Qu Yuan and the Double Fifth

The first taste on the tongue is sweet. Right after it comes a little sourness. Then a faint, tingling warmth, as if someone had just breathed warmth into the mouth.

The eyes are not fully open yet. The feet have not found their sandals. The face, for certain, has not been washed. And yet a small bowl has already been placed in the hands.

In the bowl are whole grains of sticky rice, dark purple and glossy, clinging together in little clumps and lying wet in a thick liquid. The smell of the ferment rises before the bowl even reaches the nose. It is not sharp. It is warm and a little sour, like sticky rice left overnight, only far more fragrant.

Grandmother says just one short sentence, the same as every year.

"Eat it up, and kill the bugs inside."

It is the fifth day of the fifth lunar month.

In Vietnam this day is called Tết Đoan Ngọ. Đoan means beginning, and Ngọ is often explained as the hour of midday, the stretch from eleven in the morning to one in the afternoon. But at home almost nobody uses that learned name. The grown-ups simply call it Tết giết sâu bọ, the festival for killing the bugs.

And that homely name explains why the bowl must be eaten the moment one wakes up. People of old believed that small bugs lived inside the human belly. They lay still all year and rose up only on this one day. So they had to be met while the stomach was still empty, before a single sip of water.

That bowl cannot be made in a hurry. The dish is sticky rice fermented with a rice wine starter. The rice is steamed, left to cool and sprinkled with the starter, then left for about three days until it slowly turns sweet. In northern Vietnam, people often choose one of two kinds of sticky rice: a fragrant golden kind, or purple sticky rice. A deep, charcoal purple bowl like Grandmother's has to be purple sticky rice, with the outer layer of bran left on each grain, because the purple color sits in that bran.

Beside the bowl are a few more things. A plate of plums, their skins still dusted with a thin white bloom, so sour they make a face pucker. A bunch of lychees, newly in season, whose bumpy skins peel away to show flesh as clear and white as jelly. And one small bánh tro, still tied with string, still wrapped in its leaves.

Bánh tro is also made from sticky rice. But first the rice is soaked in water made with ash, and only then is it wrapped in leaves and boiled. After boiling, the grains melt into one another and form a clear block the color of amber. Held sideways, it even lets the light shine through. The cake has no filling. It is neither salty nor sweet, only cool and smooth. It needs a dip in sugarcane syrup to become truly good.

Then midday comes. At the hour of Ngọ, when the sun stands straight overhead and a person's shadow shrinks to one short streak, many families go out to the garden to pick leaves. People of old believed that, in the whole year, this was the moment when the leaves in the garden were most precious.

That is how gently the morning of the fifth day of the fifth month passes in a Vietnamese home.

But on that same day, along rivers far away to the north, there is a completely different sound.

Drums.

The drums boom across the water, beat after beat, steady and urgent, clear all the way to the bank. On the river are long, narrow boats decorated as dragons, and each bow is carved into a dragon's head. Along both sides, a whole row of rowers drive their paddles into the water to that exact beat, and no one misses a stroke. White spray flies up on either side. The races are held mostly along the middle and lower Yangtze, in China, on that same fifth day of the fifth month.

As for why those drums sound, the old storytellers tell it this way.

More than 2,200 years ago, in the state of Chu, there lived a man named Qu Yuan. He was both an official and a poet. And he did not write poetry the old way. He opened up a new kind of poetry altogether, so much his own that later generations named the whole style after his greatest poem.

That greatest poem is called the Li Sao. Later his poems were gathered into a collection called the Chu Ci. It is one of the two greatest collections of ancient poetry in all of China. People went on copying it out and reading it again, without a break, for more than 2,000 years.

In his later years, he no longer lived near the capital, but in the river country of the south.

Then he died on the Miluo River, on a stretch of it that lies in what is now Hunan province. The villagers living around it mourned him deeply.

The story goes that the villagers poured out to the riverbank. They jumped into boats and rowed upstream and down to look for him. They struck the water hard with their paddles and beat their drums loudly, and the sound echoed back and forth between the banks. Then they scooped up handfuls of rice and dropped them into the current, hoping the fish would eat the rice and nothing else.

People tell one more part. The handfuls of bare rice tossed into the river had hardly drifted before a creature in the water took them. So from then on, no one threw bare rice anymore. They wrapped the rice in leaves, tied it tight with colored thread, and only then let it go into the river.

People say those handfuls of rice, wrapped in leaves and tied with thread, became the cake that people still wrap and boil every year on the fifth day of the fifth month. It keeps the same leaf-wrapped, string-tied shape it had long ago.

Scholars today add something more. The fifth day of the fifth month was already a special day before the poet's story existed. It falls in the hottest, most humid stretch of the year, just when the rice has been planted out in the fields. People of old used the day to drive away some of the stifling heat and the damp. The poet's story came later, laid over a festival that was already there, and it has stayed ever since.

So on the same page of the calendar, on the same fifth day of the fifth month, each place remembers something of its own. Even in China itself, different regions honor different figures on this day, rather than the whole country remembering one person. It is like a shared courtyard where each household brings out its own story. The dragon boat festival on the river was added to the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2009.

Back home, the morning goes on just as it does every year.

The bowl of fermented rice is empty. Now the grandchild holds the bánh tro. The string comes off, the leaves open one layer at a time, and the smell of boiled leaves rises, grassy and cool and hard to name. Inside is the amber block, so soft and slippery it nearly slides out of the hand.

One corner of the cake goes into the bowl of sugarcane syrup. One bite. The same cool taste, the same smell of leaves, just like last year, just like when the grandmother was as small as her grandchild is now.

Only one thing is different. Now, as the last leaf opens, the one holding the cake also knows an old tale of why the handfuls of rice on the Miluo River had to be wrapped in leaves.