continue...
Getting Granny ready
for home
Wednesday
At daybreak, I helped one of my aunts to buy more prayer supplies. After lunch, exhausted by the heat and the crowd, I took a long nap and it was already dark when I got up. The place was now bustling with activities as more distant relatives and friends started to arrive. Everyone was talking nosily, joking, swapping anecdotes and updating memories. The occasion was bright, lively, and totally unmournful. A Chinese funeral celebrates life in the midst of death.
In her lfietime, Granny had countless friends and relatives among the clannish Hakka community. I like to think they were here to pay a final call on a very distinguished kinswoman and well-loved friend. Many had at one time or other rented rooms in her house at 77 Amoy Street in the heartland of Chinatown. For those who just emigrated from China before the War, it was their first home in Singapore. They had all known her boundless hospitality.
This evening, the abbess and her assistants read the Soul-Returning Sutra summoning the soul not to wander but to return to the old familiar place of home. So passionate was the reading that most of us were moved to tears. More people came, a final mass was said and the entire family joined in a melodious chant of Buddha's name.
Later, the paper-and-bamboo articles depicting luxury cars (including stick figures of uniformed chauffeurs), multi-storeyed mansions, clothes, treasure chests and all the materialistic stuff for a comfortable after-life, as well as huge stacks of Hell's banknotes, were brought behind the vegetable farm and burnt in one magnificient conflagration.
Accumulating a large monetary hoard on earth is beyond most Chinese but they can still carry paper-made representations of material wealth into the next life, which, to their practical turn of mind, shouldn't differ much from this life. And government officials whether on earth or in Hell are equally willing to smooth things over for the chap who has sufficient money to grease them.
Thursday
It was a bright, hot day. At 11 am, the coffin was lifted onto the lorry and I was gripped by the suden realisation I would never ever see Granny again. As long as her body was lain in the courtyard, I didn't really feel sad. Now that the undetaker was hauling her away, I burst into tears.
Granny's body was cremated but her spirit still lived in memory. Despite financial hardship and the hard task of raising a large family, she enjoyed life to the max -- going to the movies and open-air operas, eating durian by the roadside, playing late-night card games, telling ghost stories to her grandchildren, cooking mounts of gorgeous dishes during festivals, organising funerals of friends who had died, and, in the mid-1960s, making a sea voyage to China and returning with presents for everyone, and a toy drum for me.
-- Francis Chin. The account was from my 1975 diary, published in the local newspaper on Feb 4, 1979 and updated for the Web on Nov 3, 2001.
77 Amoy Street nestles in the heartland of Singapore's Chinatown where Granny as landlady, presided over more than a dozen families living in cubicle rooms in this three-storey building in the 1950s and 1960s. The back had a courtyard and common kitchen where communal cooking and dining took place. In the long, hot afternoons, people gathered around the Rediffusion set (cabled radio) to listen to news, soaps and narrations of kungfu tales, broadcast in Cantonese, Hakka and other Chinese tongues.
Picture above, was taken in 1979 for my newspaper article on Granny's funeral.
Amoy Street today (1999), where the rows of immigrant houses are now replastered and airconditioned as offices for dot-com producers, PR firms, ad agencies and other fly-by-night yuppie companies.
