Burning Money: The Material Spirit of the Chinese Lifeworld

Chapter 2 Endless Scroll

25 c h a p t e r 2 Endless Scroll Increase Increase Increase —epigraph on a Little Heavenly Gold My plan to collect all the different paper monies ended very quickly years ago. Trying to grasp the whole galaxy of paper monies soon becomes a bewildering and endless task. Simply walking into a store specializing in paper monies in any sizable city in China is a daunting experience. Some Tian Jiu chain outlets in Hong Kong even provide shopping baskets. Although such shops import paper monies from other regional markets, no one shop can possibly retail the whole corpus of commercial manufactures, not to mention the vast sea of homemade paper monies that extends from Harbin to Hanoi. Then there is the question, paper money for what? Paper replicas of worldly things are burned for every passage fraught with danger or crisis or anxiety that attention to ritual helps resolve: pregnancy, birth, travel, washing hair at the risk of losing whatever little fortune one possesses, coming of age, marriage, marital estrangement, divorce, dealing with a harasser or other nuisance (or, conversely cursing or harassing an adversary), exorcising a demon, mourning a death or helping the deceased through the hellish ordeal of ridding the body of its worldly corruption, remembering the deceased, giving thanks, opening a business, responding to an entrusted dream, leaving on a trip, taking an exam—the list is endless. Each ritual occasion in different places may entail a different ensemble of papers. Along a busy boulevard in Guangzhou on a summer afternoon in 1995, I happened on a wheelbarrow outside a construction site in 26 chapter two which an older worker was feeding a fire with sheets of gold-foiled papers in a nonchalant manner. The giant sheets of yellow-brown tissue were stamped with a wood block of red emblems for longevity and monetary fortune; below these was an incantation that read, “Giving thanks for the kindness bestowed by the divines” (chóudá shén’ēn). There is considerable overlap in the ensemble of papers appropriate for different occasions, and knowing which papers to use is usually a matter of family tradition or consulting a spirit master or a vendor. Much of the business of assembling papers for maximum communicative effect is a combination of implicit rules of thumb, common sense, individual style, ingenuity, purpose, and sense of aesthetic. This includes the physical motions and gestures that cannot be separated from the papers. A mother and pregnant daughter-in-law laid out an elaborate offering on the floor of the Wong Tai Sin temple, Hong Kong, on a brisk fall morning in 1999. The food offerings included a small roast pig resting in the long paper shopping bag in which it was transported, while the two women folded the Longevity Gold papers (HK$5 packs) in a novel style. Working in unison, each took a pack and turned each leading edge of a leaf back to its opposite edge, creating a kind of puffed-up tube and giving maximum exposure to the gold foil. Then into each “coiled” pack was inserted the red paper charm of a “noble benefactor” (guìrén fú), and the whole reconfigured pack was placed snugly against a previous pack to create a sea of gold. Then in a manner that was out of the ordinary for this place, the mother and, close behind, her daughter-in-law got down on their knees, upon which the two turned to face away from the main altar and bowed deeply from the waist in a kneeling position to praise the sky. It was a grand gesture and lovely to behold. They did not actually touch their heads to the pavement, but as their folded hands came down with the downward motion of their bodies from the waist, the hands separated, spread down and to the sides, with the palms open to the sky but never touching the pavement. The way they did it was as sweeping as it was graceful and their bodies and offerings became the flesh of the world. After beseeching the firmament, the two turned around and did the same for Wong Tai Sin. endless scroll 27 Taxonomies Although a lot of paper money is made by family members for home consumption , most paper money is manufactured and retailed by countless little family-based workshops and hand-labor paper money makers scattered around China. There are also...