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The dead travel in globalized age
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“‘TIL death do us part,” that age-old marriage vow, has always sounded a little, well, non-committal to Confucian ears. In Vietnam, for instance, where I come from, death is not the end of relationships, it only deepens them.
A traditional Vietnamese worships his ancestors. He talks daily to ghosts. Every morning, every night, he lights incense and offers food and drinks to the spirit of his ancestors, prays for protection and asks for advice.
If he claims to have seen his grandfather’s ghost the night before, few would question him. More likely they would help decipher the meaning of the visitation.
Though we have spent 38 years now in California, my family and I are still trying to live out some of these Confucian ideals, especially when it comes to the business of burials. This was most evident when we buried our grandparents on my mother’s side in San Jose.
My grandfather died and was buried in Saigon in 1972. My grandmother, on the other hand, died a few years at the age of 98 in Silicon Valley. If grandma had a single wish, it was to be buried side by side with her beloved husband.
Unlike most in their generation, my grandparents’ marriage was a love match. One of my favorite childhood memories is of sitting on a cool tiled balcony of their villa with my cousins and siblings during the Autumn Moon festival in Saigon. Grandpa and grandma would recite their favorite poems to one another as they drank tea.
Confucian moment
Alas, grandma’s wish to be buried with her husband was interrupted when the war ended and we had to flee. Grandma was adamant about staying — “Who will attend your grandfather’s grave if I leave,” she kept asking. In perhaps the most Confucian moment of their lives, my mother, uncles and aunts all got down on their knees and begged her to come along.
Grandma’s love of the living finally won out over her yearning for the dead. At the last hour, before the airport closed, she grabbed her purse and a few dresses and stuffed them in a plastic bag and came along with her children to America.
The years here for my grandmother were years of longing and regret. She regretted leaving Vietnam, and she missed the Sunday rituals of tending to her husband’s grave. Exile for her was a spiritual amputation. Worse, in America, grandma no longer dreamed of grandpa the way she did when she was living in Vietnam.
When the Cold War ended, we sent a cousin in California to Vietnam, and he managed to bring grandpa’s urn to the US. In a Buddhist temple in Sacramento, grandpa’s urn sat, waiting for my grandmother to live out the rest of her days.
When she finally died, their two urns sat on a Buddhist altar amid wafting incense smoke and chanting monks in San Jose. At the cemetery pulsing with birdsongs where we buried them, we cried. But we were inwardly glad, too. Grandpa and Grandma were united at last, and the living had performed their filial duties.
Andrew Lam is an editor with New America Media and the author of three books, “Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora,” “East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres,” and his latest, “Birds of Paradise Lost,” a collection of short stories about Vietnamese refugees struggling to rebuild their lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.
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