Reality Equation

Dragon Boat Day and the Pípá

I love sticky rice. It’s one of my favorite things to have seafood with, right up there with rice noodles. So when I was told that May 28 this year would be Dragon Boat day in China, and that there’s a special sticky-rice dumpling associated with the festival, I was psyched!

So yesterday was Duān wǔ jié (端午节), which translates to something along the lines of ‘festival of the fifth day of the fifth lunar month’, a date that bears special significance in China. Like most things here, the festival has a story to it, and Han Shu agreed to explain it for the camera (the sound isn’t all that great—this was really done at the spur of the moment—but he should be comprehensible):

The Story

Legend goes that sometime in the Warring States period (from 476 BCE to 221 BCE), a very popular minister and poet by the name of Qu Yuan (屈原) was falsely accused of corruption and disgraced in his home state Chu, where, devastated, he committed suicide by jumping into the Milo river (汨罗江, mìluó jiāng). Hundreds of people thronged to the river and, in an attempt to save him from drowing, got on dragon boats and searched the river. But his body was nowhere to be found.

So that Qu Yuan might not starve, people made rice dumplings for him and dropped it into the river. They wrapped it in bamboo leaves so that only he, and not the fishes (and other people who might have also, at some point, fancied a jump into the same river?) , could get to it.

Duān Wǔ Jié Today

So duān wǔ jié is a festival to commemorate Qu Yen and his contributions to the state as an honest minister, but what it’s known for most today is the pyramid-shaped rice dumpling.

Zongzi (粽子) is made with steamed sticky rice, wrapped in bamboo leaves. Although the rice dumplings are really supposed to be had on duān wǔ jié, these days they can be bought from street-side baozi vendors and supermarkets (the local Carrefour had it!) several days in advance.

Michael and I stopped by a local baozi vendor and tried some:

Although the basic zongzi is just sticky rice, the recipe has evolved to include anything from meat and tofu to dates, red bean paste, eggs, beans. These things don’t have the strong/distinct flavour that most Chinese dishes are normally exploding with, but they’re still quite tasty.

On Campus

Dragon boat day is a holiday in China, which means we didn’t have classes on Thursday. What’s interesting is that, not unlike what the French do when it comes to taking a long weekend when a holiday falls on a Thursday (’faire le pont‘), Friday was also a holiday. To make up for the three-day weekend, Zhāng lǎoshī told us that we’d have classes on Sunday instead. (Okay, so many not completely in the French tradition).

To celebrate the festival, our Chinese friends pulled together a special evening of food and activities, with an elaborate feast involving the aforementioned zongzi, a plethora of vegetable and meat dishes, fruits, snacks (including 100-year old preserved eggs that looked like jelly!), drinks.

They had asked to perform something on the day, and had themselves prepared dances and songs. Having been given such a short notice (not that that particularly mattered), we scrambled to come up with something. On the day before the performance, I began writing a song based on what little Chinese I knew and the next day, on the day of the performance itself, Brian and Michael Nord joined in and finished it off with their more extensive knowledge of pǔtōnghuà. The song itself went:

Wǒde peng you gao su wǒ, zai yi ge fàndìan zai Guanting lu
(My friend told me in a restraunt on Guanting Road)

“Wǒ you yi ge wenti,” “Hǒo,” “Wo bu xiaode ni jìao shénme mingzi…”
(I have a question,” / “Alright,” / “I don’t know your name…”)

Wǒ jìao Winston Gore, keshì ni kěyì jìao wǒ Gao Wenzhong, nǐ ne?
(My name is Winston Gore, but you can call me Gao Wenzhong, and you?)

Wo jìao Amy Li, keshì wǒde zhōng gúo mingzi shì Li You
(My name is Amy Li, but my Chinese name is Li You)

You get the idea, basic stuff. It was basically based on characters on our Chinese textbooks, the Integrated Chinese series published by the Cheng and Tsui company.

We actually performed this with Michael Hogan doing the acoustic guitars, Mike Nord and Brian Martin doing the vocals, and with me playing the electric guitars (distorted, with shredding in between) and occasionally singing. No one could really hear what we were singing, but we thought they found it amusing. (I don’t have photos, but if I get it from someone else, I’ll post it up here).

The Chinese students performed some instruments: clarinetist played a Japanese tune, our program monitor a traditional song on a sort of flute and Gloria (Huang Ying) the pípá (琵琶). Another student did a traditional umbrella dance, and others still sang together loudly. It was quite a bit of fun!

Pípá, the 4-stringed Chinese instrument

We didn’t know this until yesterday, but Gloria apparently holds the rank as the best pípá player in the Anhui province, and almost made the instrument her major. Her mastery of the four-stringed Chinese instrument, which took her four years to learn, was simply awesome. Most of us had never heard anything like it, except perhaps in movies, and even those times didn’t compare at all to her skills.

I talked to her after the performance, and tried playing the pípá. I tried plucking the strings as I do a guitar, but she quickly corrected me, “You can’t play it like that”. She explained that one has to sit covering 3/4th of the stool and hold the instrument between one’s legs (closed) at a 45º angle, bending slightly forward. The hand must be in a specific position, with forearm parallel to the body of the instrument and the hand at a 45º (at the back of the palm) from the forearm. The thumb and the index finger must always form a circle, and one must learn not to move one’s distal or intermediate phalanges, moving instead one’s proximal phalanges, which is to say you’re supposed to move the entire finger as one fixed instrument.

This isn’t easy. Judging by the sort of hand positions that are required to play the pípá properly, it seemed like one would require a lot of training to be able to do it. “When I started, it was the same for me,” Gloria told me. “I couldn’t get the fingers tot stay in the right positions, so I had to use various instruments to tie my fingers and bend them in the right direction to train myself”. No wonder I was having a hard time.

I don’t have a video of this either (I hadn’t charged my camera battery for a while, and it died before the show), but will upload it if I get it from somebody.

Festivals, Tihar

Like most festivals, duān wǔ jié is a reason to slow down, drink, eat and spend time with family and friends. Most families in China prepare zongzi together at home—it’s supposed to be not-so-easy to make—with kids sitting around waiting for the first few batches of prepared rice dumplings.

In many ways, this isn’t different from Tihar in Nepal, with (usually) moms preparing sel roti, a sort of circular rice-donut (for lack of a better word), on the day of Laxmi puja. Much like the zongzi, they’re not very common any other time of the year, but when Tihar comes around, and especially on that one special day, the smell of sel (mostly butter and rice) permeates the atmosphere, and the food becomes a reason for people to get together and celebrate.