Happy Duan Wu Jie! Also known as the Dragon Boat Festival, this holiday is outranked in importance only by the Chinese New Year and possibly the Autumn Moon Festival, but that's another post for another time. It falls on the fifth day of the fifth month of the lunar year. My Google searches have come up with various historical facts, but a common theme centers on the poet Qu Yuan, who, in about 250 B.C., flung himself into a river to protest the corrupt government of his time. Well... I think a better interpretation would be, he was completely overwhelmed by the desolation of the government of his time; otherwise I'm not sure how effective a protest that would have been. He wrote a final poem before his suicide, and another term for this holiday is Poet's Day.Being beloved by the people, they raced to the river to find his body, and to keep the fishes from eating it, threw in food and beat the water with paddles to scare them away. In one legend, they needed to placate the dragon that lived in the water and Qu Yuan appeared in a dream to tell them their food needed to be wrapped in three-pointed silk bundles. Thus the tradition of zong zi (sticky rice wrapped in bamboo leaves) was born, as well as the titular dragon boats, that are, on one hand, used to scare away the fishes, and on the other hand, to represent the fearsome dragon that dominated the waters.
These days the Dragon Boat festival commences with (surprise) a dragon boat race and supposedly, if you can balance a raw egg at exactly 12 o'clock noon, your entire year will be lucky.
There are two reasons why I love this holiday: the zong zi's (this, my friends, is just simply awesome) filled with pork butt, chestnuts, and peanuts (no red bean paste for me), and, more importantly, it happens to be my birthday, which is why my Chinese name includes the character for "poet." Being based on the lunar calendar, it falls anywhere from the end of May to the end of June, giving me a cushy margin of error in which to celebrate all things me. I'm so vainglorious.
I'll be off balancing my raw egg...
4 comments:
Wow, you're like our own local Chinese celebrity, Asian (I think I'm going to keep calling you this for a while). I'm honored to know you.
So did you make zong zis this year? How do you personally celebrate Duan Wu Jie? Aside from celebrating your birthday, that is...
This is definitely my second favorite Chinese holiday. (My first being Mid-Autumn Festival). Any idea where I can get some zong zis in Salt Lake?
Also, for your birthday I got you a Dragon Boat team. They'll be waiting in your local public pool.
I made zong zi's once, in a random publicity stunt on my mission that put the white elders from Idaho on the Taiwanese news that night. We dressed up in traditional Taiwanese garb and ceremoniously wrapped them in front of the media. It was actually much more difficult than I had imagined, not helped by the toothless ancient wizened woman that kept gabbling instructions at me that I didn't understand...
These days we just buy them from our local Asian (no relation) market. I had one for lunch yesterday. A note: zong zis are comprised of sticky rice, which sits in your stomach like a brick for hours. Caution should be exerted when choosing the size of your zong zi, otherwise your intestines will suffer. For me, the ideal size was approximately 5/8 the size of my fist.
I don't know where they'd sell em in SLC... you can ask my sister though? And I can't wait to get off of work to check out my birthday present!!
there's a chinese grocery store on 9th s and about 3rd east, and another one on state street and about 6th south, you can check out those two places if you're really looking for zong zi...
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