“All Chinese funerals honor the elders,” Chen said. “That is the basic paradigm of the funeral, and the people that come honor that paradigm.”
At an October funeral at Wan Shou, for a 40-year-old immigrant from the Chinese province of Fujian, funeral host Zheng Kemin laid out tin cartons of dumplings and meat on a table for the deceased.
Zheng read aloud the milestones of the man’s life, and guided his wife and two teenage sons as they bowed, incense in hand, before the coffin.
For many immigrant families, going to a non-Chinese funeral home would be impractical, Zheng says.
“The language is different, the customs are different. It’s a traditional obligation for children to take care of their parents in this way,” and non-Chinese funeral homes can’t do it, he said.
The increasing numbers of Chinese immigrants living and dying in Brooklyn no longer have to leave the borough for traditional services.
“If you live in Brooklyn, you should be able to go to a place in Brooklyn,” Huang Lichun says.
A 35-year-old from southern China who runs a dry cleaner, Huang went to the Bensonhurst branch of Wan Shou when her father died in August.
Huang was looking for Chinese speakers who could understand the particular needs of a traditional send-off, with incense, scrolls, silk clothing for her father, a feast laid out for him, and a fire of paper houses, cars and money to see him comfortably into the afterlife.
She found the expertise, she says, in Peter Xiao and Amy Li, the Chinese couple who arrange funerals both in Bensonhurst and in Sunset Park.
It didn’t matter to her that an Italian-American family from Dyker Heights owns Wan Shou.
Flowers at Ting Guan's Funeral. Photo: Dave Mayers |
Joseph Aievoli, a 47-year-old owner of Ralph Aievoli & Sons, says he first started thinking of providing Chinese funeral services when he watched an influx of new Chinese immigrants move into the traditionally Italian neighborhood of Bensonhurst.
Not a single one ever came to the funeral home, he says, until the day in 1997 that Xiao knocked on the door.
Xiao, now 50, was a student counselor at Toure College in Brooklyn. A student of his was looking for a place that could hold a funeral for his father, and Xiao offered to help.
He found Aievoli, and walked him through the steps of a traditional Chinese funeral, building a fire in the parking lot because there was no fireplace.
Other funeral homes in the city have shut down as deaths decreased by more than 20 percent between 1990 and 2005, but Aievoli survived by adapting. The funeral home hired Xiao as a translator and cultural guide.
“There was this new immigrant community who needed to be serviced in a specific way by somebody who understood their culture,” Aievoli said.
The owner likes to boast about Xiao’s background putting on funerals in China, but in truth they looked much different from the ones he arranges today.
As a young man in southern China during the political chaos of the Cultural Revolution, Xiao worked in a state-run funeral home. Most people received simple cremations, with little ceremony.
The government allowed exceptions only for the funerals for high-level officials, eulogized with pomp and respect, and Buddhist monks, who served as repositories for the country’s suppressed religious death rites. These funerals, says Xiao, looked most like the ones families ask for now.
The funerals are not cheap; the average price at Wan Shou can reach $12,000. In Sunset Park, the median household income for 2005 was around $31,224.
But Huang, who says she never felt pressured by the funeral home to spend more money, believes she gave her father the kind of send-off that wouldn’t have been possible for him in China even today.
“In China, you have to be an important character to have this kind of funeral,” Huang said. “Here, everybody can have it.”
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