A Chin Family Gravestone

I've been visiting this gravesite at the Mountain View Cemetery in Oakland, California, for as long as I can remember, well over fifty years, once or twice a year when I was younger for Ching Ming and other occasions, less as I've gotten older. So, I know this tombstone, but I never really read it until my Aunt Millie asked to to help translate the Chinese words.

I know the names of my Uncles and Aunts etched here in granite, in both English and Chinese. If I had bothered, I would have seen the name of our family village in Chinese (Toisan, Luk Chun, Char Jew Village) and that they were members of the 25th generation [to live in that area]. I had completely overlooked the poetic couplet between their English and Chinese names or perhaps ignored them as indecipherable. Yet a poem like this is rare on both Chinese and English gravestones. 

The couplet reads as follows with the Hoisanese pronunciation/Mandarin Pinyin in parentheses:

寶骨悲留千古地 寶 (bo/bao) - treasure, precious 骨 (goot/gu) - bones 悲 (bi/bei) - sorrow, sadness 留 (lau/liu) - to leave behind, remain 千 (tein/qian) - thousand 古 (gu/gu)- ancient times 地 (ee/di) - earth, land

家身慘掛萬年墳 家 (gaa/jia) - family, home 身 (seen/shen) - body 慘 (taam/can) - tragic 掛 (kaa/gua) - to hang, suspend 萬 (maan/wan) - ten thousand 年 (nein/nian) - year 墳 (foon/fen) - grave

Put together into a rough poetic translation*:

    Precious bones tragically remain in the ancient earth for a thousand years
    The family's sadness hangs over the grave for ten thousand years.

Alternatively:

     Precious bones tragically linger in the ground for a thousand years
     The living family mourns at the grave for ten thousand years

This couplet was almost certainly written for Jimmy, probably by his father Pak Yick Chin, as the first character of each line are taken from the characters of Jimmy’s name "Bo Gar". It expresses the sorrow at his and his older brothers' (Harry and Hammond) untimely deaths, with their physical remains staying in the earth, and the family’s grief lingering for an eternity. The contrast of "thousand years" and "ten thousand years" poetically expresses that eternity.

Pak Yick Chin and Jimmy Bo-Gar Chin
1950, Oakland, CA

Twins Harry and Hammond both died two weeks after the were born in 1924. Jimmy was my mother's youngest brother. The baby of the family, the youngest of her father's 17 children, Jimmy died in a tragic car accident in front of their home in Oakland Chinatown. He was 5 1/2 years old.

Edith was the matron of the family. The eldest girl and a mother figure to her younger siblings and her nieces and nephews. She served as a nurse for 50 years first during World War II then at Chinese Hospital in San Francisco Chinatown. She knitted many scarves, hats, and gloves for her younger family members.

Else, as she preferred to be called, was an eccentric member of the family. She worked at the Naval Supply Center in Alameda for 40 years, and was know for her amazing works of pottery.

William is the polymath of the family. He has many talents and interests including languages, history, genealogy, photography, and skiing. Legally blind as a young adult, he was nevertheless an athletic skier well into his sixties. He easily navigated steep, mogul studded terrain with no poles and a hot cup of coffee in one hand. He was equally at home skiing backwards as well as forwards. He currently lives in Thailand.

I've written more about Edith, Else, and William in my post about the Chin Family's Greatest Generation. William also wrote about his experience Growing Up in Oakland Chinatown.

[*Translation assistance from the Hoisanese diaspora in the Hoisan Cooking and Culture group on Facebook and ChatGPT-4.o. Any mistakes or misinterpretations my own.]