Chinatown group cleans graves at NYC, Long Island cemeteries

Chinese families got an early start on an ancient tradition this past weekend when they visited cemeteries in New York City and Long Island to pay respects to their ancestors.

Technically, the Ching Ming festival, also known as “Tomb Sweeping Day,” occurs on April 4. But on that day, the crowds flocking to cemeteries become very large and vehicles can line up for hours to get to graves.

To beat the crush, members of the Gee How Oak Tin Association in Manhattan’s Chinatown visited places like The Evergreens Cemetery in Brooklyn to clean graves, and burn incense and fake money.

Among the places the association visited at Evergreens, one of the city’s oldest burial grounds and located on the Brooklyn-Queens border, were two poignant graves marked by black granite. The stones mark the final resting place of people whose families don’t know where they are buried. The graves are rarely visited except by the curious and members of Oak Tin.

“Nobody comes,” remarked Donato Daddario, an assistant supervisor at Evergreens during a recent visit to the graves. “You will see people go and plant flowers, but I don’t think any are relatives. They just do it out of respect.”

The marble stones list the names of scores of Chinese immigrants who died between 1888 and 1930 in the city and whose bones were never claimed for formal burial by their families.

“We go there every year,” said Ted Chan, a ranking member of the association, about the pilgrimage to Evergreens. The association installed the stones as a way of showing respect for the dead whose families remain unknown, he said.

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While it may not be widely known, for decades in the early part of the 20th century, Chinese families in New York would hire a bone boiler to exhume the remains of the deceased a few years after death, clean the bones in a large pot of boiling water and repackage them for shipment to China.

However, during World War II, a ship crossing the Pacific with the metal boxes containing the bones destined for reburial in China was torpedoed.

The shipments stopped during the war years, said Daddario, adding that even after the war, the bones were collected but sometimes never returned to China.

As a result, about 100 unclaimed containers piled up in Evergreens’ receiving vault, a dark, cold underground structure built in 1872.

Finally in the early 1980s, officials at Evergreens decided the boxes had to be moved and given a more appropriate location.

At the time, Daddario said he had started a job as a caretaker and was assigned the job of moving the remains with a superstitious co-worker who seemed apprehensive.

The setting was a bit spooky, he said. There was no artificial light to break the darkness. The damp vault was laced with cobwebs and some of the bone boxes had deteriorated, Daddario said.

While the two were moving the boxes, one of them opened and a skull fell out, a sight that sent Daddario’s co-worker running.

“He shot out the door and they had to go to town to get him,” Daddario said.

The Gee How Oak Tin Association took up the responsibility and expense of making sure the bones were repackaged into better containers. They were then placed in the two common graves. Included in the inscriptions are the names of the deceased and the dates of death. In some cases, the names are unknown and only a date of death is noted.

It is entirely possible that relatives of those buried under the granite markers at Evergreens might come forward in the future to claim the remains and make arrangements for individual disposition such as cremation or burial. But until then, the monuments remain as a testament to the old traditions and a singular way of remembering those who might otherwise be forgotten.

By Anthony M. DeStefano

tony.destefano@newsday.comtonynewsday

Anthony M. DeStefano has been a reporter for Newsday since 1986 and covers law enforcement, criminal justice and legal affairs from its New York City offices.