Portrait of an LBX

By Evan

Looking down from about 3/4 up the giant mountain over endless bamboo stalks. Photo by Andy

It’s been a long time since my last update (is anybody surprised?), so I’ll try to go easy on not overloading you with the silly stuff we’ve been doing. When last we left off, we had been stuck in Jiangle for days due to nonstop rain. Finally we caught a break and rolled south three days after expected and after skipping past the Yuhua caves (玉华洞, we still refuse to pay admission anywhere) rolled for over an hour and a half up a mountain through cloud base up to just shy of 1000 meters high followed by a breakneck plummet of 10 km. At the bottom of the mountain in the little village of Dakeng (大坑), we came across an unusual sight: a large group of LBXes gathered on the roadside clustered around several women in red coats playing music on marching band instruments with the reverb kicked way way up (no, that’s not poor audio quality on the video). Intrigued, we asked what was going on, to which one of the red-clad band members responded: “a funeral! (葬礼呀)” Then about five women screamed at us in unison, “come sit down and have a drink (过来喝一杯酒吧)” and a minute later we were sitting at the table facing one Mr. Le (乐先生), whose grandmother, 87 year old Mrs. Zhang, had just passed away.

The hired women's band "adds noise" to the occasion of Mr. Le's grandmother's funeral. Photo by Andy

Immediately we felt awkward to be barging unceremoniously into a funeral, which one usually supposes to be a somber event, but Mr. Le quelled our discomfort by explaining the mood of the event: a happy sendoff (欢送). “No, no, you don’t understand! The livelier the funeral, the more successful; so the more people, the better! (放心，我们认为越热闹越好，就是说人越多就越成功” he explained to us. The “happy sendoff” nature of the funeral, after the Daoist tradition which the family follows, explained the women’s band (女子乐队) playing very very loudly (we could hardly maintain conversations) right next to us. Within minutes Mr. Le’s mother, 67 and covered in white gauze (白纱, traditional garb for mourning families) threw two enormous bowls of noodles in front of us while Mr. Le fetched from the kitchen leftover pork and intestines plus a kettle of warm, homemade rice wine. “Please eat and drink. We’ll feel bad if you’re not full when you leave here (请多吃多喝，一定要吃饱，要不我们就很难过).” Needless to say, the sight of 3 bicycling foreigners had drawn a huge crowd from within the family and the other locals, and we started to feel really bad about taking the attention away from the deceased. Nevertheless, everybody was all smiles between asking us questions, explaining the rituals, and pushing food and the sweet rice wine on us. “Don’t worry, just eat! (没事的，你们吃吧!)”

Mr. Le toasts me with a bowl of his family's home brewed rice wine, the best homemade we've had yet in China. Photo by Andy

On the wall behind Mr. Le was a red poster including the names of the family and their exact relation to the deceased grandmother, mourning son, mourning daughter, mourning grandson by father, mourning grandson by mother, etc (mostly surnamed Jiang [姜] like the rest of the families in the village). Inside the small house the grandmother’s picture and name were enshrined among nearly twenty vertical wall hangings inscribed with mourning verses. The women of the grandmother’s family, from mid 20’s to very old, were all attired in white gauze. Periodically the mother would wail while running up and down the street in what looked like a very ceremonial manner. Eventually the somewhat reticent Mr. Le, who makes 7000 yuan a year making tofu in a nearby village, said that he had paid out over 1000 yuan for the entire day-long event, including hiring the band from out of town. By the end, they had refilled our wine bowls enough to get us nice and tipsy — at which point we finally said we should be going. Before we left, they asked if we wouldn’t add to the renao (热闹, excitement) by singing a song from waiguo (外国, the amorphous idea of “those non-China places”). So it was that Alexis and I decided to duo in front of nearly 40 mourning onlookers the only song we both know by heart: La Marseillaise, the French national anthem (maybe not the most appropriate for the situation, but everybody seemed pleased anyway). Despite multiple insistences from everybody in the family that we eat more (our stomachs were already about to pop), we finally thanked everybody and made our own happy departure down the road, zigzagging ever so slightly (由于酒喝多了一点，又是蜿蜒着点骑走了).

My immediate emotion coming out of the funeral, other than the more corporeal sensations of being stuffed and buzzed, was admiration. Owing to my family’s Catholic background, most funerals I attended in my youth were dreary, painful affairs. It wasn’t until my maternal grandmother, a Southern Baptist, passed away in my second year of college, that I finally discovered funerals don’t have to be so mellow. The preacher had the choir fill the church with happy music and insisted that everybody who spoke tell only funny stories, since “we’re already sad enough today.” It was great to see that the family of Mr. Le shares the philosophy of a “happy sendoff,” the same one behind my grandmother’s Baptist funeral, New Orleans jazz funerals, and as I discovered during my own studies of Daoism, that of Zhuangzi (see passage below), my number one ancient philosopher. I hope that at my own happy sendoff, my family sees fit to not sit around moping, but to raise an unholy ruckus and fill up wandering passers by on homebrew and jambalaya.

庄子妻死，惠子吊之，庄子则方箕踞鼓盆而歌。
惠子曰：“与人居，长子老身，死不哭亦足矣，又鼓盆而歌，不亦甚乎！”
庄子曰：“不然。是其始死也，我独何能无概然！察其始而本无生，非徒无生也而本无形，非徒无形而本无气。杂乎芒芴之间，变而有气，气变而有形，形变而有生，今又变而之死，是相春秋冬夏四时行也。人且偃然寝于
巨市，而我嗷嗷随而哭之，自以为不通乎命，故止也。”

Rough translation:
Zhuangzi’s wife died, whereupon his disciple Huizi visited him to offer his condolences. When Huizi found him, Zhuangzi was sat on the floor with legs stretched out playing a drum and singing.

Huizi asked him, “Your wife, with whom you lived your whole life, gave birth to your children and grew old with you. You don’t have to cry over her death, but it’s going pretty far to play the drums and sing on this day!”

“You’re wrong,” Zhuangzi retorted. “When my wife had just died, of course, I was sad. But afterward I gave it a think and realized: we really don’t have life. Not only do we not have life, but we really don’t even have a body. Not only do we not have a body, but we don’t even have breath. Amid changes of chemistry, she changed from nothing to have breath, whereupon she changed to have a body, whereupon she changed to have life. Today again she has changed, and the change is death, which is just as natural as the changing of the seasons. Now that she is at rest with the entirety of nature, would not my crying and sadness indicate that I have far too weak an understanding of the world? Once I realized that, I stopped crying [and started drumming away].”

After the funeral, we rolled south through the town of Xiamao (夏茂镇), where we ran into three female Buddhist monks. They generously said we could spend a night in their monastery, provided, however, that we could push the bikes up a steep path to its location 800 meters high on a mountain. Realizing the impossibility of that task, we bid the sisters adieu and continued on to the next village, where we ended up sleeping for free in the local government compound and getting drunk on rice wine (yes, it never ends!) with a vice-party secretary. More to come on that and many other stories tomorrow night and in the following days as we’ll be resting a while in Xiamen while Alexis renews his visa in Hong Kong. Until then, goodnight!

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