The Hired Mourner

Granny Sun lives in the next village. Sixty-three this year. When there is a death within ten miles and the children of the house are not at hand, they send for her. Eighty yuan a time, and a meal. She goes often and knows the roads; she can tell you of any family how many children they have, where they work, how long since they came back — she has it all by heart.

Old Wu at the east end died; his son is in Xinjiang and could not get back. On the burial day Granny Sun knelt before the bier and wept as if her heart would break, crying "My father, oh my father, what a wrongful death," until her lips went white. The onlookers wiped their eyes and said, that daughter weeps so truly it hurts to hear. Nobody let on — she was no daughter. She was the eighty-yuan hire.

She has a gift for it: she can make up the lament on the spot, to fit the family. Children away elsewhere — she wails, "your child is a thousand li off and cannot come home." Unfilial children — she wails, "you raised them so big and at the end not even a glimpse of their face." When the sorrow peaks she weeps real tears, not feigned. She says you have to carry some true grief in this line, or the crying comes out dry and the family is displeased. And where does her true grief come from? She has a son of her own, in Dongguan, who has not been back in three years.

The village takes this calmly enough. Some say, at least a hired mourner makes a noise, or it's too bleak and the dead lose their dignity. Others say, it's the way of things now, the young are all away, they can't attend to the dead. No one thinks it strange. No one thinks it wrong. The day Old Wu was buried, his son was on a worksite in Xinjiang; he had not even been granted leave for the funeral. He only heard his old father was gone, and lay on his bunk in the dormitory and slept the day through. While Granny Sun wept in his name, he was hauling cement, never knowing that somewhere a stranger was crying herself hoarse under his own father's name.

The first time I saw Granny Sun weep was at the funeral of Auntie Li at the west end. Auntie Li's daughter was in Shenzhen — sent money home, sent no person. Granny Sun knelt there, weeping piteously, and the real relatives beside her wept along. I stood at the back and suddenly remembered: when Auntie Li was alive, what she wanted most was one look from that daughter. Now she was dead, the daughter had not come, and in her place a paid stranger, standing in for the daughter, was crying the words "Mother, I wronged you" to the wall.

When the burial was done Granny Sun went to the side room to eat: a bowl of cabbage with glass noodles, two steamed buns. The family handed over the eighty yuan; she took it, wiped her mouth, slung the cloth bundle on her back, and walked on to the next village — there was another funeral waiting there. She can do two in a day, one in the morning, one in the afternoon, a cold bun on the road at noon. She says it's tiring, but the money's easy, better than hauling bricks on a site. She gave a smile, and the smile held nothing.

Once I could not help asking: your own son hasn't been back in three years — don't you miss him? Granny Sun was tying her bundle; her hands paused. She said, I do. Paused again, then: what good is missing? He has to eat out there; what would he eat if he came home. She settled the bundle on her shoulder and left; the figure shrank slowly into the distance. Wind came off the empty fields, with the smell of earth in it.

I stood there a long while and did not move. Funerals in the village now have it all — musicians hired, Granny Sun hired, banquet tables hired — livelier than in old times. Only the person in that coffin, the children and grandchildren they truly longed for, is mostly not there. There is weeping, yes — only, the one who weeps and the one who ought to weep are not of one family.

Toward dusk, from far off, came the sound of weeping again, in a tune I knew well — Granny Sun. No need to look: surely another family has put on its white cloth. The weeping in this village grows more and more, louder and louder, yet the little truth inside it grows thinner and thinner.