dial a wail

Danwei translates a feature from the Beijing News on professional mourners, without which no funeral in Sichuan is apparently complete: 

Hu says that more time is devoted to wailing in the countryside. In video recordings, Hu can be seen howling, weeping with her eyes covered, and at times crawling on the ground in front of the coffin in an display of sorrow. 

At some funerals, she crawls for several meters as she weeps. This never fails to move the mourners. As she wails, the family of the deceased sob, and some of them weep uncontrollably. 

Income from tips and gratuities comes to the equivalent of about £80.00 per month. Not a great living, even in the Chinese interior. Business comes through “wreath shops”, which seem to be evolving into western style funeral directors. 

Norman Lewis once wrote up a variant on the trade in Italy, The Uncles from Rome. These were elderly people hired to arrive in a car and look grave and vaguely prosperous at working class Neapolitan funerals, with the implication that the deceased and his or her family amounted to something materially.

Comments

[quite successfuklly to modern globalized culture.]

I read somewhere recently that Chinese authorities were cracking down on the hiring of strippers at funerals. The more people who turn up at someone's funeral, the more that reflects credit on the deceased.

Meanwhile in the latest Private Eye's True Stories, there's a New Zealand guy known as the Grim Eater who turns up to funerals with a back pack and plastic containers, filling them with food from what's put on the tables at the Wake. What he's doing is not illegal if the funeral has been publically announced in the local paper. Anyone can turn up.