Mr. Chen said his own marriage, at 35, was a lucky stroke, coming after he
lobbied the family of a younger woman in another village. It allowed him to have
three children and carry on his family name. But he said the pool of available
brides was limited, a scarcity that increased their value - an irony, given that
some rural families, conscious of China's one-child policy, abort female fetuses
before birth or abandon newborn girls.
Qin Yuxing, 80, with his grandson, Qin Tianxiang, 7. Mr. Qin bought a wife
for his younger son for $500, but after she gave birth she ran away.
"For
girls, it doesn't matter about their minds, whether they are an idiot or not,"
he said. "They are still wanted as brides." Dead or alive, he added, as he
peered at the river.
"There are girls who have drowned in the river down there," he said. "When
their bodies have washed up, their families could get a couple of thousand yuan
for them."
Villagers and Mr. Yang, the funeral director, said a family searching for a
female corpse typically must pay more than 10,000 yuan, or about $1,200, almost
four years of income for an average farmer. Families of the bride regard the
money as the dowry they would have received had death not intervened.
The existence of such a market for brides has led to scattered reports of
grave robbing. This year, a man in Shaanxi Province captured two men trying to
dig up the body of his wife, according to a local news account. In February, a
woman from Yangquan tried to buy the remains of a dead 15-year-old girl,
abandoned at a hospital in another city, to satisfy her unmarried deceased
brother. She said the brother's ghost was invading her dreams and demanding a
wife, according to a news account.
Guo Yuhua, a sociology professor at Qinghua University in Beijing, an expert
on folk traditions and burial customs in the Loess Plateau, said the minghun
custom stemmed from both dread and sympathy for the dead. She said parents with
dead daughters, like those with dead sons, were also carrying out an obligation
to their child. They will sell their bodies as a way of finding them a place in
a Chinese society where tradition dictates that a daughter has no place on her
father's family tree.
"China is a paternal clan culture," said Professor Guo, who did postdoctoral
work in anthropology at Harvard. "A woman does not belong to her parents. She
must marry and have children of her own before she has a place among her
husband's lineage. A woman who dies unmarried has no place in this world."
Pinpointing the origins of minghun is difficult, but scholars have found
allusions to the practice in different ancient texts, including the Rites of
Zhou, a guidebook of appropriate Confucian behavior written around the third
century B.C. Commentators on the Confucian classics have argued that the ancient
educated elite disapproved of the custom.
Yet Professor Guo emphasized that the values of Confucianism, later blended
with Buddhism and Taoism, are the basis of folk customs like minghun, which
share a reverence for family.
In the village of Qinjiagelao, where roughly one in four eligible men are
unmarried, Qin Yuxing, 80, is a genial grandfather unashamed of the minghun
practice or the fact that he bought living brides for both his sons.
His younger son, now 40, had tried to find a spouse but the family was too
poor. The elder Mr. Qin saved his money and bought a bride from a man who showed
up at a local market offering a woman for $500. The woman bore Mr. Qin's son a
child and then left three years ago to visit her family - and never came back.
"People aren't willing to come here," the elder Mr. Qin said to explain why
he was willing to purchase a woman for his son. His village is perched atop a
cliff and had no road until last year. Women often face backbreaking work. Mr.
Qin said similar pressures weighed on a neighboring family after their unmarried
son died in a gas explosion more than a decade ago. That family spent $500 for
an afterlife marriage, he said. Mr. Qin's wife, Cao Guoxiang, 76, recalled
another case involving parents buying a dead bride for their unmarried son, a
trucker who died in an accident.
She said the size of afterlife ceremonies depended on a family's wealth.
"Poor people just bring the bodies over and put them in the earth," she said.
"People with money will have a reception and slaughter a pig or a sheep for
friends."
She added: "It's superstition and religion. People live as couples. If they
die, they should live as a couple, too."
And that is why families too poor to afford a minghun bride also follow a
similar custom in some villages: They make a figure of straw and bury it beside
a dead son as the spouse he never had.
Jake Hooker contributed
reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/05/world/asia/05china.html
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