Anshan

Today was Tomb Sweeping Day (or Qing Ming Jie) in China, which is a holiday in which you go to the graves of your ancestors and pay your respects to them. While this is a tradition that's been effect for several centuries in China, this is the first year that it's been made a national holiday, so everyone had the day off, and the cemeteries were packed. To start off, Chinese cemeteries look nothing like American ones. Because the Chinese value feng shui, anyone with any money strives to bury their loved ones in an area with both mountains and water. Thus, where American cemeteries are in flat plots by churches, Chinese graves are located atop verdant mountains, and to visit a Chinese cemetery is to see rows upon rows of brilliantly decorated tombs stretched across a mountain for as far as the eye can see. Families are often buried together, with the most senior deceased at the center and with the tallest headstone. Scattered around each grave site are the little superstitious tokens which mean so much to us, such as the platters of food so that the dead can remain well-fed in the afterlife, or the stone shrines that give refuge to the minor guardians of the dead. We laid some flowers at the headstone of my great-grandfather, said prayers and kowtowed as is custom, and then swept the site itself to show our respects to the living quarters of the dead.

After tomb sweeping, a lot of Chinese like to get baths, or, as we did, get food. We stopped by a local porridge and dim sum restaurant, which was deliciously rowdy with the hoards of pious Chinese coming back from the cemeteries. Comfortably fed, we spent the rest of the day similarly rewarding ourselves by doing such strenuous activities as shopping for stationary and getting Chinese foot rubs (which are decidedly more painful than their Western counterparts). Dinner was hotpot, in which we all ate several plates each, and left no survivors. After a nice walk in the park, I came back to the house, where I slept like a babe :-)