Bereaved parents yesterday held a posthumous ghost wedding in Greater Taichung’s Dongshih District (東勢) for their beloved daughter and son, a young couple killed last week by a mudslide caused by torrential rain.
With a Chinese love song playing in the background, the parents of Su Cheng-hung (蘇正紘) and Teng Hsin-ning (鄧心寧) bore witness to the couple’s love in a wedding ceremony held at a mortuary designed to bring their spirits together for eternity.
Su, a conscientious forest ranger at the Dongshih Forest District Office, was at work at Chiayang forestry station on Monday last week, where Teng was visiting him, when a landslide caused by heavy rains in the mountains of Lishan (梨山) smashed into the station and buried them.
Photo: Hsieh Feng-chiu, Taipei Times
Despite being rushed to a hospital, the couple were soon pronounced dead.
Prior to the marriage ceremony, Su’s family asked the forest district office to issue an “order of task release,” which was burned and passed on to Su in the afterlife, telling him to “stand down” and go home.
The posthumous wedding ceremony, presided over by Forestry Bureau director-general Lee Tao-sheng (李桃生) and officiated by the fathers of the deceased was almost identical to a normal wedding.
A range of traditional items were prepared, including gift money, 16 boxes of wedding cakes, golden necklaces and new clothes.
The main difference with a ghost wedding was that a paper mache mansion is burned as a gift to the couple as was a composite -wedding -photograph made by Su’s colleagues.
Holding back their tears, Su’s parents, Su Ming-hsien (蘇明賢) and Ho Yu-tzu (何佑慈), said they had long regarded Teng as their daughter-in-law.
“They were both born on 16th day of the fourth month of the lunar calendar, with [Su] Cheng-hung being three years older than [Teng.] We hope that they follow hand-in-hand in the footsteps of Buddha and live happily ever after in heaven,” they said.
Su Cheng-hung’s high school and college classmate, Hsieh Kuang-pu (謝光普), also addressed the ceremony and shared with the attendees how the couple met and fell in love.
“They met at school because of their passion for sports. They started a long-distance relationship after [Su] Cheng-hung graduated from college and started his military service. Only after [Teng] Hsin-ning was admitted to a postgraduate program at National Chung Hsing University did they get to spend more time together,’’ Hsieh said.
“I hope they have a wonderful life in the next world,” he said.
Translated by Stacy Hsu, Staff Writer
GOOD DIPLOMACY: The KMT has maintained close contact with representative offices in Taiwan and had extended an invitation to Russia as well, the KMT said The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) would “appropriately handle” the fallout from an invitation it had extended to Russia’s representative to Taipei to attend its international banquet last month, KMT Chairman Eric Chu (朱立倫) said yesterday. US and EU representatives in Taiwan boycotted the event, and only later agreed to attend after the KMT rescinded its invitation to the Russian representative. The KMT has maintained long-term close contact with all representative offices and embassies in Taiwan, and had extended the invitation as a practice of good diplomacy, Chu said. “Some EU countries have expressed their opinions of Russia, and the KMT respects that,” he
An increase in Taiwanese boats using China-made automatic identification systems (AIS) could confuse coast guards patrolling waters off Taiwan’s southwest coast and become a loophole in the national security system, sources familiar with the matter said yesterday. Taiwan ADIZ, a Facebook page created by enthusiasts who monitor Chinese military activities in airspace and waters off Taiwan’s southwest coast, on Saturday identified what seemed to be a Chinese cargo container ship near Penghu County. The Coast Guard Administration went to the location after receiving the tip and found that it was a Taiwanese yacht, which had a Chinese AIS installed. Similar instances had also
CHANGES: After-school tutoring periods, extracurricular activities during vacations or after-school study periods must not be used to teach new material, the ministry said The Ministry of Education yesterday announced new rules that would ban giving tests to most elementary and junior-high school students during morning study and afternoon rest periods. The amendments to regulations governing public education at elementary schools and junior high schools are to be implemented on Aug. 1. The revised rules stipulate that schools are forbidden to use after-school tutoring periods, extracurricular activities during summer or winter vacation or after-school study periods to teach new course material. In addition, schools would be prohibited from giving tests or exams to students in grades one to eight during morning study and afternoon break periods, the
AMENDMENT: Contact with certain individuals in China, Hong Kong and Macau must be reported, and failure to comply could result in a prison sentence, the proposal stated The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) yesterday voted against a proposed bill by Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) lawmakers that would require elected officials to seek approval before visiting China. DPP Legislator Puma Shen’s (沈伯洋) proposed amendments to the Act Governing Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (臺灣地區與大陸地區人民關係條例), stipulate that contact with certain individuals in China, Hong Kong and Macau should be reported, while failure to comply would be punishable by prison sentences of up to three years, alongside a fine of NT$10 million (US$309,041). Fifty-six voted with the TPP in opposition