Who Will Sweep Their Graves?

The characters were hard to discern. Faded, obscure, and stylized, I was not expected to understand them. But I was supposed to stare for a while, and meditate on the ancient stone block on which they were written. One character--larger than the rest--bore the surname Li. Beside was a date in the old agricultural calendar which I had never successfully learned to read.

"How old are these graves?" I asked my friend.

"A few hundred years old I think," He Jiang replied solemnly, "though this stone isn't so old as that. It's relatively new I think."

"New?" I exclaimed, brushing my hand against the moss. "How old is it?"

He leaned in close to the stone and examined the date, feeling the characters as though they were braille.

"I don't know," he concluded after a moment. "It's too hard to read. Someone here must know." He looked around hopefully at the scores of people crowded around us. A handful were watching us talk, and the rest were busy sweeping, weaving about two piles of earth with long brooms that scratched the cement like wooden spiders. These two mounds were the real graves; the stone block merely marked them.

An old man stood feebly some way off. He rested one arm against the hill and the other against a crooked cane. His arms shook as he walked toward us. He paused for a moment, regained his breath, and then withdrew two cigarettes for Jiang and I. I politely refused while he and Jiang puffed in silence.

Now that he was near, I wondered how old the man must be. His chin was shrivelled and his eyes cataractous, but his grip on the cane was firm. When he lifted a hand to remove his cigarette, he did so with truculence, as though daring old age to deny him his last remaining pleasure.

When he finally spoke, he spoke quietly, pausing occasionally to find either his breath or the words to continue. Minutes were punctuated with a solemn puff on his ashy cigarette.

I could tell that even Jiang--a Dayao native--was struggling to understand the old man, but he nodded politely all the same, and after a few minutes turned to me, and said in Mandarin, "He asks if you know who these people are." He pointed to the two mounds of earth encircled by men and brooms.

I shook my head. No one had said anything about the names of these people, and I had believed it was a gap in conversation I was not intended to fill.

"He says their names have been lost, but that they are very ancient ancestors of Dayao. Most of us here are still related to them somehow." He paused and added silently, "Though of course you're not." I thought this last phrase was Jiang's own, until I saw the old man's wrinkles twist into a smile. He was evidently proud of his little joke. I smiled in return.

"He wants to know where you're from, and if people in your country are sweeping tombs today."

I turned to the old man, and spoke slowly and clearly so that he might understand. "I'm American, and in my country we do not have Tomb Sweeping Day. This is my first time."

The man looked confused, and I understand his next sentence before Jiang translated it: "But then who will sweep their graves?"

In truth, I had never thought about this. I had always imagined a grave as an end in itself, the end of a life. It was the life that was to be celebrated, not the tomb. A life looked nothing like a tomb anyway--nothing about a life is cold, flat, or inconstant like a stone is. But as I looked at the men and their brooms, I knew they did not come to respect a stone; they came to remember. They came to remember what hundreds of years and thousands of busy days might make anyone forget--where they had come from and where they were returning to.

No one could read the date on the block and no one could remember the names of the people it commemorated. But that didn't matter. Sweeping a tomb--like a tomb itself--is not for the dead, but the living. As the men return with their brooms each year, they know they too will be remembered--even after their names are mute on every tongue and weathered from every stone.

"How is it," he said, "That you do not sweep your tombs?"