The Vacuum

By Yan Zi

A friend of mine went back to China for a few days to attend his mother's funeral. After his return it took him several days to get over from his mental and physical exhaustion.

It has been twenty years since China's economic reforms. Except for the political figures who still make TV headlines, ordinary people no longer follow revolutionary rituals in their funerals. Revolutionary style funeral ceremonies are pretty rare these days.

My friend told me that his family had never held a funeral and they did not know what protocols to follow. So they took the advise of a village woman whom they had hired as a house-help.

So when city folks ran out of ideas about how to conduct a funeral it was the village woman, who had been quietly doing all the chores, who suddenly appeared in the spotlight. She was happy to make suggestions and instructions based on what she had seen in her village.

Apparently the twenty years of education in revolutionary historic materialism and dialectics had never talked about human souls. Finding themselves caught in this vacuum, the muddle-headed survivors desperately needed some practical advice and without asking questions or carrying out any research, they simply accepted the rituals suggested to them by a village woman.

Our revolutionary baptism has already lasted two or three generations and all the revolutionaries of the past are now buried in their tombs. I asked a friend of mine who practices ancestor worship whether he really believed that dead people become angels. He replied off-handedly, "I just follow the rules."

In seems that, besides food and clothing, we are all searching for some ideological realities in our lives. As a result, we actively defend certain traditions, be they old-fashioned communism, or the new-fashioned accumulation of wealth, or even modern feudalism. We pay far too much attention to formality and packaging, much less to essence.

Perhaps, when we have lost interest in self-indulgence and extravagance, or when we are no longer content with the world's vanities, or when we no longer seek personal reassurance in empty chatter, then we may be able to comprehend the real essence of all things.

The author came from Beijing. He earned two Masters' degrees from Illinois State University. He now lives in Hong Kong.