a quick update while i have the chance.
two weeks of work set on fire start to disappear in two minutes.
after two hours, it's nothing but ash and carbon monoxide.
final count: twenty cardboard chests of offerings. i gave up keeping track of how many bin liners full of folded gold and silver taels we had at the end.
i filled my box with a Mercedes-Benz, Pensonic portable cassette player, Nokiv mobile phones, some sushi, packet drinks, some blouses (oddly enough there were no skirts or any other sort of bottoms), a pair of shoes, and a purse. the standard supply of fifty-billion dollar notes, fifty-million dollar notes and other notes of ridiculoulsy smaller denominations (five, ten, fifty) plus gold/silver bars (the silver bars had 99.9% Pure Gold in Chinese stamped on them) and folded gold and silver taels.
i loved arriving at six-thirty, the sun not yet up, the air crisp and cool, on a truck the size of a standard-length single-decker bus (the regulation sticker on the back said "41 pax") loaded with offerings that blocked up the entire section of the cemetery we were in whilst i not-so-casually unloaded everything. there were already a number of people there, but no one else had quite the bonfire we had. there were families that brought a pick-up with one cardboard chest. there were families that managed a quarter of what we burnt. not a single one quite matched us.
and that is how i spent the first twelve hours of april fool's day, year two thousand and six.
face and money. that's all it
us asians are a queer lot.
1 comment:
hello. you said eh to me on sunday, what's up?
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