Tony Huie, who emigrated to the United States in 1966, checks a paper lantern-shaped money basket at a funeral supplies store in New York's Chinatown. Wang Jingshu / China Daily

"In my family, there is an elaborate process of burning joss sticks and bank notes, both when you arrive and when you leave," said Silvia Pan, a student at Macaulay Honors College at the City University of New York, and a third-generation immigrant. "There is a feeling that if you leave without paying, your ancestors will follow you when you leave, and you don't want spirits to follow you. It's really bad luck, so if you don't do everything you're required to do, you'll have bad luck in the next year."

The negative connotations of this superstitious aspect of the holiday may be a contributory factor to why younger generations of Chinese in the US are less interested in the holiday, Pan said.

"I think that because the holiday is centered around the belief that ancestors will give you bad luck if you don't worship them, there's a negative feeling, from an American point of view," she admitted. "It's very superstitious, so I'm not really sure if the younger generations will want to continue celebrating the holiday."

For many third-generation immigrants, whose relatives may be buried on the Chinese mainland or Hong Kong, there is a weaker connection with the past, Pan said.

"For my generation, it's not emphasized at all because all the ancestors we do know are often buried in different places. For my parents' and grandparents' generations, there was much more of a sense that it was a responsibility that you had a duty to fulfill, but I think that feeling is diluted here in the US," she added.

One method by which Chinese immigrants are combating the distance between the deceased and the living is the shipping of burial remains from China to the US, to be reburied closer to the family, said Sue Fawn Chung, professor of history, and the chair of Asian studies at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and co-editor of Chinese-American Death Rituals: Respecting the Ancestors.

"There is a belief that the spirit stays with the ashes," Chung said. "Some families will accept a memorial tablet, but for many, the memorial tablet isn't sufficient and the bones of the ancestors must be honored directly."

In "The Chinese Mortuary Tradition in San Francisco's Chinatown", Linda Sun Crowder reported that mortuary directors in the Bay Area have noticed a substantial increase in cases of remains arriving from China for burial in the US.

"As more Chinese immigrants make their homes in America, the remains of loved ones overseas are reunited with the present generation, reversing the previous custom," she writes.