DrAgOn Boat Festival

I feel excited when I think about coming home, and I feel sad when I think about leaving China. So many emotions are involved now that I have become close to the people here. I guess I will have to become a hermit. I told my students I was leaving and they were very concerned. They will be leaving to go home for summer break as soon as finals are over, but I was touched by their thoughtfulness. I think one of my writing classes is planning a surprise party for me on Tuesday. They planned it while I was in the room because I don’t speak Chinese. Later they dropped little hints like: “Are you busy after class next Tuesday?” Or “ You will know soon what we were talking about today.” Very sweet!

I had a full schedule this week. Besides teaching all my classes, I had some fun activities in the evenings. On Monday night Sue Nibley and I went to dinner with Leah, one of the professors in the translation department, and her husband. We went to an Indian restaurant near the old campus where I live. It was the first time I had eaten Indian food and it was very good! The dessert was a dish of delicious yogurt. Leah’s husband is a self-taught musician. He graduated in finance because he had no money for music lessons when he was young and the tuition for arts universities is very expensive. So he sells car insurance all day and composes music at night. He knows all kinds of things about American music. He was asking Sue and me about different artists like Frank Sinatra, Aretha Franklin, Benny Goodman, and others. Very knowledgable!

Thanks to Leah, I was able to schedule my final the week of June 20^th and did not have to go through the hassle I went through last semester. I just explained to her that I was flying out on the 28^th of June and she took it from there. She is a delightful lady. On Wednesday she invited Sue and me to a photographic/writing exhibition of her three technical writing classes. They had chosen different subjects, mostly environmental issues or campus issues, to photograph and write about. One of her classes was my Newspaper Reading Class from last semester and it was fun to see them again. I had a class from 2:00 to 4:00 and then the exhibit was from 4:00 to 5:00. Very enjoyable!

On Thursday I attended a Shakespeare play, Twelfth Night, at the new campus. One of the foreign teachers has a Shakespeare club at the school, and they worked for several months to prepare the play. I was quite impressed because, first, it is Shakespeare and he is difficult for English speakers let alone ESL students, and second, they could perform it so well. It was entertaining and amusing. Reto Winkler is the talented teacher who works with these students. He is a native German living in China teaching Oral English. Very unique combination.

That was this week. Last week I had two fun adventures with students. On Tuesday I was invited by two of my sweet female students to go get a milk bean curd treat. We walked over to the place but it was closed. We decided to do it on Thursday instead. Apparently there was a robbery on Monday so the lady had not opened her shop until later. On Thursday those two students, plus one more, took me for the dessert. It was a pudding-type milk dish with sweetened red and white beans on top. It was very tasty. They were telling me about school and volunteering at the Expo. Very fun time!

Since we could not have the treat on Tuesday, the girls walked me back to the bus so I could head on home. It was crowded so I was standing near the back when four of my other students got on the bus and invited me to go see the Women Culture Museum at the library on the Shaanxi Normal University campus. We rode the bus about one-third of the way to the old campus then we got off and walked to the library.

The exhibits were so interesting because it was all about women so it was the history of “her” story. In fact, the guide said that until recently it was the only women’s museum in China. Now Beijing is building one and has taken many of the artifacts from this one. The first exhibit was pictures and displays about foot binding. Unbelievable! They also had one part that was called the half-sky myth. I think it was during the time of Mao when women were expected to do their share of the heavy work and hold up “half of the sky”. I was surprised and amused. Since when did women not hold up their half of the sky? The next room had examples of old wedding books/diaries. The friends would write in the first few pages and then the bride kept a diary on the rest of the pages.

Another exhibit told of some women living in a particular village secluded in the mountains who developed their own language and writing system that only they could read. They had several examples of fans or manuscripts where women wrote about their hardships in their secret writing. I also saw the brilliant silk thread pictures, which are incredible. The details are amazing and all done with hours of labor with yards of tiny silk thread!

In the hallway there were 12 paper cuts from a book called The Red Dream in Chamberby Hong Lou Meng. The pictures were all of women in elaborate costumes and headdresses who were depicted in the book. The details were incredible! However, the highlight of the entire exhibit was the 50 traditional wedding dresses from all over China. Each colorful, elaborate dress was made by hand. As soon as a girl is old enough to do needlework, she begins to prepare her wedding dress. The last display in the room was of a wedding bedspread that was made by a woman who hated her husband. Of course, this was in the days when parents chose their spouses for them and they had no say. The characters told of her extreme unhappiness. Unbeknownst to him, he slept under the cloth for years. Very interesting!

This Monday we have another national holiday—so no school. Yippee!

Dragon Boat Festival is celebrated on the fifth day of the fifth month of the lunar calendar and sometimes called Double Fifth. The Duanwu Festival is believed to have originated in ancient China. A number of theories exist about its origins as a number of folk traditions and explanatory myths are connected to its observance. Today the best known of these relates to the suicide in 278 BCE of Qu Yuan, poet and statesman of the Chu kingdom during the Warring States period.

Qu Yuan, a descendant of the Chu royal house, served in several high political offices. However, when the king decided to ally with the increasingly powerful state of Qin, Qu was banished for opposing the alliance and was accused of treason.  During his exile, Qu Yuan wrote a great deal of poetry, for which he is now remembered. Twenty-eight years later, Qin conquered the capital of Chu. In despair, Qu Yuan committed suicide by drowning himself in the Miluo River on the fifth day of the fifth lunar month.

It is said that the local people, who admired him, threw lumps of rice into the river to feed the fish so that they would not eat Qu Yuan's body. This is said to be the origin of zongzi, a steamed rice dumpling covered with leaves. The local people were also said to have paddled out on boats, either to scare the fish away or to retrieve his body. This is said to be the origin of dragon boat racing.

Other theories for the origin of the festival:

Many traditional rituals of the Duanwu Festival emphasize the avoidance of disease. The desire to prevent health hazards associated with the mid-summer months may have been the primary original motive behind the holiday.

Another theory, advanced by Wen Yiduo, is that the Duanwu Festival had its origins in dragon worship. Support is drawn from two key traditions of the festival: the tradition of zongzi, or throwing food into the river, and dragon boat racing. The food may have originally represented an offering to the dragon king, while dragon boat racing naturally reflects reverence of the dragon and the active yang energy associated with it. This combines with the tradition of visiting friends and family on boats.

Whatever the reason for the holiday, I am all for it!