I’m not even sure what to make of this article, which is about Chinese families buying female corpses to bury alongside their dead sons, in order to give him a wife in the afterlife. Brides are already essentially bought and sold in some rural areas, where there are thriving networks of “bride sellers” who trick or kidnap women and then sell them into marriage.
But if you ever needed an example of women’s humanity not mattering, this is it:
“For girls, it doesn’t matter about their minds, whether they are an idiot or not,” he said. “They are still wanted as brides.” Dead or alive, he added, as he peered at the river.
“There are girls who have drowned in the river down there,” he said. “When their bodies have washed up, their families could get a couple of thousand yuan for them.”
It’s apparently customary for families to burn fake money in honor of deceased relatives, with the hope that the dead will be able to use that money in the afterlife. These families also need a woman for their deceased son to use in the afterlife.
Guo Yuhua, a sociology professor at Qinghua University in Beijing, an expert on folk traditions and burial customs in the Loess Plateau, said the minghun custom stemmed from both dread and sympathy for the dead. She said parents with dead daughters, like those with dead sons, were also carrying out an obligation to their child. They will sell their bodies as a way of finding them a place in a Chinese society where tradition dictates that a daughter has no place on her father’s family tree.
“China is a paternal clan culture,” said Professor Guo, who did postdoctoral work in anthropology at Harvard. “A woman does not belong to her parents. She must marry and have children of her own before she has a place among her husband’s lineage. A woman who dies unmarried has no place in this world.”
Lovely.