To the Joss Paper Boss
The staff of my arts residency program had taken us on a gallery crawl one night, and we were walking back home when we stumbled upon your open storefront. White paper buildings with red-brick imitation roofs and miniature replicas of luxury cars and household appliances lined the walls. Our local host explained that you were a maker of pasted-paper sculpture and joss goods.
One of your assistants was chipping away at long bamboo sticks with a rectangular cleaver axe. On the back of his left hand, he kept a glob of translucent glue that he spread onto thin cellophane strips with which he lashed sticks together into a frame that could support the construction of paper houses. Through our interpreter, we learned that the houses were burned at funerals. In the old days, these houses were large enough for a man to walk through. But no one makes them that big anymore. Another of your assistants placed wads of cotton inside paper that she folded into neat squares. A woman dreamed about her mother feeling chilled and asked us to make some warm clothing to send to her mom. We learned that clients asked for cats, dogs, and horses. Companions for the afterlife. A customer once commissioned a piano. Someone else requested paper pistols and a tank.
Your assistant told us he’d long been interested in making grave goods and found a master craftsman who agreed to teach him. That master was you. He told us to come back the next day to meet you.
I had trouble sleeping that night, thinking about the stories my father had told me about the time my uncle consulted a Taoist shaman to communicate with the dead. They burned an effigy to send a car to a friend who had recently died. The shaman confirmed its immediate appearance in the underworld. But then the shaman went off-script and asked about my dead grandfather. Was he blind? There’s someone here who knows you. My uncle got upset. He had prayed that in the afterlife, my grandfather’s eyesight would be restored. My uncle was the keeper of the ancestor tablets and the one to sweep the graves of the dead every year. He was a devoted son. What the shaman shared was hard to hear.
My father was the only one of his nine siblings to immigrate to the United States. I could only know my grandfather in memories and stories. As the youngest in the family, my father shared a particular tenderness and closeness with his father. In their one-room Japanese-style house, my father slept alongside my grandfather to keep him warm in the cold, wet winter months. In the humid summer heat, he fanned his father’s back with a giant leaf. When the family enjoyed the luxury of eating meat at lunar new year, my father would sneak his own meager portions into his father’s bowl. The tale of my uncle’s visit with the shaman disturbed my father, too, because it suggested that my grandfather still suffered. Haunted by regret, my father passed his guilt along to me, along with his preoccupation with Taoist supernatural practices. I never met my grandfather, but my own desire for his well-being was as tangible as my father’s.
I went back to your shop the next day. Your assistant was out on the sidewalk assembling a large bamboo frame. I asked him if I could commission a special piece and asked for medicine to treat my grandfather’s blindness. But I wasn’t sure if it would be better to make pills or Chinese medicine. Or to send a doctor. Your assistants looked at each other, scratching their heads, when you pulled up on a scooter that reeked of gasoline. Inside, you searched your desk and pulled out a stiff printed cardboard image stapled to a wooden tongue depressor. The figure was bug-eyed and half naked, with a pot belly hanging over his grass skirt. He held two green leafy branches in one hand and sported a garland of leaves around his neck, with a gourd-shaped flask slung over his shoulder. This is Shen Nong, you said. We send him to cure illness.
Maybe I was biased by Western medicine, but I wanted the figure of an immaculately groomed clinician in a white lab coat to journey to the underworld on my behalf. Back then, I didn’t know the origins of Shen Nong, who is better known as the Medicine King, or Divine Farmer. Shen Nong catalogued 365 herbs and their effects on the human body. (He also died from eating a noxious weed that overtook him before he could administer the herbal antidote.) In that moment, I saw only something that frightened me. To tell the truth, you also made for an unlikely shaman, chain-smoking with your unshaven face and yellowed undershirt.
“To tell the truth, you also made for an unlikely shaman, chain-smoking with your unshaven face and yellowed undershirt.”
I decided it would be better to send medicine. My grandfather supposedly lost his eyesight in a gang fight, though some of my relatives believe he lost his vision from hysterical blindness brought on by the trauma of seeing his first son sent to war in the Philippines. I tried to explain this uncertainty to you and we came close to arguing. You told me you were forbidden from making some things and that I should make the medicine myself. I looked around at the designer paper clothes, fake bottles of liquor, and folded paper jewels that people bought only to burn and throw away. Just yesterday, I’d seen someone purchase a paper jumbo jet. What I asked seemed inherently reasonable in the world of grave goods.
Finally, you felt sorry for me and relented. You gave me the briefest of instructions on how I could make a cure: Roll some paper into a tube. Write on the outside of the structure what the medicine is for. Then burn it.
This presented me with a new problem. My grandfather and I didn’t share a common language and if I was to be fully responsible for making the medicine itself, I couldn’t handwrite a message in Chinese script that he would understand.
I left feeling bereft, unable to facilitate the healing that my ancestor needed.
*
Fifteen years later, I still think about our exchange. I’ve been back to Taipei twice since then, but have never returned to your shop. Fifteen years ago, I pushed away the visage of a crazy-eyed medicine king, thinking he had nothing to offer me or my family. I had confused the desire to heal my grandfather’s blindness with the wish to repair my father’s heart.
And yet, I’d made one other critical misdiagnosis. What I really sought to make whole again was my love for each of them. I was afraid to embrace the wildness of Shen Nong because I had yet to undertake a journey into my own underworld to recover the fragments of myself that had been left behind; to accept the Taiwanese parts of myself that felt distant and lacked cultural context. In the end, were you trying to empower me to craft a ritual of my own making? If so, I received that lesson. I know now that I am the master and main character of my own narrative. And although you couldn’t fix the affliction that belonged to my grandfather, in the end, I’m the one who has come to see the world with new eyes.
About the Author
Shin Yu Pai is a poet, essayist, and visual artist. Her most recent poetry book is Virga (Empty Bowl, 2021). Other titles include SIGHTINGS: Selected Works (1913 Press, 2007). In 2020, Entre Rios Books published Ensō, a 20-year survey of her work across creative disciplines, including photography, public art, installation, performance, personal essay, and poetry. Her essays have appeared in Atlas Obscura, Zocalo Public Square, The Rumpus, Tricycle, Seattle Met, South Seattle Emerald, and International Examiner.
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Header photo by Francesco Gallarotti.
Author photo by Daniel Carrillo.
