Chinese Tradition?
Chinese tradition. It's something vague, something that's not really present to the teen world - but it still exists, well, at least I know it does.
My family took the bus and we walked into Bright Hill Rd, the new main building of the temple loomed infront on the right of the curb, it was spectacular; huge to be exact. Sometimes you wonder why some people actually bother to worship a practice we aren't even sure exist; I carried that impression into the aged altar-building beside the new construction.
Dad suggested we go pay my Grandma's ashes a visit, so we headed down the parking lot and into the other altar-site opposite. It was packed with people, offering their respects, bringing down their customs and their beliefs and praying to the gods for peace and stability in their homes, their families and their work. I've never seen such a range of age groups on a specific religious ground, there were teens, lumbering down the walkway to the burnhouse with paper money. There were young adults, kneeling down before the god statuettes and moving their jossticks in a linear momentum. There were middle-aged homemakers, laughing loudly to the vendors selling fresh flowers and fruits.
We headed down a hallway and into the basement, there were neverending rows of yellow boxes, with pictures, names and death-dates of the respected deceased, the holy buddhist music chanted from the back speakers as we squirm through alleys and alleys of these boxes, behind uge and broad glass panels. The place wore a sad and diminishing touch. My Dad bent over on one of these shelves and pointed. "There's Ah-ma," he said. I bent over and saw my late grandmother's picture, on the side it wrote the year she passed away, 1998, and then I realised why people still carry on such age-old beliefs.
We, Chinese were faithful to our ancestors, even those that we don't even know, we stop and pray to them, hoping they find new peace wherever they go after they pass on from this world. When I was younger I always wondered why during funerals, adults pour and cry their hearts out, but now it's dawned on me - if anyone close to me had left for somewhere else, I would've wallowed in tears as much as they had. So for some of us, even if we don't believe these taditional rituals and rites, we just go and worship because we respect the ones who had passed on, as a form of filial piety, and a form of faith, and hope this dying heritage doesn't fail.