already greeted him.

Before long the Elder, who always keeps the children of the family clustered about him, asked, ‘Where is my daughter Sou-mai? Is the baby Shaojo’s birth month not yet full?’

His favorite, Mai-lei, answered, ‘Today is the day of his full month, but his mother says that it is a day short of a month because she does not want anyone to consider anything except the fullness of your eighty years.’

‘I am the first-born now in the House of Exile. Shao-jo, five generations below me, is the last-born,’ the Elder responded. ‘What more perfect arrangement could Heaven make than that we be congratulated together?’

He sent the baby’s father to stand proxy beside his proxy in the Hall of Dignity, and he dispatched Mai-lei to bring Sou-mai and her son. When they came he kept them beside him until all the guests had praised the mother and admired the child.

Family and guests had put away the heavy garments of winter and wore the elegantly fitted gowns of springtime silk, which are without embroidery and as delicate in color as the springtime blossoms. They wandered at will through the courts. Some lingered in conversation by the waters of the pool. Others renewed friendships in quiet corners on seats in the bamboo grove, or listened to the minstrel from the City of Noonday Rest, who sang in the Poet’s Retreat. Many admired Uncle Keng-lin’s birds in the Well of Heaven aviary. All accepted refreshments at the tables and gave attention to the theatricals on the stage opposite the Hall of Ancestors.

The players were from Peking. They were all men. But they filled the women’s parts with such skill that I did not know until long afterward that they were men. The plays were given on a stage without scenery, as plays were given in Shakespeare’s time; but so vivid was the acting that it created the impression of background.

The theatricals charmed me. I sat listening most of the day. The actors did not speak their parts; they gave them in poetic beaten measure to which an orchestra kept time. The principal guests, as they seated themselves at the refreshment tables, were requested to name a play which they would like the actors to perform. Then the man in charge of the troupe was given the guest’s preference, and as soon as the play in progress was finished the new play began. The guests were, of course, politely considerate. If they saw that a play had just started, they said that it was their favorite play, as they knew that the day was too short for the actors to perform a tragedy or a comedy for every guest.

There was never any hesitation or demur from the players. They seemed to have all the plays in their heads and all the necessary costumes in their boxes. With slight intervals for refreshment, the players went on until the star Canopus was clear in the heavens. After sunset the stage was lit by flaming pine kncts in iron baskets, held high at each end of the stage, and tended by Camel-back.

We had The Siege of the Empty City, The Death of Chu-ho, The Filial Daughter, The Naughty Wife, Love in a Fishing Boat, The Two Cousins, The Black Donkey’s Complaint, and The Dance in a Jade Bowl.

In the civic plays the orchestra led off with a single skin drum, followed in succession by the castanets, the flutes, the pipe flageolets, the balloon guitar, the reed organ, the two-stringed violins, the chiming gongs, and the small kettledrum. The military plays were announced by a march played on the large drum and the small gongs, followed by the cymbals and the clarionets. When the actors played sad parts, the orchestra was slow, low, and plaintive. When humor was acted, then the accompaniment was a quick, laughing rhythm. And when justice triumphed over wrong, the musicians made their instruments sing the victory.

When Canopus was clear in the heavens, a table was arranged in the Court of Sunrise. It was covered with a vermilion altar cloth which fell to the paving stones on all sides, and the portrait¹ of the God of Longevity was put on it. Six plates of apples, symbols of peace, and six candles, in symbol of the six generations it was hoped the Elder would remain on earth to count, were placed before the portrait, and a satin kneeling cushion was laid before the table.

The Elder knelt first. He burned incense and gave thanks for eighty years of life. Then each member of his family knelt and thanked Heaven for permitting the homestead the blessing of his Eldership, and petitioned that it should continue for another decade. Then the guests — of whom only the most loved had been asked to remain — prayed, and departed.

When the last guest had gone, and the To and From the World Gate had been closed, the Elder examined his gifts. Each caller had brought something, in addition to what had arrived by post; and three long tables were loaded with presents. Each had an attached card on which was written the donor’s name and an appropriate greeting.

IV

In the House of Exile the birthdays of childhood are the Fullness of the Month, the Rounding of the Year, and the Cycle of Ten. After these the only birthday celebrated, until after the half-century is past, is the bride’s first birthday after marriage. The birthdays of childhood and the bride’s day are family affairs.

The twins, Shao-yi and his sister Ching-o, and the cousins Nan-wei and Ming-chi, were all four born in full moon of Chrysanthemums and completed the Cycle of Ten in the autumn of the same year that the Elder filled his eighth decade.

So when the moon was round in Chrysanthemums, the birthday awnings were spread over the Garden of Children and their courts were decorated with picturesque lanterns, happiness banners, and crimson joy characters. Their dwelling houses were filled with lovely flowers, and the model ships were set afloat on the shallow sand pool with all flags flying.

The relatives sent gifts. The birthday children were dressed in festival gowns, and received congratulations from all the family, who bowed to them in turn. The Family Elders permitted each birthday child to choose an entertainment for the combined party.

Shao-yi asked for the marionette players. A tiny stage was put up for them, and the same plays given as are given in the theatres. The troupe responded to every request. They did The Women Robbers, A Visit to the Moon, Submission to the T’ang Emperor, and Shao-yi’s favorite, The Battle of the Red Cliff, which had to be repeated three times for his special benefit.

Shao’s twin asked for the juggler. He came. He was a child not much larger than Hsing-mu; but he threw plates above his head and caught them on a twirling stick balanced on his nose, danced between sharp swords, turned handsprings while he tossed eggs about and yet did not break one, and finally took a live rabbit out of Ching-o’s pocket and gave it to her as a birthday present.

Nan-wei asked for the candy maker, and was laughed at for wanting as a special treat on a feast day this ordinary old man, who comes by the To and From the World Gate every day. But he was invited in, and was one of the most popular features of the birthday. He made nests of birds, ladies’ fans, three-sailed fishing craft, prancing horses, a cat with kittens, the God of Happiness, a monkey eating an orange, and whatever was asked for, from syrup which he boiled — on a little charcoal stove that he carried with him — and blew deftly into shape through a hollow reed.

Ming-chi asked for the fortune teller from the Street of the Sound of Thunder. He found signs of good omen in the palms of all the children, and foretold marvelous adventures to come to them all in the future.

At evening the birthday feast, for which the birthday children chose the menu, was served on a long table in the open courtyard. The table was lighted by forty candles arranged in four groups of ten each, and held in bronze holders made in the likeness of the tortoise. After dark, old Camel-back set off a bevy of skyrocketing stars — one for each child to wish on.

V

When persimmons were ripe, Shunko sent me through Mai-lin’s Walk, which tunnels the wall between the houses of Lin and Wong, with a basket of gold fruit, and the request to borrow a set of drying racks. I found the women of the Wong homestead in tearful agitation because their Elder had given the order for his burial clothes to be stitched. While I waited for the racks, he came in through the Orchid Door, followed by a merchant with materials from the big shop in the Street of the Sound of Thunder on the Flat Ground.

On the approach of the Elder, his wife motioned the two young women of the family, who were pregnant, to leave the court where we were gathered, as women concerned with the beginning of life must not loiter where consideration is given to the end of life’s pilgrimage.

The merchant and the elder wives exchanged greetings. Tea was brought. Two lads, who came dose on the merchant’s heels, set down the bamboo pole over which they carried his pack. The lads unknotted the twists in the blue pack cloth and spread it out as a carpet on the flat stones. The merchant then gave attention to the display of his silks.

Squatting on his satin-clad feet, with his long dark cashmere gown folded neatly under his knees, the merchant reverently undid the dull gold wrapper around each bale. Reds for the coffinbed curtains came first. Red is the color of joy. When a man or woman has conscientiously filled seventy years and leaves as fruit of his or her life a numerous, well-behaved posterity, there can be no grief concerning the completion of this life and the beginning of a new existence.

The racks that I had been commissioned to borrow were wanted for work in progress. As I lingered, Shun-ko came to tell me. She stayed and helped to examine the blue silks for the inner trousers and short jacket of the Elder’s Heavenly costume. When the women found nothing to their liking, the Elder indicated a length called ‘Sky in the Late Summer’ from the heap of bluebell, columbine, flax, cornflower, hyacinth, larkspur, and gentian which, by then, lay in a mass. Swathing of raw silk was selected and the merchant commissioned to tint it a delicate pink. A fine white fillet for the head was chosen. Then the yellow silks for the winding sheet were opened. When we left, Wong Mai-su politely walked back with us to the gate in the dividing wall, discussing with Shun-ko the cut of sleeves in the Ming period. When I asked why the garments would be fashioned as in the Ming period, she answered, ‘Because we always enter Heaven dressed that way.’

In a dream two days earlier the Elder of Wong had seen his Soul stand beside him, dressed in traveling clothes and carrying a scroll. So he knew that his earthly scroll was filled. Through a circle of seasons, in which he continued in robust health, he made ready.

Of clothes he had five complete changes, in addition to the riding jacket and cap for the journey, as he desired to be suitably garbed for whatever occasion he must meet. His wife took the pearls from her dowry earrings and sewed them into the lining of his money pocket for emergency, should his cash be insufficient to satisfy the gatemen on the toll road through Hell. His eldest daughter embroidered and filled a tobacco pouch, and her husband sent an amber-stemmed pipe.

In the House of Lin we bought stuffs and made a quilt on which we stitched appropriate sentiments. The House of Chow sent a quilt of jade-green crêpe de Chine filled with thistledown. Other houses sent ‘warmth of affection’ coverlets until there were enough for the coffin bed and a great heap lay on a table in the Guest Hall.

The sons prepared the coffin for their father. When it was made, priests from both the Buddhist and the Taoist temples came to bless it. Then it stood ready in the Hall of Ancestors. The Houses of Lin and Wong believe that Li-hua, the blind widow of Lin, is more gifted than any other seer of their knowledge. She chose the soil under the redbeam tree, in the southeast corner of the land the Wongs farm, as the place where the Elder of Wong should give his body to the earth. From the day of choice he labored to build there a place of pleasant dalliance, where the living members of his family would be happy to spend leisure hours. ‘I want the music of their laughter and the ripple of their talk,’ he said to me.

He planted three poplars, a scarlet maple, a walnut, and a cutting our Elder gave him from the maidenhair fern tree. He brought builders from Peking to construct a pavilion. He set wistaria, to climb over it, and put forsythia before the door.

VI

Winter was late that year. But on the Second of the Pepper Moon, thirteen months after the Elder of Wong’s dream, we had a fall of wet snow. Mai-da and I were in Yu-lin’s dwelling, learning to do seed-stitch embroidery, when the Elder of Wong’s Third Green Skirt came to ask if she might look down the road through the telescope, as she was anxious because he had set out, by sedan chair, at dawn and had not yet returned.

The shrine in which the telescope is housed is kept locked. Su-ling, who brought it home when she returned from the Sorbonne, feared that the children might be tempted to tamper with it. I was sent to unlock and dust the instrument. But it had no power to open a road of light through falling snow. When the Elder of Wong’s Third Green Skirt had tried in vain to find her man, she put her head down on the table and sobbed.

Bald-the-third came to us with umbrellas. She took us back to my dwelling place, where she made the woman drink tea laced with corn spirit, and then escorted her home.

She told us that the Elder of Wong had arrived some time before and gone to his bed, where he lay alternating between chill and fever, but stubbornly refusing to swallow either the beef tea his wife had made or the physic his granddaughter pressed upon him.

He did not get up again. On the evening of the fourth day, the daughters of the homestead knelt in the circle of prayer (the cries of virgin daughters are the most audible to Heaven’s ear) asking that Heaven’s gate be unlatched for the earth-departing Soul. But the Soul did not leave until the light of a new day illuminated the sky, and this is a good omen that the homestead family will continue to eat three meals daily.

According to local proverb, ‘In the canal, water is driven onward by water behind; in the world, newcomers take the places of those who pass.’ The instant the Soul of the Elder of Wong became unconscious of earthly details, the next heir in line became the Elder of Wong and took control of proceedings. He climbed to the roof of the late Elder’s dwelling and begged the departing Soul to tarry yet a little longer with the homestead family. The family, gathered in mass in the courtyard below, echoed his pleas. When all efforts failed to bring the Soul back, the new Elder ordered the males of the homestead to unravel their queues, the females to twist white cotton in their hair, and candles to be lit before the God of the Hearth.

The body was washed with water from the temple, then dressed for the journey and placed comfortably on the coffin bed, with the changes of clothes, the pipe and tobacco pouch, a book to read, and the necessary passports and money conveniently near to the hands. ‘Warmth of affection’ quilts were tucked around. The curtain of joy, on which the wives of the homestead had stitched wishes for a long and a prosperous life in the Western Sky, was hung in the Court of Dignity, where the coffin stood.

The new Elder of Wong set a table at the coffin head. On it he put a tablet carved with the late Elder of Wong’s personal name in gold lettering. This is the life tablet now cherished in the Wong Hall of Ancestors as the symbol of the spirit in Heaven. He replenished the sesame oil in the basin of the pagoda-shaped Lanthorn of Heaven. Before the tablet he stood the Lanthorn; on its left an incense burner sending forth fragrant purity; on its right a vase of blue ‘virtue flowers.’

In the street, to the left of the To and From the World Gate, a red pole was set to announce to all passers-by that a man in a coffin lay within. The Wong gatekeeper went to summon the musicians and priests who had been engaged to chant.

These home details attended to, the males of the House of Wong dressed in gowns and head fillets of coarse white cloth, put on straw sandals, and walked to the Temple of Agriculture to announce to the Lord of the Soil that their ancestor now had need of a place in the earth for his body.

The scribes of the Wong Family brought large sheets of yellow paper into the Lin library which the Elder of Lin offered, as there was need of a quiet place in which to write the funeral invitations. Wei-sung, who is versed in the phraseology of officialdom, prepared the copy for all government servants; Su-ling, experienced in modern ways by three years in Europe, wrote out what should go to the Wong maternal cousins in the port of Tientsin. Although different in phrasing, the invitations were essentially the same, in that they recorded briefly the life of the late Elder of Wong from birth until death, listed the honors he had won, and stated the days appointed for the reception of guests.

The Lin twins and I worked much of the day helping the children of Wong fold the yellow envelopes to hold the invitations. On each we pasted a stripe of blue and of red. Mai-da attended to the posting, carefully accounting the cost of the stamps, and moderately tipping the green-coated postman.

On guest days, a young priest beat a drum in the entrance court to let the family know of each arrival. The family then knelt beside the coffin in order, but the visitor did not address them until after honoring the departed man by kowtowing three times to his coffin and his spirit tablet. Each time the visitor bowed, the family bowed in unison with him, and the courts were filled with the music of instruments and the chanting of priests.

Serving folk then politely conducted the guests from the hall to the banqueting room, and set food before them. Men and women of the house then thanked the guests for honoring their ancestor, and for the Heavenly gift that each brought. In this exchange of greeting no word of sorrow or consolation was spoken, as such would be a slur on the departed one’s chances of preferment in Heaven.

The funeral catafalque was covered with a heavy white satin cloth, and was carried by seventy-two bearers dressed in green embroidered with red characters, meaning long life in the Western Sky. The order of the procession was: the deceased’s sedan chair; the boat on which he traveled the canals; his portrait on an easel; the chanting priests, eighteen of them Taoists, eighteen Buddhist, and seven Lamas; a stringed band; one hundred and eight bearers carrying Heavenly gifts; twenty-one bearers of white paper brooms to sweep the road to the Western Sky; the sons on foot, the eldest carrying the spirit tablet, the second the lighted Lanthorn of Heaven; the time-beater with his wooden clappers; the catafalque; the wives wearing white cotton and riding in carts drawn by mules in white trappings; the married daughters in blue carts; friends in their own conveyances; more bearers with Heavenly gifts; more chanting priests; and at the rear another band of musicians.

At intervals silver paper cash was thrown to right and left by the sons to bribe the devils who might be wandering about. Along the route friendly families had erected little houses to honor the Wong ancestor. The procession stopped when the coffin came opposite these, a white mat was spread across the road, and the sons knelt to thank the donors. There was a tablet to the late Wong in each house.

When the procession reached the grave, the beater called relatives and friends to a circle. Then, to the throb of eerie music, each of us threw earth on the coffin. When it was covered, the priests sent the Heavenly gifts to the sky by fire. Some of the gifts were lifesize papier-mâché servants, each with his or her name attached; banner men with scrolls of gray, blue, or black silk; papier-mâché horses, carriages, and grooms and a motor car with uniformed chauffeur; pots of cypress bent to animal shapes; silver and gold; a chest of books; a table lute; a set of chess; a three-sailed boat manned by a boatman and his wife; a hen with chicks, and a basket of ripe peaches.

Then the House of Wong took home their spirit tablet, symbol of the ancestor who had plucked the flower of life, and set it in their ancestral hall.

Never in the House of Lin or of Wong have I heard anyone speak of the late Elder of Wong (or of any ancestor) as dead. On all feast days they send him, by fire, gifts symbolic of wishes for good fortune in Heaven. On all days he is very much alive on the lips of his family, who speak of him as having a keen interest in all of their affairs.

During the first sixty days following his departure, they expressed concern for his travail on the road through Hades by wearing coarse cotton gowns, white shoes, and a white knot in their hair. In this time no one went abroad, except by necessity, when the dress was changed to one of black with a white girdle, white cap button, and white shoes. After sixty days they wore gray gowns with black shoes and blue hair strings. The women used no ornaments until one hundred days were passed, when they put on silver. Until three years had gone they did not wear either silk or satin.

(Next month this account of family life among the Chinese will be concluded with a further article, ‘Three Marriages’)