A Proper Burial Is Group’s Goal Tradition-Minded Chinese Buy Plots

For the Chinese, the end of life is just as important as the beginning.

The young never think about death, said Eming Liu, a Shanghai native who emigrated to the United States in 1968. “But old people get ready for it. They don’t want it to just happen.”

That’s why Liu and other members of the local Hip Sing Association buy cemetery plots for the poor.

Instead of donating money to the living, this small group of elderly Chinese Americans makes sure the dead receive a proper burial.

“In Asia, the time you are born and the time you die are very important,” said Toi Mulligan, a Chinese American and local business owner. “Death is part of life.”

For the past 20 years, Spokane’s Hip Sing Association has bought hundreds of plots for Chinese families that couldn’t afford to bury a loved one. The group also spent nearly $50,000 to reserve 100 spaces at Spokane’s Greenwood Memorial Terrace.

To raise money for the cemetery plots, Hip Sing members host a seven-course banquet each year on the eve of the Chinese New Year.

A marble monument at Greenwood stands as testimony to their work. Etched into the pink and gray rock in intricate Chinese calligraphy are the names of people who have donated money for their cause.

“Some old people don’t have family in the United States,” said 75-year-old Norman Ng, the current Hip Sing president and owner of Songhay Restaurant. “They are alone. When they die, they have no one.”

The nationwide organization was founded at the turn of the century by Chinese immigrants who came to work on the railroads.

The words “hip sing” translate into “help” and “togetherness,” they say - the two reasons the association came to be.

In the beginning, most of the Chinese who immigrated to the United States didn’t speak much English and had trouble finding jobs and housing, said Ng, who left his native Canton in 1949. They came to Spokane as contract workers for the Northern Pacific Railroad, laying track between Spokane and Rathdrum, Idaho. Those who had been in the country for a few years created the fraternitylike organization to welcome newcomers and support them as they started a new life, Ng said.

However, Hip Sing also was originally part of the Tong groups formed in the early 1900s. Known as the Chinese Mafia, the Tongs were feared within the Chinese community. They gambled, blackmailed, sold drugs and prostitutes, sometimes even murdered. While Tong members helped people from their own provinces in China, they weren’t always friendly to other Chinese.

Through the years, Hip Sing evolved into a combination welfare association and social club. While members came together for drinks and parties, they also coached immigrants for citizenship hearings, helped members start businesses, settled family quarrels and provided free funeral services. Made up mostly of Cantonese, the Spokane group also extended membership to Chinese from other provinces.

Most of the 25 local members are now in their 60s or 70s and own Chinese restaurants in Spokane, a city with a Chinese population of about 1,000. The group, they say, is a Chinese version of organizations such as the Rotary and Lions Club.

“We come to help each other,” said Paul Eng, owner of Gung Ho Restaurant.

It’s been 45 years since he came to the United States from Canton to escape the communist takeover, but he still remembers the early days.

He was 22 and didn’t speak a word of English. He worked at a laundry in Seattle and he ended up sleeping there, too.

“It was lonely,” said Eng, now 70. “I had no friends.”

Within a year, Eng moved to Spokane via Yakima. He started out as a cook at a Chinese restaurant and eventually earned enough money to start his own.

The challenges he encountered and his desire to survive in a new country led him to join Hip Sing 10 years ago so that he, too, could help other Chinese.

While the organization still helps many new immigrants, much of its effort in recent years has been on funeral services. In their culture, members say, death is sacred. A funeral becomes a celebration of a person’s life.

Liu’s mother, for example, told her family that in death she wanted to look like a Chinese bride. For her funeral, she was dressed in a red silk dress, Liu recalled.

They adorned her with her favorite jewelry and covered her body with a silk blanket. They also put paper money and a mahjong tile in her coffin because mahjong was her favorite game.

“So when she’s in heaven, in the next world, she won’t be poor,” Liu said.

While Hip Sing members’ preoccupation with death may seem almost morbid to Westerners, their understanding about the end of life gives meaning to their existence, Liu said.

It also erases some of the fear that usually accompanies death in other cultures.

“Birth and death are natural,” she said.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color Photo