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On a wind-swept Sunday morning in Maryland, Hon Yuen Wong leads a graveside ritual at Cedar Hill Cemetery and uses a blowtorch to light the tips of incense sticks at the altar of someone else’s ancestors. Wong and others in the 17-person group bow three times, holding the burning incense in memory of the Chinese immigrants buried here. They drizzle three cups of rice wine on the grass.

The ceremony — held just over the District line in Suitland, Md. — was the first of five stops in a reverent and joyous trek through Washington’s suburbs to honor lost lives and save dying traditions in an early celebration of the Qing Ming Festival, or Tomb Sweeping Day. Chinese communities in Asia and elsewhere traditionally celebrate Qing Ming, which falls on April 4 this year, by going with their families to clean the tombs and graves of their ancestors.

The group visiting the Maryland cemeteries said that for a century, they and their predecessors have held similar Qing Ming rites here and at other D.C.-area cemeteries.

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“Windproof!” Wong says of his hefty torch, which replaced the meager cigarette and barbecue lighters of years past, before reaching into a solid brick oven to ignite handfuls of paper representing money into a blaze that sent ashes floating out.

“We’re depositing money in their accounts,” said Ted Gong, executive director of the 1882 Foundation, a nonprofit that seeks to broaden public knowledge about the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.

Dating back many decades, an immigrant aid and public service group known as the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association helped provide burial plots for impoverished Chinese bachelors and others who were barred from having family members join them in the United States or were unable to have their remains shipped back home to China for reburial. The association led Sunday’s five-cemetery journey with a focus on that mission.

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“They had made, in essence, that promise, and they’re keeping it,” Gong said.

The woman who used to bring the chicken and roast pork to offer to the dead moved to Texas last year after the death of her husband, a longtime leader in the Chinese community. So this year the group set down a basket of pears, oranges, apples and a kiwi — a choice that was praised by some for its practicality and environmental friendliness but that was a bit of a letdown for a few harder-core traditionalists.

They continued on to the nearby Washington National Cemetery and then Fort Lincoln Cemetery in Brentwood, where they burned the next batches of silver-and-gold-adorned paper money in a black pot that the mother of longtime community leader Rita Lee used to keep soup hot. Later at another stop, Ken Jan of Leesburg burned paper money in a small, well-ventilated structure, stoking the fire with a stick.

“Here, play mah-jongg,” said Jan, who’s been coming to similar remembrances for decades. “Buy some good dim sum.”

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“It all feels a little casual, probably, but it means a lot,” said Kevin Lee, 37, who was among the younger members of the procession. He bowed and poured out wine with other elders and was accompanied by his parents. They make similar trips to commemorate their relatives every year, though they mostly do so as a family rather than part of the community.

His family paid respect to relatives at three of the five cemeteries Sunday, but Lee said it’s easy to forget where certain landmarks and graves are and he wants to keep learning from his parents before they, too, are eventually gone and he’s the one in the lead.

“This is very much a family tradition,” Lee said.

His mom, filmmaker Penny Lee, had stepped away from the full group to stand at the grave markers of her great-grandparents.

“When you bury somebody, you don’t just leave them. You have to go back and take care of them,” said Lee, who is guided by her Christian faith and appreciated the overlap this year between Palm Sunday and the commemoration in Maryland. “Hopefully they will know in heaven that we still care.”

As for her children, she says she hopes the trips to the cemetery help form a kind of muscle memory. “We go with our kids so when we’re not here, they will know where to go. I hope and pray they will come to see their ancestors, as well as us.”

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Wong, who is now a Rockville doctor, moved with his father from China’s Guangdong province to Hong Kong when he was a boy. He studied medicine in Taiwan, before immigrating to New York, setting up a practice in Pennsylvania and moving to Maryland.

As Wong honored the dead from his community, which he has been doing for a quarter century, the memories of his parents were close by. He’s 77 now, and as he drove from one cemetery to the next, he was brought back to his days as a young man and his father’s request that he return to Hong Kong. Wong’s dad was also a doctor and wanted them to practice together.

His parents were cremated, and their ashes are held in a Hong Kong temple. On the rare occasions he has visited them there, he brings flowers, fruit and incense and says “sorry for the things I didn’t do and I should have done.”

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Like call his parents more before they were gone. But it was early in his career, Wong said, and he was working seven days a week, day and night. International calls were so expensive then.

His mom was a nurse, who met his father after he joined the army to fight the Japanese. Wong regrets not asking them more about how they first became a couple, and about their joys of having children, so he would have more to tell his own kids.

“When he found out I would definitely not come back to practice with him, he was so sad,” Wong recalled, breaking into tears as he headed down New Hampshire Avenue. He had been young and stupid and rebellious, Wong said. But he’s tried to live up to his father’s spirit.

After the group finished their Qing Ming rounds, Wong said he’s counting on younger members of the Benevolent Association to keep the custom alive.

“We’ve gone too far for it to stop,” he said.

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