Individual Details
Tú Chuántán 凃傳谭
( - )
Memorial for Tu Chuantan written in 1999 by his son-in-law, Terry Rex Wilson:
In July 1998, Tu Chuantan, age 65, was very ill with cancer of the stomach that had spread to the liver. He stayed in bed all the time except when he walked to the bathroom. From time to time he was able to talk a little, and he gave me the new name “Tu Jiahui” using his own family name to indicate that I was considered to be one of his own sons. The name translates roughly as “the shining light of the Tu family”. Everyone in the family agreed that it was an excellent name for me, and I felt very grateful to receive it. It is for this reason that I refer to him now as “Father”.
A Life of Service
As Father lay on his sickbed surrounded by devoted relatives, his daughters asked about his youth, which he had seldom spoken of. A sister of his recalled that once he had run away to avoid being punished by a teacher. He laughed for the first time in days and told the story:
When he was ten or eleven years old, each day his teacher assigned a passage from classical Chinese literature for the students to memorize and explain. However, the teacher himself did not have a deep knowledge of literature, and sometimes father would correct the teacher’s interpretations of the texts. In traditional Chinese schools, the teachers expect their students simply to listen and memorize whatever the teacher says,so this teacher was quite annoyed when Father embarrassed him by showing that he knew more than the teacher. One day the teacher angrily told Father to come forward and teach the class, so he did. After that the teacher resented him even more, so he assigned Father two passages each day while the other students only had to do one. This was very difficult for him because he also had many duties helping his father, a landlord, manage his estate. He had to arise at 3:00 a.m. and study by candlelight.
One day Father was only able to memorize one complete passage and one-half of the other, though he was able to explain both of them. The teacher, who was waiting for an excuse to punish him,insisted that he must have ten strokes of the cane on his hand. Father protested that it was not fair to have so many strokes as none of the other students had to do two assignments, and he had memorized one of them, so he should not have more than five strokes. The teacher agreed to give five strokes and began beating Father. However, he did not stop at five, but continued, intending to give the full ten strokes. At this point Father bolted out of the room,knocking over a desk, and went to hide in the hills. He did not go home until the next morning.
A few years later, when Father was still only fifteen years old, he became a teacher himself for a short period, and the teacher who had despised him before asked Father to teach his son.
Following traditional practices, Father’s family arranged a marriage for him when he was still quite young. However, he felt no attraction to his intended bride and refused to marry her. Instead he joined the air force at the age of sixteen and became a pilot. The military was willing to accept such young men because in 1950 the Nationalists, who had recently been driven off the mainland to Taiwan, were expected to launch a counterattack at any time.
However, his father did not want his son in the military, and soon he was back in civilian life supervising the construction of the railway between Nanping and Xiamen. An idealist, Father was admitted to the Chinese Communist Party at the age of only twenty-four, which was considered an unusual honor. In that year he organized workers to build the furniture factory of which he was the general manager for the rest of his life.Even when he was very ill and unable to go to his office, his employees came to him to ask for instructions.
Tu Chuantan was greatly respected by everyone. He never tried to enrich himself through his business; he always looked after his employees. His assistant for twenty years, Mr. Dong, said that he felt lost without him because there was no one else whom he admired like Tu Chuantan.
Father told us that it was in his factory that he met Xu Jianhua, Lua’s mother, who was working in the accounting department. Yingxue asked if Mother was beautiful. Father smiled and said that she was. Actually, there were many other girls who were more beautiful. There were hundreds of employees working in his factory, and as a handsome young man with good prospects he had many choices.
While still a girl, Xu Jianhua was sent to live in Zhejiang Province with the wealthy family of a boy whom her parents had arranged for her to marry. Her parents then went back to Malaysia. She became very close to her mother-in-law, who raised her like her own daughter, but she did not want to marry the boy. The mother-in-law could not bear to loose Jianhua in marriage to another family, so she begged Jianhua to marry her son and said she would kill herself if she refused. She reluctantly married him and had one son named Weixiong. However, her husband mistreated her. Finally, Jianhua and her mother-in-law decided to run away together to Fuzhou, taking the baby boy with them.
It was in Fuzhou that Father met Jianhua, and he was attracted to her qualities of character and intellect. He took upon himself the responsibility of caring for her, the young son, and the mother-in-law, who was ill. He proposed to Jianhua in a poem that he wrote for her, and she replied with a poem to him.
They all traveled to Putian to settle matters with the family so that she could remarry. Her in-laws were very angry,especially over the loss of face that they suffered by her running away from them, and they accused Father of “stealing” her. This scandal resulted in Father being expelled from the Communist Party for a while.
In the late 1960s, during the Cultural Revolution, everything was turned upside-down. The times were very dangerous. A group of Red Guards in Nanping accused another group in Fuzhou of not being loyal to Chairman Mao Zedong, and there was fighting that resulted in some fatalities. It was during this time of turmoil that Father was expelled from the Party for the second time.
One day an angry group of people from the factory came to the house to accuse Father of being a counter-revolutionary. Perhaps because of his dignified composure they did not lay a hand on him. That night he fled to Fuzhou and was not able to return home for some time. His daughter, Yingxue, who was a skinny little girl at that time, remembers that she wished that she was big so that she could punch those intruders and drive them out.
It was during this period that her parents took Lua to stay with some relatives in the countryside. She was only about three years old when this happened, but she still remembers vividly how Father gave her ten cents, which was more than she had ever had before. Then the family rode away while she ran after them crying.
When Lua returned from the countryside she was so tanned that the other children teased her, calling her a “black cat”. Although she was not the oldest, Father gave her more chores than the other daughters. She sometimes went fishing on the river with her father in the evening after he had been working all day. On these occasions, in spite of having a bad leg and back, he carried a heavy car battery that he would use to stun the fish and catch them to supplement the family’s meager diet.
The Last Days
Since the doctors said that Father’s cancer was inoperable, we knew that he did not have long to live. The daughters,including Lua and me, went to buy the burial clothes that would be needed.Since Father was from Fuzhou, he would be buried according to the Fuzhou tradition, not the local Nanping tradition. There was a cap and a pair of cloth shoes with five jackets and five trousers. The innermost clothing is white, and the other suits are of blue, brown, or gray. Two of the suits have both an inner and outer layer so that the entire set, all of which must be worn,consists of seven layers. The number of layers is significant because even numbers,which are considered luckier than odd numbers, are not appropriate for a funeral.
Lua and I returned to Macau after the first week of July to finish some business. Father’s condition deteriorated quickly. By July 15 he was too weak to speak, so he wrote a single character on a note before fainting: Yue [moon], indicating that he wanted to see his daughter Yingyue. Later he revived a little and wrote one more character: Feng [peak],which is the last character of the Chinese name by which he has known me since he first met me. The family phoned us that morning to say that it was urgent for us to go to see Father, so we got tickets to fly back to Fuzhou where Yingping’s husband Zhao would meet us to drive to Nanping.
Shortly before we left for the airport in Macau, another call came from her younger sister Yingping. I asked Lua, “Is it worse?” She replied, “It’s worse.” In fact, her father had just died, but she could not bear to say it.
At sunset we arrived at the family home in Nanping. Candles and incense were burning on the verandah outside Father’s room. Loud funeral music was playing from a stereo. The bed and chairs had been removed, and a blue curtain concealed the rear part of the bedroom. A table in front of the curtain served as a makeshift altar. On it were five dishes, each with three fruits, as well as two candles and a censer with joss sticks. Black Chinese characters on strips of white paper flanked a photograph of Father in the center of the table. It was not until I saw all of this that I realized with a sinking heart that we had arrived too late to comfort Father one last time.
I went behind the curtain from where I could hear Lua sobbing. Father’s body was laid out on a wooden frame already dressed by the daughters in the seven layers of funeral clothes that we had bought less than two weeks before. His head was resting on bundles of imitation paper money, and a thin square of paper covered his face. Since the weather was hot, blocks of ice had been placed underneath the body, making the floor of the room very slippery. With heavy hearts each member of the family kowtowed before the altar, kneeling and bowing the head to the floor three times while holding a lit joss stick.
At 8:00 p.m. the descendants went to the street to burn some gold and silver paper money for Father. Later that evening I went alone to Father’s room to express some private anguish and to read some Bahá’í prayers for Father’s soul. The daughters kept a vigil in the room throughout the night to keep the incense burning.
Many relatives and friends had arrived already, and by the time of the funeral two days later there were around fifty guests staying in the large three-story house, cooking, eating, drinking, and talking. Perhaps two hundred people came to pay their respects. The traditional gift on such an occasion is a blanket or bedspread. Before long there were dozens of them hung from the clothesline in the verandah outside Father’s room or piled up in other rooms. Other people brought gifts of cash in small red envelopes. All of these gifts were recorded by funeral assistants who posted red paper ribbons on the wall with the name of each donor and the amount given.
On the second day I went to the mortuary with the daughters to make arrangements for the funeral the next day. We borrowed several large wreaths of colored paper flowers to be placed in front of the house. On each wreath were hung strips of white paper with the names in black characters of the family members who were sending it as a gift of condolence. We also purchased an urn in the shape of a vase with a lid carved from a single gray stone to contain the ashes. Coffins are traditional, but cremation is required by law in Nanping.
In the evening we put on white sackcloth jackets and caps for a solemn ceremony in Father’s room. The more distant relatives used only the sackcloth cap, not the jacket. The grandsons in the male line wore yellow jackets and caps. The man officiating read the announcement of death, hundreds of copies of which had been printed on bright pink paper. This contains the names of all the descendants of Tu Chuantan, but not the name of his wife or anyone else from his or previous generations. The names are listed in conformity with protocol: first the sons, then the daughters, followed in order by the daughters-in-law, the grandchildren in the male line, the sons-in-law, the nephews, the nieces, and finally the grandchildren not in the male line. Because Father had given me the new name Tu Jiahui before he died, my name was inserted by hand in the first column just after that of his natural son Tu Jialong. The man officiating read the name of each person, whereupon he or she came forward to kowtow at the altar. Mother did not want to be left out and asked, “And me?” so she also had a turn. The sons and grandsons in the male line each held a stick decorated with paper—red for the sons, red and yellow for the grandsons. The latter category included only Tu Jialong’s son Tu Congqi and my stepson ”Thomas” Zhixing. Although Thomas has the surname Yao [Io in Cantonese], he was treated as an honorary descendent in the male line. On the announcement his name was given as Lei Zhixing, using my former Chinese surname. On this day also I went back to Father’s room later for a private ceremony to read Bahá’í prayers.
The Funeral
The day of the funeral is one that I shall never forget. Early in the morning two brass bands arrived and took turns playing dirges. Ten motorcycles and more than twenty cars and busses gathered to form the funeral procession. With Jialong at the head, the body was carried out and placed in the baggage compartment of a bus to the accompaniment of much wailing and bowing. The funeral procession made its way slowly through the city of Nanping to the mortuary. About a dozen large multicolored paper flower wreaths were carried on the cars from home to the mortuary. When the bus crossed the river, Lua said, “Now we are crossing the river, Father.” This simple act substituted for a more elaborate traditional ceremony (which was not performed) in which the spirit tablet of the departed is carried over the“Bridge of Sighs.” The family insisted that Mother stay at home, which seemed like a bad idea to me. Later, when I saw the funeral, I understood why they did not want her to go.
At the mortuary we stood in a large hall where the interminable list of the names of all the mourners was read. This was followed by a glowing eulogy from the Director of Light Industry. Then Lua, representing the family, tearfully read an emotional eulogy to her father.
After this we went into the next room where Father’s body was laid under a transparent plastic cover. The family received the greetings of the guests as they walked around the body. At this point all but the immediate family and a few others left. Then with Tu Jialong again at the head, the body was carried through an opening into another room where there was a pair of large ovens, each with a mechanism for sliding a body in.Father’s body was placed on one of these as the wailing began again with renewed vigor. I was startled to realize that we were in the crematorium and thought to myself, “They are not really going to do this while we watch, are they?”
The altar with Father’s photograph was set next to the door of the oven, and we performed another series of kowtows. Then we all knelt down near the mechanism. Suddenly the door of the oven was raised and the body quickly inserted as a great cloud of black smoke flew out of the oven and up through the hole in the ceiling. The daughters ritually splashed water onto an umbrella. A couple of the women tried to throw themselves forward as men restrained them. This scene was so emotional that even Jialong, who had remained stoic throughout the funeral, could not maintain his composure.
The effect of this catharsis was dramatic.The crying stopped almost immediately after the body disappeared into the oven.Everyone removed the sackcloth and put on a crimson sash—worn over the shoulder by family members, around the waist by others—and waited calmly under a shade tree for the cremation to finish.
Some of us went to the mausoleum where the urns are stored to select a vacant niche. Next to the north wall, space number 1038 was available and was chosen for the lucky sound of the number. I brushed the dust out and folded my sash to line the bottom of the dismal-looking wooden slot.
When we returned to the crematorium, the bones had already been spread out on the floor to cool. The mortician remarked that they were unusually white. The bones continued to make little crackling noises like hot coals. The attendant swept up the bones and put them into the stone urn that we had purchased the day before, using an iron rod to crush them into the bottom so that all would fit. The bones of the skull and jaw were placed carefully on top, uncrushed, with two dried sea horses, several bunches of colored thread, and some oil. After the lid of the urn was cemented into place, Jialong carried it to a garden where we performed more kowtows and burned more incense and paper money. Finally he carried the urn up to the mausoleum and placed it carefully into its niche to await the day when a more permanent resting place is chosen.
On the evening of the funeral more than 130 guests attended a twelve-course funeral banquet. The funeral assistants distributed red envelopes to all of the guests, which Lua had stuffed with 50 yuan each. This was to give everyone good luck after the bad luck of the funeral. The sons and daughters went around to each of the eleven tables to drink a toast and thank them for coming.
Remembering Father
In the following days we burned paper money for Father each morning. Father’s older brother, respected as the patriarch of the family, advised Mother to sleep the evening after the funeral in the bed that she and Father had used to overcome any fears she might have. It had been aired in the sun for three days, and only the mattress was discarded. The uncle also said that it was not necessary for the descendants to fulfill the traditional seven days of mourning because Mother was still alive and the memory that we cherished of Father in our hearts was more meaningful than the outward forms of rituals. Mother was eager for us to travel to her hometown of Putian for a visit to the miraculous shrine of the goddess Mazu and to her relatives, many of whom were staying with us for the funeral. Nevertheless, we delayed our trip until the week was finished because the daughter-in-law, Xuelin, said that it could be unlucky and that people would say we did not show proper respect for the dead if we traveled sooner.
The expressions of love and respect for Father seemed to come not only from the people who knew him. There were also strange events in his garden. One curious sign seemed to come from the night-blooming cereus, a large,fragrant white flower that usually blooms only one night per year. Shortly before Father passed away, this cactus produced an unusual pink blossom in the daytime. After Father died, the peach tree in front of the house bloomed in the second week of September. No one had ever seen this happen before because normally it blooms six months later in the first week of March. Everyone was astonished, and they said that the tree was blooming for Father, who had planted it years before.
Seven weeks later, we returned to Nanping for the final rite: the burnt offering of more paper money and several paper houses and boats.
All of these experiences were very strange and fascinating to me. The traditional Chinese funeral of Tu Chuantan was completely different from but no less emotional than the Christian funeral of my natural father El Dean Wilson eight months before.
Tu Chuantan was one of the most selfless people I have ever known. He was a soft-spoken man with a rather high-pitched voice, but people listened attentively when he spoke because of his dignified manner and his reputation for high integrity. Although he seldom displayed his emotions, the goodness of his heart was manifested in his many acts of kindness and generosity. In these ways the essence of his character was similar to that of El Dean, though his personality was different.
It was a privilege for Lua and I to have outstanding fathers and fathers-in-law. The memory of our fathers will live in the hearts and minds of the many family and friends who had the privilege of knowing them.
In July 1998, Tu Chuantan, age 65, was very ill with cancer of the stomach that had spread to the liver. He stayed in bed all the time except when he walked to the bathroom. From time to time he was able to talk a little, and he gave me the new name “Tu Jiahui” using his own family name to indicate that I was considered to be one of his own sons. The name translates roughly as “the shining light of the Tu family”. Everyone in the family agreed that it was an excellent name for me, and I felt very grateful to receive it. It is for this reason that I refer to him now as “Father”.
A Life of Service
As Father lay on his sickbed surrounded by devoted relatives, his daughters asked about his youth, which he had seldom spoken of. A sister of his recalled that once he had run away to avoid being punished by a teacher. He laughed for the first time in days and told the story:
When he was ten or eleven years old, each day his teacher assigned a passage from classical Chinese literature for the students to memorize and explain. However, the teacher himself did not have a deep knowledge of literature, and sometimes father would correct the teacher’s interpretations of the texts. In traditional Chinese schools, the teachers expect their students simply to listen and memorize whatever the teacher says,so this teacher was quite annoyed when Father embarrassed him by showing that he knew more than the teacher. One day the teacher angrily told Father to come forward and teach the class, so he did. After that the teacher resented him even more, so he assigned Father two passages each day while the other students only had to do one. This was very difficult for him because he also had many duties helping his father, a landlord, manage his estate. He had to arise at 3:00 a.m. and study by candlelight.
One day Father was only able to memorize one complete passage and one-half of the other, though he was able to explain both of them. The teacher, who was waiting for an excuse to punish him,insisted that he must have ten strokes of the cane on his hand. Father protested that it was not fair to have so many strokes as none of the other students had to do two assignments, and he had memorized one of them, so he should not have more than five strokes. The teacher agreed to give five strokes and began beating Father. However, he did not stop at five, but continued, intending to give the full ten strokes. At this point Father bolted out of the room,knocking over a desk, and went to hide in the hills. He did not go home until the next morning.
A few years later, when Father was still only fifteen years old, he became a teacher himself for a short period, and the teacher who had despised him before asked Father to teach his son.
Following traditional practices, Father’s family arranged a marriage for him when he was still quite young. However, he felt no attraction to his intended bride and refused to marry her. Instead he joined the air force at the age of sixteen and became a pilot. The military was willing to accept such young men because in 1950 the Nationalists, who had recently been driven off the mainland to Taiwan, were expected to launch a counterattack at any time.
However, his father did not want his son in the military, and soon he was back in civilian life supervising the construction of the railway between Nanping and Xiamen. An idealist, Father was admitted to the Chinese Communist Party at the age of only twenty-four, which was considered an unusual honor. In that year he organized workers to build the furniture factory of which he was the general manager for the rest of his life.Even when he was very ill and unable to go to his office, his employees came to him to ask for instructions.
Tu Chuantan was greatly respected by everyone. He never tried to enrich himself through his business; he always looked after his employees. His assistant for twenty years, Mr. Dong, said that he felt lost without him because there was no one else whom he admired like Tu Chuantan.
Father told us that it was in his factory that he met Xu Jianhua, Lua’s mother, who was working in the accounting department. Yingxue asked if Mother was beautiful. Father smiled and said that she was. Actually, there were many other girls who were more beautiful. There were hundreds of employees working in his factory, and as a handsome young man with good prospects he had many choices.
While still a girl, Xu Jianhua was sent to live in Zhejiang Province with the wealthy family of a boy whom her parents had arranged for her to marry. Her parents then went back to Malaysia. She became very close to her mother-in-law, who raised her like her own daughter, but she did not want to marry the boy. The mother-in-law could not bear to loose Jianhua in marriage to another family, so she begged Jianhua to marry her son and said she would kill herself if she refused. She reluctantly married him and had one son named Weixiong. However, her husband mistreated her. Finally, Jianhua and her mother-in-law decided to run away together to Fuzhou, taking the baby boy with them.
It was in Fuzhou that Father met Jianhua, and he was attracted to her qualities of character and intellect. He took upon himself the responsibility of caring for her, the young son, and the mother-in-law, who was ill. He proposed to Jianhua in a poem that he wrote for her, and she replied with a poem to him.
They all traveled to Putian to settle matters with the family so that she could remarry. Her in-laws were very angry,especially over the loss of face that they suffered by her running away from them, and they accused Father of “stealing” her. This scandal resulted in Father being expelled from the Communist Party for a while.
In the late 1960s, during the Cultural Revolution, everything was turned upside-down. The times were very dangerous. A group of Red Guards in Nanping accused another group in Fuzhou of not being loyal to Chairman Mao Zedong, and there was fighting that resulted in some fatalities. It was during this time of turmoil that Father was expelled from the Party for the second time.
One day an angry group of people from the factory came to the house to accuse Father of being a counter-revolutionary. Perhaps because of his dignified composure they did not lay a hand on him. That night he fled to Fuzhou and was not able to return home for some time. His daughter, Yingxue, who was a skinny little girl at that time, remembers that she wished that she was big so that she could punch those intruders and drive them out.
It was during this period that her parents took Lua to stay with some relatives in the countryside. She was only about three years old when this happened, but she still remembers vividly how Father gave her ten cents, which was more than she had ever had before. Then the family rode away while she ran after them crying.
When Lua returned from the countryside she was so tanned that the other children teased her, calling her a “black cat”. Although she was not the oldest, Father gave her more chores than the other daughters. She sometimes went fishing on the river with her father in the evening after he had been working all day. On these occasions, in spite of having a bad leg and back, he carried a heavy car battery that he would use to stun the fish and catch them to supplement the family’s meager diet.
The Last Days
Since the doctors said that Father’s cancer was inoperable, we knew that he did not have long to live. The daughters,including Lua and me, went to buy the burial clothes that would be needed.Since Father was from Fuzhou, he would be buried according to the Fuzhou tradition, not the local Nanping tradition. There was a cap and a pair of cloth shoes with five jackets and five trousers. The innermost clothing is white, and the other suits are of blue, brown, or gray. Two of the suits have both an inner and outer layer so that the entire set, all of which must be worn,consists of seven layers. The number of layers is significant because even numbers,which are considered luckier than odd numbers, are not appropriate for a funeral.
Lua and I returned to Macau after the first week of July to finish some business. Father’s condition deteriorated quickly. By July 15 he was too weak to speak, so he wrote a single character on a note before fainting: Yue [moon], indicating that he wanted to see his daughter Yingyue. Later he revived a little and wrote one more character: Feng [peak],which is the last character of the Chinese name by which he has known me since he first met me. The family phoned us that morning to say that it was urgent for us to go to see Father, so we got tickets to fly back to Fuzhou where Yingping’s husband Zhao would meet us to drive to Nanping.
Shortly before we left for the airport in Macau, another call came from her younger sister Yingping. I asked Lua, “Is it worse?” She replied, “It’s worse.” In fact, her father had just died, but she could not bear to say it.
At sunset we arrived at the family home in Nanping. Candles and incense were burning on the verandah outside Father’s room. Loud funeral music was playing from a stereo. The bed and chairs had been removed, and a blue curtain concealed the rear part of the bedroom. A table in front of the curtain served as a makeshift altar. On it were five dishes, each with three fruits, as well as two candles and a censer with joss sticks. Black Chinese characters on strips of white paper flanked a photograph of Father in the center of the table. It was not until I saw all of this that I realized with a sinking heart that we had arrived too late to comfort Father one last time.
I went behind the curtain from where I could hear Lua sobbing. Father’s body was laid out on a wooden frame already dressed by the daughters in the seven layers of funeral clothes that we had bought less than two weeks before. His head was resting on bundles of imitation paper money, and a thin square of paper covered his face. Since the weather was hot, blocks of ice had been placed underneath the body, making the floor of the room very slippery. With heavy hearts each member of the family kowtowed before the altar, kneeling and bowing the head to the floor three times while holding a lit joss stick.
At 8:00 p.m. the descendants went to the street to burn some gold and silver paper money for Father. Later that evening I went alone to Father’s room to express some private anguish and to read some Bahá’í prayers for Father’s soul. The daughters kept a vigil in the room throughout the night to keep the incense burning.
Many relatives and friends had arrived already, and by the time of the funeral two days later there were around fifty guests staying in the large three-story house, cooking, eating, drinking, and talking. Perhaps two hundred people came to pay their respects. The traditional gift on such an occasion is a blanket or bedspread. Before long there were dozens of them hung from the clothesline in the verandah outside Father’s room or piled up in other rooms. Other people brought gifts of cash in small red envelopes. All of these gifts were recorded by funeral assistants who posted red paper ribbons on the wall with the name of each donor and the amount given.
On the second day I went to the mortuary with the daughters to make arrangements for the funeral the next day. We borrowed several large wreaths of colored paper flowers to be placed in front of the house. On each wreath were hung strips of white paper with the names in black characters of the family members who were sending it as a gift of condolence. We also purchased an urn in the shape of a vase with a lid carved from a single gray stone to contain the ashes. Coffins are traditional, but cremation is required by law in Nanping.
In the evening we put on white sackcloth jackets and caps for a solemn ceremony in Father’s room. The more distant relatives used only the sackcloth cap, not the jacket. The grandsons in the male line wore yellow jackets and caps. The man officiating read the announcement of death, hundreds of copies of which had been printed on bright pink paper. This contains the names of all the descendants of Tu Chuantan, but not the name of his wife or anyone else from his or previous generations. The names are listed in conformity with protocol: first the sons, then the daughters, followed in order by the daughters-in-law, the grandchildren in the male line, the sons-in-law, the nephews, the nieces, and finally the grandchildren not in the male line. Because Father had given me the new name Tu Jiahui before he died, my name was inserted by hand in the first column just after that of his natural son Tu Jialong. The man officiating read the name of each person, whereupon he or she came forward to kowtow at the altar. Mother did not want to be left out and asked, “And me?” so she also had a turn. The sons and grandsons in the male line each held a stick decorated with paper—red for the sons, red and yellow for the grandsons. The latter category included only Tu Jialong’s son Tu Congqi and my stepson ”Thomas” Zhixing. Although Thomas has the surname Yao [Io in Cantonese], he was treated as an honorary descendent in the male line. On the announcement his name was given as Lei Zhixing, using my former Chinese surname. On this day also I went back to Father’s room later for a private ceremony to read Bahá’í prayers.
The Funeral
The day of the funeral is one that I shall never forget. Early in the morning two brass bands arrived and took turns playing dirges. Ten motorcycles and more than twenty cars and busses gathered to form the funeral procession. With Jialong at the head, the body was carried out and placed in the baggage compartment of a bus to the accompaniment of much wailing and bowing. The funeral procession made its way slowly through the city of Nanping to the mortuary. About a dozen large multicolored paper flower wreaths were carried on the cars from home to the mortuary. When the bus crossed the river, Lua said, “Now we are crossing the river, Father.” This simple act substituted for a more elaborate traditional ceremony (which was not performed) in which the spirit tablet of the departed is carried over the“Bridge of Sighs.” The family insisted that Mother stay at home, which seemed like a bad idea to me. Later, when I saw the funeral, I understood why they did not want her to go.
At the mortuary we stood in a large hall where the interminable list of the names of all the mourners was read. This was followed by a glowing eulogy from the Director of Light Industry. Then Lua, representing the family, tearfully read an emotional eulogy to her father.
After this we went into the next room where Father’s body was laid under a transparent plastic cover. The family received the greetings of the guests as they walked around the body. At this point all but the immediate family and a few others left. Then with Tu Jialong again at the head, the body was carried through an opening into another room where there was a pair of large ovens, each with a mechanism for sliding a body in.Father’s body was placed on one of these as the wailing began again with renewed vigor. I was startled to realize that we were in the crematorium and thought to myself, “They are not really going to do this while we watch, are they?”
The altar with Father’s photograph was set next to the door of the oven, and we performed another series of kowtows. Then we all knelt down near the mechanism. Suddenly the door of the oven was raised and the body quickly inserted as a great cloud of black smoke flew out of the oven and up through the hole in the ceiling. The daughters ritually splashed water onto an umbrella. A couple of the women tried to throw themselves forward as men restrained them. This scene was so emotional that even Jialong, who had remained stoic throughout the funeral, could not maintain his composure.
The effect of this catharsis was dramatic.The crying stopped almost immediately after the body disappeared into the oven.Everyone removed the sackcloth and put on a crimson sash—worn over the shoulder by family members, around the waist by others—and waited calmly under a shade tree for the cremation to finish.
Some of us went to the mausoleum where the urns are stored to select a vacant niche. Next to the north wall, space number 1038 was available and was chosen for the lucky sound of the number. I brushed the dust out and folded my sash to line the bottom of the dismal-looking wooden slot.
When we returned to the crematorium, the bones had already been spread out on the floor to cool. The mortician remarked that they were unusually white. The bones continued to make little crackling noises like hot coals. The attendant swept up the bones and put them into the stone urn that we had purchased the day before, using an iron rod to crush them into the bottom so that all would fit. The bones of the skull and jaw were placed carefully on top, uncrushed, with two dried sea horses, several bunches of colored thread, and some oil. After the lid of the urn was cemented into place, Jialong carried it to a garden where we performed more kowtows and burned more incense and paper money. Finally he carried the urn up to the mausoleum and placed it carefully into its niche to await the day when a more permanent resting place is chosen.
On the evening of the funeral more than 130 guests attended a twelve-course funeral banquet. The funeral assistants distributed red envelopes to all of the guests, which Lua had stuffed with 50 yuan each. This was to give everyone good luck after the bad luck of the funeral. The sons and daughters went around to each of the eleven tables to drink a toast and thank them for coming.
Remembering Father
In the following days we burned paper money for Father each morning. Father’s older brother, respected as the patriarch of the family, advised Mother to sleep the evening after the funeral in the bed that she and Father had used to overcome any fears she might have. It had been aired in the sun for three days, and only the mattress was discarded. The uncle also said that it was not necessary for the descendants to fulfill the traditional seven days of mourning because Mother was still alive and the memory that we cherished of Father in our hearts was more meaningful than the outward forms of rituals. Mother was eager for us to travel to her hometown of Putian for a visit to the miraculous shrine of the goddess Mazu and to her relatives, many of whom were staying with us for the funeral. Nevertheless, we delayed our trip until the week was finished because the daughter-in-law, Xuelin, said that it could be unlucky and that people would say we did not show proper respect for the dead if we traveled sooner.
The expressions of love and respect for Father seemed to come not only from the people who knew him. There were also strange events in his garden. One curious sign seemed to come from the night-blooming cereus, a large,fragrant white flower that usually blooms only one night per year. Shortly before Father passed away, this cactus produced an unusual pink blossom in the daytime. After Father died, the peach tree in front of the house bloomed in the second week of September. No one had ever seen this happen before because normally it blooms six months later in the first week of March. Everyone was astonished, and they said that the tree was blooming for Father, who had planted it years before.
Seven weeks later, we returned to Nanping for the final rite: the burnt offering of more paper money and several paper houses and boats.
All of these experiences were very strange and fascinating to me. The traditional Chinese funeral of Tu Chuantan was completely different from but no less emotional than the Christian funeral of my natural father El Dean Wilson eight months before.
Tu Chuantan was one of the most selfless people I have ever known. He was a soft-spoken man with a rather high-pitched voice, but people listened attentively when he spoke because of his dignified manner and his reputation for high integrity. Although he seldom displayed his emotions, the goodness of his heart was manifested in his many acts of kindness and generosity. In these ways the essence of his character was similar to that of El Dean, though his personality was different.
It was a privilege for Lua and I to have outstanding fathers and fathers-in-law. The memory of our fathers will live in the hearts and minds of the many family and friends who had the privilege of knowing them.
Families
| Spouse | Living |
| Child | Living |
| Child | Living |
| Child | Living |
| Child | Living |
| Child | Living |
| Father | Tú Lǐhuā 凃礼花 ( - ) |
| Mother | Huáng Liúdì 黄留俤 ( - ) |
| Sibling | 凃傳坤 Tú Chuánkūn ( - ) |
| Sibling | 凃傳坦 Tú Chuántǎn ( - ) |
| Sibling | Living |
| Sibling | 凃傳奇 Tú Chuánqí ( - ) |