BRITAIN: The bodies of some of the 23 Chinese cockle-pickers drowned at Morecambe Bay last February finally returned to their home villages last week. Clifford Coonan was there.
The first sign that Ling Guoguang was coming home was when a terrible keening went up in the family house in the early morning.
Ling Guoguang was one of 23 Chinese cockle-pickers drowned in the fast-rising waters of Britain's Morecambe Bay last February. His story strikes a chord in Ireland, where economic migration is still part of our living memory.
Ling Guogang's body came in a container wrapped in black plastic for burial in his hometown of Youyi, a dusty town in the southern Chinese province of Fujian, 10 months after he drowned.
The return of Ling Guogang's corpse last week was delayed by a knotty investigation into "snakeheads", who trade in cheap illegal labour, and a bitter wrangle over compensation.
It arrived in a military truck just before dawn, along with the corpses of his two cousins, and a big police escort. As soon as it was confirmed that his body was coming, the women of the family began keening around his photograph, in a similar style to the wakes in Ireland years ago.
The women had spent the whole night frantically preparing for the long-awaited funeral, getting the big, round, paper-flower wreaths ready. When I arrived into the brick house, they pressed cans of peanut juice and cigarettes on me, and urged me to eat breakfast dumplings.
Ling Guoguang's wife, Li Jingyun, fell to the ground as the trucks passed. The 38-year-old mother of two then donned the traditional Chinese funeral costume of white clothing, overlaid with sackcloth. Li Jingyun was finally allowed to grieve after months of wondering about what would become of her husband's body. She knew he was dead, but there was no corpse to bury. And her struggle isn't over.
"Now our only hope is that we get justice from the British authorities and get a bit of money so the kids can stay in school and graduate. The thing we're worried about most is the children," she said.
Li Jingyun was still crying as we climbed the hill to the graveyard. Chinese graveyards are usually on hillsides, as the feng shui is better. This was where Ling Guoguang would have a Christian burial in the grey morning light in Youyi, back in his home soil.
One grizzled middle-aged mourner threw a steady stream of red firecrackers, which banged and fizzled as we ascended to the graveyard, passing a stark concrete church with a large cross on top. Many in this part of China are Christian and have been since the Portuguese missionaries came to Fujian in the 16th century.
The bodies of the cockle- pickers have been kept in Britain since the incident as investigations continued and impoverished relatives worried about how to pay for the funerals.
Li Jingyun's story is familiar to any Irish families who have had relatives working illegally in America or Britain.
Ling Guogang owned a fish farm until a big storm washed it away. The family borrowed money to clear their debts, but unable to make ends meet, Ling borrowed money for a ticket to Europe. He travelled to France with a passport, and then made his way across to Britain somehow.
He couldn't find any work there, so he borrowed more money to stay alive, before eventually he got a job picking cockles, the shellfish which are exported to restaurants around Europe, in Morecambe Bay.
Ling had been picking cockles for five or six weeks before the accident, and hadn't been paid for his work. All his wife has left is a body and a whole rack of debts.
Li Jingyun's cousin, Ling Meiqing, was mourning her husband, Ling Youxing, who had only been working for a short time in Morecambe Bay when the waves claimed him.
When his body was offloaded from the truck, she leapt on to the black, plastic-wrapped box. Her teenage son walked around in circles, bewildered by grief, wailing "Baba, baba", Chinese for "daddy", and hitting his forehead. His sorrow seemed to go beyond the usual formal grieving process.
It was not so much a coffin as a container. Ling Youxing was number 13, according to a sticker on the front.
One Chinese male delivered from Britain to China, via Hong Kong, said the terse delivery note given to the relatives.
The air filled with the smell of death when the box was opened to find out which end Ling Youxing's head was facing. The position of the corpse is very important in Chinese burial tradition. He needed to be facing in the right direction.
The relatives put some of his clothes and personal effects into the container before resealing it. There was no time for many of the usual funeral customs.
Security was high at the funeral, to ensure the burial did not spark wider unrest.
Like all the relatives of the cockle-pickers who died, Li Jingyun was angry. She finally buried her husband but she still has a battle on her hands to win compensation for her loss.
She has gone into debt to pay for the funeral, a costly affair in China. There were flowers to be bought, meals to be paid for, and gifts to be given out. She still owes money for the expensive headstone.
Li Jingyun commissioned a carved stone tomb for Guoguang, costing nearly €3,000.
He was the sole breadwinner and now she has no income source.
"The kids need money to go to school. That's been the hardest thing about the past 10 months," she says.
"My husband used to weep over the telephone, telling me how hard the work was and how badly they were treated. He always hoped our two children would stay in school and graduate so they don't have do the same work," she said.
The village is like many in Ireland back in the bad old days of mass emigration, largely sustained by remittances from overseas.
Back in the simple family home where the meal after the funeral was held, friends dropped by to leave little wrapped up pieces of paper containing money, red 100 yuan notes, as is the tradition. An older man wrote down the names of those giving money and the amount in a book, and said it would go some way towards paying for the funeral but was really just a token.
Ling Fuzhu, uncle of the three widows, is is a representative of the victims' families but on this day he was the organiser of the funeral. "They heard about the accident on Chinese TV, then they started to worry that their husbands were among the victims. They telephoned them, and couldn't get through, and then they knew they were dead," he said. "The police told us we would only get the bodies back after we get compensation but that hasn't happened. We're very disappointed and angry about the circumstances that we're getting the bodies back in," he said.
It's not clear who is supposed to pay the compensation. As many of the workers were believed to be illegal, they will not qualify for compensation and the people-smugglers are unlikely to be forthcoming.