An Easter Qingming Crossover Special
My grandpa was buried at sea.
I wasn't around. I had spent a week in the hospital with him toward the end of his life, but returned to start work at Facebook at the behest of my mum and dad. Even though I had ten days of bereavement leave, it was my first job, they reasoned, and it wasn't very good to be absent from work for that long. As an aside, Facebook did not notice my absence and to this day, I regret not being part of my grandpa's funeral. Use all your bereavement leave. It's there for a reason.
What I've been told is that my family members chartered a fishing boat to bring us out of Tamsui and when we were far enough into the ocean, we scattered his ashes in the ocean and said:
阿公，你要保重喔
Grandpa, be well.
It's tombsweeping day, a day of reverence as we clean the graves of our ancestors and share space with them. I feel a disconnect to tradition. My mother is the only one in our extended family who converted to Christianity. As such, while my relatives took part in traditional Han Taiwanese ancestor veneration practices, I was not allowed to join them in practice. Nowadays, even though I have long-reconciled my Christianity with ancestor veneration (see my baptism statement), I do not know the exact practices and am often frustrated. I am insecure about the possibility that I am a rupture in a long lineage. I don't think I'm alone in this.
A song that expresses this disconnect and disquiet is Chyi Yu's 橄欖樹 (Olive Tree). The lyrics of the song are written by famed Taiwanese traveler, author and thinker, San Mao.
不要問我從哪裏來
我的故鄉在遠方
爲什麼流浪
流浪遠方
流浪
Don't ask me where I'm from.
My hometown is distant.
Why wander?
Wander distantly...
Wander...
The lyrics and the melody capture a wistful longing for a distant homeland coexisting with a relentless wanderlust. I have spent much of my life, much like San Mao, in lands distant from my ancestors. In this distance, I often feel detached from any anchor, like a piece of driftwood.
This Tomb-sweeping day happens to a Tomb-sweeping Easter crossover bonanza (for the first time that I can possibly remember). A coworker recently told me that computing the date of Easter is a ridiculously over-complicated mathematical problem that I am not going to bother to understand. However, the more I think about it, the more I see parallels between Easter and Tomb-sweeping Day.
Both the story of Easter and Tomb-sweeping Day are rooted in a reverence for the dead. The discovery of the resurrection starts with a "tomb-sweeping". As recounted in Luke 24, the women who followed Jesus to Jerusalem and saw him crucified wanted to see him buried with dignity. Thus, on Easter Sunday, they "went to the tomb, taking the [embalming] spices that they had prepared" (Luke 24:1, NSRVUE). Were there no tomb-sweepers, there would have been no discovery of resurrection. I would argue that Luke 24 teaches me that, far from heretical, venerating the dead is a window into a spiritual truth. For early Jesus followers, it led to the empty tomb and the resurrection.
Now where does that leave me? It's Easter weekend and it's Tomb-sweeping day, but I'm far away from home and I have no graves to sweep.
My ah-gong was buried at sea and his ashes are no-doubt, drifting in the Pacific now. So I guess the gargantuan task he left me was to clean the oceans, or to care for creation. I think, for me, at least for now, tomb-sweeping day is going to involve some form of creation care, to make grandpa's grave just a little better for everyone else.
It just so happened that my friend had a birthday park-cleaning party. She brought people together to garden at a public park in deep Brooklyn, raking leaves and picking up trash. Strangely, in the motions of raking leaves and dumping foliage and detritus into purple plastic bags, I had space to think about those who came before me and those that will come after.
So, on this Tomb-sweeping/Easter crossover event, I hope you, just like the women of the grave, found a way to use reverence for the dead as a window into good news. He is risen. He is risen indeed.
Links/Content
- I've been enjoying Season 5 of For All Mankind.
- I got to catch Tristan und Isolde at the Met and really enjoyed it.
Speaking about Spotify and Apple Music, Iovine flatly stated: “The streaming services, to me, are minutes away from being obsolete.”
- I've been thinking a lot about the commodification of content and enjoyed reading this Substack making the case that Spotify and the other music streaming services are in grave danger.
- Mamdani Budget Could Tank Queens Subway Expansion He Once Supported: Please contact your local electeds (in NYC) and let them know that you support QueensLink and not QueensWay. We need desperately need more subway in Queens and this is definitely a mayoral blunder.