Dragon Boat Festival

It’s Dragon Boat festival.  It’s a National Holiday, but I run an international business.  I acknowledge implicitly that all my Chinese colleagues and partners and customers and competitors will be resting, while understanding that no one anywhere else in the world will care.  Like “Ancestor Grave Sweeping Day”, Dragon Boat festival doesn’t have a very commanding, requisite quality to it in English.  It doesn’t sound like a particularly serious holiday, one that I could throw out breezily to someone in California:  “Oh, didn’t you know?  I’m off today and tomorrow for Dragon Boat.”

The Chinese Communist Party has something to do with this perception of mine.  I’ve been here for years, but it was only in 2005 that the PRC began to officially recognize either traditional holiday, which had always been celebrated during the same period in Hong Kong and Taiwan.  These traditional festivities were regarded as feudal remnants that needn’t be honored with anything official.  More important days commanded reflection, like the anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party.  So they still remain quasi holidays in my mind.  Besides, I live near mountains and the Gobi desert.  No one is racing any boats around here. 

For the kids, this marks the end of school.  They’re out for summer.  Kick the Alice Cooper theme.  The little one is at a sleepover.  The older one has crafted the same thing with her friend.  In both cases, the kid is moving on.  Our transient little expat community has people coming and going regularly.  Eventually we’ll do the same.  And one day they’ll return to this place and they won’t know anyone and it won’t look the same.  But it isn’t so much different for me in suburban New York.

The Mrs. is off at her office and so It’s just me, here alone.  I’ve thrown on some remarkable old Ramon Montoya, the Spanish Flamenco guitarist whom I should have known about but never did.  He hammers notes and slides down the fret in a manner that would be tough to pull off on an electric guitar.  With a nylon string (or cat gut string?) acoustic, I can only marvel at how strong his fingers must have been.  Apparently the guitarist was only supposed to be a stage prop to support the singers back there in Spain in the teens.  But he regularly upstaged the people he was hired to support.  Something about that instrument; built for assertion.  I’ll turn him up then.  It’s just me and Ramon today.