On a busy Hanoi street in the Old Quarter is a street of shops that carve gravestone markers.  Marble and engraved with faces and words I don’t know, they are not like anything I’ve seen before. 

Today riding the train north to Yen Bai we passed many graves, some with stark white headstones rising out of the emerald green rice paddies.  Others were little villages of graves.  Many had markers like those I saw in Hanoi.

I remember my father used to say he didn’t understand why people bothered with fancy markers after a person was dead.  He wanted to be cremated and scattered to the wind.  And he was.  But in Vietnam, like in China, I think the ancestors play a much more prominent part in people’s daily lives.  The gravestone markers give them honor in death.