“When you find yourself at a dead end, try a deep ‘graveyard meditation’ — it might clear the fog and show you the way forward. Han Yun’s ‘philosophy of self-consistency’ could be the antidote: ‘Happiness doesn’t have to be profound. One minute of joy is the measure of a lifetime.’”
— Wu Yuqin, reader

“I read this book in one sitting. The author weaves together stories from her own life and lays before us the people, the rules, the raw humanity inside Chinese funeral rites. Someone joked, ‘Have tissues ready’ — well, I cried several times.”
— Jiushi Xiaoqiao, reader

★ Three generations, one calling.
The author is the third-generation mortician in her family. Through nine true stories spanning decades, she gives the reader an intimate glimpse into Chinese deathways — the tenderness and absurdity, the dignity and the struggle, the quiet heroism of ordinary people facing the end.

★ The Chinese Departures — but anchored in the universal theme of grief healing.
This is not a book about “Chinese funeral customs”. It is a book about how ordinary human beings live with the loss of someone they love. Readers will recognize the same aching silence, the same unfinished conversations, the same clumsy love that transcends any culture.

★ Some Key Quotes
“Death is a small thing; living is the real thing.”
“Death is not the end. Forgetting is.”
“Seeing so much death — it really does teach you how to live.”
“We never dress the dead for the dead. We dress them for the living. A funeral is our way of telling those who remain: The one you love has gone, but you — you still have to go on. And you can.”

This is a work of immersive, emotionally charged creative nonfiction — part industry memoir, part philosophical meditation on mortality — written by a woman who has spent her entire life inside the world of Chinese funerals.

Han Yun comes from a family of morticians in Tianjin, a sprawling port city in northern China. In the local dialect, her profession is called Dàliǎo — literally, “the one who finishes things.” The family has been “finishing things” for four generations.

Drawing on her own lived experience, Han Yun does not write as an outsider observing rituals. She writes as the hands that wash the body, the voice that asks the widow what dress she wants her husband to wear, the silent witness to squabbling heirs and heartbroken parents. With meticulous, unsentimental tenderness, she documents the funerals of childhood friends, relatives, neighbours — ordinary people whose deaths reveal how they lived.

Far from an anthropological survey of “Chinese funeral culture,” this book is a gallery of human souls caught at the moment of final departure. It lays bare the tears and laughter, the unspoken debts and sudden reconciliations, the impossible weight of a single goodbye. Through these nine true stories, Han Yun offers a vision of death that is neither tragic nor mystical, but simply the other side of living — and in doing so, she guides her readers toward a healthier, clearer, braver relationship with their own mortality.

Han Yun (pen name: Ziran)

She is a mortician and a writer.
Her debut book, The Business of Death (2016), was selected for the Douban Reading Annual Nonfiction List — a prestigious recognition on China’s largest and most influential reader community (often described as the Chinese equivalent of Goodreads).

She is the third generation of her family to work as a Dàliǎo, and has handled over a thousand funeral cases. Her writing is rooted in the gritty, gallows-humour-rich vernacular of Tianjin’s old neighbourhoods, yet speaks to a universal human longing: to make peace with the people we lose, and with the one life we each have.

Preface - Death Is Also a Small Matter
Grandfather (Maternal)
Shrimp Skin Mom
Silly Two
Silly Big
Uncle Dick
Third Uncle
Yongqiang
Yongwang
China Doll
Tabby Cat
Wang Zishuai
Epilogue