REPUBLIKA.CO.ID, ZIWEI VILLAGE - The Li family wonders how to spend Saturday's annual Tomb-Sweeping Day. The three Li brothers usually visit their mother's grave in their rugged village in northeast China, but absent this year is the youngest brother — a passenger aboard the missing Malaysian airliner.
Should they add 34-year-old Li Zhixin to those they should mourn? If so, how would they do that without a grave? And what if he is still alive?
Their state of limbo reflects one of the emotional struggles for the families of Chinese passengers aboard Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. The culture places a strong emphasis on recovering the body of a dead person before closure can properly begin.
Li Zhixin, one of hundreds of thousands of Chinese men who venture abroad each year in search of better wages, was returning home from a disappointing 10-month trip seeking construction work in Singapore when his flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing vanished on March 8.
Authorities piecing together scant satellite and radar data believe the jet carrying 239 people, two-thirds of them Chinese, crashed in the Indian Ocean. No trace of the plane has been found despite an intensive, international search.
"You know, you either have the living body or the corpse when accounting for a person," said his 72-year-old father, Li Zhou'er. "But now we don't know where he is."
On Tomb-Sweeping Day, families typically visit the ancestral burial plot to clean the graves and present offerings of fruit and burn paper money. Some set off firecrackers for good luck and to drive off evil spirits. Such traditions are strong in rural areas, though they are falling by the wayside as people migrate to the cities.
The Chinese believe the body to be the carrier of one's soul, said Han Gaonian, a folklorist at Lanzhou-based Northwest Normal University. "If you have the body, then the soul has a place to be," he said.
Those presumed dead and whose bodies cannot be returned usually get a grave with their clothes buried, Han said. But there is no ritual of mourning for those whose fates are unknown.
"Pigs cherish their piglets, dogs cherish their puppies, and we humans cherish our children," Li Zhou'er said. "There has not been a day that I do not miss my child."
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