Yang Qi, Class 18, Senior 3, Shenzhen Middle School

A few days ago, I had dinner with a friend of mine. As soon as the words “Shenzhen Will Bank” jumped out of my lips, she exclaimed with shock: “How ominous!”

The word “will” indeed sends out a vibe of death since it is death that activates it. Making a will is like trespassing onto the alien and intimidating other end of life, piercing through everything in between.

Young and bold as I am, I am always in awe when conceiving death; not to mention that for most of my grandma’s peers in China, uttering the word “death” is taboo, as if Hades would respond and come to capture us. In older customs, even praising a child can be dangerous, since the demons of the underworld might take them away out of appreciation or jealousy.

Death, thus, is gloomy, imposing, and mysterious in our traditional contexts. The best we could do is to ignore it. And because of its inevitable connection with death, the concept of will is shadowed and therefore distanced.

The confrontation of death, however, is not the only negative connotation in the perception of many Chinese.

Unlike farewell notes, the function of wills is not so much as carriers of emotions; they serve more to dispose properties and attribute other forms of legacies. This role of wills, unfortunately, is also not in line with the Chinese traditional value of understating personal interests.

In the perceptions of the elderly, merely speaking about money is vulgar and transgressing, not to mention how indecent it would be when family members become the beneficiaries. In this way, making wills develops into an implication of unhappy families and selfish offspring.

During my internship, when I went to numerous neighborhoods with other staff of the Shenzhen Will Bank to promote laws and statutes related to wills, many elders proudly exclaimed at the scene: “My sons and daughters have perfect relationships. It is impossible for them to turn against one another for legacies. Our family shall never need to file wills!” In an atmosphere like this, filing a will is like announcing to the entire neighborhood that one’s family is shattered.

However, “perfect” families that don’t care about legacies at all only exist in wishful thinking instead of in reality. Attorney Min Qishuang, the founder and chief director of Shenzhen Will Bank, told me that she established the service center exactly because she had witnessed so many times how inheritance disputes shattered harmonious families into pieces and transformed beloved ones into foes.

As the economy of China thrived, individual assets in general increased rapidly, so did disputes over inheritance. Reports indicate that about 70 percent of legacy dispute cases in courts of Beijing could have been avoided if there were wills; plus, about 60 percent of the wills in question are invalid. Up till 2017, only 1 percent of the 220 million elderly people in China had drafted wills. As our society is aging rapidly, it is foreseeable that inheritance disputes will continue to mushroom.

From a legal angle, properties would be distributed and arranged based on a well-established set of relative statutes when there are no wills. However, the results of such “automatic” distribution could deviate considerably from the deceased’s own expectations or preferences. For example, Auntie Zhang personally possesses two estates, and she has only one daughter. It is natural for Auntie Zhang to think that her estates could go only to her daughter. However, what she doesn’t realize is that half of her legacies would be legally distributed to her parents if they are still alive; and if her daughter gets married, the remaining half will fall into the couple’s joint possession.

In soap operas, plots of cat fights for legacies between the offspring satiate audience’s flavor for dramas. And during my internship, I also received requests for help from various special groups such as differently abled people who can’t fully understand the signing of information regarding wills and remarried elderlies who met obstacles in adapting wills. Wills in many ways can express people’s lives, carrying their concerns and responsibilities, and exhibiting their influence as well as restraints. And everyone deserves to be expressed.

Promoting wills is not an easy trip. What we can and have to do is to hack our ways despite the resistance.

Senior staff at Shenzhen Will Bank and I talked a lot about human nature, which is so vividly presented, as if under spotlight, there in the room for will filing. Inevitably, providing this special service, we can easily pierce into the selfish and shaded side of human nature, which drives us to ponder over what is the proper attitude to hold towards the complexity of humanity.

In my opinion, everyone is more or less selfish, and it is also righteous to be self-interested. The question is to find a balance between personal interests and the bonds with people close to us. In the case of inheritance, a will is the most powerful tool to reach that balance.

A will is a manifestation of senses of responsibility. Arranging legacy through wills is being responsible for the ones we care about; preventing family disputes is being responsible for the integrity of our families; and ruling out misunderstandings of our own wishes is being responsible for ourselves.

“Will” sounds ice-cold, shrouded in the shadow of death and adhering to the darker sides of human nature. Yet it also bears the warmth of love, concern, responsibility, and initiative. With a will, death is no longer the end of everything — it rather turns death to a beginning, a threshold for the deceased to tell about their wishes that do not cease along with their heartbeats.