chinese history lesson part 1
To commemorate the dragon boat festival today, here is a bit on how I
learned about it. Keep in mind that some of the facts in the story
may be exaggerated due to my memory.
Growing up, my parents were a big fan of tradition. We celebrated all
the major chinese holidays. After a while, without knowing the
reasoning behind it, it would just become a big blur. For instance,
some holidays I was expecting mooncakes, but instead we cleaned the
house. Its too bad I lived in California for much of my wonder years
because fireworks were illegal; you could light those on any holiday
and it would be appropriate. That is one great advantage of being
chinese, we invented fireworks.
What I remember most about this holiday is eating this stuff called
'粽子', pronounced zhong4 zi3, which is basically a chinese tamale
filled with rice. I always liked eating them, but I never really knew
where they came from, or why they were wrapped like that. So my mom
told me the story of 屈原, romanized to Qu Yuan, which was this minister
of one of the great warring states. To make a long story short, and
she did, Qu Yuan was exiled by the king after he fell out of favor
with the other corrupt officials, and he decided life was not worth
living and drowned himself in the river with a pair of concrete shoes.
This is also not before he wrote a bunch of poems reflecting on his
apprehension for the future and his love of the nation-state. The
zhong zi are thrown in the water by the citizens to make sure he
doesn't go hungry. Let me correct myself on that one. Last week, 18
years later, I learned from my Dad that this is incorrect. The zhong
zi are thrown into the river to feed the fish and keep them from
eating Qu Yuan. My Dad said that, as a kid he got it wrong too, so it
was only fair that I received the truth at roughly the same time he
got his epiphany. As far as the dragon boat racing is concerned, I only made the
connection that the zhong zi were thrown from people in boats.
What's funny to me is, while reflecting, I'll never forget this, but
my mom would say that he was a true chinese patriot. But back then,
I'm going to elementary school to discover that true patriots, at
least the American ones, bear arms and promote militant action. They
even had awesome catchphrases like 'Give me liberty, or give me
death', and 'the British are coming'. But our patriot wrote some
nationalist poems and thats that. I'm not knocking on our history,
I'm just saying, it would have been nice to have something to compete with
the American ones, even something to the tune of using firecrackers to
at least burn a part of the palace down. Or took some concubines for
his own as slaves and started a new colony, I mean, no judgment in
brainstorming here.
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