I know how a procession is supposed to behave. Someone walks ahead. Someone keeps the lamps from going out. Someone carries what cannot be left behind. Someone tries not to look back. I have seen enough thresholds to respect the arrangement.
Mine is less conventional. The attendants have too many teeth, too much enthusiasm, and a terrible instinct for music. One has taken charge of a trunk. Another is pulling a stringed instrument as though the evening depends on it. A third has discovered that a wedding chest makes an excellent drum.
Give a ghost a job and, for one night, he stops behaving like a ghost.
This is why I like the procession better than the family tree. It does not ask me to prove a sister before it begins to move. It asks only that we make room for carrying, playing, teasing, and getting everyone safely through a door.
In the pictures, I am rarely the softest thing in the frame. Good. A guardian should not have to become gentle in order to be useful. I can keep one hand near the road and another near the people who have made the road feel dangerous. The small spirits may be unruly, but they have been given a purpose. I recognise the relief in that.
There is also comedy in it, and I refuse to lose that. A wedding train made of demons is not an apology for fear. It is fear taught to carry a lantern without dropping it. It is disorder persuaded to take part in a ceremony.
I still do not know whether the woman behind the curtain is truly mine to escort. But the picture has given us a duty toward one another, and perhaps that is enough for a night.
Next comes a harder question: when people hand a guardian a role, a household, and a promise, which part is mine to keep?
Keep me honest
- National Palace Museum, Zhong Kui Marries Off His Sister. The catalogue describes the complete wedding procession and its closely observed demon attendants; the episode uses that visual tradition as its narrative frame.
- “On Xie Bin’s Zhong Kui Marries Off His Sister,” Huhai shi zhuan. The poem’s description of a route, attendants, instruments, and a curtained cart demonstrates how richly the procession could be imagined in later reception.