The dragon boat festival is held in remembrance of poet Qu Yuan’s death. Qu Yuan was a faithful servant of his emperor, but was falsely accused of being a traitor. He drowned himself in a river after several decades in exile, but the local people loved him and remember him fondly. Sounds morbid, but actually the festival is a joyous one, where dragon boats are raced on the river (to commemorate the search for Qu Yuan’s body) and 粽子 zòng zi5 (boiled triangular rice balls wrapped in leaves) are eaten (when he died, it’s said that 粽子 were thrown into the river to feed him in the afterlife – other stories have it that people threw 粽子 into the river to keep the fish from eating his body before they could find it).
A couple of words in this essay are not in the dictionary, and need explaining: namely 艾香. I this case, 艾香 ài xiāng means “the smell of wormwood”, and it refers to the smell produced by bouquets of wormwood (艾草) that people hang on their door during the Dragon Boat Festival to drive away bad luck.
Another word here is 雄黄酒, something that I’ve seen but never tried, and while there is an English word for this, I’ve never heard this spoken in English. 雄黄酒 is “realgar wine”, whatever the heck realgar is. If you’re curious, this article has more information on realgar wine and it’s association with the Dragon Boat Festival.
And finally, there’s 趟露水, literally “to wade in the dew”, and it refers to (what I think is a) regional custom of going out on an early morning walk and anointing one’s face with dew drops.
我家的端午节
今天是端午节，我们一家人五点就起床，按照习俗上山去趟露水。一路上我用双手捧起晶莹的露珠往眼睛上抹，一时间我觉得眼睛好像亮了好多。直到坐在教室读书时还觉得眼睛特别亮，什么字都能看清楚。
放学后，我撒开腿就往家里跑。刚到门口就闻到粽子香，一进门就看见爸爸做了一桌子好菜专门等我回家吃。我洗过手来到饭桌前，先给爸爸妈妈一人解了一个粽子，撒上白糖，然后给我自己解了一个漂亮的三角粽子，撒上白糖就津津有味地吃起来。饭桌上，我们一家边吃边聊，屋子里充满了端午节的快乐气氛，弥漫着香喷喷的粽子味和浓浓的艾香。
吃完饭，妈妈给我耳朵上抹了雄黄酒，给我嘴上摸了唇膏，给我手腕上戴了红线绳，把我打扮得和粽子一样香，就让我到学校去学习。
我爱吃粽子，爱过端午节，爱享受节日的欢乐气氛。
6 replies on “Essay: My Family’s Dragon Boat Festival”
Yeah, I think the same day you were there I was actually at Longwood Gardens to get some good fall pictures. My preparation for The Storm was to get some good photographs before Sandy blew all of the leaves off the trees!
I remember everything my teacher told us about the Dragon boat festival. It makes me want to go to China and get a first hand experience of the festival.
I searched Realgar, and it appears to be an arsenic mineral. Growing up in China, I remember that the normal rice wine had a red waxy seal on the pottery jars. I wonder if Realgar wine is just rice wine, which each family made, and was drunk with most meals.
In paragraph three, could the 摸 in 给我嘴上摸了唇膏 actually be 抹?
Hi there! So, I think that one is right, and I’ll tell you my reasoning: 1) There are actually quite a few ways to say “putting on lipstick / chapstick”. Most common is 涂口红 or 涂唇膏, you can also 抹口红, or 擦口红. I think the author chose 摸 partially to describe it as as less of a “smearing” and more of a… dabbing? Probably with the finger? And partially because she was trying to use a different verb than was used in the clause before it (抹了雄黄酒) .
This is a kind of abstract observation, but I’ve noticed that in Chinese art and culture, symmetry is extremely important. Left and right should balance each other, top and bottom should set each other off precisely. We see this most obviously in traditional architecture, but it even extends to things like the way the government is structured. And of course it extends to language – if you’re going to use three verbs, 抹(雄黄酒), 摸(唇膏), 戴(红线绳), if two of them were the same and the third was was different, this would instinctively feel like bad writing to a native reader. They all should be different, so I think that’s probably a subconscious reason the author didn’t pick 抹 for this one.
But, as always, I’m open to correction.
Thanks! I appreciate all the work you’ve put into this site.