the dead between the living

Monday August 10th. We got to the burial ground on mom's side of the family a little before noon. The sun beat down on the sand and the heat rose up, and black grasshoppers sprung back and forth before our eyes, between the world of those beneath the earth and that of our own.

My grandparents were born in the same village and grew up watching the same fishing boats leave and return each afternoon. They played on the same sand banks and walked the same narrow twisting dirt roads, and I am tempted to say they were childhood sweethearts, but they weren't. love in the traditional sense was something you learned after marriage and grew into. love came with responsibility, with knowing that your lives were tied to each other and there was little else but to make the most of it. it came with no guarantee and was often confused with the sheer convenience of being together, like two pieces of wood leaning on each other. talking one away will cause the other to fall.
I don't know when they started loving each other but in his old age my grandpa wrote poems to my grandma, etched with sentimentality and gratitude that she existed in his life. and when he died 5 years ago her heart broke. but she went on living, struggling with having to stand alone with the weight of 86 years on her shoulder. a weight so heavy it injured her spinal cord and confined her to bed.
After they got married my grandparents moved from town to town with the escalation of the war, chased by air-raids that ripped the sky and burst open the earth. Once a bomb shattered the ground and half buried my grandma. But she survived and perhaps when i was a child people still talked war but i never paid attention. the stories never seemed real, never seemed believable. How can words be enough.

Coming from the same village their families were buried in the same graveyard. And we stood, daughters and sons, grandsons and granddaughters, heads bowed in front of the main altar, 3 sticks of incense between our hands, shook them and prayed. The oldest tomb in the family dates back to pre-Tran, roughly 900 years ago. We go way back.

I had always considered this ritual a custom, a way of life but by now have to reassess it as a religion. People in Vietnam travel great distance back to the family burial ground and altar partly to pay respect, and partly to ask for protection and guidance. There is a firm belief that those who'd loved and protected you all their lives will continue doing so after death. Blood ties are stronger than steel rods, enough to penetrate the wall between life and death.

My uncle died from a car accident last year. My mom whispered that the fortune teller said his time was up many years ago but some great great aunt in the family held some high position in the other world and has protected him until then. I told her so even in the world of the dead there is still hierarchy? Life is never fair. neither is death. The Vietnamese sense of heaven and hell so closely resembles the system of a monarchy. There is a king for each world and different levels of aristocracies below.

My aunts and uncles brought fruit and flowers, and a lot of paper money, paper clothing, paper hats, paper suppliants for the dead. Paper so they can be burnt and transferred to the other world. But i kept wondering what makes them think live people can print money for the dead. and if the dead still need money to survive they're probably not doing too well. A lot of things we do are remnants of the past, done half out of tradition and half out of fear. What if it's true? that the dead need money? if we don't provide our ancestors with what we can then they will suffer... that kind of mentality.

There are the rich dead and the poor dead; the remembered and the forgotten; the released--those who cross safely to the other world, as well those who're left behind--who died on a bad day at a bad hour and missed the boat, condemned to eternal wanderings between the living and the not. These lost souls then returned to their families or villages to voice their bitterness. My paternal grandma talked of the woman in her village who returned to haunt her husband's new wife, entering the poor woman's body and commanded that the family keep things in order. shouting. screaming Do you know who I am?
I wonder if the dead bore nationalities like we do, even though the nation state is a modern concept. maybe they're regional instead. Perhaps when you die you become what's left of your imagination. and those who lacked it lacked ways out.

It started drizzling but the paper offerings continued to burn, until black ashes got stirred up by the wind and stuck to our clothes. We got back into the car and headed for the Nguyen family temple. I have a family temple on each side of the family - the Nguyen temple on mom's side, and the Bui temple on dad's side. The Vietnamese family follow the paternal system and thus, technically, I belong to the Bui temple. but we always visit both sides.

We swept through the Nguyen temple and placed our offerings of food and drink on the altar. Phoenix and dragons curved the walls in bright colorful paint strokes, and Chinese verses praising filial piety hung from the ceiling and along the columns of the building in pairs. People in the family who still live in the village take turns maintaining the place. A Rules and Regulations on Entering hung at the entrance with last February's lunar new year guarding shifts pinned next to it. On the last day of the old year and the first of the new the temple was to be attended to at all times.
The temple head put on his silk ao dai and sounded the drum to call up the ancestors. Everyone got on their knees and bowed. the smell of incense filled the place.

The dead in Vietnam live among the living. so that if you're masturbating you can't help feeling that maybe your ancestor's standing at the foot of the bed disapproving. and if you're tempted to lie about your origin, not out of shame, simply just to lie, to imagine being anything else, you see your grandpa sit up in his grave and curse what have i done that you'd reject me? So on. But people not only fear the dead. they turn to them to consult all sorts of matters. There is the phenomenon of psychics who let the dead speak through their bodies, or who call up the dead and install them into family members so they can talk. And in the cases when the dead do speak through such manner, people whose words no one listened to when they were alive suddenly become precious teachings.
My mom has been to one of such psychic sessions and recalled with awe. i listened, neither agreeing or disagreeing. life is a big mystery. so sure, why not add a little more mystery. and the more dimensions we bring to it, perhaps the more interesting.

Ancestor worship, it's so deeply ingrained in the Vietnamese way of life. my friend's sister was baptized last year but she still prayed to the ancestors before each major examinations. today the moon is full, my grandma brought flowers and fruits for the altar and lit the incense. the smell permeates the house, making me wonder how long tradition will last. whether I will do the same each full moon like my parents and their parents and their grandparents used to do. i'd looked at the practice with interest but up until now the idea of carrying them out has never really occurred. but if i stop the tradition perhaps the ancestors will be lonely...

Dislocation

Saigon rain. The very rain I had romanticized about in my writings 3 years ago seemed to sink my soul as I roamed the street, feeling incredibly lost between the lines and lines of motorbikes in this city. Everything seems to be happening behind a glass screen and I exist in a different sphere. Everything seems to be floating and perhaps when I have space I will hang my canvases up and draw floating circles because that is how I feel. Because all the lines that I tried to draw yesterday kept tangling up into a mess. And I find myself climbing back into bed, a heap of flesh and bones twisted out of shape and spirit. I act like a rejected lover, though without the comfort of romance.

When people tell me to go paint walls and portraits, the image of Aki smashing plates and walking on the shatters loop at the back of my head. I'd like to smash a few prejudices and preconceptions.

Ahh...there is no use complaining. I need to gather myself up and start rolling. There are still so many books to read, movies to see, people to find... I need to find people like Laura, whose excitement turns into rapid whispers, whose eyes gleam with fire when we talk life. and beauty. and art. and i mean art - a serious attempt at love and life, thoughts and feelings. not wall decorations.