One year on

Last year Fr Warren Kinne wrote an article for The Far East about the death of his adopted Chinese mother.  One year on, Warren updates us on the family gathering to honour his mother’s memory.

It is one year today since my Old Shanghai Mother died. So there was a meal in a private room in a restaurant nearby. When I arrived I noticed I was in the “guest of honour place”, opposite the door. The son of the deceased sat on my right and the daughter who had accompanied her mother for years was on my left. I still see her regularly but I hadn’t seen the others in a year.

We had a fine meal through the haze of cigarette smoke. Mind you smoking is now forbidden in restaurants in Shanghai made more urgent by the imminent World Expo 2010. But whenever you ask the restaurant waiter “why is there smoking going on in here” they answer “but this is not a restaurant”. The whole city must be a designated smoking room!

I was told that you could eat the bones of the Chinese herring descriptively called “knife fish”. I politely declined the shell fish and said that I had an allergy to some kinds and couldn’t breathe after eating them. That stopped any further pressure to slurp on a shell.

The married daughter of “my sister” on the left was present and is having Chinese medicine after a mastectomy and chemotherapy. She is one of many in this city that has the highest incidence of breast-cancer in China. Her three/four year old son was dexterously dipping his chopstick in his grandmother’s yellow wineand very much enjoying sucking on the chopstick. He was doing this repeatedly and his minders started to get alarmed with this prank. I said something to the effect that we had a “little wine devil” in our midst and all agreed.

He is a clever kid and his performance was to give everyone around the table an honorific name denoting their relationship with him. I was an old Uncle on the mother’s side.

Toasts were given throughout the meal to whoever you want to toast and to all and sundry. When I said thank you for inviting me my “younger brother” to my right just said: I have to.

Most of the meal they talked in Shanghai dialect which is a form of double Dutch to me and on occasions I would ask “my sister” to the left what they were talking about. She would tell me in Mandarin. The conversation seemed quite animated about the country-side people who were very fortunate in being given apartments and pensions off the government for their land which was to be turned into yet more high-rise.

The son of my “younger sister” tried to work out if I was a materialist or an idealist in the philosophy classroom and he then tried to instruct me on the differences between Marx and Hegel.

As I slurped into the shark fin soup I was thinking of all those unfortunate fish swimming around off the West Australian Coast rudderless. We live with ambivalence.

We are now in the time of Sweeping the Tombs here in China. My old Chinese mother must have been happy with the way we honoured her memory.

Fr Warren Kinne  teaches in Fudan University in Shanghai.

Read Fr Kinne's article - My other mother