A daughter recalls accompanying her father for the first time on this traditional ritual, Cheng Yuezhu writes.

Residents of a community in Xin'gan county, Ji'an, Jiangxi province, get fresh chrysanthemums on April 1 as Tomb Sweeping Day drew near. (LI FUSUN / FOR CHINA DAILY)

As bleak and macabre as the translation "tomb-sweeping day" might sound, what tends to be neglected, even among Chinese people, is that its original name qingming literally means "pure brightness". It was when I first visited my grandfather's grave years ago that the true message of the day became clear to me.

It was usually my father's mission to go, on every Tomb Sweeping Day, to visit my grandfather's grave that lies in a distant city where the ancestral home used to be. That year, though, I decided to go with him for a change.

We boarded the only bus that goes to the cemetery, concealed within the pale hills on the horizon of the bustling city. When the drowsy and dreary one-hour bus ride finally finished, what was presented to me was the typical images of the traditional festival crystallized into a silent, isolated mountain scene.

It was a breezy early spring day, the sky overcast with nebulous clouds, and the hills, covered by conifers, on the yearly turn from dark green to a more vibrant spring emerald.

On the long walk leading up to the cemetery gate, I spotted a curious establishment－an old-age nursing home. "That's convenient," I said.

After laughing at my inappropriate joke, my father replied, "The environment here is very nice. There's a Taoist temple just nearby. Good feng shui, apparently."

My grandfather didn't believe in any sort of those things. He was a head-on atheist who found joy in tangible knowledge. His only demerit, I would say, was a love for alcohol and meat, which probably caused him to have a stroke, the quick exacerbation of his condition, and the hastening of the inevitable end.

Flowers are placed on the tombstones of relatives at a cemetery in Yichang, Hubei province, to mark Tomb Sweeping Day. (LI FUSUN / FOR CHINA DAILY)

I remember getting a call from my mother and rushing home for the funeral, and was immersed in an unbearable noise compounded by blasting music played by a folk band and the chattering of guests engaging themselves at lunch. In the empty living room, incense was burning on the counter and my grandfather lay peacefully on a makeshift bed.

The level of hubbub felt disrespectful to me, so I complained to my parents that grandfather would have preferred a simple, quiet ceremony. But they told me that in his last days, perhaps realizing his imminent mortality, he specifically asked for a traditional Chinese funeral, with joss paper money and everything. The teenage me thought he was being a coward for that.

The tomb-sweeping excursion continued with us walking for quite some time and finally arriving at the foot of the hills. It was late afternoon, so very few people were within our vision. A vendor stood on the roadside in front of his truck.

My father stopped and bought what we needed for tomb sweeping－joss paper, a lighter, some plastic garlands because that was the only option.

"We should have gotten some real flowers downtown," I said. "These are so ugly and overpriced. Look at all the plastic flowers on the tombstones. I bet they'll go up there at night, take down the flowers, and sell them again tomorrow."

He was quick to respond. "They have to make a living. And anyway, it is environment-friendly to recycle them, isn't it?"

After entering the cemetery grounds, it was another long excursion and thousands of stone steps to go uphill, with tombstones and shrubs terraced thickly and neatly on both sides. It was truly a necropolis, a city for the dead. Just when I thought it was the last flight of steps we needed to climb, there emerged yet another even higher slope, providing resting places for hundreds.

We finally arrived at my grandfather's grave, a marble headstone with a small picture of him in the top middle, his name, the year of birth and death engraved in black paint, and another few lines stating his ancestors. A metal bucket was already at the front with burned paper inside, to which my father explained that our relatives had paid a visit.

"Wait a minute. Why is grandmother's name carved there as well?" I was appalled, because she is still alive and well.

"That empty pit nearby is your grandmother's. We bought it in advance. And her name is painted in red. That means this person's not dead," my father answered almost nonchalantly.

A caretaker at Yinlongshan Cemetery in Nanjing, Jiangsu province, cleans a gravestone for relatives who could not attend, in March. (YANG BO / CHINA NEWS SERVICE)

Then he took out a bottle of black paint and started carefully tracing the characters of my grandfather's name, parts of which were fading in color.

He draped the garland on the tombstone, put some joss paper money in the bucket and set them alight. White smoke mixed with tiny pieces of golden paper arose into the sky and dissipated into the misty air.

"Come and collect money, father. Your granddaughter is sending you a lot of them," my father said in a way too lighthearted tone. "With all this money, you can buy a lot of nice things over there."

Not knowing what to say, I just made the ritualistic three deep bows. Part of me thought my father absurd, but I can't deny that the idea offered by the traditional customs is able to bring solace, that our deceased families are somewhere living a new life, and the rituals link us to each other.

After the rituals were completed, we negotiated other steps to place flowers on several other tombstones that belong to our deceased relatives.

It started to drizzle on our walk back to the bus station, adding the finishing touch to the conventional qingming scene. Though to wayfarers it wasn't exactly an ideal weather, my father seemed very much enjoying the excursion. He had then spotted some wild Chinese toon trees on the side of the road and went to pick the tender, edible leaves just emerging from the end of each branch. With great desperation I watched a rare bus rolling past on the distant highway.

The rain stopped after a while, the sky cleared up and the air was refreshing. "Maybe this is what 'pure brightness' is actually about," I thought. Maybe the festival demonstrates the time-honored ability to see a silver lining in everything, even the loss of life, to appreciate the revitalization of nature from a little fall of rain, to find strength in the loving memory of our deceased family members and carry on with our own life journeys.

The epiphany, however, was instantly forgotten when the bus arrived and brought me back to modernity, as I began a tedious monologue about being drenched and cold.

"Don't worry. At least you'll have scrambled eggs with fragrant toon leaves when we get home," my father said.

Contact the writer at chengyuezhu@chinadaily.com.cn