Offering Plain Water Instead of Tea at Qingming: A Tribute to a Lifetime of Bittersweet Years
Whether for a society, a family, or an individual, it is said that three stages are inevitably traversed: the passionate ferment of exploration, the plainness of holding on, and—after prosperity—the reflection and settling that return to life's depths. In this final stage, we inevitably take on a certain religious quality, for we begin to touch our own soul.
So after a society becomes materially rich and politically stable, literature often turns decadent and Buddhist-casual; people living in prosperous times begin to grieve for the inner life. In ages of material scarcity, people worry only about what to eat today; in ages of plenty, they begin to wonder what the point of living is. And such thinking mostly ends in nihilism—because an honest person cannot deny the reality that life ultimately comes to emptiness. We will die, and everything pursued and possessed in life ultimately is as illusory as mirror flowers and moon water.
Born in the late 1970s, I have witnessed China's journey from poverty to prosperity. As a child, we ate meat only on festivals; today most people can no longer endure plain fare and find life without fish, meat, eggs, and milk unbearable. Only a few—like me, long accustomed to plain food, or vegetarians by conviction—still keep a simple life.
My age has also reached the third stage of life: I started a business in my twenties, consolidated in my thirties, and after forty began to reflect and settle, wondering what life's meaning really is. Just then, the world changed drastically; a pandemic overturned the whole world.
After World War II, human society, driven by the industrial and information revolutions, enjoyed unprecedented prosperity. Now all humanity has fallen from the peak of prosperity, and our blurred, frenzied hearts, after one fright after another, seem to have nowhere to rest. The world has become uncertain: will we still be as well off tomorrow morning when we wake? When will the next wave of pandemic come? When will the fate we see in the news—countrymen struggling through infection and quarantine—descend on us?
In 2012, after my mother died, I once took a train from my hometown back to Beijing and chatted in the carriage with an older man from my county. I told him, infinitely grieved, that I had just lost my mother and would return every Qingming to tend her grave. He comforted me: young man, you have seen too little of the world; only in your present grief do you think you will come back every Qingming; later, for all sorts of reasons, you will rarely return. The living manage the living, the dead the dead; look after your own life! Your mother, beneath the nine springs, would think the same. I strongly disagreed at the time, feeling he could not understand how deep my feelings for my mother were; how could I ever give up Qingming grave-sweeping?
Ten years later, sitting in my Beijing home, I look back on this episode with a sigh. I have now missed three Qingmings of grave-sweeping. Will I be able to tend my mother's grave next Qingming? No one can say. Even my son's school has replaced Qingming memorials to revolutionary martyrs with online rites. A thousand li away, grass must already be growing green on my mother's grave, but I cannot come and make an offering there.
Life's end is not only empty; life's process is also full of helplessness. In prosperous times we confidently believe we control our lives, unaware that, unseen, fate has always been manipulating our life and death, and the joys and sorrows of all beings. Those bright, swearing moments were nothing but "not knowing in the dream that one is a guest, greedy for a moment of joy."
The uncertainty of fate has plunged many instantly into career lows; too many have no time to grieve at "the Qingming rain falling one by one, the traveler's heart breaking on the road." Mortgage, car loans, tuition, living costs, and medical bills have crushed many. A little over two years ago, most of us were high-spirited, thinking how to grow our careers; now, keeping a job and feeding one's family is already good. The pandemic has given us much extra time and, despite ourselves, set us thinking about the ultimate meaning of life—questions we previously had no time for—because perhaps plague, death, war, or poverty will knock on every home tomorrow. Middle-aged people like me, the mainstays of our families, tread on especially thin ice.
Life has always held an element of sorrow; no one can go through life without moments of grief, and a life with occasional sorrow is the real one. Falling flowers and the plum rain move us because they stir the sorrowful memories in our hearts.
Bittersweet years have both grief and joy. The Song-dynasty lyricist Jiang Jie wrote "Ripples Sifting Sand·Listening to Rain": "In youth I listened to rain in the singing tower, red candles dim behind the silk curtains. In middle age I listened to rain in a traveler's boat, the river wide, clouds low, a lone wild goose crying in the west wind. Now I listen to rain beneath a monk's eaves, my temples already gray. Partings, sorrows, joys—all are pitiless; I let the drops, step by step, fall till dawn."
When we understand this lyric, our life has entered the third stage—the stage of returning to life's depths to reflect and settle. After reflection and settling, most people's feelings are complex, hard to put into words. One can only, like Jiang Jie, "let the drops fall step by step till dawn," or, like me at this moment, offer plain water instead of tea in tribute to a lifetime of bittersweet years.
In my melancholy I cannot tell whether I am memorializing my mother or the past. My mother's shadow is both clear and blurred; the past is both clear and blurred. Although my melancholy has not reached the depth of "life's eternal regret, like the river flowing east," it is indeed something I cannot bring myself to speak.
Written for my Qingming of 2022.