Caitlin Doughty's Blog, page 7
May 31, 2021
Guiding Our Dead, Saving Our Spirit: The Cost of Being Chinatown’s Mortuary Band
Chinatown funeral procession in San Francisco, Circa 1910
A Chinese American funeral is concerned about ghosts.
After the body is prepared – often covered in layers of cloth or blankets in the casket, and the face covered – and loved ones have had time to bring offerings and pay their respects, it’s time for the funeral procession.
If you’ve ever witnessed a modern Chinese American funeral procession, you are probably struck by what appears to be pomp and pageantry; color and sound. Pink, white, and yellow flowers adorn the casket or the car that carries it. If the deceased was older the color red might decorate the casket as a more joyful gesture. A large photograph of the deceased, also surrounded by colorful flowers, is affixed to a car and takes a prominent position in the procession.
There is the sound of crying, perhaps wailing. While the family may choose to ride or walk quietly with the casket, sometimes professional mourners are hired to cry out on their behalf.
The procession calls out to the living, “This is the last physical journey of our person!” It commands attention. But such attention is not only for the living, it also fills the street with layers of movement and energy to confuse and distract unseen assailants.
Evil spirits.
Think what you will of ghosts and gods. Many Chinese Americans aren’t “believers” themselves, but even if their belief in spirits has died, the ritual itself lives on.
A flurry of paper and sound fills the air around a procession, calling out to any evil spirits who have attached themselves to the deceased and their family. The goal is to discombobulate the unwanted ghosts, throw them off the trail of the newly dead.
Paper money for the dead or “Hell Bank Notes” are scattered to bribe evil spirits away from the deceased. White paper with holes cut through them are thrown out like confetti during the procession, as a way to confuse the dishonorable spirits. It’s believed that evil spirits can only go in a straight line, thus the scattered paper with the holes will confuse them.
But perhaps the most visceral element of the procession is the music. Musicians often march in the procession loudly playing traditional Chinese music, western hymns, or songs with personal meaning – often a mix of all three depending on what the family wants. When the novelist Amy Tan’s mother died, her funeral procession played “Daisy”, in remembrance of her mother’s English name.
Most notably the Green Street Mortuary Band, a western-style marching band in San Francisco, carries on this musical tradition. Serving San Francisco locals, especially those connected to Chinatown, the Green Street Mortuary Band plays over 350 funerals a year and is a fixture in the Chinatown landscape. The kick of the drum, the cry of the wind instruments, there is no mistaking an approaching funeral procession in San Francisco.
But aside from announcing “Here comes a funeral,” the music from bands such as Green Street is a tactic in chasing off evil spirits. Paired with firecrackers and wailers, the cacophony is a sound that is all at once dissonant, harmonious, and mournful. Evil spirits are driven away, while the spirit of the deceased, who is often thought of as confused and unsettled, has a place to focus, providing a way to keep track of their body.
Helping the spirit of the dead keep track of its body is just another act of death care for the family. If the spirit of the deceased were to get separated from their body, they would become a lost, hungry ghost, who will then bring misfortune upon all those who cross its path. The music helps to guide the new ghost along.
A Chinese American funeral’s music serves not only to venerate the dead and protect them from evil spirits, but to also give an impression of who they were, how important they were; and to show that people cared about them. In Hong Kong, where the practice of the funeral procession and funeral band evolved apart from mainland China’s traditions, some funeral processions would have several separate bands processing in a funeral. Each of these bands would have been hired by a friend or family member as a way to honor the dead.
In the early 20th century, there was allegedly a Hong Kong funeral that had “16 separate bands” supplied by various mourners. The procession completed one turn around Happy Valley race track (1.37 km or a little less than a mile) then carried on to the nearby cemetery.
Chinese funeral procession, June 1900
When Chinese people were coming to America in the mid-to-late 19th century, first for the Gold Rush and then to build the transcontinental railroad, they brought with them many of the “East meets West” funeral practices that were already taking root in Hong Kong, a British colony. Once in America those practices continued to evolve into new rituals and traditions that became distinctly Chinese American.
The Green Street Mortuary Band is descended from that Chinese American lineage. But it is a complicated family tree, featuring unions and splits, intermarriage and new familial units. For better or for worse, it informs a distinctly Chinese American experience.
By the late 1800s western-style marching band music was taking hold in San Francisco Chinatown funerals. From songs you might recognize in a main street parade to “Amazing Grace” or “Nearer My God To Thee,” Chinese people began to embrace elements of Americana available to them. As early as 1897, Chinatown crime boss Little Pete was honored with “the funeral march from the opera Saul” for a “fanciful funeral procession.” (Crowder; Chung; Wegars 226) But western-style bands in Chinatown didn’t really rise to prominence until 1911 when a meeting was organized “between Chinese and American youths.”
“On a Saturday afternoon the American boys arrived [in Chinatown] in a large bus…. When they got out of the bus, … [t]he Columbia Park boys lined up and started serenading their peers with “America” and other tunes. After a few numbers, Evans [the headmaster of the Columbia Park School] asked the Chinese boys to join them in a march, and so, with the band playing, [the Chinese boys] fell into line … to the applause of a large crowd that gathered to watch them marching to and fro along Stockton Street. … Never before had young Chinese and American groups even mingled to talk, let alone develop friendships and exchange ideas with each other….”
Soon after this encounter, 13 Chinese boys went to Chinese Six Companies Association, the organization that led and controlled Chinatown, and asked if they could form a band that played western-style marching band music. The Six Companies agreed that such a band would be good for the community and in a matter of days raised the sum of 2,000 dollars for a band teacher, instruments, and a practice room.
The Chinese Boys Band was born.
1929 Marching band, Cathay Boys’ of San Francisco
Led at first by Thomas Kennedy and then shortly after by original band member Thomas Lym (until 1964 when they disbanded), the Chinese Boys Band rapidly grew in size and status. When they merged with other Chinese boys bands, they became the Cathay Boys Band. When they incorporated junior bands in 1916, they became the Cathay Musical Society. By 1930 they became the Cathay Club Band or Cathay Band and in addition to music their charter included “sports, community service, and social activities” (Crowder; Chung; Wegars 227).
What started as a little Chinatown band formed by a handful of kids, became an award winning phenomenon, a point of pride for the Chinese American community. For a group of people that had once been called, and were still very often called, “unassimilable” in America (a word that is still loaded amongst Chinese Americans to this day), the Cathay Band folded Americana into its ways and practices, and through some alchemy, created an invaluable piece of Chinese Americana.
While the band played parades, clubs, free concerts in the park, parties, the 1915 Panama Pacific International Exposition, the Golden Gate Bridge opening, the World’s Fair, and many other high profile gigs, they continued to play for funeral processions in Chinatown. From 1913 to the 1950s, the band played almost every funeral in Chinatown – always at the front of the procession.
The procession would take about an hour and would snake through every single street in Chinatown. In the 1940s and ‘50s the band had 60 members. They could split into as many as three bands for a long procession, if requested – playing mainly Christian hymns. By the 1950s, the Cathay Band was the most popular mortuary band in the area. Other bands formed and tried to compete with them, but did not survive. While this appeared fortuitous for the Cathay Band, their success also heralded their downfall: the Musicians’ Union noticed them.
The Union stated that only union musicians could play funerals and unless the Cathay Band members joined the union, they could no longer be the lead mortuary band to Chinatown. They could play as “auxiliary” to a union band, but the Union insisted that funerals must be played by union musicians — the majority of which were white musicians, and most certainly not Chinese. If the Cathay Band ignored these stipulations, they would be picketed.
The Cathay Band didn’t have much of a choice. They couldn’t afford the union fees – the money they earned from funerals came in the form of lai see or red envelope money. Such money was more of a gesture of gratitude, a way to ward off bad luck, not actual pay. So after over 50 years of serving their community, the Cathay Band was forced to stop playing Chinatown funerals. Finally, in 1964 they stopped playing altogether.
William Chan, a saxophonist in the Cathay Band from 1931 until the end, said in a 2015 interview, “We just gave up, it’s about time to quit anyway…it’s no fun.”
Said Raymond O. Lym, whose father was Thomas Lym, “You can’t blame the Union, we just feel kinda odd to see them marching instead of us.”
It’s easy to think, “It’s just a band. Bands come and ago. Times change. They still have their funerals.” But what was taken away was more than music, more than a band – they took away care for our dead.
The instruments are unchanged, the songs may be the same, the faces in the crowd might even be those of the children and children’s children of those that heard the Cathay Band in the 1940s and ‘50s; but it is not the same. It is America’s fatal flaw: believing you can remake a cultural tradition in your image and the spirit follows.
There is a difference between “the dead” and “our dead.”
Now the only mortuary band in Chinatown is the Green Street Mortuary Band, a union band made up of (at the time of this writing) only white musicians. In the past there have been Black band members, but since 1992 when Green Street Mortuary manager Clifford Yee asked Lisa Pollard to start a new Chinatown mortuary band, it has been predominantly white—a gentrified version of a band created by Chinese American youth to serve their community. Not since the 1950s has Chinatown’s mortuary band been comprised of Chinese people.
Has this stopped the Chinese American community from employing the Green Street Mortuary Band? No. To her credit, Pollard works closely with Green Street Mortuary to uphold the traditions set by the people of Chinatown. With the motto “Dignity, Honor and Respect” it is apparent that Pollard takes her responsibility to the Chinese community very seriously.
Daryl Bush
“We take the deceased on their last journey where they’ve been born and raised – their last farewell to Chinatown,” says Pollard.
In a video by the San Francisco Chronicle, Pollard says, “It starts way, way before us. It was the Chinese Boys Band at first that was playing funerals.” She says this with reverence; pride in the work she’s taken on.
As a Chinese American individual, it’s hard to discern how to feel about the Green Street Mortuary Band.
On one hand, they are keeping a tradition alive. They are providing ritual to a community where such rituals knit together generations, ancestors, and history. If it wasn’t for Green Street Mortuary Band’s popularity (from both the AAPI and white community) the aural history of a culture could have been muted.
But – and this objection is not an objection targeted at Lisa Pollard, Green Street Mortuary Band, or Green Street Mortuary; it is objection to the centering of white individuals in a Chinese American history.
But it should be the Cathay Band.
It should be the Cathay Band – William Chan, Raymond Lym – preserving their own culture’s rituals, sending off their own dead in a way that only Chinese Americans can understand. From the sweetness of a candy pressed into our hands to chase away sorrow after a funeral to the three bows we count to honor our dead – it’s in our bones. These are our ways.
So much of Chinese American death has been cannibalized by American culture – from choosing where our bodies are allowed to lie, to how (or if) our names will be recorded, to even when we die at the hands of someone who cannot fathom our humanity.
Though the Green Street Mortuary Band upholds an important piece of Chinese American history, it’s impossible to avoid the fact that it was taken away from Chinese Americans. Because of money.
The Cathay Band was forced to disband over the money that Union members could make at Chinese funerals. Let’s not forget that for the majority of years that the Cathay Band was playing, America still lived with Chinese Exclusion laws. Chinese Americans and Chinese Immigrants were seen as a threat to not only American morals but all Americans ability to earn money.
While there certainly were middle class Chinese Americans in the early part of the 20th century, the majority, especially those in Chinatown, were poor and faced severe racism that impeded their ability to gain any sort of wealth. Thus, asking the Cathay Band – who mainly played free community events and did not get paid much or anything for bigger gigs – to pay Union dues was an impossibility.
Now the Chinatown funeral band is back. And despite my frustrations, I am happy the tradition is alive. I’m sure many of my fellow Chinese Americans, the uncles, the aunties, the por pors, the gung gungs, are happy too. I’m happy that Chinese American funeral workers have a chance to conduct funerals in a manner that continues the rituals adapted by immigrants who paved the way for me.
But. And again there is always a “but” when it comes to witnessing how much America asks other cultures to bend.
But have we saved the spirit?
We alter our names, our words, our rituals. At what point are we told to bend so far that we not only break, we disintegrate? Don’t misunderstand me, the Green Street Mortuary Band is not singlehandedly taking down Chinese American culture – far from it. I’m simply disquieted by how easily white culture accommodates the loss and replacement of a Chinese American institution and accepts it as a one-for-one trade off. It is not.
It should be the Cathay Band.
Guiding Our Dead, Saving Our Spirit: The Cost of Being Chinatown’s Mortuary Band
A Chinese American funeral is concerned about ghosts.
After the body is prepared – often covered in layers of cloth or blankets in the casket, and the face covered – and loved ones have had time to bring offerings and pay their respects, it’s time for the funeral procession.
Chinatown funeral procession in San Francisco, Circa 1910
If you’ve ever witnessed a modern Chinese American funeral procession, you are probably struck by what appears to be pomp and pageantry; color and sound. Pink, white, and yellow flowers adorn the casket or the car that carries it. If the deceased was older the color red might decorate the casket as a more joyful gesture. A large photograph of the deceased, also surrounded by colorful flowers, is affixed to a car and takes a prominent position in the procession.
There is the sound of crying, perhaps wailing. While the family may choose to ride or walk quietly with the casket, sometimes professional mourners are hired to cry out on their behalf.
The procession calls out to the living, “This is the last physical journey of our person!” It commands attention. But such attention is not only for the living, it also fills the street with layers of movement and energy to confuse and distract unseen assailants.
Evil spirits.
Think what you will of ghosts and gods. Many Chinese Americans aren’t “believers” themselves, but even if their belief in spirits has died, the ritual itself lives on.
The procession calls out to the living, “This is the last physical journey of our person!”
A flurry of paper and sound fills the air around a procession, calling out to any evil spirits who have attached themselves to the deceased and their family. The goal is to discombobulate the unwanted ghosts, throw them off the trail of the newly dead.
Paper money for the dead or “Hell Bank Notes” are scattered to bribe evil spirits away from the deceased. White paper with holes cut through them are thrown out like confetti during the procession, as a way to confuse the dishonorable spirits. It’s believed that evil spirits can only go in a straight line, thus the scattered paper with the holes will confuse them.
But perhaps the most visceral element of the procession is the music. Musicians often march in the procession loudly playing traditional Chinese music, western hymns, or songs with personal meaning – often a mix of all three depending on what the family wants. When the novelist Amy Tan’s mother died, her funeral procession played “Daisy”, in remembrance of her mother’s English name.
Most notably the Green Street Mortuary Band, a western-style marching band in San Francisco, carries on this musical tradition. Serving San Francisco locals, especially those connected to Chinatown, the Green Street Mortuary Band plays over 350 funerals a year and is a fixture in the Chinatown landscape. The kick of the drum, the cry of the wind instruments, there is no mistaking an approaching funeral procession in San Francisco.
But aside from announcing “Here comes a funeral,” the music from bands such as Green Street is a tactic in chasing off evil spirits. Paired with firecrackers and wailers, the cacophony is a sound that is all at once dissonant, harmonious, and mournful. Evil spirits are driven away, while the spirit of the deceased, who is often thought of as confused and unsettled, has a place to focus, providing a way to keep track of their body.
Helping the spirit of the dead keep track of its body is just another act of death care for the family. If the spirit of the deceased were to get separated from their body, they would become a lost, hungry ghost, who will then bring misfortune upon all those who cross its path. The music helps to guide the new ghost along.
Helping the spirit of the dead keep track of its body is just another act of death care for the family.
A Chinese American funeral’s music serves not only to venerate the dead and protect them from evil spirits, but to also give an impression of who they were, how important they were; and to show that people cared about them. In Hong Kong, where the practice of the funeral procession and funeral band evolved apart from mainland China’s traditions, some funeral processions would have several separate bands processing in a funeral. Each of these bands would have been hired by a friend or family member as a way to honor the dead.
In the early 20th century, there was allegedly a Hong Kong funeral that had “16 separate bands” supplied by various mourners. The procession completed one turn around Happy Valley race track (1.37 km or a little less than a mile) then carried on to the nearby cemetery.
Chinese funeral procession, June 1900
When Chinese people were coming to America in the mid-to-late 19th century, first for the Gold Rush and then to build the transcontinental railroad, they brought with them many of the “East meets West” funeral practices that were already taking root in Hong Kong, a British colony. Once in America those practices continued to evolve into new rituals and traditions that became distinctly Chinese American.
The Green Street Mortuary Band is descended from that Chinese American lineage. But it is a complicated family tree, featuring unions and splits, intermarriage and new familial units. For better or for worse, it informs a distinctly Chinese American experience.
By the late 1800s western-style marching band music was taking hold in San Francisco Chinatown funerals. From songs you might recognize in a main street parade to “Amazing Grace” or “Nearer My God To Thee,” Chinese people began to embrace elements of Americana available to them. As early as 1897, Chinatown crime boss Little Pete was honored with “the funeral march from the opera Saul” for a “fanciful funeral procession.” (Crowder; Chung; Wegars 226) But western-style bands in Chinatown didn’t really rise to prominence until 1911 when a meeting was organized “between Chinese and American youths.”
“On a Saturday afternoon the American boys arrived [in Chinatown] in a large bus…. When they got out of the bus, … [t]he Columbia Park boys lined up and started serenading their peers with “America” and other tunes. After a few numbers, Evans [the headmaster of the Columbia Park School] asked the Chinese boys to join them in a march, and so, with the band playing, [the Chinese boys] fell into line … to the applause of a large crowd that gathered to watch them marching to and fro along Stockton Street. … Never before had young Chinese and American groups even mingled to talk, let alone develop friendships and exchange ideas with each other….”
Soon after this encounter, 13 Chinese boys went to Chinese Six Companies Association, the organization that led and controlled Chinatown, and asked if they could form a band that played western-style marching band music. The Six Companies agreed that such a band would be good for the community and in a matter of days raised the sum of 2,000 dollars for a band teacher, instruments, and a practice room.
The Chinese Boys Band was born.
1929 Marching band, Cathay Boys’ of San Francisco
Led at first by Thomas Kennedy and then shortly after by original band member Thomas Lym (until 1964 when they disbanded), the Chinese Boys Band rapidly grew in size and status. When they merged with other Chinese boys bands, they became the Cathay Boys Band. When they incorporated junior bands in 1916, they became the Cathay Musical Society. By 1930 they became the Cathay Club Band or Cathay Band and in addition to music their charter included “sports, community service, and social activities” (Crowder; Chung; Wegars 227).
What started as a little Chinatown band formed by a handful of kids, became an award winning phenomenon, a point of pride for the Chinese American community. For a group of people that had once been called, and were still very often called, “unassimilable” in America (a word that is still loaded amongst Chinese Americans to this day), the Cathay Band folded Americana into its ways and practices, and through some alchemy, created an invaluable piece of Chinese Americana.
While the band played parades, clubs, free concerts in the park, parties, the 1915 Panama Pacific International Exposition, the Golden Gate Bridge opening, the World’s Fair, and many other high profile gigs, they continued to play for funeral processions in Chinatown. From 1913 to the 1950s, the band played almost every funeral in Chinatown – always at the front of the procession.
The procession would take about an hour and would snake through every single street in Chinatown. In the 1940s and ‘50s the band had 60 members. They could split into as many as three bands for a long procession, if requested – playing mainly Christian hymns. By the 1950s, the Cathay Band was the most popular mortuary band in the area. Other bands formed and tried to compete with them, but did not survive. While this appeared fortuitous for the Cathay Band, their success also heralded their downfall: the Musicians’ Union noticed them.
The Union stated that only union musicians could play funerals and unless the Cathay Band members joined the union, they could no longer be the lead mortuary band to Chinatown. They could play as “auxiliary” to a union band, but the Union insisted that funerals must be played by union musicians — the majority of which were white musicians, and most certainly not Chinese. If the Cathay Band ignored these stipulations, they would be picketed.
The Cathay Band didn’t have much of a choice. They couldn’t afford the union fees – the money they earned from funerals came in the form of lai see or red envelope money. Such money was more of a gesture of gratitude, a way to ward off bad luck, not actual pay. So after over 50 years of serving their community, the Cathay Band was forced to stop playing Chinatown funerals. Finally, in 1964 they stopped playing altogether.
It’s easy to think, “It’s just a band. Bands come and ago. Times change. They still have their funerals.” But what was taken away was more than music, more than a band – they took away care for our dead.
William Chan, a saxophonist in the Cathay Band from 1931 until the end, said in a 2015 interview, “We just gave up, it’s about time to quit anyway…it’s no fun.”
Said Raymond O. Lym, whose father was Thomas Lym, “You can’t blame the Union, we just feel kinda odd to see them marching instead of us.”
It’s easy to think, “It’s just a band. Bands come and ago. Times change. They still have their funerals.” But what was taken away was more than music, more than a band – they took away care for our dead.
The instruments are unchanged, the songs may be the same, the faces in the crowd might even be those of the children and children’s children of those that heard the Cathay Band in the 1940s and ‘50s; but it is not the same. It is America’s fatal flaw: believing you can remake a cultural tradition in your image and the spirit follows.
There is a difference between “the dead” and “our dead.”
Now the only mortuary band in Chinatown is the Green Street Mortuary Band, a union band made up of (at the time of this writing) only white musicians. In the past there have been Black band members, but since 1992 when Green Street Mortuary manager Clifford Yee asked Lisa Pollard to start a new Chinatown mortuary band, it has been predominantly white—a gentrified version of a band created by Chinese American youth to serve their community. Not since the 1950s has Chinatown’s mortuary band been comprised of Chinese people.
Has this stopped the Chinese American community from employing the Green Street Mortuary Band? No. To her credit, Pollard works closely with Green Street Mortuary to uphold the traditions set by the people of Chinatown. With the motto “Dignity, Honor and Respect” it is apparent that Pollard takes her responsibility to the Chinese community very seriously.
Photo By Daryl Bush
“We take the deceased on their last journey where they’ve been born and raised – their last farewell to Chinatown,” says Pollard.
In a video by the San Francisco Chronicle, Pollard says, “It starts way, way before us. It was the Chinese Boys Band at first that was playing funerals.” She says this with reverence; pride in the work she’s taken on.
As a Chinese American individual, it’s hard to discern how to feel about the Green Street Mortuary Band.
On one hand, they are keeping a tradition alive. They are providing ritual to a community where such rituals knit together generations, ancestors, and history. If it wasn’t for Green Street Mortuary Band’s popularity (from both the AAPI and white community) the aural history of a culture could have been muted.
There is a difference between “the dead” and “our dead.”
But – and this objection is not an objection targeted at Lisa Pollard, Green Street Mortuary Band, or Green Street Mortuary; it is objection to the centering of white individuals in a Chinese American history.
But it should be the Cathay Band.
It should be the Cathay Band – William Chan, Raymond Lym – preserving their own culture’s rituals, sending off their own dead in a way that only Chinese Americans can understand. From the sweetness of a candy pressed into our hands to chase away sorrow after a funeral to the three bows we count to honor our dead – it’s in our bones. These are our ways.
So much of Chinese American death has been cannibalized by American culture – from choosing where our bodies are allowed to lie, to how (or if) our names will be recorded, to even when we die at the hands of someone who cannot fathom our humanity.
Though the Green Street Mortuary Band upholds an important piece of Chinese American history, it’s impossible to avoid the fact that it was taken away from Chinese Americans. Because of money.
The Cathay Band was forced to disband over the money that Union members could make at Chinese funerals. Let’s not forget that for the majority of years that the Cathay Band was playing, America still lived with Chinese Exclusion laws. Chinese Americans and Chinese Immigrants were seen as a threat to not only American morals but all Americans ability to earn money.
While there certainly were middle class Chinese Americans in the early part of the 20th century, the majority, especially those in Chinatown, were poor and faced severe racism that impeded their ability to gain any sort of wealth. Thus, asking the Cathay Band – who mainly played free community events and did not get paid much or anything for bigger gigs – to pay Union dues was an impossibility.
Now the Chinatown funeral band is back. And despite my frustrations, I am happy the tradition is alive. I’m sure many of my fellow Chinese Americans, the uncles, the aunties, the por pors, the gung gungs, are happy too. I’m happy that Chinese American funeral workers have a chance to conduct funerals in a manner that continues the rituals adapted by immigrants who paved the way for me.
But. And again there is always a “but” when it comes to witnessing how much America asks other cultures to bend.
But have we saved the spirit?
We alter our names, our words, our rituals. At what point are we told to bend so far that we not only break, we disintegrate? Don’t misunderstand me, the Green Street Mortuary Band is not singlehandedly taking down Chinese American culture – far from it. I’m simply disquieted by how easily white culture accommodates the loss and replacement of a Chinese American institution and accepts it as a one-for-one trade off. It is not.
It should be the Cathay Band.
Louise Hung is the producer & co-writer for “Ask a Mortician”. Along with writing and researching for the Order, you may remember her words from HuffPost, Time, xoJane, or your local NYC lit reading. Follow her on Twitter.
Resources:
“Chinese Funerals in San Francisco Chinatown: American Chinese Expressions in Mortuary Ritual Performance” Crowder, Linda Sun. The Journal of American Folklore, Autumn, 2000, Vol. 113, No. 450, Holidays, Ritual, Festival, Celebration, and Public Display (Autumn, 2000), pp. 451-463
Chinese America: History and Perspectives, 1999
Ruthanne Lum McCunn, editor. Chinese Historical Society of America, 1999.
Guiding Our Dead, Saving Our Spirit: The Cost of Being Chinatown’s Mortuary Band
May 30, 2021
May 25, 2021
Destitute and Dissected: The Dead From a London Workhouse
“Avoid idleness and intemperance,” this motto that was carved at the front of the building encapsulates the predominant Victorian views of the workhouse, an institution that provided housing in exchange for work. The people who ended up here were seen as lazy, overindulgent, and unwilling to prosper in life. These people weren’t just poor, they were the undeserving poor. It’s a discourse still strikingly familiar, reminiscent of current debates about benefit claimants.
Workhouse shelter, in 19th century London. Via Mansell/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images
Our modern ideas about the workhouse come in large part from Victorian popular fiction, notably from the works of Charles Dickens, who lived near the Cleveland Street Workhouse—then known as the Covent Garden Workhouse—in his formative years, and might have taken inspiration from it. In Oliver Twist (first published between 1837 and 1839) he exposed the brutality of the system through the fictional story of a child born and raised in the workhouse—it was the author’s response to the New Poor Law of 1834, which established the system.
The archaeological study of burial grounds tells us that not even death, the ultimate frontier, can obliterate social divisions.
The 18th and 19th century Poor Laws were intended to tackle the ever growing population of the elderly, sick, and poor. The previous system of poorhouses and almshouses was thus replaced by the workhouse system, which implied full-time forced labour. The severe façade of the Cleveland Street Workhouse is a testament to the principles behind its conception: workhouses were designed to be unappealing and forbidding. A deterrent, not an invitation. The last resort, the place only someone desperate would consent to be taken. This cruel logic allowed the government to reduce expenditure on poverty.
For the Victorian working classes, there was nothing more horrific than ending up at the workhouse. Journalist Henry Morton Stanley, who famously tracked down the missing explorer Dr Livingstone, described the workhouse where he grew up as a “house of torture”. Many surviving historical documents provide a harrowing read. Letters from workhouse inmates remark on the conditions they endured, with children being violently punished and adults—including the elderly and the infirm—regularly abused. The regime was “worse than a prison”, “inhumane”, “brutal”. Every aspect of the existence of the inmates would be regulated: from the clothes they wore to what they ate. Separated from their families, stripped off their belongings, having reached rock bottom, with no possibility to rise, the workhouse poor were treated punitively, as if they were part of an inferior class whose life situation was entirely of their own making. The archaeological study of workhouse burial grounds proves that the social division between the poor and the workhouse poor persisted after death.
The archaeological study of workhouse burial grounds proves that the social division between the poor and the workhouse poor persisted after death.
Cleveland Street Workhouse
The burial ground associated with the Cleveland Street workhouse was active between 1790 and 1853. The current excavation, carried out by archaeologists from Iceni Projects and L-P Archaeology, reveals it was divided into two areas. The southern part appears to contain the remains of the poor people from the parish, with evidence of dental diseases, nutritional deficiencies and chronic infections. Historical documents show it was conceived as an “overspill” cemetery for the parish of Covent Garden. The burials in the northern side, however, while showing similar health patterns, paint a different picture: this section seems to be the area reserved for those who died in the workhouse—the destitute poor.
“The remains found in this area are noticeably different,” says Claire Cogar, director of Archaeology at Iceni and head of the excavation. “They don’t follow the typical orientation seen in the southern part of the cemetery, which was north-east south-west. Burial plots are arranged even more densely, forming up to ten burials in one grave, sometimes with more than one person in the same coffin.” But perhaps the most harrowing of all is the extensive evidence of post mortem dissections. Skulls, limbs, and body parts were cut open. One of the skeletons presented remains of a pinkish white substance, revealed to be a mixture of lead carbonate, pigments, and coniferous resin. This substance would have been injected into the circulatory system to better visualise the blood vessels during a demonstration dissection, before the remains were interred in the workhouse burial ground.
If with the Poor Laws parishes could take the destitute off the streets and profit from their labour, with the Anatomy Act of 1832 they could also legally profit from their deaths even against their will. The legal supply of bodies to the medical schools in London rose, reducing and eventually ending the illegal practices of the resurrectionists, but the new law introduced a new anxiety among the Victorian poor: “the existential foreboding triggered by the prospect of post-mortem dissection”, in the words of Sambudha Sen. The fear of dissection had started in the 18th century, when changes in British medicine highlighted the importance of gaining practical experience in the dissecting room. The demand for corpses caused the proliferation of grave-robbers and resurrectionists. The consequent anxieties resulted in the use of mausoleums and mortsafes by the well-off, while the poor had relations or friends keep an armed watch at night. However, the Anatomy Act of 1832 made it legal to dissect the workhouse poor, even when they opposed to it. These people were—unwillingly—part of an industry; their bodies were used as a commodity in public autopsies for anatomy students and for the advancement of modern medicine.
Unclaimed bodies are still used for anatomical purposes in some parts of the world. In a 2014 article for The New Scientist, David Gareth Jones stated they still constitute the source of cadavers in around 20% of medical schools in the US and Canada. In some US states, unclaimed bodies are passed to state anatomy boards.
Mortsafes in a churchyard, placed over graves to deter bodysnatchers. Photo by Judy Wilson.
The Cleveland Street Workhouse burial site is a striking memento of how society is built on the backs of the oppressed—on the one hand, deformities, stunted growth and work injuries hint at the terrible work conditions they endured; on the other, the evidence of dissections after death reminds us of their lack of autonomy and choice. The archaeological study of burial grounds tells us that not even death, the ultimate frontier, can obliterate social divisions. It is a sobering experience, and one that reminds us that social activism should also be concerned with our deaths.
Maria J. Pérez Cuervo is a freelance writer, editor, and communications manager based in Bristol, UK. Her work has appeared in Fortean Times, Mental Floss, Daily Grail, The Order of the Good Death, and many other places. She’s the editor of Hellebore, a magazine devoted to British folk horror and the occult.
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May 21, 2021
April 26, 2021
Is it only gays that remember?: The AIDS crisis and COVID-19
What is COVID-19? For Bill Gates, it is the ‘first modern pandemic’; for UN Secretary General António Guterres, the virus is “the greatest test since World War Two;” and for news outlets, an ‘unprecedented moment’. Yet, as a gay man, I cannot stop thinking of another devastating pandemic that swept the world in the 1980s and 1990s, one that destroyed communities and transformed intimacy, that still kills almost a million people every year: AIDS.
US News, April, 11 2020
“COVID-19 and AIDS: NYC Gays See Parallels, Contrasts” was the headline that ran on U.S. News on April, 11 2020. Reading this, my immediate reaction was to wonder: was it only gays who remembered AIDS? How could the population at large not remember a crisis that was so devastating? That is the question I will try to answer: who remembers, and equally important, who gets to be remembered?
It’s a hot summer day in June of 1981, Kim Carnes’ ‘Bette Davies Eyes’ is at the top of the charts, and the CDC has just published a note saying that five healthy, young men have died from an unusual type of pneumonia in Los Angeles. It would be two more years before scientists would establish that AIDS was caused HIV (human-immunodeficiency virus). By then, almost 200,000 people had contracted it, and many had died.
The AIDS crisis spans between 1981 and 1996, the same year the first effective medication became available; it was a time that was marked by the rapid spread of HIV and death. In 1995, the NYT reported that AIDS was “the leading killer of Americans from 25 to 44”.
The early association between HIV and gay men (as well as intravenous drug users and immigrants) explains why the Reagan administration refused to act on the unfolding tragedy. Reagan’s Press Secretary, Larry Speakes, laughed in public about AIDS, calling it a ‘gay plague,’ and it would take four long years for the President to even mention AIDS publicly, in 1985. Both the silence and lack of funding from this administration spoke volumes about the prevalent homophobia that existed in society: as well as among the doctors, undertakers and countless others who refused to provide care for those with the virus.
By 1990, twice as many people had died from AIDS in the U.S. than had died in the Vietnam war. Yet there is no big, black wave remembering them, no state-sponsored cemetery. The only large-scale monument to the AIDS crisis is the NAMES AIDS Quilt: a quilt composed of 50,000 panels that people had sewn together to remember a loved one who had died from AIDS. This is a painful reminder of how it was left to activists and victims to make sure that AIDS deaths were remembered.
AIDS quilt in front of the Washington Monument
Sarah Schulman, an American writer and AIDS historian, explains that “the disallowed grief of twenty years of AIDS deaths was replaced by ritualized and institutionalized mourning of the acceptable dead. In this way, 9/11 is the gentrification of AIDS. The replacement of deaths that don’t matter with deaths that do.” That is, as the AIDS crisis slowly came to its end for white communities following the advent of effective medication in 1996, the time was right for reckoning and grief, for the communities most affected to mourn their dead, and for those in positions of power to be held accountable for their homophobia and inaction which resulted in lack of care, support, and endless unnecessary death and suffering. And yet, in 2001, politicians took hold of 9/11 to develop of a sense of national unity in the face of tragedy that precluded any of that from happening.
It can be said that the U.S. national consciousness of AIDS deaths was gentrified: framed as the deaths of gay men, drug users, and others, who were forgotten to make way for the deaths of those deemed more “respectable.”
It can be difficult to understand just how much of a tragedy the AIDS crisis was, especially for those of us who did not live through it. During my research, I interviewed Josh, a 54-year-old man from Chicago, who told me about his experiences of the AIDS crisis:
“It was almost ‘84, I was 18, and I got a boyfriend. About a year and two months later, he was dead. By ‘85, all of his friends started to get AIDS. So for two years, up until 1987, my life was people dying in my arms. I was taking care of them, but the problem was that there was nothing to do, they were just dying. Some of them had a horrible death, most died in my apartment. All I remember from those years, it was so weird, it was taking care, taking care, and that push, push, push forward. I remember when Shawn died in 1987. He was the last one because all the others had already died.”
A resident’s room the day of his death from AIDS at the Bailey-Boushay House, an HIV/AIDS care center in Seattle. Photo by Saul Bromberger & Brandy Hoover.
Today, Schulman writes how AIDS “was a phenomenon so broad and vast as to permanently transform the experience of being a person in the world” and philosopher Paul B. Preciado argues that COVID-19 poses this question: “Under what conditions, and in which way would life be worth living?” There is an eerie similarity between these two reflections, a sense that COVID-19 is not, after all, that unprecedented. We have been here before, but what is different that we forget to think of AIDS when we talk about COVID-19?
There are many differences between the two viruses: routes of transmission, spread, lethality (without treatment HIV is deadly, COVID-19 is not). But there are also key differences of the speed with which science understood the virus, found treatments and vaccines (even today, no effective cure for HIV exists and neither does a vaccine), resources were mobilized, and victims were cared for. These differences are not solely the product of biology or technology.
From its earliest days, HIV was the disease of the gay community, the drug users… of all those belonging to historically marginalized groups of society. It was only when HIV ‘spilled over’ into the ‘respectable’ society (hemophiliac children, straight people, etc.) that it became a ‘crisis’. On the other hand, the early images of COVID-19 the media focused on were middle aged, middle class, white cruise-ship passengers, white nurses and doctors, the elderly, etc. These people were framed as ‘heroic’ and ‘innocent’ victims of a foreign virus that threatened their lives and their families. AIDS victims were not only blamed for their own deaths, but also seen as a threat to the rest of society. COVID-19 has disproportionally affected Black, as well as Latine, and Indigenous communities, and those with unstable housing or employment, and yet it is incorrectly still thought of by many as a ‘great equalizer’ that affects us ‘all.’
When talking about COVID-19, the loud silence about AIDS demonstrates how insidious the erasure of the deaths of gay men and other marginalized individuals can be.
By forgetting, or choosing not to remember, it becomes clear how memory is mobilized. Saying that COVID-19 is “unprecedented” erases the lives, deaths, and grief of millions of people worldwide who live with HIV or have died from it. It also prevents accountability: we will not ask why the government’s crisis response failed, yet again, if we do not know there was just as much of a crisis only 30 years ago—and the government failed then, too.
If anything, AIDS teaches us that memory is political, that remembering and forgetting are political acts with profound consequences for our society, how we define ourselves, and how our histories are constructed.
Jaime García-Iglesias is a Mildred Baxter research fellow at the Centre for Biomedicine, Self and Society at the University of Edinburgh. He holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Manchester (UK). He has worked extensively on how people make sense of HIV, negotiate risk, and understand intimacy. For more resources on these topics, as well as food pictures, you can follow him on Twitter @JGarciaIglesias.
Resources
Preciado, Paul B. 2020. “The Losers Conspiracy.” Artforum. https://www.artforum.com/slant/the-lo....
Schulman, Sarah. 2012. The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Is it only gays that remember?: The AIDS crisis and COVID-19
April 18, 2021
April 12, 2021
A Guide To FEMA’s Covid-19 Funeral Assistance Program
What:
The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) will provide funds to cover the funeral costs of families who’ve lost a loved one to COVID-19Funeral expenses dating back to January 20, 2020 are eligibleWho:
The death must have occurred in the U.S. (includes U.S. territories and the District of Columbia)Death certificate must indicate that the death was caused by Covid-19S. citizens, non-citizen nationals, and qualified aliens are eligibleYou can apply for reimbursement of funeral expenses for more than one person, if applicable.When:
Application process (phone only) begins Monday, April 12thMonday–Friday, 6am-6pm PST / 8am-8pm CMTHow to Apply:
Call the FEMA hotline to begin the application process: 844-684-6333 | TTY: 800-462-7585You will be given an application number over the phone and instructions on how to submit supporting documentation to FEMAYou will need:
Death Certificate with COVID-19 listed as cause of deathProof of paid funeral expenses (receipts, contract for services, etc.)How To Prepare:
Applicants will be asked for the following information:
Birthdate of applicant and the deceasedSocial Security Number of applicant and deceasedAddress/location where death occurredInformation about any financial assistance received from charitable organizations, donations, etc.Qualifying Funeral Expenses
CasketUrnCemetery plot or cremation nicheFuneral arrangements, use of funeral home, and staffHeadstone or grave markerTransportation of bodyCremation, burial, and related costsOfficiant or clergy feeDeath certificate
For more information go to FEMA’s Official Covid-19 Funeral Assistance Webpage
March 29, 2021
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