Sometimes ceremony is all one has to offer. From the NYTimes:
… “It’s important that this be done right,” said the man, Zhao Ru.
In the complex choreography of Chinese funerals, an important element is the funeral scroll, made from cloth or paper and adorned with messages rendered in calligraphy to express condolences or to praise the life of the deceased.
Mr. Zhao, 73, a Chinese calligrapher who lives in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, has been making ceremonial scrolls for much of his life. On Friday, he undertook one of his most high-profile jobs, creating a pair of scrolls for the wake and funeral of Wenjian Liu, one of the two police officers killed last month by a gunman in Bedford-Stuyvesant…
In his home city of Toishan, in southern China, Mr. Zhao was a schoolteacher and well-known calligrapher. He immigrated to the United States in 1989 with several family members, and he worked in Chinese restaurants and garment factories in New York.
But his fame as a calligrapher had migrated with him, and over the years he has frequently been commissioned to provide calligraphy for funerals and other occasions.
In the case of Officer Liu’s funeral, Mr. Zhao said, he was acting on his own accord and was not getting paid: He had been planning to do the scrolls since hearing of the officers’ murders.
“I could use my calligraphy to memorialize the officer,” he said in Mandarin. “What a pity it is. He was such a good police officer. He was an only son.”…
Read the whole story here.
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What’s on the agenda for the new day?