It
was, she said, the
Red Army Temple. The Temple was certainly pleasant, looking like a county library
right down to the wood floors and the air-conditioning, which greeted us like a blessing.
We entered through a wooden hall and found a courtyard growing bamboo. The tops of the
stalks reached through a hole in the roof. Mai Lin pointed out how bright and perfect the
trunks were. "See? Always green! Red Army lose tree, but always living, always
more!"
We
walked over the stones toward the main gallery. At the door she suddenly stopped.
She turned to me with a look of wonder and said "You no fear?" This was the
place of the dead, after all; the air should be filled with ghosts.
Ghosts?
Oh, I concluded, ghosts must inhabit temples; that makes sense. But as for being
frightened, I didn't know what to say. I had a choice between rejecting her beliefs, or
being patronizing; so I simply said that I wasn't worried.
She
said "That is good thinking; But Chinese person always a little fear--" She
stood in the door for a moment, carefully, before entering.
By then I almost understood
what I saw. There were row after row of shelves, widely set and twenty
feet high, with little glass doors. Within each cubicle sat a box, carved
and polished in the shape of a palace or an exotic garden. Inside them
were cranes, or celestial ladies, attending snapshots. Each photo portrayed
a...soldier. Some of the subjects were young and trim, obviously pulled
from an old album; most, however, were old and crumpled, like lions trapped
in flypaper.
Of
course. These boxes held the ashes of dead soldiers; and the families decorated them with
plastic symbols. Peaches could be added to give long life, or oranges to bring good luck.
The angels symbolized the afterlife, the cranes represented conjugal loyalty. Many boxes
also held the traditional tablets for ancestor worship. Once, every Chinese family had
kept a dozen, but that was before the Cultural Revolutions, so these were the first I had actually seen.