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While I’ve lived in my little xiao qu (housing area) I’ve gotten to see quite a few people coming back from funerals.  I never saw that in Shenzhen.  It’s because Shenzhen is sort of an “artificial town” – originally it was a village of 20,000 people, Deng Xiaoping said “Build a city here,” building started, and voila! — now there are 8,000,000 people, nearly all of whom came from somewhere else to work there.  Because of that, old people are few and far between.  The average age there is 27.  I did see one funeral there, a Daoist one, which was interesting, but that was it the four years I was there.

In Shanghai, by contrast, there seem to be TONS of old people, because this has been a major city for generations.  Most of the people in my xiao qu are pretty old, since younger people would rather live in a new apartment or someplace grassier. 

Anyway, the other day I saw a big procession of people coming back from a funeral, so I asked Dog Man about it.  The people were all wearing squares of black cloth pinned to their arms, which is common here, and means someone in your family or someone you know has just died.  You’re supposed to be especially nice to anyone wearing one of these.  However, I saw that a lot of people also had this little yellow thing, like a little yellow tassel or flower, pinned to the black cloth.  Dog man said that if the person who died (and this is a little hard to explain because of Chinese familial concepts) is from your father’s side of the family, you wear a red one, and if the person is from the mother’s side, you wear a yellow one.  So if your nai nai (paternal grandmother) dies, you wear a black cloth with a red thing, but if your wai po (maternal grandmother) dies, you wear a black cloth with a yellow thing.  (Now that I’ve written it like this, it doesn’t seem so confusing anymore!)  The children of the deceased wear white sashes around their stomachs, and sometimes wear white cloths wrapped around their lower legs.  Nobody had white caps on, like at the Taoist funeral I saw in Shenzhen. 

So now thanks to my pal the Dog Man I understand a bit more about what’s going on here in Shanghai.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 19th, 2007 at 12:33 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.