DRAGON BOAT FESTIVAL
By Crystal Lu
If you’ve ever passed by Chinatown in a late spring day, you must have seen many fist-sized, dried-leave-wrapped pyramids and cubes on display in front of markets and stores there. You might have guessed they were a certain kind of food. Named zongzi in Chinese, they are indeed steamed food similar to the tamales you’ve had in Mexican restaurants. However, it is not cornhusks but bamboo leaves that wrap up the Chinese tamales. And instead of cornmeal, glutinous rice is their main ingredient. Their other ingredients vary, but the most common ones usually contain small pieces of stewed pork, salted egg yolk, boiled peanuts or chestnuts, and black mushrooms.
Though generally not served in Americanized Chinese restaurants, zongzi appears wherever authentic Chinese food is. Chinese people may eat the tamale-like rice polygons all year round but will definitely have them for the Day of Duan Wu, also known as Dragon Boat Festival, a traditional holiday that features dragon boat races on the fifth day of the fifth lunar month and can fall on any day between late May and late June of the Western calendar.
Duan Wu, a phonetic translation of two Chinese characters, means “exact noontime”. Ancient Chinese believed the sun was exactly in the middle of the sky, without any slightest slant, at noon on Duan Wu, which therefore marked the beginning of summer. But the holiday has meant far more than the Chinese summer solstice since it originated as a day of commemoration for a patriotic poet, Qu Yuan (340-278 BC).
During the period of Warring States, there were seven kingdoms in the territory of today’s China, and Qu Yuan once held a high-ranked official’s position in the Chu Kingdom, the southernmost one of the seven. He had great strategies to keep Chu strong. But other officials were jealous of him, spread rumors about him, and eventually persuaded the king to banish him. Qu Yuan spent the next 20 years in exile, wandering around a lake area south of the Yangtze River and letting out his frustration through writing. His epics and lyrics have remained some of the most brilliant in Chinese literature.
After the Qin Kingdom conquered Qu Yuan’s beloved Chu Kingdom, he drowned himself in the Miluo, a tributary of the Yangtze, on the fifth day of the fifth lunar month that year.
Many sympathizers took their boats out in an attempt to save him. When they finally gave up searching, they decided to wrap rice with reed or bamboo leaves and throw the little packs into the Miluo in hope that the fish would eat the rice rather than Qu Yuan’s body. Keeping the corpse intact was, and still is, the way of showing ultimate respect for the deceased in Chinese culture.
To commemorate Qu Yuan, villagers threw leave-wrapped rice into the Miluo and rowed boats on the river on every anniversary of his death. The rice dish making and the boat rowing gradually evolved into nationwide holiday customs. People added various ingredients to zongzi, which had made its way to the dining table, and decorated the bow of each boat with a dragonhead sculpture, the most favorite Chinese symbol. Dragon boat rowing developed into a racing game held everywhere in China every Duan Wu. The team sport even followed Chinese immigrants to the United States. There have been dragon boat races in San Francisco. An annual event sponsored by Kaiser Permanente, surprisingly held in mid-to-late summer rather than May or June days around Duan Wu, has taken place on Lake Merced and at Treasure Island’s Clipper Cove. Dragon Boat Festival therefore may sound familiar to the general public in the Bay Area, except that the festival’s origin hasn’t been much publicized.
Even less known to non-Chinese is a love story that begins with a chance encounter on Dragon Boat Festival. Legend has it that a white snake, after praying for becoming human over a hundred years, finally gets her wish granted, and the transformed beautiful lady in a white dress meets a well-educated young man from the wealthy Xu family by West Lake on a warm afternoon of Duan Wu. It is sprinkling. He approaches her and offers sharing his umbrella with her. They fall in love, get married, and have a son. But a self-righteous monk with supernatural power sees Madame Xu’s hidden identity, determines it to be harmful, and urges her husband to find out by mixing an herb called xung-huang in her rice wine. The drink turns her back to a white snake. Saddened by her husband’s betrayal, she can’t muster enough strength to fight the monk, who wins a duel with her, takes her away, and imprisons her underneath a pagoda by West Lake. Xu realizes too late that he loves her whether she is a woman or a snake. He lives the rest of his life in regret.
It may be hard to believe Dragon Boat Festival is associated with sad stories of the Xus’ separation and Qu Yuan’s suicide, while it appears to be such a flamboyant holiday, with colorful boats, enthusiastic audiences, and delicious zongzi. Perhaps it is the resilient nature of the Chinese that has transfigured a poet’s tragic death into a nation’s cheerful festivity. The Chinese have always been capable of moving on. Through millennia of tyrannies, wars, famines, and disasters, the aromatic steam from the zongzi carries an aged and ageless secret to survival.
If you’ve ever passed by Chinatown in a late spring day, you must have seen many fist-sized, dried-leave-wrapped pyramids and cubes on display in front of markets and stores there. You might have guessed they were a certain kind of food. Named zongzi in Chinese, they are indeed steamed food similar to the tamales you’ve had in Mexican restaurants. However, it is not cornhusks but bamboo leaves that wrap up the Chinese tamales. And instead of cornmeal, glutinous rice is their main ingredient. Their other ingredients vary, but the most common ones usually contain small pieces of stewed pork, salted egg yolk, boiled peanuts or chestnuts, and black mushrooms.
Though generally not served in Americanized Chinese restaurants, zongzi appears wherever authentic Chinese food is. Chinese people may eat the tamale-like rice polygons all year round but will definitely have them for the Day of Duan Wu, also known as Dragon Boat Festival, a traditional holiday that features dragon boat races on the fifth day of the fifth lunar month and can fall on any day between late May and late June of the Western calendar.
Duan Wu, a phonetic translation of two Chinese characters, means “exact noontime”. Ancient Chinese believed the sun was exactly in the middle of the sky, without any slightest slant, at noon on Duan Wu, which therefore marked the beginning of summer. But the holiday has meant far more than the Chinese summer solstice since it originated as a day of commemoration for a patriotic poet, Qu Yuan (340-278 BC).
During the period of Warring States, there were seven kingdoms in the territory of today’s China, and Qu Yuan once held a high-ranked official’s position in the Chu Kingdom, the southernmost one of the seven. He had great strategies to keep Chu strong. But other officials were jealous of him, spread rumors about him, and eventually persuaded the king to banish him. Qu Yuan spent the next 20 years in exile, wandering around a lake area south of the Yangtze River and letting out his frustration through writing. His epics and lyrics have remained some of the most brilliant in Chinese literature.
After the Qin Kingdom conquered Qu Yuan’s beloved Chu Kingdom, he drowned himself in the Miluo, a tributary of the Yangtze, on the fifth day of the fifth lunar month that year.
Many sympathizers took their boats out in an attempt to save him. When they finally gave up searching, they decided to wrap rice with reed or bamboo leaves and throw the little packs into the Miluo in hope that the fish would eat the rice rather than Qu Yuan’s body. Keeping the corpse intact was, and still is, the way of showing ultimate respect for the deceased in Chinese culture.
To commemorate Qu Yuan, villagers threw leave-wrapped rice into the Miluo and rowed boats on the river on every anniversary of his death. The rice dish making and the boat rowing gradually evolved into nationwide holiday customs. People added various ingredients to zongzi, which had made its way to the dining table, and decorated the bow of each boat with a dragonhead sculpture, the most favorite Chinese symbol. Dragon boat rowing developed into a racing game held everywhere in China every Duan Wu. The team sport even followed Chinese immigrants to the United States. There have been dragon boat races in San Francisco. An annual event sponsored by Kaiser Permanente, surprisingly held in mid-to-late summer rather than May or June days around Duan Wu, has taken place on Lake Merced and at Treasure Island’s Clipper Cove. Dragon Boat Festival therefore may sound familiar to the general public in the Bay Area, except that the festival’s origin hasn’t been much publicized.
Even less known to non-Chinese is a love story that begins with a chance encounter on Dragon Boat Festival. Legend has it that a white snake, after praying for becoming human over a hundred years, finally gets her wish granted, and the transformed beautiful lady in a white dress meets a well-educated young man from the wealthy Xu family by West Lake on a warm afternoon of Duan Wu. It is sprinkling. He approaches her and offers sharing his umbrella with her. They fall in love, get married, and have a son. But a self-righteous monk with supernatural power sees Madame Xu’s hidden identity, determines it to be harmful, and urges her husband to find out by mixing an herb called xung-huang in her rice wine. The drink turns her back to a white snake. Saddened by her husband’s betrayal, she can’t muster enough strength to fight the monk, who wins a duel with her, takes her away, and imprisons her underneath a pagoda by West Lake. Xu realizes too late that he loves her whether she is a woman or a snake. He lives the rest of his life in regret.
It may be hard to believe Dragon Boat Festival is associated with sad stories of the Xus’ separation and Qu Yuan’s suicide, while it appears to be such a flamboyant holiday, with colorful boats, enthusiastic audiences, and delicious zongzi. Perhaps it is the resilient nature of the Chinese that has transfigured a poet’s tragic death into a nation’s cheerful festivity. The Chinese have always been capable of moving on. Through millennia of tyrannies, wars, famines, and disasters, the aromatic steam from the zongzi carries an aged and ageless secret to survival.
posted by CAEA @ 5:49 PM
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