Got to Be Decidedly Southern

Happy Dai people are dancing.  Topless men are carrying an enormous boat down the street.  Tourists line the riverbank with enormous cameras ready to shoot.  An areal shot of a twisting muddy river bow.  Air China wants me to know that Dragon Boat Day approacheth.

This has got to be a decidedly southern Chinese tradition.  Beijing doesn’t have any estuaries worthy of such an aquatic holiday.  The seminal Yellow river doesn’t even reach the sea most of the year in Shandong.  The riverine Yangze culture, the “river people” of the Three Kingdoms, these guys were well disposed towards celebrating water dragons, one reckons.  I’ll have to look it up, but the seminal Dragon Boat festival scenes are always with southern ethnic minorities like the Dai people all the way down on the Thai and Burmese boarder  But if that’s the case, how did their local “ethnic” holiday become a national celebration, meriting two full days off for everyone?

Twenty-five years ago, I recall Dragon Boat was, like ancestor grave sweeping day: something only the Chinese in Taiwan and Hong Kong, formally observed.  Racing boats carved to look like Dragons would have been a feudal artefact and indicative of everything China was trying to shed as it labored towards a worker’s paradise.  Why celebrate a backwards ethnic remnant when you had proper holidays like O Yanghai’s birthday and the success of the Eighth Route Army reaching Yanan to celebrate?  It’s a new day.

Does anyone else on the plane notice that the ‘history of Air China’ reel they were running (I wasn’t watching, honestly I was writing. I was glancing.  But I certainly wasn’t listening. . . ) shows the proud origins of the air travel in China and then skips nearly five decades of war and revolution to suggest a time in the 80s when suddenly Chinese other than cadres or fighter pilots might be able to board an airplane.  Is anyone curious about the gaps in history?  Wouldn’t anyone care to have them filled?  Is it simply that by the time people are free to fill them, everyone with experience of them will simply have passed?

Friday, 05/26/27