Miss Bai Qin's Misunderstandings

If one day, I don't intubate, cut off gas, and don't get electric shock, I'm gone, and what happens after me: no obituary, no farewell ceremony, no funeral ceremony, no portrait, no tomb, no memorial tablet, cremation The ashes can be buried.

At the end of October last year, my father left such a paragraph on his Facebook account. The words were dashing, but they did not attract much attention. At that time, my father was still able to walk and eat. ), Dad’s daily melancholy speeches and making a big fuss about minor ailments have become a habit, but no one takes it seriously.

Of course, when he pieced together what he should have written in the future, he already suspected that he had cancer, but he was unwilling to go to the hospital for an examination and judgment, but that was another story. I won't go into details about the course of the disease that went straight to the ground. In short, after less than 100 days, this text became the so-called account of the funeral . As a filial daughter Bai Qin , I only handled it according to my father's last words.

Under my mother's insistence and my persuasion, my father walked drowsily on morphine in the An Ning Ward for the last leg, but he did not suffer from intubation, tracheostomy, or electric shock. However, I actually went through a funeral and found that it was full of misunderstandings. From the day my father passed away, it was farther and farther away from his last words.

Dad has no "son" under his knees, and his mother is a Christian. During family sacrifices, he only prepares the dishes and ignores the ceremony. The so-called memorial tablets have always been the responsibility of the uncle's family. The uncle is a traditional person, but he also has enlightenment. The younger sister who was married at the beginning passed away, the uncle was afraid that the younger sister-in-law would marry again, and believed that the younger sister was the daughter of the family, so he suggested that we should take her tablet back into our family tablet. The father under the Confucian education felt inappropriate. My father didn't understand the matter of sacrifice at all. He thought that since the ancestral tablet was placed in his uncle's house, and he had no son, he was not qualified to enter our family's tablet, and there was a misunderstanding that he could not (can) set a tablet.

And of course, as a child, I can’t let my father become a lonely ghost. After all, I have long ago agreed with my uncle and cousin that I will be a tablet in our family in the future. Is there any reason why both daughters and sons-in-law join the tablet and the father is not there? So this matter went against my father's wishes under the uncle's decision.

Since he wants to enter the memorial tablet, it is necessary for the family man to go to the hospital with a spirit banner to lead his father's heroic spirit home. Most of the rituals can be saved during the epidemic, but the mourning hall still needs to be set up, otherwise there will be nowhere to put the father's soul .

Since I want to set up a mourning hall, I will hand it over to the etiquette company. Although my father chose a photo in the last few days of his life, it means that his mother should take it to a photocopying shop and print it in A4 size. It was placed in the living room, but the remains were wrapped. The owner of the etiquette company asked if there were any photos? After the mother handed over the photo, a standard-sized portrait was naturally printed.

So far, things have gotten out of hand. Fortunately, we insisted that only 30 obituaries were printed as family leave for children and nephews, but did we keep the obituaries? Dad probably forgot that he was also an internet celebrity in the world of retired teachers . Do you need an obituary to notify the news of death these days? Mother simply typed "curtain call on xx, xx, xx, xx" on his FB, and the whole world knew it. This is good, there is no farewell ceremony. Where should his relatives, friends, three thousand disciples, and various netizens who have met through the Gusun channel in the past few years go to pay their respects?

Since my father didn't want to do anything after he retired, he just insisted on sorting out various documents, photos, and speeches that he had been engaged in education for 30 years. It was not enough to finish 21 volumes in the chronological style, and he could change it into a chronicle and then read more books, so I had a whimsical idea . He said that he would help his father hold a memorial document exhibition , so that although he abides by his last words and does not hold office, at least let people visit and pay tribute to him and also to mourn their own youth . As everyone knows, this is completely digging holes for everyone to jump.

Because according to my father's plan before his death, it was actually very simple and generally frozen. After we returned to Taiwan to complete the isolation prison, we could take it out for cremation and burial. However, we set up a stall next to the mourning hall for a document exhibition on the 14th, and it was exhausting. First of all , since there is a mourning hall, there is a matter of praying for meals in the morning and evening . At the beginning, I was still in isolation, and I could only rely on my cousins who lived in other counties and cities to come back to help. At this stage, the mother had to welcome the condolences from all over the world alone, and she might not be able to eat from nine in the morning to the evening.

And after we were released from quarantine, because of the self-management we should not gather together, the number of mourners was broken down into pieces, and it took longer to pick up customers. To be honest, if there is a public sacrifice, according to the friendship of some people, it will only come on the day of the funeral, instead of sitting at the display table and reminiscing about the past and telling us about the past. Obviously, without the public sacrifice, everyone became very obsessed with visiting Dad's final work. Dad is the kind of person who has a perfect outer edge and has various defects in the inner edge. As time goes on, he can listen to his flawless praises. The more I thought about it, the more my mother and I became more and more wrong , and the feeling that the origami lotus flower that knew I should be quiet was more healing.

I thought that the whole document exhibition was hidden in a private garage, and the grand occasion of asexual reproduction in the sea of flowers before my grandmother's funeral would not be repeated. Unexpectedly, my father's old friends were warm at first and said that they would send flower baskets for the "document exhibition". It’s okay to accept one or two, but as more old colleagues visited, the flower baskets became designated for funerals that should not exist in the eyes of outsiders. The flower baskets began to line up on the outer walls, and the famous brands gradually increased from the education sector to the political figures. Fortunately, it was just after the end of the year, and I finally stopped before the situation got out of control.

As for the burial, it seems to be different from what my father thought. I thought he was going to scatter the ashes under the Aiwen mango tree in his backyard. Later, I found out that he had designated a cemetery , but I clearly remember him saying His burial was a tree burial, and he thought he had surveyed beforehand, but his uncle and mother came back with a solemn expression after the survey: the soil would be turned over every two or three years after the burial .

"It's okay, I'm going to pay his respects under a tree anyway," I thought innocently. As a result, it was only on the day of the funeral that I realized that the burial in the cemetery was to bury the ashes under the lawn. When the grass grows well in the coming year, I don't know where to bury it? ! This really shocked me: after all, there is a tree that feels like there is a monument, and the grass really feels like ashes .

I'm not sure if this is the ending that Dad imagined, but since things have come to this, we can only respect his last words.

Dad's funeral is basically a balance between patriarchal and Hokkien traditions and "non-traditional" . Fortunately, my father did not have any strong traditional beliefs before his death. The only remaining child was a daughter who was married to a foreigner. The sentence "He just doesn't have a son" can explain the unreasonableness in the eyes of various neighbors.

For example, my mother is a Christian, even though she doesn’t mind evoking spirits or inviting spirits, when I asked the etiquette company to remove the three golden Buddhas on the offering table and replace them with the full text of the Heart Sutra with orchid decorations , Mother was still greatly relieved. Even though the Medicine Buddha Dharma Repentance was done the day before the family ritual, the family ritual also included a prayer section at the end, allowing the family members to get what they needed.

The first conflict in the funeral came from the way the obituary was written. Although it was clearly not intended to be sent to the outside world, as a wife and daughter, I was unwilling to give in one step. My mother said that she was a wife for a lifetime. Also, traditionally married daughters need to add "Shi X" next to their name, so I wrote "Shi Lin" next to my own name. Oh, can my husband take a random Chinese surname and take it seriously? The uncle and the funeral agency explained that it would be clear who you are marrying? I explained that I was all having New Year's Eve dinner at home, so I had to write "Suitable XX" next to my husband's name. He didn't care anyway, and then I said, "Why don't my cousin and cousin's wife have to write who is suitable?" "Because they married us. Home!" As soon as these words came out, my cousin also joined the battle. In short , it was a little trick in the patriarchal society to use words to separate daughters from being excluded from the family . My cousin and I insisted on removing all the appropriate words in the obituary. .

The grand ceremony of kneeling three times and nine kowtows for one's daughter at the family festival is naturally required. According to tradition, the younger generation must have it. However, my mother thinks that apart from the cousins, cousins and sisters, since my father was admitted to the hospital, they have been busy going in and out for me, who can't go home in time. How embarrassing Then ask them to kneel and kowtow to their father three times? However, the uncle, who has been defeated in many details, feels that he can no longer let it go, and insists that this is the filial piety that the younger generation should perform. This disagreement was not finalized until before the family festival.

But the main event still happened to my father's two sons-in-law. The etiquette company first thought that foreigners did not have this tradition. Asking my husband to kneel seemed disrespectful to his culture. They also thought that the son-in-law of another family should not come to do this big gift. . It sounds nice, but my daughter-in-law unanimously decided that if the target was a Southeast Asian son-in-law or a widowed daughter-in-law, there would be no more hesitation. "Both of them can enjoy my father's inheritance, how difficult is it to kneel and kowtow three times?" I coldly blocked these inappropriate inappropriateness.

As a daughter, I have to pay tribute at home sacrifices. According to tradition, as long as relatives of the same age or above as my father come to offer incense, I have to kneel and kowtow in return. I don't care if my father-in-law and aunt kowtow, but when the master of ceremonies asks me to kneel before my father's cousins and sisters, I'm confused? Most of these relatives can’t be named, and some of my father’s younger cousin grew up with me and went to school together, but it’s just a difference in seniority that makes me kneel? So there was an embarrassing scene where I got down on my knees after shouting twice, and I stood up before my knees hit the ground.

Before everyone offered the incense, the master of ceremonies asked me to kneel in front of my father's spirit, and then he wrote and directed a hymn, which he read for 5 minutes. He insists that I will be my father's daughter in the next life . Frankly speaking, I have no grief in my heart at all after listening to this passage. I just feel amused. After my father was buried in the ground, the first thing I did was to clarify on FB that I had written a letter and put it in my father's coffin. I really have an afterlife, I hope to be good friends with my father, but stop worrying about each other as father and daughter, and also ask him not to wait for my mother and me, and go on freely, okay?

Afterwards, my cousin said that if we knew that there was such a paragraph in the family sacrifice, why not let us write our own recitation? Obviously, my generation is good at writing, and I can say touching words at my fingertips, not to mention that I was a frequent winner of the Mandarin reading competition when I was a student. Do I really need an irrelevant person like the emcee to say something insincere in a strange voice? You must know that when my sister passed away, I read an article at her funeral, and the master of ceremonies handed me a business card and asked me if I wanted to consider this career.

In the end, after a funeral, my husband became a master of burning paper money, and won all kinds of praise and the name of a good son-in-law for accompanying me back to China to go to the funeral and participating in the whole process of the funeral. For the reason of being liked, there is no doubt that the Chinese people's deep-seated love for foreigners is on display .

The unexpected events of the entire funeral can really be written into seventy-seven forty-nine chapters. In addition to colliding with the already crumbling tradition, there are also some unexpected episodes (?).

At the beginning of the funeral, I was still in isolation at home and had nothing to do, so I typed out the condolence message on FB into a small newspaper called "Words to Principal X", and planned to print it out and put it in the coffin, so that my father could bless all parties. down to leave. Unexpectedly, everyone became more serious (probably the occupation is the relationship between elementary school teachers), and they sent letters to submit manuscripts. From a few words of nostalgia and nostalgia, it was expanded into a font of 11. A single line spacing can also be filled with two large sheets of A4. The writing competition was held. Although I should be proud of how many people love my father, but for me, who just wanted to give him a ride in a way that my father liked, but my heart was always allergic to praise, it was definitely not the original intention.

The day before the funeral, the staff of the etiquette company explained that the mother should prepare the money on hand, and there are different bags for the younger generation and the widow. Of course the money at hand is a lot more. Experienced people probably read this and already know what's going on? After receiving the money, the etiquette teacher instructed me to present my mother's purse, and told my mother that this bag should be hidden and that it would not be used for the rest of my life! Mother regretted, "Who told you to put so much greed?"

The last ten days of the puja after being entombed is a Buddhist ceremony. It should not be an unenvironmental part of burning treasury money. However, I bought a paper house for my father on a whim. When the Master saw it, she kindly asked me How to burn? I said just burn it in the golden stove that usually burns paper money! She glanced at me reproachfully and asked if I understood how to write the title deed? Honestly, how could you possibly know? I can understand every word on the title deed, but it looks like a book from heaven, but I didn't expect it to be on this level. So the master wrote the land deed and performed the ritual, and instructed us to carry a few piles of paper money to the open space outside the house. With the sound of bells and the swaying spirit banners, the house melted into ashes and smoke, and we became Pingtung is an accomplice who adds fuel to the already polluted air.

Cremation is also an unbelievable plot. Several times my relatives passed away. Because I was a woman, it was not my turn to collect bones, so I never knew that the crematorium in Taiwan would grind the bones in front of the family members! ! (I'm not a writer who likes to use exclamation points, but there are so many exclamation points in the whole funeral.) The best part is that the crematorium staff asked me to confirm whether it was my dad's ashes before grinding it? "Eh, that doesn't look like that..." I wonder how they would react if I said that? In fact, even if the crematorium made the mistake of the family, there is no way to verify it. Why should the family watch the grinding process?

In contrast to my heartache when my sister and grandma passed away, or the heartache when I remembered not being able to have a funeral to send Uncle Paul away during the pandemic, I hardly shed a tear during the entire period of my father's death (even as of the deadline), and I couldn't reveal it. For any grief, Dad didn't cry when he decided to enter the tranquil ward, he didn't cry when he sent him off on video, he didn't cry when he saw Dad for the last time before the funeral, he didn't cry when he sent Dad to the fire, and he didn't cry when he saw Dad's skeleton. I didn't cry when the powder fell into the ground, only when my younger brothers and sisters offered incense, I shed a few tears of sadness thinking that I had lost my father and siblings to discuss family affairs.

We have all seen the lively and absurd Taiwanese funeral in the movie "Seven Days After My Father". Dad thought he had confessed his last words, and I thought that replacing the traditional mourning hall with a document exhibition would be able to avoid the stereotypes. , The original intention of the dizzying ceremony was to make the living people tired and have no time to grieve. We took a detour and stepped into the same trap.

After the funeral, I thought, even if the husband and wife have been married for more than forty years, or how sincere the father-daughter relationship is, they must part.

Of course, this is just another misunderstanding of the filial daughter Bai Qin. The funeral is not as simple as the end of the farewell ceremony . It turns out that if a new member of the family wants to enter the ancestral tablet, he must first practice next to him for a year, and then the furnace can be closed after the next year. During this year, every 15th day of the new year, he has to worship in the morning and evening.

"Anyway, you have to persevere for a hundred days, otherwise you can't justify it." Mother said to me.

 Note: The filial daughter Baiqin is a profession. In this article, I use it to satirize all traditional customs that I do not agree with.