The seventh lunar month is a month of joy.
In the Hungry Ghost Festival, I am a tumbling child laughing. I am pulling grass, a juvenile tornado. I spread sticky cake between my teeth and smile as wide as the sky and chatter secrets about my mother’s most recent plastic surgery, to see if the cake does indeed prevent your secrets from spilling away.
In Qing Ming, the day of the ancestors, I feel the burden of the dog cage weighing heavily. In the day of my ancestors, children belonged in dog cages but as they, the ancestors lay inert, we dance and offer them merry tribute. We fling our ankles into dead dirt, burying rolls upon rolls of coloured paper, as if to say, “Be Happy, the waiting is over!”
When I was modern, plastic and shiny; when I had just been emitted from the womb, sticky-like they lifted me shining from the car. I awoke in a chill – and I was in the graveyard, luminescent at 5AM. I stuck coloured paper into the ground with my ankles, and
As we staggered knelt into the concrete floor in twilight – all in a row, our generation of children – my cousin hissed, “Stop burning me with joss-sticks, you fucking motherfucker!”
And as our tribute descended into the ground, he said, “Let’s go for a walk, little one,” And I know the meaning of relating relatively and the meaning of love, but I feel nothing for the man under 6-8 feet of sod. I say, “Enjoy the coloured paper, old man.”
And this was what I always knew.
Later, as always, there was the feeling of knowing. I trudged into the graveyard of my own accord on Qing Ming. I mastered the cleaver and demolished all weeds in the way of my ancestry. And I reached the tiny, faded picture in the cold tombstone at the top of the hill where I could say, “Hey. I remember you,
and I wish you were here. Happy All-Souls’ Day.”
