Dragon Boat Festival

If you had neglected to mark it on your calendar, let me remind you that this Thursday is Dragon Boat Festival! On Dragon Boat Festival, people have dragon boat races and eat zongzi, a kind of triangular dumpling made of sticky rice and wrapped in bamboo leaves. In class this week, we had the students try to tell the story of the holiday's origin in English. I will let two of my star students from class 5-3 explain Dragon Boat Festival for you:

"Today is Dragon Boat Festival. A long time ago, Chu Yuan is a poet, because he has big stone jump into the river and commit suicide. Why is he commit suicide? He commit suicide because king don't like him Chu Yuan was so sad, he go to river, hug big stone, jump into the river, he gave dream to people, say "the fish is eating my body, help me," the people make rice dumplings and row a dragon boat, throw rice dumpling give fish eat but fish don't eat Chu Yuan body, people is so happy." by Stephanie

"A long time ago, have a man, his name is Chu Yuan and he is a poet. He tells emperor a advice, but emperor doesn't listen, Chu Yuan is very sad, he want to commit suicide and he holds a big stone jump into the river, but no body find Chu Yuan's body, So they row a boat and throw rice dumplings into the river, hope the fish don't eat Chu Yuan's body. They in memory of Chu Yuan, they decide a day as Dragon Boat Festival." by Bob

(Note: these stories are largely a product of the 8 bajillion vocab words we put up on the board; there wasn't anyone in any of my classes who already knew the words "poet" or "commit suicide")

Dragon Boat Festival has consumed a lot of my life recently, since a fair amount of my time has been devoted to practicing and competing in the Kaohsiung City dragon boat races on the Love River. Our team, Hamburger Breakfast, was a motley crew of Fulbrighters and Taiwanese friends (mostly recruited by Gered, notably including his host mother). The team name is an allusion to the common misconception in Taiwan that, besides being white and blonde and blue-eyed, all Americans also eat hamburgers all the time, including for breakfast.

Hamburger Breakfast was an underdog from the start; our initial time in practice was over 7 minutes, and you have to get under 6 just to escape disqualification. We thought that since we were competing in the foreign division, our competition wouldn't be very serious, but when we arrived at the first actual race on Monday evening, we noted that the other teams were all composed of large men and appeared to have obtained corporate sponsorships. Our team had no corporate sponsors, but we did have shirts with big yellow hamburger sunrises on them! We rowed frantically in the first race, and managed to lose by just a nose (a non-humiliating loss is its own kind of victory), coming in at 4:39. We came back on Tuesday with a new strategy and rowed in top form, our most excellently in-sync race yet. We managed to lose again, but we improved our time by 21 seconds! And most importantly, we looked good.

In practice:


Race day!


The actual race is at night, when it's cool, which means that we get to have an excellent light-up boat! Also on race night we discovered that the Love River is FULL OF JELLYFISH! So it was extra exciting.