When we were in Hong Kong visiting the many Buddhist temples there, I had a flashback of my childhood. Not because we were Buddhists, but because as a Chinese immigrant child, you experience a lot of the cultural Buddhist stuff that is hard to distinguish between religion and tradition. As we walked up the steps in one Buddhist temple, we saw different Chinese Buddhist believers in the middle of the temple grounds on their knees, praying, shaking a cylinder can of incense sticks, holding incense sticks and ke-tou-ing or bowing reverently with their heads touching the ground. These are all things I mostly knew of, because of my Chinese upbringing.
I remember when I was about 6 or 7, my mom told me a God was coming to live in our home. She kept talking about this Shen (Chinese word for God!) who was going to come and bless our lives, bless my Dad's business dealings, and help us to be happier. We would be able to pray to him daily, and pray for our ancestors too. Our entire home had to be clean for when this God would arrive, including our dump room which usually had big black gardening trash bags of clean clothes and paperwork stashed away so the rest of our home appeared completely neat and orderly while this room housed all the junk. It was a big feat to get ready for the God to come. Only when he came, I realized, for the first time, He was just an acrylic figure of a Chinese God that is everywhere. He has a long beard, looks like Confucius, and stands with two fingers held propped up, and wears an elaborate long teal robe with red accents.
When he first got to our house, there was a shelf my dad had created for him to go on top of. The incense pot would also go there. It took some trial and error for our family to figure out we needed to line the ceiling above with foil since the burning incense would create a big black hole on the ceiling above it.
My mom burned incense for the God morning and night. Sometimes, she would offer me three sticks of incense to pray for my ancestors, my family, and bow three times while standing, before being able to insert the incense sticks. I don't know why the tradition exists, only that I obliged and followed along when needed.
The same went for when we visited grandparents at the grave site. In fact, I remember when my maternal grandfather passed, we met religiously every weekend at his grave. There were different ritualistic stuff we did, like bowing on our knees, touching our arms to the floor, burning incense, bringing food offerings (that we could consume later, once the incense was done burning), and then as the weeks passed, the rituals always changed and added more. We burned gold, or gold paper folded to look like gold bars, a constructed home, which would be wai-gong's house up above, and paper money which always confused me as it said Bank of Hell. Lost in translation? I sure hope so. We had these black bracelets that all the grand kids wore, and we were encouraged to wear them to school everyday for weeks. My mom finally told me I could take it off and just keep it close by and treasured, but I still never figured out the reason for it. I thought it was all just a Chinese thing. But then when my dad's father died years later, it was completely different. We wore white, people came and chanted some songs, and it was entirely different. We didn't have to go back to the grave site for seven consecutive weekends, but we did the same things with burning symbolic goods, incense, bowing, and bringing food offerings.
I never thought much of any of this. It was just what I was used to. About as normal as chicken feet on Saturday dim sum. Which I suppose isn't that normal at all. But now as a mom, I'm very particular about which Chinese traditions I want to make sure my kids understand. They know the Chinese Zodiac better than you. Definitely. They might even know the order better than you. I was consumed with which animal each of my family members was, and my kids are the same now. Even though language is lost among them, I am doing my best now to immerse them this summer, and make sure they at least have the tones down so when they want to learn more later. I have made very conscious efforts to introduce my kids to boba, seaweed, squid, Chinese candies, Chinese bakery bread, pig ears, and stomach lining. It actually tickles me excited that my daughter loves these as much as me. When she had tripe for the first time, she exclaimed, "it tastes just like noodles! Yum Mom!" My pickiest eater won't touch boba balls and even has a slight disdain for Chinese food in general, but he loves seaweed and ube ice cream. I guess I can compromise a bit.
As I navigate living in white Utah, I hope I can remember to continually shed light on the Chinese culture and traditions for my kids.
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