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Qingming, a time to celebrate life

By Chen Weihua (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-04-04 10:56

If you think cemeteries are ghastly places, full of stories of sorrow and pain, think again. At least the burial grounds in Shanghai are not just about grief.

Sure, you'll find people sobbing, burning incense, and offering food and wine to the dead. But look a little further, and you'll also spot happy people, of all ages and sizes, flying kites, playing on swings or just sitting around and enjoying the afternoon sun.

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The two drastically contrasting scenes, which have stirred a fair amount of debate here, have been quietly accepted as a norm in many Shanghai cemeteries, at least during the annual Qingming (clear brightness) Festival, also known as the Tomb Sweeping Day.

At the Binhai Cemetery, right along the East China Sea in suburban Shanghai, many tombstones are designed artistically to reflect people's changing perception of death.

A sea burial ceremony held there last week was attended by some 1,000 family members and friends of the deceased. A squad of women, dressed in traditional colorful rural costumes, danced and beat gongs to mark this increasingly popular burial service.

At this vast and well-landscaped oceanfront cemetery, surrounded by lush greenery, more than 90,000 people's ashes are buried.

In fact, the Qingming Festival, which falls on Saturday, is traditionally a time not just to mourn the dead, but also to celebrate the onset of spring.

The 15th day from the spring equinox, Qingming is a time when plants are sprouting and flowers blooming. It is the season to plant, from trees to rice, a time when a large number of people step out of their houses to feel nature at its best.

That's precisely why the Shanghai Tourism Bus Center has launched 156 sightseeing routes for Qingming this year. Airfares have also gone up since it was made a national public holiday last year. This year, an estimated 8 million people in Shanghai are set to visit various cemeteries during the festival.

On way to the Binhai cemetery, giant billboards are welcoming people to visit the peach blossom in Nanhui and rapeseed flower festival in Fengxian, which have turned the city's suburbs into a real-life painting.

I hadn't lost someone very close to me until three years back, when my mentor, Bill Woo, a great journalist and professor, died in California.

In his last email to me, he said he was planning to come to Shanghai to finish a book about his father, also a prominent Chinese journalist back in the 1930s and 40s.

Two months later, my own father passed away. He was a person who had experienced China's turbulent decades since the 1920s. He taught me to be a just man, who gives much and takes back little.

Each time I think of Bill or my father, I feel a deep sense of remorse. Losing someone so dear and inspiring is not something you can get over easily.

I feel the love inside me for my father every time I think of him or gaze at his photograph, or visit his ashes at Binhai.

Bill still inspires me whenever I sit down to write. His lectures in class, the pages of his book - Letters to the Editor, published after his death - are etched in my memory forever.

It's easier said than done, but important nonetheless, that instead of crying over the loss of those who we love, who inspire us, we celebrate the life they have lived and the fact that they touched our lives in some way or the other.

That's what Qingming truly means.

E-mail: chenweihua@chinadaily.com.cn