Making an Exit

by Sarah Murray

  To a control freak like me, the approach of death—the great unknown—is bad enough without these kinds of questions. Then there’s the anxiety that comes with heading to an eternity of indeterminable form. What if you get there and the seats are uncomfortable, the food is terrible, and you get stuck next to the guy shouting into his cell phone?

  And it’s one of life’s perversities that the things we most desire lose their appeal if we get them in boundless supply. I learned this lesson as a child when, after badgering my mother to let me eat more Angel Delight (a popular British 1970s dessert made from pink powder and milk), she told me to go ahead and have as much as I liked. I eventually threw up. The promise of an end, on the other hand, makes everything far more delicious. Life is (or should be) made precious by the fact that its supply is limited.

  And looked at another way, maybe it’s actually death that makes us great. For, if we were to live forever, we’d have no need of leaving marks or creating legacies. But faced with an end, we leave behind things we reckon will have a longer shelf life than our patently frail human bodies. So we bequeath money to the local hospital, endow a scholarship, fund a park bench with our name on it, design a building, compose an opera, or—in perhaps the most labor-intensive version—produce offspring. And, of course, some of us try to get our work in print.

  This was something my father loved to do. In addition to his commentaries on drainage, Fa enjoyed contributing to debates about the Church of England, an institution for which he professed a great fondness, even though he was a nonbeliever. His letters on local diocesan issues or the church’s broader role in society appeared in Team News, our parish weekly. Fa’s became such a familiar name that the rector once came dashing over to invite him to join the fold, only to be disappointed to find a man unwavering in his atheism. But while he never joined the church, Fa kept writing his letters and articles.

  Money can also extend the human spirit’s reach that little bit further. And while large financial bequests often spark family rifts or lengthy lawsuits, the best ones are those helping the people surviving us to have a good time when we’re gone. My friend Tom Schuller was surprised to receive a letter one day from the executors of the will of his godmother, a woman he had not known well. The letter was brief and it ran along the following lines: “Miss Barbara Vincent-Jones has indicated in her will that £200 should be given to you ‘for a fine dinner.’ Please let me know where the check should be sent.”

  More than three centuries earlier, Oliver John, a surveyor who helped rebuild London after the great fire of 1666, devised a similar scheme, leaving money in his will for an annual roast meat dinner for the boys of the Blue Coat School at Christ’s Hospital, Newgate. And today, Merton College, Oxford, is known for superb cuisine since an old Mertonian left an endowment specifically to feed the students.

  This sort of scheme appeals to me. For although I envy those with a belief in the afterlife, nothing can wipe out my persistent conviction that when I die, that’s it—no more games, no more parties, no more fine dinners. But other people can still play the games, hold the parties, and eat the dinners. In fact, there’s something reassuring about the idea of planning something fun for others to do after you’re gone. You can’t be there, of course. But in a way, it’s something to look forward to, giving you that delicate but continuing thread connecting your future dead self with the world of the living.

  I’ve yet to decide what that might be. A big party, perhaps, or a slap-up meal—alternatively I could invite my friends to get together to set fire to my paper high-heeled shoes, my cardboard iron, the tissue paper dim sum set, and those huge wads of Hell Bank notes.

  * * *

  Today is Qing Ming. It’s one of those warm, soggy Hong Kong afternoons that hit you like a wet sponge. Armed with an umbrella, I’m heading to one of the territory’s largest cemeteries. I once passed this graveyard every day on my way to work when my home was Shek O, a village on the island’s far southeast coast.

  In Shek O, I lived amid a motley collection of tin-roofed houses in what, as I enjoyed telling friends, was officially termed an “illegal erection.” Planted on top of another building and with windows all around, I slept with the sound of the sea in my ears. Everything about living there was an adventure. To get to my house, I followed a tiny passage past a noodle stall, a Chinese temple where old men played mahjong, and across what was essentially someone’s backyard—a small courtyard where a family would eat dinner while a brown hen tethered to a brick pecked feverishly at a bowl of rice. Directions for my visitors therefore included the unusual phrase: “Go past the chicken on a string.”

  To get to the cemetery from Shek O, you take the number 9 bus, a blue-and-cream Leyland Victory double-decker. Get on at the tiny terminus and, if you have nerves of steel, choose the front seat on the top deck. From the terminus, the bus makes an impressive three-point turn, heads up the hill, and winds around a series of terrifying coastal curves where glorious views open up across the azure waters of the South China Sea. At a certain point, you’ll catch a glimpse of a series of gray stone structures set on terraces that cling to the mountain slopes. This is the Chai Wan Chinese Permanent Cemetery.

  It’s a tranquil spot. Far from honking horns and hammering construction sites, Hong Kong’s daily roar is reduced to a low hum. Trees rustle in the breeze. Dragonflies dart around (you can hear the buzz of their wings). Thousands of grave terraces—each numbered—cover several of the mountain’s slopes, hugging its curves, leaving no space wasted. Like hillside rice paddies, they rise in steps up to the summit, where a thick fringe of subtropical foliage looks ready to pounce down over the cemetery wall.

  Every grave is like a mini temple, featuring a tiny courtyard (the worshipping platform) and a small roof sheltering pictures of the deceased, captured in black-and-white photographs on ceramic tiles. As you clamber up the steep steps past row after row of graves, each with the faces of their occupants visible, you might sense a sound, a sort of murmuring. Is it your imagination, or is it the voices of the thousands of souls whispering to you from the afterlife? As always, in Hong Kong one is rarely alone.

  The view from the top is spectacular. Beyond the grave terraces lies a shimmering landscape of tower blocks framed by sea and mountains. Urban drama has replaced what was once a rural valley of fishing villages and rice paddies known as Sai Wan. These days, clusters of tall public housing blocks compete in height with a mountain range behind. It’s a battle between mixed concrete and natural rock as to who’ll reach the heavens first.

  Today, though, the main battle is getting to the cemetery. During Qing Ming, the Hong Kong Transport Department goes into overdrive. On its Web site, the list of arrangements runs for several pages, with details of traffic reroutings, extra buses, parking suspensions, and closure of roads to large vehicles (“except hearses”). Meanwhile, at Chai Wan station, like ants fleeing the anthill, people pour out from Hong Kong’s efficient subway system. I’m swept along with the crowd through the Hing Wah Shopping Center and out again at the entrance to a steep road leading up to the cemetery.

  Police officers with megaphones arrange and rearrange barricades to accommodate the flow of people. They stop the crowd every so often to let double-decker buses through. On one side of the road, hundreds of people are walking up the hill, swinging capacious red plastic sacks full of paper treasures. Meanwhile, on the other side of the road, visitors descend empty-handed—their goods are now well on the way to the afterlife.

  At the entrance to the cemetery, notices posted by the Food and Environmental Hygiene Department (the agency responsible for public cemeteries) exhort worshippers to burn offerings only in the incinerators provided. It’s not surprising such warnings are needed. Already, as I approach the rows of graves, I can smell burning cardboard and the thick perfume of incense. Fragments of blackened paper drift through the sky and smoke wafts up the hillside.

  The cemetery slopes are crawling with families. The yellows, reds, and
blues of fleeces and raincoats combine with the pinks and purples of the paper offerings to create an explosion of color against the dull gray of the grave-covered hillside. The old women employed to keep the cemetery clean (identified by their eccentric headgear of wide-brimmed straw hats covered in garbage bags) ferry around big rusty tins, the incinerators. People chat loudly on mobile phones. Bored teenagers play with their Game Boys. It’s a family day out.

  The grave terraces are not the only place to visit the ancestors. Many more reside at the cemetery entrance in a large tower—the Cape Collinson Columbarium. Lack of burial space in Hong Kong has created a new type of high-rise building: the multistory mausoleum. In columbaria across the territory, more than three hundred thousand niches store the cremated remains of dead individuals. And even these mortuary skyscrapers are filling up. On the “Available Niches Lookup” section of the Food and Environmental Hygiene Department Web site, the words “No Vacancy” come up in a search under the “New Niche” option in five of the six columbaria listed on the site.

  Stylistically, the Cape Collinson Columbarium is undistinguished. Its octagonal form with an open center represents the bagua, a Chinese cosmological symbol, but inside municipal efficiency prevails, with white tiled walls and a distinct absence of decoration. Two staircases with steel railings spiral up in opposite directions to the upper floors where, on every level, concentric walls following the building’s octagonal format house neatly ranked grave niches, six layers high, each covered by a marble plaque of about nine inches by ten.

  At the base of each wall are troughs to accommodate plant joss sticks and food offerings, while miniature vases attached to the front of the niche tablets hold tiny flower arrangements. Gold and red text engravings in the marble mark the names of the occupants who, as on the hillside tombs, stare out from small black-and-white photographs.

  According to my calculations, this columbarium must contain almost sixty thousand niches, most holding two sets of ashes. As do the living in Hong Kong, here in this funerary skyscraper, the dead live cheek by jowl.

  In front of one niche, an older woman squats below the pictures of her parents. With her hair in a chignon, she’s dressed in a smart red jacket, black pants, and high-heeled shoes. At her feet are bowls of rice, piles of oranges, and a clutch of joss sticks. The ancestors look down impassively at their daughter. But she’s not paying attention to them. She’s too busy tapping the keypad on her cell phone. With a look of deep concentration on her face, she’s oblivious to those in the domain of the spirits. They’re being elbowed out by the technology of the terrestrial world.

  By now, the industrial fans that ventilate the columbarium are fighting a losing battle. Like the vast mouths of terrifying gods, huge incinerators on every floor gobble up the offerings being thrust into them. Smoke from the joss sticks and paper conflagrations pours down the corridors. It’s like being in a burning building, except it’s not the building that’s going up in flames—it’s reams of paper money and cardboard TVs.

  My eyes are streaming with tears and I’m starting to cough violently. Everyone around me is clutching tissues to their eyes. It looks like a mass mourning ritual except that no one seems remotely unhappy. Between sniffs and splutters, teenagers send each other text messages and families catch up on gossip. With all the chattering and cell phone rings, the atmosphere is more like a cocktail party than a ceremony honoring the dead.

  I wander around the smoke-filled corridors for a while until the smoke gets too much. Turning to leave, I see the woman in the red jacket again. She’s still squatting in front of her family niche, still tapping into her cell phone.

  But I was wrong about her—she’s not ignoring her parents. She’s not making a call or sending a text. Now I see what she’s doing. She’s flipping through the photographs stored on her phone. Finally she finds the one she wants. It’s the smiling face of a chubby baby and, once it’s on the screen, she turns it toward the sepia snapshots of her dead parents on their ceramic tile. With a great beam of pride on her face, she addresses them, chattering excitedly as she introduces them to their new great-grandchild. Paper goods are going up in flames all around. But in front of this niche, it’s a cell phone (not one made of cardboard) that’s providing a connection to the afterlife.

  6

  Raising Pigs

  A GET-TOGETHER IN THE PHILIPPINES

  If you happen to be strolling through Sagada at dusk, you’ll notice a fragrance that feels dangerously potent. It comes from Angel’s Trumpets, extravagant tubular flowers whose pendulous pink blooms have hallucinogenic properties. Every evening in this remote mountain village, they open their petals to release a heady perfume. In the Amazonian rainforest, Angel’s Trumpets are prized for their ability to induce dreams foretelling the future and revealing the causes of death. But not in Sagada—here, death isn’t lurking in the flowers. It’s hidden in the mountains.

  Sagada sits five thousand feet above sea level in the craggy Cordillera Mountains that cut through the Philippine province of Northern Luzon. Its settlements—known as barangays—drift across a valley at the upper end of a tributary of the Chico River amid forests of Benguet Pine, glassy lakes, clear waterfalls, and limestone caves. Not far away, at Banaue, are the two-thousand-year-old rice terraces that Filipinos like to call the “Eighth Wonder of the World.”

  Lying about two hundred miles north of Manila, Sagada’s spectacular landscape is home to the Igorots, a fiercely independent people whose language is Kankana-ey. Bubbling away like one of the cheerful brooks that tumble down the slopes around them, its gentle tone belies the fact that the Igorots once drove spears into their enemies and brought home the heads as trophies.

  Today, Sagada is a peaceful place where everyone knows everyone and the town motto is: “We share what’s good.” By the standards of rural areas of the Philippines, it’s relatively affluent. Neat homes have pitched tin roofs painted green or red and balconies and terraces. Hillside gardens burst with nasturtiums, red hibiscus, blue petunias, and pure white lilies.

  But there’s another presence in this idyllic domestic landscape—the rock itself. Jagged boulders sit uncompromisingly in the middle of vegetable patches. Needles of limestone jut up unexpectedly in front of a porch or next to a bedroom window in what seem like attempts by the mountain to thwart the domestication of its slopes. And if the rocks invade the living space of humans, humans have penetrated the mountain’s deepest crevices—for this is where the people of Sagada bury their dead.

  These days, some locals opt for the tranquility of the Christian cemetery near the Church of St. Mary the Virgin, a handsome if rather stout granite structure with two huge rose windows that has provided a vigilant presence over the valley since the early 1900s. In its cemetery, whitewashed gravestones, their backs turned toward the lower slopes, clamber up a steep grassy hill as if struggling to reach the heavens.

  It’s a bucolic resting place. But even so, many of Sagada’s citizens still want to be laid to rest according to local custom—wrapped in ceremonial blankets, tied in the fetal position, and carried down into the valleys. There, they’re placed in wooden sarcophagi that are left hanging on cliff faces or lodged in the fissures and caverns of Sagada’s jagged forests of stone.

  * * *

  Intrigued by tales of coffins in caves, I’m heading to Sagada. It’s true that in weighing up burial options, this is not one I’ve so far considered. But while I doubt I’ll settle on a final resting place in a coffin on the side of a Philippine mountain, I want to see what this highly unusual form of interment looks like.

  From Manila, the Philippine capital, the first leg of my journey is a dramatic flight to Baguio, the mountain resort that’s the starting point for long-distance buses to Sagada. After an hour winding up the Halsema Highway in a GT Trans Company bus (signs warning that this is an ACCIDENT PRONE AREA), we emerge into mist-shrouded mountains sliced at every opportunity by layer upon layer of terraces. Those we left behind on the lower slopes w
ere planted with neat rows of vegetables, but up here they’re covered in the dazzling green of rice plantings. Small settlements cling precariously to the edge of the road as if the tarmac has some special magnetism preventing them from tumbling into the ravines below.

  Between hairpin bends, random snippets of life flash into view—chickens peck the dirt enthusiastically, satellite dishes bristle on top of tin roofs, and laundry flaps in the breeze. A concrete tomb surmounted by an iron cross sits in a garden. A giant billboard displaying all Ten Commandments casts its authority across the valley. I see fleeting glimpses of human dramas, too. On a stoop, a young woman sits crying, her hair covering her face. Next door, two men are engaged in a fierce argument that seems to concern a rusty cement mixer. What’s the dispute? What’s the girl’s trouble? I’ll never know. The bus moves on.

  By the time we shudder to a halt in Sagada, it’s late afternoon and my legs feel in desperate need of a stretch. I have the names of two people who know about cave burials, so after securing myself a room at the Saint Joseph Resthouse (a former seminary surrounded by a lovely garden), I call one of them, Siegrid Bangyay, to see if we can meet. Siegrid is a potter who supplements her income by working as a guide. She agrees to meet me tomorrow to take me through Echo Valley, the canyon where many of the coffins hang.

  Then there’s Villia Jefremovas, a Canadian anthropologist recommended to me by Lucy, an English friend living in Manila, and Neal, a photographer I called up to ask for advice for my trip. I don’t have an address or phone number, but that’s not a problem. When I stop in at the Log Cabin restaurant, owner Dave Gulian says that of course he knows Villia. Following his directions, I head through town and, next to a small provisions store, I clamber up a steep lane.