I withdrew my eyes from students who were all dressed in black, scurrying to X’s memorial, a student who passed away last year, whom most of them on this college campus did not even know. Every email, every newspaper coverage, every eulogy on X’s death praised her as the spirit of Oxford, abiding by the Oxford value of bringing together a community. The girl wearing a sad face that was behind me in ballet class, so thin that she always wore a puffer jacket even in spring, so thin that she could never land firmly after turning, was described as a sunshine that greeted and inspired everyone at Oxford with a smiley face all the time.

A person is only left to interpretation after death.

I’ve only been to two funerals in my life. The first was for my grandma on my mum’s side. When everyone was asked to gather around her body and mourn for her, I withdrew immediately because her face wasn’t my grandma’s face. I even wondered if my mum picked the wrong body from the freezer. The cosmetician apparently didn’t understand that my grandma wasn’t such a serious person who would ever wear eyeliners. Also, I was convinced they cut her legs off somehow, because the lower part of body was simply covered with a blanket, and she looked smaller than ever. I stood in the corner, listening to the overdone funeral march while being consumed by the fading image of my grandma.

I got scared when I tried to empathize with my grandma’s life, so I never did. She was partially deaf, couldn’t speak Mandarin, and obviously didn’t understand Shanghai dialect coming from Anhui where Shanghainese would pejoratively call “barbaric country”. My dad, an elitist Shanghainese, hated her for that. I remember shouting at my grandma for being a “country woman”, as my dad kept teaching me to do. “Get back to your Anhui countryside if you can’t hear what I say,” I said to her.

So my dad thought my withdrawal from her body was an act of detest against her.

“But you still feel a bit sad after all, right?” He tried to comfort me after the funeral, as the only 10 people who cared to come to my grandma’s funeral were leaving. The hall was so empty and the walls were so blank that I wondered why people came all the way here just to stare at a body that no longer belonged to my grandma. My nightmares kept replaying the scene where my grandma came back as a ghost, nobody being able to see her except for me, while I kept waking up because of the scary funeral march music in my dreams.

The second funeral came within a week after my grandma’s (or was it “grandma’s” funeral, really?), in the exactly same venue, for a distant relative I still don’t know anything about even today. The exactly same funeral march played again and again in the background while this time, the room was filled with at least a hundred people per my guess as a tiny person squished in the middle. The walls were also decorated this time, while speech givers broke into tears multiple times. The crying became louder and more dramatic as more people joined, eventually turning into shouting. But everyone smiled upon the end of the funeral, when the host announced that the final step of the memorial was family dinner. The dinner was one of the most affluent meals I’ve ever had.

Then I got confused again. Why didn’t my grandma receive so much for her funeral, although that funeral was perhaps not really for her?

The funeral march music visited my dreams even more after the second funeral. I refused to go to any more funerals after that.