No grave visits for pregnant mothers

Cheng Beng – a day the family gets together at the graves of ancestors. I am unsure of how much the true origins come from the spiritual aspect of ancestral afterlife connection, or the social aspect of a family get-together at a site of common ancestral respect. Whatever it is, dead or alive, granny in the grave is still keeping us together with such an annual occasion.

Over the centuries, long family hikes to mountainside gravestones has evolved to air-conditioned drives on highways to manicured memorial parks laid out like an urban metropolis. Even the traditional burning of paper folded “gold” ingots and “hell bank notes” to transmit “wealth” to the afterworld is now supplemented with paper mobile phones, LCD TVs with blu-ray DVD players, and we even saw a convincing gucci bag!

GF didn't join us this year. There is a belief that grave visits by pregnant mothers may undesirably invite some “residents” of these neighbourhoods to “follow us home”. Although this advice was from her mum, mine concurred too and played along. The rest at the grave still didn't know and a "she's tired and is still sleeping at home" was sufficient. For now, the general tiredness of early pregnancy is also a real enough reason for GF to skip and stay home to sleep on too. Anyway, she didn't miss much. Just the usual annual morning family picnic by the campfire on the hillside.