Death experience founder kills his idea
Wei Li'er lies on the crematory at the Wake and Death Experience Hall where she is surrounded by visions of fire and light, simulating the actual incinerator.
The Wake and Death Experience Hall, which aimed to stimulate people’s thoughts on life and death by setting up scenarios involving difficult decision they may have to make in real life, is experiencing its own death.
It “entertained” its last group of 10 players on Wednesday night.
In the three years since it opened, the pavilion has sent 7,024 people to a “crematory” for 444 yuan (US$66) per person. In Chinese, the word for the number 4, or si, sounds like the Chinese for death.
The pavilion has known about its own death for quite some time. On September 23, 2017, one of the founders of Wake and Death posted an article on its WeChat account saying it would shut on April 4, 2019.
Huang Weiping said he wrote the article because he realized the goal of the experience hall had gone astray.
“I was so anxious about selling more tickets, having more people come,” said Huang. “But come to think of it, the original idea of the place is to tell people about the impermanence of life. How ironic.”
Huang was a businessman who, around 2009, began to focus on hospice care. Before that, he spent three months in Sichuan Province after the catastrophic earthquake as a volunteer.
“One cannot help but think about the meaning of life and death after seeing hell there,” said Huang.
In 2013, Huang and his friends rented a pavilion in a small park in Huangpu District. The design of the experience took them three years.
“We presold 100 tickets in 2013,” Huang said. “When the pavilion finally opened in 2016, only a third came.”
In 2015, the Economist Intelligence Unit issued a Quality of Death Index that ranked China ranked 71 out of 80 countries.
“Most people don’t get to choose the way they check out, people don’t like to talk about it either,” said Huang. “It’s not just China.”
Bai Jiaxin monitors the progress of those taking part in the experience and gives instructions.
The experience was designed as a game that takes two and a half hours, but often lasts longer.
All the scenarios were devised by Huang’s friends Ding Rui and Morris, both now professional scriptwriters.
Six to 12 players are taken to a room where each faces questions such as whether they want to put an end to the suffering of a family member who is critically ill. Or the group will face the dilemma of choosing someone to die to save the others.
There is no right answer to these questions, and players can vote people off based on others’ answers, or are randomly eliminated under the rules of the game.
Those eliminated walk through a dark tunnel to a crematory where they will lie down to experience visions of light and fire before eventually seeing a starry sky.
Wei Li’er bought a last-minute plane ticket to Shanghai from Kunming at 4am on Monday. She arrived on Tuesday.
Wei had wanted to come for a while, but many of her friends didn’t understand the idea and had tried to dissuade her. When she finally decided to buy a ticket for the final day of the experience, she was told all the tickets had been sold.
“I decided to try my luck anyway,” said Wei. “If no one withdrew, I’d just consider it a spring outing.”
Luckily, one of the players in the second-last round of experience withdrew.
Wei met others at the pavilion and found that eight of them were from other cities like her.
Li Ping and Lin Hongyu from Shandong Province bought their tickets in January.
They had encountered death in real life with the passing of loved ones.
Lin said that one of her family members died years ago but, until now, she hadn’t been able to cope with the subject.
“I broke up with my boyfriend this year,” said Lin, “because he told me his mother was diagnosed with cancer.”
Lin came to the pavilion to learn about death. “But after it, I found death is not something you can learn, life is,” Lin said. “It will always remain incognizable but what we should look at is how to live a better life.”
A blackboard outside the pavilion is where people can write down what they want to do before they die.
Wei was the player who made it to the last. In the monitoring room, Bai Jiaxin was giving players instructions as a voiceover judge.
“You now can have some time on your own,” Bai said to Wei over the speakers. “Consider it a reward for your victory.”
Later, Wei told Shanghai Daily there was no sense of victory at all.
“There was a scene in the experience where I had to choose whether to torture the baby girl of a bomber or let him blow the city up,” Wei said. She chose torture.
“The experience forced you to make hard choices, it makes you think deeper,” Wei said. “And you can speak your mind and say things you usually won’t say for fear of being judged by others.”
Wei had the thought of ending her own life when she was a teenager because of domestic violence.
“From time to time I would think about giving up,” Wei said. “But not anymore, I will not escape from my life.”
Huang recalled that once or twice people who were truly about to die had come to take part. They took the experience as a chance to rehearse saying goodbye.
The original plan for the last day of the pavilion was to invite two groups of cancer patients, but the plan was derailed for “complicated reasons.” So was an exhibition of people’s mementos.
“It is a taboo to talk death, or bring negative energies, you know,” Huang said.
Huang said the closure of the pavilion will give him more time for his hospice-care projects. He has established 10 hospice-care facilities in Shanghai and cultivated more than 1,200 hospice-care volunteers over the past 10 years.
But Huang wants to carry on the idea of facing death squarely after the pavilion’s demise.
“Maybe in a way that more people can accept, instead of shoveling you into a crematory,” he said.
