SINGAPORE: A Place to Die

In an alleyway off Sago Lane in Singapore’s Chinatown, beneath banners and scrolls and paper models of ships and planes, dozens of Chinese last week played mah-jongg by the light that gleamed from two adjoining houses. From inside the houses came a deafening cacophony of clanging cymbals, shrieking flutes and thumping drums. In the ancient Taoist tradition, the mah-jongg players had come to pay their last respects to friends and relatives who lay dying inside.

For generations, poorer Singapore Chinese have sent their infirm relatives to spend their last days in what the proprietors call “sick receiving homes,” but what most of Singapore knows as “dying houses.” For $3.33 a month, the two houses on Sago Lane provide a bed for each patient, see that food is brought in from outside, summon doctors (whose chief duty is to write death certificates), and provide a funeral.

Paper Palaces. When one of the “active” members of the tai Ian kun (The Club of the Most Critical Moment) is dying, a roast-pig dinner is laid before him, and Taoist priests chant prayers that he will be transported to heaven. Women fold silver joss papers that cost 40¢ a 1,000 but are thought to be worth 1,000 silver dollars in paradise. The average traveler to the next world gets about 10,-000 pieces of silver, a ricksha, a medium-sized house—all made of paper. The better off, who can pay $330 for a big funeral, receive paper limousines, palatial mansions, four servants, a de luxe oceangoing liner, and even a jet airliner. By Taoist belief, when the papers are burned, they become real objects for use by the deceased in the next world.

The sick receiving homes sprang up years ago when an enterprising Singapore Chinese noticed that poorer people, who could not afford a funeral parlor, had to put coffins on the sidewalk for the three to five days of mourning. He also noticed that Chinese refused to go to hospitals as they got old. The sick receiving homes take a cut from the contractors who provide the bands, the lantern and banner carriers for each funeral, and the professional mourners whose pay is graded by the length and depth of their moans.

Ghosts & Coffin Carriers. On grounds that the burning of joss paper constitutes a fire hazard and that the houses are a menace to health, the Singapore city council recently decided that the houses must be moved out of the center of town. But last week the perplexed council members were finding that this was more easily decreed than done. One new site proposed by the council proved to be so near a cemetery that professional coffin carriers would have less distance to travel, and would lose revenue. In the other new location proposed by the council, prosperous citizens were complaining that the arrival of the houses (and hence of the restless ghosts of the dying and unburied dead) would lead to a mass flight of superstitious servants. “The servants,” reported one community spokesman gloomily, “are already scared stiff.”