In September 2020, Gu Xiong travelled with a team of filmmakers to five Chinese-Canadian settlement and burial grounds: Cumberland Chinatown, D’arcy Island, Harling Point Cemetery, New Westminster Chinese Cemetery and Mountain View Cemetery. He filmed and photographed sites that held historical significance to Chinese immigration in Canada and were vanishing or had already vanished from view. His captures are of deteriorating buildings exposed to the elements, redeveloped land once home to the dead, and everyday places with forgotten histories. Xiong aims to create a sense of immediacy and invite viewers to draw connections to their own lives and histories; for Xiong, memory is not simply a record of the past, but also a framework for understanding the present.

My great-grandma and great-grandpa are buried in Mountain View Cemetery in Vancouver. Every spring, on the day of Qingming, or “Tomb-Sweeping Day,” we pick up bouquets from Lily’s Florist on Knight Street and visit their graves. This holiday is not marked by decadent lotus-seed mooncakes or festive red money envelopes, but by a pleasant walk through a cemetery, carrying food, flowers and incense sticks as offerings to the deceased.

My great-grandparents were born and raised in China and owned a business in Vietnam. They travelled back and forth between the two countries until the Second Sino-Japanese War, when they stayed in Vietnam to escape the turmoil and never returned to China. In 1985, my great-grandma immigrated from Vietnam to Canada with the rest of her family, including my father, my mother and my two brothers. She was in her nineties and a few months after landing in Canada, she passed away. My family brought my great-grandfather’s ashes with them when they immigrated, and though he had never even taken a step in Canada while alive, my family decided that my great-grandparents should be buried together in Vancouver. Every year, my father reminds me that the lease of the plot expires in thirty years and that I need to remember to renew it, because he may no longer be alive.

After many years in Canada, we now buy six bouquets and make two cemetery visits instead of the one. After holding a quiet reverence at Mountain View Cemetery, we drive to Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Burnaby, where we visit my great-uncle, great-aunt, grandfather and aunt. Every so often, we arrive at a spot and find flowers or incense sticks already placed near the grave. Most likely from one of our relatives—or perhaps from other grave visitors who are grateful that their loved ones in the ground have company. We want to say our thank yous too, so my father lights some incense sticks and we walk around sticking them in the dirt next to the graves nearby, saying hello to our loved ones’ neighbours and friends.

Gu Xiong explains that when he visits these graves, he tries to let his eyes travel through the time and space occupied by the deceased, to follow their footsteps across the land and sea. To him, every tombstone contains the life of the person, every cemetery a microcosm of history and every choice to be buried here a declaration of belonging and presence in Canada.

Every time we visit my great-grandma’s grave, we close our eyes and follow her footsteps across the sea, and back again. She chose to be buried here and we chose to bury her here. And though her name on the tombstone may fade, the imprints of our footsteps only become deeper with time.

The images are from The Remains of a Journey by Gu Xiong, published by Centre A in 2021. Gu Xiong’s multimedia exhibit was co-presented by Centre A and Canton-sardine in Vancouver, BC from November 13, 2020 to February 13, 2021.