Ching Ming celebration honors Chinese ancestors

A place linked more with solemnity than festivity had been overtaken by 2,500 pounds of rice and a hundred cases of green bubble tea. Caskets had made room for Costco: The chapel at Bellevue's Sunset Hills Memorial Park and Funeral Home Saturday lay under bags of apples and boxes of chocolate and cartons of water, all of it ceremoniously set out before an altar in tiered multicolor formation.

It was Ching Ming, a traditional Chinese celebration going back millennia and stretching over several days. "It's like Memorial Day for Chinese people," said Michael Ha, an 18-year-old senior at Renton's Hazen High, here to remember his grandfather. "A day to look back and reflect."

Monks from Ling Shen Ching Tze Temple chanted; bells were rung and incense burned. In the lobby, amid a forest of red and yellow balloons, cookies and crayons kept the kids occupied.

Ching Ming usually starts April 5 or 6, but like other area funeral homes, Sunset Hills offered a weekend celebration to better fit work schedules.

Some, like Seattle's Evergreen-Washelli, used the occasion to market options such as "private estate" plots; at Sunset Hills, sale-priced specials on view sites were offered "Ching Ming Weekend only." Renton's Greenwood Memorial Park hosted about 200 people for its Ching Ming festivities.

"We do so much business in the Asian market that we wanted to give back to the community," said Sunset Hills sales director Neily Bissette.

The celebration is also called Tomb Sweeping Day; that name refers to the need for gathered family members to clean off infrequently visited grave sites on untended terrain.

"That's the time everybody gets together," said Shan-Tung Hsu, a feng-shui consultant on hand to advise families. It's an opportunity to keep connections, he said, "to say, 'These are my kids,' 'This is my baby,' 'My son's in university now.' "

Families honored ancestors not only by cleaning grave sites but by making their own offerings of drink and food and burning play paper money in bins provided by the memorial parks.

"The money is for them to use in the afterlife," said Leah Li, 13, whose grandfather is buried at Sunset Hills. "They can buy whatever they want in the sky," said her father, Hengda Li.

For years, said Sunset Hills' Robin Russell, Chinese families had come to the cemetery in early April, befuddling park officials. But when an affiliated funeral home in Vancouver held a similar Ching Ming event, Sunset Hills officials began to hope the same could happen here.

They advertised in local Chinese newspapers and on Chinese-language TV and brought in feng-shui master Hsu, who helps traditional Chinese families pick a burial site the same way they might choose a home. Sunset Hills' site — western-facing, atop a high plateau — is appealing to many, he says, including Tai Wei, who chose his own burial plot before he died following a stroke.

"We're here to pay respects to my grandfather," said Wei's oldest grandchild, Tahn Ha, a 28-year-old mortgage broker attending the event with her parents, grandmother, aunts, uncles and cousins.

"But as for the chants and the ceremony, I don't know what's going on."

Waiting in the lobby with her younger siblings and cousins, away from the cryptic ceremony inside, Ha wondered whether the tradition would carry on.

"It's only the older generation that does things like this," she said. "Maybe I will, but I don't know about all the little ones."

Outside, fires were stoked in tin canisters for burning the money offerings.

Farther out on the lawns, members of Wei's family, including a bevy of frolicking, waist-high kids, gathered near a white canopy erected over the patriarch's gravesite, where they'd laid out an assortment of fruit, Perrier, egg rolls, barbecued pork and roast duck — part picnic and part offering.

"It's one of those rare occasions where everyone gets together," Ha said. "Even though [my grandfather's] plot is so close, we don't get to visit. Everybody's so busy with life."

Marc Ramirez: 206-464-8102 or mramirez@seattletimes.com