The ancestors, and the unbroken line

In the west the dead mostly leave. There's a funeral, a stone, a few visits that taper off, and the living are encouraged to move on, which is a strange phrase when you sit with it, as if grief were a town you were loitering in.

The Chinese way keeps the line unbroken. The ancestors don't leave, they change address. They move onto the altar, a photo, a name carved or written, a little shrine that might be a whole room or just a high shelf, and they stay in the family, consulted and fed and kept up on the news. At the new year you clean their place first. You set out oranges, because the word for orange sounds like the word for luck, and you light incense, and the smoke is the road the message travels up.

This is filial piety, xiao, the spine of the whole culture, the debt that runs downward and upward at once. You honor the ones who made you because you stand on their work, you would not have a face to wash or a name to carry without them, and one day you will be the photo on the shelf and you'd like to be remembered too. It is not morbid. It is the longest possible view of a family, where you are one bead on a string that runs back past anyone you can name and forward past anyone you'll meet.

There's comfort in it I think the west gave away too easily. You are not the start of anything and not the end of it. The people behind you are still, in the only way that matters, at the table. Light something for them. Tell them how the year went.