This weekend is the Dragon Boat Festival (Duan Wu
Jie) in which nothing particular happens except everybody eats lots of zongzi,
banana leaf-wrapped glutinous rice parcels with meat or nuts or prunes or all
of the above inside. Last year in
Pingxiang we ate more zongzi than I could count, so this year I’m taking it
easy.
The story of zongzi is that
once a well-loved poet, Qu Yuan, committed suicide by drowning himself in the river, after the powerful Qin took
over the capital of his homeland. The
local Chinese, ever concerned that everyone is getting enough to eat, dropped
zongzi into the river to provide Qu Yuan with sustenance in the afterlife. The rice was wrapped in bamboo leaves to stop
the fish eating them.
People also supposedly went
out on the river in boats, either to scare away the fish or to retrieve the poet’s body. It doesn’t really matter why, since either
way it resulted in the fine tradition of dragon boat racing.
Last year I saw a grand total
of zero dragon boat races, because they sneakily take place a few weeks before
the actual festival. So this year I was
determined to witness the event. Happily,
Xiamen has lots of lakes, so there was a big Dragon Boat competition up in
Jimei (just onto the mainland). Even
more happily, the rugby team (which I have recently joined) was putting in a
squad.
After extensive training (once or twice, some
people didn’t make it to either) on the Jimei dragon boat lake we were ready
and raring to go. Although, after
splitting into a men’s boat and a women’s boat we didn’t actually have enough
people in either. Never mind eh.
Saturday was the
‘qualification’ round and Sunday was the main event. It was great to see all the pros out on the
water. There were some really rapid boats.
Some pretty good boats.
The boys’ boat.
And us.
When we finally got around to racing (about 3 hours after we arrived), we managed about 5 minutes in the boat before the rudder broke. There followed a hasty and chaotic boat change after which we were screamed at by Chinese men to race the full length of the course down to the start line, as if it was our fault that the boat was rubbish. So we reached the start line out of breath and exhausted and, of course, were given no time to recover before we raced back.
I blame the broken rudder entirely on our sad loss that day.
Here we are celebrating for absolutely no reason.
But we had fun. Not so much fun that any of us wanted to
return on the Sunday, when we were invited back in what was clearly a pity/let’s
all laugh at the foreigners vote, but some amount of fun nonetheless.
And they put me in the newspaper!
Happy Dragon Boat Festival!
