Things That Don't Fit # 11: Ghost Mansions

Walking home last night, I was admiring the three-story-brick paper mansion in front of the Buddhist Offerings Store on Bao An Lu, only to turn into our lane to find one set into a chalk circle, ready for fire.

There are earlier posts on silver joss paper ingots & on the addressed red envelopes that the ingots get stuffed into... (though, by the looks of it, this particular photo was taken for the "four of my favorite things" category..)

...on the ghost circles left behind after "festival" days... 

 but here in action is the making of the ash pile:

That's as far as I got with picture taking before I was told "bu yao," meaning "not wanted." So I apologized & quit & just watched as the whole structure collapsed in flames. The rectangles of white cloth (forward of the flame in the photo) were added to the house's embers & then it was the turn of the red envelopes & joss paper cubes (in the foreground) to go up in smoke.

I left the pyre then, feeling that I'd been intrusive enough already. Perhaps, the rites were for the old man whom I had seen, once or twice while he was being evacuated by ambulance, & many more times in the back lane while he took his constitutional supported by a cane & an attendant who invariably announced his age, most recently: 101 years!

The paper mansions reminded me of one that I bought years ago outside a temple in Kunming. The Chinese are very superstitious about what might invite death in so I have kept it out of sight, folded flat inside an album. Once, a westernized Chinese friend who collects beautiful things from the past, showed us some densely embroidered burial shrouds from the Republican Era that he'd unwittingly acquired in a trove of Deco furniture, but he scrambled to hide them as other, Chinese, guests arrived;  he said, "it will make them so nervous if they know these things are here in the house."

But, today, I was suddenly curious about the mansion I owned, apparently a "mod-con" one,  complete with silver Buick:

Note the 4 flower pots on the window sills on the right. They appear on the two other windows sills that frame the doors, so that's 4 again. Number 4  - si/四 - is a homophone with the word for die/death/dead - si/死. You might think, gentle reader, that I am reading too much into this but the Chinese point things like this out to me all the time.

As for the garage... best I could tell, the paper engineers intended for it to fill the rectangular space outside the front door. Which means that you'd have to go thru the garage to get to the grand [coffin-ish?] first & second floor entries. But, then again, probably that ain't no thang for ghosts.

Coda:

It suddenly occurred to me, after writing this post, how inured I've become to a certain category of experience here that was so startling to us when we were newly arrived: the weird intimacy you have/had with strangers by virtue of how much of life is/was lived not behind closed doors.

It happens much less often now as life here has gotten more familiarly middle-class but in earlier years, you'd be in a cab, stalled in traffic, look left & right there, and I mean really, just right there, would be a guy dressed only in his boxers, at an open tap, soaping himself up inside his shorts. Or, at one very busy intersection that included a fire station & its training building, which I regularly biked thru on my way to the studio, a woman squatting on the curb with her head out over the street, a mere foot or two from the tires whizzing by, rinsing shampoo out of her hair with a tranquility I can't even manage in my shower. Or, seen so often we stopped commenting, shop owners seated behind the counter of their frontless shop, brushing their teeth. Death, funerals, so often kept well out of view in American life...& here I just pop in on one, on my way home for the day. Startling...and, apparently, not.

Drawer # 4.4: Emptiness

I had a post ready to go for today but the bombings at the Boston Marathon have put me in a darker frame of mind.

By weird synchronicity, i.e. without my planning, Drawer 4.4 remained empty. The number 4 in Mandarin Chinese, si 四, is a homophone for the character si 死, meaning to die or to be dead. So like our number 13, it's a bad luck number...& doubled, like in this, it's super inauspicious for the superstitious. Drawer 4.4 is also, as it turns out, the dead center of the cabinet.

Although I didn't plan its position, I did plan its emptiness. In the treasure hunt of searching through the drawers I wanted moments of...maybe disappointment... or maybe stillness. Or of emptiness, in the way that I, at this moment, understand the Buddhist concept of sunyata.

Writes Buddhist psychologist and teacher, Jack Kornfield in A Path with Heart: 

True emptiness is not empty, but contains all things. The mysterious and pregnant void creates and reflects all possibilities. From it arises our individuality, which can be discovered and developed, although never possessed or fixed.

Here's the story that embodies the idea for me: He-Whom-I'm-Trailing, recently arrived from Shanghai & full of Christmas dinner, falls asleep sitting on the sofa. My aunt, whose sofa it is, is thrilled as it signals to her that he feels fully at ease in her house. My aunt's sister, my mother, is mostly keeping to herself the fact that she's a little appalled by what seems to her like anti-social behavior. For my part, I know that He-Whom-I'm-Trailing is in that state of jet lag where you can be in standing in platform heels at the Glamour Bar on a window ledge above the Huangpu River, watching the burlesque show at their tenth anniversary party & still fall asleep.

[V]oidness does not mean nothingness, but rather that all things lack intrinsic reality, intrinsic objectivity, intrinsic identity or intrinsic referentiality. Lacking such static essence or substance does not make them not exist —- it makes them thoroughly relative.

                                                                                       - Foreword of Mother of the Buddhas by Lex Hixon


So any given situation is "empty" or open & we fill it with what we will.



My heart goes out to all those hurt physically or psychically by the bombings in Boston and especially to the parents of the young Chinese student who lost her life mid-stream. May they all find strength in their recovery.

Drawer # 2.1: Jam's Drawer

In a completely different mood: the one drawer in the cabinet created by someone else, the very     talented young Chinese artist, Yu Ji (于吉.) 

I met Yu Ji some 8 years ago, in my very first months of living in Shanghai. In anticipation of my 2005 show for Laumeier Sculpture Park in St Louis, I and a slew of Shanghai University students built miniature bamboo scaffolding all around the furniture in my apartment. The students were recommended to me by their teacher at Shanghai University, the artist Petra Johnson. There was lots of excitement around working with a foreign artist: some days there was up to 10 of us in my very small apartment on Tai Yuan Lu. It was my introduction to chaos China-style & it was great: cultural questions flying in all directions.

Yu Ji, or Jam, as she's known in English, was among those students. Though we are in generations & cultures far apart, we recognized a kinship in our sensibilities & so we continued to work together through the years of compiling the Cabinet. Most of the patterned boards that line the drawers are thanks to her good work cutting & gluing; in her great charming way, she has negotiated many a situation on my behalf for which I am very grateful.

I had thought of asking a number of artists friends to fill drawers but somehow, in the end, I only asked Jam. She filled hers in the weeks just after the death of her grandfather. He had been, at one time, a successful shop owner but persecutions by his neighbors during the period of the Cultural Revolution left him forever changed & fragile. He spent his days, as do many older Chinese men, tending to his birds, building and repairing their cages: the rails in the drawer are ones that Jam found while clearing his workbench. Her drawer stands as a memorial to him & has an eeriness like nothing else in the Cabinet. I feel really honored to have it; it preserves in the cabinet something of the quality of our conversations together over the years.

Drawer # 1.2 : Hell Meds and More for Ghosts

It came as a great shock to me that I was still going to need medicine after I was dead. Silly me, I'd imagined that dying was the hard part & then you'd...I don't know...just sort of coast after that. Leave behind bothersome, tedious things like cold germs & pinched nerves. But no. Apparently, even in Hell you have to take your meds.

Says a Mrs Zhao in the New York Times: "They [in the afterlife] probably have the same system as we have on earth," & so there's all manner of things that can helpfully be sent on by smoke. 

Mansions with their own private security guard:

Vintage peasant wear:

Full course meals of hairy crab, complete with condiments & hot sauce... & sports cars:

And these days, it's getting even more upscale.

via MacRumors via BSN

The Bright Side of News reports that "unscrupulous paper offering sellers"  are selling paper iphones complete with  paper chargers so that "the ancestors don't come back to ask them to recharge their iPhones." 

The Communist Party banned the celebration of QingMing & the practices that went along with the holiday to move the country away from so-called feudal & superstitious behaviors. Near the bottom of page 2 of an article detailing what products are available where & for how much ("The most expensive paper villa on Taobao [massive e-market] was priced at [$2725]16,888 yuan..."),  the People's Daily reports that a 1997 law "explicitly prohibits the making & selling" of the paper offerings. Like the law that prohibits hanging your laundry out on the street, this law doesn't hinder much: the PD goes on to say that "more than1,000 metric tons of paper products are burned across the country as offerings during the festival period, costing more than 10 billion yuan [over $1.6 billion]."

But about those Hell meds. I'm still hoping Poet Billie Collins has it is right:

While you are preparing for sleep, brushing your teeth,
or riffling through a magazine in bed,
the dead of the day are setting out on their journey.

They are moving off in all imaginable directions,
each according to his own private belief,
and this is the secret that silent Lazarus would not reveal
that everyone is right, as it turns out.
You go to the place you always thought you would go,
the place you kept lit in an alcove in your head. 

The Afterlife

From top: 1. Tin & glass container with Traditional Chinese Medicine herbs 2. & 3.  Paper offerings in the form of  medicine packages from Hell Maedicinelo Ltd. purchased in Hong Kong 3. Mentholatum in Chinese packaging
Drawer Photo credit: Bruno David. All others: Christina Shmigel

Drawer # 8.2 : Ghost Flowers

The smell of things burning floats anxiously thru the house, dozens of ghost circles in the lane before the torrential rains wash them away, Buddhist Supply shops doing a hopping business: it's Tomb Sweeping Day.

Qing Ming Jie, 清明节, Clear Bright Festival, arrives on the solar calendar, on April 4th. It's the time for visiting family graves and bringing gifts to those who have gone ahead to the afterlife.

But not all ghosts stay peacefully in that afterlife; some ghosts are restless. They roam the earth, disturbing earthly life. They can be appeased by the burning of paper lotus flowers.

Or so I'm told by someone seeing these in my studio. I bought them for the beauty of their folding... & for how they looked in their cheerful yellow box. I've been shy about buying the folded gold paper pineapples but one of these days...

In the weeks preceding QingMing, one sees the older people passing their time folding dozens & dozens of pieces of joss into the shape of chinese ingots. At the temple, the paper ingots go into large red sacks inscribed with the names of their recipients in the afterlife. The sacks go into the fire cauldrons in the temples courtyard & the smoke carries the goods into the afterworld. As seen at the Jade Buddha Temple. ( Please forgive me the quality...it's this luddite's very first imovie.)

Drawer #8.2:  From the top, compartments 1, 3, & 4: ghost flowers made from folded paper bound with thread; backing cloth is a traditional Tibetan pattern; 2. Tin & glass container 

Virtual Drawer #2 : Ghost circles

After a very long hiatus... family & holidays on both coasts... jet lag & re-entry... I return to the time when I left off... Dongzhi, the "arrival of winter" in Shanghai.

In the days leading up to, and on the evening of, the winter solstice, chalk circles appear, drawn on the pavement that runs down the center of our lane. These circles, unlike those for the dead, have escape routes: sometimes the clean open channel, sometimes the odd little gate like the one on the bottom left. Joss, an offering to family ancestors, is burnt inside the circle, then its ash remains swept up. I rarely see anyone actually drawing these so when I step out of our front gate & find them in the lane, they seem to me to be the work of spirits. It's hard to follow the seasons in Shanghai like I might at home, by watching the changes that nature brings. Here it's man-made signs that year in and year out announce the arrival of winter: these ghost circles, the lovely drifting scent on the air of a street vendor's sweet potatoes roasting in his portable 50 gallon drum oven...

Drawer # 8.6 : Things for the Dead

We don't especially know the other people who live in our lane and they don't especially seem to know each other: it's hard to imagine anyone here on our lane organizing a block party.  In winter, we mostly see our elderly neighbors on sunny afternoons, huddles of small old women, made smaller & squatter still by the layers of their padded clothes, set on short-legged stools close to the ground, escaping their small damp rooms. 

We do, however, know when one of them passes away. In the mornings, sometimes we find the markings of a funeral rite: a large chalk circle drawn on the ground, at its center the charcoal smudge of a swept-up pile of ashes. The chalk circle encloses the departed soul's earthly place, protects that soul from wandering the earth as a restless ghost. Much has been burnt to accommodate the soul into its after life: paper money, paper mansions complete with garage & Lexus, dvd player & large screen tv, paper clothes & cellphone, cigarettes, medicines, all the material things of this life sent along by fire & smoke to the ancestral life. Sometimes at night we come home while the family is standing around the circle, quietly stamping their feet against the cold, chatting on their cell phones, waiting for the fire to burn down. 

Once we sat drinking coffee at a smart cafe on the futuristic side of the river, inside the photo view that is Shanghai to the world. For two hours, three employees of the cafe nonchalantly fed an unending supply of joss, spirit money, into a small brazier just to the side entrance of the cafe. Wads & wads of flimsy rice paper embossed with a thin metal foil square, all going up in smoke, to someone.

Sometimes the joss sheets are folded into boat-like shapes, paper counterparts of the traditional ingots of gold and silver. On the days leading up to certain dates of the lunar calendar, the old women sit together in the sun on their stools folding hundreds & hundreds of silver & gold paper ingots. They bundle them in red sacks & take them to the temple to burn.

I'm a fire person so I love all this: it reminds me of an elder's advice in a entirely different tradition:  

“Abbot Lot came to Abbot Joseph and said:  Father, according as I am able, I keep my little rule, and my little fast, my prayer, meditation and contemplative silence; and according as I am able I strive to cleanse my heart of thoughts:  now what more should I do?"  

 The elder rose up in reply and stretched out his hands to heaven, and his fingers became like ten lamps of fire. He said:  Why not be totally changed into fire?”                                                                                          

                            -(LXXII) from The Wisdom of the Elders, Thomas Merton

Drawer 8.6 from bottom: 1. Funeral circle made w/ in-laid silk pins,  heads dipped in some material the color of bone   2. Joss paper, pre-folded into ingots at the Buddhist goods shop, still in its store wrapping 3. Tin container containing Chinese medicine 4. Cast concrete souvenirs of the Terracotta Warriors, beneath a plastic pipe insulated with used plastic bags against winter cold ( drawer photo credit: Bruno David)

Drawer # 5.7 : Scraps & Fake Flowers

How one thing leads to another:

I was under some dark theft star one night last week, very unusual here: in the evening, a pickpocket, sneaking up behind me in the dark, tried to get into my purse; the following morning, I discovered that during the night some other knave had nicked the ceramic flower box that was home to our kitchen window morning glories, leaving all their poor naked roots dangling helplessly in the wind. The pickpocket I grabbed and told off (in my best Anglo-Saxon) & got on with things if a little shaky with adrenaline. But the flowerbox broke my heart. Our neighbor & housekeeper, Wu Fang, wrote 素质差 (su4 zhi4 cha4) on my phone which my (life-saving) Pleco translation app translated as “So ignorant! So uneducated!”

All summer the morning glories had brought pleasure to our neighbors who use the narrow walled-in lane behind our block of rowhouses, for washing vegetables in their outdoor kitchen sinks & hanging out laundry on the bamboo poles overhead. I’d look up from my own (indoor) sink to see someone paused in their path to gaze for a moment at the unexpected beauty of the vines. Once, an elderly man who had once lived in America as a chemistry professor, spoke to me approvingly as I watered the flowerbox: “I think you are very comfortable in China.” (Not.)

So morning glories gone but determined not to be robbed of beauty outside my kitchen window, I plotted my own theft…