“Would you like to see my grandmother’s remains being exhumed?” is not the sort of question you get asked often.
But this was the proposition my wife presented one sunny Sunday morning during a trip to my in-laws’ home in Nantou County.
An opportunity to experience firsthand the “picking up the bones” (揀骨) ritual, for which the remains of an ancestor are removed from their resting place and packed into an ossuary in a second burial
(二次葬), was not to be missed.Memories of Indiana Jones movies — cavernous, snake-filled pits waiting to foil anyone foolish enough to disturb the dead — flashed through my mind.
Those images quickly evaporated, however, as we arrived at our destination, a gently sloping hill behind a temple near Nantou’s main industrial district, dotted with hundreds of graves, the long grass scorched brown by intense sunshine.
There my father-in-law and six of his siblings chatted, waiting for the master of ceremonies and the two bone collectors (who I nicknamed Burke and Hare after the infamous 19th-century Irish murderers who sold their victims’ bodies to an anatomist for dissection) to show up.
While we waited, my wife’s aunt wandered over and stuffed a hongbao, or red envelope, into my pocket to ward off bad luck, she said.
After a few minutes, the three men arrived. Following instructions to apologize to the cemetery’s residents as we stepped on their final resting places, we tiptoed our way across the graves.
The ritual of the second burial, according to Douglas Gildow, a PhD fellow in Buddhist studies at Princeton University’s Department of Religion, began so that the remains of people who died away from their ancestral home could be returned for reburial.
For many 18th-century Chinese immigrants in Taiwan, that home was China’s Fujian Province. But as they set down roots here, Gildow said, the practice developed into a general burial custom.
Many cultures in Southeast Asia still observe the same or a similar ritual, he said, adding that the body is usually left underground to decompose for between three to 12 years.
In Taiwan, the second burial usually takes place seven years after the first.
After being dug up, the bones are cleaned to remove any dirt or flesh before the skeleton is reassembled, painted with a mixture of wine and paint in a symbolic re-fleshing, and then deposited in an ossuary.
Despite the widespread observance of the annual Tomb Sweeping Day (清明節), which this year falls tomorrow, many of the Nantou graves looked as if they hadn’t been swept in decades.
And despite coming from a sizeable family, my grandmother-in-law’s grave also appeared to have been rarely visited in the 18 years since she died.
No one seemed exactly sure of what to do.
After much discussion, the tall grass was cleared from around the grave and some incense burned and prayers said. A stack of “ghost money” was also burned. We waited for the astrologically auspicious time to start digging: 9.04am.
I wondered why this reburial had taken so long.
My wife’s youngest uncle said that practical considerations played a role. His mother’s bones were being moved so she could be interred alongside her husband, who died last year aged 94. Having the couple in the same place would be more convenient for relatives to pay their respects.
A 2007 National Geographic short documentary film about second burials notes the practice is a way to consolidate ancestral remains at one site.
It was time to start digging. No sooner had Burke plunged his shovel into the reddish soil than up popped the head of an angry cobra. A sweep of the shovel later and the headless serpent’s writhing body was tossed aside onto a pile of earth.
The first thud of the shovel hitting wood came after 10 minutes of digging. Another five minutes and the coffin lid, which resembled a hollowed-out tree trunk, appeared.
Apprehension set in. I’d never even seen a dead body before. Hare grabbed a crowbar and began prying the lid off. After a few seconds of struggling he and Burke managed to lift up the heavy wooden cover and heaved it aside.
There was no wispy cloud of long-trapped spirits escaping to the heavens, just a damp, musty smell.
The contents — a surprisingly small, brown, child-size skeleton half covered in orange earth, encrusted in what looked like rust and dressed in some tattered, old-fashioned clothes — weren’t as gruesome as I’d imagined.
Burke jumped down into the coffin and began trampling all over the remains, heaving his shovel into the dirt with little thought for the integrity of the skeleton and tossing out the contents as he went.
First came the jewelry, hands attached. As with many other cultures, the Taiwanese often bury their dead with cash and jewelry for use in the “next world.” Several jade and gold bracelets, necklaces and a small quantity of coins followed, which were separated for cleaning and distribution among family members.
Next came the feet, followed by the legs and pelvis. Then Burke and Hare moved on to the arms, ribs and spine, the bones of which had to be shaken out of the clothes and picked up from the dirt and dust at the bottom of the coffin.
Last, but not least, came the skull. The spine bones were counted. All present and correct. A quick sift through the remaining soil to check that none of the skeleton’s smaller bones had been missed and that was that.
The remains were wrapped in an old cement bag that was tied up with string. Burke swung his sledgehammer into action and brought it down on the headstone and grave’s wall, cracking them (to signify there’s nobody home). The bones were sent off to the funeral home for packing into an ossuary. And that was my how I met granny.
Feb. 9 to Feb.15 Growing up in the 1980s, Pan Wen-li (潘文立) was repeatedly told in elementary school that his family could not have originated in Taipei. At the time, there was a lack of understanding of Pingpu (plains Indigenous) peoples, who had mostly assimilated to Han-Taiwanese society and had no official recognition. Students were required to list their ancestral homes then, and when Pan wrote “Taipei,” his teacher rejected it as impossible. His father, an elder of the Ketagalan-founded Independence Presbyterian Church in Xinbeitou (自立長老會新北投教會), insisted that their family had always lived in the area. But under postwar
In 2012, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) heroically seized residences belonging to the family of former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), “purchased with the proceeds of alleged bribes,” the DOJ announcement said. “Alleged” was enough. Strangely, the DOJ remains unmoved by the any of the extensive illegality of the two Leninist authoritarian parties that held power in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and Taiwan. If only Chen had run a one-party state that imprisoned, tortured and murdered its opponents, his property would have been completely safe from DOJ action. I must also note two things in the interests of completeness.
Taiwan is especially vulnerable to climate change. The surrounding seas are rising at twice the global rate, extreme heat is becoming a serious problem in the country’s cities, and typhoons are growing less frequent (resulting in droughts) but more destructive. Yet young Taiwanese, according to interviewees who often discuss such issues with this demographic, seldom show signs of climate anxiety, despite their teachers being convinced that humanity has a great deal to worry about. Climate anxiety or eco-anxiety isn’t a psychological disorder recognized by diagnostic manuals, but that doesn’t make it any less real to those who have a chronic and
When Bilahari Kausikan defines Singapore as a small country “whose ability to influence events outside its borders is always limited but never completely non-existent,” we wish we could say the same about Taiwan. In a little book called The Myth of the Asian Century, he demolishes a number of preconceived ideas that shackle Taiwan’s self-confidence in its own agency. Kausikan worked for almost 40 years at Singapore’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, reaching the position of permanent secretary: saying that he knows what he is talking about is an understatement. He was in charge of foreign affairs in a pivotal place in
RSS