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| Searching for “the science “ |
We’d have dragon boat races right here in Discovery Bay, and an international regatta out at Stanley beach that we’d sometimes go to watch in our very own boat to drink and laze and gawk and bet on outcomes and swim.
Now the best this pusillanimous place can do is land-based “racing”. All the science would tell us it’s much safer to be out in the water, with breezes dispersing any lurking virus. But no. We’re land bound, apparently because of a “surge of cases”. Surge? Our Seven-day moving average is 2 cases a day. That’s up from 1 a day a month ago so I guess one could spin that as a doubling of cases. A surge! While deaths sit stubbornly at zero. Never mind, we’ll keep on locking down.
They don’t have the guts, our officials, of the upright official that today’s festival celebrates — the life and untimely death of the upright civil servant Qu Yuan of the Warring States period around 300BC. Qu Yuan, the senior official in the court of the Chu Kingdom, disagreed with a policy of appeasement to the rising Qin province, by his king. In frustrated desperation Qu chose suicide, by himself into the river. He was pursued by his adoring fans who tried to save him in their “Dragon Boats”. Too late. He drowned. So they threw glutinous rice cakes on the water to feed his soul. I guess it made for Happy Fish. If not a happy soggy body. And that’s what continues to this day. Except today in Hong Kong. Where caution reigns.
Qu Yuan’s bravery, standing up to the Man, as echoed centuries later in the Tang Dynasty, when the Confucian ideal of the honest and brave courtier, and poets, was something of a fad.
I’m also reminded of a post recently wondering if the current phenomenon in China of youth “lying down”, in Chinese Tang Ping (躺平), might be a sly way of Chinese contrasting Xi Jiiping’s China with the China of the Tang Dynasty. Maybe. But probably not.
The “maybe” is that Chinese do love word play, Chinese being particularly good for it, with so many more homonyms than most languages. More here.
[Whoops, interrupted; more to come]
Whoops again. Turns out I was wrong: purveyor of fake news. There was indeed Dragon Boating in Hong Kong, all over the place, including Stanley Bay, where we used to go to watch.
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| SCMP front page 15 June 2021 |
