I stare at a tiny burn mark on my left hand as I write this. It is small and shallow enough to not leave any scars, but looking at it now reminds me of a lesson I’ll never forget.
It happened just this afternoon. We were all at the cemetery — my father, grandfather, uncles, aunties and their kids. There were so many people, I couldn’t even address every one of them confidently. My father had to help me out by prompting me from time to time: this is lao chek; that is Shawn, not Mike.
It was a yearly affair, and a family tradition for as long as I can remember. Every year, around the third weekend of March (on the Western calendar), we’d buy lots of food and paper offerings and book a bus to the Choa Chu Kang Cemetery. This is to commemorate Qīngmíng Jié, the “tomb-sweeping” day in the Chinese tradition. The highlight of the day was always the ham (cockles), freshly boiled and topped off with grandma’s delicious garlic chilli paste, which I relished.
This particular year, we didn’t enjoy our ham in the cemetery as we usually did. The skies were overcast when we reached and the occasional raindrop was a constant reminder that we had to leave soon. We went about our routine faster than usual: laying out of the food around great-grandma and great-grandpa’s graves, lighting the joss sticks and candles, and burning the paper offerings.
Now this is the one part I’m always afraid of: the offering of the joss sticks. We take turns paying our respects according to seniority in the family, so by the time my turn comes, the urn is always filled with burning joss sticks fanned out at all angles, with red-hot ashes teetering at the tips, threatening to crumble and fall at any moment.
I think it is obvious by now how I came to have the burn mark on my left hand. It is inevitable. When I stick out my hand to try squeeze the joss stick into the overflowing urn, the ashes from the surrounding joss sticks fall, scalding me.
Year after year it happens this way. Ah well, I thought, I can’t do anything about it. The urn may be full but I still need to fit my joss stick in. When I do that, ashes inevitably fall and burn my hand. It cannot be helped though - I can neither request for the elders to let me go first when the urn is completely empty, nor make my offering only when all the other joss sticks have finished burning.
So year after year, I get burned. I know I will, yet there’s nothing I can do about it.
This is until I saw what Han, my uncle, did this year. He is three years my senior but took his turn at great-grandma’s after me as he had just walked over from great-grandpa’s.
He took a lighted joss stick, prayed three times respectfully, and simply used it to tap the outer joss sticks on the right side of the urn. The ashes flaked off easily and he inserted his joss stick serenely, without incident.
