Death’s New Face : Funeral Industry Responds to the Immigrant Culture

Cemetery workers at Rose Hills Memorial Park were baffled when fires began erupting in trash cans dotting the cemetery’s neatly tended hillsides six years ago.

The mysterious puffs of smoke and flame even prompted a visit by a concerned fire marshal, who “came to ask what the heck was going on,” recalled Dennis C. Poulsen, Rose Hills’ president.

After a few months, officials of the cemetery near Whittier finally learned the cause. Bereaved Chinese families were burning paper money--an ancient custom--to ensure a happy afterlife for the deceased.

As a result, the 75-year-old cemetery, which once served mostly white Protestant families, now prints leaflets in English and Chinese, politely informing mourners that, on request, portable incinerators will be provided for their graveside ceremonial fires.

Across Southern California, the American way of death is taking on a distinctly immigrant cast. Mortuaries and cemeteries are increasingly responding to the region’s new cultures and customs by hiring bilingual workers, advertising in foreign languages and even remodeling their facilities to accommodate rites introduced here from around the globe.

“As the community has changed, we have changed with it,” Poulsen said. Cemeteries and mortuaries that fail to recognize the region’s kaleidoscopic ethnic character, he said, are “not going to survive as a successful business.”

Observers of the funeral industry say that many of the trends set by Southern California’s cemeteries and mortuaries are already being adapted by their counterparts in other regions with large immigrant communities. Just last year, The Director, an industry trade publication, ran an article explaining burial rituals practiced by Hmong, Latinos, Samoans, Muslims and Haitians.

“Immigrants need understanding and assistance, and funeral directors who serve these people well will also enhance their businesses,” the magazine advised.

That advice is heeded on a daily basis in Southern California.

Here, Muslims prepare their dead for burial by gently washing the body, an act of devotion that takes family members into preparation rooms traditionally off limits to non-mortuary staff.

Korean families decline to schedule funerals on even-numbered days, considered unlucky.

Vietnamese immigrants burn incense, prompting some funeral directors to install fans in chapels to draw off the thick smoke.

In return, some immigrants have begun assimilating old American mourning traditions into their rites.

Last month in Chinatown, a funeral procession for respected businessman Ernest S. Wong was led by a jazz band playing the alternately mournful and joyful second-line funeral music of New Orleans.

As bandleader Tommy Cortez danced and strutted out in front, the procession passed by the Han-Hoa Jewelry Co. and Canton Poultry to the strains of “When the Saints Go Marching In.”

The procession followed a zig-zag course so that the hearse would not cross over its own path, considered bad luck in Chinese tradition.

The accommodating funeral directors at the Wah Wing Sang Gutierrez and Weber Mortuary--its very name a jarring testament to the awkward blending of cultures--had plotted the route accordingly.

But at many older funeral homes, which traditionally served homogeneous ethnic populations, the learning is more difficult.

“It involves a lot of new learning,” said Ted Brandt, vice president of Forest Lawn, whose billboards promise Latinos Todo en un lugar-- everything in one place. “It’s obvious that we’re all experiencing an increase in almost all of the ethnic areas because of the complete change in the demographics. . . . And we’ll see more of it in the future.”

Along with other funeral directors in the region, executives at Rose Hills first noticed that their clientele was changing in the mid-1980s, roughly the time that groundskeepers began finding fires burning in their trash cans.

Rose Hills employees also discovered that their state rooms, built in 1961 with nuclear families in mind, had become too small to accommodate the larger extended families of Asians and Latinos who were arriving for prayer vigils, Poulsen said. Crowds spilled into hallways and mourners had to lug in furniture from unoccupied state rooms for extra seating.

On March 1, the mortuary opened five new state rooms designed for Latino and Asian services. The rooms are large, spacious enough for Asian rites, in which mourners circle the coffin with burning incense sticks.

At Oakdale Memorial Park in Glendora, half of the cemetery’s 200 sales representatives are bilingual, speaking 20 languages and dialects, mostly Spanish and Chinese.

The Cemetery Board of California, the state agency that licenses those who sell burial plots, began administering a licensing exam in Spanish about six years ago.

Two years ago, the National Assn. of Colleges of Mortuary Science began to catalogue world funeral customs in an effort to create a new textbook for funeral directors who serve growing minority communities across the nation, said Doug Metz, chairman of the Mortuary Science Department at Cypress College in Orange County.

Metz said it will take years to complete the textbook, because funeral customs vary from country to country, region to region, even city to city. And customs have been changing as generations assimilate in the United States.

“It’s just a never-ending project,” he said.

Gordon Bigelow, executive director of the American Board of Funeral Service Education, said that at a national conference in April, he expects the group to approve new curriculum explaining Muslim burial rites. The board is acting at the request of Mikal Abdullah, the Muslim owner of Mikal’s Funeral Parlor in Atlantic City, N.J.

In death and in life, the growing minority populations are changing the demographics of mortality in Southern California.

Although Asian and Latino communities are burgeoning in Los Angeles, they constitute only a small percentage of deaths in Los Angeles County, according to the Department of Health Services, which compiles mortality records by ethnicity.

But the percentage is growing. In 1976, the county Department of Health Services recorded 58,971 deaths, 5,487 of them Latino. In 1986, the last year statistics are available by ethnicity, there were 7,007 Latino deaths. The increase is more striking in the Asian community, where deaths rose from 667 in 1976 to 1,985 a decade later.

County planners expect that Latinos--27% of the county’s population in 1980--will comprise 36% in the 1990 federal census. The Asian and Pacific Islander population could increase from 7% to 12.6%. Conversely, the census is expected to show the white population dropping from 53.2% in 1980 to 39.8% in 1990.

As a result, courting immigrant groups is now an investment, say funeral directors.

“It is a long-term market,” said Brandt of Forest Lawn.

The region’s older funeral homes are not the only firms looking for business among immigrant communities. Immigrants themselves are now stepping in to provide burial services.

Funeral director Paul Kim said that his discomfort with a funeral for his parents at a traditional cemetery prompted him to open the first Korean mortuary in Los Angeles in 1984. Koreans express grief openly, even loudly, he said, and his family felt out of place at the staid cemetery.

Formerly in the import-export business, Kim recognized an untapped market. Soon, other Korean immigrants saw the same potential. One of Kim’s former employees, Jaeung Yun, jumped to Pierce Brothers in 1987, and the chain of 40 funeral homes advertised his arrival in Korean newspapers, radio and television. A second employee left to start his own funeral home three months ago.

Yet, as some immigrants face the logistics of death in America, they have come to realize that death--like life--sometimes forces them to make compromises.

Muslims, for example, do not use coffins, believing the corpse should be allowed to return to the earth. Caskets are not mandated by California law, but most cemeteries require them to prevent graves from settling.

Adapting, Muslims now bury their dead directly in the concrete vaults made to encase caskets, said A. Nasouf, vice coordinator at the Islamic Center of Southern California in Los Angeles.

“Sometimes certain customs conflict with our laws,” said Richard R. Gutierrez, president of Wah Wing Sang Gutierrez and Weber Mortuary.

Gutierrez, whose family has run funeral homes since he was a boy, said Chinese mourners used to drop slips of paper, punched with holes, as processions headed for the cemetery. Legend has it that a serpent--in some versions, a devil--follows the deceased to the grave. The creature must stop to pass through each hole in the paper, giving a family time to bury the dead unmolested, he said.

Gutierrez said he has not seen that custom in decades. Customs change, he explained.

But Mary Dougherty, general manager of 106-year-old Rosedale Cemetery in Los Angeles, offers a simpler explanation:

“They don’t do that anymore because of the littering law,” she said.