FUNERAL
PRAYER
IN
FUJIAN
PROVINCE
PRAYER
IN
FUJIAN
PROVINCE
Rise—
Blessings, thrice:
Namu amida butsu!1
Heaven’s grace grants you passage.
Nine hells, eight nodes, six realms, four seas…2
Someone who’s dead now taught me the language of hanged men and heresy.
Bound by talismans and prayers, her sedan chair3 sits. Pensive, watching the moon-eyed monk clasp his dappled palms, over and over.
Gods, watch my grandfather, eyes watering from the incense’s lambent haze—another wife sent to wade through Wangchuan4 while his third kneels at his feet, as lovely and useless as the veil of joss flowers.
She is fluent in silence—a Hakka woman’s knotted tongue. We renounce our bodies at birth—split our mothers in half, still screaming, cleaving branches from roots. Grafted to a thousand other men to bear fruit from stolen seeds.5 My decade across the ocean only eroded the paradigm, dashed memories of my cradle into flotsam and seafoam.
Heaven forgive my grandmother’s heart for growing outwards.6 For bearing bitter flesh, casting her daughters like cyanide pits—taking root in foreign soil, bursting hemorrhages of rot in my mouth. A hereditary grief, committing to verse and nursery fable where scholars’ brushstrokes faltered.7 The age-old yearning of consorts—carried into lonely palaces by sedan chair, and released only once, the same way, in death. My grandmother thought I could carry a tune she’d forgotten how to sing, urging me to feed the hunger of fallen dynasties still roiling in my gut.
And look where it got her, grandfather had spat when my mother found them. My grandmother, who taught us girls to read rhymes and make words dance. Whose nimble fingers moved like rivers—skimming across guzheng8 strings, weaving between the plaits of my hair. Who took a knife to the bark and engraved her own grandmother’s stories in the ridges of my throat for safekeeping. Incessant, imploring: We were here. Remember me. Remember me. A woman’s words, or mutinous weeds in grandfather’s walled garden? What no war or regime could purge, what no revolutionary or bureaucrat could seize9, yet all it took was her keeper’s noose in the end, choking out the growth with both hands wrapped around her neck. Grandfather, who bruises even the air he touches, who wields his taut-knuckled fists and withering words, who dreams of embalming girls from the inside out.
Because the word “slave” and the feminine “I” share the same character in Chinese.10 Stunted lexicons and uprooted maiden names11—what did my grandmother see in those woods, sprawling past the mud-stained walls and village gates? Surely something more than this—children buckling beneath the cloak of their father’s hand-me-down anger. I wore my new name like an amulet, but English only splices old branches, only gave me more words to describe the unfathomable—more ghosts to bury with my mother tongue, and all of the mothers’ tongues that came before hers.
Now, tipped onto my hands and knees, summoned back to the maws of a village that my mother once fled, I can feel its breath, hot and heavy, behind my neck. A secret it buried alive, trapped between the austere sky and arid earth, fated to expire with moss growing thick in my grandmother’s throat.
But when the monk sets the offerings ablaze, I don’t flinch, don’t watch the swelling smoke carrying her skywards, transfixed by a lone pear that toppled from its sacrificial altar, gleaming whiter than bone.
I imagine the weight of it in my palm, sinking my teeth into its skin, gossamer-fine, nectar dribbling from my chin.
Something tells me it would please her, make her giddy with ravenous glee.
To eat food left out for the gods.
Heaven’s grace, grant safe passage.
For us both.
Sacrilege smiles.
Hungry.
Still.12
1 Buddhist chant commonly used to guide souls to rebirth after death.
2 Ancient Chinese mythology believed the geography of the heavens, earths, and hells were divided as such.
3 In Taoist funeral rites, sedan chairs and other goods made from joss paper are burned with the dead to accompany their journey into the afterlife.
4 Wangchuan is the name for the Chinese River Lethe, or River of Forgetting.
5 Hakka custom betroths newborn girls to their husbands from birth—and often, even earlier.
6 Common Chinese idiom: “A girl’s heart has outwards tendency,” or 女心外向，meaning girls are never their birth families’ to keep (either due to marrying into their husband’s family trees or a stereotype that improper upbringings lead to wandering girls with loose morals).
7 Official government ledgers and scholarly work were entirely authored by male writers, leaving women to pass their stories down through song, theatre, and so on.
8 The Chinese zither.
9 See: the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) and Mao’s China, which incited the purging of Chinese culture and ideologies.
10 奴才，denoting both slave or “I” for commoner girls throughout China’s history.
11 Almost all families hold a genealogy book recording the migration and ancestral trees of their clan. All female members’ names are omitted.
12 The bracketed word counts follow the Fibonacci sequence, a naturally occurring pattern in nature that predicts the growth and splitting of new branches from their parent trees.