Changle, Fuzhou. 1995. Every day, thirteen-year-old Jing and her five-year-old sister Fei wait with their Uncle Wei for a smuggler’s boat. Their mother disappeared to the U.S. nine years ago, and now the boat is finally coming to take them to her. Secretly, Jing fears she has been forgotten, and little Fei can barely remember what her mother looks like.

But the boat is delayed, again and again. The days of waiting stretch into Qingming, the Tomb-Sweeping Festival, when families climb to the mountain graves to burn offerings for their ancestors. In this anxious time, Jing gets her first period — confused and without her mother, she is visited by her grandmother's ghost.

Uncle Wei and the sisters make the climb together to clean their grandmother's grave and burn spirit money. But Jing wanders away from them, deeper into the mountain, and is bitten on the ankle by a snake. She falls into a fever and cannot wake. When the boat finally arrives, only Uncle Wei and Fei are able to board. Jing, bound by her wound, is left behind.    

     

I’m Cynthia Lin, the writer and director of A Funeral Procession of Fireflies.

I was born in the United States and sent to Fuzhou, China, as a baby. For five years, my great-uncle and great-aunt raised me. They were the people I called my parents. My real mother and father existed only as distant presences — voices on the phone, money in the mail, a feeling of being watched from somewhere I couldn't see.

Children like me are called "satellite babies." It is a long-standing practice in the Fuzhounese diaspora: parents work overseas while their children are sent back to China to be raised by relatives. When I returned to my parents at age five, I arrived in a country I didn't remember, to a family I didn't recognize.

Seventeen years later, I went back to Fuzhou. I lived again with my great-uncle and great-aunt on the same old street, not yet demolished for high-rises. Slowly, things returned — the sound of firecrackers, the smell of frying snacks, the cadence of the Fuzhounese dialect I had lost as a child. I began interviewing other satellite children. One described his absent parents as spirits — protective when he behaved, punishing when he didn't. I remembered that feeling. A Funeral Procession of Fireflies began there.