How We Struggle to Grieve in Our Chinese Christian Family

One day in March, my mother emailed to report that my grandmother had died. Of course, as a good Southern Baptist, she did not say that my grandmother had died. “Grandma,” she wrote, “is with our Lord.”

I read the words and looked up at my husband—I am not a good Southern Baptist, or even a Baptist anymore—and said, “My grandmother died.” My face crumpled and I went to him and buried my face in his shoulder, as surprised by my tears as I was by the grief itself. It wasn’t as if this had been unexpected; Po Po had been in and out of the hospital for months.

Chinese Christians in the circles I grew up in talk about dying all the time. They declare how eager they are to be safe in the arms of Jesus, to leave this world they’re “just passing through,” to wear the heavenly crowns earned through their piety. Yet as my family shifted from vigil into mourning, we faced a new reality: We didn’t really know what we were doing. When the missionaries came to us with their Good News, they had also declared that what we’d had before was bad—including our traditional Chinese rituals of mourning.

Some things have survived: The day my grandmother died, red was banished from my family’s fashion palette. For the Chinese, red is the color of good fortune, of luck, of happiness; when death visits our house, we’re supposed to put it away as a sign of our respect and grief. Traditionally, it was for a year.

When I landed at the Hong Kong airport, my mother and father greeted me with hugs and a reprimanding look, as my mom noticed I was wearing a striped red-and-blue shirt. I explained that I’d rushed to get dressed (wrong answer), had almost no clean clothes left (wrong answer), and just hadn’t been thoughtful about it (marginally acceptable answer). Even though it was seventy-five degrees outside, I put on my dark blue jacket and zipped it all the way up before any other relatives could see me.

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Religion is supposed to do more than just tell us where we go when we die. It should also guide how we live. It should be both framework and skill set, rites that reflect the otherworldly as well as rituals that mark our days on this earth. But so often, in its attempts—our attempts?—to answer life’s big questions, religion leaves us waiting and wishing, caught in the hopeful in-between.

Po Po spent her life in such liminal spaces, in anticipation of something else. What I know of my grandmother’s history was gleaned from her half-finished sentences, punctuated with a wave of her wrinkly hand. As she grew older, I tried to interrogate her about her past. Sometimes she gave me nuggets of stories. Sometimes she just looked at me sadly and asked if I had eaten, or when I’d find a nice girl to marry. (Whether it was a mark of respect for my elder or a sign of our culture of shame, I never told her about the nice boy I married.)

She was not sent to school as a child. Her father was some kind of scholar or teacher, but his bookishness did not pay the bills. Her mother, a compulsive gambler, lost what money she’d had at the mahjong tables. The sixth of fourteen children, my grandmother had to help care for her younger siblings. Once, when we were talking about how only six of the fourteen made it to adulthood, she darkly joked, What did my mother expect, since I was taking care of them?

When Po Po was twelve or thirteen, her mother sent her to live and work in a knitting factory in Hong Kong. This was neither unusual nor illegal; an ordinance codified in 1922, the year she was born, set Hong Kong’s legal working age at ten. Her mother requisitioned her paycheck. My grandmother’s boss, recognizing her nimble fingers, compensated her with pity and side gigs. On Sunday, her only day off, she was sent to teach rich women on the Peak how to knit; that money, which her mother didn’t know about, was her own.

In 1943, during the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong, Po Po married a man who already had another wife. It remains a mystery whether she knew about this other wife, who was then still in mainland China. According to one version of the story, my grandfather played spectacularly dumb, citing the war and claiming he wasn’t sure if his first wife was still alive. But it was neither atypical nor shameful for Chinese men of that generation to have multiple wives and households; if anything, it demonstrated “manliness” and propped up the appearance of possessing financial means. Within seven years, Po Po had given birth to six children.

The family’s Christianization began during World War II. They did not become Anglicans, like some of Hong Kong’s rich Chinese. Instead they became Baptists, whose missionaries had more success among the working class, and my grandmother was baptized in 1948. The family’s conversion came with pragmatic accommodations: My grandmother and her children went to one church; the other wife (who had moved to Hong Kong after the war) and her children went to another. They were safe in the arms of Jesus, and in the comfortable distance between separate congregations.

A few linguistic differences aside, these congregations would not have seemed out of place in the American South, from which most of the missionaries had come. What passed for “Christian” was white American evangelicalism. The Women’s Missionary Union meetings were the same. The burgundy velvet bags into which we deposited our offerings were the same, as were the gold ones for the building fund. The hymns were the same, except we sang them in Chinese. The post-worship lunches were the same, down to the metal folding chairs, except it was Chinese food served. The prayers were the same, too, which is to say very, very long.

For Chinese families, the rituals of mourning are rooted in tradition and heritage. When the Christian missionaries came, they brought with them the admonition that “this world is not our home.” It was a way of calling my people to reject their “heathen” behaviors; to get rid of the pre-existing spiritual furniture. When they asked us to redecorate, however, what they offered wasn’t inherently Christian; it was white and American and Southern.

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Church is a kind of culture. Mine is a Christian family in a society that still mostly follows traditional Chinese rituals. What we’ve ended up with is a mish-mash of old and new religions—much like a room filled with our familiar rosewood sofas and chairs, uncomfortable to foreigners, jumbled up with a few pieces from the Salvation Army thrift store. We’ve blended our Chinese traditions with Western ways—and coloring it all is significant doubt about whether we’re doing it “right.”

When Po Po died, we did not bow to her body, because we now worship the one true God and not our ancestors. We did not burn paper money, since we didn’t believe she needed it in the next life. We did not put food on her grave, because we’ve been taught that she’s been freed from hunger. Yet we are, much like the missionaries who converted us, faithful in principle and syncretistic in practice. At the funeral, we still gave mourners the traditional piece of candy—the sweet chaser after the bitterness of death. We still don’t visit our friends’ houses or give gifts while we are in mourning, as we aim not to bring our misfortune into the lives of others.

The day before my grandmother’s funeral, we did pay a visit to an uncle on the other side of the family. He’s a Baptist minister, and believes that baptism washed away not only our sins, but also our superstitions. Sitting in his living room, we debated what to call the traditional post-funeral meal. Normally, it’s called a kai wai jau (解穢酒). The first character means, roughly, “to solve,” “to banish,” or “to undo”; the middle character comes from a phrase that refers to the dirt and detritus of this suffering world; and the final character is “feast.” Yet this term, especially the middle word, can have Buddhist connotations. In Christian circles, my uncle explained, it’s been replaced by another wai (慰)—a homophone that comes from the phrase for “comfort.” The name of this meal, in doctored sound-alike form, celebrates the freedom and solace that we have in our Savior.

But retrofitting old ways with new vocabulary doesn’t really solve the problem. Even if we announced the meal at the funeral, the old and new terms would sound exactly the same, and nobody other than the family would know the difference. Our spirit was willing, but the meaning—we’re Christian, and we don’t do those old things, so don’t judge us—was weak. In the end, we just asked people to join us for a meal after the funeral, and announced that the buses would be leaving in twenty minutes.

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While I was in Hong Kong, someone raised the question one night at dinner: Who really cares what people think? Nobody responded, because this was akin to questioning the value of air and water. The Chinese are traditionally far more skilled at saving face than saving souls. Our currencies are perception, prestige, and shame, and somehow my family’s sanctification in Christ has not yet freed us from that.

Christians like to say that we live in “the now and the not yet,” expressing the belief that God’s work in the world is paradoxically and simultaneously complete and unfinished. Most days, as a Christian, I believe that first part is true—Jesus paid it all. But I know the second part is true, because I see the pain, brokenness, and grief of our lives.

My grandmother went to school for the first time in her mid-sixties, after she moved to California to spend more time with my sister and me. She signed up for English classes at the Berkeley Adult School. What she lacked in fluency—which is to say, nearly everything—she offered in enthusiasm and volume. She chatted happily with anyone and everyone, oblivious to their incomprehension. At home, she filled legal pads with shaky but careful cursive. I never really understood her English, but I delighted in how hard she tried to learn it.

I wonder whether one lesson for me and for my family, now that she is gone, is that there is no shame in effort like this, in work that has not yet borne fruit. Our desire to make sense of what doesn’t make sense counts for something. Surely our God, a God of grace, would recognize that?

I miss Po Po, even if I don’t quite know how I am supposed to miss her. For Christians, the funeral brings sorrow at a parting but joy at the expectation of eventual reunion, all wrapped up in grateful worship of God. When Po Po died, I prayed. I cried a little bit. I tried to turn my grieving heart to thanksgiving.

But I am still not wearing red.