JISHOU, HUNAN — These Chinese holidays just sneak up on me, I swear. I knew about Mid-Autumn Festival and Spring Festival before I came here, but some others I learn about just a few days before, it seems.
Because of my temporarily sparse teaching schedule, getting a day off Thursday for Duan Wu — the Dragon Boat Festival — gave me almost a five-day holiday. Too bad I had not made any plans ahead of time.
But I managed to find things to do, and see.
First, a primer on Duan Wu. This traditional holiday has roots going back (like almost everything in China) thousands of years. Its origins are so ancient that there are different stories about the reason for the holiday.
Until recently, the national government had banned many traditional holidays as national days off, but in the last few years, the Party has reinstated several traditional holidays (another is QingMing — Tomb Sweeping Day) to give the hardworking Chinese public some respite.
There are two key customs associated with Duan Wu: dragon boat racing and zongze. One I did not see. The other I ate a lot of.
Dragon boats are long, seating at least 12 paddlers and many times more. Every town or city with a large enough navigable body of water sponsors boat races. I had planned to go to Yuanling, near Fenghuang, to see a traditional dragon boat race, but heavy rains forced the postponement of the race. Fenghuang did not cancel its race, but my friend and I decided not to brave both sloppy weather and the inevitable crowds there. The Yuanling races will be next month sometime.
Zongze are dumplings made with glutinous (sticky) rice, with various kinds of fillings (meat, red bean paste, etc.), which are steamed wrapped in bamboo leaves. They are a traditional food of the holiday.
The foreign affairs office gave each of the foreign teachers a box of 20 zongze, with each of four flavors in vacuum-sealed bags. We also got a huge box of preserved eggs, another traditional food for all sorts of holidays. These eggs are also known as “thousand-year eggs,” since the traditional method of preparing them is to bury the eggs underground in a highly alkaline clay for a several weeks or months. As disgusting as the process sounds, the result is usually quite tasty.
[We folks of Swedish extraction have a similar food preservation method, which produces lutfisk, which unlike thousand-year eggs still has to be cooked. Another unique preservation method -- fermentation of herring -- produces the more, um, pungent surströmming, which smells so awful that I have never risked eating it.]
Besides the foreign affairs office gifts, some charming students dropped off two zongze from the canteen Thursday morning, and my friend, Rain, and her three-year-old daughter, Nancy, gave me five more on Friday morning.
It’s a good thing I like zongze. Unfortunately, the eggs were not so good. The yolks tasted rather acrid, and even my Chinese guests Friday night ate them sparingly.
With my travel plans scotched for Thursday, I spent the day inside watching the rain disconsolately, hoping it would let up enough to make going out to dinner more enjoyable. My friend Elektra and I had made a date to meet her friends, Ms. Xiang (a local hotel sales manager) and her boyfriend Mr. Wu (the hotel’s karaoke club manager), for dinner. Then we all went to a Jishou night club.
Jishou is not exactly a hotspot for nightlife, so learning that it had a non-karaoke night club was a real revelation. Elektra described it as a way to show me some “local culture.”
The evening’s activities began around 8, with a betting game: two spinning wheels with numbers on them for two players to throw darts at. Member of the audience bet on the sums of the numbers hit. I quit when I broke even, and Elektra and I volunteered to be the dart-throwers several times.
An hour later, there was a floor show of lovely young women in gowns for the audience to vote on. Then, three lively song-and-dance numbers, two solo singers, female and male, a very energetic traditional flute player from Changsha with a weird shtick, a tame (by US standards) strip show, and a ribald comedy skit involving PLA soldiers, a party official and a local mayor. Elektra could not (or was too embarrassed to) explain much of the dialogue in that last skit, but I got the gist of it.
All I can say is, the acts weren’t Vegas by a long shot.
Of the singing and dancing, it was OK. Not terrible, but Simon Cowell would not have been pleased. One peculiarity stands out. It was the second time I saw a male singer in China deliberately get drunk on stage. The first time was when I watched a TV variety show — I was a captive audience somewhere — during which a singer chugged first bottles, then pitchers of beer on stage, then continued performing seemingly unaffected. I was stupefied, but chalked it up as the performer’s gimmick. So, watching a considerably slimmer and younger man repeat the same feat with a pitcher or two of wine cooler convinced me some Chinese ideas of entertainment are just fucking weird. (I don’t know the exact pitcher count. I was trying to get to the toilet at the time, but was corralled on the way by some showgirls wanting photos with me.)
The flute player’s shtick is to invite a young woman, preferably one who is not escorted by a man, to join him on stage. Elektra’s friends had pushed her into this public embarrassment the previous night. First, he asks the girl a multiple-choice test: (a) is she single and will she be his girlfriend? (b) does she already have a boyfriend? (c) is she married? [Elektra surprised everyone by picking (a).] Then, while he plays the flute kneeling next to his hapless victim, she has to mop his brow with a napkin.
He was a pretty good musician, despite the tastelessness of his shtick, though.
The strip show was hardly sexy, or maybe I’m just jaded. The girl strutted her stuff for a while, then picked a suitably drunken fellow from the audience, pulled off his shirt and sat him down in a chair on stage. She ran her hands up and down his chest and belly, finally undoing his belt and taking it off. She took off her top to reveal a skimpy bra. She strutted some more. The yokel then pulled off his pants, leaving him in his boxers. (I am not sure if this part was scripted.) She took off her shorts, to strut in bra and panties. He then removed his boxers to reveal (mercifully) briefs underneath. At this point, drunken yokel was sent back to his ringside seat, and the girl finished her act in skimpy bra and G-string.
Here my comment will probably shock my children, present and former students, and anyone convinced that teachers are also monks: I have seen better … much better. I decline to offer further details.
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