Paper offerings are often burned in traditional Chinese funeral services as a way to send offerings to the dead. This paper house is constructed in the old diaolou (碉樓) style prominent in Toisan, a town in Southern China where many immigrants in Providence as well as the wider United States from the late 1800s to early 1900s hailed from.

In the late 1900s, A cemetery plot with over 100 tombstones in Providence was purchased for Chinese immigrants who could not return to China or didn’t have family/money for burial services (Brown Daily Herald). 叶落归根—when leaves fall, they must return to their roots. But for the Chinese immigrants buried here, thousands of miles away from home, where can they return to? As villages of diaolous in Southern China lay abandoned, is there a place to return to at all?

By burning this house in my backyard, in Providence, I hope to provide the Chinese immigrants buried in Providence with a spiritual resting place, a place to finally return.