Qingming, the road home

In late March the hills around Chizhou start to turn. The rape flowers come up yellow between the terraces, and the air gets the particular damp warmth that means spring has actually arrived. And along the roads, for a week before and a week after the festival, there are people walking with plastic flowers and spades. Qingming is the one day of the year when the whole country performs the same errand at the same time: go home, find the graves, and tidy them up.

The graves of the most senior members of my family, my great-grandparents, are on a slope above the city, a patch of ground that was chosen decades ago and that no one since has seriously questioned. The stones are plain, the inscriptions worn. When I was a child the not-very-often walk up the hill was the whole point of the day, an outing with the adults carrying baskets. I understood the occasion as a picnic with formalities. The adults burned paper money, poured a little wine, swept the stone, and then we sat nearby and ate the food we had brought. Nobody lectured me about ancestors. I was simply included in the errand, and inclusion was the lesson.

The older I get, the more I notice who comes and who does not. The generation above mine makes the trip without being asked, and a few of them drive hours from the cities where they now live. The generation of my cousins, a little older than me, is thinner on the hill. They have jobs in Shanghai, in Shenzhen, in Hangzhou, and in Nanjing, and the festival falls on a workday this year, so the road home is longer than the road to the office. I do not moralize about it. Every family makes its own arithmetic between the dead and the living. But I notice the arithmetic, and it changes the way I think about my own.

There is a version of this festival that the cities have repackaged, with paper flowers in pastel colours and commercials about family warmth, and it makes the actual day sound like a soft-focus advertisement. The real thing is muddier. The slope is steep, the weeds are stubborn, and the work is honest manual labour with a scythe and a bucket of water. It is also, once done, strangely calming. There is a satisfaction in restoring a small plot of order that nothing else quite matches, because the plot will not stay ordered, and everyone on the hill knows it. You do the work anyway. That is the tradition in its most honest form, care performed without an audience.

I have been thinking about what the graves actually hold. Not the ashes, which are not there in most of these plots, but the stories, which are. My great-grandfather’s stone carries dates and a name, and nothing about the way he judged a melon, or the imagined argument he kept having with his brother, or the reason he settled on this particular slope. The sweep of the hill is where the remembering happens, because the stones are too small for it. The dead are kept by the living doing the walk, telling the stories on the way up, pointing at a stone and saying, perhaps: ‘this one was your great-great-uncle, he never learned to swim.’

Chizhou’s younger people are leaving for the coastal cities in a way they did not twenty years ago, and the slope is one of the last places where the whole family gathers by default. That fact makes me uneasy and grateful in about equal measure. Uneasy because I know the walk is a habit that has to be passed down by hand, and habits passed down by hand are the ones that get lost. Grateful because it is still being walked. Somewhere in the middle of that unease and gratitude is a plain truth: a family is what it does together, and ours walks up a hill every spring and tidies a piece of ground.

The remembering has not finished, and the road home is never out of season. The rape flowers will fade, the weeds will come back, and the work will need doing again next year.