My apartment was just beside this place. I came early in the morning. The dust had not yet been swept from the red stands. The incense sticks were still unlit, the cigarette untouched. I had assumed it was a temple, but there were no statues, no ritual objects. The space was open, quietly glowing from within, inviting silence and breath.
The caretaker shuffled in rubber slippers, moving through his routine — lighting incense, filling water pitchers. I passed this place every morning, and he already recognized me. That day, I finally asked him to teach me how to pray. “Very simple,” he said. “Three bows at the two doors, and three in each direction at the main wall.” I hesitated. Why the wall? Where were the statues?
He didn’t quite understand my question, only nodded. Then he pointed to the wooden tablets and said, “They are all dead.”
“Who?”
“These tablets — they are the dead.”
“And this one wrapped in cloth?”
He smiled. “Not yet. That one is still alive.”
The next morning I came earlier and saw something unexpected. He lit a cigarette, bowed in each direction, then placed the cigarette into the urn in the center. “Why?” I asked. He pointed gently to one of the tablets. “He loved smoking very much. This is for him. Every day I light one.”
Later, I returned to sketch the dog carved on the right. While noting its shape, I looked again at the map. It was not marked as a temple, but as a shrine. A lineage hall. A place for ancestral ashes — a temple dedicated to deified ancestors and the continuity of family lines in Chinese tradition.
Somehow I had missed this. The truth settled slowly, like ash after incense smoke. This was not a temple to gods in the way I imagined, but a house of memory. A threshold where the living and the dead share quiet mornings. A place where daily gestures — sweeping, bowing, offering a cigarette — continue love.
Standing there, with my sketchbook in hand, another thought came quietly:
Can I dance in this space? Am I allowed?
Is movement here a disturbance — or could it be a form of respect, a bow made with the whole body?
I did not ask yet. The question is still resting inside me, like the first stirring of breath before motion.
And I understood: this is where my research begins.
In places where memory breathes.
In gestures that honor the unseen.
In the trembling moment before asking whether the body, too, may pray.