NOT IN MY BACKYARD: The collision between space

scarcity and social memory on remembering the dead

Winsome Lee, MSc, MA, University of Leicester/ Alan Chiu, BA, StandNews Hong Kong

Introduction
This original interdisciplinary research argues these acts solely focus on pragmatic
motives, and neglect the plurality and symbolic significance of physical monuments
and mourning space.

Background
• The number of death in Hong Kong is believed to escalate in a rapid rate
(data from the local Legislative Council Panel on Food Safety and
Environmental Hygiene)-:

• With Hong Kong’s space scarcity and skyrocketing prices for niches and
cemetery plots, the authorities rethink how they should remember the
deceased.
• In 1980’s, the predominant approach was land burial, cremation took
up only a small minority.
• Merits of cremation gradually dawned upon the community after a few
decades of persistent public education.
• In 2015, land burial and cremation respectively take up 7% and 91% of
the annual number of deaths”
• Food and Environmental Hygiene Department (FEHD) currently manages 11
Gardens of Remembrance (GoRs) in eight columbaria.
• Dedicated walls are erected at each GoR for mounting plaques, from
2001 to 31 March 2016, a total of 15,327 bereaved families have
applied for scattering the ashes of their family members in these GoRs.
• Currently, about 11,000 memorial plaques have been mounted.
• Numbers of “green burial” and the digital memorialisation option
implementation remains stationary from 2013 to 2015 (data from the
local Legislative Council Panel on Food Safety and Environmental
Hygiene)-:

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 • Local authorities actively promote the use of digital plaques for families to pay
respect, thereby reducing pressure on land demands.
• In June 2010, FEHD launched the Internet Memorial Service (IMS), a
free memorial website (www.memorial.gov.hk) which enables users to
create and furnish the memorial webpages for loved ones.
• Users can pay tribute to and give electronic offerings to the deceased
at any time and from anywhere.
• As at 31 March 2016, IMS had about 7,500 users and about 8,400
memorial pages, with about 2.73 million hit counts.
• Scholars do not revoke the use of digital memorialisation, yet they claim that
such acts would eventually annihilate one’s social identity.

Objectives
This original research is a part of deathscape and public health research series in
Hong Kong. With this pilot research, it is aimed to-:
• Explore the existing deathscape issues in Hong Kong and the effects of such
• Dissect why digital momentos wouldn’t be the mere solution for memorising
the dead in Hong Kong in future

Smoke Gets In Your Eyes: Existing geographical culture

and location of columbarium and cemetery may violate
basic human rights of the dead
• The concept of “NOT IN MY BACKYARD” — living and the dead must
differentiate and be separated clearly, yet still try to maintain a close ancestral
relationship

Chinese traditional ancestor worship culture bonds the ancestors and their
descendants. Customs like Sweeping the Grave Day（”清明節”, or “Tsing
Ming” festival）on every April 5th becomes an annual gathering with the dead
and the living descendants. Teather (1998) paper using cemeteries and
columbaria as the lens to argue about the tensions between the individual and

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 the society, and the cultural/ religious and the secular perspective.
Traditionally, deceased will be buried underground.

Generally, the life-death value in Hong Kong is a blend of Confucius, Tao,

Mozi, Buddhist religion. The concept of feng shui, a traditional Chinese
system of harmonising the environment provides a guide for the living and for
the dead. There has to be a designated yet separate space for the dead, the
spiritual, or “yin(陰)” world, in which the bones, the ashes and the spirits
belong (the living world is “yang (陽)”).

Feng shui refers to the geomancy claims that the energy forces are powerful
in order to assist or harm the individuals within their surroundings.
Traditionally, it affects the location and orientation of the family grave, which
would impact upon the fortunes, luck and health of the family’s descendants.
Destruction of the grave, or absence of a grave, is equivalent to breaking the
positive “feng shui,” and even is considered as declaring hostility to the
descendants.

• Building in a vertical direction:

o Cemeteries: every visitor needs to climb up the stairs

FIG. 1. OVERLOOK VIEW OF THE CHINESE PERMANENT FIG 2. CLOSER LOOK AT THE CEMETERY, EACH GRAVE IS
CEMETERY AT TSUEN WAN, HONG KONG CLOSE TO EACH OTHER, AND VISITORS NEED TO CLIMB UP
THE STEEP STAIRS.

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 o Columbarium: reach the ceiling-high niches with ladder

FIG 3. INTERIOR OF THE COLUMBARIUM, ROWS ARE MARKED

WITH NUMBERS.

FIG 4. THE BUILDING ITSELF MIGHT NOT HAVE ENOUGH

LIGHTING, AND THE COLUMBARIUM REACHES THE CEILING-
HIGH NICHES WITH LADDER

Hong Kong has undergone substantial change in funerary practices over the
years of its development, and shifting from traditional burial to cremation
would be a significant change. Infrastructures such as niches (i.e. a small
space- about A4 sized space- to house the urn of a deceased, occasionally

there are doubled-space for couples) and columbarium (i.e. a wall of niches)
have been built by the colonial government and later followed by the HKSAR
government in order to welcome a change in funerary practices.

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 During the 19th century, many Chinese people moved to other countries
around the world in search of better opportunities. It therefore became a
traditional practice to return to their ancestral village to die, or to be
repatriated. As a result, Hong Kong therefore became a transition hub of such.
In order to follow traditional beliefs, the remains would first be buried in a
temporary grave before being exhumed and moved back to the birth place or
the ancestral village of the deceased. Cremation becomes a widely-seen
option, families insist on housing the urns with ashes in traditional graves and
cemeteries.

• Smoke gets in your eyes: existing columbaria environment and rites

People need to withstand the smoke, in line, and use a ladder to just spend
seconds/minutes with the dead. 
o Burning incense and jossy paper mortuary offerings in closed area -
ventilation is not ideal
o Tightly packed and ceiling-high niches - no privacy
o No resting area
o Dark

FIG 5. EACH COLUMBARIUM IS PACKED, AND IS IN LACK OF PRIVACY WHEN PEOPLE

COME TO PAY A HOMAGE TO THE DECEASED

Digital Memorialisation: Remembering? Or Forgetting?

• Enthusiasts: an exciting technological solution to the problem of forgetting and
being forgotten; thus could grant people a virtual immortality (Bell et al. 2009).
• Internet database is increasingly used as social memory for the deceased,
and help the living to have an easier access to it
• Digitising identities and memories is a singular (or linear) and a binary
process, while memory itself is a plural, relative and contextualised item
• Digital identity and memory are selective representations of an individual to an
extent
• It is remembering certain aspects of a person’s life, but forgetting others at the
same time
• Remembering should be considered as an “ongoing operation”

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Discussion
• Physical death of a person is instant, social death isn’t if one’s memory lasts.
• Memory is layered. Scholarships differentiate “memory” into three levels:
social, cultural and collective memory
• Social memory: constant idea of carrying memorial
• Cultural memory: the rites that were used (i.e. style, rituals, and
religion, monuments)
• exists in symbolic forms, and maintained through cultural
formations (Marton & Kallinikos, 2017)
• Collective memory: the outcome of the above
• the lived everyday life and experience that would remain stable
for generations
• through which, would be able to reconstruct the life of the
deceased before it became a dead memory or history. (Marton &
Kallinikos, 2017)
• Émile Durkheim emphasises the importance on the production of a collective
imagined past via rituals and religion, as a measure to transmit social memory
and bounding groups together (Hebert, 2008).
• Digitisation leads to disintegration of cultural artefacts
• It would rest on the social memory level but not quite reach the cultural
memory level, and thus no collective memory achieved
• It would reduce the integration of cultural artefacts into a series of 0s
and 1s
• Internet mourning somewhat blurs the line of public and private space
• Mourning and remembering is a rather personal act
• “The landscape is a locus of memory. It is physically obvious,
horizontally and vertically satisfied, and empirically
recoverable.” (Silverman, 2008)
• Physical artefacts (tombstones and monuments) allows interactions between
families and the space that dedicated to the deceased
• Families and people interact with objects based on meanings
established through social structure (Hebert, 2008).
• Meanings are continually developed as people interact and the
interpretation of the process of interaction (Hebert, 2008).

Conclusion
Digital memorialisation isn’t the mere measure for solving the land scarcity for the
dead. Rather, synthesising the implementation of technology and the traditional
rituals and rites would be an ideal and creative way to find the mutual ground to
satisfy the realistic and sociocultural needs. Zooming out to Korea and Japan, they
both are facing similar situations as in Hong Kong. Yet, Korea found a creative way
to store ashes as well as some personal items together, which allows the families to
personalise the monuments and have privacy while mourning. On the other hand,
Tokyo has successfully blended the LED technology with ashes storage. Even
though in a wall full of small Buddha statues that with the ashes inside, with LED
technology the family can still find privacy and space to remember the loved ones.
Death is an inevitable natural cause. People dead wishes should be fulfilled.
Authorities shouldn’t tackle a cultural and humanistic problem from a pragmatic and
economic perspective.

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Acknowledgement
The authors would like to thank for Tsuen Wan Chinese Permanent Cemetery for
their help in this research.

References
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Marton, A. & Kallinikos, J. (2017). When Forgetting Becomes Digital: Social Memory
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Miller, D.S. & Rivera, J.D. (2006). Hallowed Ground, Place, and Culture: The
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216158

Contact the authors

Authors are extremely grateful for any suggestions and feedback of this pilot study.
Please kindly contact the authors at:

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 Winsome Lee: winsome2989@me.com
Alan Chiu: alanwlchiu@gmail.com

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