The vendor’s hands moved deftly as I walked past, twisting a bundle of threads: blue, red, yellow, white, black, into a single cord before I had even asked the price. It was early June in Dalian, and the by lane market smelled of steamed rice and diesel from the cart engines idling at the corner. Makeshift stalls lined the street, silk threads hanging off bamboo poles.
First time I stopped in front of these stalls sometime in the year 2007. I was driven by the familiarity of the threads. They reminded me of rakhee from back home in India.
“Duānwǔ jié,” the vendor said, following my eyes. Double five. The fifth day of the fifth month.
I bought a few threads. Now, as years have passed, this thread buying has become a part of a ritual I always follow this time of year.
Tucking them into the inside pocket of my bag where they’d survive the flight back to India, back to my brother’s wrist.
The threads I learnt over the years are supposed to keep evil away. Five colors for five elements, tied on children especially, on the left wrist. But the festival isn’t really about the thread. The thread is what’s left over from a much older grief.
Some two thousand years ago, in the southern state of Chu, there was a minister named Qu Yuan, a cadet of the royal house, trusted enough to hold high office, honest enough to argue against it. When the king moved to ally with the rising state of Qin, Qu Yuan objected. He was banished for it, and worse, accused of treason for the offense of being right too early.
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Exile did what exile does to poets. It gave him time. He wrote of grief and longing, while Qin’s armies closed in on Chu regardless of his warnings. When Ying, the Chu capital, finally fell, Qu Yuan walked into the Miluo River and did not walk out.
The people who lived along the river, the story goes, loved him enough to go looking. They rowed out in whatever boats they had, to search for Qu Yuan and when they couldn’t find his body, they beat drums to keep the fish away and dropped balls of sticky rice into the current, an offering meant to keep the fish from destroying the body. Zongzi is still eaten every Duanwu. The dragon boats, still raced every year with the same urgency, are what’s left of that failed rescue.
Qu Yuan didn’t stay only a local grief. Through the twentieth century, he was lifted out of the Miluo and remade a patriot poet, a face for the nation to recognize itself in. A man exiled for loving his country too loudly became, generations later, proof of how the country wanted to see itself loving him back.
Meaning has a way of loosening its grip on a story the more times that story gets retold at a market stall and sometimes it just becomes more personal with each passing year. Every year I carry these threads out of a Dalian market for my brother’s wrist and he laughs at me for turning up with Chinese rakhee again. Raksha Bandhan and Duanwu Jie don’t share a river, a myth, or even a season by most calendars, but the gesture underneath is the same one.
