I am reminded of a remark from a WeChat researcher in Hong Kong: “ WeChat is being used as an archive of emotions.”Īround the same time, I noticed my experience was quite common among people in the Chinese diaspora. Even now, two years after his death, it is still too raw. But I still can’t bring myself to play them and hear his voice. I still have my dad’s voice messages on my WeChat. So, we went through the same ritual on WeChat a few days later – in the crematorium and in the cemetery. I kept assuring him as soon as the travel ban was lifted, I’d go to see him.īut he died a few months after Mum: suddenly, most likely due to a heart attack. Two weeks of quarantine in a hotel in the international city where I would land (Shanghai), then one more week in a hotel in my home city in a nearby province, plus one week of home isolation. He understood I couldn’t be there, knowing what I’d have to go through to actually visit him. My dad was then in his mid-eighties, but very healthy for his age. Thanks to the wonders of technology, my private grief had to be sidelined. Half an hour after I ended this call, I had to join a work-related Zoom meeting. Two days later, my brother hooked me up on WeChat again so I could witness the burial of my mum’s ashes in the cemetery. In my inner-west home in Sydney, I saw Mum’s body in the coffin. They persuaded the local crematorium to let them stream the funeral event live via WeChat, so I could “be there”. In the days after her death, my brother and his wife did their best to make me feel included. She was progressively unable to recognise or communicate with me. In a way, these online occasions were more for my benefit than hers. In fact, for months before she died, our weekly WeChat exchanges mostly took the form of my simply looking at her on the screen, noticing subtle signs of deterioration each time. I wasn’t shocked to hear about Mum’s death – she had been very ill for a couple of years. Mum had died the previous night, he told me. One morning in February 2021, I was woken by a WeChat call from my brother in China.
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