Laid to Rest Again--in a New Land

When he gave up a Pomona cauliflower farm and moved back to his native China for family reasons in 1925, Gin Gee Tong figured he would return to Southern California one day.

But U.S. restrictions against Chinese immigration blocked an escape from war and revolution. Tortured by the new Communist regime, he died a broken man in 1952, buried at first without even a coffin in an unmarked grave near Guangzhou.

He ultimately did return to California this autumn, evidence of a growing custom among immigrant families of moving deceased relatives’ remains to the United States. Such transfers can sever the families’ remaining emotional and physical ties to the old country, while symbolizing that America is now home.

Tong’s recently cremated remains and those of five other relatives were delivered from China in marble urns by air cargo and truck to a son’s hillside home in the El Sereno section of Los Angeles. The urns were buried next to one another at Rose Hills Memorial Park in Whittier, an easy drive from the beloved Pomona farmland, which is now a suburban tract.

“Finally he has come back to the place he loved,” said his son, Yook Chew Tong, a 72-year-old retiree who arranged shipment of the remains, which include those of his mother, stepmother, two brothers and a sister-in-law.

“I finally can do something for them so they can rest in peace. So I feel good about that,” added Tong, who, after escaping to Hong Kong, immigrated to Los Angeles in the 1950s.

Transfers of remains from overseas graves to California are becoming so common that they now apparently outnumber instances of sending immigrants’ remains back to their homelands for burial, according to funeral directors and county health departments’ records.

Definitive statewide or nationwide statistics on the practice are not kept. But Asian families clearly are leading the trend so they can more easily fulfill cultural and religious obligations to visit parents’ and grandparents’ grave sites on memorial days and birthdays.

“They want to pay respects without the long commute,” said Loyal Ekholm, an administrator at Skylawn Memorial Park in San Mateo.

That yearning to honor ancestors, and to have their remains close at hand, overcomes old taboos against disturbing graves. It compels families to travel to China, Hong Kong, Korea, Vietnam, Indonesia and Myanmar and bring back cremated ashes, often in carry-on luggage like souvenirs.

Some then say they have little reason to visit their native country again.

Don Nakanishi, director of UCLA’s Asian American Studies Center, described the transfers as “a very clear sign of an intent to really sink one’s roots down here in America. No question about that.”

Henry Kwong, manager of Universal Chung Wah Funeral Directors, with offices in Alhambra and Los Angeles’ Chinatown, agreed. “They feel they will be settling in the United States, and they don’t think they will be going back anymore,” he said.

Kwong estimated that he helps arrange about one transfer of remains a week from Asia.

Political Changes Abroad Raise Fears

Political changes overseas are a factor. Several years before the 1997 transfer of Hong Kong to mainland China’s control, fears about the change set off a flurry of such reburials, said Rose Hills official Merrill Mefford. Continuing worries about the future of Taiwan and Korea have prompted others.

Sometimes, practical issues are paramount. The elderly fear that the younger generations will forget to send graveyard upkeep fees to the old country. Or families learn that a cemetery is being moved--or worse, paved over for a real estate development, as occurred recently in Singapore.

“We don’t mind paying taxes as long as we are alive,” said a Laguna Hills man whose parents and grandparents were buried in a private plot in Taiwan. “But when we are gone, nobody’s going to take care of it.”

The man, a former Taiwanese military officer who spoke on condition of anonymity, recently moved four urns from Taiwan to Live Oak Memorial Park in Monrovia and paid for perpetual maintenance.

Some families say that they had to spread money around the homeland to successfully retrieve the remains. Others say they faced few roadblocks.

“Usually, both sides of governments are compassionate and understand the situation,” said funeral director Kwong. “Everybody has a father. Everybody has a grandfather.”

The U.S. Customs Service does not require the declaration of cremated remains being brought into the country, said Mike Fleming, the agency’s Los Angeles-area spokesman. If drug smuggling is suspected, the urn might be X-rayed, but Fleming could not recall any such recent incidents.

U.S. funeral homes and cemeteries help with burial permits and with arrangements for entombment or placement in temples or in columbariums, structures built to hold urns. They also give advice on how to follow customs about the best timing for interments and best locations--in the ancient feng shui tradition of creating a harmonious environment. Adhering to these customs can overcome fears that moving a body may bring a curse upon the family.

Still, relatives say that all sorts of emotions are stirred. Guilt mixes with joy as they consider their financial success and personal liberty, which were unattainable for the older generations. If the U.S. residents travel to retrieve the remains, they can confront painful and happy memories.

That was the case with Hank Kim, 45, who owns an auto repair shop in Lake Forest. In the years after his father’s 1971 death in Seoul, Kim and other family members moved to the United States and so they could not visit the grave often.

“I was feeling just a little guilty about my dad. I thought, ‘I have to bring him here so my heart is comfortable,’ ” Kim said recently in his Cerritos living room, a large cross on the wall evidence of his Presbyterian faith.

The matter became urgent after Kim’s mother died in March in Southern California and was buried at Rose Hills. Over Labor Day weekend, Kim flew to Seoul and watched his father’s bones dug up so they could be cremated. He carried the urn on the airplane home and then to the cemetery, where it was placed in the earth above his mother’s coffin as the family pastor offered prayers.

Kim says that the transfer, which he estimates cost about $6,000, was well worth the time and money it took to reunite his parents.

On a recent Sunday afternoon, a dozen members of Kim’s extended family gathered at the grave. A brown patch in the otherwise well-manicured grass was evidence of the urn’s interment a few weeks before. Kim’s wife, Joyce, wiped the marble ground marker clean with paper towels and Windex. Their children, Alice, 16, and Victor, 14, planted flowers, as did other relatives.

Wearing a dark suit and carrying a leather-covered Bible, Hank Kim led the clan, including his brother and sister and their spouses and children, in prayers and hymns. He read, in Korean, a passage from Corinthians about resurrection and eternal life. Alice read the selection in English. As little cousins toddled by the grave, generations seemed peacefully united.

“It’s kind of symbolic and very reassuring,” said Alice, a junior at Cerritos High School. “I never thought I’d meet my grandfather. And it’s very comforting to know my grandfather and grandmother are together.”

Deeper Issues of History Emerge

Evelyn Lee, a 52-year-old aerospace engineer from South Pasadena, recalled similar emotions during a trip to China two years ago to retrieve remains of maternal grandparents. Concerns about the costs of cemetery maintenance, not any philosophy or sense of duty, prompted the trip. Yet deeper issues of family history surfaced as a dozen relatives, including Lee’s three children and her mother, traveled together.

An American cousin who was working for the U.S. State Department in China helped them, as did other relatives still living in the Guangzhou region.

One grave was in a crowded urban cemetery and the other in overgrown farmland that had to be cleared with machetes. Ginger jars containing the bones were dug up as the family conducted graveside ceremonies, burning incense and offering food and money to ease the loved ones’ journeys into another life.

After the cremation, the family carried the ashes to California in resealable plastic bags, double lined for safety. Then, in an informal service led by Lee’s husband, who is a Presbyterian minister, the remains were placed in urns in a wall memorial at Forest Lawn Memorial-Park in Glendale.

“For my children, it’s a sense of history. It’s continuity,” Lee said. “Now that they’ve seen China, they think: ‘Oh my God, we could have been born there.’ It’s incredible for them to see the opportunities we have here versus what they don’t have in China.”

Her mother and aunts and uncles, a generation who emigrated from a poor village, lived to see grandchildren graduate from Ivy League universities. So the transfer “brought closure for a lot of them,” Lee said.

Yook Chew Tong also takes pride in how his family fared in Los Angeles. He and his late wife juggled businesses in the garment and produce markets to support eight children, who now include a lawyer, a teacher, a dentist, a sheriff’s deputy. Daughters videotaped Tong as he recently recounted his family’s sufferings in China and his efforts to reunite the survivors in America.

Tong did not want to visit China to retrieve his family’s remains. So in September, a cousin there helped with six cremations and shipments. A nephew in Canada paid most of the expenses, which totaled about $5,000, including transfer of another relative’s remains from Kansas. They also bought 10 local burial plots at a total cost of more than $25,000.

Before the burial, Tong and a brother placed a new silver dollar in each urn, a custom believed to help the departed start a new existence. At the cemetery, the urns were placed on a table against the smoggy sky while Tong read a poem he composed for the day.

In translation, it proclaims:

“Neither the tallest mountain, nor the longest river can match a parent’s never-ending love of their child. Neither the oldest cedar, nor the senior pine can match a child’s eternal devotion to their parents.”