Wednesday, December 2, 1998

"I was feeling just a little guilty about my dad. I thought, 'I have to bring him here so my heart is comfortable,' " Hank Kim, 45, who owns an auto repair shop in Lake Forest, said. He spoke recently in his Cerritos living room, a large cross on the wall evidence of his Presbyterian faith.
      In the years after his father's 1971 death in Seoul, Kim and other family members moved to the United States and so they could not visit the grave often.
      That yearning to honor ancestors, and to have their remains close at hand, overcomes old taboos against disturbing graves. It compels families to travel to China, Hong Kong, Korea, Vietnam, Indonesia and Myanmar and bring back cremated ashes, often in carry-on luggage like souvenirs.
      "They want to pay respects without the long commute," said Loyal Ekholm, an administrator at Skylawn Memorial Park in San Mateo.
      Political changes overseas are a factor. Several years before the 1997 transfer of Hong Kong to mainland China's control, fears about the change set off a flurry of such reburials, said Rose Hills official Merrill Mefford. Continuing worries about the future of Taiwan and Korea have prompted others.
      Sometimes, practical issues are paramount. The elderly fear that the younger generations will forget to send graveyard upkeep fees to the old country. Or families learn that a cemetery is being moved--or worse, paved over for a real estate development, as occurred recently in Singapore.
      "We don't mind paying taxes as long as we are alive," said a Laguna Hills man whose parents and grandparents were buried in a private plot in Taiwan. "But when we are gone, nobody's going to take care of it."
      The man, a former Taiwanese military officer who spoke on condition of anonymity, recently moved four urns from Taiwan to Live Oak Memorial Park in Monrovia and paid for perpetual maintenance. Concerns about the costs of cemetery maintenance, not any philosophy or sense of duty, prompted the trip.