Purposive without Foresight

My best girlfriend Map recently moved to the Chinatown in San Francisco. She witnessed a brisk event which turned out to be a funeral.

Though there’s a common Chinese phrase “Hong2 Ba2 Xi3 Shi4″, which means “red and white happinesses” (red refers to marriage for brides were always in red dresses, white refers to death for people in funerals were always in white), traditionally Chinese people don’t really consider the death of people is happiness. Then why call it “red and white happinesses”? The “happinesses” here is a Pian1 Yi4 word in Chinese grammar, it refers only to the red part. White is tragic, but people didn’t like to be straight, people should “Bi4 Hui4″. Thus the Pian1 Yi4 word comes in place.

Now let me explain why the funeral music didn’t sound sorrowful. Objectively the physical acoustics characteristic of the Chinese instruments counts. I play several pieces of Chinese instruments like pipa, erhu, ruan. And I am a huge fan of Chinese traditional music. Most of Chinese instruments sounds great in solo. However these instruments have a common con that they are hardly harmonic to each other when they are put together. This is the key difference between Chinese instruments and western instruments. That’s one of the main causes why traditionally China never had great orchestra with our own instruments, there are wonderful modern Chinese orchestra for sure (I’m going to blog this), but it’s played by western instruments. There are well-arranged Chinese traditional chamber music which sounds good. But usually the out-door music is not so carefully arranged. Instruments compete for showing their acoustics cons. In such occasion, one hears something brisk if lucky enough, hears something like scratching on glass if unlucky.

Traditionally Chinese people must cry really loud and make really loud sound in the funeral parade to show their love to their newly died family members, especially to parents and/or grandparents and/or grandgrandparents….this is called Xiao4. The larger the parade team is and the louder the crying and music (I wonder whether it could be qualified as music but let me just call it music here…) are, the more Xiao4 people will be considered to be. So sometimes the size of the parade team and the loudness of the noise for dead peaple boost living people’s vanity, especially in rich families. Something really funny is, in the old time, in oder to make the crying louder, there were professional criers for hire whenever there was a funeral. I believe nowadays this profession has disappeared already. And you know the music must be loud…western funeral music can be loud too, as long as there is really strong part on bass, luckily there are decent western bass instruments…but our instruments’ bass is very weak. So the musical loudness is finally achieved with something sounds like screaming intentionally.

There’s another thing I don’t know whether Map had seen. In the old time, Chinese people liked to burn paper-made treasures in funeral. Things like paper money for the dead people to spend in the Yin1 world(Yang2 world is where alive people live and Yin1 world is where dead people live. That is one of the meanings of Yin-Yang). This tradition is still there in China. But nowadays people are full of imagination when they are making a funeral. They burn 1:1 size, paper made wash-machines, refridgerators, Mercedes S600 or BMW 7xx or…., so far I haven’t seen any computers though.

I am a Chinese myself but I really, really find such thing funny. When I die I don’t want a funeral like that. Quietly, those who loved me and who I loved could send me a white rose if they could. That’s everything I want. I’d like to denote all the organs which are still useful to people who are suffering from diseases and need them. The rest part of my dead-body should be burnt, upon the ashes I’d like to grow a tree.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 15th, 2005 at 7:18 pm and is filed under China, General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.