Traditions

Dad spoke.

But I was not the one he spoke to. Not even when I have been sleeping next to my dad's shrine ever since he passed away. Not even when my hand was the last to touch dad as he was placed into the freezer.

Instead, dad spoke to this Daoist master. A master who has the ability to communicate with spirits and the dead. And he also does fortune-telling too.

Taiwan is a place rich with traditions. This island has throughout its history absorbed peoples and cultures from East and West, and assimilated religions and beliefs from near and far. People have their roots in Confucianism, which makes them learned in idea(l)s such as filial piety and respect for law and order. At the same time, they have a strong influence from the Japanese past and upbringing, and are under the constant bombardment of Western fashion and culture. The result is an unique hybrid of faiths and traditions.

This means, often you have statues of a (Mahayana) Buddha placed next to the Chinese Guanyin (Godess of Mercy), while merely a few feet away sit the local deities for the wind, the earth, fire and water . All this often together under one roof. Buddhist monks mingle with Daoist priests. Local customs of burning paper money mix with chantings of Sutras from ancient India. No combination of rituals and rites seem too surprising, and many submit themselves to these rites and rituals often without knowing exactly why or how. Sometimes it amounts to pure superstitition, at others times pure mysticism and cult-like worship. It is both a fascinating socio-historical insight into life on this island, but at times, also daunting to understand, let alone practice perfectly.

For the past few weeks, I am just beginning to learn the intricacies of all these rituals and traditions, and to be honest, some are simply outright outrageous and nonsensical.
When it comes to the dead, the rites are especially long-winded and complicated, which is part of the reason my dad can still not be cremated, even though it has already been almost a month since he passed away. It is not just a matter of cremating him and placing the ashes in an urn. We have had to find a suitable location to place his urn, which all depends on his birth and death time and date, and in addition we must find a suitable time to do this.

According to the tradition, each person has three spirits, one of which remains in the body of the dead, and the other two fly away and wander the world after dying. These three spirits must be gathered together by an elaborate ceremony of chanting and sorcery, gongs and bells, for them to return home. And the reason why many people have an ancestral plaque bearing the name of the deceased inside their homes is because it is widely believed that the dead, though invisible to normal people, usually will return and continue to live in that plaque. It is this plaque, often wooden, that is worshiped and referred, and before which fresh food and fruits, incense sticks and paper money, together with the favourite things of the deceased, are offered regularly. This is just a thin icing on the rituals that need to be performed.



To make sure the spirit comes home takes time, and a lot of effort. And for the many, many days since dad's death, we have been busy with this. My mum knows of this grand master who apparently has great abilities, and he has been involved in many of the planning and ceremonies. The day before yesterday, he suddenly called and told my mum that my dad spoke to him, and the grand master said that dad is sad that none of us have visited him at the mortuary, where dad's body is lying in a freezer. It is of the utmost importance that we go see dad, the master said.

I did not know whether to laugh or cry. Why did my own dad not communicate with me, but communicated with a master of ceremony and voodoo-- the very kind of people dad detested to the bone while he was still alive? Most ridiculous of all, we were told that we should open the freezer and let dad 'see' us. I was outraged.

It is correct that I have not paid respects to my dad at the mortuary since his death. But apparently waking up every single morning to cook dad breakfast and offer him cigarettes is not quite enough. I must open the freezer and let he see me. Why? Why?

I began to sob at the thought. It baffles me, as it has baffled me several times in the past few weeks, why people are so concerned with the dead when they are dead, but not when they are alive? What use is it to give the dead a proper burial according to all the rites and rituals from generations and generations ago, when you do not show any compassion or love toward the dead when they are still living? How can any amount of chanting or voodoo help the dead toward a peaceful existence in the hereafter, when while alive you let the person down and give him regrets and disappointments? It is to me beyond sense how people can can blindly obey rituals and rites, but never stop to ask themselves whether their intentions and their hearts are pure and clear. A thought stuck to mind from this, and other turbulent encounters with unheard of myths and rituals... when dad passed away, I felt little sadness and shed little tears... why most the living make me so sad and make me shed so many tears?

I bluntly told my mum and brother that I refuse to open that freezer, and that they cannot force me. I want to treasure my own memories of dad, to treasure that peaceful posture at the moment of passing, and I absolutely do not want to have it ruined with view of the stiff and darkened flesh on my dad's cold corpse. Why must I go let a dead corpse see me? Is it not enough that I hold my memories of my very own dad in my heart and mind? Is it not enough that I send metta (loving-kindness) and wellwishes to my very own dad in silence? Can I not mourn dad's loss in my own quiet and calm way? Traditions dictates that I cannot... or at least better not, unless I want to suffer from bad luck and risk experiencing disasters rain upon me.

If so be my life and fate, so be it.

When I got to the mortuary, I went in first. Along a wall of freezers, I found dad's. Number 440. I knelt down before it, and put my hands together. Silently I whispered to dad, firstly apologising for not visiting after he passed away, but I told him, and I think he already knows, he is in my heart. With eyes closed, I knelt there, sent him prayers of good wishes and my hopes of his happiness and newly found freedom. Perhaps he also received the little words and wishes I sent up in the sky lantern the day before. Nothing more do I ask for on my birthday.

My brother softly walked to stand beside me, and I started to turn and walk away, thinking perhaps he had gotten the guard to come open the freezer. But my brother called me, and asked me to come back. He too realised that it is not necessary, and will only accentuate the pain of loss over nothing. We went to the mortuary, as told, and we saw dad. Perhaps not in so many words, but we saw him in our hearts, and felt him through our palms and fingers as we placed them on the door of the freezer. And I think we can come to peace with that. And as can our dad.

This is just a simple example of the kind of superstition that makes my life sour and complicated, and sadly even more so in this difficult time when I have to deal with dad's passing away and be strong physically and emotionally to comfort my family.

And there may be more to come.

21 February

"Dear Dad
Be Peaceful
Be Happy
Be Free"

With those words, my sky lantern lifted up into the dark sky, rising and rising together with tens, hundreds, thousands of other hopes and dreams and wellwishes that rose to the heavens.

Watching the lanterns rise, I was filled with a sense of awe, taken aback by the serene beauty of the scene of a swarm of lights like stars traveling further and further away, taking the words of the people below up to those above who would hear and read them. I hope my dad can also read mine.

The mountains gathered mist, the river slid smoothly below, while the moon shone at its brightest and roundest for the first time after the Lunar New Year... also for the first time after dad's death. A part of me was saddened, and empty.

On this night of my twenty-fourth birthday, I have already lost a dear part of me that can never be recovered. Except those fleeting moments when dad's face and words are briefly recaptured in memories and pictures.

I hope dad can also feel this pain too.

20 February

Mum was discharged from the hospital yesterday, after having spent three days almost constantly in bed with a tube buried inside her left right shoulder. She says she feels alright, and that her digestion is more or less normal. But this morning when I was cooking in the kitchen, she came in and as soon as she smelt a pot of soup, her stomach became upset, and she started to choke from vomit.

After chemo-therapy, the patient normally has an aversion to food. My dad would feel sick at the thought of food, and told my mum not to even mention that word. Luckily, my mum can still eat a little and has not thrown up yet. Mum did say that she feels her heart is pounding, and that her blood pressure level may be really high, as predicted by the doctors. I squeezed fresh grapefruit and mixed it with Yakult, and she drank a two big glassfuls. My auntie, the youngest sister of my mum, has also been staying with us for the last two weeks, and has been preparing lots of delicious and nutricious foods to make her body strong and balanced.

I looked at my mum carefully today, as she lay in bed to rest, and I noticed... noticed the saggy, eyes, and the darkened and wrinkled eye lids. There was a tiredness in those eyes I never saw before, even though she still spoke clearly about everyday things and details of my dad's funeral plans as if she did not undergo any excruciating treatment.

Ward C069

The past two days I have spent at the hospital. Mum was admitted late Sunday evening in preparation for her chemotherapy shots, and I stayed with her every night at the hospital, on a bench next to her bed.

The doctor says the new 'target therapy' raises the chance of success between 15 to 20%. But as with all medicine, there are side effects, including nose bleeds, hormonal imbalance, higher blood pressure levels... and a minimal, but not negligible risk of intestinal rupture and bleeding, which will require immediate surgery. Mum's colon cancer is already at an advanced level, and tumours have started developing around the lymph glands. Two years max, if the medicine does not succeed. Many more years, if the treatment is well received, and if the diet and daily habits are well looked after. Within a time span of less than two weeks, two shocks to my life.

Brother indeed began looking very stern and concerned, and became irritated at the fact that he was never told until two days ago, whereas I knew more or less how bad my mum's situation already is. Accept it, mum has always said. Life consists of birth, aging, illness, and death, as the local saying goes. But when I think about it, some people skip the illness part and go on living a healthy life until the inevitable death. Why both my parents have to undergo such fate... and why now, and together?

The sound of haggard coughing, wheezing, gargling of phloem... the weak, almost inaudible whisper of an old wrinkled lady telling her children her regrets and worries... the beeping of machinery, the stench of old laundry mixed with medicine. Hospitals are not a pleasant place, but a place where the air is stale, and the people stern looking and fragile. Save for the kindness and warmth of those angels in white, whose comforting words and smiles bring in sunlight into the artificially lit ward, there is little to cheer up the mood. I look at mum, eyes closed, sleeping, drugged by the medicine, and notice for the first time how the hairs around her ears have turned white.

Dad spent the last moments of his life in a hospital bed. Dad spent the last few days of his life confined within the confines of the huge hospital complex. The walls may have pictures of mountains, birds, and even photographs of Keukenhof where we once were together as a family, but nothing can replace that freedom of being able to wander the world freely, and free of illness. Thinking of dad, and how he must have wandered those very corridors, and at times sneaked outside for a quick cigarette, I feel comforted, but at the same time saddened. I look at the sad faces of patients and their relatives, I look at the cripple and the vegetated man in a wheelchair. So much pain, so much suffering... who will take care of them?

Her eyes closed, her arms still, and her posture serene and motherly. Sitting next to mum, I am for a moment glad. I can take care of her. While I still can.