I took these pictures without knowing the consequences, and I hope that there isn't.
Anyway I'm not that superstitious..
This is how the paper house looked like.
The height is two-storey high but the house is three-storey high with alot of rooms.
Here's one of the bedroom.
and the altar..
The front door with a 'Zhang' on the lantern.
It represents that the house belongs to Zhang family.
Here's the picture of the sedan chair with four servant carrying it.
I supposed it's for my ancestor traveling purposes, and there's not only a sedan chair, there's two. It's kinda of ancient, it can only carry two person per travel, we should like burn paper cars for them. But you know what, we bought them paper aeroplane, it's even faster and more people can travel together. How thoughtful we are...
On Saturday, the most tiring day of all because my energy was spent swiftly by walking in circles and calling names that I have never heard of. In fact, I didn't know what's the purposes of doing it. I just did because they call us to do it. But I have the rough idea of it. The ceremony of turning the red squarish structure with paper dolls on it was to let the eight aborted babies reincarnate. They can only reincarnated, after the ceremony is preformed. There's a lot of process during the ceremony, not just by turning the structure. Each time we turned the structure, we have to kick the basket with chicken in it (it's places under the stucture), touched the banana leaves besides the stucture, and while we are turning the sturcture we have to shout the names of the babies. It's a tiring job, and I almost lost my voice because of it.
If you notice, I'm wearing black and being blocked by the structure. I'm the only grandchildren of the female children of my grandparent wearing black. It's because I didn't expect that we have to wear blue for the ceremony.
During the ceremony, we have a few family members filming down the ritual in action. I'm not sure of the purpose, but I guess it acts as an memory for us, as we had put in my energy, effort in preparation this ritual, and most importantly it acts as an bonding activity for the whole family. Which I believe have bring us closer..
We are not practising Kiasuism here, each family have showed their gratitude towards the ancestors, we folded each incense paper into a 'gold-shape'.
And these bags are enough to fill two trucks.
The last part of the ritual was to 'sent' our offerings to them. The moving of the paper house was a tough job as it's so heavy and big in size.
It requires alot of effort.
Lots of preparations before burning the incenses, it was bought to a far far place which I suppose that the place is meant for buring of big incense.
And after placing all the big bags of 'gold' around the paper house, the house was lighted with fire, and burned.
It's a great experience being part of the ritual, it's an eye opening to get to know more ritual and traditions. And of course I didn't typed out the whole ritual event, I just gave a short summary of it, obviously we did more, if not how it lasted for three days. There was like some 'show' kind of thing, we crossed the reincarnate bridge too, etc...
Yesterday was the first time working at TCC.
The people are nice, the supervisor even gave me the broccoli soup.
I seriously hate my name, it's hard to pronounce, and I need an alias seriously.
JS? Give me some ideas, something that sounds JS..
I seriously need to sleep now, I can't think and type properly now. For the missing informations, I'll update tomorrow.
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