Wacky Christmas Eve Funeral

My Christmas eve started with a river cruise and ended with a funeral. Let me explain.

I started the day quietly, taking it easy in anticipation of a long day on the bus tomorrow to Longsheng. I went on a river cruise in the afternoon on a bamboo fishing raft, and in the evening I went to see a Zhang Yimou choreographed outdoor light show called Liusanjie, performed by local villagers on their fishing rafts, which sounds dumb but was actually pretty cool.

After the show, I was wandering around town when I stumbled into, of all things, the red hat’d gold epaulette’d marching band that woke me up yesterday morning with their awful playing and endless firecrackers during their funeral march. (I know I'm now fated to join this marching band at some point on my karmic crawl toward insect-hood.)

This time, they were playing with a performing theater troupe. I started taking pics, felt really self conscious because this was a funeral dinner that spilled into the street, but people didn’t seem to mind or care or notice, in fact they smiled at me, so I kept at it, making my way towards an old guy playing (I think) the pipa. I smiled sheepishly at him when he looked over, and instead of throwing his shoe at me, he pointed his chin towards behind the stage. And so I made my way back there and chatted up the middle aged actors when they were in between scenes or doing one of their endless costume changes. (I couldn't follow the story, or the two dozen characters played by 4 pudgy actors.) I made myself warm around their charcoal fire, ate peanuts and bananas and oranges with them, smoked Guilin cigarettes with the troupe leader Mr. Huang, who explained to me that local funerals last for 3-4 days and always end with this dinner and performance thing the night before they bury the guy.

The band guys kept joking around about when this 3 day funeral was going to finally end and I kept taking pics because the actors kept striking poses. I felt kind of bad because the family of the deceased was watching all this horsing around and I thought for sure they were going to come behind that curtain to either tell us to shut the hell up or to kick our asses. But nothing happened. So I hung out with these merry part time farmers/musicians/actors until the clock turned twelve. Merry Christmas.