The Moon over San Francisco's Chinatown: A Student's First "Cross-Border Joss Paper"
03 Dec 2025
On the Qingming Festival in 2021, the wind in San Francisco still carried the coolness of early spring. I clutched a crumpled 50-dollar bill and lingered at the red wooden door of "Fuxing Store" in Chinatown, hesitant to push it open. Inside the glass counter, gold ingots were neatly stacked, and the vermilion scrolls of deathbed prayers exuded a warm, time-worn glow. Most prominent were stacks of joss paper printed with "Heaven and Earth Bank," their patterns identical to those I remembered from the markets back home.
This was my third month in the U.S., and the first Qingming Festival since Grandma passed away. The joss paper Mom had stuffed into my bag before I left was seized by customs. She sobbed on the phone and said "never mind," but I knew the old lady who always taught me to fold gold ingots before Qingming was definitely waiting for this token of remembrance.
"Young lady, is this for your elderly relative?" The shopkeeper, an uncle with Cantonese-accented Mandarin, handed me a laminated bilingual instruction sheet, his fingertips smelling of sandalwood. "This 'Heaven and Earth Bank' money works just as well when burned here. If your grandma gets cravings, she can buy sweet osmanthus cakes at the alley entrance with it." His words pricked my eyes, and tears I'd held back finally fell—Grandma's last wish was to learn to fold new-style gold ingots from me when I returned from studying abroad.
That night, I spread a fireproof mat tightly on the balcony. When I lit the first piece of joss paper, the orange flame lit up the Chinese knot on the opposite apartment building. On the video call, Mom held her phone up to the ancestral hall back home. As candlelight flickered, she pointed to the sweet osmanthus cakes on the offering table: "Your grandma loved these most when she was alive. I put them out for her." The wind carried the ash upward, and the moon over San Francisco was unusually round. For a moment, I felt this moonlight was bridging the Pacific to my hometown.
After burning the last piece of paper, I touched the warm ash in my palm and suddenly understood the uncle's words. This stack of joss paper was never for "ghosts." It was for the old lady who hid osmanthus cakes in her drawer waiting for me after school, for the winters she said "I'm not cold" while wrapping herself tightly in a cotton-padded jacket during video calls, and for the childhood that would never wait for me to come home on vacation.
Later, chatting with fellow international students about this experience, I realized we all had similar awkward moments: being warned by dorm managers for secretly burning incense in the hallway, holding Chinese deathbed prayers without knowing how to recite them, or folding gold ingots until our fingers ached, only to get lopsided results. It wasn't until I found a "Study Abroad Student's Nostalgia Set" recently that I realized someone had noticed our yearnings.
The mini gold ingot mold in the set solved the problem for clumsy hands—one press made a neat ingot. The bilingual deathbed prayer sheet had both the original Chinese and English annotations, so we didn't have to worry about misunderstanding from foreign roommates. The most thoughtful items were the small fireproof incense burner and foldable paper-burning basin, which fit perfectly on the balcony without taking up space. No more worrying about triggering the smoke alarm.
Last week on Qingming, I took the set to Chinatown. Uncle praised it repeatedly: "Young people think of everything." While burning paper, a fellow student came over to ask for the link, saying she could finally pay her respects to her grandpa properly. In the flame light, I seemed to see Grandma smiling as she took the gold ingots, just like she used to, tucking osmanthus cakes into my hands.
It turns out that nostalgia is never about a specific piece of land, but about the concerns hidden in rituals. A piece of joss paper, a stick of incense—even across the Pacific, they can deliver our thoughts accurately to the ones we miss.
Interactive Topic: What "clumsy yet sincere" acts of missing someone have you done abroad? Share in the comments
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