Today is Duan Wu Jie, the 5th day of the 5th lunar month, a holiday we westerners usually call Dragon Boat Festival. I suppose once upon a time dragon boats must have been raced on this day, and maybe they still are somewhere in the Chinese diaspora. But this traditional holiday has only been officially revived here in Shanghai in the last few years and it seems that much of the old way of celebrating must have been extinguished for good. On this day a couple of years ago, we set off in search of dragon boat racing on a nearby lake. It was a total bust: the races ended earlier than advertised, and when we arrived we found a bunch of foreigners like us (except younger) just rowing in and eager to get cracking a case of Bud. So I’m still not sure what this holiday means for local Chinese people.
Except for Wang ayi, our housekeeper. For her, it means making zongzi, traditional little steamed pyramids of sticky rice and fillings. Since they keep well in the freezer anyhow, she made ours a little early this year.
Here are the basics: some kind of leaf (some say lotus, but aren’t lotus leaves round? these look like palm fronds to me)
and a sack of nuomi, short grains of sticky rice, which your digestive system either likes or decidedly doesn’t.
Sitting on the kitchen floor with the fixings spread out around her, Wang ayi first teases a nice, long frond out of the pile,
then makes a little cup into which she spoons rice and pork that she slow-cooked at home and brought to work, or rice and red bean paste.
Then she quickly twists and rolls the thing up — no matter how many times I’ve seen her make them, I can’t quite nail down the movement — into a perfect tetrahedron. She grabs the string and ties it up. Teeth are an important tool.
And then she does it all over again.
When she makes the ones with bean paste, instead of tying them with string, she sews the zongzi together with a thin strip of the leaf. (If I ever understood why this works for bean paste and not for pork, I have forgotten.) This is, of course, my favorite part: she uses her mother’s old needle, which she brings to my house and shows me every year and tells me has much smaller it has worn with use.
At last, two pots are set on the stove to steam for at least four hours.
All the while I sit upstairs, purporting to work, tantalized by the aromas that crawl all the way up to my tingzijian. Finally, in the late afternoon, I descend to ask how long they have to cool, before I can unwind the long frond and reveal the little mountain of gushy fragrant rice and dig into its buried treasure.
