On the first night of the current Hungry Ghost Festival, on the first day of the 7th month on the Chinese calendar, I saw a dead man.  Or maybe a boy.  In fact, could have been female, now that I think about it.  I couldn’t tell.  All I could see was a body in a heap, apparently thrown from a motorcycle in the middle of the highway.  There was a convoy of motorcycles stopped, with some people directing traffic around the site of the accident, and some standing on the roadside watching.  One had his cell phone out, apparently calling for help.  The accident had just happened, and the body was curled up into what a yoga instructor might call “child’s pose,” though the neck was twisted at an odd angle, with the forehead facing the sky rather than resting neatly on two fists.

My friend who was in the car with me did not see the body.  When I told her I did, and that there was no way the person had survived, she cringed.  It reminded me of two different times I’d seen very different responses to death on the roads in Shanghai, making me think that the dead are seen differently there than anywhere else I’d ever been.

In the first instance, I was in a cab with a friend, and we saw a body beside the road.  We had no idea what had happened — probably a traffic accident, but we weren’t sure.  I was only sure that I’d seen the whole person covered with the blanket, head to toe.  My friend thought it was covered just to keep the person warm, and the head was not covered.  We debated it just a little, then asked the driver what he thought.  He said, “Dead, no question.”  My friend said to me, “How can it be, when everyone is still just walking by not even giving a second look?  You get more stares than that on the roads, you know!”  She was right about the callous responses of passersby, and even of our driver.

The second incident was one that I, again, viewed from a cab.  This time I was alone, except for the driver.  On the other side of the road from where we were, a bicycle zipped out from the bike lane, apparently wanting to cross the road.  It seems he had not seen the vehicle approaching from his side of the road, and got hit pretty hard.  The cyclist was quite elderly.  I don’t think he could have possibly survived such a hard impact.  My driver’s response?  He laughed. Long and loud.

I don’t actually believe the people on the streets of Shanghai are immune to the horror of death.  I don’t think the indifference I’ve seen in people who bypass a traffic incident are real indications of how death makes those passersby feel, any more than I believe my driver was honestly amused enough to laugh at the misfortune of the cyclist.  I may be naive, but I just don’t see people as that bad, nor do I see the end of a life as that insignificant.  And I don’t believe that anyone does.

I don’t know that I really understand the impulse that drove my driver to laugh or the pedestrians on the road to just keep walking without even seeming to notice the corpse on the roadside.  I sort of think it is a defense mechanism in a place where one is surrounded by other people and their problems every minute of every day, but I could be wrong there.  What I do know is that death does not evoke the same response in Shanghai as it does in Singapore – at least not the death of the anonymous.

Perhaps that is where the difference really lies.  Perhaps it is not so much that the dead are seen differently in Shanghai than in Singapore, but that the dead are not quite seen at all in the bigger, busier city.  Anonymity can be a coveted commodity in such a crowded place.  Maybe it is a form of respect, then, to grant it to the dead.