On 5th June, 2022, I will be organizing a celebration for the Chinese Dragon Boat Festival. The festival is also known as Tuen Ng, which falls on the fifth day of the fifth lunar month. It was originally set to commemorates the death of an ancient patriotist and poet, Qu Yuan, who threw himself into the lake to protest against the government. To protect his corpse from being cannibalized by the fish in the lake, his supporters created huge dragon boats to scare off the fish, and threw wrapped sticky rice into the water to feed the fish. These two acts then became the tradition of the Chinese Dragon Boat Festival – race dragon boats and eat Zongzi.

Origami Dragon Boat practiced by the author for the handicraft session

Origami Zongzi practiced by the author for the handicraft session

However, the overseas Chinese in Sri Lanka have been long suffering from their incapability of celebration, due to a lack of resources or the loss of a festive atmosphere. This has especially been exacerbated in recent years when Easter Bombing, Covid and the economic crisis further hindered the celebrations. As a result, I decided to organize this event on June 5 2022 to encourage participation in preserving culture and tradition. The session will start at 10 Am in Colombo Chinese Cultural Center, with young kids as my targeted audiences. I will first start by introducing the history and tradition of the festival, then move onto some interactive Q&A sessions, which will together last for about half an hour. After that, I will introduce the handicraft session that will appeal to the children much more. In it, I will distribute materials and teach them how to make a paper dragon boat and zongzi, which will last for about an hour. Then there will be a parent-child interaction session.

It’s my pleasure to be able to host an event like this, and I think I’ve grown a lot in planning and initiating throughout the process, as I had to constantly make changes and adaptations to ensure the quality of the sessions. Right now, I’m familiarizing myself with the dragon boat and zongzi origami. The purpose of this session is not as superficial as it seems, which is to host a fun session for kids, but deeply, I hope to address a larger global issue, which is the negativity caused by loss of tradition overseas. I hope to reduce the level of stress among Chinese people during this special time with my own effort, by providing them with resources of celebration, and hopefully help them to redeem the feeling in their home town. It could be viewed as a small personal step towards culture rejuvenation in an overseas environment, and something that could be applied to the overseas Chinese community.