A paper foot massager machine and a massage chair for the dead...
A Malay colleague of mine laughingly asked me about Cheng Beng Festival, the Chinese All Soul's Day. She had read in a newspaper about a paper bungalow being sold for an exorbitant price of RM6000. For RM6000, one could easily get a plasma TV or if you are talking about an Acer laptop, you can get at least two of them and have some change left too! The bungalow purportedly came with a swimming pool and my colleague quipped how nice it would be to the dead person who receives this gift. Burning paper houses to the dead is a common practice among Chinese and this is done not only in Cheng Beng. A paper house is burnt during a funeral and the house used to come with paper servants and big paper motorcars. Modernisation has however brought about changes and now, people even burn video recorders, paper one of course and as my Malay friend said, paper Astro decoder too, the decoder for subscribing TV programmes by satellite broadcast etc etc. Another colleague had then chipped in saying there is a shop in Taiping specilising in producing these paraphernalia and she had seen an Indian employee making a paper house in a matter of seconds! Now, this ancient custom does keep the living happy, don't you think? Besides easing the minds of the living next of kins and allowing some others to have the joy of shopping, some other people get to earn their living. It's better than stealing anytime!
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