Teacher Liu, I saw a very unusual piece of news online—a Chinese girl who studied in the UK returned home and works at a cemetery helping people clean graves. Is that true?

Yes, it’s true! Her name is Xiao Bai, and she’s from the post-2000 generation. With Qingming Festival approaching, she visits about ten graves a day and bows hundreds of times.

Bowing hundreds of times… that sounds exhausting. How much does she earn per month? I heard jobs like this pay a lot.

Actually, it’s not as much as people think—around 4,000 yuan a month. But she says money isn’t the most important thing. She treats every deceased person as if they were her own family.

We also have ancestor worship traditions in Vietnam, so I can understand the meaning of this work. But she lives alone in the mountains—doesn’t she feel scared?

She says she’s not scared at all. She believes in this idea: the ones you fear might be someone others miss day and night but can never see again.

That’s a very powerful statement. In China, Qingming Festival is very important for families, right?

Yes, Qingming is an important traditional Chinese festival. People return to their hometowns to sweep graves and honor their ancestors. But some people are abroad or too busy, so they ask someone like Xiao Bai to do it for them. Xiao Bai says, ‘Every act of remembrance deserves to be treated with care.’

I think her work is very meaningful. Languages and cultures may differ, but missing one’s family is the same everywhere.

Well said, Xiaopan! What you said reminds me of an ancient poem: ‘A stranger alone in a foreign land, I miss my family even more during festivals.’ This is a shared human emotion.