Dragon Boat Festival is a traditional Chinese festival. It is the 5th day of the 5th month of the Chinese calendar, or June 14th this year, a Monday. The festival originated around 300BCE, during the Warring States Period with a famous poet, Qu Yuan.
According to Chinese folklore, Qu contributed a lot to society, having served in high offices. However, he fell out of favor with the emperor, was accused of treason and eventually sent into exile. During his time in exile, Qu wrote a lot of poetry. Unappreciated and unhappy, he drowned himself in the Miluo river on May 5 of the lunar calendar in 278 BC after the Qin state captured the Chu capital of Ying.
By Cathy Wu, That’s Shenzhen magazine
According to legend, the local villagers highly admired Qu. In an attempt to save him, or at least find his body, they raced out onto the river in boats – which is said to be the origin of dragon boat races.
Meanwhile, other villagers threw rice balls to keep the fish away from the, probably dead, poet’s body. Eventually, people decided that eating the rice, which evolved into zhongzi, a type of sticky, sweet rice ball, or dumpling, I’m not exactly sure, that is wrapped up in a leaf, was better than feeding it to the fish.
I was really looking forward to experiencing this festival. It was going to be the first holiday in China that I could celebrate and have an activity to enjoy. I was in quarantine for Chinese New Year and there really wasn’t anyway, or at least a traditional way, to celebrate Labour Day. But, for Dragon Boat, I could go see the Dragon Boat Races, and pick a boat to cheer for, or something. Maybe buy a little dragon or dragon boat souvenir.
Work
It is one of the holidays I get off, according to my contract. As it is on Monday, I already don’t work Mondays, and my work schedule at the center was already set, they didn’t want to change it to give us a day off, if they don’t have to. So, no 3 day weekend for me.
However, my employer and the training center talked and decided that we would work out normal hours, not getting a day off, but they would pay us for an extra day, as Dragon Boat Festival is in our contracts as a paid holiday. Seems fair, right? I like money and I still get to have the actual holiday itself off.
The training center wants to celebrate the holiday by having an extra class after the other classes are finished on weekend before the holiday. They asked if any foreign teachers wanted to participate.
It looked like a fun class. They were making tons of zhongzi, if the number of leaves I saw the Chinese teachers washing was any indication. They also had a PowerPoint about the history of the holiday, which I sadly didn’t get to see. I would have enjoyed learning more about the festival.
While I do want to teach the class, it would require me to wait around the center for an hour and a half after I get off work, since I get off earlier than everyone else on the weekends. I do enough sitting around doing nothing there that I don’t want to do any more, if I don’t have to.
I was told that the classes could go on without a foreigner to teach the special classes, but eventually, one of the part-timers agreed to teach them.
Gifts
Recently, work has started bribing us on the weekends to like them, instead of changing some of the things that the foreign teachers have been complaining about, namely the lack of communication. So far, on Saturdays and Sundays, we get a small cake and tea or coffee.
I have yet to eat a bad cake. Although Chinese cakes have little in common with their American counterparts, having a mouse around a small cake center or just lots of whipped cream with thin layers of cake between. We also got something that tasted an awful lot like a cloud, consisting of a very light whipped cream with a few prices of fruit surrounded by a thin mochi container. The clouds are my favorite so far.
My half-eaten strawberry cloud 
Delivery tea 
Mango cakes
For the Dragon Boat Festival, they stepped up the gifts. They gave each teacher, foreign and Chinese, a whole box of lychee fruits instead of the more traditional zhongzi since all the other foreigners don’t like them as they are insanely sticky and sweet, or so I’ve heard, I haven’t eaten one yet, and based on the description, I don’t think I’d enjoy them either.
In addition to a huge box of fruit that I don’t know how to eat and don’t have enough students to help lighten the box, they also gave us a very nice box, hiding a little decorative bag. It celebrates another aspect of Dragon Boat.
Again around 2,000 years ago, people believed that the little sachet could ward off bad luck, monsters, and diseases caused by warm, humid weather. Nowadays, the little bags are used for decoration, warding off summer diseases, and for saying “I appreciate you”.
Box of lychee 
So many lychee! 
My only apartment decoration in China
The Festival
The festival itself was canceled due to the recent outbreak of COVID-19 in the city. It will be a whole year before I can experience the Dragon Boat Races, the main attraction of the festival, at least it’s the best-known part of it and the only part I knew about before I moved to China.
I guess I’ll just add it to the list of things to see and experience, right next to Chinese New Year and being able to get away for the weekends.
Guess I’ll just have to content myself with eating the peanut butter I somehow managed to find with some celery. It’s holiday food, right?
If you have any questions about any of the terms I’ve used, look in the glossary.
My TEFL Adventure 