The following essay won first place in Documented’s 2025 bilingual essay contest for Chinese high schoolers in NYC. Students were asked to respond to the prompt: “a tradition I hope never goes away.”
阅读本文的中文版本: 一个我希望永不消失的传统——端午节
The cafeteria smelled like disinfectant and processed cheese when I unwrapped my zongzi at lunch. Around me, friends peeled back foil from their sandwiches: clean, predictable rectangles of bread and meat. My pyramid of bamboo leaves crackled like old letters being unfolded, releasing steam that smelled of soaked lotus and soy sauce. The scent turned my plastic cafeteria chair into my grandmother’s old wooden stool.
“Is that, like, a tamale?” Maya asked, poking the leaf with her pencil. The lead left a gray smear on the bamboo, like debris floating on the Miluo River. Sticky rice clung to my fingers like undried tear stains. I wanted to tell her that each grain carried the weight of a poet who chose drowning over dishonor. Instead, I said, “Chinese food,” and watched her return to her turkey sandwich, so weightless, so free to forget.
That evening, my father was washing dishes when I walked into the kitchen. He glanced at my backpack, then at me.
“Your classmates don’t know the story,” he said, not as a question.
I didn’t need to ask which story. We’d had this conversation in pieces over the years. Just never all at once, never dramatic, only fragments dropped during quiet moments.
“Qu Yuan jumped because staying meant becoming something else,” my father continued, turning off the faucet. “The royal court wanted him to write different words. Safer words.”
I leaned against the counter. My father had his own safer words, the ones he used with his boss, the careful tone he practiced before important calls. We both understood what it meant to translate yourself for others.
“Different river,” he said quietly, “but we face the same choice.”
About a week later, we drove to Jefferson Port in Long Island for the Dragon Boat Festival. The lake reflected a dozen teams preparing their boats, paddles cutting through water that looked nothing like the ancient Miluo River but carried the same purpose.
I watched the rowers sync their movements: forward, pull, forward, pull, their grunts and shouts forming a rhythm that faded into the ancient. These weren’t the fishermen who once raced to save Qu Yuan’s body. These were accountants, teachers, and shop owners, their children cheering from folding chairs. Somehow, they’d become part of the same current.
“Look at them,” my father said, pointing to a boat where the drummer’s voice cut through the afternoon air. “Two thousand years, and we’re still racing.”
But I understood now that we weren’t racing toward anything, we were racing against something. Against the forgetting. Against the slow dissolution that happens when you reshape yourself for others’ convenience. Each paddle stroke was a refusal to let the river swallow what mattered.
The winning boat crossed the finish line with a splash that sent ripples to every shore. For a moment, I could almost see it: the ghost of every generation that had refused to let go, their hands still gripping the oars.
But later that night, the weight settled in differently. I stared at my homework — essays about American literature, math problems that had nothing to do with ancient rivers or sticky rice. My phone buzzed with messages from friends planning weekend hangouts, speaking in references I understood but didn’t feel.
This was the choice my generation inherited: not whether to jump into rivers, but whether to keep swimming against them. The pressure wasn’t political corruption, but something quieter, more insidious, which lets tradition fade into mere performance, that vaguely answers “Chinese food” when someone asks about zongzi, that chooses the path of least cultural resistance.
I thought about my little cousin, born here, who speaks English to his parents and pretends not to understand when they respond in Mandarin. I thought about myself at his age, embarrassed by the smell of star anise in my lunch box. The drowning wasn’t dramatic, it was incremental, one small compromise at a time.
The zongzi leaves from lunch still sat in my trash can, stained with soy sauce and memories. Yes, a sandwich would be easier, but I taste the difference, and so would the ghost of Qu Yuan.
The next day, I packed zongzi for lunch again. This time, when Maya wrinkled her nose, I didn’t shrink. Instead, I peeled back the bamboo leaves slowly, deliberately, letting the steam rise between us like incense.
“It’s called zongzi,” I said. “We make them remember a poet who refused to compromise.”
She watched, curious now rather than disgusted, as sticky rice clung to my fingers. I didn’t wipe them clean immediately. Instead, I let the residue remain: proof of what I’d chosen to carry.
That evening, I called my grandmother. In Mandarin, I asked her to teach me her recipe over video chat. She laughed at my awkward request, but her eyes were bright as she showed me how to fold the leaves, how to tie the string tight enough to hold but loose enough to breathe.
“Tradition has weight,” she said, “but carrying some weight makes you stronger.”
Now, at every Dragon Boat Festival, I taste more than sticky rice and bamboo. I taste the choice to remain undigested, to let the history leave its mark. In a city of easy forgetting, my hands stay deliberately stained by the bamboo leaves. Let them call it messy, but many others along with me know that it’s the glue that connects me to the world and also the mark that keeps me from dissolving in this melting pot.
