The question turns up in the fortnight before Qingming, always in the same shape. The grave is in Fujian, or Guangdong, or outside Shanghai. The person asking lives in Sydney and can’t get the leave, or can’t face the April airfares. What do I do at home?
In China it isn’t a question. You get in a car.
Two dates are involved, for anyone who didn’t grow up with them. Qingming, early April, is the day families sweep the graves. The seventh lunar month, Ghost Month in English, carries its own observance around the fifteenth.
Making the offering from a distance
An old practice in its own right, not something the diaspora improvised. You can’t reach the grave, so you set up a temporary place where you live and go through the sequence there.
Four things need fixing: the time, the place, the direction, the names.
The time follows the lunar calendar, Qingming by the solar term and the other by the seventh month. Pick an hour and keep it. The rest of the family has to know which afternoon to turn up, and a date that drifts each year quietly becomes a date nobody attends. The place need not be a shrine. A clean table in the living room, wiped down, a cloth over it, cleared away afterwards. Not in a bedroom, not facing a toilet door, not under a beam. I keep those three for what they amount to: that corner does nothing else that day.
Direction is the geographic one. Face where the person is actually buried. Draw a line on a phone map from where you live to the county the grave is in, read the bearing off it, and set the table to that angle. No compass. If the grave has been moved, or the ashes ended up somewhere other than the family plot, go by where the person is now rather than where the plot is. People ask whether the trigram positions have to be turned around first down here. They don’t. What flips in the southern hemisphere is the Later Heaven placement used for reading a house, and a bearing to a real grave is not that layer.
Names last, and this is the part I nag about. Full name in characters, both dates, relationship to you; the commonest break in the line I see overseas is a second generation that cannot write their grandfather’s name.
Unrelated, while I’m on it: the plastic. People bring supermarket fruit in the punnet and set the whole thing down, cling film and barcode still on it. Take it out of the packaging.
Whether you need a tablet
Most people don’t need a permanent one.
A paper tablet does the work: a plain sheet with the form of address, surname and given name set out properly, put up for the occasion and afterwards put away or burned according to the rite. Two or three uses a year is a lot more realistic than a lacquered wooden tablet standing in an apartment indefinitely.
A permanent tablet assumes a clan hall, somebody maintaining it, somebody taking it over. Work out what happens when you move before you install one.
Incense and the smoke alarm
Where to put the altar is what gets asked. What actually stops people is the smoke alarm. Australian dwellings must have them, apartments included. Within a unit the alarms are interconnected, so one going off sounds the whole flat. Some buildings also run the unit detectors back to a monitored panel, and that is the arrangement that empties the building and gets a truck dispatched. Ask your strata which one you are in. Ionisation alarms react quickly to flaming fire; photoelectric alarms react to smouldering smoke, which is what a stick of incense produces. Ten minutes of a joss stick in a closed apartment and the alarm does the job it was installed to do. At which point somebody tapes a bag over the detector or pulls the battery. Don’t. Removing or covering a residential smoke alarm is an offence in most states, the exposure is heavier in a rental, and a false call-out on a monitored system can carry a charge. Offerings were never only incense: clean water, tea, seasonal fruit, a bowl of rice, flowers, all standard. If you want incense, use short sticks under the rangehood with the extraction on high, and pinch them out rather than letting them burn down. Electric incense is acceptable, and the LED ones flicker, which looks silly, so buy the sort that doesn’t.
Not on the balcony either. Once the fire danger rating climbs through a Sydney summer an open flame outdoors is a problem on its own terms, and balconies down one face of a building are effectively continuous.
What burial in Australia actually looks like
Burial space in Sydney has been tight for years: expensive, pushed further out, new cemeteries slow to open. Most people here are cremated now, Chinese families included, even where the parent had said they wanted to go into the ground. Check one thing before signing. In New South Wales an interment right is not automatically perpetual: some cemeteries sell a perpetual right, some a renewable one for a fixed term, and if it is the second sort, who renews it and at what cost sits in the contract. Other states write it their own way. The instinct that buying a plot means owning that ground for good has to be checked against the paperwork. That belongs to the cemetery and a solicitor, not to me, but I tell everyone who asks to go and read it.
After a cremation the usual options are a niche in a columbarium, a plaque on a memorial wall, a memorial garden, or the ashes coming home. Most of the apparatus built around burial doesn’t survive the trip. I don’t encourage anyone to fake it.
Ashes back, or ashes here
This is the question I answer worst.
Taking them back satisfies the custom of the village. Keeping them here has one blunt advantage: the descendants will actually go. A child raised in Sydney can manage a local cemetery once a year. Fujian once a year is not going to happen. Some families split them, part back and part here; opinions in my own tradition differ enough there that I have no settled answer, so I leave it with the family. If ashes are leaving the country, check the export and airline rules well ahead.
Does the date move down here
Asked most years: the seasons run the other way in Australia, so shouldn’t Qingming move to October?
No. The layer that gets recalculated against the local season is date selection, the waxing and waning of the five phases through the year, which I have written about elsewhere. Festival dates aren’t in that layer. Qingming and the seventh month are an agreement among living people about which day everyone shows up, and the relatives in China are doing it on the same day.
Expect it to feel wrong for a while. Qingming here is autumn. Early April, the mornings have gone cool and the afternoons haven’t, and the trees hold their leaves until May or June. The seventh month lands in August or September, the tail of winter. The wet green cold of Qingming in southern China isn’t available here, and for a few years the name of the season and the feel of the day don’t line up.
The ninth month is not for this
The first to ninth of the ninth lunar month is the Nine Emperor Gods festival, and across those nine days I teach the Northern Dipper Scripture. That one is fixed in my year. People assume it is another ancestor occasion and send me names for it. It isn’t: those nine days concern the natal star and the extension of life, a different piece of work on a different date.
What I do, and what I won’t
Blessing rites and rites for the dead are ordinary Zhengyi work. It’s the trade. If a family wants a rite performed on their behalf I can do that, and beforehand I tell you what each section is: how the documents are written, how the altar is set, what hour it starts.
Plainly: I promise no supernatural outcome. What a rite cannot do, it cannot do. The weight of the occasion sits mostly with the living: a formal setting with a fixed shape, where the things nobody managed to say get said and the people who should be there are in the room.
One more thing. If someone in the family still isn’t sleeping months after a death, or isn’t coming out of it, that is one for a doctor, and a rite won’t touch it. An Australian GP can write a Mental Health Treatment Plan, and the psychologist referral attracts a Medicare rebate. Lifeline is 13 11 14.
Before Qingming and through the seventh month the phone runs hot with that same question. You can’t get back, so do it at home, in order. Details, or to have a rite performed: iching@dao.today.