On a Monday morning, the wails of a recent young widow escaped through the open door of Wan Shou Funeral Home into the indifferent sunlight of a fall day.
Passersby on the busy sidewalk of 8th Avenue in western Brooklyn’s Sunset Park neighborhood looked startled by the anguish behind the new black awning.
An avenue of restaurants, clinics, pharmacies, fish stores and fruit stands caters to the every need of the new immigrants that live nearby. And now it serves them even in death.
Wan Shou Funeral Home opened in September. Its services have operated for nearly 10 years out of Ralph Aievoli & Sons, a funeral home on 65th Street in Bensonhurst.
But the new Sunset Park branch became the first in Brooklyn to specialize in funerals for Chinese immigrants, providing residents with a local alternative to existing funeral homes in lower Manhattan’s Chinatown and Flushing, Queens.
The services performed at places like Wah Wing Sang in Chinatown, Chun Fook in Queens, and Wan Shou in Brooklyn offer an amalgam of traditions carried over from Hong Kong, Taiwan and mainland China and rites created by immigrants.
The ceremonies vary by families’ region of origin, the dialect they speak and the religion they practice, said Roger Chen, a Queens funeral director who has been performing Chinese funerals in New York since 1969.
Some incorporate Buddhist prayers; others tie in Christian beliefs, or no religion at all. But a set of customs and beliefs unite them.
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