Doug cannot resist the cheap firecrackers here. You can buy a huge roll of firecrackers the size of your thumb for $2 USD. He likes to light them off in the morning. He thinks they bring us good luck. One day he went into a roadside store to buy some and the old man working there became upset and kept saying “Mudi” over and over again. We actually know this word. It means “cenetery”. Many of the roadside stores that sell firecrackers also sell fake money. It looks nothing like actual Chinese currency.
Today we were passed by a bus and someone was throwing firecrackers out the back window followed by handfuls of fake money with the occasional very small denomination real currencyy. We were finding this fake money alongside the road for miles.
We picked some of it up to have a closer look. They are for ridiculously large denominations- 50 million and they actually say “dollars” on the back. The back side also says “Hell Bank Note”.
Doug and I are guessing that the money is for the person who died and in case they are going to hell, they will have money to buy their way out. It would seem that Satan speaks English, accepts US dollars and isn’t all that savvy.
I do however like that Doug has been lighting firecrackers off every day. It’s as if we have been unknowingly honoring my uncle the whole time. 
4 Responses to “Firecrackers And Free Money”
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All fireworks are fun, fun, fun! I don’t know if they make you lucky, but what the hell, whatever works!
Some of the fire crackers are huge and have English names like “widow maker”. I have seen a couple people with missing hands and can only imagine what happened.
There’s a human being in the middle of the note like Mao in RMB. He is King of Hell, he is not only the ruler but also the judge of the underworld and passes judgment on all the dead. He always appears in a male form, and his minions include a judge who holds in his hands a brush and a book listing every soul and the allotted death date for every life. In our ritual, we avoid picking the hell money up by throwing out from a funeral family, it brings you very bad luck, burn it if you still have it.
We didn’t keep it. We took a photo of it and left it somewhere. Thanks for telling us about the Hell Bank Notes. Maybe that’s why I hurt my toe : (