KFC Bucket Takeaways For The Living

Tiffin cans & rattan baskets of fd. Tupperwared rice & stir-fry dishes. Whole roasted birds, sponge cakes, fresh fruits, incl whole pineapples.

Sent:
11:07:28
01/28/2006

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Big bags of burning paper and bundles of incense. Multigenerational families jostling, sweating. Silk flower arrangements. Tiny red plastic wine cups.

Sent:
11:10:52
01/28/2006

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Canned foods beer soft drinks tarts curry braised meats. Expensive seafood & dried goods. Bundles of "Hell Bank" notes. Utensils, thermos flasks.

Sent:
11:18:14
01/28/2006

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Whole (cooked?) bunches of lettuce whole slabs of tofu bank notes in 5 denominations. 1000 10 50 100. Parcels of paper clothing bottles of chinese wine. Holding incense like brollies high above their heads Crabs mock fish and meats wax candles tt look like candies Gingko desserts paper shoes glutinous rice cakes of diff colors 7 types of burning papers boxes of paper apparel for male & female setting tables in the courtyard filled w foods

Sent:
11:40:30
01/28/2006

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Throwing kidney bean shaped wood blocks to make sure the ancestors have supped; if not, the entire family can't leave. One faced up, one down. Try till can.

Sent:
11:50:30
01/28/2006

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KFC bucket takeaways for the living. Drinks from the vending machines.

Sent:
11:53:13
01/28/2006

I had to resort to sending text messages to myself because I'd left my pencil and notebook in the car; a half dozen of texts that construed the almost incoherent, rambling, and grammatically (semantically and syntactically) unsound catalogue of what I'd spied with my little eye on the morning of Lunar New Year Eve in Seu Teck Sean Tong Temple.

My Dad had herded the family there because that's where my (paternal) grandparents' ashes and plaques are housed. I'm not sure if it's a Chinese thing or a Teochew thing, but that was what you do on the Lunar New Year's eve apparently: you visit your ancestors bearing a multi-course feast, offer joss sticks thrice, wait for some floor-space in front of the rows of ancestral plaques to be cleared so you can take your turn tossing the two halves of a large wooden kidney-bean until one half is faced up and the other down (which is the sign your ancestors have eaten their fill - otherwise, you can totally forget about leaving); when they finally have 'eaten' their fill, you repack your multi-course feast into your bamboo baskets (tiffin carriers, trays, plastic bags, and etc.), throw artistically fanned-out stacks of joss paper into a roaring, air-polluting fire hazard of a furnace, and then you can leave the smoky, sweaty, squeezy space of the temple ... to gather at some rellie's place to ingest (forcibly or voluntarily) what is left of the ash-speckled feast meant for your ancestors - which is just about every fucking dish your sainted aunt had spent the entire morning preparing.

I had plenty of time between the first and second and third joss stick-offering, and waiting for a confirmation from my grandparents that they had indeed had their fill - which I spent wandering around, goggling at everything I saw. All of a sudden, being Chinese seemed rather exotic and intriguing, and I was glad I was Chinese because I'd otherwise have missed this whole curious circus at the temple.

Just before I (and the rest of the family) was 'allowed' to leave, I spotted a few young children sitting in a semi-circle on red plastic chairs in a corner, and seated with them, on a chair of its own, was a distinctive red-and-white bucket of Colonel Sander's secret recipe chicken. Watching one little boy dig happily into his large container of (what must pass for) mashed potatoes and gravy, I thought it was really amusing. (I'm not quite sure why I'd found it funny now.)

Food for the living, food for the dead; food for the generation past, food for the generation future.

I rue that I'll never get to see the Lunar New Year Eve where families visit these temples with offerings of pizzas, fried chicken, double-cheeseburgers, fries, and milkshakes - now food for the living, food for the dead then.