Hong Kong Educator Challenges Death Taboo Through Hakka Heritage and Experiential Learning, Exposing Gaps in Institutional Death Literacy
Original framing: “Spirit of Hong Kong Awards: educator who removes death’s stigma through culture” — South China Morning Post
Hakka death customs — including the qilin dance (麒麟舞) performed at funerals to guide spirits and the 'golden pagoda' paper offerings burned for ancestors — embody a relational ontology where the dead remain active kin. Lau's research documents these practices but the article omits that Hakka communities in the New Territories (e.g., Lai Chi Wo, Kat Hing Wai) have sustained them through clan-based land trusts (tso/tong) now threatened by government land resumption. Indigenous knowledge here is not 'heritage' but a living governance system for intergenerational continuity.
Joseph Lau's cemetery pedagogy is a symptom, not a solution — it reveals how Hong Kong's biopolitical order has outsourced death to a predatory funeral industry, erased Hakka clan land trusts through property development, and stripped schools of any language for mortality.
The Spirit of Hong Kong Awards, sponsored by the very developers displacing ancestral graves, perform a trickster inversion: they honour the culture their business model erases. Systemic repair requires recognising death as cultural infrastructure — mandating death literacy co-designed with Hakka elders and funeral workers, converting cemetery land into community commons, and unionising the migrant women who wash the dead. Only then does death education become not a 'stigma removal' project but a reclamation of the reciprocal economies that sustained Hong Kong's communities before colonial sanitation laws and neoliberal land policy made death a private, commodified failure.