A lack of dignity in death
We hear a lot about the quality of life in Hong Kong, but what about the quality of death? If you ever attend a memorial ceremony at an American funeral home, you will notice that the environment fits the occasion. All the furnishings and arrangements are of high quality, very tasteful and in excellent order.
What a difference there is here. In Hong Kong, our funeral homes are so run-down, shoddy and depressing that you have to wonder whether this is really any way to honour and respect the departed. Even the vans that carry coffins here look more suitable for delivering goods to a market.
We also have problems with finding enough resting places for our loved ones. With too little land for the living, only about 10 per cent of Hongkongers are buried. Remains in public cemeteries must be exhumed after six years and either cremated or reinterred in an urn cemetery. (Second burials are not unusual in Chinese custom.) Most people's remains are simply cremated straight away, their ashes placed in urns and stored in niches in structures called columbariums.
There are some private, religion-based and other members-only facilities of this sort, but the public ones are more affordable and therefore more popular. The last new public niches sold out last March, and there are only 100 used ones left on sale. Under current plans, around 35,000 more niches will become available by the end of next year. And the Legislative Council was recently officially informed of a proposal to build a new, eight-storey columbarium, providing a further 18,500 niches by the end of 2008, at Diamond Hill.
And what then? Last year, 38,683 people died in Hong Kong. By 2015, the number is expected to be 47,000. Some will be interred in ancestral homes on the mainland, but the majority will probably stay here. Some commentators argue that, with an ageing population, our current approach is unsustainable - hence the suggestion to build high-rise columbariums. Maybe we could start building them underground, which is, after all, the traditional place for the dead.
The problem is not simply a shortage of land, but a plentiful supply of superstition. By anyone's standards, our notions about death are strong, hence our avoidance of the number four. Until fairly recently, people were reluctant to consider buying life insurance simply because it involved talking and thinking about dying.
Funeral homes and crematoriums are considered 'essential but unwelcome facilities', to use the jargon of urban planners. In other words, they are about as popular in neighbourhoods as sewage plants or prisons. Most Hongkongers would rather have a view from their home of a bare concrete wall or a car park than a green, leafy cemetery.
I would guess this contributes to the small number of funeral homes, and therefore the lack of competition between them, and to the shortage of space for additional columbarium niches. There are also practical issues to consider, such as the concerns the Wong Tai Sin District Council has had about the Diamond Hill project. Thousands of people come to columbariums on grave-sweeping days, creating traffic problems and excessive incense fumes.
Our public columbariums are well designed and dignified, with open areas for families to have picnics. But will we also make sure that our departed are housed, honoured and transported in higher-quality facilities before reaching the columbarium? Maybe my expectations are too high, after attending funerals in the United States. But they do deserve better.
Bernard Chan is a member of the Executive Council and a legislator representing the insurance functional constituency
