Country Driving [4]
A day later I stopped at another funeral just after the grave had been filled. It was in the countryside, on an open plain marked by a huge Great Wall signal tower. There weren’t any cities nearby—in China, where the law requires most citizens to be cremated, only outlying rural regions are allowed to conduct burials. Near the tower, twenty men and women had gathered, wearing white sackcloth tied at the waist with red rope. In the distance a massive government propaganda sign read: “Protecting the Arable Earth Means Protecting Our Line of Life.”
I was greeted by the only attendant not dressed in mourning white. He was sixty-nine years old, a pudgy man in a blue suit and cap; his round moon face shone with sweat. He wore the biggest smile I’d seen since yesterday’s funeral, when I’d chatted with Wei Fu, the leader of the opera troupe. There’s always at least one happy person at a Chinese funeral.
“Come over, come over!” the pudgy man said, pulling at my arm. “We’re almost finished!”
He gave me a laminated name card. The front featured a picture of two hands clasped in a businessman’s shake, along with the words:
Zhang Baolong
Feng Shui Master
Services for the Entire Length of the Dragon,
From Beginning to End
Traditionally, feng shui masters evaluate the relationship between buildings and landscapes, trying to create harmony between what is natural and what is manmade. In ancient times, these beliefs often influenced military and political affairs. Northwest of Beijing, the Ming dynasty avoided building the Great Wall along a twenty-mile-long ridge because of its proximity to the imperial tombs. From a strategic point of view, the ridge was perfect for defenseworks, but feng shui masters believed it represented a longmai, or “dragon vein.” Any construction that violated the vein could bring bad fortune to the Ming, and so the ridge was left alone. The emperor went to the trouble of building walls farther to the north, where the terrain was less defensible and required more extensive fortifications.
After the Communists came to power in 1949, they attacked many cultural traditions as superstitious, including religion, fortune-telling, and feng shui analysis. Even when the reforms of Deng Xiaoping introduced greater tolerance, some practices never recovered—Taoism, for example, attracts few believers in today’s China. But faith in feng shui has proven to be resilient, largely because it’s connected to business. Good feng shui means good fortune, and people are willing to pay for expert analysis. Zhang Baolong was one of the new masters—he negotiated the market economy as skillfully as he did the geography. His business card listed twenty-seven separate services, ranging from “selecting marriage partners” to “choosing grave sites”—this was the “length of the dragon, from beginning to end.” He also offered to install wood beams for houses, determine locations for mining, and treat “unusual diseases.” He built coffins. (“You must supply your own wood.”) He assisted in the carrying of wedding sedans. On the card, service number twenty-one involved moving bones to a new grave site—a common task in a nation undergoing a construction boom.
“I chose this site!” Zhang said proudly, pointing at the patch of recently dug earth. In front of the tomb, mourners took turns kowtowing: each person knelt, burned a stack of paper grave money, and wailed as he knocked his head against the ground. Nobody seemed to mind my presence. In northern China, I had learned that funerals are almost always welcoming, in part because people rarely see foreigners. Nevertheless,