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the front court and sell them for wood, and he says he’s going to raise pigs in the garden. Oh, I’m
glad
Papa’s dead! He loved this house and the garden and the trees. I love them, too, and I wish I were dead with Papa.”
    There wasn’t much I could say. The Yu family
were
poor. Their stocks and deposits had become so much paper, and even if they tried to stay together and keep the house, they would have to live very differently from the way they had lived before the revolution. “Don’t worry,” I told Ninth Sister. “Do as your brother says, and everything will be all right.”
    Actually, I didn’t believe that anything would ever again be all right for them — their way of life was ending unconditionally — but she looked up, brushing away her tears.
    â€œYes,” she said. “We are still the Yu family, and if we stay together, everything will still be as it used to be. I will help. I promise I will. I have a plan, too.”
    â€œYou have? What plan?” I asked.
    â€œI don’t want to tell you now,” she said, “but I’ve been thinking about it for a long time.”
    I didn’t see Ninth Sister again until late that afternoon, when I was taking my place in a procession consisting of the family, the guests, the monks, and the orchestras. At its head marched a group of monks blowing ten-foot-long horns carried for them by little boys, who marched before them. The horns were to dispel evil spirits. Each could sound only one note, but, blown several at a time or all together, they produced uncanny harmonies. After the horns came the orchestras, playing, and then more monks, now quite hoarse but still chanting. Next came the spirit tower of Mr. Yu, borne on bamboo poles — a small paper pagoda in which was enshrined a fading framed photograph, taken some thirty years before, of Mr. Yu wearing a European suit and high collar.
    Behind the spirit tower came the immediate family, and then the other relatives, all carrying bundles of lighted incense sticks and wearing white paper flowers. Mr. Yu’s eldest son, as chief of the mourners, wore white net blinkers over his eyes, symbolizing a grief so deep as to make him unable to see. Although actually he could see, and could walk quite well, ceremony demanded that he be supported on either side by attendants. Every ten feet, he knelt on a cushion placed before him by an attendant, knocked his head on the ground three times, and wailed. He would then be helped to his feet and taken forward another ten feet. Behind the family, at a pace respectfully — and necessarily — slow, came the several hundred guests. They, too, carried incense and wore paper flowers.
    At intervals in the procession were the paper servants and paper horses, held up on poles by funeral caterers. There was also a paper sedan chair, and there was a paper pleasure boat about fifteen feet long, complete in every detail. Through its windows I could see, among other surprising furnishings, paper tables with paper teacups on them, and a miniature paper model of an old-fashioned, round-topped Zenith radio.
    The purpose of our procession was to burn all these paper objects, with the exception of Mr. Yu’s photograph (but including the spirit tower itself), outside the walls of a nearby Buddhist temple. We reached it eventually, and the burning began. The pagoda was set on fire first, and when it began to collapse the other objects were thrown onto the fire one by one. It was macabre to see the very human-looking servants first curl in the heat of the fire and then burst into flame. Their faces and hands were of papier-mâché, and burned more slowly than their clothes. I thought of Joan of Arc, of medieval witches, and of the ancient funeral sacrifices of real servants, of which this ceremony was a discomforting survival.
    One of the foreigners, trying for a photograph, got too close to the fire and suffered the