So Why Are We Here Again? by Ysabelle Cheung / Fiction / Untitled Books

"My uncle lights the gold-tipped papers with a thick whoosh of a lighter flame - the air burns liquid - and then they're floating. Money for the dead, my uncle mutters."

So Why Are We Here Again? by Ysabelle Cheung

This is how it starts: the first grave is always the easiest to find, the limestone scoured to a stripped cleanliness. White. From afar, the graves look like Jewish stone offerings amidst the moss of the hill and ropes of staircases. We stand, the whole family, silent, the sea wind blowing warm and salty on our cheeks. The sky is a blunt Hiroshige - it pounds the stairs into white butter. We stand. The incense has been lit, the wine, pungent and dry, spilt in a dribble across the dirt. The sweeper, a huddled, small spit of black, limps to the metal can where flames are swallowing the thin air. She is almost blind, most probably deaf and at least eighty years old. Her fingers, crippled by arthritis, grip the rusted tongs as she pokes at the burning papers in the can. I cough. Her split nails blacken.

The first grave, this singular clinging fragment of my great-grandmother, faces a leafy square of graves. Tiny rectangles. An iron fence, only a few inches tall, ladders round the perimeter. Someone asks if the graves belong to war victims. A smooth cherub sits merrily on the smallest grave in the square.

No. I say. Children. Babies.

My uncle lights the gold-tipped papers with a thick whoosh of a lighter flame - the air burns liquid - and then they're floating. Money for the dead, my uncle mutters. The papers are feathering into ashes, settling here and there, over the tiny graves within the iron fence. I watch for a while longer. Our eyes: we go round and round and round and round.

After this, we all pile back into the van. My aunt, all creamy folds of skin and lipstick, rearranges the nine bouquets of carnations stuffed behind the front seats. Chalky dust things of incense are flung onto the sticky floor as the car stutters up the hill. We visit grave number
two. Bow, pray, give. Grave number three belongs to my paternal grandfather, who died on my birthday ten years before I was born. Pray, bow, give. Graves four, five and six belong to distant relatives.

Grave seven is in a memorial shrine in a Buddhist temple. We enter a small room. The little wooden name block of my great-grandfather is squashed between hundreds of others, half-hidden by the glare of thick glass. The red letters, pressed deep into the wood, are painted in a lacquered red. My grandmother preoccupies herself with arranging the damp carnations in a glass jar; she has to throw away two vases of flowers to make room for her one on the shelf. She licks a leaf with her finger. Clean. Around me, people are lighting incense sticks and biscuit coils; in the inch of fog I can make out the crispy silhouette of a roasted suckling pig, held up in the air by two brown hands.

We're outside again; we're in the car. We drive around for at least an hour but grave eight has seemingly disappeared. The sun slips out in squares, triangles and shattered glass shapes through tree branches. Here is where I shade my eyes. My elder cousin takes a detour and heads straight for the ninth grave - the last grave. Mouths dry and eyes just that much drier, we huddle, we plant our feet to the ground. This last grave is perched right by the water; the mouth of the river spreading into the hot sea. The sky's yellow glow has taken on an oily filth.

We are standing, again.

My aunt turns her neck: Where are the oranges?

Laying the round, misshapen balls of gold, my great uncle's beard bristles with the flex of his tongue. He's concentrating - but a distant screech interrupts his ritual. The pink flesh of his neck shivers, slick with muggy sweat. An orange falls. It bounces, jumping on blades of grass. My aunt, his wife, picks up the orange and hands it to him. Their eyes meet - it's an offering, she's handing him an excuse to carry on, to twist the canals of his ears towards the ritual, towards prayer and life must go on. He takes the orange. His eyes flicker towards the slaughterhouse down by the water.

As he lights the incense, we hear the pigs bleat in protesting screeches, twisted and tangled with the stench of spilt blood and flesh. When I think back to this place, I remember the dampness, the humidity, and the smell of something cold and going off. Dusk steam drifts around my shoulders, the sun is going down. We bend and pray and murmur in our safe little huddle on the hilltop. I am reminded once again that pigs ready for slaughter have the mental intelligence of a three year old child - any child, you or I or our children - when they enter the slaughterhouse. There is a clustered thumping, the sickening sound of skulls cracking against wet barn walls. Like the cold slap of damp earth when it hits the coffin.

And then, silence.

It is a ritual that is repeated into perseveration yearly, but still, I can't bear to hear small creatures scream. The fat lazy runts, colt-legged, bug-eyed calves, oddly woolly balls of lambs - their eyes shocken and then when they scream it is the singular most painful sound... little babies of their lumpish, meaty mothers, their spindly virginal legs buckling in one swift blow; I listen with horror - and fear - from my heart, but mostly from my mouth, which itches terribly from the cardinal sin that I commit: eating meat.

But of course, we do. And we will continue to. So we stand close to the river year after year, and I mourn those whom I have never known whilst murder cries at us from below the ninth grave. And underneath the hill of graves, the blood and skin of human corpses thins and veins out into the crumbling earth, eventually reaching the water where it is met with the carnal spillage of pig guts. We are all the same in life. We are all the same in death. They have been split and castrated, their insides ruptured with fat glands: from this we pluck out the gristle in the hot steam of blood, offal, gut, a white white bone, the warm squash of a baby's heart -easy as plucking rabbit's fur, turning its pink coat inside and out.

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Ysabelle Cheung is currently interning at Granta magazine and completing a BA in English and Creative Writing at UEA. She lives in London.

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Tuesday, 24 May, 2011

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Issue 44 / May 2012

"My uncle lights the gold-tipped papers with a thick whoosh of a lighter flame - the air burns liquid - and then they're floating. Money for the dead, my uncle mutters."