Nov 13 2008
Bamboo Baskets on Grave Stones
I was sightseeing in Anhui, China, in 2005. One day, our tour passed by a graveyard and we saw some large bamboo baskets left upside down, covering the grave stone. It was a strange site. I asked Li, our guide, about those bamboo baskets.
“This is a tradition of this town.”
“But do the baskets mean anything.”
“Well, the story goes like this. Centuries ago, this town was hit hard by a famine. Every family had to struggle for food. The bread-winner of one such family was a man in his thirties. He and his wife had a few young children to feed. There was also his old and frail father, hard on walking from a stroke. He had a plan to make life easier for the rest of the family. He made a bamboo basket big enough to sit his father in it. One fine day when the wind blew, he offered to take his father to the hills for an outing to see the chrysanthemums. He and his wife carried the old man in the big bamboo basket into the hills. They placed him beneath the tree and quietly slipped away and made their way home. When they got home, their six year old child was surprised to see them return without grandpa. ‘Where’s grandpa?’ ‘Sorry, son, we had left him in the hills. We don’t have enough food for all of us. Grandpa is so ill anyway. He wouldn’t live long even if we try our best to feed him.’ His son thought for a while and appeared to understand the situation. The young boy then spoke again, ‘at least, we should go and retrieve the basket. We might need it to carry you to the hills one day.’ The man was petrified by his son’s suggestion. He and his wife hurried back to look for his father. It was too late. The old man had been bitten by a poisonous snake and had just died in the basket under the tree. In tears he buried his father and left the basket to shade the land where the old man laid. The basket shading the buried parent subsequently became a tradition of the town.”
The story kept going round my head for a few minutes. I sat beside the graveyard and pondered about the basket and the famine. Then I noticed that a few workers were collecting the baskets from the grave stones. I was perplexed by what they did and asked them why they were taking the shade away from the dead.
“What about this tradition after the famine?”
They didn’t seem to know what I was talking about. “What famine? We use the baskets to shield the newly painted grave stones from the insects and the rain. What did you hear?”
I went up to Li to ask him about the lie and found him sitting by the graveyard. He was staring into the distant hills with a cigarette between his fingers. However, from the inch-long ash tangling on his cigarette butt, I could see he was not smoking. He seemed to be miles away.
My approaching footsteps startled him and brought him back. “Let’s go. We aren’t that interested in grave stones, are we?”
