Dragon Boat Festival Flare
May is a good month to live in China. Flowers are blooming, the weather is warm, and the sky in Shenyang is only moderately gray. May also begins and ends with holidays. We kick it off with the May Day / Labor Day holiday on May 1st and wrap it up with the Dragon Boat Festival (端午节).
The rainbow coalition of a bracelet I'm sporting now was hand made by one of my students and is one of the main traditions of the Dragon Boat Festival. From what I've been told, the bracelet is supposed to be secretly placed on the arm of some unsuspecting person while they're asleep. I don't wear much in the way of clothing when I sleep, so on the off chance that someone broke in to give me a Dragon Boat surprise, they'd be too horrified to come close enough to attach it to my wrist. The student just gave it to me before class.
Basically the idea of the bracelet is to wear it until the first rain after the festival, then throw it in a puddle. While you wear it, the bracelet continually sucks the bad luck out of your system (and, I assume, absorbs any external bad luck that you might imbibe through osmosis). When you cut it off and toss it into a puddle, it takes all that bad luck with it, leaving only the good, great, and mediocre luck behind. It is my assumption that the completely grotesque creek just north of our school and the undrinkable tap water in my apartment are direct results of bad luck puddle run off.
The more I think about it, the more I think there's something to all these traditions of good luck in the Chinese culture. You've got a billion people and a myriad of holidays all with their own good luck traditions. Add them all together and you go from an ostensibly undeveloped country to a world super power in fifty years. In America, all of our traditions are so selfish. Everything is a wish. And wishes are always so specific: win a sports care, meet a hot girl, cure your STD. Luck is so much more practical and it's because of it's generality.
"Hey, my crotch doesn't itch today. My luck is turning already!"
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