Today is Hong Kong’s Chung Yeung festival, the day where ancestor reverence boils over and the country shuts down to show their respect.
Besides being a national holiday with government offices and banks closed, many Hong Kongers visit cemeteries to clean family member’s graves and burn paper replicas of objects the dead might want in the afterlife (such as an iPad).
Stores that only sell these replicas – ranging from air conditioners to dentures that price from around $2.00 on up – line the street in the Sheung Wan neighborhood, one of the city’s last with terraced turn-of-the-century buildings just starting to trend upward as hip galleries and glassy apartment buildings pop up.
Fingers crossed, these mom and pop shops survive the neighborhood’s change. Where else will the dead (and their families) be able to grab a pack of Marlboro’s or six pack of Heineken?
