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FEATURE : Green dragon boating tradition offers Ilan family more than one way to grow

Cindy Chen and her brother Chen Ping display the Chen family’s prized project, Legend, in a swimming pool at Parkview Hotel in Hualien on May 14. The boat and the siblings’ costumes are decorated with more than 10,000 paper advertisements folded into the shape of rice dumplings. PHOTO: MEGGIE LU, TAIPEI TIMES

For most families in Taiwan, celebrating Dragon Boat Festival is a weeklong event that involves cooking buckets of glutinous rice, braising pieces of fatty pork, mushrooms and chestnuts, and wrapping them in bamboo leaves to make pyramid-shaped treats called zongzi (粽子).

However, for Ilan County resident Shen Chiong-chiu (沈瓊秋) and her husband Chen Wen-jung (陳文榮), the annual event is something their family plans its year around. Since 2004, Shen’s family has been participating in The “Green Dragon Boat Festival” competition, an 11-year tradition hosted by the Hualien Environmental Protection Bureau.

The family is well-known among the judges in the Hualien competition, as not only have the Chen family entered for the sixth straight time this year, they cruised to third place for their third time, said Dai Wen-chien (戴文堅), Hualien environmental protection bureau director.

“They are here every year and always bring very elaborate and impressive projects,” Dai said during the competition on May 14.

RECYCLED

The Chen family project this year — called Legend — was a 5m boat that floats on 132 plastic milk cartons collected over an entire year. The craft featured a rotatable dragon head with plastic piping for whiskers and two shiny bicycle lights as eyes, as well as more than 10,000 colorful real-estate advertisement flyers folded into the shape of zongzi.

“Aside from NT$300 worth of glue that holds the dumplings to the boat, the materials for the project were free. We made no extra purchases for their containers or wrappings for the competition,” Shen said.

Speaking of their inspiration, she said: “We wanted to infuse a traditional Dragon Boat Festival spirit into our project,” referring to the paper zongzi.”

Legend has it that the Dragon Boat Festival originated from the Warring States Period in ancient China. Qu Yuan (屈原), a poet and a royal house official in the state of Chu, is said to have drowned himself in the Miluo River on the fifth day of the fifth month on the Lunar calendar when his state was conquered by the state of Qin. To commemorate him, the Chu people threw zongzi in the river to prevent his body from being eaten by fish.

“The children were all involved in folding the paper rice dumplings and sticking them onto the boat. It made their fingers very dexterous,” Shen said.

Both staff at Ilan’s Lotong Sports Park, Shen said she and her husband had often noticed the amount of waste material after large events at the park.

“For example, you would see promotional flag, flag poles, flyers, banners, plastic drink bottles, plastic cheering cones and other things laying on the grass field,” she said. “Before we knew about the Green Dragon Boat Festival, my husband and I used to bring some of the discarded items home from the park because we felt that it was so wasteful to use them only once.”

That was why she promptly signed her children up for the competition when she read about the event in the newspaper.

“It is very good education for children,” she said.

INSPIRED

The family spent a month in 2004 collecting Styrofoam boxes from seafood restaurants in Ilan and built a small boat that could carry one person across the Hualien Parkview Hotel swimming pool — which is a competition requirement — Shen said, adding that on competition day the other teams’ elaborate projects inspired her family to do even more.

“Learning from the first year’s experience, everyone in the family spent the next year collecting all the waste materials they came across,” Shen said. “Now, every year our work on next year’s project begins the day after we return home from the competition. The whole family brainstorms for ideas.”

While some people may have entered the competition for the prize money — this year, the first place winner received N$100,000 — Shen said her family participates in the competition because of the positive influence the event has on them.

One of the most visible benefits — having drunken all the milk for the 132 milk cartons — is that her twin boys each grew more than 10cm over the past year, the young mother said, giggling.

“We’ve also become a much closer-knit family, spending a lot of time discussing the projects,” Shen said, adding that the children have plenty of opportunities to express their love and talent for art, and are much more aware of environmental protection since they began participating in the event.

“They know that it is not only important to be environmentally conscious in their own lives, saving energy and reusing things, but it is also important to promote the idea to other people. Environmental protection should be a value in people’s lives,” Shen said.

The family enjoys the project so much that this year they made their green dragon boat debut on the west coast in the Taichung City Green Dragon Boat competition last week.

The city took after Hualien County’s example and began hosting the competition in 2006. Shen’s family won second place.

‘FAMILY TIME’

“The first and third place winners there this year were both teams from recycling companies. We were the only family who won a prize, but we want to tell all the families in the nation that they can make environmental protection part of their family time,” she said.

The fact they have never won first place is educational to the 15-year-old twins and their 12-year-old sister, their mother said.

“They now know that sometimes even when you have made a lot of effort, you may not necessarily win or receive a proportional reward,” she said.

However, this does not mean that they would even consider giving up.

“We were very disappointed that we did not win first place, because we feel that our project is of the top-level,” she said. “But we will definitely sign up for the competition again next year ... We already have ideas for what we are going to make next.”
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