Marriage for The Unmarried Soul

Marriage and family; life and death; ancestors and descendants. These dichotomies have always played a very important and integrated role in Chinese life. Though I am very much an American, it was instilled in me the importance of acknowledging my heritage, loyalty to my ancestors, and that the parent-child relationship was a reciprocal one -- mom and dad cares for me now so that I may care for them in their old age. Upon a person's death, your responsibilities to one another did not cease. The child and future descendants maintain the familial grave sites, burn joss paper (hell notes), and serve tea to provide for them in their afterlife. In return, the parents and other ancestors maintain protection over your life on earth until you join them later. Unlike other cultures, in this way, the Chinese relationships crossed realms and were not severed just because corporeally you were no longer together.

When my family and I visited our home village in southern China, we made a trip into the city to run some errands and do some shopping. But before we did that, we made a short visit with a relative -- my mother's "elder sister". I could not understand, at that moment, why we were visiting her or who she really was. I knew my mother did not have any sisters in China; they were all in America now. I knew she had one elder sister who died at a very young age but all living siblings were accounted for. So who was this woman?

The Chinese language is an odd one. The words/characters can either be very specific or very vague in usage, application, and meaning. In this case, the term "sister" was used somewhat loosely. She was not, in fact, the biological sister of my mother, but, rather, a sister-in-law of sorts.

In pre-modern China (and perhaps even today), there is/was an old belief (or, superstition, to non-believers) that a person who should die unmarried would not be permitted to the afterlife and, therefore, become a haunting ghost. As I mentioned before, marriage and family, life and death, ancestors and descendants are very important, interconnected concepts. An unmarried person and a childless person is not considered to be "whole" and is one who have not led a very meaningful life. An unmarried person, particularly an unmarried woman, is thought to be in limbo, neither belonging to her father's family nor her martial family (because she has none). And if you are unmarried, then you are also very likely childless. You have no family to belong to AND you have no descendants to provide for you on Earth as you make your way through the afterlife, so to speak. In this way, you are a very troubled soul.

To rectify this situation, there are many ways family members can restore the balance to the soul of the dead. You may find another person who died around the same time and perform a wedding ceremony so that both souls are joined together in the afterlife. Apparently, a living man may have sex with a dead woman and bring her back to life while suffering his own death (scary, isn't it?). Or, if you know your child will die very soon, you may do what my grandmother thought she had to do for her child -- you find a son who is also fated to die and unite them in matrimony while they are still living so that both children can make a smooth transition to the afterlife without ever experiencing limbo.

The "sister" (aunt, in my case) we visited, as it turns out, was either the sister or the sister-in-law of the son who married my mother's real sister. I have only heard of this sort of belief/superstition once, on television, in one of those crime shows. I forget the name of the program but it is the one about people who are reported missing. The woman/mother on that episode lost her son and convinced her son's living girlfriend to participate in the wedding ceremony in order to enter the afterlife. However, here's the catch, you can only marry one soul to another. You cannot marry a living person to a soul, at least not according to this Chinese belief. If you dig around, you'll see that this type of "ghost marriage" between a ghost/soul to a living human being does exist in another culture (some kind of small tribe in India or Africa... I forget).

I did not think much about the plot to this episode and was surprised such folk-y tradition existed among modern Chinese people, especially those living in the United States. I was equally surprised to know that my grandmother was so superstitious as we have never been a religious or spiritual type of family, though we did believe in certain traditions, superstitions, and feng shui. Still, it was a shock.

As my mother's elder sister's death deeply troubled my grandmother, she and any in-laws from this union were never mentioned. It was a forbidden subject and in a very, very sad way, it was as if my aunt never really existed.

Her memory is practically non-existent if we examine how grandparents chose to give out names to my mom and her siblings. The way they named their children, every pair of sons and daughters shared the same first character. In total, they had seven children, only six are living.
Wai Sam (son)
Rui Fang (daughter)
(I don't know her name but my late aunt, who was third eldest, did have the character "Rui" in her name)
Rui Ying (my mother)
Wai Ken (son)
Woon Yia (daughter)
Woon Yio (daughter)
As you see, we have two Wai's, two Rui's, and two Woon's. You would have never known that there once was a child born before my mother because they chose to pass on the "Rui" name to my mother and leading us to think she was really the third child.

I am kind of sad that my second aunt is such a taboo subject but I was very happy that my parents paid a visit to what should have been and kind of is my mother's sister-in-law. By doing that and by calling her "sister", my parents acknowledged that there is a side of our family that still exists, however shunned and hidden. And, in a silly, superficial way, it gave me a story to tell and compelled me to do a bit of research on Chinese beliefs surrounding death.

*I do have the URL addresses to back up some of the information provided in my story and will link to them another time.