ABSTRACT
In land-scarce Singapore, the government has ordered the destruction of every cemetery but one. In the cemetery that remains, the public cemetery at Choa Chu Kang, burial plots are guaranteed for only fifteen years. Therefore, most Singaporean families will face the unsettling experience of digging up their dead. In any context, to raze the grave of a loved one would likely horrify, but here the act is all the more terrifying: many Singaporean Chinese families believe that all good things – health, wealth and fertility – stem from the fact that the dead are appropriately buried. Digging up a relative’s body does not merely desecrate his/her memory; it devastates one’s own future. The process, I suggest, turns ancestors into ghosts, and the state is complicit in this transformation.
In this chapter, I focus particularly on the fragments of bone recovered from graves. I describe how exhumations are marked by a near obsessive focus on recovering every body part. However, once retrieved, the remains act as a conduit for nightmares and visions, channelling misfortune into the home. These bones present a problem: they can be neither kept nor disposed of. They remain troubling and unsatisfactory, precisely because the fragments can never equal all that is lost.
