Chinese American Death Rituals: Respecting the Ancestors

Abstract

Chinese American Death Rituals: Respecting the Ancestors. Edited by Sue Fawn Chung and Priscilla Wegars. (Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 2005. Pp. ? + 308, acknowledgments, introduction, photographs, illustrations, figures, tables, notes, bibliography, index. $88.00 cloth, $36.95 paper) After two decades of sporadic efforts from different disciplinary perspectives, studies of Chinese American rituals are at last well represented here. Chinese American Death Rituab, a broad survey covering a wide range of history and geography from largely archaeological and historical perspectives, is meant to help break down stereotypes that Americans have about their Chinese American neighbors. For this fact alone, the present volume, well-designed and well-illustrated (though the bibliography is a few years behind), is worth cheering. It must be noted, however, that the introduction seems a broad historical mosaic presented at the cost of both clarity and scholarly accuracy. It is misleading to state that Chinese funerary practices "fascinated nineteenth-century English anthropologists" (3), because not only does Western interest in Chinese funerals predate the nineteenth century, but the English anthropologists played a much lesser role in Sinology - the study of Chinese culture - than did missionaries from other countries before and during the nineteenth century. The identity of J. J. M. de Groot, mentioned early and without explanation (3), will doubtless be a mystery to the uninitiated (he was a Dutch Sinologist who lived from 1854 to 1921 [Honey 2001:xiii]). In describing the practice of seeking a geomancer, or fengshui expert, it is not correct to use the word "scientist" (5), since the practice and concept of fengshui has always been an art (shu), not a science (xue) (Zhang 2004), and is moreover called "pseudo-science" by Joseph Needham ([1954] 1988). Similar problems of clarity and accuracy are found in the first essay, which sets out to provide a broad history of the death ritual in China and California. This ambitious goal is hampered by the simplification and hybridization of different interpretations and is achieved at the sacrifice of academic insight. To say that "Confucianism embraced the concept of Ii, or ritual, and reinforced the importance of rites" (21) is to oversimplify Confucianism, a practice scholars are trying to avoid nowadays (Ames and Rosemont 1998:51). The next three articles present three cases, starting with a history of the Chinese worship of ghost-spirits as revealed through examination of local records of various public rites conducted by the Chinese in Maryville, California from the mid-nineteenth century to recent years. The first case study presents a quite peaceful and integrative picture prior to World War I, then suggests that in later decades the Chinese practiced fewer and fewer Chinese rites and that their death ritual gradually "transformed into dying American." The second report draws a meaningful connection between late nineteenth-century social segregation and the spatial organization of graves in cemeteries. The third describes the exhumation of Chinese graves incidentally found in the 1990s in Carlin, Nevada. Unfortunately, this last article presents a picture of the Chinese in Carlin that cannot be corroborated from any other records, written or oral. …