THE CHINESE FUNERAL HOME

The Glamorous Profession of Writing, and the Other Professions it Requires

I have a nutcase of a Cuban writing partner, “Charlie,” with whom I have been wrestling through an interminable, never-ending screenplay for years.  He’s also a cop and a dad, which makes collaboration difficult.  He’s a connoisseur of vintage European motorcycles and a boxer, and dresses like a young Hollywood thug.  He is very handsome, usually armed, and relatively dangerous.  I love him like a brother. 

About a year ago, being a writer, I was expressing my extreme financial terror to him, and he decided to offer me a job:  his job, the job he had been doing for the last 30 years.  This was it, he said. He was finally letting go of his Chinese mortuary gig.  It was driving him nuts, he said. They were going to have to put him in a box if he kept doing it. 

For 30 years, Charlie had been coordinating the motorcycle escorts for one of San Francisco’s oldest established Chinese funeral homes.  

It sat right in the pocket between North Beach, San Francisco’s version of Little Italy, and Chinatown.  What made this funeral parlor special was its slow-moving New Orleans style jazz band, the trumpets and drums of which followed behind the hearse and the “flower car” - a Cadillac Fleetwood that had been customized to have a flatbed in the back and a seat for the bereaved, that they might be visibly transported behind a large, gold-framed portrait of the deceased.  

 For a little while, right before Covid hit, Charlie and I actually had finagled an office for ourselves in the mortuary to write in.  The boss was a spritely older gay man, “Bill,” who had once been in show business — he had been a protege of Liberace, and had performed in a glitzy double-piano act for years.  I liked the funeral parlor, because around any corner you might peek behind a curtain and see a neatly prepared dead Chinese guy laying in an open coffin.  It felt writerly.  I recalled a certain school of Buddhism where the adherents shared their rooms with a decaying corpse in order to fully grok the reality of death.  Anyway, it was colorful.  The building was enormous, and had been in business for so long, it was filled with secret abandoned rooms that Charlie took me spelunking in.  

I had known of the job before, because an ex-boyfriend of mine had had it when he was just out of college.  He and a bunch of Chinese guys riding “rice rockets” — Ninja motorcycles, mainly — rode in front of the hearse and cleared the pedestrian traffic in the Chinatown intersections, while wearing a general approximation of Cop Drag. 

The Chinese guys my boyfriend rode with were always flying on multiple hits of acid.  (I knew two other morticians who were also heavy into acid. Perhaps the Grateful Dead were onto something.)

Anyway, I decided to go for the job in earnest.  I bought a new pair of black patent leather Doc Martens and some appropriately black and respectfully funereal officewear.  Bill was a total delight, and introduced me to the whole funeral team, most of whom were Chinese.  He gave me an extensive tour of all of the giant rooms — I estimated that at least 3 well-attended funerals could be going on simultaneously.  Bill had tricked out the basement of the place and turned it into a coffin showroom.  One corner of the showroom was a wall of what looked like Barbie accoutrements - brightly colored cardboard versions of symbolic wealth, including flat screen TVs, pairs of shoes, suits, cars, paper money, mansions and servants. “These are all things the Chinese like to burn graveside, so they can have them in the afterlife,” Bill told me.   I am bonkers for this kind of anthropological fact. 

Charlie decided I needed a training ride out to the cemetery in order to see, so I met him one Sunday at the mortuary.  As the coffin was loaded into the back of the hearse, the three heavily booted motorcyclists lined up in a row and bowed three times from the waist.  Then we moved out on the bikes — I was riding on the back of Charlie’s.  The bikers moved ahead of the procession, stopping foot traffic at various intersections.  Charlie praised or criticized each motorcycle escort for his “command presence.”  We made a stop in front of one Chinatown apartment building and the back doors of the hearse were opened - Charlie explained that, according to tradition, they were letting the soul of the dead person out in front of his home, so he could visit one last time.  

The Chinese cemetery is out in Colma, Daly City - a town that was founded as a necropolis in 1924.  It has a population of approximately 1500 living people, and over 1.5 million dead residents.  We roared through the gravestones on the motorcycles in front of the funeral procession, parked a respectable distance away from the grave, and watched the ceremony.   Plumes of smoke rolled from wrist-sized bundles of yellow incense over a seemingly unending sea of headstones as a professional musician created angular laments on an erhu — that 2-stringed bow instrument peculiar to Chinese music.

Anyway, after several weeks of trying to break me in, Charlie finally waved me off of the job.  It was impossible to train me for. “If I give it to you now, you’ll just lose it.  Someone will steal it from you,” he reasoned. I had learned enough at that point to know when to give up.  There were too many irregularities that had gone on for too many years.  There were wheels within wheels of bureaucratic and legal Gordian knots around the job which were essentially unsolvable.  The whole job really only existed because of various protections in place to preserve Chinese culture.  In terms of the SFPD, insurance and permits, the motorcycle escorts had existed for decades in a kind of extra-legal Twilight Zone that only Charlie could possibly navigate. 

As it turned out, the job wasn’t really a job for long anyway. Business has been in a steady decline at the mortuary.  The love of elaborate funerals has been lost, among the generation of Chinese relatives burying their dead in San Francisco.  The funeral parlor is doing less and less business.  The marching band has disbanded.  The Chinese (who did so remarkably well during Covid they barely died at all) are opting for cheaper funerals, these days.  Fewer bells and whistles.  Cremation, even.  

There was just no understanding the job, ultimately.   It’s Chinatown. 

Artwork: “Anna May Wong,” oil on linen, Cintra Wilson 2022